Arlene McKanic

Fiction

Disquiet on the home front

Review by Arlene McKanic

The only time this reviewer ever screamed back at her television was during an airing of David Rabe’s play Sticks and Bones. The show was about a returning Vietnam vet who’d been blinded in the war. His family was hung up on him sleeping with a prostitute or something else that was so beside the point that it was maddening. Roxana Robinson’s latest, long-awaited novel, Sparta, might make a reader just as mad.

Robinson’s previous novel, Cost, was unflinching in its portrayal of the ruination caused by a young man’s drug addiction. Sparta is nearly as devastating.

The protagonist is Conrad Farrell, a returning Iraq veteran, who’s come home to his loving, liberal, upper-middle-class family in upstate New York. Though none of them are as crazy as the family in Sticks and Bones, they too just don’t get it. Not only that, they don’t want to get it, despite their exhortations to Conrad to tell them “everything.” This is especially true of his mom, Lydia, a therapist. She’s a loving and caring mother—with an infuriating tendency to start coming unhinged anytime Conrad even hints at what really went on over there.

Still, we understand why an otherwise comfortable bunch like the Farrells can’t really cope when the chaos of war is dropped suddenly in their midst. We sympathize with Conrad’s girlfriend, Claire, even as we secretly wish she’d run as far from him as she can, even as we know Conrad desperately needs someone in his corner. But we also know that something very bad is going to happen if she stays.

Robinson’s sympathy for the deeply messed-up Conrad and his fellow vets is as impressive as her knowledge of their circumstances. How could she know what it’s like to be blown up by an IED? How does she know about the macabre jokes soldiers tell to keep themselves sane? In fact, Robinson interviewed several vets to give her book the verisimilitude it needed. Their stories must have been excruciating to hear, but they needed to be heard.

Their stories, or at least Conrad’s story, also deserve to be told. Full of the grief and deep compassion that’s becoming Robinson’s trademark, Sparta is a brilliant, necessary work.

The only time this reviewer ever screamed back at her television was during an airing of David Rabe’s play Sticks and Bones. The show was about a returning Vietnam vet who’d been blinded in the war. His family was hung up on him sleeping with…

FictionDebut Fiction

A delectable tale of the families we choose

Review by Arlene McKanic

Lorca, the excruciatingly vulnerable protagonist of Jessica Soffer’s first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, is, like so many teenage protagonists, burdened with a couple of seriously bad parents. Her mother Nancy, a chef, notices her when she feels like it. When the novel opens, she’s beginning to feel like it less and less. Lorca has been caught cutting herself and is to be packed off to boarding school. Nancy can’t wait, but the thought of being so discarded terrifies Lorca. As for Lorca’s absent father, he obeys and is cowed by his ex-wife.

On the other side of New York City is another lousy mother, Victoria, a woman with a self-obsession that sucks the air out of any room she’s in. (One mark of Soffer’s talent is that she makes the reader stick with Victoria even at her worst.) Victoria wants to believe that her love for her late husband, Joseph, with whom she used to run a restaurant, was so overpowering that there was no room in their marriage for anyone else. This was why she gave up their child at birth. But now Joseph, as subservient to his wife as Lorca’s dad is to his, is dead, and she has no one but her somewhat scattered upstairs neighbor Dottie. To get over her grief, Victoria starts a cooking class in her own kitchen. To finally win her mother’s affections, Lorca decides to learn how to cook a meal Nancy once rhapsodized over. When she sees a flyer announcing Victoria’s cooking school, she thinks it’s a reprieve.

Well, yes and no. Victoria and Lorca take to each other right away, gently circling each other physically and emotionally as they put together meals from Victoria’s native Iraq. The reader roots for Lorca as she begins to emerge from her isolation. She befriends not only Victoria, but also an equally lonely boy named Blot and maybe even Dottie.

Indeed, we root for all of Soffer’s rich and complex characters, with the exception of Nancy, perhaps—Soffer dislikes her too much. Sometimes families just don’t work, the author seems to say. The good news is you can always find another.

