Arlene McKanic

FictionInspirational Fiction

A town at the heart of something supernatural

Review by Arlene McKanic

Something strange is going on in Bellhaven, South Carolina, an exurb of Charleston. It’s the spring of 1920, and everything is blooming at once. That means the Carolina jessamine, the honeysuckle, daffodils, dogwoods, azaleas, crepe myrtles and magnolias. The whole town looks like a Monet painting. If you’re familiar with the South, you know that just doesn’t happen. But here it is in James Markert’s tale of destiny and good versus evil in the Low Country.

Another bright, strange thing is the town itself. It’s multiracial, like many historical Southern towns, but everyone is equal. The African-American friends of the white protagonist, Ellsworth Newberry, feel free to come into his home and call him by his first name. The town hosts a congenial jumble of the Abrahamic religions and their offshoots. One character calls Bellhaven the highway to heaven, and it just may be. It seems that everything bad that happens here comes from the outside, like an infection.

One of these pathogens is a strange little chapel in the woods just outside of town. At first, it’s in a place of surpassing beauty, with blossoming trees and singing birds. Inside, the very air is fresh and invigorating, and people who enter hear the voices of their deceased loved ones, granting them forgiveness. The townspeople long to believe this is unalloyed goodness, but it isn’t. It’s “fool’s gold,” as Ellsworth says, a trick of the devil that must be resisted.

All Things Bright and Strange feels like an allegory, probably a religious one. Consider that four of the main characters are named Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. Then again, it might be an allegory of the evils of slavery and genocide, as the chapel is a place where slaves and Native Americans were tortured and killed. It may even be an allegory of drug addiction, as the need to revisit the chapel becomes a nearly irresistible craving. It may be all three. Whatever is going on, this magical novel warns us to be careful what we wish for. We may get it.

Something strange is going on in Bellhaven, South Carolina, an exurb of Charleston. It’s the spring of 1920, and everything is blooming at once. That means the Carolina jessamine, the honeysuckle, daffodils, dogwoods, azaleas, crepe myrtles and magnolias. The whole town looks like a Monet painting. If you’re familiar with the South, you know that just doesn’t happen. But here it is in James Markert’s tale of destiny and good versus evil in the Low Country.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

By the light of the flames

Review by Arlene McKanic

Critics claim that stories about adultery are going out of style. Contemporary adultery is so commonplace and banal that no one’s interested. Does any 21st-century woman stand to lose what poor, dumb Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina did back in the day? With Jamie Quatro’s stunning The Fire Sermon, the answer may not be as simple as we suppose.

Margaret Ellmann is a writer and amateur theologian. Brought up as an evangelical Christian, her faith is real and important to her, and thus a bit vexing. It keeps her tethered to a man who, though somewhat repulsive as a lover, is a great father, provider and citizen. Maggie would adore her two lovely kids whether she was devout or not. They are teenagers when she starts to correspond with a poet named James Abbott. Their correspondence—handwritten letters and email—is heady, with shared intelligence and enthusiasm.

Maggie and James meet at a conference in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. Later, they meet again at a conference in Chicago. This time, James’ wife isn’t around. Neither is Maggie’s husband. She will spend the rest of her life wondering just how what happened could have happened. As her kids grow up and leave home, as her hair turns gray, as her husband starts to slip gently into dementia, Maggie will wonder what her affair meant and how it fits into her relationship with God. Could it be that her out-of-control passion for James was just a simulacrum of the passion she should have for God? If it was, was it a sin? Would God have understood if she’d run away with James? After all, Buddha’s Fire Sermon teaches that everything is burning, and to understand this is a path to enlightenment.

These questions aren’t the usual ones you see in a contemporary novel, and they make The Fire Sermon gripping.

Critics claim that stories about adultery are going out of style. Contemporary adultery is so commonplace and banal that no one’s interested. Does any 21st-century woman stand to lose what poor, dumb Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina did back in the day? With Jamie Quatro’s stunning The Fire Sermon, the answer may not be as simple as we suppose.

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

A New Orleans symphony

Review by Arlene McKanic

Has anyone written the Great Novel of New Orleans? If not, Nathaniel Rich’s sprawling, funny, tragic, generous new work, King Zeno, comes close. It reminded this reviewer of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, with its clever melding of real and fictional events, its snippets of newspaper articles and astonishingly memorable characters.

