Harvey Freedenberg

Fiction

The dark secrets of suburban life

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s 3 a.m. in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts. Can you imagine all the trouble brewing there? Stephen Amidon can, and he offers a generous helping of it in his fast-paced, stylish suburban mystery/thriller, Security.

Edward Inman is the owner of Stoneleigh Security, a low-pressure business in this sleepy college town “with a crime rate equal to a sedate Swiss canton.” Still, Edward’s night terrors have gotten so severe he’s taken to leaving his home in the middle of the night to prowl the empty homes of absent clients. Edward, whose wife is an ambitious town selectman planning a mayoral campaign, is simultaneously excited and dismayed at the prospect of rekindling a relationship with his former lover, Kathryn Williams, a single mother beset by the problems of her college dropout son, Conor.

Tension builds slowly in the first half of the novel, as Amidon establishes the complex web of relationships among his characters. In addition to the Inman and Williams families, there’s Angela, a student at Mt. Stoneleigh College, and Stuart Symes, the creative writing teacher and failed novelist with whom she’s been having an affair; another student, Mary Steckl, and her alcoholic father Walter, notorious for his frequent brushes with Stoneleigh’s authorities; and Doyle Cutler, a vaguely sinister businessman who’s made his fortune in the “debt management industry.”

The pace of Security accelerates dramatically in its second half, when police respond to a 911 call and find Mary severely beaten in the kitchen of her home, her father standing nearby and unable to remember anything of the evening’s events. But when her account of the incident changes, the cloud of suspicion slowly shifts from Walter to men like Conor Williams, Stuart Symes and Doyle Cutler, each one possessing a secret he’s desperate to hide. As the crisis in his personal life escalates, Edward Inman struggles to discover what happened that night.

Amidon’s plotting is crisp and assured and his depiction of disturbing secrets embedded just below the surface of placid suburban life has the feeling of truth. It’s a territory he knows well and in Security he’s successfully made it his own.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

It’s 3 a.m. in Stoneleigh, Massachusetts. Can you imagine all the trouble brewing there? Stephen Amidon can, and he offers a generous helping of it in his fast-paced, stylish suburban mystery/thriller, Security.

Edward Inman is the owner of Stoneleigh Security, a low-pressure business in this sleepy…

Fiction

Night and the imagination

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Elderly book critic August Brill lies awake, tortured by insomnia in "another white night in the great American wilderness." He has moved into the Vermont home of his divorced daughter, Miriam, to recuperate from injuries suffered in an automobile accident, and is joined there by his granddaughter, Katya, who's struggling to recover from the death of her onetime boyfriend Titus Small. That's the setup of this intricate and challenging novel from Paul Auster.

In his effort to pass the long, sleepless hours, Brill invents stories, and the one that runs parallel to his own tale of emotional turmoil is of a frighteningly plausible alternative history of the U.S. after the election of George W. Bush in 2000. Led by New York, 15 states secede and form the Independent States of America that wages war against the Federals. Into this conflict, Brill thrusts an everyman named Owen Brick, first seen asleep at the bottom of a deep hole. Brick, who works as a magician known as the Great Zavello, is sent on a mission to kill the man who is imagining the tale: August Brill. Brick navigates his way through a war – ravaged landscape, gradually discovering that in this alternate reality there's been no 9/11, no Iraq War, these traumatic events supplanted by an even more terrifying vision of his country riven by civil strife.

Brill's creative musings gradually and yet somehow inevitably give way to reflections on the losses and failings of his own life. He recounts the story of his brother – in – law Gil, an idealistic lawyer for the city of Newark whose career is destroyed by the 1967 race riots. He movingly shares with his granddaughter the details of his marriage to his late wife Sophia, a talented singer, with whom he reconciled after an ill – advised marriage to a younger woman and then lost to cancer. And in a starkly realistic climax, Brill narrates the horrific details of Titus Small's death in a way that brings home the chilling reality of war.