Lorca, the excruciatingly vulnerable protagonist of Jessica Soffer’s first novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, is, like so many teenage protagonists, burdened with a couple of seriously bad parents. Her mother Nancy, a chef, notices her when she feels like it. When the novel opens,…

FictionDebut Fiction

A daughter’s secrets, uncovered online

Review by Arlene McKanic

Kate Baron’s daughter Amelia is dead. She fell off the roof of her tony private school in Brooklyn. At first the death is ruled a suicide; then Kate gets an anonymous text that claims it wasn’t a suicide at all. Though shocking to the already shattered Kate, she suspected that her daughter—bright, pretty and fairly well behaved—wouldn’t have thrown herself off a roof. What happened?

Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia is a page-turner, but it’s not only the mystery of how Amelia died that keeps readers going. The chapters alternate between Kate’s point of view and Amelia’s, which includes postings from her Facebook page, text messages to and from her friends—including a mysterious boy named Ben—and missives from her school’s nasty online gossip sheet. We find in Amelia a delightful but deeply needy young woman. Indeed, nearly everyone in the book is needy. Kate, whose own neediness led to her unplanned and unwelcome pregnancy with Amelia, needs to get to know the truth about her daughter. The other adults, many of whom betray Amelia in some way, need to keep up appearances or cover their tracks. The other kids, even the posse of mean girls who torment Amelia during the last weeks of her life, need to belong.

Speaking of kids, McCreight is one of those rare writers who gets teenagers with the sort of specificity and accuracy that can put an ex-teenager’s teeth on edge. She makes you remember the good and bad craziness of those years. She makes you ache for the harrowed single mother Kate, and she makes you want to put your arms around Amelia and tell her everything gets better. But then you realize Amelia is gone, and your heart hurts. Reconstructing Amelia will keep you hooked till the last page.

Kate Baron’s daughter Amelia is dead. She fell off the roof of her tony private school in Brooklyn. At first the death is ruled a suicide; then Kate gets an anonymous text that claims it wasn’t a suicide at all. Though shocking to the already…

Fiction

A family restored is not a family remade

Review by Arlene McKanic

What is it like to be one of those families whose child is abducted? What is it like to be one of those families whose child is miraculously restored to them? The Vincents, in Atlanta author Sheri Joseph’s unsettling novel Where You Can Find Me, know the answer to both questions. When he was 11, their son Caleb was abducted, then found three years later. He and his family—mother Marlene, dad Jeff and precocious little sister Lark—struggle to pick up the pieces after he returns.

But Caleb’s abduction and return only exacerbate what was already wrong with Marlene and Jeff’s marriage. Deeply flawed, neither Marlene nor Jeff can give their children what they need, at least not by themselves. Eventually, Marlene takes the kids from Georgia to her mother-in-law Hilda’s ramshackle hotel in the rainforest of Costa Rica, without Jeff. There, no one knows who Caleb is. There are no news vans on the street; no one points and stares. Hilda is distracted but loving, and her man-boy of a son Lowell becomes a buddy to Caleb and Lark.

All seems to be well, but one mark of a good writer is the ability to hint at the disquiet beneath what looks like a calm surface. Like Hilda’s old hotel, part of it fallen into the valley and the rest teetering on the edge of a cliff, the reader is kept in a state of almost nail-biting uncertainty when it comes to this family’s recovery. In Where You Can Find Me, Joseph takes on a difficult subject and makes it work.

What is it like to be one of those families whose child is abducted? What is it like to be one of those families whose child is miraculously restored to them? The Vincents, in Atlanta author Sheri Joseph’s unsettling novel Where You Can Find Me,…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Joyce Carol Oates goes supernatural

Review by Arlene McKanic

Joyce Carol Oates must have had a ball writing The Accursed. This long (more than 600 pages), nutty tome covers a fractious year in the life of the Princeton upper crust in the early 20th century. Why Oates would bring such woe upon the place where she has happily lived and worked for years is anyone’s guess, but the result is tremendous fun.

The misfortunes that bedevil the Slades, Burrs and other muckety-mucks during that year of 1905-1906 seem to have been prompted by a lynching that draws forth the powers of darkness from a shadowy, scabrous netherworld called the Bog Kingdom. The first of these denizens of the dark to arrive in Princeton is Axson Mayte, who seduces a virginal Slade girl at the very moment of her marriage to a West Point graduate. It’s worse than “Downton Abbey”! Mayte is followed by a Count Gneist, who seems to be some sort of vampire and seduces one of the Slade girl’s relatives. Then, there’s the devilish Countess who almost seduces—wait for it—Woodrow Wilson, who at the time was the president of Princeton U.

