Harvey Freedenberg

NonfictionMemoir

Journeying together

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In the winter of 2011, 81-year-old retired college professor and mathematician Jay Mendelsohn enrolled in Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer, an undergraduate seminar taught by his son, Daniel, at Bard College. In this insightful, tender book, the younger Mendelsohn gracefully marries literary criticism and memoir to describe how that class launched an intellectual and personal journey that becomes one of profound discovery for both men.

Father and son are unlikely traveling companions as they embark on this odyssey. Daniel acknowledges an antipathy to the world of hard science to which his prickly father devoted his life, while Jay approaches Homer’s revered work with skepticism born of a conviction that Odysseus was something less than a real hero. “This is going to be a nightmare,” Daniel worries, after his father violates a pledge not to speak even before the first class session ends. But by the time the semester concludes and the Mendelsohns depart for a cruise that retraces Odysseus’ difficult homeward trek, they seem to have reached a well-earned truce, born of their deep engagement with the classic work and their respect for each other.

Daniel is an artful storyteller whose skills are equal to the task of weaving Homer’s poem into his own life. Most impressive are his transitions from scholarly consideration of “The Odyssey” to intimate stories of his family life, as when the class discussion of Odysseus’ reunion with his wife, Penelope, at the end of his 10-year voyage home from Troy flows effortlessly into a magical moment, witnessing Jay as he offers a heartbreakingly beautiful tribute to his wife of more than six decades. Daniel writes, “You never do know, really, where education will lead; who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.” That’s only one of the many wise lessons to be gleaned from this lovely book.

 

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

In the winter of 2011, 81-year-old retired college professor and mathematician Jay Mendelsohn enrolled in Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer, an undergraduate seminar taught by his son, Daniel, at Bard College. In this insightful, tender book, the younger Mendelsohn gracefully marries literary criticism and memoir to describe how that class launched an intellectual and personal journey that becomes one of profound discovery for both men.

FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Innocence lost

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes are best friends, enjoying a carefree life on the cusp of adolescence in Royston, a sleepy town in the North Shore of Massachusetts. The unsettling changes that upend their placid existence are the subject of The Burning Girl, veteran novelist Claire Messud’s penetrating psychological thriller about “what it means to be a girl growing up.”

Julia and Cassie spend the summer before seventh grade exploring the environs of Royston, in excursions that take them to a posh country estate turned long-abandoned women’s mental asylum, among other places. But that idyllic summer—one that’s marred only by a dog bite Cassie sustains at the animal shelter where the girls volunteer—marks a turning point in a relationship in which they’ve been “conjoined all their lives,” as Julia, the novel’s narrator, describes it.

As middle school begins, Cassie falls in with a group of girls led by one whom Julia bitterly nicknames the Evil Morsel. Cassie’s life takes an even darker turn after Anders Shute, the emergency room doctor who cared for her dog bite, begins a relationship with her widowed mother. Are the disturbing changes in Cassie’s behavior—ones that lead her to question what she’s been told about her father’s death in a car accident when she was 11 months old—merely the result of Shute’s strict discipline or something more sinister?

The author of five previous novels, including The Emperor’s Children and The Woman Upstairs, Messud masterfully portrays Julia’s mounting dismay at her friend’s choices and the events they set in motion, as the girls are carried far from a time “when we could never have imagined coming unstuck.” For all the suspense Messud sustains after a desperate Cassie recklessly digs too deeply for the truth about her father’s death, the poignant depiction of the girls’ estrangement—fueled by their inevitable path toward adulthood—is an equally compelling reason to read this haunting novel.

 

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

Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes are best friends, enjoying a carefree life on the cusp of adolescence in Royston, a sleepy town in the North Shore of Massachusetts. The unsettling changes that upend their placid existence are the subject of The Burning Girl, veteran novelist Claire Messud’s penetrating psychological thriller about “what it means to be a girl growing up.”

FictionLiterary Fiction

A father’s desperate search for his son

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The toll of addiction and the burden it inflicts on families dealing with that curse are the difficult subjects of Lindsay Hunter’s bleak second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry.

