WINKIE

By Clifford Chase

Grove Press

256 pages

$16.95

I picked up Winkie expecting a madcap romp: it is, after all, the story of a living teddy bear of somewhat indeterminate gender falsely arrested for terrorist acts by an overzealous, arbitrary government. Some reviewers have invoked Franz Kafka, but the comparison fails in important ways. Like Joan Didion, Clifford Chase writes prose that reflects not just his own ravaged psyche but that of the country — and embeds in his book the concrete circumstances he’s reacting to.

Further, in its chronicling of Winkie's thoughts on and interactions with his human family (whom he leaves) and child (who is taken from him), the novel is an existential meditation on love, companionship, and the seemingly inevitable loss that accompanies these. It is a solemn and sorrowful book. It also contains moments of high farce involving America’s justice system, many quite funny. I’ve never cracked a smile while reading Kafka.

That said, the book does take one misstep. The prosecutor charges Winkie with crimes dating back millennia, including corrupting Athens’s youth, casting spells, and teaching evolution, and this character — who sees a moral equivalent between those offenses and the attempted letter bombings that led to Winkie’s arrest — is a troubling straw man.

Unlike John Scopes, Winkie is innocent, but the crimes he’s accused of would be serious in any age. And to anyone familiar with the current administration’s methods, these preposterous allegations will seem like unnecessary hyperbole — the theater of cruelty now under way needs no embellishment. Although Winkie is not sent to Guant�namo and is given a court-appointed lawyer (named Unwin, a welcome bit of absurdity), his imprisonment is horrifying and the terrorism-related charges against him no less so. Problematizing these with historical witch hunts only dilutes their power.

Chase is also dealing with personal concerns in Winkie: he is a character in the book, as is his mother, who died this year. These problems are not just his, though, and in the character of Winkie, who sheds his passivity for action, Chase has offered a vision of innocence whose example we might do well to follow in these mad and maddening times. (Juliana Froggatt)

FRAGILE THINGS

By Neil Gaiman

William Morrow/HarperCollins

384 pages

$26.95

Neil Gaiman is a fragile thing. Like fellow fantasist Ray Bradbury, he populates his worlds with wise children and miracle makers. He wraps his tales in layers of fog and cobweb, with a tenderness that belies their often shocking conclusions (not to mention his own reputation as, in the words of one Miami New Times writer, “literature’s rock star”). In Fragile Things, his first miscellany since 1998’s Smoke and Mirrors, there is plenty of potentially shocking material. But despite his predilection for such unsavory themes as pedophilia (“Keepsakes and Treasures”), adultery (“How Do You Think It Feels”), and the perils of being devoured alive (“Feeders and Eaters”), Gaiman remains solicitously by his readers, dressing the wounds he inflicts with a subterfuge of gauze.

A fantastically prolific writer of novels, comics (most notably the Sandman series, published by Vertigo/DC), screenplays, and even poetry, Gaiman has received awards for science fiction (including both the Hugo and the Nebula), ...