Like the U.S.A. novels, the action in King Zeno takes place around the time of World War I. An axe murderer is preying on Italian grocers and their families, and sometimes tosses what’s left of them into the dig site for the Industrial Canal. Sicilian-born Beatrice Vizzini is bankrolling the construction of the canal, which will connect the Mississippi with Lake Pontchartrain. (The canal is real; Beatrice is fictional.) The imperious Beatrice is ever worried about her son, Giorgio, a hulking brute who is probably not as stupid as he wants everyone to think he is.

Detective Bill Bastrop is on the Axman case. He is just back from the trenches and suffering from what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. More than this, he shot an innocent man suspected of being a robber—though this wasn’t taken very seriously, as the man was African-American. On the other side of town, Isadore “King” Zeno is a young man who can play a fierce cornet but has a pregnant wife and mother-in-law to support. The money just isn’t rolling in—until it is, thanks to a prank that he almost regrets.

Eventually, Bill and Isadore, Beatrice and Giorgio find themselves tangled in the Axman’s mayhem. Rich not only knows these folks and their loved ones, but he also knows New Orleans. He loves the honky-tonks, cathouses and bayous, the names of its streets and even the fetid mud and miasmic summer heat. He is cognizant of the city’s racial hierarchies, which may not be as brutal as those in neighboring Mississippi but still have the power to crush young black men. Readers will genuinely worry for Isadore and his friends, ever threatened by this sledgehammer of racism. Because of this, the ending is a nail-biter—with a twist.

King Zeno is the New Orleans novel we’ve been waiting for.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Has anyone written the Great Novel of New Orleans? If not, Nathaniel Rich’s sprawling, funny, tragic, generous new work, King Zeno, comes close. It reminded this reviewer of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, with its clever melding of real and fictional events, its snippets of newspaper articles and astonishingly memorable characters.

FictionSpeculative FictionHorror

Natural selection

Review by Arlene McKanic

Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty is just the thing for readers who prefer maximum weirdness and body horror in their books. Set in a post-apocalyptic colony where all the women have died of a bizarre fungus and only the men remain, the story transmogrifies, folds, spindles and mutilates gender roles and common expectations.

The narrator is a boy named Nate, who functions as the griot for a colony of bereft and bewildered men. That the women, from the eldest to the newly born, have all died is dreadful and mysterious enough, and then the men start to notice mushrooms growing out of the women’s graves. The mushrooms evolve into yellow, ambulatory beings with heads but no faces. These mushroom-fungus creatures claim a number of the men. They are seemingly irresistible, bringing such pleasure that the men call them the Beauties. The men see in them their lost mothers, wives, lovers, sisters, daughters. But the Beauties’ love, gentleness and subservience are not unconditional, and the changes they wreak in some of the men who love them are freakish. Sometimes, the freakishness is welcome, as a man may be so enraptured by his devoted Beauty that he’ll tolerate anything to be with it. But other men of the colony resist and pay the price.

Also included within The Beauty is a tantalizing novella titled Peace, Pipe, about an astronaut’s relationship with an alien entity that the astronaut calls Pipe. On the other hand, maybe Pipe isn’t an alien at all. Maybe what the astronaut takes as Pipe’s voice is just the sound of water in the plumbing of the space where the astronaut has been quarantined after a disastrous mission.

Despite the Möbius-strip twistiness of her stories, Whiteley imbues them with compassion and—dare I say—humanity. Love and hope punch their way through, despite all obstacles. You’ll be surprised by how moved you are at the end.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Aliya Whiteley’s The Beauty is just the thing for readers who prefer maximum weirdness and body horror in their books. Set in a post-apocalyptic colony where all the women have died of a bizarre fungus and only the men remain, the story transmogrifies, folds, spindles and mutilates gender roles and common expectations.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A marriage at an impasse

Review by Arlene McKanic

It takes a brilliant writer indeed to spin the straw of everyday life into gold, and Bernard MacLaverty is such a writer. After reading his latest, Midwinter Break, you won’t wonder why he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his 1997 novel, Grace Notes. This tale of two ordinary pensioners satisfies in ways that a really good book should: The characters are memorable, the writing is luminous and you never want it to end.

