Lost Lake / The Language of Baklava

[March 23rd, 2005]

^Lost Lake

By Phillip Margolin (HarperCollins Publishers, 321 pages, $25.95)

You don't read Portland lawyer Phillip Margolin's earnest thrillers seeking literary art. In Margolin's latest, his characters are cardboard cutouts shaped by boilerplate descriptions, all broad shoulders and smiles that light up rooms.

What distinguishes a Margolin bestseller is its pacing, and that's the craft that's on display in Lost Lake. The everything-and-the-kitchen-sink story unwinds in 39 quick-read, cliff-hanging chapters, revolving around Vanessa Kohler, a paranoid D.C. tabloid newspaper reporter who's seeking to prove that her father, a big-deal general, has been operating a clandestine, international assassin unit for more than 20 years. When Kohler recognizes an ex-lover in a news report on an attack at a Portland Little League game, she crosses the country and goes undercover to persuade Dan Morelli, a Vietnam vet and former assassin now charged with attempted murder, to help expose her evil father, a well-financed presidential candidate.

Even this roughest of outlines suggests the over-the-top, ersatz Michael Crichton nature of the book, with a plot propelled not by the underlying question of "whodunnit?" but rather "who's not crazy?" And in a season where TV's geniuses are turning out yet another new Law and Order series, Lost Lake will probably find plenty of local readers up for speeding through its pages. It's a guilty pleasure worth a couple of hours, as long as you don't drive yourself crazy expecting, well, art. Ellen Fagg

^The Language of Baklava

By Diana Abu-Jaber (Pantheon, 330 pages, $23)

If you look for memoirs in the bookstore, you'll usually find them classified under nonfiction. But who-other than obsessive diary-keepers or politicians with secretaries-can accurately reconstruct conversations or events from 20 or 30 years ago? Perhaps successful memoirists just have phenomenal memories. But more likely they have the gift to turn their life experiences into narrative that feels so deeply, resoundingly true that readers are willing to believe every word. That's certainly the case for Diana Abu-Jaber's new memoir, The Language of Baklava.

Abu-Jaber, who teaches creative writing at Portland State University, has woven her bicultural upbringing into a vivid tale starring her Jordanian immigrant father, Bud. A tender, mercurial family despot, Bud recreated his homeland in his upstate New York kitchen, cooking an endless array of dishes like lamb shanks in buttermilk, okra braised with garlic, and chicken with pine nuts and sumac. Her schoolteacher mother, an American of Irish-German heritage, provides a rooted balance to Dad's flamboyance, and an endless cast of Jordanian relatives adds an almost surreal note to this absorbing tale of a first-generation American girlhood.

In her two novels, Arabian Jazz and Crescent, Abu-Jaber's penchant for lyrical metaphor sometimes threatened to overwhelm her plots. In The Language of Baklava, however, the author has found a way to blend the filigreed, dreamy storytelling of the Middle East and the razor-sharp Western-world detail that makes a story vivid and memorable. The reader will feast. Heidi Yorkshire