Arlene McKanic

Fiction

Three new books explore the power of belief

Feature by Arlene McKanic

Religion is a motivating force in the lives of millions of people, for good or for ill. In these three books, characters’ religious beliefs spur the action, influence major life decisions—or leave them with at least a shred of dignity under dire circumstances.

FBI-trained forensic artist Carrie Stuart Parks’ suspenseful novel, A Cry from the Dust, is inspired by a dark moment in history: the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, where a posse of renegade Mormons slaughtered a group of pioneers and tried to blame it on the Indians.

Gwen Marcey has no idea what she’s in for when she agrees to sculpt the death masks of three victims of the massacre. The forensic artist has taken the job at the Mountain Meadows Interpretive Center to pave the way for a return to a normal life after beating cancer. Mother of a stroppy teenager, ex-wife of a narcissistic best-selling author, owner of a pony-sized Great Pyrenees, Gwen is also intelligent, talented and amazingly perceptive. She will need all of her gifts to survive the mess she will soon find herself in: A remnant of a secret Mormon sect holds a grudge over the long-ago incident, and they want something from Gwen badly enough to kill.

Fortunately, our heroine is lucky even in her misfortune. As her Spock-like friend Beth says, “Everything happens for a reason.” Case in point: The ravages brought by Gwen’s cancer treatments—double mastectomy and hair loss—help her disguise herself during one of many close calls.

Besides having a resourceful and likable heroine, the book also features that rarest of characters: a villain you don’t see coming, but whom you hate with relish. Moreover, you think said villain’s crazy plans for world domination just might work. Let’s just say it’s amazing what some people think they can do with Semtex.

A Cry from the Dust will keep you hoping, praying and guessing till the end.

HOPE AND CHANGE
Philip Gulley’s latest novel, A Place Called Hope, begins propitiously. You’re about six pages in when you realize there are about a half dozen characters you want to smack. This might even include the lovable protagonist, Quaker minister Sam Gardner. That’s because everyone in his small town is pleased to walk all over him, from his wife to his secretary to the church elders.

Sam seems content to tolerate the abuse, until he isn’t. The last straw comes when, as a favor to another minister, Sam presides over a same-sex wedding at the Unitarian church. It gives his church elders the excuse to fire him that they’ve been looking for. It’s no wonder that he fantasizes, for a hot second, about writing a novel about a pastor who slaughters the elders of his church and stows their carcasses in a freezer.

But no matter—Sam finds another meeting to pastor, even though it does only have 12 members. Why, when it used to have more than 100, is one of the mysteries Sam needs to suss out. Gentle and humorous, A Place Called Hope strikes the reader as a sort of extended episode of “Leave it to Beaver” with email and smartphones. That, by the way, is a compliment.

HISTORY'S LESSONS
Though much has been written about World War II, the fight against Japan is often overshadowed by stories of Nazi brutality. This novel changes the balance. A little more than halfway through Sigmund Brouwer’s heartrending Thief of Glory, the sadistic director of a Japanese concentration camp in what was then Dutch East India demands that every girl over the age of 16 be turned over to him as a concubine. The women decide to refuse, knowing it may cost them their lives. Then, they break into “Amazing Grace.”

Though this is the most overtly religious scene in Brouwer’s book, faith pervades the narrative of this Empire of the Sun-like tale of Jeremiah Prins’ childhood in a Jappenkamp. We see it in the piety of the Prins family before they are torn asunder by the occupation. We see it in Jeremiah’s repudiation of his faith after he’s lost everything, and his struggle to get it back.

The author of more than 30 novels, Brouwer based this novel partly on his father’s own experiences in Indonesia during WWII. Not just a book about faith, Thief of Glory is also about redemption and forgiveness.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Religion is a motivating force in the lives of millions of people, for good or for ill. In these three books, characters’ religious beliefs spur the action, influence major life decisions—or leave them with at least a shred of dignity under dire circumstances.
Memoir

Pearls of hard-won wisdom

Feature by Arlene McKanic

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.

AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND LEGEND
The late Louis Zamperini—the Olympic athlete and war hero who died in July at age 97—was indeed an inspiration. He wrote about his POW nightmare in Devil at My Heels, and Laura Hillenbrand chronicled his experiences in the bestseller Unbroken. In the last book from Zamperini, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life, co-written with David Rensin, he mines his experiences for advice that will encourage others. Even as a young man, he had the gumption to turn his excess energy into something positive and became a champion athlete. His ebullience led him to set up camps for delinquent boys. In his twilight years, Zamperini carried the Olympic torch and went skateboarding. He also fully appreciated getting hugs from Angelina Jolie, whose film of Unbroken opens on Christmas Day.

THE POWER TO FORGIVE
Thank goodness for Anne Lamott. Her writing style, both unfussy and diaphanous, her congeniality, loopy humor and dogged optimism are balms. Her latest book, Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace is a gem. In addition to hope, she also brings anger, even rage, and uses it like a finely honed weapon. Because of her rage—at ridiculous men found on match.com, at politicians both heartless and gormless, at perfect, stay-at-home moms who wear size 0 and run around in biker shorts, at her rather grotesque mother, long-dead father and the state of the world in general—much of the book also focuses on forgiveness. Forgiveness may be a useful thing, she says, but people often need to be dragged to it kicking and screaming. According to Lamott, forgiveness probably needs one of those improbable moments of grace to happen at all. Surely, when it comes to questions of faith, Lamott is to essay writing what Marilynne Robinson is to fiction. Awesome.

ABOVE & BEYOND
Eric Metaxas, author of Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life, certainly believes in miracles, those eruptions of the ineffable into the mundane. He has no patience with those who think what the human being can discern with five senses is all there is. The miracles Metaxas writes of here range from the spectacular to what can be called “miracle light.” One of his acquaintances, a very British, High Church Anglican type, sees 50-foot angels in full battle rattle. Others see an incandescent Jesus or are healed at the last minute from deathly illnesses. Metaxas has no use for subtlety; these miracles only happen through the intercession of Jesus. But his writing, and the miracles he describes, encourage all of us to ponder the possible.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How much of an understatement is it to say that we need inspiration in this day and age? When the world is riven with war, pestilence and those other horsemen of the Apocalypse, a bit of hopefulness is just the thing.
Fiction

Shivers under the sun

Feature by Arlene McKanic

2015 BookPage Summer Reads

The good and useful thing about scary stories is their variety. They may leave you sad, mad or contemplative—but all of the good ones make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Not even 40 pages into Sarah Lotz’s latest thriller, Day Four, it becomes clear that when things start going pear-shaped on a cruise, you don’t even need the supernatural to have a good horror story.

The Beautiful Dreamer is the not-quite jewel in the crown of the Foveros Line, which has a reputation for gifting its passengers with norovirus. Passage is cheaper than the going rate, and it shows. We have neon and general garishness, annoyingly chipper cruise directors and staff who are only on the ship because no one else will hire them. The passengers are spoiled, ugly and miserable. Indeed, at least two of them took the cruise with plans to commit suicide.

Then, something happens and the boat is dead in the water. There’s no electricity and no way to call for help. Passengers move to the decks to avoid the stench from the overflowing toilets. Then they start seeing and hearing impossible things. A woman spots a little boy running through the corridors, even though this is an adults-only cruise. A man swears he’s seen the devil. Stress is a perfectly logical explanation, but. . . . Lotz revels in her characters’ discomfort—a beautiful reminder that you don’t have to like a character to care what happens next. But her real genius is putting the action on a crippled, noisome ship that the world seems to have forgotten. The characters, and the reader, want to get off this bucket, but how? It’s worse than being on the Nostromo. And it makes Day Four irresistible.

