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Highlights from the Texas Book Festival, part 2

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I started the festival’s final day Sunday in the Capitol Extension listening to James Hynes talk about his masterful new novel, “Next.” Hynes is a native of Michigan and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who moved to Austin in 1995. “Next” is his fourth novel — he’s also written a collection of darkly comic novellas called “Publish and Perish” — and a bit of a departure from the academic satires that have largely defined his career thus far, though the jabs at academia aren’t absent from “Next.”

You can broadly label “Next” a post-9/11 novel because it’s partly about the fear of the unexpected blistering our lives, and the festival had titled Hynes’ discussion “The Age of Anxiety.” Hynes noted that his novel is “not entirely about post-9/11 anxiety, but really more about the inevitable anxiety of a 50-year-old guy.”

That 50-year-old guy is Kevin Quinn, the editor of a University of Michigan academic journal who’s mired in middle-age nostalgia and melancholy. Without telling anyone, including his younger girlfriend who may or may not be pregnant with his child, and whom he is thinking of leaving, Kevin flies for the day from Ann Arbor to Austin for a job interview. He arrives hours early so he wanders downtown Austin, following an attractive young woman who reminds him of an old lover and reflecting on his life and where it might be going.

It would be easy to spoil “Next.” Let’s just say that as Kevin’s Ulyssean journey ends and he heads toward his interview, the novel pivots toward an ending that, while subtly foreshadowed, is still stunning when it arrives.

“Next” is not the first novel Hynes has set in Austin. His 2005 novel, “Kings of Infinite Space,” was set here, too, though Hynes called Austin “Lamar” in that book, “for some silly reason,” he said. In “Next,” Austin is Austin. Still, Hynes said that so many condo towers kept sprouting up while he worked on his book that after a while he gave up trying to keep its downtown scenes current. “At some point, I resigned myself to the fact that this was going to be a historical novel,” he said, laughing.

Hynes does use fictional names for some Austin landmarks. He began his session by reading a short passage in which Kevin visits Gaia Market — Hynes’ stand-in for Whole Foods. Kevin’s reaction to Gaia Market pierce the shopping aesthetic of Whole Foods. Hynes joked that one of the advantages of being a middling novelist who is not well known or whose books don’t sell well is that he has no need to fear being banished from Whole Foods because “nobody at Whole Foods is even aware of my ideological critique.”

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I next went to the sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church on Lavaca Street to hear Karl Rove (right). The controversial campaign operative and former adviser to President George W. Bush filibustered at least 30 of his 45 scheduled minutes by reading from his memoir, “Courage and Consequence.” Rove read passages covering the origins of the working friendship between Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock and then-Gov. Bush, the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, Bush’s arrival back in Washington late on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, and Bush’s visit to ground zero three days after 9/11.

An echoey sound system combined with the natural echo of a church sanctuary made it hard to understand Rove at times, at least for those of us sitting in the gallery. By the time he was done reading, there was time left for only three questions. The first asked was confused and pointless, something to do with politics as sport and winning as everything. The second question was related to the legitimacy of the Iraq war; for the only time during his session, I could hear and understand everything Rove said.

The question, mildly and politely asked, nonetheless prompted Rove to launch into a vigorous, nine-minute defense of the Bush administration’s interpretation of the intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities and a pugilistic attack on congressional Democrats who accused Bush of lying about those weapons. Rove, growing more prickly as each second ticked by, said he warned Bush that the accusations threatened to turn into “a dagger in the heart of your presidency unless we can fight it from the top of this administration to the bottom.” He repeated the familiar administration line that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq may not have had an active weapons program but it did have the capability of reconstituting its biological and chemical programs and restarting its nuclear program and would have done so as soon as the West lost interest in policing Saddam’s regime.

Rove quickly dispatched the final question, about government spending. He did note that the administration’s struggle to control spending was not entirely a struggle with Democrats. Republicans in Congress love their earmarks, too, Rove said.

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Austin author S.C. Gwynne (left) followed Rove Sunday afternoon. I’m a huge fan of Gwynne’s “Empire of the Summer Moon,” his history of Quanah Parker and the Comanches. So, so far, books by Austin writers — Hynes’ “Next” and Gwynne’s “Empire” — top my picks for the year’s best fiction and nonfiction.

Gwynne is from Connecticut and he said his book reflects “a Yankee’s love affair with the state of Texas.” A longtime journalist, first with Time magazine, then with Texas Monthly and now with the Dallas Morning News, Gwynne said his reporting skills were a natural fit for historical research, and he was pleased to discover that writing a book “is just slow reporting.”

I interviewed Gwynne as part of the Statesman’s coverage of the Texas Book Fesitval. You can read the interview here. It reflects many of the same things Gwynne discussed Sunday at the festival.


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