Man in the Dark is terse and frighteningly intense. Whether he's describing the brutality of the imagined second American civil war or delving into his protagonist's inner life, Auster is a master at sustaining acute psychological tension. Like a Russian nesting doll, there are layers within layers to be discovered in this intellectually stimulating work.

Elderly book critic August Brill lies awake, tortured by insomnia in "another white night in the great American wilderness." He has moved into the Vermont home of his divorced daughter, Miriam, to recuperate from injuries suffered in an automobile accident, and is joined there by…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Diary holds the key to a mystery

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Although he's an esteemed author in his native Spain and received critical praise here for his 2001 novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina remains largely unknown in the U.S. The publication of A Manuscript of Ashes, his prize-winning first novel originally published in 1986, in a translation by the eminent Edith Grossman, is likely to introduce Munoz Molina to a broader American audience.

In the winter of 1969, a young student named Minaya travels to the home of his uncle Manuel in the small town of Mágina. Minaya, who was imprisoned briefly during the waning years of the Franco regime, is there to research his doctoral dissertation on the life of Jacinto Solana, a poet and political activist of the 1930s and '40s.

Minaya's scholarly task quickly takes on a new and darker cast. He finds himself drawn inexorably into the story of a tragedy that occurred at his uncle's home in the early morning hours of May 22, 1937, when Mariana Rios, a former model who had been introduced to Manuel by his friend Solana and who had wed Manuel the previous day, dies from a gunshot wound to the head. Thirty-two years later, her killer's identity remains unknown.

Shortly after Minaya arrives in Mágina, he discovers a diary-like manuscript entitled "Beatus Ille," written by Solana in early 1947, after he was released from an eight-year imprisonment and returned to the town. Through that manuscript and with the help of Ines, a beautiful young housekeeper who becomes Minaya's lover, the young man tries to piece together the mystery of Mariana's death. In the process he unravels the story of a love triangle acted out against the political turmoil of the Franco era, leading him to a startling discovery that upends his, and our, perceptions of all that has gone before.

Munoz Molina's novel is a dense, at times devilishly complex tale that yields its secrets slowly, all the way up to its astonishing final pages. It's a challenging metafictional work that demands close reading, but one that in the end will gratify those willing to make that commitment.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Although he's an esteemed author in his native Spain and received critical praise here for his 2001 novel Sepharad, Antonio Munoz Molina remains largely unknown in the U.S. The publication of A Manuscript of Ashes, his prize-winning first novel originally published in 1986,…

FictionDebut Fiction

The Story of Forgetting

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Somewhere near the top of the short list of dreaded medical diagnoses is Alzheimer's disease. And how much more tragic is it when that disease strikes someone long before old age has descended? That dark prospect is the subject of 24-year-old Stefan Merrill Block's compassionate, heartbreaking, funny and consistently engaging first novel, The Story of Forgetting.

Seth Waller is a precocious, some would say "geeky," 15-year-old living outside Austin, Texas. When his mother Jamie's merely annoying forgetfulness morphs into a strain of early onset Alzheimer's known as EOA-23, Seth embarks on a stealthy "empirical investigation" seeking the roots of her disorder. Along the way, he meets victims of the disease and their family members, their encounters played out in scenes both vivid and poignant.

Paralleling Seth's story is that of Abel Haggard, an elderly hunchback spending his dwindling days in a ramshackle house near Dallas, on what's left of what was once a thriving farm. Abel bears the searing memory of having fathered a child with his sister-in-law while his twin brother Paul served in the Army. Like Seth, his life has been scarred by the loss of family members to Alzheimer's. The novel's narrative unfolds deliberately, revealing how the lives of Abel and Seth are inextricably linked. That some may discover the source of their connection relatively early in the book does nothing to detract from its emotionally resonant final scenes.