After reading Paul Tremblay’s mightily disturbing novel, you may wonder why more teenage girls don’t lose their minds. In A Head Full of Ghosts, an exorcist is called in. But the real demons that torture Marjorie Barrett are external.

The story is narrated by Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry, who recounts events of 15 years before. Now 23, Merry blogs about the wildly popular reality show that featured her family. Yes, Marjorie’s suffering was on TV for the world to witness. Why? 

First, there’s the patriarchy. In one queasily funny scene, the men who torment Marjorie during her exorcism refuse to believe that she can be possessed by a female demon. Demons are male, and they like to prey on adolescent girls, who in turn need learned male priests to save them.

Second, there’s Marjorie and Merry’s dad. John Barrett is a failure. And not because the family finances were wiped out when his job went away, although money is a big reason for the camera crew. John is a failure because he doesn’t respect the women who love and live with him. He crushes his wife, and he is certainly one reason why Marjorie goes crazy. The only one he doesn’t grind down is Merry, because she’s tough and funny and smart and reminds you of Scout Finch.

But in the end, even Merry has her own demons. What happens to her 8-year-old self is so appalling and unfair that it’s almost unbelievable—a scary story, indeed.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The good and useful thing about scary stories is their variety. They may leave you sad, mad or contemplative—but all of the good ones make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Fiction

Short stories that stick the landing

Feature by Arlene McKanic

A short story is rather like a gymnastics routine at the Olympics. The best ones are brief, intense and stick the landing. A reader can only be in awe of those writers who get it just right, no matter if the story takes place in outer space or is so full of kitchen-sink realism you can imagine the rust ring around the drain. The three writers reviewed here have all just about conquered the genre that Junot Díaz justifiably called “unforgiving.” These women are writing mostly about women and their struggles with being women, or girls on the verge of becoming women, or the double-trouble of being a woman while black.

The tales in Clare Beams’ We Show What We Have Learned & Other Stories appear, at first, to be the most conventionally written. Many are set in indefinable eras that might be the present day or 70 years ago, and some have a lovely, sorrowful, Thornton Wilderesque clarity, but others have surreal twists. In the title story, a teacher literally and matter-of-factly falls to pieces in front of a class full of fifth graders. In another, a meek young girl goes to a girl’s boarding school run by a (male) headmaster whose concept of beauty is old-fashioned to say the least, and bizarre and frightening to say the worst. Then, there’s the old lady, revered by the townspeople she lives among, who owns buildings that mysteriously tidy themselves. When one building does not, in a most catastrophic way, she’s at a loss for what to say to the townspeople. Her ultimate solution is both shocking and weirdly compassionate. The collection is so adept, it is startling to learn that this is the author’s debut.

DISCOVERING A LOST GENIUS
The story of the author of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, Kathleen Collins, is the most puzzling and sad. These stories are being published for the first time, and posthumously; Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, at the age of only 46. In addition to writing short stories, Collins was the one of the first African American women to direct a feature film in America. That, too, premiered after the author’s death. 

Collins’ stories are powerful yet crafted with a spareness and delicacy. Focused on the contortions of race in America, they remind one of James Baldwin’s 1960s fiction, even if some of them are set in the 1970s and 1980s. The first story is written like a movie treatment, with directions for a cinematographer as he or she follows the unravelling of a couple. A continuation of the story focuses on the husband, who is a cad, and the wife, who soothes her pain by keeping continuously busy. Many of Collins’ characters can pass for white, or are educated and cultured in a way the world does not expect them to be as “Negroes,” or “colored people.” But their struggles only result in alienation from white, black and even self. The beloved uncle of one narrator literally cries himself to death. In another story, a family who interbreeds to make sure they keep their light skin and “good“ hair don’t know what to do with the dark-skinned narrator. They’re loving people, but marrying cousins generation after generation says something tragic about them and something condemnatory about the society in which they try to live.