Did I say the couple in the story is ordinary? They are and they aren’t. There’s Gerry Gilmore, who was an architect, and his wife, Stella, a former schoolteacher. They live in Glasgow, Scotland, and when the book opens they’re preparing to go on a four-day winter vacation to Amsterdam. Stella is a font of goodness: interested, quietly intelligent, brimful of love and compassion. Gerry is smart and a bit stodgy. He’s funny and loves his wife. He’s also an alcoholic. One of the reasons they’re going to Amsterdam is for Stella to figure out whether she can keep on living with him. It’s a midwinter break in more ways than one.

MacLaverty is superb when it comes to revealing the minutiae of a long-married couple’s life: Stella remembering to put in her eye drops to ease her dry eyes; their custom of chastely kissing in elevators; their bedtime rituals; Gerry thinking up ways to hide how much he’s drinking, even though the perceptive Stella knows the truth. MacLaverty layers on these particulars until we come to deeply know these people. The reader begins to think, I hope nothing happens that’ll make me not love them! Nothing does, but the reader does learn of the primal wound that knocked this relationship just a bit askew. It happened early in their marriage, was unforgivably atrocious and not in any way their fault. Yet it may have set Gerry to his drinking problem and certainly troubled Stella’s strong Catholic faith.

Midwinter Break is a slim book, which proves you don’t have to write a Middlemarch-esque doorstopper to produce a masterpiece. This quietly passionate, knowing novel is bound to be read and savored for years to come.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It takes a brilliant writer indeed to spin the straw of everyday life into gold, and Bernard MacLaverty is such a writer. After reading his latest, Midwinter Break, you won’t wonder why he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his 1997 novel, Grace Notes. This tale of two ordinary pensioners satisfies in ways that a really good book should: The characters are memorable, the writing is luminous and you never want it to end.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Boundaries of forest and psyche

Review by Arlene McKanic

Kate Hamer’s piercingly sad, engrossing novel is a modern fairy tale.

It’s a familiar premise: An orphan finds out that the perfectly dreadful people who raised her aren’t her biological parents and so embarks on a search to find her real ones. Per usual in such a tale, the questing orphan has something special about her. In the latest novel from the author of The Girl in the Red Coat, the orphan is a British girl named Ruby with a port wine stain on her face and a talent that truly sets her apart—she sees dead people.

Ruby finds a surrogate family in the woods: three teenage siblings, not orphaned but abandoned by their hippie parents in a great pile of a house. There’s Tom, who loves her at first sight, flame-haired Elizabeth and tetchy Crispin. One of the kids has a secret, the nature of which is such that when it’s revealed, readers may go back to the earlier chapters to look for clues. While Ruby lives with her new family, they make do, milking goats and shooting wild rabbits for supper. And bit by bit, she learns the sad tale of her Mum and Dad, who were too young when she came along and not ready for her.

In The Doll Funeral, the relations of parents and children are not only difficult but impossible. There isn’t a single parent/child relationship that works. Ruby’s horrid adoptive parents were no more ready for her than her biological parents, who had lost a child too soon before they brought her into their lives. The siblings’ parents eventually stop sending money. Even Ruby’s ghostly companion, Shadow, was once a boy abandoned and left to die. Yet despite the grief all of this entails, Hamer’s novel reminds the reader that family does not necessarily mean blood, and love and connection are possible. For a girl like Ruby, they transcend death itself.

Kate Hamer’s piercingly sad, engrossing novel is a modern fairy tale.

FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

A community bound by loss

Review by Arlene McKanic

The little town of Sycamore, Arizona, the locale of Bryn Chancellor’s eponymous novel, is a place where the American Dream goes to die. Many of the denizens are there because of failure: the failures of marriages, families, relationships, careers they thought would be brilliant and have come to nothing. Ironically, they fetched up in Sycamore just to find versions of the same old failures and deferred dreams lying in wait for them. Children who are born there long to leave.

Few know this better than Jess Winters and her mother, Maud, who’ve fled to Sycamore to escape the fallout of a divorce that’s left them struggling both financially and emotionally. When the book opens, Jess is nearly 16 and already wants to be shut of the place where she’s lived for less than 24 hours. Restlessness plagues Jess even when she finds friends and boyfriends and discards them and makes that one last mistake. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that in the first chapter Jess is alive and by the second chapter, set some 18 years later, she’s not.