Interspersed with the main narrative are fascinating chapters entitled "Genetic History," describing the role of the Mapplethorpe family of England and its descendants in spreading the EOA-23 gene across the globe. Alongside this science are enchanting mythological tales of a land called Isidora, "where every need is met and every sadness is forgotten." In an author's note, Block reveals the prodigious research that informs and enriches this story. Yet he never permits that research to eclipse the storytelling skills on display in this accomplished first novel. His own family history spurred an interest in Alzheimer's, since many of his mother's relatives, including his maternal grandmother, suffered from the disease. The only question about what's sure to be his eagerly awaited next work will be whether he can discover another subject about which he cares so passionately and speaks so eloquently.

 

Somewhere near the top of the short list of dreaded medical diagnoses is Alzheimer's disease. And how much more tragic is it when that disease strikes someone long before old age has descended? That dark prospect is the subject of 24-year-old Stefan Merrill Block's…

FictionWorld Fiction

The White Tiger

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Aravind Adiga’s first novel, The White Tiger, paints a vivid and disturbing picture of life in the strikingly different cultures that comprise modern India. Home to more than 15 percent of the world’s population, the country has grown to become an economic power, and yet vast numbers of its inhabitants have little to show for its prosperity. The conflict created by that reality propels this riveting tale.

Balram Halwai is born into the grinding poverty of the portion of India he calls the “Darkness.” He’s a bright student, nicknamed the White Tiger for an animal that appears only once in a generation. Still, by the accident of his birth it appears he’s sentenced to a near subsistence-level life in his native village, where raw sewage courses through the streets and the residents are at the mercy of venal landowners.

Balram manages to trade his menial job in a local tea shop for a position in New Delhi as the driver for Mr. Ashok, the son of one of the village landlords, and his wife Pinky Madam. In his new role, Balram astutely grasps the workings of the Indian economy, as Mr. Ashok is forced to bribe government officials in order to carry out his business activities. Although Balram confesses early in the first-person narrative that he’s murdered his master, in a tale that faintly echoes Dostoevsky, we learn how the plan to commit that crime gradually and yet inevitably took form. And in a startling denouement, Balram reveals how he capitalizes on his crime to recreate himself as an entrepreneur in the booming Indian economy.

Balram’s voice is seductive and his observations are acute, laced both with a sardonic wit and a trace of sadness as he exposes the inescapable truth that the benefits of India’s remarkable economic success are not dispersed fairly throughout its population. His depiction of life in what he calls the “Rooster Coop,” in which tens of millions of Indians are destined to live short, miserable lives, hounded by poverty and disease, is at times shocking in its brutality and frankness. This intense, unsettling novel will open the eyes of many Western readers.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

This intense, unsettling debut novel will open the eyes of many Western readers.
FictionShort Stories

New Lahiri collection explores immigrants’ path to assimilation

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In her relatively brief career, Jhumpa Lahiri already has carved out a distinctive literary niche. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and author of a critically and commercially successful novel, The Namesake, her tales of Indians encountering contemporary American life have resonated with a wide swath of readers. Her latest collection, Unaccustomed Earth, will only burnish that estimable reputation. It's an emotionally astute, character-driven assortment of stories that carry forward and deepen the themes she's explored in her previous works.

Except for some fleeting glimpses, Lahiri has abandoned the Indian settings that formed the backdrop for several stories in Interpreter of Maladies. Most of her characters have settled into a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in affluent suburbs from Boston to Seattle. Allusions to the symbols of their success, Ivy League colleges and luxury automobiles chief among them, are sprinkled generously throughout these pages. Indeed, but for occasional references to Indian foods like luchis or dal, or a description of one character's closet full of saris, these stories might be those of any upwardly mobile Americans. If there's a unifying theme in Unaccustomed Earth, it's the way these immigrants have assimilated so quickly and effectively into American life.