A HAUNTING COLLECTION
The most experimental of the stories are found in Alexandra Kleeman’s Intimations. The author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, Kleeman plunges her female protagonists into topsy-turvy, Escher-like worlds—psychologically if not physically—that have no exit. Indeed, they have no entrance; these anxious stories often begin with a young woman having no idea how she got to be in a particular place, like a baby whose brain is just beginning to lock down memories. As for real babies, they simply materialize, and the girls are expected to take care of them some kind of way, even though they have no idea how. Even a mother who came by her baby in the more conventional way has no problem handing her to a complete stranger while she goes searching for a busted stroller.

In another story, a family ruled by a tyrannical, wildly imaginative father literally controls, or tries to control, the weather. The owner/protector of a feral boy taught to be a ballet dancer learns too late that not all the wildness has been beaten out of him. Not quite science fiction, not quite fantasy and not even magical realism, these haunting stories belong in a category of their own.

Arlene McKanic writes and reads from South Carolina

A short story is rather like a gymnastics routine at the Olympics. The best ones are brief, intense and stick the landing.
FictionLiterary FictionHorror

Reprieve

Review by Arlene McKanic

At some point while reading James Han Mattson’s novel Reprieve, you’ll think, “This can’t be real. This better not be real.” On its surface, Reprieve is about four ordinary people who venture into a haunted house for the chance of a monetary reward. You could say it’s a story adjacent to The Haunting of Hill House, but even more disturbing. 

Quigley House in Lincoln, Nebraska, is a full-contact escape room, in which staff are allowed to physically engage with contestants. A group of participants enters and passes through several “cells” in the old mansion, collecting a number of envelopes in the allotted time and then moving to the next cell. If things get too intense, a member of the group can shout, “Reprieve!” at which point the game and its torment ends, though no one wins the prize money. It’s all perfectly safe, according to John, the man who runs the haunted house.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Leave the lights on! We picked seven books for Halloween reading, rated from slightly spooky to totally terrifying.

Unlike Hill House, Quigley House is not a nefarious entity, but something or someone within it is. Is it John, or perhaps one of the actors hired to play ghouls and freaks? Maybe it’s the folks responsible for the house’s ghastly special effects, if they are indeed special effects. Or is it someone among the latest group of thrill-seekers who have taken on the challenge of this grisly obstacle course?

Local college student Bryan is the leader of this group of contestants. Jaidee, his roommate, is an entitled Thai student who developed a crush on his English teacher, Victor, and followed him all the way to Nebraska. Victor and his fiancée, Jane, round out the foursome. We also meet Kendra, Bryan’s cousin and an avid fan of horror, who works for John. And though he’s not a member of the group, we also learn about Leonard, whose first action toward the woman he’s attracted to is to mow her down (accidentally or on purpose?) with a shopping cart. 

There are many ways to look at a book with so many flavors of madness. It could be a study of the effects of thwarted desire on people who are basically incapable of empathy, which we see in Jaidee and Leonard. John goes out of his way to befriend Kendra, to get her to enlist Bryan to endure a whole lot of trauma for a chance to win what, in the end, isn’t a whole lot of money. After all, there aren’t that many African Americans in Lincoln, and Quigley House needs the press that would follow Brian’s win.

As the book’s horrifying events unfold, Reprieve can be read as a commentary on, or even an allegory of, American racism. Are we fighting to succeed in a fun house whose rewards aren’t worth the pain? As a study of systems of power at their most perverse, Reprieve is a horror story, certainly, but it’s not as scary as it is deeply disturbing.

At some point while reading James Han Mattson’s harrowing novel, you’ll think, “This can’t be real. This better not be real.”
Fiction

Harlem Shuffle

Review by Arlene McKanic

Somewhere near the end of Colson Whitehead’s tragicomic Harlem Shuffle, I found myself giggling in spite of myself. What was happening on the page was horrible, but it was hilarious. It was hilarious in the way that the comeuppance of the white supremacist clowns at the end of “Breaking Bad” was hilarious. The clowns in Whitehead’s story probably didn’t deserve their fate quite as much, but when they underestimated who they were dealing with, their fate was sort of sealed.

