In the title novella, 'Bibliophilia,' the unlikely protagonist is a postmenopausal university librarian pressed into reluctant duty as a 'sex cop,' whose job is to troll the stacks for students intent on illicit coupling among the classics. The stories are equally zany and wide-ranging, featuring, among others: a hair scientist who is going bald; an English professor trapped in a monkey cage; a mother who hands her toddler to a mugger while she rummages for money in her purse; a nightwatchman in a used-hubcap yard; and the owner of a landfill who is also the proud father of a teenage chess prodigy. What the fictions have in common is an astute mixture of comedy and pathos. Taking seemingly ludicrous premises, Griffith manages, in surprising ways, to render them poignant.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The sex police take to the stacks in Griffith's pithy, clever follow-up to Spikes; the title novella here shares space with four noteworthy short stories. Myrtle Rusk is a university librarian drifting in the haze of an unfulfilling marriage, "having passed (thank God) her change in life." An unexpected complication arises when Rusk is enlisted by her boss, Mort Bozeman, to crack down on couples who sneak off to neck and copulate in the library's nooks and crannies. As she warms to her new mission, Rusk develops a casual friendship with one of the students, an Egyptian named Seti who is busy trying to impress beautiful, nubile Lili, who happens to be Bozeman's daughter. Seti initially ignores the possibilities offered by his friendship with Myrtle, but Griffith concocts some inventive coincidences to set up the finale in this sexual comedy of manners, with the climax featuring an unlikely but hysterical tryst. Clever treatment of libido aside, the combination of wry, ironic character portraits and sharp academic satire often reads like William Gass with Christopher Buckley handling the plotting and some of the political commentary. The short stories feature a beguiling array of eccentric, excessive characters, including a macho wrestler whose son develops a passion for chess, a gay English teacher who has been imprisoned in a cage at an amusement park and a balding hair scientist who tracks his decline according to his hairline even as his wife seems to grow more vital by the day. While the short stories aren't quite as vibrant as the novella, Griffith remains a formidable literary talent who continues to carve out a very particular niche with his sly humor, imaginative plotting and trenchant musings.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Clever and exuberant, Griffith loves puns, malapropisms, and slang and is fascinated by life's endless capacity for absurdity. Praised for his witty first novel, Spikes (2001), he now presents a hilarious, bittersweet, and perceptive novella about a middle-aged librarian working at a New Orleans university library. Myrtle has cultivated dignity, but she was once very wild and is appalled to find herself assigned as the library sex cop. As she tries to accept the diminishments of age and her role as killjoy with grace, her boss' lubricious 18-year-old daughter, for whom the library is a place not for book learning but for erotic adventure, bedazzles Myrtle's favorite coworker, Seti, a sweet and proper Egyptian whose English is based on 1930s screwball comedies. As Myrtle valiantly prowls the stacks and smitten Seti struggles to remain faithful to his Muslim values, Griffith shrewdly considers our need for romance and our zest for rules and ardor for breaking them, themes further explored in the inventive short stories that orbit Bibliophilia like bright moons around a glowing planet. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Love Was Keeping His Foot Calluses Neatly Pumiced,
By Jaime Reyes (Tucson, AZ) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories (Hardcover)
Michael Griffith's Bibliophilia is the most masterly novella to come along since George Saunders' Pastoralia. Less surreal than Saunders, Griffith is funnier and, sentence for sentence, more muscular stylistically than Saunders. Reviewers compared Griffith's terrific debut novel, Spikes, to Nabokov and Saul Bellow, but Bibliophilia is unlike anything I've ever read. Its drop-dead smarts, super-duper vocabulary, and off-the-cuff scholarship would be over the top if not for his richly developed characters. Rather than giving us the stereotypical spinster librarian, Griffith presents us with Myrtle, an unhappily married laid-off legal aide who was once a raving sexpot and is now earning wages by prowling the stacks, looking to break up students boffing one another. Griffith's portrait of Myrtle's coworker, the Egyptian college student Seti, is the high point of the book. Nothing in Spikes prepared me for Griffith's rendition of Seti; he is one of the -- in Forster's sense -- "roundest," funniest, most ponderable, and memorable characters in recent American lit. I have no idea how Griffith, from Orangeburg, SC, got into Seti's consciousness so surreptitiously, making us laugh at his goofs, mispronunciations, misunderstandings, without reducing the guy to a laughing stock, a stock character. At the end of the novella when Seti and Myrtle come together it is like a confluence of the Nile and the Mississippi; it is a profound mud fest guaranteed to keep you laughing, even crying, out loud. Several short stories follow Griffith's novella as encores, and each, especially "Zugzwang," is a gem. I was delighted with Spikes; now Bibliophilia confirms my suspicions: Michael Griffith is a major American writer you absolutely must read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
love this.,
By
This review is from: Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories (Hardcover)
this is a book that i give to people and don't get back. it's just so brilliantly written -- i can't blame folks, really. the title novella "bibliophilia" is stunning, and has become one of my undying all-time favorites.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fine Writing, but Thin Plot,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Bibliophilia : A Novella And Stories (Paperback)
Griffith relies alomost entirely on the absurdity of his premises and his adept wordplays to drive his narration, but there is very little plot. You'll enjoy it if you're someone who loves playing with the English language and finding new meaning in the words, but this will still be a read-a-chapter-before-bed book.
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