The collection's title story tells of Ruma, a vaguely dissatisfied housewife who's raising a young son with little assistance from her husband, a hedge fund manager. When her widowed father comes to visit and quickly bonds with the young boy, she wrestles with the decision of whether to invite him to live with her family, discovering only after he departs that he's involved in a relationship with another woman. "A Choice of Accommodations" examines the simmering tensions in the marriage of Amit and Megan, as they return to Amit's New England boarding school to celebrate the wedding of a female friend from his school days. In "Only Goodness," Lahiri writes poignantly of Sudha, a woman trying to rescue her younger brother Rahul from his descent into a life of alcoholism, and her "fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and as terrifying as any other."

Part Two of Unaccustomed Earth consists of three linked stories, following the lives of Hema and her childhood friend Kaushik over more than 30 years. In "Once in a Lifetime," Kaushik's family comes back to America after several years in India when his mother develops breast cancer. They move into Hema's home, where they spend several awkard months. Five years later, Kaushik's father has entered into an arranged marriage with a woman some 20 years his junior and the mother of two children, and in "Year's End" Kaushik recounts his struggle to accept the new domestic arrangement. Finally, in "Going Ashore," Hema and Kaushik meet by chance in Rome. She's a Latin scholar on sabbatical and he's an accomplished photojournalist. Their encounter kindles an intense love affair, which ends when Kaushik leaves for a magazine position in Hong Kong. The story's climax, at a Thai resort on December 26, 2005, is haunting and almost unbearably sad.

Lahiri's prose style is graceful, elegant, understated. It's awkward to call these pieces "short stories"—the shortest is 24 pages—and, like Alice Munro, Lahiri is adept at handling chronology, ranging backward and forward in time, compressing lifetimes into a single artfully crafted paragraph. Relish this gorgeous collection and contemplate the prospect of the work she'll produce as she reaches her artistic maturity.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

In her relatively brief career, Jhumpa Lahiri already has carved out a distinctive literary niche. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and author of a critically and commercially successful novel, The Namesake, her tales of…

Fiction

The Blue Star

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s been seven years since novelist Tony Earley introduced readers to Jim Glass and his small North Carolina town of Aliceville in the acclaimed novel Jim the Boy. Now, it’s a pleasure to report that Jim has returned as a young adult in Earley’s quietly moving, elegiac sequel, The Blue Star.

This chapter of Jim’s story begins in the fall of 1941 and spans his senior year at Aliceville High School. Life there still proceeds at a pace that’s as elemental and unvarying as the seasons. But in this year, the shadow of World War II darkens the town as teenage boys contemplate the prospect of trading a high school diploma for a military uniform before summer arrives. “Bucky” Bucklaw, the son of one of Aliceville’s more prominent families, already has enlisted in the Navy and finds himself stationed at Pearl Harbor. Jim becomes infatuated with Chrissie Steppe, Bucky’s girlfriend. Jim struggles to reconcile his intense attraction to Chrissie with his barely suppressed wish that Bucky not return from the war alive. That tension provides the novel’s dominant theme and defines Jim’s growth and change.

It’s refreshing to see that Earley’s writing has lost none of its elegant simplicity. What makes The Blue Star such a rewarding contribution to the coming-of-age genre is the author’s skill in crafting a vivid and yet fully plausible interior life for his protagonist. And every character, from Jim’s bachelor uncles to his ex-girlfriend Norma, contributes depth and richness to the story.

As the novel ends, we sense that for some, like Jim’s best friend, Dennis Deane, who’s married his pregnant girlfriend and now grimly sweeps floors in the cotton mill, any hope of life beyond the lovely but painfully limited world of this serene North Carolina valley has disappeared. But for Jim Glass, life, in all its beauty, terror and uncertainty, feels like it is just beginning, and we readers can only hope we’ll be fortunate enough to see him emerge someday into the full flower of adulthood.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Early crafts a vivid and yet fully plausible interior life for his protagonist—every character contributes depth and richness to the story.
Fiction

The strange world of sex tourism

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Many of Scott Spencer's eight novels have focused on love, in all of its mystifying complexity. In his latest, Willing, a riotous black comedy, he has abandoned, temporarily at least, that subject for a frank detour into the disturbing world of pure lust.