Indeed, like “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire,” Harlem Shuffle acknowledges a sense of morality and an ethical code that may be strange to those of us who aren’t crooks or cynics. Whitehead’s Ray Carney is one of those rare people who can walk the line between crooked and straight and live to tell the tale. By day, he’s a genial Harlem furniture salesman. By night, now and then, he fences “gently used items.” He is a genuinely devoted family man, not just to his smart, sensible wife and adorable kids but also to his cousin and childhood bestie, Freddie. Everyone knows a Freddie. He’s the perennial problem; he’s the one who gets you into the trouble you can’t even imagine. Yet you can’t quit Freddie, because he’s charming and he’s handsome and he’s stupid, and most of all, he’s blood.

Like Dante leading us through the levels of hell, Whitehead presents the reader with the levels of rottenness in early to mid-1960s New York City. There are heists and stickups and beat downs, as well as the hypocrisy of the Black upper crust who think Carney is too dark-skinned to join their club. There’s the tiresome regularity of racist police violence and the protection money paid to the cops and local hoods with lovely monikers like Miami Joe, Cheap Brucie, Yea Big and Louie the Turtle. Downtown, the rottenness is carried out in pristine office towers built by rich white folks who own not only the buildings but also the machinery of the city itself. Carney gets caught up in all of it thanks to a smidgeon of criminal DNA he inherited from his dad and, inevitably, Freddie’s fecklessness.

At the end we see the chasm from which the World Trade Center’s twin towers will rise, the fruit of a deal between more compromised New York mucky mucks. Sic transit gloria mundi, says the author. Thus passes worldly glory. Harlem Shuffle is yet another Colson Whitehead masterpiece.

Like Dante leading us through the levels of hell, Colson Whitehead exposes the levels of rottenness in New York City.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A woman’s-eye view of the peculiar institution

Review by Arlene McKanic

Like any other institution devised by human beings, slavery had its inconsistencies. Lalita Tademy's saga, Cane River, highlights the peculiar way this peculiar institution was practiced in the Louisiana of her ancestors. One hesitates to say that slavery was more benevolent in this part of the Deep South, but the Catholic slaveholders of Louisiana did believe their slaves had souls that should, at least minimally, be tended to. Thus, Tademy's ancestress Suzette is given First Communion, and later her daughter Philomene is allowed to be married (to the extent that a slave could be married) by a priest. These episodes, among many, give Cane River a thrilling sense of newness for the reader that is missing from many grim slavery and post-slavery narratives, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, that take place in other areas of the South.

Cane River is a novelization of stories Tademy gleaned from years of research about the generations of strong, dedicated, passionate and sometimes wrong-headed women who labored, in all senses of the word, through slavery and beyond. The book begins with Elisabeth, who was sold from Virginia to Louisiana, and one of Tademy's many brilliant touches is her description of the matriarch's difficulties with the Creole French spoken by the slaves and their masters. Tademy proceeds to recount Elisabeth's female descendants' difficulties with the men who owned them or thought they did. As if a metaphor for society itself, the relationships between Suzette and Philomene and Emily and the white fathers of their children evolve from flat-out rape, to distrustful financial arrangements cemented by childbearing, to real, if forbidden and dangerous, love.

Tademy's writing is gripping, whether she's describing the drudgery of day-to-day slave life, the dread felt by slaves about to be sold away from their loved ones, or the joy of an ex-slave finally getting her own house and gathering in the sundered parts of her family.