Much of the rest of the story of Sycamore is told by its women. In scenes that move between 1991 and 2009, we hear from tall, beautiful, fractious Jess; her first bestie, Angie Juarez, who’s blossoming lesbianism was too much for their friendship to bear; Jess’ next best friend, Dani, a brilliant girl whose ambitions are wrecked by betrayal; Esther, the high school teacher turned baker; and Rachel, Dani’s whirligig of a mother. The men around them strive to be decent; they often fail. In one case, the failure can’t be forgiven.

But Chancellor’s compassion for her characters balances their unwillingness to forgive (the event at the novel’s core wasn’t as bad as it could have been, after all) with imperfect impulses to connect and understand. Sycamore is a sad, knowing and timely book.

The little town of Sycamore, Arizona, the locale of Bryn Chancellor’s eponymous novel, is a place where the American Dream goes to die. Many of the denizens are there because of failure: the failures of marriages, families, relationships, careers they thought would be brilliant and have come to nothing. Ironically, they fetched up in Sycamore just to find versions of the same old failures and deferred dreams lying in wait for them. Children who are born there long to leave.

FictionHistorical Fiction

If these walls could talk

Review by Arlene McKanic

The Dakota is a notorious, castle-like building on 72nd Street off Manhattan’s Central Park—but 130 years ago, this location was the muddy middle of nowhere. Fiona Davis’ The Address is the story of two women a century apart whose tumultuous lives become part of the Dakota’s sometimes unhappy history. Even John Lennon figures into it.

The novel begins in 1884, when Sara Smythe is brought from London to New York City to be the “manageress” of this brand-new but remote apartment building. In 1985, Bailey Camden is the poor, not-quite relation of the Camdens, who now own the Dakota. Having been tossed out of her interior decorating gig, Bailey gets a job renovating her cousin Melinda’s apartment, transforming it from fusty Edwardian to Barbie beach house. Melinda, a deliciously nasty piece of work, wants green plastic drawer pulls. It’s dispiriting.

Yet dispiriting isn’t the word when it comes to the fate of Sara, who falls in love with the Dakota’s designer. Theodore Camden is a man with three cherubic children and an unhappy wife—but you only think you know what happens next. Davis knows how to twist a plot.

With her nimble writing style, Davis makes pithy commentary on gender, social and economic inequality in both eras. In the earlier setting, one fallen woman is carted off to an insane asylum, while another retains her status by dint of being in a respectable marriage. In 1985, Melinda dismisses servants without a second thought and treats Bailey just a little bit better.

This thought-provoking book makes you wonder what Edith Wharton would have made of these Camdens and pseudo-Camdens. Thankfully, Davis is here to tell us.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiona Davis’ The Address is the story of two women a century apart whose tumultuous lives become part of the Dakota’s sometimes unhappy history.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Family feuds and family jewels

Review by Arlene McKanic

Imagine what it would be like for Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s grandchildren to deal with the messes their grandparents made 80 years ago. The eponymous piece of jewelry of Claire McMillan’s absorbing novel is what remains of another Gatsby-esque Jazz Age tragedy made by another bunch of careless people.

Nell Merrihew has come to the family seat in Ohio after being tapped as the executor of her great-aunt Loulou Quincy’s will. This is viewed with some dismay by her upper-crust Quincy cousins, for Nell isn’t considered one of the clan. When Nell’s statuesque, snobbish cousin Pansy finds out that Loulou gifted a fabulous and valuable Indian necklace to Nell, Pansy has no problem threatening to haul out the big legal guns. Anyone who’s had to deal with a passel of greedy and/or irrational kinfolk when it comes to the fine print of a last will and testament will identify, painfully.

Alternating with Nell’s chapters are those focusing on the triangle involving Nell’s long-dead maternal grandparents. Loulou’s brothers, Ethan and Ambrose Quincy, contend for the love of May, a nice girl from another well-heeled family who’s going to marry one or the other anyway. When the restless Ambrose decides to head to Asia for some culture and big-game hunting, May stays behind with the dutiful Ethan. In the fullness of time, Ambrose returns with the necklace meant for May, his new sister-in-law.

