William Geist began his suburban odyssey as a Tribune columnist, and he currently covers that same beat for the New York Times. Toward a Safe and Sane Halloween and Other Tales of Suburbia (Times Books, $15.95) collects his dispatches from that nether world between the end of the city`s sidewalks and the last of the culs-de-sac. To be the Boswell of the boonies is no easy task. The natural temptation is to position yourself at one or another of the esthetic extremes. When your subject matter is ”the polyethylene flamingos, the leisure suits, the Tupperware parties, the Weber outdoor grills” which, as Geist notes, are the region`s flora and fauna, it is easy to fancy yourself a later-day Edward Gibbon. Conversely, simple good-guy neighborliness can easily trap a reporter who lives there–as Geist does–into a self-conscious and wholesale defense of the suburban lifestyle.
Geist, though, has found a way to deal with his material. That is doubly remarkable, considering he set out to do no such thing. Fresh from journalism school at the dawn of the Watergate era, cub reporter Geist was painfully aware that Bob Woodward had once been rejected for the Suburban Trib slot that he himself held.
”As he and Carl were becoming the richest and most famous journalists in the world, I was attending suburban board meetings in Bob`s stead, meetings where debates droned on until the wee hours concerning the unconscionable raising of school towel fees,” Geist recalls of his first days in the news business.
Still, he did manage to stay awake through enough of those meetings to learn how to recognize the quintessential sound of his neighbors` voices. By six years of such careful listening, he completed a do-it-yourself course in anthropological field work of which Margaret Mead could have been proud.
For Geist`s strength is his uncanny ability to recognize cultural details that another writer would most likely overlook. He picks up on nuances of the suburban landscape that even the inhabitants miss. Why would one sleepy suburb outfit a trained and equipped SWAT team, ethnologist Geist wants to know, except on the unspoken assumption that you never can tell when things might get out of hand at a block party or church supper?
Of course, man`s capacity to make himself look foolish is hardly limited to suburbanites. But most journalists assume that the subtleties of human personality are revealed one way in the nation`s halls of power, quite another way at the end of the commuter train`s run. Which is only to say that many of his colleagues require that their subject matter be underscored or set out in bold-face type, while Geist can find it in the little interstices where most of us lead our lives.
That is probably why many of us will remember his little prose poems to the world of the ordinary long after we have forgotten the headline stories about captains and kings.
”Maybe it was possible to be a journalist and not even write about subjects discussed on ”Face the Nation,” Geist suggests in his introduction. My guess is that many readers will answer that question with a resounding yes, long before they have come to the end of ”A Safe and Sane Halloween.”
Two Chicago authors have recently provided us with book-length lessons in human anatomy. In Notes of an Anatomist (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $12.95), Frank Gonzales-Crussi, a staff member at Children`s Memorial Hospital, shows us how the world looks from the perspective of a practicing pathologist. In The Male Member (St Martin`s, $7.95), Kit Schwartz takes a below-the-waist look at 50 percent of the human race.
In the 11 well-crafted essays of his ”Notes,” Gonzales-Crussi considers a range of subjects, all of which concern the human body in life and death. Of that latter state, he notes that the ancients and we contemporaries take differing attitudes. Like us, the Egyptians knew the mortician`s profession:
witness all those mummies on display in the basement of the Field Museum.
But the ancient mortician and his modern counterpart work for different audiences. The pharoah`s funeral director was only concerned with preserving his desceased employer`s body so that he might use it again in the next world. Not so his contemporary counterpart. Since the invention of modern embalming in the late 18th Century, practitioners of that craft have worked for quite another audience. Witness the continuous expansion of the services they offer –including one enterprising mortician`s drive-in wakes.
”What is apparent to the modern embalmer, in stark contrast with the ancient calling, is that all these carryings-on are strictly for the benefit of the living,” Gonzales-Crussi writes.
In similar fashion, he offers equally insightful observations on the phenomenon of child abuse, on various cultures` non-to-peaceful conceptions of the afterlife and on the peculiar pyschology of twins.
”The identical twin, like the identical triplet, or any identical multiple” he observes, ”gazes into the shattered mirror of his own individuality with a perplexity that is directly proportional to the number of his brethren.”
Schwartz`s study is a reviewer`s nightmare. How do you deal with it without falling into a quicksand of double entendres?
When I reached the end of The Male Member, a ”Compendium of Facts, Figures, Foibles, and Anecdotes about the Loving Organ,” I had only one question. Why? Through all of her book`s 181 statistic- and vignette-filled pages, Schwartz never lets us know the source of her own preoccupation with the subject. Was it old-fashioned penis envy or idle curiosity about how the other half lives that inspired her to write the book?
Without knowing the answer to that question, it is difficult, at times, to figure out why she wrote this ”quick study, speed-reading, sex history course.”