When Greg Reinart’s son, GJ, goes missing for three weeks, the retired accountant wearily crams himself into a compact RV and drives from his West Virginia home to Florida to search for the 30-year-old, who’s cycled through multiple visits to rehab and failed efforts at recovery most of his adult life. In Florida, Greg also must deal with a mountain of unfinished business remaining after his long-ago divorce from GJ’s mother, Marie. “Parents of the Lost, a species all their own,” is how Greg thinks of himself and his ex-wife.

As Hunter reveals through Greg’s eyes, the damage wreaked by GJ’s drug use has infected his father’s life. Greg’s fondness for junk food gradually has turned him into a “lump with eyes,” and his own drinking has become problematic. In his despair he fantasizes about putting his arms around his son, bitterly envisioning them at “Rock bottom, but together.”

Mirroring the darkness of the novel, Hunter’s Florida is not a place of gleaming beaches and stately palm trees. Instead, it’s world of strip malls and strip clubs, a twilight land through which Greg wanders, following a trail of increasingly faint clues to GJ’s whereabouts as his own demons pursue him. “Why did we choose each other? Why did we choose this life?” Marie asks as she and Greg pick over the wreckage of their former life.

Eat Only When You’re Hungry is far from a comforting read. Instead, it’s a starkly realistic portrait of a family in crisis, a journey through purgatory with precious few road signs to help the travelers on their way.

The toll of addiction and the burden it inflicts on families dealing with that curse are the difficult subjects of Lindsay Hunter’s bleak second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry.

FictionSatire

Brave new world

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There’s no shortage of recent nonfiction works lamenting that our obsession with digital devices could turn our world into one where most human connection is a distant memory. For all the science proferred to support that thesis, leave it to a work of fiction—Courtney Maum’s razor-sharp Touch—to bring this vexing issue into focus with compassion and wit.

Sloane Jacobsen is a brilliant trend forecaster who’s been hired by consumer electronics company Mammoth (think Apple meets Amazon) to help develop a line of products aimed at childless couples. Instead of stimulating Sloane’s predictive gift, that assignment brings to light the state of her rapidly cooling domestic relationship with Roman Bellard, a self-styled public intellectual who’s taken to wearing a bizarre full-body outfit that makes Sloane think of him as a “Lycra-suited zombie.” It doesn’t help that Sloane’s vision of a world in which “touch could come back to people’s lives” clashes with Roman’s enthusiasm for a virtual “post-sexual world,” a pronouncement that goes viral with the publication of a New York Times op-ed.

Maum deftly manipulates this tantalizing setup to raise provocative questions about why so many of us seem to be happier tapping and swiping than we are in encounters with real human beings and what it might take to change that behavior. It’s premature to predict whether our world will evolve toward more intimate interactions or greater absorption with our ever more sophisticated smart phones and tablets. Whatever may happen, Touch provides an entertaining frame for what will continue to be a lively debate.

 

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

There’s no shortage of recent nonfiction works lamenting that our obsession with digital devices could turn our world into one where most human connection is a distant memory. For all the science proferred to support that thesis, leave it to a work of fiction—Courtney Maum’s razor-sharp Touch—to bring this vexing issue into focus with compassion and wit.

NonfictionMemoir

A master novelist’s homage to his parents

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In a four-decade career that includes a Pulitzer Prize and an impressive body of critically acclaimed novels and short stories, Richard Ford has never produced a work of nonfiction. With Between Them, a tender, deeply appreciative memoir of his parents, he impeccably remedies that gap in his résumé. What’s most extraordinary about these concise reminiscences—his mother’s written after her death of cancer in 1981 and his father’s some 55 years after the heart attack that killed him in 1960—is how Ford transmutes the utterly ordinary lives they describe into art.

When Arkansas natives Parker Carrol Ford and Edna Akin met in a Hot Springs, Arkansas, grocery store in 1927, perhaps they envisioned lives of excitement and great accomplishment. They certainly never anticipated the 16 years it would take their only child to arrive. They passed those 16 years in a pleasant, nomadic life; Parker was a traveling salesman for a laundry starch manufacturer in seven Southern states, and Edna was his traveling companion.

