Arlene McKanic

Fiction

A son’s crime, a father’s guilt

Review by Arlene McKanic

Screenwriter Noah Hawley’s latest novel, it must be said, does not join the list of novels and movies about “demon seed” children who cause unspeakable mayhem. Though The Good Father is narrated by a parent, the miscreant here is a grown man when he commits a senseless act of violence. Still, the tale of Daniel Allen, aka Carter Allen Cash, is no less harrowing for that.

Daniel’s father, renowned rheumatologist Dr. Paul Allen, simply refuses to believe that Daniel has murdered an aspiring and inspiring presidential candidate—a cross between Barack Obama and John Edwards. For the longest time, Paul, logical as he is, dismisses the mountain of evidence against his son; the reader can’t blame him but will grow more and more exasperated by his blindness.

The question that haunts this suspenseful novel is why Daniel did what he did. Was it because he worked for the candidate at one point and saw him looking lecherously at some girl’s cleavage? Was it an explosion of pent-up rage over his parents’ divorce? Paul keeps wondering whether he was indeed a good father to Daniel. If he was, how could this have happened? And if not, is he being a good father to his young twins now?

In the background of Hawley’s heartbreaking book, the reader senses the anxiety of a class of people who believed that their lives were predictable and comfortable, only to find those lives suddenly and inexplicably upended. While others endure unemployment, underwater mortgages or catastrophic illness, Paul Allen has a political assassin for a son. You can run, The Good Father tells us, but you can’t hide.

Screenwriter Noah Hawley’s latest novel, it must be said, does not join the list of novels and movies about “demon seed” children who cause unspeakable mayhem. Though The Good Father is narrated by a parent, the miscreant here is a grown man when he commits…

Fiction

A family’s will to survive

Review by Arlene McKanic

The reliably prolific Jodi Picoult returns with Lone Wolf, an absorbing story about an unusual, fractured family. When Luke Warren and his daughter Cara get into a ghastly car wreck, Luke suffers such brain damage that no one knows if he’ll ever recover. The family, including Cara’s remarried mother, stepfather and estranged brother, gather to try and determine if the plug should be pulled or not.

The page-turning potential of such a story might be enough for other writers, but Picoult’s focus on her characters makes the story that much more compelling. The story’s second most compelling character is Cara, who, to be blunt, is a thoroughly dislikable brat. Still, as full of self-absorbed teenage angst as she is, the reader sympathizes with her. A child not only of divorce but of familial implosion, she’s the one who insists there’s still hope for her beloved father. Her older brother Edward, on the other hand, would like Luke to end his life with some kind of dignity. Edward parted abruptly, angrily, from their father, and Cara is sure he wants Luke dead out of spite. Edward and Cara’s mother Georgie is, like mothers are, torn between her warring older children as well as her obligations to her new, young family. She also feels some residual obligation to Luke, the man who, she can’t forget, swept her off her feet once upon a time.

If Cara is the second most compelling character, Luke is the first. A mountain of a man, he’s gained notoriety for his study and care of wolves; he even spent a couple years living with a pack. The chapters are narrated by different characters, and Luke’s insights into wolf society make his contributions the most intriguing. By the end, you understand Luke’s tragedy: He knew everything about living with wolves, and very little about living with humans.

Picoult keeps the reader’s emotions seesawing till the last page. Lone Wolf has much to say about families—both human and animal—and the love, resentment and desperation that come into play during one human family’s time of trouble.

RELATED CONTENT
Jodi Picoult goes Behind the Book of Lone Wolf.

The reliably prolific Jodi Picoult returns with Lone Wolf, an absorbing story about an unusual, fractured family. When Luke Warren and his daughter Cara get into a ghastly car wreck, Luke suffers such brain damage that no one knows if he’ll ever recover. The family,…

FictionDebut Fiction

A gift from the snow

Review by Arlene McKanic

“Is she real?” is the question the reader asks about the strange, wild little girl at the center of Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child. Faina shows up in the dead of winter at the home of Mabel and Jack, a married couple who are trying, without too much success, to make a go of it as homesteaders in post-World War I Alaska.

