Word: autographing
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...hunger to get a piece of the famous and the psychology behind that desire are the substance of her intellectually agile but emotionally lacking follow-up, The Autograph Man (Random House; 347 pages). In it Alex-Li Tandem as a boy develops a fascination with celebrity signatures; in the poignant prologue, his father takes him to a wrestling match and drops dead of a brain tumor as Alex is jockeying to get a famous wrestler's autograph. Before dying, Alex's father gives him a signed pound note as a bet on the match, sealing the psycho-paternal importance...
...Autograph Man is smaller than White Teeth in size and scope but not in themes. Religion, race, fame, death--Smith hits all the biggies here, and nearly every major character has a theory about at least one of them. Alex, for instance, is compiling a book that divides the world into people and things with "Jewish" traits (including poplar trees, Jimmy Stewart and John Lennon) and "goyish" traits (including oak trees, Elvis fans and the Jewish troubadour Leonard Cohen). It's inspired by a Lenny Bruce riff, the novel's epigraph, but it becomes a predictable dog-people...
...Autograph Man almost succeeds anyway, through the ecstatic inventiveness of Smith's prose. Her characters don't give thumbs-up; they make the "International Gesture for well-being." Like Martin Amis, she has sympathy for her comically debauched characters and mints turns of phrase the way the government mints pennies, as when Alex wanders into a bar "to have a drink, maybe drinks, maybe drinkseses." And she has a feel for the peculiarly male, geeky world of collectordom. But while she finds myriad arresting ways to say celebrity is a modern religion--"All fandom is a form of tunnel vision...
...Leavy is less interested in the ballplayer than in the man and in how the world reacts to him. His closest friends on the Dodgers were usually the subs at the end of the bench. When a former player approaches Koufax for an autograph, she writes, he blanches because a "peer [has] become an acolyte." As one of the very greatest of living ballplayers, still venerated by fans--especially Jewish fans, who embraced him with a fervor bordering on idolatry--Koufax could build a very profitable life out of his fame, yet he appears at maybe one autograph show...
...miracle baby"--Ginny tried for nearly a decade to get pregnant and finally succeeded shortly after her 36th birthday. Hilary is tall for her age and trim, with fair, freckled skin and a froth of red curls so striking that strangers stop her on the street for her autograph, insisting that she must be an actress from a Broadway production of Annie. This year, as in every other, she earned straight A's. She competes in five sports (ranking statewide in swimming), plays the piano and, in her free time, strings rosaries to give to the poor. "My life...