In recounting the quotidian details of his family’s life—the purchase of a new car or a first house in the suburbs—Ford makes little attempt to invest those events with any larger significance, but his gentle stories of his life in Jackson, Mississippi, are suffused with gratitude. “I was fortunate to have parents who loved each other and, out of the crucible of that great, almost unfathomable love, loved me,” he recalls. “The fact that lives and deaths often go unnoticed has specifically inspired this small book about my parents and set its task,” Ford writes. His parents would be proud of the honor he’s paid in this work to their humble, decent lives.

 

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

In a four-decade career that includes a Pulitzer Prize and an impressive body of critically acclaimed novels and short stories, Richard Ford has never produced a work of nonfiction. With Between Them, a tender, deeply appreciative memoir of his parents, he impeccably remedies that gap in his résumé. What’s most extraordinary about these concise reminiscences—his mother’s written after her death of cancer in 1981 and his father’s some 55 years after the heart attack that killed him in 1960—is how Ford transmutes the utterly ordinary lives they describe into art.

FictionComic Fiction

A Passover gathering with a comic, murderous twist

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

If there were a shade of comedy darker than black, David Samuel Levinson’s novel Tell Me How This Ends Well would define it. The story of an ill-conceived murder plot hatched by three adult children to dispatch their psychologically abusive father, it’s a devilishly funny and yet painfully honest dissection of one Jewish family’s angst, set against the backdrop of a terrifying near-future America in which anti-Semitism has emerged with renewed vengeance.

On an April weekend in 2022, the Jacobson family gathers at the San Fernando Valley home of Moses Orenstein-Jacobson, a B-movie actor and the star of a cancelled reality show that also featured his wife and their five sons. They’re joined by his sister Edith and, from Berlin, his brother Jacob and Jacob’s German partner, Dietrich.

Over the course of the weekend, the Jacobson siblings—in the presence of their mother, Roz, the victim of a terminal lung disease—rehearse their lifelong litany of grievances against their “mean, viperous, and unpredictable” father, Julian, a man with an uncanny knack for seeking out and exploiting each child’s point of maximum emotional vulnerability. Julian’s verbal cruelty, past and present, easily qualifies him for membership in any hall of fame of literary villainy. The Jacobsons’ murderous scheme, climaxing on the evening of a televised Passover Seder at Moses’ home, unfolds with the lack of professionalism and bizarre humor one would expect from such a profoundly damaged trio.

Levinson’s vividly imagined America is home to some 4 million Israeli refugees, an influx of new immigrants that sparks a wave of anti-Jewish terror that includes suicide bombings on the Los Angeles freeways and attacks on Jewish day schools. The hostile environment, which seems eerily plausible, only exacerbates the Jacobson family’s insecurity, heightening the tension that surrounds their criminal designs.

Tell Me How This Ends Well takes the familiar tropes of family conflict and flashes them in a funhouse mirror. Yet somehow, they emerge from that process of distortion ever more clearly reflected in our own minds.

 

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

If there were a shade of comedy darker than black, David Samuel Levinson’s novel Tell Me How This Ends Well would define it. The story of an ill-conceived murder plot hatched by three adult children to dispatch their psychologically abusive father, it’s a devilishly funny and yet painfully honest dissection of one Jewish family’s angst, set against the backdrop of a terrifying near-future America in which anti-Semitism has emerged with renewed vengeance.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Boys to men

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

What does it really mean to be a good man? That’s the challenging question posed by Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs) in The Hearts of Men, an earnest exploration of the best and worst of male behavior, set against the backdrop of that quintessential laboratory for shaping it: the Boy Scouts.

Beginning in 1962 and spanning 60 years, most of the action of Butler’s novel takes place at Camp Chippewa, a Boy Scout summer camp in Wisconsin’s north woods. In two generations, a world that emphasizes the value of knot-tying and compass reading gives way to the age of iPads and social media. Wilbur Whiteside is the autocratic Scoutmaster who leads the camp for decades until he’s succeeded by former camper Nelson Doughty, who is aware of the profound contrast between the generous and instructive Wilbur and his own abusive father.