Avery Jankowsky is a neurotic freelance writer in his mid-30s, whose meager income is supplemented by modest trust fund income from sales of the "Jankowsky Cross," a religious artifact created by the last of his three stepfathers. When his decade-younger girlfriend Deirdre Feigenbaum has an affair, Avery's fragile world implodes. Hoping to repair his nephew's shattered psyche, Avery's Uncle Ezra bestows on him the gift of a sex tour, in which a group of men alight in European capitals to enjoy the companionship of gorgeous, pliant women. The tour becomes even more attractive when Avery is able to sell a book proposal about his experience for a sum large enough to purchase an apartment on the Upper West Side and abandon the claustrophobic one where he still lives uneasily with Deidre.

From the moment he joins the other participants on the Fleming Tours chartered jet, Avery's unease begins to grow. The stories of his companions, each of them willing to pay $135,000 for the experience, slowly and painfully unfold. The men range from a disgraced business executive to a hobbling ex-professional basketball player, but perhaps the most bizarre character is Tony, who filched pennies from a convenience store counter bowl and used them to purchase a $1 million lottery ticket. Avery makes no effort to dignify, or even rationalize, the coarse interaction between the men and high-class prostitutes in Reykjavik and Oslo, and when he finally flirts with physical and emotional collapse in Riga, Latvia, redemption arrives from an unlikely, if familiar, source.

Spencer's sumptuous prose adds much to the pleasure of this novel's provocative, and often disturbing, story. His elaborate and hilarious verbal riffs recall some of Philip Roth's writing at its best. Willing doesn't flinch in exposing one seamy corner of a world where everything can be bought and sold—for the right price.

Many of Scott Spencer's eight novels have focused on love, in all of its mystifying complexity. In his latest, Willing, a riotous black comedy, he has abandoned, temporarily at least, that subject for a frank detour into the disturbing world of pure lust.

Avery Jankowsky…

Fiction

The Soul Thief

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Mention the term “identity theft” and you’re likely to conjure up images of digital pirates pilfering Social Security and credit card numbers for monetary gain. As financially devastating as that crime may be, how much more terrifying would be the theft of the unique essence of personality? That’s the fresh and intriguing question posed by Charles Baxter’s chilling new psychological thriller.

Nathaniel Mason is a vaguely dissatisfied graduate student in Buffalo in the early 1970s. At a party he meets Theresa, another student, and encounters Jerome Coolberg, an enigmatic “collector of facts” who “wants to acquire everyone’s inner life.” Nathaniel soon enters into a relationship with Theresa, based on little more than physical attraction, while at the same time becoming involved with Jamie, a bisexual sculptor. All the while he’s pulled, in a fashion that seems predestined, into Coolberg’s orbit.

Nathaniel’s world begins to unravel when he encounters a burglar in his apartment and then learns Coolberg is recounting autobiographical details lifted directly, and inexplicably, from Nathaniel’s life. Soon the burglar is delivering Nathaniel’s belongings to Coolberg, as if to transfer the tangible being of one man to the other, and the shaky edifice of Nathaniel’s life collapses around him.

In the novel’s second half, a middle-aged Nathaniel, married and with two children, seemingly has overcome the emotional damage inflicted by Coolberg. When the latter invites him to Los Angeles, a city well known for its hospitality to people wishing to shed an inconvenient identity, he travels there and discovers a startling secret at the hands of his tormentor.

