Kenneth Champeon

Fiction

Private lives of immigrants, told in chorus

Review by Kenneth Champeon

In these heady days of immigration non-reform in the United States, it is worth recalling that much of this nation’s territory was once the property of Mexico, and that many immigrants have fled violence whose source can be traced to America, whether through military aid, drug demand and interdiction or flat-out invasion. One such family is the subject of Cristina Henríquez’s illuminating novel The Book of Unknown Americans, a kind of anti-census in which the statistics of Latino immigration are run backward to reveal individual struggles.

The Toro family has fled from Panama, invaded by the United States in 1989. They end up in Delaware, where they help foster a community of fellow Latinos. These include the Riveras, Mexicans who have come north to provide special education for their teenage daughter, Maribel. She had fallen from a ladder back home and was consequently afflicted with brain damage. Her father finds degrading work picking mushrooms, while her mother Alma struggles to learn English and stomach bland American food.

Despite her condition, Maribel manages to charm young Mayor Toro, who finds her beauty reason enough to be patient with her halting speech and unusual behavior. But their parents’ relatively conservative values conspire to confound the young lovers’ devotions, ultimately with tragic consequences for the entire community. It’s less Romeo and Juliet than a post-9/11 Latino American Beauty, set in the thick of the Great Recession, which caused many Latinos to doubt America’s long-term attractiveness. Suffice it to say that gun violence isn’t unique to Latin America, or to Latinos.

While Henríquez’s focus is these two families, each chapter is told in the first person by many individuals, using a technique exemplified by Faulkner. But this is hardly avant-garde literature and is all the more engrossing for that. In its style and themes, it recalls the writings of Jhumpa Lahiri, though from the perspective of a very different class. Clearly Henríquez’s main interest is her characters, all of whom, however officious or self-pitying, are sympathetic. Whether by intention or accident, her only two flat and sinister characters are white. The Book of Unknown Americans is ultimately a hopeful book about the pursuit of happiness, whatever the source of the misery left behind.

 

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

In these heady days of immigration non-reform in the United States, it is worth recalling that much of this nation’s territory was once the property of Mexico, and that many immigrants have fled violence whose source can be traced to America, whether through military aid, drug demand and interdiction or flat-out invasion. One such family is the subject of Cristina Henríquez’s illuminating novel The Book of Unknown Americans, a kind of anti-census in which the statistics of Latino immigration are run backward to reveal individual struggles.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Beneath the Okinawan surface

Review by Kenneth Champeon

As the United States exits two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget that nearly 100,000 defense-related Americans remain in Japan, a country with which the U.S. ceased hostilities nearly 70 years ago. The American bases occupy about one-fifth of Okinawa, an island unfortunate to have served as a rampart for the Japanese mainland during the war and as an aircraft carrier for the Americans after it. Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird attempts to bridge the gap between these two phases in Okinawan history.

Luz is a modern American army brat, in Okinawa because of her gung-ho military mother. In her crass way, she tries to navigate global transience and her own mélange of ancestries. The other narrator is Takimo, a wartime Okinawan teen convinced that Japan is invincible and that her emperor is divine. She is forced to suffer all manner of privation on the road to disillusionment with the imperial cause.

That these two eventually become connected Hollywood-style may go without saying. But the contrasts between them are fascinating. During World War II the Americans were hardly innocent of demonizing the Japanese, but Takimo reminds us that the demonization went both ways. Luz, for her part, gets a schooling in East-Asian ancestor worship and filial duty that helps her better accept her mother’s idiosyncrasies and the premature death of her soldier sister.

Once herself an American in Okinawa, Bird knows her subject; the novel displays keen appreciation and sympathy for the Okinawans and their culture. The prose could benefit from more showing and less telling, as the cliché goes, but the voices of the girls are convincing.

The American presence in Okinawa remains controversial, whether because it desiccates a vibrant island or because soldiers there occasionally go berserk and assault the locals. Above the East China Sea provides welcome context to the news reports from an island whose pivotal place in global power politics remains mostly unexamined.

 

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

As the United States exits two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget that nearly 100,000 defense-related Americans remain in Japan, a country with which the U.S. ceased hostilities nearly 70 years ago. The American bases occupy about one-fifth of Okinawa, an island unfortunate to have served as a rampart for the Japanese mainland during the war and as an aircraft carrier for the Americans after it. Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird attempts to bridge the gap between these two phases in Okinawan history.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Medieval England’s most dangerous book

Review by Kenneth Champeon

The term “Middle Ages” contains a prejudice: that the era was merely an unremarkable void straddling antiquity and modernity. Recent scholarship has eroded this perception. The era produced Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio as well as significant leaps in mathematics and even algorithms and cryptography. It was, moreover, a time when the lust for life was great and the powerful had lust aplenty. Bruce Holsinger’s captivating historical novel A Burnable Book is testimony to this more accurate view of a fascinating period.

The scene is London in 1385. Reigning over England is Richard II, later to adorn one of Shakespeare’s plays. The church is divided between Rome and Avignon while England hangs in the balance. A book, the “burnable” one of the title, appears, allegedly written during the reign of William the Conqueror. The book prophesies in historically accurate terms the death of every English king from William to Richard. Thus it falls to the book’s many temporary owners to decipher that prophecy and save, or not save, the reigning monarch.