Faina lives all by herself in the woods. Her skin is ice pale, her hair so blonde that it’s white. She seems to thrive in cold and snow and can’t tolerate heat; Mabel actually fears she’ll melt if she gets too close to a fire. She appears after Mabel and Jack build a snow child in their yard one whimsical night, and Mabel thinks she’s both a manifestation of her and Jack’s deep longing for a child and a sprite out of a Russian fairy tale. Unwinding alongside the mystery of Faina is the very palpable reality of Alaska. Ivey’s depictions of the state she was born in are literally breathtaking. You feel the snow and cold in your lungs, as if you’ve inhaled the place’s icy air, or spent time crunching through pure white blinding snow that comes up to the knees. Very rarely has the beauty and unyieldingness of nature been described so sensuously.

The reader also cares about Ivey’s characters. Mabel and Jack deserve a measure of happiness, and it would take a hard heart not to adore their salt-of-the-earth neighbors. But wrapped around everything is the enigma of Faina. Who or what is she, really? The answer is just one of the elements that make The Snow Child such a splendid, magical book.

“Is she real?” is the question the reader asks about the strange, wild little girl at the center of Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child. Faina shows up in the dead of winter at the home of Mabel and Jack, a married couple who…

FictionWorld Fiction

The fleet feet of the hunted

Review by Arlene McKanic

Many people think of the Rwandan genocide as a single, inexplicable eruption of violence that came out of nowhere, and ended with close to a million people being slaughtered within a matter of weeks. Most of the victims were from an ethnic group called the Tutsi. They were butchered, often at close range, by neighbors, former friends and even family members. Why? Because.

In Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron demonstrates that the genocide came slowly, over years, through the eyes of a young Tutsi man named Jean Patrick Nkuba. All Jean Patrick wants to do is run in the Olympics. He doesn’t want to start cutting people up with a panga because of some ideology no one understands. After all, the Belgians imposed the Tutsi and Hutu designation on the Rwandan people, many years before. Now they can only be told apart by ethnicity cards that everyone must carry.

Benaron’s focus on this one young man is part of the book’s brilliance. Our fear for Jean Patrick begins early and builds as we identify with him more and more. Had Benaron concentrated on too many people, the reader’s dread would have been too diffuse. Even as he’s roughed up, discriminated against and forced to pass as a Hutu just to fulfill his passion for running, Jean Patrick still refuses to believe that his country will descend into madness. Of course not—none of us would. What will happen in Rwanda, whose beauty Benaron rapturously describes, is incomprehensible in a society that thinks of itself as even a little bit civilized. The harassment will pass, Jean Patrick believes, and when he wins the Olympics and people find out he’s a Tutsi after all, the ridiculous prejudice against his people will be gone forever.

Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. But before the horror becomes inescapable, Jean Patrick lives his life. Benaron writes beautifully about the pain and exhilaration of being an Olympic-level runner (she’s a triathlete), of the friends Jean Patrick makes at school, of his savvy and taciturn coach, his loving mother and uncle and beloved brothers and sisters, the nutty white American professor he meets who insists on taking pictures of everything. Even the death of a cousin from malaria is sad, but ordinary. How can these good people know that in the months to come they’ll look back on such quotidian deaths with something like nostalgia? It’s unbearable; Benaron’s genius is that we read on despite it.

Many people think of the Rwandan genocide as a single, inexplicable eruption of violence that came out of nowhere, and ended with close to a million people being slaughtered within a matter of weeks. Most of the victims were from an ethnic group called the…

FictionHistorical Fiction

A funeral train for a fragile America

Review by Arlene McKanic

After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, his coffin was placed on a train and transported from New York, where his funeral was held, to Washington, D.C., where he was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands of ordinary people stood for hours in the unseasonable heat just to get a glimpse of the train passing. David Rowell’s insightful, gently humorous and compassionate debut tells the stories of a handful of these people. For those who were alive and remember the traumatic spring of 1968—Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated only weeks before Bobby Kennedy—the book might bring back memories both disturbing and strangely innocent. Along with the Vietnam War, riots and assassinations, there were only a few channels on TV, Walter Cronkite told everyone the news and everyone believed him, and the Beatles had not yet begun their slow and terrible four-way divorce. For those who weren’t around, The Train of Small Mercies is a snapshot of a time when all certainties about race, gender, parenthood and America’s place in the world were undergoing upheaval.