When it comes to the Boy Scouts, Butler isn’t interested in exploring the controversy surrounding an organization one character dismisses as “a dogged fraternity of paramilitary Young Republicans desperately clinging to some nineteenth-century notion of goodness in a modern world,” but he does imply there’s an enduring benefit to its ethos. Several of the characters, including Wilbur and Nelson, fight in wars that range from World War I to Afghanistan, and whether their conduct is cowardly or heroic, Butler suggests that the experience profoundly shapes the way they live the rest of their lives. He’s perceptive enough to recognize that only a tiny minority of men will see combat, but that most will be tested in other ways that reveal character.

Novelist Jonathan Evison described Shotgun Lovesongs as a “good old-fashioned novel,” and that’s an equally fitting description of The Hearts of Men. Butler doesn’t make it hard to tell the admirable men from the ones who badly misbehave, but his role models aren’t lacking complexity or flaws. Writing without irony, in a style that brings to mind writers like Andre Dubus III and Tom Perrotta, Butler, who grew up and still lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, displays an intuitive feel for the values of his characters. He’s portrayed them with compassion in this kindhearted, affecting novel.

 

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

What does it really mean to be a good man? That’s the challenging question posed by Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs) in The Hearts of Men, an earnest exploration of the best and worst of male behavior, set against the backdrop of that quintessential laboratory for shaping it: the Boy Scouts.

FictionLiterary Fiction

An elegiac story of two odd, old friends

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In her new novel, the always intriguing Ali Smith portrays an odd friendship between a centenarian and the neighbor girl—now a young woman—he cared for in her childhood. Smith blends conventional realist narrative with passages that read almost like prose poems to create an elegiac story that’s decidedly more than the sum of its parts.

Daniel Gluck, once a songwriter and former “unofficial babysitter” to Elisabeth Demand, awaits his death in a nursing home. In the present, we penetrate Daniel’s consciousness to share some of his hallucinatory dreams, and through flashbacks, Smith gently reveals how this kindly, unassuming man served as a mentor to his young charge. Now in her early 30s, Elisabeth is a junior lecturer in art history, struggling with her doctoral thesis.

Drawing back from this intimate tableau, Autumn also offers a piercing view of an unsettled England in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote. “All across the country,” Smith writes in a terse chapter whose every sentence begins with those words, “there was misery and rejoicing,” echoing the opening passage of A Tale of Two Cities, quoted by Elisabeth in her bedside reading to Daniel.

Much of this novel’s pleasure flows from Smith’s supple prose. She indulges in word play with an almost Joycean zest (offering an homage to him in a brief allusion to his iconic Dubliners story, “The Dead”). Autumn is the first installment of a projected quartet of “seasonal” novels. Impressionistic in character, it’s a book to be read less for any conventional plot than for its skill in stimulating a reflective mood.

 

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

In her new novel, the always intriguing Ali Smith portrays an odd friendship between a centenarian and the neighbor girl—now a young woman—he cared for in her childhood. Smith blends conventional realist narrative with passages that read almost like prose poems to create an elegiac story that’s decidedly more than the sum of its parts.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

A robust and revealing portrait of the American frontier

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

There's a certain audacity involved in any attempt to extend the lives of characters in an American classic like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps that's why it's taken more than 130 years for an author of Robert Coover's stature to make that effort. While it's unlikely that Huck Out West will attain the status of its source material, Coover's novel is a stimulating companion to Twain's novel.

In Coover's lively account, Huck's decision to "light out for the Territory" to avoid the attempt to "sivilize" him lands him a world that's about as far from civilization as one could find in 19th-century America. Whether Huck is riding for the Pony Express, scouting for both sides in the Civil War or simply trying to survive in the grimly named town of Deadwood Gulch at the start of the Black Hills Gold Rush in the mid-1870s, he demonstrates an engaging ability to live by his wits and a wryly observant eye about the often bizarre events he witnesses.

Coover packs his story with nearly nonstop, highly cinematic action that includes hangings, explosions and even a beheading. He remains cleverly true to Twain's use of the vernacular as Huck finds himself feeling "meloncholical" or describes another character as "start-naked." Much of the frank fun of the novel lies in trying to sort out the truth from the often exaggerated version of it Huck presents in one of his "stretchers."

