Harvey Freedenberg

Admirers of Norwegian Per Petterson’s melancholy, atmospheric novels like Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia will welcome this story of two boyhood friends from a small town outside Oslo and the unexpected paths their lives trace after those early days. Featuring the same deep attention to character and introspective style of his earlier works, I Refuse confirms Petterson’s status as a standout among contemporary novelists.

The action of I Refuse encompasses a broad swath of time, a technique Petterson characteristically has employed to explore how long-ago events resonate in the present. Early on a September morning in 2006, Tommy Berggren encounters his friend Jim, whom he hasn’t seen for more than 35 years, fishing off an Oslo bridge. From that chance meeting the novel flashes back four decades to the town of Mørk, where Tommy and his three sisters live with their abusive father, abandoned by his wife. While Tommy overcomes his troubled childhood to become a successful, if emotionally remote, businessman, Jim, a self-professed socialist, struggles with panic attacks that reduce him to depending on disability payments.

Petterson relies on a variety of narrative voices, both first and third person, to tell this story. He’s especially effective depicting the quotidian moments of boyhood, and in illuminating the relationship between teenagers Tommy and Jim, two boys “so close to each other that there might be some current between them, an electric arc that made one feel what the other felt.”

Few writers can surpass Petterson’s skill in employing a narrative technique that’s distinctive for its confidence, and his readers will relish the opportunity to fill in gaps from what’s only hinted at on the page. Couple that with the psychological acuity of his storytelling and it’s clear why his novels, for all their surface bleakness, are so deeply satisfying.

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

For those who argue that global capitalism is in the midst of a second Gilded Age, Canadian novelist Stephen Marche’s second novel (after Raymond and Hannah) offers an intriguing genre-crossing allegory for the rapacity and relentlessness of that economic philosophy.

Marche’s narrator, Jamie Cabot, a struggling New York freelance journalist, channels Nick Carraway in this story of the Wylies, the eighth-richest family in the world, whose male members just happen to be werewolves. From his humble beginnings as the son of an immigrant barber in a small mill town near Pittsburgh, Dale Wylie launches a radio station in the Depression-era Midwest that eventually becomes a globe-spanning media conglomerate. The novel follows the family through the next two generations, climaxing in the death of Dale’s grandson Ben, the discovery of whose frozen body in northern Alberta opens the story.

In his portrayal of the Wylie men (and Ben’s adopted Chinese sister, Poppy), Marche conveys the ambivalence that surrounds the accumulation of a fortune so vast it “enables the fulfillment that eludes ordinary life.” Whether it’s Dale acquiring a British media empire or his son George entering the Chinese market on the eve of its emergence as an economic superpower, the preternatural skill of the Wylie men in creating a life of “fluid, effortless expansion” is matched only by their determination to live in near obscurity.

Though he no doubt will be delighted if this novel is a popular success, Marche isn’t simply another literary novelist who’s decided to season his work with some commercial flourishes. His brief digressions into a psychiatric case study of “lycanthropy as a narcissistic delusion” or of the history of accounts of werewolves, dating back to The Epic of Gilgamesh nearly 4,000 years ago, show a serious engagement with that theme and lend texture to the story.

“The rich should be different from you and me but they’re not,” Jamie Cabot observes, turning F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous formulation on its head. This convincing portrait of how money can satisfy material wants without slaking emotional hunger tells a tale that cautions while it entertains.

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

With the publication of The Lay of the Land in 2006, it appeared Richard Ford had written the final chapter in the story of Frank Bascombe, one that began with The Sportswriter and continued with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day. Happily, Ford has given readers one last chance to enjoy his knowing, wry protagonist.

Like each of the novels in the Bascombe trilogy, the four long stories that make up Let Me Be Frank with You are set on the eve of a holiday, in this case Christmas 2012. Sixty-eight-year-old Frank has retired from selling real estate, but in the first story, “I’m Here,” which sets the mostly elegiac tone of the book, he returns to the home he once owned on the New Jersey shore to witness firsthand the devastation (“Nagasaki-by-the-sea”) wrought by Hurricane Sandy.

In the other stories, he has an unsettling encounter with a woman who once lived in the house he and his wife occupy, visits his ex-wife in the “state-of-the-art, staged-care facility” where she’s moved after her diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and pays a call on a dying friend. Each of these stories is told in Frank’s candid, confiding voice, one Ford has so artfully channeled and kept fresh through the nearly 1,600 pages that comprise the four books.