The stories of Rowell’s characters are largely ones of disappointment and dislocation. They include the family of a veteran who has lost a leg in Vietnam; when he returns, they struggle to reintegrate him into their lives. A Kennedy-worshiping mother is obsessed with her daughter to the exclusion of her husband and sons, and tragedy ensues. A young Pullman porter is following in his father’s footsteps. His first job? He’s serving on the funeral train, and while he’s excited, proud and a little scared, his mind is largely on what’s going to happen between him and his pregnant girlfriend. Later, he gets into a brawl that threatens his job. An Irish immigrant learns the job she was about to start has fallen through; she was supposed to be the nanny to one of the late senator’s many children. A little boy tries to come to terms with the fact that the nice time he’d spent with his father in a cabin in the woods wasn’t what it seemed.

The funeral train takes all of these people momentarily out of their lives and gives them something else on which to focus their grief. These are the small mercies of the title, and at such a fraught time in American history, small mercies are everything.

After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, his coffin was placed on a train and transported from New York, where his funeral was held, to Washington, D.C., where he was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands of ordinary people stood for hours in the unseasonable…

Fiction

Bonds of sisterhood span decades

Review by Arlene McKanic

It’s amazing how one mistake, one mistimed incident, can affect a family for decades. Mabel and Alberta (Bertie) Fischer, the protagonists of Nancy Jensen’s heartbreaking debut novel, The Sisters, are teenagers from Juniper, Kentucky. Their father died in World War I, when they were too young to really know him, and their mother marries a man so villainous that he borders on caricature. When the mother dies, the girls are left defenseless. Mabel has a plan, but that plan goes very wrong and results in generations of wounded women.

Jensen, whose novel was inspired by a rift in her own family that no one ever knew the cause of, helpfully provides a genealogical chart at the beginning of her book, and it’s sometimes needed. Yet she’s such an accomplished writer that she gives each character her own drama, and her own pain. There’s Mabel and Bertie, the recipients of the original wound. Mabel triumphs over disaster to become a renowned photographer, while Bertie marries a man she respects but never quite comes to love, though their marriage is successful and lasts for decades. As the mother of Alma and Rainey, Bertie is often withholding; the reader feels her view of life is to muddle through and endure it. Mabel rescues a little girl from the same sort of monstrous home life she suffered, then raises her, with great love, as her own daughter.

The story of the Fischer sisters is a woman’s story. The men are tangential, save Hans, Bertie’s steadfast husband. Bertie and Hans remind the reader—who may be more used to tales of breathless passion—that a couple can quietly abide together out of goodwill and the tasks of raising a family and running a home. The other Fischer women tend not to be as fortunate.

While Jensen’s men aren’t as richly drawn as her female characters, they too are pulled, without their knowledge, into the Fischer women’s trauma. Would these women have married the men they married, or not married the men they didn’t marry, had the thing that happened when Mabel and Bertie were girls been avoided? It’s no surprise that Rainey’s eccentric daughter Grace makes chain-link armor. Jensen’s book deftly explores both the armor and the links that went into creating and sustaining the wounded Fischers.

It’s amazing how one mistake, one mistimed incident, can affect a family for decades. Mabel and Alberta (Bertie) Fischer, the protagonists of Nancy Jensen’s heartbreaking debut novel, The Sisters, are teenagers from Juniper, Kentucky. Their father died in World War I, when they were too…

Fiction

An American family’s implosion

Review by Arlene McKanic

A reader coming to the end of Martha Southgate’s devastating fourth novel might think, “What did the Hendersons do to deserve this?” For they are a normal American family whose members are, at heart, kind and decent—and yet they struggle with more than their share of problems.