McMillan impresses with her knowledge and interplay of both timelines: Ambrose’s handwritten letters versus the texts between Nell and her love interest; the golden sheen that surrounds a family at the height of its pre-Depression power and wealth versus the aggravations of having to find ways to get rid of every unwanted, moth-eaten thing in that family’s crumbling old mansion. Throughout, McMillan reminds the reader that the bonds and misunderstandings among families continue from generation to generation.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Imagine what it would be like for Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s grandchildren to deal with the messes their grandparents made 80 years ago. The eponymous piece of jewelry of Claire McMillan’s absorbing novel is what remains of another Gatsby-esque Jazz Age tragedy made by another bunch of careless people.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A complex racial divide

Review by Arlene McKanic

Thrity Umrigar’s disturbing novel is going to be controversial. And it must be, for it deals head-on with race in America.

The story begins on a stiflingly hot day in 1991, when an African-American boy named Anton Vesper breaks a window to escape his apartment in a housing project. His crack-addicted mother, Juanita, has been gone for days. When Anton finally crawls out of the window, he opens his leg on a shard of glass, and the blood catches the attention of a passing cop.

A wealthy white judge named David Coleman learns of Anton’s plight and agrees to foster the bright, beautiful but undereducated child. David quickly falls in love with Anton; after a while, so does his wife, Delores. They adopt him. Anton comes to love his adoptive parents, too—deeply, genuinely. But the whole setup is so very wrong. It is wrong to the point that David—so loving, supportive and liberal—can be considered nothing less than the novel’s villain.

The fact remains that David stole a child from his mother. He blackmails Juanita and steals Anton the way a slave owner would steal a slave child from his mother. David wanted something and took it.

Fannie Hurst’s groundbreaking 1933 novel Imitation of Life was made into several movies and at least one song by the Supremes, and all of these versions end with the child, who has passed for white, begging forgiveness of their poor black mother who’s died of a broken heart caused by the child’s rejection. In the age of Obama, Anton doesn’t have to pass for white to grow up in privilege and to seek power as an adult. But in Umrigar’s thought-provoking tale, there’s a whole lot of forgiving to be done.

Thrity Umrigar’s disturbing novel is going to be controversial. And it must be, for it deals head-on with race in America.

FictionThrillerGothic Fiction

Haunted in dreams

Review by Arlene McKanic

“All this has happened before and will happen again,” President Roslyn said in “Battlestar Galactica,” and this sentiment informs Gian Sardar’s strange, beautifully written thriller. Abby Walters, a Los Angeles estate jeweler, is being tormented by nightmares—one nightmare in particular—that have returned after 14 years. They are so vivid and terrifying that she feels the need to get to the bottom of them, once and for all.

Abby believes her dreams have something to do with her grandmother’s ring, and something to do with what happened to her grandmother’s best friend, a woman named Claire Ballantine. Claire disappeared a few years after World War II, and her husband, William, killed himself shortly thereafter. Abby’s high school reunion is in the offing anyway, so she leaves her recalcitrant scriptwriter boyfriend behind and returns to her childhood home in Minnesota. She arrives just in time to learn there’s a serial rapist on the loose, and her former high school crush is one of the detectives trying to hunt him down.

Sardar titles Abby’s chapters “Now” and alternates them with “Then” chapters, which center on the unhappy Ballantines and Eva, the girl whom the wealthy and guilty William has turned to for solace. Eva is poor, from a Minnesota nowheresville that she longs to put behind her for several reasons. William may be her ticket out, but she truly loves him. Cleverly, subtly, even insidiously, Sardar shows how Abby’s life parallels the lives of the Ballantines and the hapless Eva. What happened “then” has much to do with the nightmares Abby’s having “now”; the author seems to suggest that some catastrophes can be impressed upon the genes as indelibly as they can on the mind and the memory of them passed on. No, Abby is not a secret descendant of Eva or the Ballantines, but she is a descendant of her grandmother. Readers won’t be surprised to learn that Sardar co-wrote a memoir called Psychic Junkie.

You Were Here will make you wonder about the nature of reality even as it gives you goosebumps.

“All this has happened before and will happen again,” President Roslyn said in “Battlestar Galactica,” and this sentiment informs Gian Sardar’s strange, beautifully written thriller. Abby Walters, a Los Angeles estate jeweler, is being tormented by nightmares—one nightmare in particular—that have returned after 14 years. They are so vivid and terrifying that she feels the need to get to the bottom of them, once and for all.

