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By Sandra Cisneros. 165 pages. Random House. $18.
Writing, not living well, has always been the best revenge, because you get to skewer your antagonists in public. Take Sandra Cisneros: she's 36, a Latina. Her father is Mexican; her mother, Mexican-American. She has six brothers who, she says, treat her like a daughter. Never married, she's been with many men who played the role of husband. A macho environment like that can make a woman feel thoroughly colonized. But Cisneros is a writer: her feminist, Mexican-American voice is not only playful and vigorous, it's original-we haven't heard anything like it before.
There's nothing cautious about the sketches and stories in "Woman Hollering Creek." Noisily, wittily, always compassionately, Cisneros surveys woman's condition-a condition that is both precisely Latina and general to women everywhere. Her characters include preadolescent girls, disappointed brides, religious women, consoling partners and deeply cynical women who enjoy devouring men. They are without exception strong girls, strong women. The girls who tell their brief stories are so alert they seem almost to quiver; the mature women, in their longer stories, relish the control they have painfully acquired. One, who paints portraits of her lovers, says she is "making the world look at you from my eyes. And if that's not power, what is?"
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The book's triumph is its title story, a story good enough to take its place in any anthology of American short stories. A young Mexican woman, made romantic by television soap operas, crosses the Rio Grande to marry a Texan. But in her real life soap, "the episodes got sadder and sadder. And there were no commercials in between for comic relief." She surveys her husband, "This man who farts and belches and snores as well as laughs and kisses and holds her ... This man, this father, this rival, this keeper, this lord, this master, this husband till kingdom come." How she sorts out her life, and the nice play with metaphors that this involves, results in what may be the most appealing of feminist stories.
Speaking in Chicago recently, Cisneros insists she has "no intention of getting married," though she "likes men a lot." For her, men seem to be a utility that a woman turns on and off as required. In one story, Cisneros describes hot weather: "Heat like a husband asleep beside you, like someone breathing in your ear when you just want to shove once, good and hard, and say, 'Quit it'." Later, this same woman says: "The world has always turned with its trail of tin cans rattling behind it. I have always been in love with a man." Cisneros lists her hobbies as talking with friends, collecting vintage clothes and sleeping. Sleep, she says, "is easier than writing. It's cheaper than anything. You don't need a partner." Her partners haven't always understood that she puts her work before her men: "My center is my writing."
Cisneros's stories are full of Spanish words and phrases. She clearly loves her life in two worlds, and as a writer is grateful to have "twice as many words to pick from ... two ways of looking at the world." A sometime poet, Cisneros uses those words so precisely that many of her images stick in a reader's mind. Of two people kissing, for instance, she writes: "It looked as if their bodies were ironing each other's clothes."
This book, together with a new paperback edition of her earlier collection, "The House on Mango Street," should make Cisneros's reputation as a major author, but at the moment she's still unable to make her living as a writer. "I'm not kept by a university," she says, "and I'm not kept by a man. "
PETER S. PRESCOTT with KAREN SPRINGEN in Chicago
SIRO
By David Ignatius. 465 pages. Farrar Straus Giroux. $19.95
Once it was clear that the cold war had become history, it only made sense for the spy novel to go historical, too. A story about what the Evil Empire may do next year probably lacks sophistication, but a story that anticipates-with the luxury of perfect hindsight-what actually did happen acquires a pleasing resonance. "Siro" is a fine example of how the new spy story exploits old concerns. The year is 1979, and the CIA's old boys think the world is collapsing around them. One of these, Edward Stone, is tired of the cold war; working without authority, he plans to turn up the heat. With his perfect hindsight, Ignatius lets Stone perceive that the Soviet Union is a house of cards, needing only a push to collapse. The push must come at the perimeter, for the only real threat to the U.S.S.R. is the stability of its ethnic republics. U.S. policy forbids any encouragement of revolt within these republics, but when did government policy ever hinder the CIA?
With the help of two colleagues-an idealistic young woman and a bored station chief-Stone launches his private war. He plans an elaborate diversion to spook the Russians by creating the illusion of an imminent uprising within the U.S.S.R.'s Muslim republics. "Siro's" flaw, if you must find one, is its leisurely pace-but you hardly notice because the author is such a skillful stage manager. Ignatius's characters may lack the complexity of John le Carre's, but his settings, whether in Istanbul or rural Armenia, are just as authentic and his seeming expertise in navigating the darker corridors of intelligence trade-craft just as awesome.
P.S.P.
IF I HAD A HAMMER: THE HANK AARON STORY
By Henry Aaron with Lonnie Wheeler. 333 pages. HarperCollins. $21.95.
Henry Aaron's career as a player began in the days of dusty-bus Jim Crow bush leagues and ended in the reign of TV superstations and artificial turf That makes his autobiography at least worth opening. The fact that along the way he hit 755 home runs (41 more than Babe Ruth, who played in the old white American League) and forged a career total-bases record that'll never be broken should make it indispensable. It's not, and the trouble is that while Aaron the player was a smooth blend of offensive power and defensive grace, Aaron the reflective man is an uneasy combination of gnarly radical and uptight executive. On one page he reviles former commissioner Bowie Kuhn; on another he picks on fellow black Hall of Famer Monte Irvin. On another he says what a great guy Ted Turner is.
Aaron can be partially excused for his social tic. The racist abuse he endured on the way to toppling Ruth might he unbelievable, if not for the "Dear Nigger" excerpts from an avalanche of hate mail. The wonder isn't that he persevered to put No. 715 over the fence on national television, while wearing the worst designed uniform this side of the Raybestos Brakettes. The wonder is that he never took a bat to the hecklers in the stands of Fulton County Stadium. As with most jock as-told-to's, the intended effect is one transcendent image of the hero in his prime-in this case, wristing one out of the park in 1950s Milwaukee. What we'd rather see is Aaron (now an Atlanta Braves VP) successful in his crusade to end baseball's pervasive white front-office cronyism.
