Arlene McKanic

Katie Burrelli, the protagonist of Michelle Boyajian’s Lies of the Heart, didn’t have the most satisfying life even before the death of her husband. She’s the kind of woman who has always seen herself as second best; not as pretty as her beautiful sister Dana, not as beloved by their parents, not as popular as her friends. Then she meets Nick while he’s fishing for clams in their native Rhode Island. They marry, and he becomes a speech therapist for developmentally challenged people while she becomes, halfheartedly, a documentary filmmaker.

Then Jerry, one of Nick’s clients, murders him. No one can explain why, least of all Jerry, a grown man with the I.Q. and comprehension of a child, who’d come to view Katie and Nick as surrogate parents. Jerry had grown so close to the Burrellis that they gave him his own room in their house, an act that, though well meant, was a tragic mistake.

The murder and the trial, which take up most of the book, send Katie into a spiral of anger and grief. She’s angry with her family, her friends, Nick’s coworkers; that they all seem to be on Jerry’s side enrages both her and the reader, until we learn better. Over the course of the book we also learn that Katie’s marriage to Nick, like everything else in her life, wasn’t as idyllic as she would have liked it to be. Though they passionately loved each other, Nick—handsome, talented and a bit self-pitying—could be cruel to her, and Katie was an expert at constructing maddening little head games—some of which involved innocent Jerry.

Boyajian’s writing style is deeply sensuous, even startling. The book begins with Katie imagining the path the bullet took through her husband’s brain, and the final snuffing of his consciousness. The author conveys Katie’s inability to communicate with people around her by having nearly everyone stutter, stop in mid-sentence, mumble and evade. Jerry’s own frustrations with language lead to rages Katie’s lawyer tries to use against him. The exception to this reticence is Katie’s dad, who talks too much, and at the top of his lungs; he’s not quite comic relief. We’re not surprised to learn that Katie can’t quite finish the film she’s making about two Holocaust survivors, a man and woman who have found peace and deep love despite the horrors they endured. Katie learns, just in time, that the Cohens have much to teach her about compassion and tolerance.

Lies of the Heart is a remarkable debut novel. We can only hope to hear much more from Michelle Boyajian.

What if one morning your hard-working, loving, sensible father woke up and decided he wanted to run away with the circus? And then you had to tell your mother about it? This is only the beginning of Frank Delaney’s passionate bildungsroman—for there is worse to come. The coming-of-age story told by Benedict McCarthy is not only especially tough, it’s still haunting him in his old age. And if he’s telling it now, after being born in Ireland around 1914, he’s an elderly chap indeed.

Speaking of 1914, Delaney’s interweaving of Ben’s radical loss of innocence with Ireland’s own maturation is a touch of brilliance. The action takes place mostly in 1932, an election year. The McCarthys—Harry, Louise and Ben—live in a bucolic near-paradise in southwest Ireland. They love and respect one another, and one gets the feeling that if “The Catastrophe” (as they call the circus-disappearance-act) hadn’t happened, Ben would have never left home.

Traveling circuses and vaudeville troupes are fairly common and provide much-needed entertainment for hard-working folk like the McCarthys. Harry begins to attend Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, whose eponymous star is a beautiful, much younger woman with a shady background, though its shadiness isn’t all of her own doing. He falls insanely, adolescently in love with her, and the betrayed Louise tasks their son with bringing him back at all costs. The results are even more catastrophic.

The book’s complicated plot takes in such elements as embezzlement, murder, blackmail, Celtic myth, real-life figures like Eamon de Valera—who helps Ben in his quest to set his world aright—and a bitterly snarky ventriloquist’s dummy named Blarney. Delaney, once a judge for the Booker Prize, writes with a beauty, compassion and depth that reminds one of William Trevor. He also has a peculiarly Catholic belief in forgiveness and atonement, and there is much in this story to forgive and atone for. Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show is an inventive, amazing work.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

T. Greenwood's novel Two Rivers begins with a lynching—or does it? We learn later that the incident happens in 1968, not 1928, and in Vermont, not Mississippi. We also learn that one of the possible participants, Harper, lost his pregnant wife that same night. When the action fast-forwards to 1980, we see Harper save an odd-eyed pregnant girl from a train wreck. Are these events all somehow related?

Two Rivers is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder, with its quiet New England town shadowed by tragedy, and of Sherwood Anderson, with its sense of desperate loneliness and regret. It's as if the loneliness that has plagued Harper since the death of his wife—the beautiful and ebullient Betsy, a girl he'd loved since they were 12 years old—has reached out and infected the landscape. The novel, after all, is set in autumn, a time of fading and gathering cold.Even the protagonist's name, Harper, calls to mind To Kill a Mockingbird, with its painful racial entanglements also set in a small town. Yet the girl Harper saves from the train wreck, who calls herself Marguerite, brings warmth and hope to Harper and his daughter Shelly, who was born that dreadful night and whose 12th birthday Harper nearly forgets. Marguerite, a black girl from the South who claims to have been exiled from her own town because of her pregnancy, is completely comfortable with these white folks she's never met. Why?

Along with Harper, Shelly, Marguerite and Betsy, Greenwood fills her novel with memorable characters, especially in the flashback chapters. There's Harper's mother, the town misfit, aflame with her indignation at injustice and whose passion for the civil rights movement seems to have led to her death. Harper's father, by contrast, is sad and passive. There's Harper's not-quite friend Brooder, a veteran disfigured in Vietnam, who was also in love with Betsy. Did his love for her lead him to do what he did the night the black man was lynched? It's to Greenwood's credit that she answers her novel's mysteries in ways that are believable, that make you feel the sadness that informs her characters' lives. 

Abraham Verghese’s first novel, Cutting for Stone, with its huge cast of characters and exotic locales—including the Bronx—has a richness that recalls Conrad or Forster. Set mostly in and around Addis Ababa and New York, the story follows the life of Marion Praise Stone. His mother, a nun, died giving birth to Marion and his twin Shiva, and their Anglo-Indian father fled the country after the catastrophe. As a result, the twins are cared for by Hema, an irascible but hugely loving Indian born-doctor, and the saintly Ghosh, another Indian-born physician who spends years pining for Hema even as they raise the twins together. Rosina is the boys’ nanny and her daughter Genet is their playmate and “sister,” while Matron is the stern but loving head of both the family and the “Missing” (the Ethiopian mispronunciation of Mission) hospital where the family lives and ministers to the needs of the poor.

Marion, the narrator, shares a nearly mystical connection with his twin: in fact, they were born joined at the head. Though both boys are handsome and intelligent, Shiva is an oddity; one is tempted to describe him as a high-functioning autistic savant. Both brothers, predictably, go into medicine. Marion becomes an excellent if unheralded surgeon, but Shiva, with no formal medical training, becomes a pioneer in fistula repair, a skill desperately needed Ethiopia. Yet Shiva’s inability to read social cues leads to a long estrangement between the brothers and eventual disaster for not only the two of them but also for Genet, whom Marion grows to love.

Such is Verghese’s talent that minor characters like patients, interns, Ethiopian soldiers and even the emperor’s spoiled little dog are compelling. Trained as a doctor (his memoir about working with AIDS patients garnered considerable acclaim), his depictions of surgery are graphic without being macabre, and he’s also excellent at juxtaposing the intimate life of a family with the larger crises happening in the outside world. Cutting for Stone is a brilliantly realized book that the reader wants to live in, if only for a while.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.