The Soul Thief has a Hitchcockian feel, all the more because of Baxter’s references, some direct and others more oblique, to that director’s masterpieces. While the novel is in no sense a classic mystery, reading it has the feel of trying to assemble the pieces of an elusive, even multidimensional, puzzle. Baxter has created a brooding, atmospheric work that lingers in the mind in a vaguely unsettling way, like a half-forgotten dream.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

As financially devastating as the crime of identity theft may be, how much more terrifying would be the theft of the unique essence of personality?
FictionShort Stories

Spotlight: Short stories

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Nominated for the National Book Award, Jim Shepard's stunning collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, is packed with a brilliantly diverse array of stories few writers would dare attempt to match. Covering a swath of time from ancient Greece ("My Aeschylus") to the Roman invasion of Britain ("Hadrian's Wall") to the present day, Shepard consistently demonstrates both a mastery of the form and a gift for synthesizing arcane research in a way that doesn't detract from his storytelling talents (just check out the acknowledgements for evidence of that fact).

Whether he's weaving grim tales of failed exhibitions to find the yeti in Tibet ("Ancestral Legacies") or Australia's inland sea ("The First South Central Australian Expedition"), recounting, with wry humor, the story of a doomed love affair between two Russian cosmonauts ("Eros 7") or sketching the tragic impact of the Chernobyl nuclear accident on one Russian family with deep ties to the nuclear industry ("The Zero Meter Diving Team"), Shepard never wavers in his focus on the painfully human qualities of his characters. The collection's most gripping story, Sans Farine, included in the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories is the harrowing tale of an executioner during the French Revolution, chilling in its stark detail and heart- stopping in its emotional power. Shepard is the co-editor of a collection of writers' favorite pieces, entitled You've Got to Read This. That's the same magical feeling you'll have when you finish this astonishing work.

An engaging debut
The strength of Canadian writer Neil Smith's collection, Bang Crunch, lies principally in the empathy he displays for an assortment of quirky characters, most of them living in his native Montreal.

Two stories–"Green Fluorescent Protein" and "Funny Weird or Funny Ha-Ha?"–feature Peggy, a sympathetic character who's a doctor and the alcoholic mother of a teenage son. Her husband has died of a cerebral hemorrhage while participating in a curling match, and she decides to put his ashes in a curling stone that she sometime consults for advice. One of the most charming stories is "B9ers," the tale of a support group for people with benign tumors who discover the root of their problem may be that they're too nice. In fragmentary sections, Scrapbook provides the all-too-timely account of the survivor of a college campus shooting who struggles to come to terms with his guilt over fleeing the scene of the incident. Smith also demonstrates a penchant for the occasional experimental story. "Bang Crunch," narrated in the second person and in a single paragraph, tells the bittersweet tale of Eepie Carpetrod, a victim of the imaginary Fred Hoyle syndrome (named for the creator of the Big Bang Theory), who ages one month each day and whose life then implodes at even greater speed. Her poignant advice: Act quickly, act graciously. While it may take some time to expose him to a non- Canadian audience, Smith is a young writer of ample talents that are well represented in this collection.

The space between
English-born, Australian resident Cate Kennedy's Dark Roots offers 17 stories that feature as their unifying theme the myriad ways in which communications between people break down and the corresponding struggle to revive them. Kennedy relies on terse, direct prose that's highlighted by her knack for focusing on small, but essential, details that bring the stories to life.

In "A Pitch Too High for the Human Ear" Kennedy employs the sudden deafness of a family dog as a metaphor for the lack of communication between husband and wife. A couple on their way to have their wedding rings enlarged ("Resize") discover in the process the source of their original attraction, while The Wheelbarrow Thief tells of a woman's struggle with the decision to reveal her pregnancy to her lover. But Kennedy isn't an unreservedly serious writer. Her story "The Testosterone Club" deftly sketches one woman's fiendishly clever revenge on her husband and his amorous mates. For O. Henry lovers, the stories "Habit" and "The Light of Coincidence" feature clever plot twists. Dark Roots ably displays the work of a subtle and accomplished writer who has much to say about the human condition.

