Reviews

Books

The Appeal

By John Grisham (Doubleday).

Thrillers thrive on villains and heroes, and usually these characters are not overly complicated. In John Grisham's page-turners the villains are corporate titans and their lawyers, and the plucky, idealistic heroes are renegade lawyers or law students, shocked into action by the corruption they have stumbled across. Grisham sticks with his formula for the villains in The Appeal. But he paints a more complicated picture of the heroes, while making an important point about how the justice system in more than half of the 50 states is increasingly threatened by the kind of big-money gutter politics that have made so many Americans disgusted with Washington. While plaintiffs' lawyers are the heroes in this fast-moving, smartly constructed tale, they also come off as greedy, self-absorbed and repugnant - true ambulance chasers.

Unaccustomed Earth

By Jhumpa Lahiri's (Knopf)

The fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself - accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs - is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri's sensitive new collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth. Here, as in her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and her novel, The Namesake, Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn't necessarily the country you're tied to by blood or birth: It's the place that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any map.

Fidelity

Grace Paley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Take this quiz. Was Grace Paley, who died in 2007 at 84, (a) a poet or (b) a fiction writer? The answer is (c) a dramatist. Both in the stories that made her famous and in her little-known poems, Paley most often wrote in voices - essentially, dramatic monologues and dialogues. Her best stories, often so short and telegraphic you could call them sketches, imparted theatrical vividness, as if talented actors were performing them. Paley had the playwright's gift, as well, of manifesting her imagery, not just verbalizing it. In Fidelity Paley reproduces with touching fidelity what it is to be old, and sick, and missing one's vanished friends, and philosophical up to a point - but unwilling to part with dear life. Speaking now to us from the grave, Paley is writer, character, actor - a wise companion. Though offstage, her voice seems likely to be heard a long while.

The New York Times Syndicate

Exhibition

Shining new light in modern art

Park Sung Tae doesn't use a brush to paint his artworks. Ingeniously, he uses light. Hand-made Human figures hang on the wall showing the cycle of day and night, while the shadows reflect the spirit of the piece. Park's exhibition opened at the Pyo Gallery Beijing last week. This is the first time the artist has held a solo show in Beijing. Up to 80 artworks are on display.

"Park's artworks apply the principals of oriental painting via a special medium. All figures are sculptured, even a single hand is very lifelike," says the gallery president Pyo Mi Sun.

The exhibition will close on May 4.

Xie Fang

(China Daily 04/16/2008 page20)