Tademy doesn't stint on the long-term damage slavery inflicts; the women, identifying with those who aggressed against them, value long straight hair and fair skin above all in their children. But most of the women emerge with their sanity and human dignity intact, and this, along with the fact that Tademy, a former Silicon Valley exec, is here to tell the tale, is the miracle of Cane River.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

 

Like any other institution devised by human beings, slavery had its inconsistencies. Lalita Tademy's saga, Cane River, highlights the peculiar way this peculiar institution was practiced in the Louisiana of her ancestors. One hesitates to say that slavery was more benevolent in this part of…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Pint-sized sleuth has a taste for poison

Review by Arlene McKanic

This reviewer was half-hoping that Flavia De Luce, the brilliant toxicologist of Alan Bradley’s delicious new mystery, would be a cheerful murderess on the other end of the age spectrum from the old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace. But no, save getting mild revenge on a tormentor, 11-year-old Flavia uses her knowledge of poisons for good. For example, to find out why that red-headed chap dropped dead in her father’s cucumber patch, right beneath her bedroom window.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is set in post-World War II Britain, a time of a certain dinginess, in a great country estate where the sad and widowed Mr. De Luce lives with his three daughters and his stamp collection. As Flavia tries to determine what’s causing the strange events around her home, Bradley delights the reader with lots of twists, turns and red herrings—and heaps of English atmosphere. There are unkind older sisters and dotty spinsterish librarians and a devoted, war-wounded factotum. The eventual villain is delightfully creepy and sadistic enough for you to want him thrown in the slammer for a long time—in a movie version, he’d be played by David Thewlis. At the center of it all is precocious, funny, slightly annoying Flavia, with her mousy brown braids and knack for getting out of tight spots (it helps to be little). Amid all the fun, Bradley allows moments of poignancy. Caught in one of those tight spots, Flavia believes no one in her Britishly undemonstrative family loves her. Maybe her mother loved her once, but the restless Harriet left Flavia when she was a year old and disappeared on one of her adventures.

Though Flavia narrates the story, the voice seems too adult for even a very bright child. The reader can easily imagine this as a tale recounted by a jolly, eccentric old lady, maybe a retired Oxford don, to a cub reporter from The Guardian. But it matters not. Readers will want more, much more, of Flavia de Luce!

 

Arlene McKanic picks her poison in Jamaica, New York.

This reviewer was half-hoping that Flavia De Luce, the brilliant toxicologist of Alan Bradley’s delicious new mystery, would be a cheerful murderess on the other end of the age spectrum from the old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace. But no, save getting mild revenge…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Not your grandmother’s Dickinson

Review by Arlene McKanic

The book jacket of Jerome Charyn’s imagined life of Emily Dickinson depicts a demure young lady captured in a Victorian silhouette. The thing is, the woman’s hoop skirt is transparent and beneath it there are long legs, a hint of hot pants and booties. This image gives us the first hint that, no—Charyn’s Emily isn’t the recluse we’ve all heard about. Though she calls herself a "mouse” (among many other things), she’s not. She’s obsessed with, enraptured by and completely stupid about men, beginning with her father, the loving but overbearing and eccentric Edward Dickinson, the Squire of Amherst, Massachusetts. Indeed, given her fascination with the human male, you wonder how this version of Emily managed to stay unmarried all of her life, and a virgin (at least in the book) ’till she was about 52, if this reviewer read that scene correctly. And then you wonder how she found time to write her strange, sublime, deathless poetry. Biographers suggest that Emily was passionate, intemperate even. What she wasn’t was a ninny.

The novel begins with Emily at the women’s seminary at Mt. Holyoke, where she is a restless and skeptical teenager. She falls in love with the only male creature around: Tom the handyman, a blond, impoverished near mute who lives in a shack. When he comes down with a fever, she jumps at the chance to nurse him, elbowing aside the girl who becomes his lover in the process. Tom, in this rendering, will be the secret love of Emily’s life; she never gets over him even as she fixates on depressive preachers and other sad sacks. None of these chaps can possibly compete with her father, an otherwise powerful man who can’t seem to function without her and is much closer to her than he could ever be to his neurasthenic wife. The men who breeze in and out of Emily’s gaze aren’t up to par with her handsome Yalie brother Austin, who comes close to thrashing one of them for luring his “wild sister” into a rum joint.

