Word: chrysanthemum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...awaits word of the baby's gender; in Tokyo. With no male heirs in sight--both Kiko and Crown Princess Masako have so far given birth only to girls--many Japanese have been clamoring to revise the law to allow an empress and subsequently her children to ascend the Chrysanthemum Throne, an event Japan has not witnessed in more than two centuries and officially banned...
...moon so that it glows meekly like a pale bruise on the night. Of course. The light. Or is it the heat? Could be the heat too; dead-quiet heat, seems to arise from inside your head, which feels funny these days, wobbles a bit, like a loose chrysanthemum. Or the empty space: streets wide as runways, houses flat against the white sky. Where did everybody go? It's the space, don't you think...
...that the area is bombed almost daily. The Cuban ambassador in Hanoi told me the other day that a dozen or more Cubans, accustomed to working in the fields with the Vietnamese, collapsed after three hours of packing the earth into a dike. Maybe they should have drunk some chrysanthemum-root...
...Chrysanthemum Palace (Simon & Schuster; 210 pages) is Bruce Wagner's fifth satirical novel and his fifth set among the moguls and movie stars of Hollywood. Which makes you wonder whether there's really any muck left in Hollywood for him to rake. Hasn't he already scorched all the earth, dug up all the bodies, skewered all the foibles there are to skewer...
...celebrity cameos come thick and fast (Sharon Stone! Rob Reiner!), and Thad's guest spot on Starwatch is hilariously embarrassing--he has to wear alien makeup and say things like "I believe ... we are being appropriated by the Vorbalidian System." But Wagner boldly goes beyond satire in The Chrysanthemum Palace. He finds surprising depths to plumb, even in the land of the superficial. The question that drives the book is, Can children ever escape the crushing gravitational fields of their parents? The answer, it turns out, is that sometimes even warp speed isn't fast enough. --By Lev Grossman