Southern tales
Calling a short story writer a Southern writer inevitably conjures up images of giants like Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. While Gerald Duff hasn't reached that eminence, his collection Fire Ants is a fine addition to the genre.

Like most Southern storytellers, Duff is noteworthy for his focus on some of the more distinctive personalities who inhabit the territory below the Mason-Dixon Line. In "The Angler's Paradise Fish-Cabin Dance of Love," for example, a middle-aged oil worker kidnaps a teenager and transports her to a fishing cabin on the Texas Gulf Coast merely to watch her perform her cheerleading routine. "A Perfect Man" shifts the scene to Tennessee, where a mother desperate to free her son from jail after he's been wrongly arrested for robbing a convenience store turns to the only source she can think of to help her make bail her old lover. And in the collection's title story Duff offers the eerie tale of an aging woman who re-enacts the end of a failed love affair in grisly fashion.

Not content to limit himself to contemporary settings, Duff has an affinity for historical tales. "Maryland" tells the story of a slave who's willing to sacrifice his life to save the life of his military office master, while "Redemption" recounts a grim duel in mid-19th-century Texas. Readers from North and South alike will find much to engage them in this stimulating collection.

Nominated for the National Book Award, Jim Shepard's stunning collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, is packed with a brilliantly diverse array of stories few writers would dare attempt to match. Covering a swath of time from ancient Greece ("My Aeschylus") to the Roman invasion of…

FictionWorld Fiction

A portrait of real life in Saudi Arabia

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Most Westerners have a mental picture of Saudi Arabia that's hardly more than a melange of cliches featuring white-robed sheiks climbing into Rolls-Royces to survey vast oil fields. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's haunting and enigmatic novel, his first published outside Saudi Arabia after being banned there, offers a stark picture of that society.

The central character of Wolves of the Crescent Moon is Turad, a Bedouin and former desert bandit who, as the novel opens, finds himself in the Riyadh bus station with no destination other than one that will take him out of the city he has come to loathe. After losing his ear in a desert incident that's described in wrenching detail at the novel's climax, he has migrated to the capital, moving through a series of menial jobs until he finds a position as a servant at the finance ministry.

Like Turad, the other principal characters of Wolves are physically damaged. Tawfiq is an elderly man who exists on the fringe of Saudi society. Captured in Sudan as a young boy, he is sold into slavery and then castrated. Eventually he drifts into the finance ministry, where he and the Bedouin discover a surprising connection. Nasir is an orphan who mysteriously loses his eye shortly after he's abandoned at birth. In the bus station a stranger hands Turad a government file whose contents recount the mundane facts of Nasir's existence, facts Turad uses as the springboard for an imaginative re-creation of the boy's life. Employing a nonlinear narrative that shimmers with a certain dreamlike quality, Wolves interweaves the lives of these characters in complex and unexpected ways.

It's easy to imagine this tale being narrated by an ancient storyteller to a group of rapt listeners gathered around a blazing desert fire. Al-Mohaimeed's prose is taut and yet lyrical, evoking the harsh beauty of the desert landscape in spare sentences rich with vivid imagery. While his name will be unfamiliar to most American readers, his talent deserves serious attention.

Most Westerners have a mental picture of Saudi Arabia that's hardly more than a melange of cliches featuring white-robed sheiks climbing into Rolls-Royces to survey vast oil fields. Yousef Al-Mohaimeed's haunting and enigmatic novel, his first published outside Saudi Arabia after being banned there,…

Fiction

10 years after ‘Smila,’ Peter Høeg explores the power of silence

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Danish novelist Peter Høeg, author of the acclaimed bestseller Smilla's Sense of Snow, returns with his first work in 10 years, the dense and enigmatic novel The Quiet Girl. Set in contemporary Copenhagen, it's a work that can be read on many levels psychological thriller, detective story or intense character study, among others all opening themselves to reveal new layers of meaning.