The Taste of Salt is narrated by the daughter of the family, Josie, an African-American marine biologist. She is drawn to her profession, perhaps, because her love of the water has always been a refuge from a difficult family life. In chapters that alternate between past and present, Josie tries to puzzle out how her family got to be the way it is. She wonders especially about her father and her brother, for Ray and Tick are both alcoholics. Maybe for Ray, her father, it was thwarted literary ambition, or the pressures of being an African-American man trying to raise a family in a dying industrial city. Who knows? The reasons for the handsome and charming Tick to fall as far as he does are even less explicable—he’s not only an alcoholic but has an off-and-on drug problem as well. Sarah, the stalwart wife and mother, always willing to support her men, is still healthy enough to know she can’t live with her husband; she finally kicks Ray out when Josie and Tick are young adults. But when the grown-up Tick comes home and begins to drink and drug again, Sarah can’t bring herself to turn her son away.

Not even Josie escapes. Though she’s neither an alcoholic nor an addict, her family’s troubles have taught her to armor herself emotionally, which affects her marriage to the gentle and goodhearted Daniel. She’s cruel to him, unintentionally, almost helplessly. She embarks on a crazy affair with a colleague that she doesn’t much trouble to hide. She refuses to have the children that her husband wants, a refusal that seems to occur even on a cellular level. Moreover, Josie won’t have anything to do with her father or brother unless it’s absolutely necessary. And it becomes absolutely necessary sooner than she’d like. With compassion and a quiet grief, Southgate examines the ways families self-destruct even as they try to hold it together.

A reader coming to the end of Martha Southgate’s devastating fourth novel might think, “What did the Hendersons do to deserve this?” For they are a normal American family whose members are, at heart, kind and decent—and yet they struggle with more than their share…

Fiction

A sad story from an estranged love

Review by Arlene McKanic

This sad book is about a man whose marriage disintegrates because he can’t say, “I love you.” And it’s a book about a woman whose marriage disintegrates because she can no longer tolerate not hearing her husband say, “I love you,” year after frustrating year. So it is that Michael and Kelly Hays, after many years of marriage and a daughter, Samantha, decide to throw in the towel and divorce; the only problem is that Kelly doesn’t show up in court to sign the papers. Instead, she gets in her car and drives straight from her house in Pensacola to New Orleans, and checks into the small hotel that the couple considered “theirs” whenever they were in the city. But once in familiar room 303, Kelly finds herself anchorless, defenseless and sliding into despair.

Michael is a successful defense lawyer, and his lucrative job has allowed Kelly to dabble in charity work and other things. Anticipating the formal end of his marriage, he’s taken up with a sweet young flibbertigibbet who literally swans around in crinolines for much of the book. Yet Michael’s instinct and his long years with Kelly not only tell him that she’s at “their” hotel, but that something has gone and is going very wrong.

Robert Olen Butler, a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is masterful in the way he draws us into the hearts of his characters. It’s tempting to say that Kelly and Michael have Daddy issues, but that would be too glib. Kelly’s father was mentally ill; Michael’s father believed the withholding of tenderness was the proper way to be a man and passed that belief on to his son, to devastating effect. For the Hays’ tragedy is that in his heart, Michael is neither cold nor unloving, no matter how hard he tries to be.

Butler gives the last pages of his quiet book the urgency of a thriller. The ending might be too on the nose for some readers, but for this reviewer, it was heartbreaking, and just right.

This sad book is about a man whose marriage disintegrates because he can’t say, “I love you.” And it’s a book about a woman whose marriage disintegrates because she can no longer tolerate not hearing her husband say, “I love you,” year after frustrating year.…

Fiction

Living a double life

Review by Arlene McKanic

There’s a difference in the sheer, thumping stupidity practiced by men and women, Tayari Jones’ new novel seems to say, but both forms of stupidity can devastate the lives of their children. The stupidity committed by Dana Yarboro’s father James Witherspoon is made clear from the first sentence. “My father,” Dana tells us, “is a bigamist.” Dana’s mother Gwen’s stupidity began when she married James knowing that he was already married. James married Gwen, even though he knew he was not only married but that Laverne, his real wife, had just given birth to a desperately ill premature baby named Chaurisse.

