bookpagedev

In retellings of the story of Noah and his ark, a familiar refrain is the mocking Noah received from his fellow men when, in the midst of cloudless blue skies and sunshine, he set about building an enormous boat. What is often overlooked, however, is that the reaction of man was only half of the story. In Layne Maheu’s debut novel Song of the Crow, the story of Noah is told from the perspective of an unexpected observer: a young crow named I Am. Through his eyes, the story of the flood is re-imagined from a hundred feet in the air.

From their lofty perches, the crows carefully observe but never fully understand the actions of the man below them. To the crows, Noah represents a roving ax intent on chopping down forests and destroying the trees they call home. His motivations seem especially indecipherable to I Am, whose first introduction to the beastman comes through the tremors that the tree-felling produces in his nest. For I Am, however, Noah evolves from an impending threat to a symbol of the misfortune he has been taught is his destiny and, as such, an opportunity for the crow to change the course of his fate. Maheu ushers us into the crows’ world, revealing their secrets and language so that we, too, see the story of the flood from the vantage point of the open sky. Through the author’s extensive research and examples of crow lore, I Am steals the show from Noah. When I Am cries for food in his mother’s nest, we feel the urgency; when he describes his flights through the air, we are beside him. It is a testament to Maheu’s gift and his ability to fully inhabit his narrator that the reader identifies more with I Am the crow than Noah the human. Song of the Crow is an enthralling tale that ignites the imagination and reminds us that even the most familiar story has two sides. Meredith McGuire writes from San Francisco.

He once fired a man on Take Your Daughter to Work Day. He had his assistant ghostwrite an op-ed piece on the death of literacy in America. He is currently on the board of a start-up that has the selling out of its stock and its principles built into its business plan. Meet J.P. Yates: futurist, bon vivant, low-grade sociopath and the hero of James P. Othmer’s riotously astute and blazingly hip debut, The Futurist. This novel glistens with glossy, sound-bite-sized insights common to cyberprophets, culture vultures and advertising execs (Othmer’s previous occupation). Though Yates’ job is predicting future trends (or at least, knowing when it was the absolute best time to deem that which had long been cool to cool people cool for the rest of us ), he steps a little too far ahead of the curve by announcing at a conference that, in addition to not understanding the future, he doesn’t even comprehend the present. If the people in this room were right just one percent of the time, Yates opines, we’d all be telecommuting from Tahiti, eating dinner in pill form, and having literal sex with our virtual selves. The consequences of this pronouncement are threefold. He gets booed offstage. He gets beaten up. He gets an offer from a shadowy pair named Johnson and Johnson to travel the world, all expenses handsomely paid, to discover an unstoppable wave in the ripple stages and report back to two highly connected, deeply unsettling guys . . . named Johnson and Johnson. At first, taking the money and running seems like a terrific idea, but Yates is weighted down by a certain piece of baggage generally foreign to con men: a conscience. Much as that irritating grain of sand grows ever bigger inside an oyster, so does Yates’ sense of doing the wrong thing. Yates grapples with his demons, often hilariously, across a sumptuously depicted global backdrop. In a plot that features more twists than a strand of DNA, it’s the futurist’s coming to terms with his own personal future that makes this novel a can’t-put-it-down read perfectly suited for the lighter summertime menu. Thane Tierney writes from the capital of cool, Los Angeles.

Starting at least as long ago as the Battle of Agincourt, the English have always thrived on hopeless situations. What’s so astonishing about this trait to us Yanks is that under the very worst circumstances, Britons surpass their famous stiff upper lip, their mustn’t grumble attitude, and achieve that implausible state of grace called laughter. Such transcendence should be impossible for Peter Straker, the guilt-wracked hermit in English author Clare Morrall’s second novel, Natural Flights of the Human Mind. Straker is responsible for the deaths of 78 persons, whose names and faces have haunted him day and night for the 24 years since the catastrophe. As the details of what happened rise piece by piece out of the narrative, Straker’s genuine culpability comes into focus.

Imogen Doody is, if anything, a more vexed soul than Straker, for she lives in an emotional void, with no tangible peg on which to hang her unhappiness. A dead sister, a missing husband, a dying mother and a lousy job conspire to make Doody one of those irrepressibly unpleasant characters which English fiction has always excelled at presenting.

Like Fielding and Trollope, George Eliot and Galsworthy, Morrall knows that the only way to effect a change in such unpromising raw materials is through a direct chemical reaction between them. Doody and Straker meet collide is more like it and somehow, miraculously, at this very first encounter, out of the awful bitterness of those two human wells bubbles up laughter and odd companionability. The word flights of the novel’s title has much to do with the story itself. The lure of an airplane can be fatal to human beings but no more so than our efforts to navigate life here on the ground. The hopelessness of Doody and (especially) Straker before they meet is not redeemed by their meeting. The bleak and darkly perfect image of the 78 who died cannot be erased; but the brilliantly rough sketch of two who live who, through each other, are learning how to live finds its rightful, hopeful place alongside. Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

Now in her 70s, Fay Weldon has written for 40 years about women struggling to balance their careers with family, and their sexual proclivities with the mores of their particular era. In her latest novel, She May Not Leave, the prolific author delves into the ups and downs of modern childparenting.

Londoners Hattie and Martyn, who for various reasons are partnered, not married, have a six-month-old daughter, Kitty. Hattie is taking maternity leave from her job as a high-powered literary agent specializing in foreign acquisitions. But she is feeling increasingly unfulfilled as a milk-producing changer of nappies, and wants to hire an au pair so she can get back to the gossip, infighting, the amphetamine effect of deadlines, and the swirling soap opera of office life. Martyn balks, however. A leftist journalist and budding politician, he questions whether it’s actually principled to have a servant.

But hire an au pair they do, though Hattie’s vague picture of a simple farm girl . . . with a poor education proves to be a bit off the mark. Agnieska turns out to be wholesomely appealing, especially when practicing her belly dancing in Martyn’s fascinated presence. She calms the previously cranky Kitty, prepares gourmet meals, (incidentally adding pounds to Hattie’s previously lithe figure), and accompanies the couple to so many gatherings she is often assumed to be Martyn’s wife. But Hattie trusts her, seeing Agnieska as far too serious for sexual hanky-panky. All these developments are seen through the eyes of Hattie’s 72-year-old Gran Frances, who narrates the story, intermittently reminiscing about her past, giving Weldon the chance to expound on child-rearing practices in the ’50s and ’60s and work in some eye-opening morsels from her own somewhat uninhibited early years, which first appeared in her 2003 autobiography, Auto Da Fay. It is soon obvious that Agnieska is not all she appears to be. When the immigration authorities catch on and Agnieska is threatened with deportation, Weldon leads her mismatched and bizarrely bonded threesome to what both Frances and the reader assume will be a debacle but the ending contains a unique twist, offering Weldon one more witty and ironic dig at conventional norms. And one more plug for the wisdom accompanying age, as Frances and her sister conclude, Some find fecundity to be a blessing, others a curse, which sums up this wickedly humorous novel in a nutshell. Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.