Fans of Twain's novel will be pleased that Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Jim make appearances, though Huck, as the title suggests, remains the star of the story. Through Huck's friendship with a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe named Eeteh, Coover also doesn't flinch from exposing the cruel treatment of the region's native inhabitants, much of it inflicted here by a murderous George Custer who becomes Huck’s nemesis, earning him the nickname "General Hard Ass."

Whether it's read as a companion to Twain's iconic novel or as a standalone work, Huck Out West is a robust and revealing portrait of the American frontier in a time of dramatic and often wrenching transition.

There's a certain audacity involved in any attempt to extend the lives of characters in an American classic like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps that's why it's taken more than 130 years for an author of Robert Coover's stature to make that effort.
FictionLiterary Fiction

An insightful novelist looks at life in the newsroom

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

It’s a pleasure to report that at age 81, Ward Just is still turning out penetrating studies of mature adults wrestling with life’s profound challenges, often in the public arena. His latest, the story of a lifelong newspaperman whose career takes him from small-town Indiana to Washington, D.C., is a strong addition to that consistently excellent body of work.

The Eastern Shore’s episodic narrative traverses the life of Ned Ayres, whose eagerness to pursue a career in journalism impels him to forgo college to take a job with the Herman, Indiana, Press-Gazette. During his tenure as city editor, the paper’s debate over whether to expose a respected local businessman’s criminal past reminds Ned of both journalism’s propensity for the “discovering of secrets with little attention paid to the consequences,” and of the fact that “the first version was always wrong, if only slightly.” 

After intermediate stops in Indianapolis and Chicago, Ned arrives in Washington in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, eventually rising to the position of editor-in-chief of a newspaper that calls to mind the Washington Post. When his career ends in 2005, he retires to a decaying manor house on the Chesapeake Bay, where he struggles to write a memoir that will do justice to the profession to which he’s devoted himself so single-mindedly. The house once hosted a senator’s sparkling dinner parties, gatherings that Ned attended. Now it brings to mind his beloved newspaper business, “still handsome, but no longer stately.” 

In its depiction of the claustrophobia of life in a town “like so many in Middle America with an absence of commotion,” The Eastern Shore evokes the spirit of works like William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Just’s portrait of the contemporary newspaper business and of the machinations of Washington’s political class is as realistic as today’s headlines. The languid pacing won’t appeal to readers hungry for dramatic action and frequent plot twists, but Just’s finely calibrated appreciation of the flaws of human character and his talent for gazing without blinking into the darkest corners of the human heart continue to distinguish him as a writer of keen intellect and insight.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s a pleasure to report that at age 81, Ward Just is still turning out penetrating studies of mature adults wrestling with life’s profound challenges, often in the public arena. His latest, the story of a lifelong newspaperman whose career takes him from small-town Indiana to Washington, D.C., is a strong addition to that consistently excellent body of work.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A Gonzo-styled coming-of-age story

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a title less likely to attract readers than the one attached to Nell Zink’s third novel. But anyone put off by it will miss out on a quirky and consistently engaging story about the millennial generation’s circuitous journey to find its way in the world.

The “Nicotine” of the novel’s title is a decrepit house in a “heroin-type neighborhood” of Jersey City that was the childhood home of Norman Baker, an “animist drug freak” whose medical clinic in Brazil attracted a group of passionate followers. When Norman’s devoted daughter, Penny, is evicted from his Upper West Side apartment after his death, she decides to explore the possibility of taking up residence at Nicotine, and arrives to find the house has been occupied by a group of activists united only by their passion for tobacco products. Soon the romantic lives of these characters entangle with those of Penny and her much older stepbrother, Matt, in ways that would make the term “it’s complicated” an understatement.

Zink’s fast-paced chronicle of the couplings and uncouplings that ensue amid a group that includes women named Sorry and Jazz and a self-avowed asexual bicycle activist is smart and never predictable. Though she was born a generation earlier than most of her characters, Zink is keenly attuned to the emotional weather that swirls around them. Based on the trials of Penny and her friends, she gives us reason to be optimistic about the millenials’ maturation, even as they seem destined to encounter a unique brand of stumbles along the way.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a title less likely to attract readers than the one attached to Nell Zink’s third novel. But anyone put off by it will miss out on a quirky and consistently engaging story about the millennial generation’s circuitous journey to find its way in the world.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A womb with a view

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

In novels like Atonement and Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has enjoyed playing tricks with questions of his narrator’s identity. His devilishly clever and darkly humorous novel Nutshell takes another step in that direction, revealing the arc of a bizarre murder plot from the point of view of the ultimate unreliable narrator: a child in utero, two weeks away from birth.

