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" Published in the December 2011 issue  EvelBy Leigh Montville For boys of a certain big-collared vintage, Evel Knievel was the epitome of awesome, an action figure come to life and then changed back into an action figure, a plastic hero on his plastic motorcycle. Of course, none of us really knew the man so stylishly profiled in Evel (Doubleday, $27) by Leigh Montville. Turns out, before Evel was Evel, he was Bob Knievel, just another shifty asshole from Montana. He was also a drunk, a womanizer, a fink, a liar, a criminal, and, as Montville writes, &amp;quot;some crazy son of a bitch.&amp;quot; So much of what Knievel said about himself and what others said about him was untrue, it&amp;#039;s hard to know which parts were Bob, which parts were Evel, and which parts were the product of pure imagination. And so Montville is left to navigate through the fiction and clutter to find the truth about the man so many of us kept on our shelves. Here it is: Knievel might have been an abusive, lousy, blackhearted creep, but no one ever doubted the size of his stones. There were jumps on which he believed he was going to die, but he still fired up his engines, waved to the cheering crowds, and roared off into the dust. He&amp;#039;d rather have died in a fire or on the river rocks than hear anyone call him Bob ever again. That&amp;#039;s what makes Knievel and this book worth remembering. They each remind us of the power of will, how a hardscrabble scrub of a man might still make himself into a toy, leaving a million tracks in a million shag carpets. \u2014CHRIS JONES  The Family FangBy Kevin Wilson There is much about Kevin Wilson&amp;#039;s first novel, The Family Fang (Ecco, $24), that calls to mind the oeuvre of Wes Anderson. There&amp;#039;s the title, with its Royal Tenenbaums \u2014 caliber wordplay. The twee illustration on the cover. And then there are the characters: a family of performance artists who stumble into a murder mystery. It&amp;#039;s all very clever and knowing, but it&amp;#039;s also as dark and funny as anything you&amp;#039;ll read all year. Wilson writes stylishly, with a clear eye for family dysfunction and the absurdity of the contemporary art world, but his real skill is technical, building up a slow-drip mystery in which everyone is suspected of high crimes or high art until the very end. And you will reach the end, since The Family Fang isn&amp;#039;t the kind of book you set aside when a better offer comes along. (I&amp;#039;m looking at you, Swamplandia!) It&amp;#039;s the kind of book in which you need to know what happens \u2014 to the family, and maybe even to the Esquire editor who interviews and seduces the daughter. (He wears &amp;quot;neon purple&amp;quot; briefs.) Because I&amp;#039;ll tell you what: It&amp;#039;s not what you think. Very little in The Family Fang is. \u2014RICHARD DORMENT  Train DreamsBy Denis Johnson It&amp;#039;s 1917 when Train Dreams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18) opens and itinerant laborer Robert Grainier, married with a small child at home, takes part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese railroad worker. For Grainier, these are the good old days, and Johnson, who proved how devastating a slender novel could be in his 1983 debut Angels, quickly leaves them behind. As Grainier moves through years of odd jobs, the American West transforms, railroads and highways replacing forests and farmland. His personal tragedies begin to echo those of the landscape \u2014 cut down, broken, paved over. If National Book Award winner Tree of Smoke proved that Denis Johnson has the stamina to go all 12 rounds and win on points, then Train Dreams shows that he can still deliver a quick and devastating knockout. \u2014AARON GWYN  Townie By Andre Dubus III When it begins, Andre Dubus III&amp;#039;s memoir, Townie (W. W. Norton, $26), is defined by explosive rage at his life growing up poor in the mill towns of Massachusetts, where booze and weed and candy passed for breakfast, where his fists and the act of beating other men \u2014 again and again and again \u2014 became his solace for growing up near fatherless. Near fatherless, because Dubus&amp;#039;s father, the storied short-story writer of the same name, lived just miles away. While teenage Andre searched the couch cushions for beer money, Dad was throwing down drinks with his young female students. That the two men meet and begin to frequent the same bars as if they&amp;#039;re old chums is inevitable. That the younger Andre \u2014 who went on to write best seller House of Sand and Fog \u2014 is later able to build a writing career that rivals his father&amp;#039;s is astounding. For some rage never dies. But it can be channeled. \u2014TYLER CABOT  Ratification By Pauline Maier I&amp;#039;m not exactly sure when bipartisan became a synonym for infantile. The United States of America, as it is constitutionally defined, was born in a bare-knuckled political brawl. This is not a metaphorical statement. People literally threw down over things like tariffs and the right of the government to raise an army.  Thank the Lord, then, for Pauline Maier&amp;#039;s Ratification (Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster, $30). It depicts, in great and wonderful detail, how unruly and damned near unhinged the political discussion was when it became time to decide whether or not we would govern ourselves under the Constitution. Frankly, the whole thing was a fistfight. &amp;quot;We the people,&amp;quot; right at the top, was more than a preamble. It was a fuse. It exploded across an intellectual landscape that had been politically aware, and politically active, since the British had overplayed their hand in 1770. The debate occasionally spilled into the streets. Maier takes into account the thoroughly marbleized figures of James Madison and Patrick Henry arrayed in a Founders death match in Virginia, but also the work of people like William Findley, an Irish immigrant who opposed the Constitution because it did not guarantee jury trials in civil cases, and who dug out the precedent in Blackstone to prove it.  Her genius is putting the politics back into one of the great political brawls of all time. The Constitution was not ratified because a whole lot of important people got together and thought Big Ideas at the same time. It was ratified because, in some strange way, all of the petty and provincial grievances in every state were somehow brought into harmony for the purposes of creating a country.  