PETER PLAGENS
MAO II
By Don DeLillo. 241 pages. Viking. $19.95
Talk about hiply self-referential. Here's a novel about a reclusive novelist with a blurb on the back from none other than Thomas Pynchon. Appropriately, the book is a dark satire on the manipulation of images by artists, terrorists and news hounds. Bill Grey is a famous novelist who's been working on the same book for years, kept under house arrest by a groupie named Scott. Then Grey bolts, and the chase is on, from New York to London to Beirut. DeLillo tracks not only Grey but Scott and his ex-Moonie girlfriend, along with a globe-trotting photographer and a hostage languishing in a Beirut basement. Each character is a mirror of the others; each is looking to escape some kind of imprisonment. Those who escape find that they have moved into a larger cell: a world besotted with terror. "The future," DeLillo writes, "belongs to crowds."
Though powerful and painful to read, "Mao II" can sound like the "Nightline" of novels-glib, important in some sense, but finally more impressive than persuasive. What makes it worth reading is that DeLillo is a better storyteller than he is a thinker. When he gives his characters room to breathe and forgets about tidying up life's loose ends, he creates scenes of memorable and disturbing clarity.
MALCOLM JONES Jr.
O'KEEFFE & STIEGLITZ: AN AMERICAN ROMANCE
By Benita Eisler. 546 pages. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $29.50.
One odd thing about Benita Eisler's dogged study of the most famous couple in American art is her subtitle. Romance is not the first word that pops to mind when contemplating the tumult and cruelty of the 26-year relationship of painter Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer/dealer Alfred Stieglitz. But certainly passion launched their marriage and, says Eisler, O'Keeffe's success. What's fascinating about this account is how it traces the inextricable intertwining of their careers. For it was the succes de scandale of the 1921 exhibition of Stieglitz's extraordinary, sensuous photographs of O'Keeffe-many of them of her nude torso-that made her famous and made the public curious about her art. And it was Stieglitz who promoted her paintings and kept her prices up. In 1928, he was part of a ploy announcing in the press that six small pane had sold for an astonishing $25,000-when the sale had not gone through.
Behind the scenes, the marriage was a mess. Stieglitz, nearly 40 years her senior, became infatuated with an even younger woman. O'Keeffe, suffering bouts of depression, dallied with lovers of both sexes and left her aging husband for months at a time. But despite Eisler's stabs at analysis (all of Stieglitz's loves were looking for Daddy), Stieglitz and especially the wildly eccentric O'Keeffe remain enigmatic.
CATHLEEN McGUIGAN
CHASING THE MONSOON
By Alexander Frater. 273 pages. Knopf $21.
In the latest in a long line of offbeat journeys by footloose Englishmen, Alexander Frater recently followed the monsoon from one end of India to another. Along the way, Frater, chief travel correspondent for The Observer in London, saw a lot of water and a lot of India. His book is a double portrait: of an outlandish meteorological phenomenon and of the land on which it falls. One of the most remarkable travel books in recent memory, "Chasing the Monsoon" evokes India and its climate so vividly that you want to towel off after every chapter.
India takes its monsoon seriously. In those parts where rain does not fall, drought and famine are the immediate results, making the monsoon's direction and time of arrival a subject of endless speculation ("The monsoon hijacked every conversation"). Traditionally people have courted the rains with prayer, ragas and even, it is rumored, the occasional human sacrifice. Past rulers built pavilions from which to observe the torrential storms, and even now the people throw parties in the flooded streets once the monsoon hits.
Frater's ultimate destination is the mountain town of Cherrapungi, the wettest spot in the world according to the Guinness Book of World Records (40 feet of monsoon rain is not rare; in 1876, 75 feet). Growing up in the South Pacific, the child of a missionary doctor and amateur meteorologist, he kept a painting of rain-swept Cherrapungi on his bedroom wall. His description of a clamorous downpour in that obscure spot not only offers a fitting climax to an arduous journey but brings him full circle to his own beginnings. Frater's deftly engaging account finds greatness in a neglected theme-the profound relationship among people, culture and climate. This relationship, Frater makes us see, is as much about death and resurrection as it is about crop yields, rain gauges or umbrellas.
MALCOLM JONES Jr.
SWEET REPRIEVE
By Frank Maier, with Ginny Maier. 257 pages. Crown. $18.
In 1986, Frank Maier, then NEWSWEEK'S Chicago bureau chief, discovered that he was dying from a rare form of hepatitis. One year later he endured 10 hours on a Mayo Clinic operating table to receive the liver transplant that saved his life. From the beginning he kept a journal, taking notes on himself as scrupulously as he watchdogged his doctors. "Because I lived so close to death for such a long time," he writes, "I got to know something about it." He put everything he learned into this absorbing book.
Transplants, Maier makes clear, are at best a mixed blessing. The cost of prolonging life is obscenely high, the survival rate nothing to brag about. The complications of what Maier calls a "medically managed" existence amount to going everywhere with an IV tree rolling alongside. And then there is the cost to your family. Ginny Maier suffered all her husband's ups and downs, cheered him on and fought for information when Maier himself was too addled or quiescent to ask his own questions. This is her story as much as his.
"Sweet Reprieve" is briskly written and keenly felt. Maier's eye for detail makes his story accessible, even entertaining, as when he observes that Mayo's outpatient clinic "had bowed to superstition and omitted a thirteenth floor."
Maier died on New Year's Eve 1990, having used the time he gained from his transplant to write this book. It was a bequest so generous that anyone searching for a way through the impersonal maze of modem medicine is in his debt.
M.J.
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