On Sale Today: The Indian Clerk, Two Lives

If you missed them in hardcover, two popular books from last fall are available in paperback today. David Leavitt's historical novel, The Indian Clerk, tells the story of a closeted Cambridge don who encourages a poor, straight mathematics genius in Madras to emigrate to England in 1913. While some reviewers found the novel too ambitious, The New Yorker said Leavitt used the math metaphor "to superb effect, demonstrating how the most meaningful relationships can defy both logic and imagination." Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, is, in critic Meryle Secrest's words, "not so much a joint biography as a meditation on literature and morality, built around the disquieting fact that Stein and Toklas, both Jewish [and lesbians], remained in Europe throughout World War II without either hiding or being swept up in the Holocaust." How they lived openly in such catastrophic times is interesting; while Malcolm's ruminations on biography, biographical sleuthing, and biographers "using" their subjects are fascinating. The good news is she doesn't degay anyone in the book, including the villains. The bad news is she seems to stack her deck against Alice. The book won the Publishing Triangle award for nonfiction and was a NYT notable book of 2007.