FictionComic Fiction

The unexpected effects of an open marriage

Review by Arlene McKanic

It only requires a few pages of Sarah Dunn’s sad, funny novel to spark a line of thought: “Are there still people like this? People who drink Ridge Zinfandel and slice their grass-fed wagyu beef with Laguiole steak knives? Don’t they know that Donald Trump is the President?” More on him later, by the way.

The bobo protagonists of Dunn’s story are Lucy and her husband, Owen. Their marriage has gone a bit stale, due not in small part to their son, Wyatt, a ghastly child for whom Lucy has put aside her career to care for full time. It’s one of the many ironies of the book that this little beast is more biddable in the care of his harried dad. At least Wyatt doesn’t spit in Owen’s face and scream, “I hate you!” all the time.

To revive their marriage, to let it aerate a little, Lucy and Owen agree to sleep with other people for a six-month period. The ground rules are no falling in love, snooping or leaving. (So much for that.)

Dunn, a television writer for “Spin City” and creator of “American Housewife,” draws the reader into Owen and Lucy’s situation while painting a lively picture of their neighbors. They live in a tidy, Starbucks-free burb called Beekman, accessible to Manhattan via Metro North. Neighbors include Sunny Bang, a busybody as kind as she is up in everyone’s grill; and Mrs. Lowell, the transgender school teacher who arouses the transphobic wrath of town billionaire Gordon Allen. You know who he’s based on because he’s on his third wife, doesn’t pay taxes, and Alec Baldwin harangues him for being a climate change denier.

The book charms with the author’s compassion for all her foolish, bumbling characters. All everyone wants, she says, is a little tenderness, from the horrible Wyatt to the horrible Gordon. The Arrangement will make you smile.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

To revive their marriage, to let it aerate a little, Lucy and Owen agree to sleep with other people for a six-month period. The ground rules are no falling in love, snooping or leaving. (So much for that.)

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Mother and son

Review by Arlene McKanic

When we meet Yuki and Jay, the protagonists of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s sad, well-written debut novel, things aren’t going so well. We first see Yuki in the ’60s, when she’s a teenager. The daughter of expatriate Japanese parents, she is adrift. Having spent most of her life in New York, she feels neither truly American nor Japanese. She moves in with a schoolmate when her parents return to Japan, then bounces from one bad situation to another; she only knows she wants to be an artist and is failing at it.

In 2016, Jay, who owns an art gallery, has just become a father. He is unprepared for fatherhood; his ancient hairless cat is more real to him than his daughter. His own father has just died, and he has to find his father’s widow, who lives in Berlin. Yes, Jay’s father’s widow is Yuki. And yes, she is Jay’s mother and he hasn’t seen her since he was a toddler.

Buchanan’s skill in bringing her characters to life is superb. Yuki joins the growing list of female protagonists who are believable, relatable but not likable. As a teenager she is tragically gormless. The contempt shown her by her school friend/roommate; her years of abuse from Lou, the shiftless poet manqué she moves in with; and her lack of success as an artist—these slights harden her, and she’s almost as mean to her saintly husband, Edison, as Lou was to her. Finally, the desperate Yuki leaves him and their son and flees to the city where ruined artists go to sort themselves out.

Freaked out by the twin shocks of Edison’s death and first-time parenthood, Jay is still capable of a trenchant sense of humor and perspective. He knows that leaving his wife with an infant and booking to Europe with a 17-year-old cat is ridiculous. The reader doesn’t lose hope in him.

Buchanan interrogates the ways pain is paid forward, how one generation repeats the foibles of another so inexorably that they seem inherited through the genes. She also wants the reader to know that the messes, like so many autosomal recessive disorders, are at least partially fixable. Harmless Like You is a lovely debut.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When we meet Yuki and Jay, the protagonists of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s sad, well-written debut novel, things aren’t going so well. We first see Yuki in the ’60s, when she’s a teenager. The daughter of expatriate Japanese parents, she is adrift. Having spent most of her life in New York, she feels neither truly American nor Japanese. She moves in with a schoolmate when her parents return to Japan, then bounces from one bad situation to another; she only knows she wants to be an artist and is failing at it.

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