The novel's protagonist, Kasper Krone, is a renowned circus clown who possesses the ability to access people's acoustic essence, auras of sound that reveal one's personality in musical key signatures. He's also a compulsive gambler who's about to be deported to Spain to face charges of tax evasion. But before he's transported there, an unusual order of nuns offers to intervene on his behalf in exchange for his agreement to help discover the fate of a group of children who share Krone's sound-related gift, including KlaraMaria, one of his former students who's the quiet girl of the novel's title.

Krone's involvement in the search for the missing children plunges him into a journey through a Copenhagen that's both physically and psychologically perilous. In it he meets characters known only as the African or the Blue Lady, and he's pursued by both government officials and shadowy corporate interests who are as determined as he is to find the children in order to serve their own purposes. Along the way he must deal with the impending death of his elderly father and come to terms with the loss of a woman who seems to have been the only real love of his life. Krone is a lover of Bach's music, and the novel is packed with references to the composer's work, some well known and others obscure.

Høeg's also comfortable alluding knowingly to thinkers as diverse as Kierkegaard, Jung and Buber, and the novel undoubtedly will appeal to those comfortable in that intellectual environment. In the end, much of the essence of The Quiet Girl remains to be teased out by adventuresome readers and it's likely even some of them will disagree as to the story's real meaning. For those willing to undertake that task, Høeg's novel is certain to provide lots of fodder for reflection and perhaps even some stimulating late-night conversations with the Goldberg Variations playing quietly in the background.

Danish novelist Peter Høeg, author of the acclaimed bestseller Smilla's Sense of Snow, returns with his first work in 10 years, the dense and enigmatic novel The Quiet Girl. Set in contemporary Copenhagen, it's a work that can be read on many levels…

Fiction

Philip Roth’s fond farewell to his literary alter ego

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Through nine novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, Philip Roth has created one of the enduring characters in American literary fiction: Nathan Zuckerman. Now, in Exit Ghost, Roth offers what is likely to be Zuckerman's final appearance. Although Roth's many admirers hope he'll produce more works of consequence, in many respects the novel feels like a summing up, both for a character some have seen as Roth's alter ego and for the author himself.

Zuckerman has returned to New York City after 11 years of self-imposed exile in the Berkshire Mountains. Nine years after surgery for prostate cancer has left him incontinent, he's undergoing treatment to ameliorate that condition. He meets a pair of young writers, Jamie Logan and her husband Billy Davidoff, and impulsively offers to exchange his remote cottage for their Upper West Side apartment for one year. Zuckerman finds himself attracted to Jamie, and his fantasies about a budding relationship unfold in scenes from a play he entitles He and She. Through Jamie and Billy, Zuckerman meets an ambitious young man who's researching a biography of the writer E.I. Lonoff. Zuckerman had spent a single evening with Lonoff and his lover, Amy Bellette, nearly 50 years earlier, and that evening has haunted him for the rest of his life. He reconnects with Amy, now in her mid-70s and dying of brain cancer, and the two of them join forces to thwart the biographer, who's determined to reveal a terrifying secret from the late writer's life.

Exit Ghost is a complex and sometimes disturbing exploration of the line between truth and fiction, the essence of the writing life and the nature of literary fame. It bears all the familiar hallmarks of Roth's fiction: lush and sinuous prose, unsparing insights into his characters' interior lives and a psychological acuity that is at times as comical as it is heartbreaking.

Last year, when the New York Times asked a group of distinguished novelists to vote for one novel they considered the best of the last 25 years, six of Roth's books received multiple votes. With Exit Ghost, this pre-eminent figure of modern American literature has added another fine novel to his acclaimed body of work.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Through nine novels, beginning with The Ghost Writer in 1979, Philip Roth has created one of the enduring characters in American literary fiction: Nathan Zuckerman. Now, in Exit Ghost, Roth offers what is likely to be Zuckerman's final appearance. Although Roth's many admirers hope he'll…

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