This fictional Emily Dickinson may exhibit a surprising amount of indiscipline, although Charyn displays an eye for detail and an understanding of human inner turmoil that will draw in the reader. Of note in the book are echoes of the poetry that made Emily famous, as in the time she sees that fabled snake in her family’s orchard. Scenes that combine fantasy and poetry are the novel’s greatest success.

The book jacket of Jerome Charyn’s imagined life of Emily Dickinson depicts a demure young lady captured in a Victorian silhouette. The thing is, the woman’s hoop skirt is transparent and beneath it there are long legs, a hint of hot pants and booties. This…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Edge Case

Review by Arlene McKanic

YZ Chin’s Edge Case is one of the first great novels to examine the grinding effect of U.S. anti-immigration policies during the Trump administration.

Edwina and her husband, Marlin, are in the U.S. on H-1B work visas. Both are from Malaysia; she is ethnic Chinese, and he is Chinese Indian. A tester at a New York City tech startup, Edwina is the only woman—and what seems like the only minority employee—among men so entitled, they can’t even see their racism and misogyny.

Software engineer Marlin was planning to get his green card (which isn’t green, by the way), become a citizen and then sponsor his parents to come to the United States. But this will never happen, as Marlin’s beloved father dies early in the book. This calamity unhinges Marlin, and he leaves Edwina. In the aftermath, she struggles to understand his disappearance via messages to an unseen therapist-in-training.

Compounding Edwina’s anguish over Marlin’s abandonment are her anxieties about her immigration status, her looks and daily racial insults. These barbs are too overt to be called microaggressions, and they come not just from her co-workers but also from police. (They accuse Edwina of drinking booze in the open when she’s sipping tea from a cup.) She remembers when dark-skinned Marlin was pulled out of line at the airport and hustled into an office for reasons no one knows. These affronts carry an extra cargo of anxiety that goes beyond the usual hurt of racism, since Edwina knows that if she or Marlin puts a foot wrong, they could be deported.

Chin, the author of the story collection Though I Get Home, is superb at describing the tumult of a woman being psychologically knocked about like a pachinko ball. Every chapter bears witness to Edwina’s pain, befuddlement and sheer exhaustion, while also revealing her snarky sense of humor, resourcefulness, tenaciousness and capacity for love. Edge Case shows what can happen to ordinary people when they’re caught up in systems beyond their control.

A woman is psychologically knocked about like a pachinko ball in YZ Chin's superbly tumultuous debut novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Build Your House Around My Body

Review by Arlene McKanic

Remember the smoke monster from “Lost”? It appears that he’s alive and well and living in Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body. Add in two-headed cobras, hungry ghosts, body-hopping and body horror (both the more ordinary kind that involves explosive emesis and incontinence, and the kind that involves eldritch distortions), then throw in Vietnam’s history as a chew toy of empires, and you have a small part of what goes on in this kaleidoscopic book.

On its surface, Build Your House Around My Body concerns Winnie Nguyen, a Vietnamese American woman who’s come to Vietnam to teach and to find herself. One day, she disappears. Every chapter heading refers to her vanishing; one chapter is set 62 years before her disappearance, while another’s events occur the day after. It’s as if the workings of the cosmos depend on the fate of this messed up, seemingly insignificant young woman.

And how messed up she is, despite her longing to be good. When she is told that good Vietnamese girls don’t drink coffee, she never touches it again. But Winnie just can’t make her life work. She exists in a state of squalor, both internally and externally, reflecting the condition of Saigon’s noisome open-air markets, sleazy sex motels and creepy karaoke bars and beer joints.

Kupersmith’s grasp of her story’s secondary characters is as firm as her grasp of Winnie. There’s the gentle and befuddled Long and his estranged brother, Tan, both in love with a combative girl named Binh. There are Winnie’s ridiculous fellow teachers at the Achievement! International Language Academy. There are fortunetellers and shape-shifters, pepper and rubber plantation tycoons, and a lady who may or may not be a paraplegic who sells fake lottery tickets.