Fortunately, both girls are raised in loving homes with some access to their father, though their mothers have to struggle. This is especially hard for Gwen, who has no rights when it comes to James. Moreover, James insists that both Gwen and Dana keep away from his “legal” family; Laverne and Chaurisse must be spared the distress that Gwen and Dana’s existence would cause them. That the Yarboro women are continually vexed by the existence of Laverne and Chaurisse (who has no idea that she has a sister) is of no moment to James. Dana, angry and humiliated, decides to do something about a situation she and her mother find excruciating. But she’s a teenaged girl, and her remedy for enforced invisibility is chaotic, adolescent and sad, yet a little funny for all that.

Jones’ writing is unfussy; she’s invested more in her characters and their world than any flowery prose. Her talent as a writer makes you unable to really despise James Witherspoon, a good man who got into trouble early in life and is the type who compulsively makes that trouble worse. Nor can you disdain his sidekick and enabler, Raleigh, who was raised with James and goes along with his scams without complaint or judgment. As Jones herself said, going along with James gives the orphaned Raleigh not one but two families who love him. Laverne is a solid and responsible woman, but Gwen’s non-status in James’ life brings out a side of her that’s childish and vengeful. Despite their situation, Dana and Chaurisse can be refreshingly normal, interested in clothes, boys, parties, which college they’re going to get into, and hair—much of the book focuses on how hair is fetishized in the African American community. The end of Silver Sparrow doesn’t come as a surprise. Such, the ending tells us, are the wages of stupidity, if not sin.

There’s a difference in the sheer, thumping stupidity practiced by men and women, Tayari Jones’ new novel seems to say, but both forms of stupidity can devastate the lives of their children. The stupidity committed by Dana Yarboro’s father James Witherspoon is made clear from…

RomanceFictionRomantic Suspense

Hot for this guilty pleasure

Review by Arlene McKanic

There’s always a guilty pleasure in reading books full of people who are disreputable. For one thing, you have the pleasure of knowing that you’re so much better than they are. Then there’s the pleasure of following their escapades as they do crazy stuff that you can only dream of. In Lori Foster’s latest, Trace of Fever, freelance gumshoe Trace Rivers has gone undercover to undo Murray Coburn, a goateed psychopath who’s made his money in human trafficking and owns just about everyone who thinks they have power. He’s one of those creeps it’s best to be very afraid of. Trace, not the most biddable of men himself, fears very little. He teams up with Priscilla Patterson, who claims to be Coburn’s daughter and has her own agenda with regard to the monster. Yet she and Trace turn out to have, if not soft spots, at least human spots—you will like them in spite of yourself.

Foster’s dialogue is snappy, the atmosphere noirish. Everyone is uncommonly beautiful save the bad guys, but even that’s not quite true; Coburn’s insanely evil henchwoman Helene is fairly good-looking in a feral, Amazonian sort of way. There’s a reason her nickname is “Hell.”

Trace of Fever is a sexy, suspenseful page-turner. 

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

There’s always a guilty pleasure in reading books full of people who are disreputable. For one thing, you have the pleasure of knowing that you’re so much better than they are. Then there’s the pleasure of following their escapades as they do crazy stuff that…

RomanceRomantic Suspense

Unsettling chills and thrills

Review by Arlene McKanic

Lisa Jackson and Nancy Bush’s unsettling novel calls to mind both And Then There Were None and Stephen King’s It.

In Wicked Game the bones of a young woman have been found and some old high school friends, certain the bones are those of a girl they knew who vanished years ago, come together to try to solve the mystery. To make things even more stressful, one of the friends might be clairvoyant and the girl’s probable killer may or may not be human. Then people who knew the lost girl start dying, inexplicably, one by one.

