HEAD FOR THE BORDER: The new king of the hardcover nonfiction list is, no surprise, Mark Owen — or, as he's known to his friends (and the rest of America by now), Matt Bissonnette. A former member of the Navy SEALs, Bissonnette is the author of "No Easy Day," which enters the list at No. 1 and describes, among other things, his role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The book (written with Kevin Maurer) has received admiring reviews — in the daily New York Times, Janet Maslin called it "an exciting, suspenseful account" — but it has also stirred anger among special operations forces, who adhere proudly to a code of silence. Breaking it means Bissonnette is unlikely to be included in future SEAL reunions, one retired Navy officer told The Washington Times: "The guys who run their mouths are typically not invited back." But Bissonnette hasn't let the critics keep him down. He sat for a recent "60 Minutes" interview (heavily disguised, inset) and told Scott Pelley the first thing he did upon returning from the mission was visit a Taco Bell drive-through.
"You were part of the team that killed Osama bin Laden," Pelley said, "and the first thing you do when you get back to the United States is go to Taco Bell?"
"Two tacos and a bean burrito," Bissonnette replied. "It's routine."
NOT NEUTRAL: Zadie Smith's fourth novel, "NW," hits the hardcover fiction list at No. 8. Smith isn't a fast writer; it's been seven years since the release of her previous novel, "On Beauty" (also a best seller), and in 2009 she declared, "I don't write unless I really feel I need to." So expectations for "NW" were running high. But reviews so far have been mixed. On NPR's "Fresh Air," Maureen Corrigan compared the story to "a stalk of late-summer corn that's blighted at its very tip . . . four-fifths ripe, golden deliciousness, one-fifth barren cob." In Bookforum, meanwhile, the Book Review's own Parul Sehgal liked it better: "Smith's fiction has never been this deadly, direct or economical," she said, calling "NW" a "subtle investigation into the intersections of race and class." How subtle? Smith told NPR she intentionally avoided race labels for all her characters but the white ones. "I grew up reading a generation of American and English people like Bellow, Updike or Amis," she said. "Everybody's just neutral unless they're black, then you hear about it: the black man, the black woman, the black person. And, of course, if you happen to be black, the world doesn't look that way. . . . I just wanted to try and create, perhaps, a sense of alienation and otherness in this person, the white reader, to remind them that they are not neutral to other people."
THE MISTER: "Publishers print nothing but sex novels now," Guy Patin reputedly complained — in 1657. One wonders what he'd make of the trade paperback list, where E. L. James's "Fifty Shades" books still hog the top three spots. We know what E. L. James's husband, Niall Leonard, makes of it anyway: Life goes on. "Commentators can conjure ridiculous royalty figures out of the air," Leonard wrote in The Guardian recently, "and imply that our afternoons are spent in an infinity pool with trained dolphins bringing us goblets of chilled Bolly, but in real life the dog has to be walked and the kids have to be fed." Leonard's own novel, "Crusher," has just been released, and he acknowledges that his ties to James help draw interest. "But, like most novelists, I'm hardly going to refuse publicity," he wrote. "I'm not a masochist. And that's all I'm going to say about our sex life."
By GREGORY COWLES 20 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/books/review/inside-the-list.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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