The people who debated, fought, and ultimately passed the Constitution &amp;quot;refused to be told that the issues of the day were beyond their competence,&amp;quot; writes Maier. That is the undying article of faith that we all ought to embrace. \u2014CHARLES P. PIERCE When the Men Go Wild  Melville gave us Ahab cursing the ocean and the indifferent god that sharpened its waves into white serrated peaks, and Hawthorne sent Young Goodman Brown traipsing along a forested path with the devil, and Dickey shoved those canoes down a river canyon with banjos calling like birds among the trees. In the wild, men go wild \u2014 that&amp;#039;s what literature has taught us. In Urban Waite&amp;#039;s debut novel, The Terror of Living (Little, Brown, $25), three men \u2014 on all different sides of the law \u2014 find their lives tangled up like roots after a heroin delivery goes dead wrong. Deep in the woods, with rifles blasting and knives flashing, with the gray faces of the mountains looking down at them, they seek revenge and salvation in one another. This is a book for and about men, one of the best this year. The same goes for American Boy (Milkweed Editions, $24), the ninth book by Larry Watson. In the winter-cloaked woods of Minnesota, the gunfire sounds like an ice-shattered branch, blood splashes on snow, and a shot woman stumbles out of the cold, testing loyalties and creating moral uncertainties between the men, young and old, who come to vie for her attention. But perhaps the dirtiest of them all is Bruce Machart&amp;#039;s Men in the Making (Houghton Mifflin, $24), a collection of stories about men, all with three wheels on the road and one in the ditch. They swill too much beer and work overtime for sawmills and shop at Walmart and strike cows with sledgehammers and dogs with cars while overhead the big Texas sky seems to weigh them down as much as their jobs, their families. &amp;quot;Tell me I&amp;#039;m a good man.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s what one of the characters in The Terror of Living begs his wife. The response \u2014 for any of these men in any of these books \u2014 is as soaked in shadow as a midnight forest. \u2014BENJAMIN PERCY The Book of the Year: The Submission   I have no idea how Amy Waldman came to write her first novel, The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26), which is about the contested aftermath of an epoch-defining attack on New York City by Muslim terrorists. I imagine that the title must have come to Waldman before the novel did, or rather, that when the title came to Waldman \u2014 the former co-chief of The New York Times South Asia bureau \u2014 she knew she had her novel, from beginning to end. It is rare that a title can be said to contain a novel, especially when the novel in question can be said to contain a world and a time. But if you want to know why you should read The Submission, and why it is not only the best of the many excellent &amp;quot;9/11 novels&amp;quot; but also the most straightforwardly enjoyable, you have to start with the title, because it easily bears the weight of at least four meanings, because in being lightly ironic yet endlessly suggestive, it provides the model for Waldman&amp;#039;s prose, and because it is only the first of the many promises that The Submission manages to keep.  The Submission, you see, is about a submission \u2014 an entry in a competition \u2014 and it is also about submission, in just about every sense of the word. The plot is simple and, in terms of today&amp;#039;s headlines, plausible enough: There is a competition to determine who will design the memorial for the mass-murdered in Manhattan, and the winning submission is from an American architect born into a faith whose name also means &amp;quot;submission.&amp;quot; As a nonbeliever, he calls himself &amp;quot;Mo,&amp;quot; but his given name is Mohammad, and before the novel ends he will submit in the subtlest way possible to its dictates, for The Submission is a novel in which every character submits to something: to heroism, to cowardice, to self-interest, to self-promotion, to class, to grief, to innocence, to prejudice, to pride, to art, to religion, and especially to what the beleaguered Mo thinks of as &amp;quot;the bellicose, lachrymose religion that the attack had birthed,&amp;quot; that is, the new religion of 9/11. The Submission is not a religious novel but rather a secular one that takes religion very seriously. It is not a political novel but rather a novel about the ongoing redefinition of the place where politics starts. It is a novel of large public concern, and yet what it suggests is that over the last decade &amp;quot;the public&amp;quot; in America has just become an excuse for &amp;quot;the private&amp;quot; to hold sway \u2014 for people to submit to impulses they didn&amp;#039;t know they had. It is a portrait of a country almost terrifyingly free and at the same time endlessly involved in the task its title describes: either trying to get up off its knees or fall down to them. \u2014TOM JUNOD One Other Book of the Year  My Book of the Year is my friend Ron Suskind&amp;#039;s Confidence Men (Harper, $30). You might have gotten the wrong impression of it. I&amp;#039;ve always thought that the tack his publishers have taken to promote his books (basically, provoke a bunch of high-ranking government officials to squawk that they were misrepresented) has given the reading public the wrong impression of them. His books, especially The Way of the World in 2008 and this one, are in no way &amp;quot;gotcha&amp;quot; journalism. No. They are narrative tours de force that take his scour-the-earth reporting, mix it with singular insights, and explain our recent history to us. In these last two books in particular, we get a window into the promise inherent in America that is being squandered and, at the same time, we marvel that such promise still exists. This most recent book is about President Obama. Suskind makes you see his potential all over again, he makes you mourn that it has so far been underrealized, and then, in the end, he rekindles the word that has been mocked relentlessly by the president&amp;#039;s opponents: hope. Journalism like this is all too rare in an age in which reporters trade their critical faculties for access. And it&amp;#039;s even rarer that skeptical reporting is turned into something lasting. \u2014DAVID GRANGER "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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