Jackson and Bush take their time telling their story—the novel is over 400 pages long—which allows readers to get well- acquainted with the characters. These include the somewhat obsessive sad-sack cop who was on the case long ago, and has been given the now-cold case again, and Becca Sutcliff, who used to have visions as a teenager and now, with the discovery of the remains, is beginning to have them again. The authors know how to keep their readers turning the pages just to find who or what is causing the mayhem. And they provide an ending that’s worth the wait. 

Lisa Jackson and Nancy Bush’s unsettling novel calls to mind both And Then There Were None and Stephen King’s It.

In Wicked Game the bones of a young woman have been found and some old high school friends, certain the bones are those of a…

Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

Tough times for the Lincoln Lawyer

Review by Arlene McKanic

The lousy economy of recent years, like lousy economic times of any era, has the potential to give rise to engaging, compelling works of fiction. Thus, the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession are inspirations for Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness.

Times are so bad that even Connelly’s attorney Mickey Haller not only has to work out of his car for a while, but has to moonlight, too. On top of his usual criminal defense work, he represents folks in less tony pockets of L.A. who are in danger of having their homes foreclosed upon. He’s not quite a sad sack—he does drive around in a chauffeured Lincoln, can still afford his Corneliani suits and nobody’s in line to take away his house. But he does have the mournful decency we’ve come to expect of the good lawyer or private eye, and his heart, natch, has been bruised by a woman or two.

One winter’s day, Haller’s roles as criminal defense attorney and delayer of foreclosures meet when one of his clients is accused of murdering the banker who wanted to take her house.

Writers of crime novels must be sneaky and Connelly is a master of sneak. The payoff comes at the very end, as we know it must. Connelly takes but a couple of sentences to set you up—“Here it comes at last,” you think—then the hammer comes down. Literally. The end of The Fifth Witness gives the reader one of the best, no-good, nasty feelings ever.

The lousy economy of recent years, like lousy economic times of any era, has the potential to give rise to engaging, compelling works of fiction. Thus, the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession are inspirations for Michael Connelly’s The Fifth Witness.

Times are so bad that…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Paris is not for lovers

Review by Arlene McKanic

Paula McLain’s fictionalized study of the starter marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Wife, is a pleasure for anyone who wonders what it was like to be a broke, ambitious writer in Europe in the 1920s. Or, more specifically, a broke, ambitious writer’s wife.

Hadley meets Ernest at a friend’s house in Chicago. She’s in her late 20s, nearly a decade older than he is, and on the verge of permanent spinsterhood. He deflowers her, they marry and flee to Paris, where they can live cheaply and meet all manner of big shots, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. They have a baby, nicknamed Bumby. There’s some drinking, though Hadley doesn’t hit the sauce nearly as much as Ernest. In McLain’s hands, he’s nicer than one would think, and the word that comes to mind for Hadley is “earnest” as she struggles to make homes for them in dinky little rooms while Hem tries to make a living. In clear and unfussy prose, McLain makes the reader long for their Lost Generational squalor.

Indeed, McLain’s talent is such that the fact that few of the characters are likable doesn’t mar her story. Characters need only be interesting, and well-drawn creeps are the most interesting of them all. Exceptions to the overall badness are the Murphys, the rich, cosmopolitan and compassionate couple who adopt both the Hemingways and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds like some folks adopt ugly pound puppies, and of course Bumby, still a child when his parents’ marriage detonates. Even Hadley repels with her love of bullfighting—a woman who gets her kicks from watching an animal tortured to death is simply not someone one can like. When the appalling Pauline Pfeiffer, who will become Ernest’s second wife, crawls into bed with them one drowsy Mediterranean afternoon one doesn’t know whether to cheer or gag. Hadley, like so many of her revered matadors, ends up pretty badly gored, but survives, and lives well into her 80s.

Restrained, perceptive and a bit sad, The Paris Wife is a look at a time and a marriage that weren’t as glamorous and carefree as we’d like to believe. 

 

Paula McLain’s fictionalized study of the starter marriage of Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Wife, is a pleasure for anyone who wonders what it was like to be a broke, ambitious writer in Europe in the 1920s. Or, more specifically, a broke, ambitious…

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