Besides Wilson, there’s a nice sprinkling of historical characters throughout this novel, and Oates despises all of them. This reader is certain the only reason she doesn’t flat-out kill Wilson or have him dragged down to the Bog Kingdom is because, well, she couldn’t quite get away with that. Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, Upton Sinclair, Jack London and Mark Twain (and his noisome cigars) are portrayed with an almost gleeful viciousness, for these ghastly men and their fictional counterparts represent the very worst aspects of misogyny and patriarchy. Even those hearty socialists, London and Sinclair, think nothing of trampling or dismissing their women, and a goodly number of the fictional patriarchs are downright homicidal, not only toward their simpering, suffering wives, but their little children, too.

These overheated, intertwined stories are narrated by an elderly chap who was one of those little children who just managed to escape with his life. Though the narrator is speaking from the perspective of 1984, he sounds peculiarly Jamesian; when he mentions television near the book’s end the reader is actually startled.

Speaking of the book’s end, it’s so preposterous and over the top that the reader has to be impressed. But how else could Oates finish this tale? It’s bad enough, she seems to say, that Wilson went on to become the president of the United States. She had to make amends.

Anyone who takes on The Accursed should settle in for a long, bumpy, screwy, improbable but engrossing ride.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a Q&A with Joyce Carol Oates for The Accursed.

Joyce Carol Oates must have had a ball writing The Accursed. This long (more than 600 pages), nutty tome covers a fractious year in the life of the Princeton upper crust in the early 20th century. Why Oates would bring such woe upon the place…

FictionShort Stories

Linked tales of heartbreaking beauty

Review by Arlene McKanic

The subtitle of Revenge, Yoko Ogawa’s slender collection of stories, is “Eleven Dark Tales.” But while dark in subject matter, these tales are nearly delicate, and their overwhelming emotion isn’t revenge but an excruciating sadness. Filled with lonely people who are incapable of human contact, or who can only make human contact in macabre and unsatisfactory ways, they’re also interlinked, with bits of one story illuminating parts of another. Numbers and motifs—like strawberry shortcake or the creepy figures that emerge from a public clock—recur. “Fruit Juice” features an abandoned post office full of perfectly edible kiwi fruit. In “Old Mrs. J.” we find out how the kiwis got there in the first place. In one story a character is young and lonely, while in another story the character is old and just as lonely—or dead.

Speaking of deaths, Ogawa’s writing is full of such grace and sorrow that even the most grisly death has a weird beauty. She also adds touches of magical realism that are so skillful and subtle that the reader wonders if the things she describes can really happen. Can the young woman in “Sewing for the Heart” actually live with her heart beating outside of her chest? Why does absolutely everything handled by the lonely bachelor uncle in “The Man Who Sold Braces” and “Welcome to the Museum of Torture” fall to pieces?

As for the title: Yes, some people do get revenge, large or small, on people who displease them. But in Ogawa’s heartbreaking stories, life itself seems to have the last laugh.

The subtitle of Revenge, Yoko Ogawa’s slender collection of stories, is “Eleven Dark Tales.” But while dark in subject matter, these tales are nearly delicate, and their overwhelming emotion isn’t revenge but an excruciating sadness. Filled with lonely people who are incapable of human contact,…

FictionShort Stories

Tenth of December

Review by Arlene McKanic

George Saunders is one of the masters of the difficult art of the short story. In his latest collection, Tenth of December, wounded characters confront situations that range from slightly skewed to downright Orwellian.

In “Victory Lap,” a teenaged boy prevents a catastrophe by breaking all the rules his smothering, control-freak parents have laid down for him. In “Escape From Spiderhead,” prisoners are subjected to high-tech Milgramesque experiments where their emotions are manipulated, effortlessly, by intravenous drugs. The point of the exercise is uncertain to the prisoners, the experimenters and the reader, and the story is so matter of fact in its depiction of horror that the reader almost wishes she’d never read it. This is not the last story in which impossible but cleverly named psychotropic drugs will mess with the insides of people’s heads.