It would have been easy for a book with so much going on to collapse into incoherence, but it’s an engaging read the whole way through. Build Your House Around My Body is an unsettling and powerful work.

Remember the smoke monster from “Lost”? It appears that he’s alive and well and living in Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

Review by Arlene McKanic

Did you know that the mother of Johannes Kepler, the 17th-century German scientist best known for his laws of planetary motion, was accused of being a witch? Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is the fictionalized story of Katharina Kepler, who was accused of this crime at the same time her son was struggling to get his astronomical theories written and accepted.

Katharina is an easy target for the preposterous charge of witchcraft. She’s considered a widow, since her feckless husband hared off to join a war—any war would do, and there were a number going on at the time—when their children were young. Katharina does not suffer fools, and she refers to her enemies by such nicknames as the Cabbage, the Werewolf and the False Unicorn. She’s a bit of a busybody who doesn’t hesitate to press advice and herbal remedies on people who may or may not want them. And while she’s not a highborn lady, she owns property that some folks would like to get their hands on.

But she’s also tenderhearted and capable of great devotion. One of the first things we learn about her is her affection for her cow, Chamomile. When the powers that be finally come for Katharina, the moment is wrenching.

Most contemporary stories about witch hunts take a swipe at the patriarchy, and Galchen’s novel does, too. To plead her case, Katharina needs a male legal guardian, even though she’s a mature woman of sound mind and body. Guardianship is provided by Simon, her town’s somewhat forlorn saddler, and then by the put-upon Johannes.

Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), scrutinizes the corrosiveness of town gossip as the tales about Frau Kepler grow more and more ridiculous: She scratched a young girl she passed in the road; she rode a goat or a calf or some beast backward, then killed and ate it; and a mere glance from her will cause people to sicken and livestock to go mad and die. It doesn’t help that Katharina’s illustrious son has been excommunicated by the Lutheran church.

Written with a surprising sense of humor for such a grim topic, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch shows what happens when a crowd is taken over by delusion, bigotry and grievance.

Rivka Galchen brings a surprising sense of humor to the grim topic of 17th-century witchcraft accusations.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Whereabouts

Review by Arlene McKanic

Some books leave you with a feeling for which there are no words, or at least no words in English that you know of. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts is one of those books. The feeling closest to what is evoked by this beautifully crafted novel is a stroll during the blue hour on the first warm evening of spring. (Surely there’s a word for that in German.)

Whereabouts is narrated by a middle-aged woman who lives in a country that is much like Italy—and likely is, as the novel was written in Italian and translated by the author. The woman is unmarried and has no children. She has loads of friends and a satisfying enough career in academia. Her father died suddenly when she was young. She had a contentious relationship with her mother, who is alive but fading, and now their relationship has mellowed a bit. The narrator is neither depressed nor ecstatically happy. She tends to regard everything she sees with a cool, pleasurable equanimity. Even the most shocking kerfuffle in the novel (which we won’t reveal here) passes like a storm cloud. 

One of the many joys of this little book, besides Lahiri’s usual gorgeous writing, is that there’s almost no plot. The chapters are short, some less than a page, with headers like “In Spring,” “At the Register,” “At My House.” They are all about the narrator watching, listening and thinking, whether about a favorite stationery shop suddenly turned into a luggage store, how some old flame has aged (and how she ever could have loved him in the first place) or the intimacy of a manicure.

Another lovely thing about the book is that you don’t even have to read its chapters in order. The novel is like a contemporary orarium, a collection of private devotions to read for insight and comfort before going to bed. Whereabouts is even physically small, just the size for a purse or a roomy pocket, to pull out and enjoy when you have a moment. It is a jewel of a book.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel is like a contemporary orarium, a collection of private devotions to read for insight and comfort before going to bed.

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