Memories of My Melancholy Whores

By Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman. Knopf, 128 pages, $20.

It's hard to say anything bad about Gabriel García Márquez's new book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. One can't help but be grateful for its publication: It's the Colombian Nobel Prize-winner's first novel in 10 years. A decade of fictional silence seems long enough. Expectations were so high in Latin America that black-market versions of the novel proliferated even before it was published last year, and it remains one of the most pirated books in the Spanish-speaking world. US readers, if they want, can skirt the $20 price tag by reading the novel during a long lunch or evening at the bookstore. It might not even take sitting down between aisles to get through it: 128 pages turn quickly when a master has crafted the story.

The novel's – or novella's – length is one of its most distinctive characteristics, because of the meditation on a ponderous theme it manages to fit in its pages. Like the much, much longer and more elaborate Love in the Time of Cholera, published 20 years ago, this new book is about love's capacity to conquer time and its attendants: age and death. Memories of My Melancholy Whores is about a lonely nonagenarian and his love affair with a 14-year-old virgin prostitute who sleeps through their appointments. The premise seems sordid, but one of the novel's tricks is its ability to persuade the reader otherwise. Leaving aside the protagonists' age disparity and the fact that they meet in a brothel, their romance is as convention-bound (and chaste) as any tale of courtly love. Humor and descriptive magic are sprinkled throughout.

But in the end, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is vaguely dissatisfying. The novel, among other things, is a genuflection to the aesthetic compression of Japanese literature. The introductory quotation reveals that the plot is adapted from Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties. García Márquez tells this story of an eccentric, life-affirming passion with concision and restraint. But he overdoes it: He stuffs all his themes and symbols into a tight-fitting corset. No one is saying he needs to write another 400-page multigenerational saga. The muted weirdness and delirious suspense of the 1981 Chronicle of a Death Foretold show that García Márquez is capable of achieving near perfection at this same length. The problem with Memories of My Melancholy Whores is that the characters – a clairvoyant cat, the "sleeping beauty" herself, the narrator's sexually martyred housemaid – are too obviously symbols. They seem to be gasping for life in the novel's rarefied, stripped-down climate. Oxygen, blood, sinew, and bone – that's what's missing. (Marcelo Ballvé)

Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching

By John Perricone. PublishAmerica, 87 pages, $14.95 (paper).

On the first day of class, high school teacher John Perricone, author of Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching, undermines student apathy and "attitude" with a Socratic exchange that always proceeds more or less as follows:

"Why are you getting an education?"

"So I can get a good job someday."

"And why would you want a good job?"

"So I can make money."

"Stay with me now. And why do you want to make money?

"So I can live – like, duh."

"And this is where we always end up ... ladies and gentlemen, and it's at this point that I will ask all of you this question, and you don't have to answer it out loud.... 'What do you live for? What do you personally live for?' " [Silence in the room.]

Eventually, someone replies: "I guess I just want to be happy." Without pedantry and with few platitudes, Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching offers and provokes pragmatic and thoughtful responses to questions like "What is happiness?" Perricone disagrees with current teaching methods based on carrot-on-a-stick, points-based classroom management techniques. Personal anecdotes from his teaching and personal life, including studies with karate master Hidy Ochiai, offer persuasive, concrete alternatives. His book is a useful, if discursive and breezy, manual of pedagogy.

PublishAmerica (not a vanity press, but a more accessible "traditional" publisher) presents the book professionally and attractively; if I note just a few too many typos (a who for whom, philosohy for philosophy), it's because such errors might undermine Perricone's message. And that would be a pity, because Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching transcends several bipartisan arguments on educational issues by analyzing problems that are resolvable through individual initiative. Such a book deserves required-reading status, not just among teachers, parents, and students, but with anyone who pays taxes (or makes budgets) for public education. (Alexandra Yurkovsky)

A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

By Charles Bowden. Harcourt, 309 pages, $24.

Charles Bowden can cause readerly discomfort, and not just because he's written a couple of books that plumb the unpleasant, blood-soaked depths of the drug trade – Down by the River (2002) and the recently released A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior. Bowden, a Tucson, Ariz., writer who generates stories for Esquire, Mother Jones, and other mags, is also disturbing because, to be blunt, his trustworthiness is questionable.

Bowden has a propensity for trampling the conventions of both journalism and fiction, writing nonfiction books that read like semiexperimental novels. In a Bowden book we spend much of our time deep inside the cranium of the key character, experiencing the world through his or her eyes, often in seriously nonlinear, nonchronological fashion. There's even an Isabelle Allende-ish sense of the otherworldly, as Bowden's characters often believe in ghosts and spectral apparitions – something the author relates in a close-up, deadpan fashion. Call it magical muckraking.