Most of the stories are narrated by men, or have men as their protagonists. The boys are outsiders, either too fat or too nerdy, and many of the men have soul-crushing and even bizarre jobs. In “Exhortation,” a director urges his staff to keep up their “positive energy” for some task that has a whiff of both uselessness and nefariousness about it, lest their shady overlords grow extremely displeased.

At last, the reader comes to the title story. It’s about an unpopular schoolboy, a dying man and a frozen lake. A masterpiece that reveals the power of stubborn love and redemption, it seems, in a strange way, to make the suffering in the other stories worthwhile. In Tenth of December, Saunders proves that he’s both a brilliant observer of weirdness and a fierce believer in the connections that keep people going.

George Saunders is a brilliant observer of weirdness—and a fierce believer in human connections.
Fiction

A life transformed by murder

Review by Arlene McKanic

At only 16 years old, Laurel Nicolson sees a person she has known as loving and gentle commit murder in cold blood. The authorities claim the murder was an act of self-defense, but Laurel knows better. She will spend the next 50 years of her life keeping the secret and wondering why it happened in the first place. But the need to know the truth becomes urgent: Soon after the book opens, we learn that the murderer is now dying after a very long and mostly happy life.

The Secret Keeper alternates between the present day, where Laurel, now an Academy Award-winning actress, is trying to beat the clock, and the time of the London Blitz, those days in 1940 and 1941 when London and other British cities were under continuous nighttime bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. In the midst of this horror we’re introduced to two young women—Dorothy and Vivien—and their men. Dorothy, then called Dolly, is a dreamy girl whose family was wiped out in the notorious Coventry bombing. She is engaged to Jimmy Metcalfe, a war photographer. Vivien, whose own family tragedy happened years before, is an Australian émigré married to a wealthy, much older, monstrously cruel writer. Their losses have driven both girls a little mad. Dolly has delusions that the cranky old dowager she works for will leave her a fortune, though we understand that the dowager only thinks of her as a servant. Vivien, who blames herself for the loss of her family, believes she deserves the punishment her husband, and the world, metes out. Though the women barely know each other, Dolly’s delusions quickly come to envelop Vivien as well.

Best-selling author Kate Morton takes her time unraveling this story, which begins with one secret, then leads to another the reader really wasn’t expecting. In addition to the plot’s clever twists and turns, the characterizations are also pleasing. There’s not only the tragic Dolly and Vivien, but the dogged and somewhat queenly Laurel, her sisters and their absent-minded professor of a younger brother. A long book that passes quickly, The Secret Keeper is a study of war and other tragedies, what they can do to people, and how their repercussions can carry on for decades.

At only 16 years old, Laurel Nicolson sees a person she has known as loving and gentle commit murder in cold blood. The authorities claim the murder was an act of self-defense, but Laurel knows better. She will spend the next 50 years of her…

FictionHistorical Fiction

A fairy tale interrupted by war

Review by Arlene McKanic

Susanna Moore’s The Life of Objects reminds us that people have very different ways of reacting to even the worst sort of trauma. It begins simply: Beatrice Palmer, an Irish Protestant girl, longs to get away from her undemonstrative family and her dull and backward part of the world. Like some scullery maid in a fairy tale, her ticket out is her ability to make lace. But Moore also reminds us that fairy tales can turn very dark indeed.

Beatrice is taken to Germany to make lace for the Metzenburgs, an aristocratic German couple who live on a Sansouci-esque estate with some servants. Unfortunately, the world is on the cusp of World War II, which doesn’t trouble this naive young Irish girl overly much. She knows nothing of war, after all. The worst thing she’s ever had to deal with is her unloving mother. Still, the Metzenburgs begin to secrete their family heirlooms, piece by piece, in the hope that these objects will remain untouched when what happens happens. They, their friends and their staff expect to resume their lives after the unpleasantness. But, by the time they realize their old lives are gone forever, it’s much too late.