For all the razor sharpness of his observations, Frank is no misanthrope. He spends some of his time greeting soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and reads novels to the blind. He’s a survivor who’s overcome prostate cancer and the loss of one son in childhood. Though his wit tends toward the acerbic, there’s an undercurrent of gratitude for everything that’s come to him in a life he feels he’s lived about as well as one man can. That’s no small accomplishment, Ford seems to say. Anyone who’s followed that life since it first appeared on the page can only feel a similar gratitude to Ford for having created it.

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

Displaying the economical style of his novels Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach, in his 13th novel best-selling author Ian McEwan upends the life of a respected judge with two crises—one personal, one professional—to create a penetrating character study.

Fiona Maye prides herself on being the kind of jurist who “brought reasonableness to hopeless situations” in the Family Proceedings Court of London’s High Court. But what she isn’t prepared to confront on the verge of turning 60 is her husband Jack’s request for permission to engage in an affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, his self-help remedy for the “slow decline of ardour” in their childless marriage.

With her personal life in turmoil, Fiona is assigned the case of Adam Henry, a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness suffering from leukemia who has declined, on religious grounds, the blood transfusion that may save his life. Beginning with Fiona’s visit to Adam’s hospital room, McEwan fashions a completely plausible relationship between these two characters, using it to explore the demands of faith and to portray a young man groping toward maturity.

Though there’s little inherent drama in the daily work of a judge, McEwan succeeds in bringing Fiona to life as she works with integrity and efficiency to decide, in another case, whether to permit the separation of Siamese twins, knowing that doing so will be a death sentence for one of them. The equally fateful choice she faces in weighing whether to order Adam’s transfusion, like much of her work as a judge of family disputes, inevitably is refracted through the lens of her knowledge that she will never have children of her own.

The novel’s other plot line—the intricate marital dance that ensues after Jack’s stunning announcement—is handled with the same assuredness. A scene in which McEwan describes the tension between husband and wife using the almost imperceptible movement of a coffee cup is a masterpiece of dramatic writing.

Despite its subject matter, The Children Act doesn’t simply capitalize on a controversial issue to build artificial suspense. Instead, the pleasures of this quiet novel flow from McEwan’s keen judgment of human character and his ability to translate it so deftly that through his characters we can see ourselves with new eyes.

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

Mona Simpson’s sixth novel, Casebook, visits the country of divorce through the eyes of California teenager and Sherlock Holmes wannabe, Miles Adler-Hart. Aided by his sidekick Hector (living through the aftermath of his own parents’ breakup), Miles recounts their earnest, if often fumbling, effort to make sense of the emotional disturbance that inevitably surrounds even the most amicable end of a marriage and the survivors’ halting attempts to rebuild their lives. Simpson brings this all off with style, blending pathos with humor to create an appealing story.

A teen investigates his mother’s latest boyfriend in Mona Simpson’s Casebook.

Miles’ and Hector’s sleuthing attempts to pierce the veil that surrounds Eli Lee, a man they’re told works for the National Science Foundation in Washington, and who’s dating Miles’ mother, Irene, a mathematician who teaches at UCLA. As Irene’s attraction to Eli deepens, the boys discover pieces of his story that become increasingly implausible, spurring the boys to ever more daring investigative feats, from crude wiretaps to long bus treks from Santa Monica to Pasadena. Their exploits eventually connect them with a sympathetic detective, Ben Orion, who brings a cool realism to their quest.

The success of any novel that relies on the voice of a quirky narrator ultimately turns on the author’s skill in making that protagonist both realistic and sympathetic. Simpson artfully captures Miles’ longing for an emotionally stable home and his yearning for his mother’s happiness. As determined as he is to unearth Eli Lee’s story, his adventures aren’t completely single-minded, as when he and Hector establish a thriving business selling soup in their high school or when they (both straight) become active in the school’s gay and lesbian student organization. Simpson doesn’t fall short either in portraying adults like Irene, who struggles in the gulf that separates the inexplicable (to her) end of her marriage and the beginning of a new life.

Impenetrable as their parents’ lives are to them in placid times, how much more so is that the case when children undergo the wrenching experience of divorce? In this wistful and knowing novel, Mona Simpson penetrates some of that mystery, ultimately winning us over to the side of her endearing cast of characters.

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