With Bowden, it's hard to tell how much of his verbiage is the product of his imagination and his idiosyncratic voice and how much is derived from interviews, observation, documents, news clippings, and the other building blocks of conventional journalism. In the era of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, this is a little unsettling.

None of which means A Shadow in the City isn't a fabulous read; it's a truly gripping narrative, the story of a Midwestern narc named Joey O'Shay – a pseudonym, of course – who's decided he likes drug dealers better than he likes his fellow narcs. The dealers, he figures, work harder than the drug warriors, who at one point nearly refuse to do a major sting because they'd rather watch the Super Bowl.

After 30 years in the trenches, O'Shay, a hard-drinking beefster, is filled with self-loathing. He's arrived at the realization that his key skills are an ability to deceive others and cold-heartedness. The work has hollowed him out. And this is Bowden's notable insight. The war on drugs doesn't just make prisoners of the peddlers and junkies it locks up. It jails – to a lesser extent, of course – the people on the other side: the cops and DEA agents and prison guards and prosecutors. Like any war, it corrodes the cultural fabric of the country, turning soldiers into psychos. We can't know how much of this book is verifiable truth, but on that point there's no dispute. (A.C. Thompson)

The Glass Castle

By Jeannette Walls. Scribner, 304 pages, $25.

What do you do when life hands you an upbringing that's the equivalent of a big, fat lemon, full of frightening physical jeopardy, false promises, willful neglect, and occasionally flat-out hunger and deprivation? Well, if you're Jeannette Walls, MSNBC's star gossip columnist and author of the new memoir The Glass Castle, you make lemon meringue pie – or in other words, the stuff of to-the-bone ya-ya sisterhood brunch chatter, rather than Truman Capote-esque claws-out cattiness.

As The Glass Castle reveals, Walls has had quite a life. After catching a glimpse, from her town car, of her homeless mother Dumpster-diving, she starts her tale with a flame, if not a bang, as the three-year-old Walls attempts to cook hot dogs for herself and succeeds in setting her frock on fire. The image is startling and surreal, but the most shocking impression left with the reader comes when Walls later says she "would have been happy staying in that hospital forever" because "you never had to worry about running out of stuff like food." When her dashing and possibly brilliant, but also deranged and alcoholic, dad steals her away, you learn why institutional creamed corn seemed infinitely preferable to life on the lam with the Wallses.

Walls front-loads her book with the details that lend themselves to coffee klatch yarn-telling – in a support group for once-abused children: There was the time that Walls fell out of the speeding family car, the moment Walls and her siblings set their San Francisco SRO room ablaze, and the instance when the family scurried out of their temporary home in the middle of the night and Dad tossed their cat Quixote out the car window. When the feline lands with a thud, Walls's artist mother tries to distract her wailing children by singing songs like "Don't Fence Me In." The excitement of constantly moving to new towns, mining geodes from the desert, and receiving Christmas gifts of stars (long before those spam offers started flying) wanes as the bottle begins to wear down Dad's optimism, the blue highway curls upon itself, and the Wallses run out of places to run to.

Propelled by the romance of perpetual motion (and, implicitly, progress and hope) promised by the American automobile, and sustained by the restless but ultimately unreliable minds of parents driven to hit the road when the going gets rough or overly demanding, The Glass Castle (titled after the mansion Walls's father promises to build his kids once he strikes it rich with his gold-digging invention, the Prospector) runs out of some gas when the family decelerates briefly in Phoenix, where their mother comes into her inheritance yet still manages to forget to feed her kids, who forage for chocolate in the neighborhood trash bins. It slows to a crawl in the Appalachian mountains and their father's (and Chuck Yeager's) hometown, Welch, W. Va., where the kids grow up, freezing cold in the winter, starving all year around, and slowly plotting their escape.

Walls recounts her history with a flat, spare plainness that has inspired some critics to compare her unfavorably to writers like Harry Crews, who've covered their own hardscrabble childhoods with more lyricism. But the reader grows to respect Walls's stylistic decisions – glib, ornamental adjectives wouldn't do much to improve her account. Instead the bareness of the prose throws the broad, unblinking light of a naked bulb on the everyday horrors of her childhood in a way that lends a dignity, and even credibility, to the girlhood spent growing up poor, one that for all its toughness was as fragile as a glass house. (Kimberly Chun)