Of course, the reader has no such illusions. We know what’s going to happen and we keep reading as Beatrice and the Metzenburgs endure one horror after the other, pulled along by Moore’s writerly skill and control. Beatrice is her narrator and her chronicler and she recounts all the ghastly things that happen to her with a surprising lack of outrage or terror. It’s as if Moore is saying that in times of war, people too become objects to be used and discarded. Still, we’re outraged on Beatrice’s behalf and on behalf of the German couple she’s grown fond of. One hesitates to use the word “love,” since Beatrice doesn’t seem given over to such powerful emotions, but what else except love would keep her from getting on the first transport back to neutral Ireland at the first sign of real trouble?

The Life of Objects is an unflinching look at both human cruelty and human resilience.

Susanna Moore’s The Life of Objects reminds us that people have very different ways of reacting to even the worst sort of trauma. It begins simply: Beatrice Palmer, an Irish Protestant girl, longs to get away from her undemonstrative family and her dull and backward…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The garden of the post-war heart

Review by Arlene McKanic

Yun Ling Teoh is an angry woman—and she has every right to be. The daughter of a wealthy ethnic Chinese family in Malaya, she and her beloved sister were taken prisoners by the Japanese during World War II. The camp where they were taken was typically miserable, but so obscure that even in her old age Yun Ling can’t find out where it was or what it was called. Her bitterness toward the Japanese remains relentless and even invigorating; in her career as a prosecutor and then a judge she’s sent a goodly number of Japanese war criminals to their deaths.

But Tan Twan Eng, author of The Gift of Rain, lets us know from the beginning that nothing in this tetchy, straight-talking woman’s life is uncomplicated. Yun Ling’s sister Yun Hong had a passion for Japanese gardens that was kindled by a family visit to Kyoto. When Yun Ling escapes from the camp, she vows to make one for her, despite her hatred of the Japanese. To do this she must apprentice herself to Aritomo, a mysterious Japanese gardener who once worked for the Emperor whose troops had brutalized her and her sister for sport.

Eng brings the same pleasing level of messiness to his new novel as he did to The Gift of Rain. In both cases the messiness is the result of war, which not only brings horror to the protagonists, but upends the societies in which they live and forces them to examine old beliefs and ways of life that were taken for granted. Once again, Eng transports the reader to a world that few people know about and reveals the complicated humanity of its inhabitants.

Yun Ling Teoh is an angry woman—and she has every right to be. The daughter of a wealthy ethnic Chinese family in Malaya, she and her beloved sister were taken prisoners by the Japanese during World War II. The camp where they were taken was…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Escaping horror at the edge of the world

Review by Arlene McKanic

Lance Weller’s first novel, Wilderness, recounts the harsh world of the Civil War and its aftermath unflinchingly. At the same time, he redeems it with flashes of tenderness as bright and ephemeral as the shooting stars that fascinate his protagonist, Abel Truman.

Truman is an odd but interesting character to embody the era’s small glimmers of kindness. When we first meet him he’s a gruff, old, banged-up, frightful-looking Civil War veteran. He lives at the edge of the ocean in the Pacific Northwest with a dog who’s in only slightly better shape than he is. He can almost always be counted on doing and saying the wrong thing, sometimes to the point where he puts his own life in peril. Yet his compassion is unsullied, whether he’s easing a young soldier to his death, saving the life of a blind Chinese girl who still remembers him in her old age, or caring for his dog. In turn Abel is blessed, once in a blue moon, by the kindness of strangers.

Like so many Civil War tales, Wilderness is a story of journeys through a chaotic world. The war has destroyed the social order, and no one knows what will replace it. Even nature, described in Weller’s beautiful prose, has been unsettled, the trees blasted apart by cannonballs and meadows set on fire.

Trees, by the way, aren’t the only things blasted apart by cannonballs. Weller’s depictions of a battle Truman and his fellow soldiers find themselves in are as horrific as his descriptions of nature are gorgeous. The miracle is that Abel Truman keeps his gnarly humanity even after witnessing such things. With its acknowledgment of both horror and beauty, Wilderness is an impressive debut.

RELATED CONTENT

Read Lance Weller's story of the inspiration for Wilderness.

Lance Weller’s first novel, Wilderness, recounts the harsh world of the Civil War and its aftermath unflinchingly. At the same time, he redeems it with flashes of tenderness as bright and ephemeral as the shooting stars that fascinate his protagonist, Abel Truman.

