Reviews of three new books. Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx by Stefan Kanfer (Knopf, 465 pages, $30) MARXIST POSTERITY George Bernard Shaw once called him the English world's greatest actor. He was idolized by T.S. Eliot, influenced Eugene Ionesco and found his way into the fevered prose of Finnegans Wake. Like Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx was another great American clown who rose up from the dying embers of Vaudeville to explode across the cultural landscape, profoundly affecting film, literature and the media. Though author Stefan Kanfer has made a valiant stab at Marx's remarkable life, his account is hardly Boswellian as the critics have crowed. Kanfer's good with Marx's early days, when his indomitable mother, Minnie, slaved to make her sons stage stars. But once Groucho and his brothers make it to Broadway, the biography becomes a frustrating adumbration of a life. Kanfer finds himself juggling so many different themes that he often resorts to such clumsy segues as, "Euphoric, rich, and recognized, Groucho now turned to his son." Kanfer's editor is clearly a fan of redundancy, savoring two separate chronicles of how actor William Bendix won the role in The Life of Riley after Marx had been considered for it. There's also the usual inattention to films often found in biographies of film people, such as Kanfer incorrectly assigning lines to Marx in Duck Soup that were spoken by other actors. It would have been fascinating to learn more about the early Paramount days when Marx was sharing the lot with two other great comedians, W.C. Fields and Mae West. What were their relationships like? But Kanfer's book succeeds in driving you back to the sources--the still hilarious Paramount films and Marx's own books. As you close this book, one of Marx's lines comes to mind: "What has posterity ever done for me?" Not enough yet. Steffen Silvis   Everything in This Country Must by Colum McCann (Metropolitan Books, 150 pages, $21) INHERITED TROUBLES One often wonders why publishers rush out skimpy 150-page works in this age of the monster book; but for admirers of Irishman Colum McCann's barebones word-sculpting, each new published page is welcome. His latest is a slim binding of two stories and a novella, versions of which were previously published in The Atlantic and New Yorker magazines. Yet in this small volume, McCann manages a considerable feat. Taken together, the three stories reveal the personal costs exacted at the hands of the principles and prejudices of Northern Ireland's "Troubles"--and they do so with more quiet finesse and empathy than any other contemporary fiction writer thus far. McCann subscribes to the "brimming cup" school of weighted metaphor. In the course of his previous two novels, This Side of Brightness and Songdogs, and a story collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, McCann has established himself among artists of the mean-and-lean ilk, such as Andre Dubus and William Trevor. Like Dubus and Trevor, McCann makes each word count. As his characters stumble through the motions of living in a violent world, they drag the burden of choice behind them. McCann's characters, however, aren't confronted by their own regrettable choices, but rather those of family, neighbors, even country, that seem to jointly conspire against them. How perfect then that each protagonist is still a child--they're not young innocents but teenagers hardening the callus of their caring with each newly inflicted injustice. There's an eye-of-the-storm clarity in the midst of mayhem that each young protagonist brings to the stories. Yet as the stories progress, so does the emotional age of each narrator. From the crush of young Katie in the title story, who falls for a Brit soldier, to the confusion of the boy in "Wood" asked to keep his mother's deceit from his father, to the final stray-dog angst of the boy in "Hunger Strike," exiled to the South as his imprisoned uncle chooses to starve to death, each child pays the price. And the adults--almost universally beaten--can only stand and watch their sins perpetuated. Bill Smith     Lost Girls--A Novel of Psychological Terror by Andrew Pyper (Delacourte Press, 388 pages, $23.95)   SUPERNATURAL Andrew Pyper's dark and unsettling novel, Lost Girls, is prefaced with an ominous line of Nietzsche's: "Terrible experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not terrible." Like a much more literary Stephen King novel, this Canadian writer's first work of fiction is the story of Bartholomew Christian Crane, a coke-snorting and self-loathing young defense lawyer out to defend his first murder case. Arriving in the dismal, God-forsaken town of Murdoch, he books a room in a hotel where nightmares lurk beneath the peeling layers of paint and wallpaper and the middle-of-the-night crank phone calls just never let up: "Hello?" "I know what you like..." Click. The story becomes one of Crane's slow-motion nervous breakdown, brought on by the gradual accumulation of past "terrible" experiences and irrational fears of supernatural proportion. Or are they so irrational? In Murdoch, the rain is stabbing, the waitresses curl their lip, and the Buffalo wings cause open sores. Crane's client is a shell-shocked and feeble high-school teacher who stands accused of taking two students, the only members of his after-school literary club, out to the town's lake and drowning them. But their bodies have never been recovered, and as Crane begins his investigation, a legend begins to unravel about a woman banished to the far edge of town, where the answers to these kinds of mysteries always seem to lie. Except for occasional sections where the plot gets stuck in some slow eddies (one too many trips to the lake, one too many returns to the murder site), the book is as satisfying as an old-fashioned ghost story can be, complete with redemption and moral reckonings. Warning: The sound of a drip from a leaky faucet becomes terrifying while reading this book. Michaela Lowthian   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Willamette Week | originally published April 26, 2000