McEwan’s startlingly precocious protagonist lodges uneasily in the womb of Trudy Cairncross, who is separated from her husband John—an uninspired poet and owner of a modest poetry publishing house—and living in the decaying Georgian mansion in an upscale London neighborhood that was John’s childhood home. Trudy and her lover, Claude, a property developer who happens to be John’s younger brother, appear to have in common only their mutual lust (whose manifestations the narrator rather graphically describes from his own intimate perspective) and a shared desire to see John dead. 

Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that Trudy and Claude’s scheme unfolds with all the deftness one would expect from a pair of amateur killers. Apart from his terror at the prospect of his father’s demise, the narrator has a dawning fear that he’s little more than an inconvenient afterthought in the conspirators’ minds. His own future may include spending some of his early days in prison and the rest of his childhood in a “brutal tower block.”

Whether it’s a “joyous, blushful Pinot Noir” or a “gooseberried Sauvignon,” the sense-deprived but enthusiastic narrator is given to precise cataloging of his mother’s wine consumption—clearly excessive for a woman in her third trimester, but understandable for one hoping to obliterate her consciousness of the terrible deed she and her lover are about to commit. He’s also a cheeky and surprisingly well-informed commentator on the problems of the world (owing, perhaps, to the podcasts his mother devours). For all that, he hungers to enter that world, imagining himself someday as an octogenarian ringing in the 22nd century: “Healthy desire or mere greed,” he muses, “I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness.”

In Nutshell, McEwan cleverly pulls off what might be little more than a gimmick in the hands of a lesser novelist. That he persuades us to suspend our disbelief so readily here is a testament to his consummate skill.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In novels like Atonement and Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has enjoyed playing tricks with questions of his narrator’s identity. His devilishly clever and darkly humorous novel Nutshell takes another step in that direction, revealing the arc of a bizarre murder plot from the point of view of the ultimate unreliable narrator: a child in utero, two weeks away from birth.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Off to Anchorage

Review by Harvey Freedenberg

The protagonist of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is hardly a model of parental rectitude: She abandons her home and dental practice in Ohio to traverse Alaska in a rickety RV with her two children. Starting from this dubious premise, Eggers weaves an engaging story of second chances and the fierce beauty of maternal love.

Approaching age 40, Josie is haunted by a malpractice case filed by a former patient whose litigious son-in-law claims she missed evidence of an oral cancer in a routine dental examination. Her guilt over that incident is surpassed only by the anguish she feels over the death of another patient, a young Marine who was killed in Afghanistan. 

While Josie’s tenuous hold on rationality propels the novel, Eggers gives her a pair of appealing traveling companions. Her 8-year-old son, Peter, is “far more reasonable and kind and wise than his mother,” personality traits that come in handy for dealing with his 5-year-old sister, Ana, who’s “tuned to a different galactic frequency.” Both children demonstrate remarkable resilience, resigning themselves to the fact that there’s “no longer any logical pattern to their lives.”

This tiny crew navigates a craft north from Anchorage, on Alaska’s highways and back roads. Along the way, they take in a magic show on a cruise ship, meet a veteran of one of America’s lesser-known conflicts—the invasion of Grenada—and live in a cottage on the site of an abandoned silver mine. Eggers captures the essential weirdness of this journey while firmly anchoring it to Josie’s emotional crisis.

Heroes of the Frontier seems at first an ironic description of this tiny band. But what Eggers shows so convincingly is that there’s a certain heroism in trading a disastrous life for the vague glimpse of a new one. It’s a vote for the optimistic notion that tomorrow has the potential to be better than today.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The protagonist of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is hardly a model of parental rectitude: She abandons her home and dental practice in Ohio to traverse Alaska in a rickety RV with her two children. Starting from this dubious premise, Eggers weaves an engaging story of second chances and the fierce beauty of maternal love.

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