Truman is an odd…

FictionHistorical Fiction

A sensual Edith Wharton

Review by Arlene McKanic

It is tempting, in light of Jennie Fields’ novelization of Edith Wharton’s affair with Morton Fullerton, to start a review that asks the reader to imagine Edith Wharton with no clothes on. For most of her fans this is a daunting task; the woman seemed to have been born wearing layers and layers of velvets, lace, buttons, corsets and ribbons.

Fields, however, has no problem imagining Wharton in the altogether. Still, The Age of Desire is about more than adulterous hijinks. Indeed, the book’s primary relationship isn’t between Wharton and Fullerton, but between Wharton and her now mostly forgotten governess and secretary, Anna Bahlmann. Called “Tonni” by her boss, she’s mousy, self-effacing and infinitely forbearing. She needs to be; the sometimes imperious Wharton switches between treating her like a beloved family member and a house elf. Still, this is rather better than Wharton treats her husband, Teddy, who spends much of the book not only being cuckolded, but suffering from what is now recognized as manic depression.

Fields makes us understand why Wharton would fall in love with a bounder like Fullerton. Wharton married the older Teddy because he was a gentleman of some means and it was the thing to do at the time. Their marriage is arid. Fullerton is beautiful, he’s as indifferent to public opinion as the rest of her friends, and he wants her, a plain woman in her mid-40s. All the while Tonni lurks in the background, watching and disapproving, yet ever steadfast.

Inspired by Wharton’s letters, The Age of Desire is by turns sensuous—Fields’ descriptions of Wharton’s homes and apartments are far more mouth-watering than her depictions of Edwardian rumpy-pumpy—and sweetly melancholy. It’s also a moving examination of a friendship between two women.

RELATED CONTENT: Watch a video with Jennie Fields on our YouTube channel.

It is tempting, in light of Jennie Fields’ novelization of Edith Wharton’s affair with Morton Fullerton, to start a review that asks the reader to imagine Edith Wharton with no clothes on. For most of her fans this is a daunting task; the woman seemed…

Fiction

Hard-knock story with a modern twist

Review by Arlene McKanic

Ben Hanson, the protagonist of Patrick Somerville’s fourth novel, This Bright River, is a loser. When the novel opens he’s been in jail and gone through a million-dollar trust fund—how, he can’t really say—and still doesn’t know what to do with himself. In the meantime he’s turned up at the St. Helens, Wisconsin, home of his recently deceased uncle, having been deputized by his family to sell it and pocket 25 percent of the sale. His family, at least, knows he’s down and out.

Lauren Sheehan, on the other hand, isn’t a loser. Lauren is just unlucky, and has fled to St. Helens, her childhood home, after surviving a disastrous marriage. She and Ben knew each other briefly and uncomfortably in high school. Now, these unhappy and rudderless people meet again.

Of course, there are many obstacles for this sad-sack couple to overcome before they find peace, if not happiness. A lot of it has to with their own inertia, their utter inability to go forward until some past traumas are resolved. In Ben’s case, his problems are tangled up in his wealthy parents and his almost-but-not-quite perfect sister, who took her trust fund and quadrupled it. There’s also Ben’s former friend, who not only stole Ben’s idea for a now wildly successful computer game, but his girlfriend as well. Most of all, there’s Ben’s unfinished business with his weird, brilliant, long-dead cousin, Wayne. In Lauren’s case, it’s her memories of her erratic upbringing and rackety mother, her calamitous stint as a doctor in Africa and her ex-husband, all of which have combined to give her a massive case of PTSD.

Somerville is excellent in telling this peculiarly 21st-century story about two youngish people who can’t quite get themselves together despite the advantages of brains and money. He’s also adept at unveiling those secrets that families keep hidden, most of all from themselves—despite a couple of over-the-top scenes and lurid revelations that briefly unbalance the narrative. Still, we learn to pull for Ben and Lauren as they grope and stumble their way out of the personal cul-de-sacs they’ve found themselves in. Somerville is confident and skillful enough as writer to dare to be hopeful.

Ben Hanson, the protagonist of Patrick Somerville’s fourth novel, This Bright River, is a loser. When the novel opens he’s been in jail and gone through a million-dollar trust fund—how, he can’t really say—and still doesn’t know what to do with himself. In the meantime…

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