It is peculiar perhaps to name a book for a character who is no longer present. The new PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel by Kate Christensen begins with a New York Times obituary. Oscar Feldman, The Great Man of the title, has just passed away, and while the book is apparently about the race for two biographers to complete their studies of the life and relationships of the deceased artist, this merely serves as a pretext to explore the vibrantly fascinating WOMEN who shared his life - his mistress, his wife, and his sister.

The successive segments are organized around interviews with each of the women - Teddy St. Clair, Abigail Feldman, and Maxine Feldman; however, these are just the context in which larger developments take place. Both through their introspection and their verbalized self-revelation, the women contemplate their relationships with Oscar and with each other. While not exactly grieving the loss of this major figure in their lives, his absence and the presence of these two both intrusive and curious biographers provoke them to reexamine who he was and who they are. As a result, they undergo self-examinations and reflections on their emotional engagements not only with him, but also with their female friends, partners, and family members, as well as these biographers.

The genius of the book, and in Ms. Christensen's writing style, and really the reason it seems for the award, is that each interaction with another major and minor characters, reveals a different aspect of the personality of the principal people. Surprise, these characters really do behave differently, depending on who they are with. Often they even surprise themselves! This effect is what lures the reader on. Initially, the women are all reticent towards the interviewing and interloping biographers, Henry and Ralph, and they express this is varied ways. Variously, deliberately or unconsciously, they display genuine or false welcoming behavior, agreeing to the interviews and conversations, and then participating with (again variously, even in the course of one conversation) complicity, confrontation, outright hostility, interrogating them in return. The interviewers' skill in handling the situation or lack of comprehension of what the women are doing determines the course of how they interpret the man.

So conceptually, the novel is deftly constructed and unusual in its style. Cleverly offering to reveal the Oscar Feldman's character, the novel is really only tangentially descriptive of him, elaborating in his absence who he was by the relationships that formed around him, rather than with him, . . . and that continue to grow, change, and develop now that he is gone. Try this newly acclaimed novel, as it is absolutely worthy of attention and the award.
The Great Man (Doubleday, 0385518455, $23.95)

- Andrew

Susan Choi previously has put herself on the literary radar screen with The Foreign Student and American Woman, both books which approach the concept of people who are social outsiders, through their own perception and behavior and the viewpoint of others. However, she also makes the point that her characters are uniquely and perhaps even prototypically American, although in ways that we might prefer not to be reminded. Her new novel A Person of Interest follows this same theme, striking closer to current present realities by addressing violence on a university campus and the repercussions in one alienated professor's life.

At the beginning of the book, a bomb goes off, and sets in motion not only the destruction and death, grief counseling and memorial services one might expect, but more explicitly to the point of the book a cycle of introspection and investigation into the life of the principal character, a mathematics professor named Lee.

It is should be clearly stated from the outset that Lee is not an endearing individual. In the course of his life, he, somewhat unwittingly yet rather systematically, has alienated himself from fellow faculty members, withdrawn from students, and emotionally cut off family and friends. Why he did this is never entirely clear, perhaps as that would give too much insight into a complex and, as a result, compelling personality, but in the course of the book, one does develop some sympathy for him as misunderstood and misjudged. In spite of his awkward and abrupt social practices, he becomes increasingly intriguing to the reader - and in due course, as a possible suspect, or at least "a person of interest", to the FBI .

Lee's origin is always cloaked in mystery. He is described as coming from a Southeast Asian country, but it is never identified, partly, I'm sure, to maintain the distance that his students and and colleagues must feel, and partly because his behavior implies that there is some trauma, war-induced or otherwise, in his past that he himself would prefer forgotten. In this regard, Ms. Choi's style is supremely effective.

I think Ms. Choi has deliberately created a reading experience that replicates what Lee's students and colleagues might experience by interacting with him. From the start, his actions are accompanied by half-realized motivations and half-articulated or entirely suppressed explanations. He carries his briefcase in front of him like a shield; he dresses in rumpled clothes assuming that because he doesn't pay attention to his appearance, others won't either. By trying to pass silently through the corridors of the university focusing on scholarship and speaking seldom, he ends up creating more extreme reactions than he intends.

When the portion of flashbacks begins to focus on Lee's ex-wife - Aileen, it is a liberating relief to be permitted some variety to the emotional content, and more clarity to his emotional composition. It is here that one begins to understand him and sympathize with him a bit more, although he continues to be insulated from truly understanding how best to connect with those around him. And Ms. Choi has tautly stretched that important line of keeping the reader wanting more with slowly-developing characterization and suspense, but offering just enough to allow continuing engagement.

I've begun working through a stack of books sharing in common the theme of personal secrets which lead to or conceal political disturbances, with violent repercussions.

Peter Carey's His Illegal Self traces the path of a little boy born to radicals in 1965, but "rescued" by his grandmother who wishes to raise him respectably. When he's seven, his mother shows up, takes him back, and leads him into the revolutionary maelstrom of her life.

My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru is about a man who also participated in that era's movements but left the struggle and thirty years later has a chance encounter that awakens buried memories and feelings of failure.

Surveillance by Jonathan Raban and A Person of Interest by Susan Choi both begin with explosions, but the first book explores a society that is swept into a culture of fear and suspicion; and the second focuses on a professor whose office neighbors that of a mail-bomb recipient, and whose social withdrawal and emotional introversion puts him on the list of suspects.

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize this past round and is narrated by a Princeton-educated Pakistani immigrant to the United States whose values and perspective are questioned after September 11th, as he himself is also led to reexamine them. Briefly, it does not make the United States look particularly good; but it is also a worthy exploration of the development of one human's psyche.

So these are the books that I'm beginning or trying to finish, and I expect to give more in depth accounts of this theme next week, but I will conclude today with an assessment and praise of Valerie Martin's extremely compelling, most recent book, Trespass.

Like a seed planted at the beginning of the book, one small interaction develops and grows in a multitude of directions, with a multitude of repercussions. The reader becomes aware over time that it is not only this one relationship under the lens of microscopic examination, but all of the tangled webs of interaction.

Chloe is the mother of a young man who has fallen in love with a fellow student from Croatia. In her awkward maternal way, she is jealous, supportive, competitive, embracing, but most of all suspicious of this new woman in her young son's life. As middle-class liberal, she judges herself for not being more accepting of this child of a war, who has lost her own mother and has grown up with such a different outlook on the world from her own. It is apparent that Salome is NOT going to be the daughter that Chloe wished to find in a daughter-in-law, nor does Salome appear to want Chloe to be the mother that she lost when her family fled to the United States.

Through the course of the novel, we are introduced to Salome's family history, and begin to learn who her mother was, what her family's war-torn experience and flight entailed, learning more than Salome knows herself, but implying through the mentioning that perhaps Salome nonetheless carries more in her blood heritage and her emotions than her self-knowledge allows.

In addition, another trespasser and interloper that Chloe encounters complicates her interactions with Salome - a Basque poacher in the woods behind the family property appears repeatedly at stress-filled moments. With these uncontrollable human interactions heightening the dramatic tension, taking the reader in unexpected directions, Trespass is extremely adept at recreating the complicated relationships that can emerge in spite of efforts to shield oneself from the emotional vicissitudes and violent conflicts of life - in a rural village in Croatia, the mountains of the separatist Basque region, or a wooded retreat in upstate New York.

I'll fill more in on the others later, so until then Valerie Martin's Trespass is $25.00 (0385523424, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) and we may still have a few autographed copies.

- Andrew Getman