But the true authorship of the book remains mysterious. Is it Chaucer, soon to write his Canterbury Tales? Is it Lollius, to whom the Roman poet Horace addressed one of his odes? Or is it the son of the novel’s narrator, who chews the fat with Chaucer and does some sleuthing of his own, even slinking into the brothels to ask prostitutes pointed questions? Thus the novel careens from court to academia, from house of God to house of ill repute, with scandalous overlap between the latter two.

The novel’s action proceeds at a steady clip and has the stench of authenticity, detailing everything from methods of torture to the happy custom of throwing refuse into the street. Its prose is erudite and focused, reading more like an academic thriller than a frilly period piece: John Grisham meets Umberto Eco. And Holsinger has clearly ventured to imbue his writing with the earthy English words that Orwell, among others, favored over their highfalutin’ Latinate counterparts. The language is also often bawdy, as befits a novel about bawds.

In his own book about England, Paul Theroux argued that England had been written about perhaps more than any other country, but the England he meant was likely that of Dickens, Austen or Hardy. About medieval England we know almost nil. This clever novel, as contemporary as it is distant, helps illuminate an England consigned for ages to a stagnant darkness.

The term “Middle Ages” contains a prejudice: that the era was merely an unremarkable void straddling antiquity and modernity. Recent scholarship has eroded this perception. The era produced Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio as well as significant leaps in mathematics and even algorithms and cryptography. It was, moreover, a time when the lust for life was great and the powerful had lust aplenty. Bruce Holsinger’s captivating historical novel A Burnable Book is testimony to this more accurate view of a fascinating period.

FictionWorld Fiction

Lost in reincarnation

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A middle-aged and miserable American woman reaches the end of her mental rope and absconds to some foreign or underdeveloped place to find herself—and possibly a mate. This new genre encompasses the wildly popular if dissimilar Eat, Pray, Love and Wild. Add to these a novel, A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan-Philipp Sendker, where the unlikely foreign setting is Myanmar, aka Burma.

Julia (whose surname is not Roberts) is a New York lawyer suffering not from the corresponding neuroses but from an actual possession, by the spirit of a departed Burmese woman, Nu Nu. Thus lost in reincarnation, Julia travels to Burma to learn this woman's story and thereby liberate them both.

This magical realism proves short-lived, as Julia confronts the reality of Burma under its imperishable military regime. The book mainly concerns itself with Nu Nu and her two sons, who are conscripted into the army and face the possibility of becoming human mine detectors. Desperate to save them, Nu Nu solicits a Burmese soldier in exchange for the freedom of, alas, only one of her sons.

Emerging from this nightmarish but plausible scenario, it's hard to determine whether Julia should remain in Burma, where she is maybe happy, or return to New York, where she isn't. Yet the novel coheres and holds the attention. Sendker is a German journalist formerly based in Asia, so it’s a surprising that he allows Julia to succumb to a starry-eyed reaction to the seemingly serene and smiley Orient of legend, which, in Burma, coexists with a military that employs rape as a weapon of war. Julia is spared much dwelling on this unsettling juxtaposition.

A Well-Tempered Heart will appeal to romantics and pessimists alike, but may not satisfy either. History abounds with examples of love conquering all. Recent reforms notwithstanding, modern Burma hasn't been one of them. Still, the world and literature are richer for the contest, which is engagingly drawn here.

A middle-aged and miserable American woman reaches the end of her mental rope and absconds to some foreign or underdeveloped place to find herself—and possibly a mate. This new genre encompasses the wildly popular if dissimilar Eat, Pray, Love and Wild. Add to these a novel, A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan-Philipp Sendker, where the unlikely foreign setting is Myanmar, aka Burma.

FictionWorld Fiction

An exuberant take on the beautiful game

Review by Kenneth Champeon

America is anomalous, as insular as its two oceans suggest. Consider the game known stateside as soccer and elsewhere as football. An American would struggle to name a global soccer star, despite their commanding astronomical salaries and divine admiration. The Sun and Other Stars, by Chicago author Brigid Pasulka, offers a glimpse into the glamour and goofiness of the so-called "beautiful game.”

In the Italian town of San Benedetto, Etto, a butcher's son, struggles to resist the delirium that soccer inflicts on the citizenry. He instead frets about the untimely deaths of his brother and mother—by moped and suicide, respectively. More pointedly, he is unsure he belongs, not least because his father is determined to make Etto a butcher as well.

Etto's sun-soaked stasis is disturbed by the arrival of a renowned Ukrainian soccer player, Yuri, and his fetching sister, Zhuki. The callow butcher-to-be is smitten, and his bumbling attempts at winning Zhuki's love are accompanied by attempts at mastering soccer under Yuri's tutelage. Eventually Etto realizes that soccer gives hope to the downtrodden, which may explain the sport's weak hold on rich America. Etto increasingly appreciates his town and confronts the ghosts of his departed loved ones.

The Sun and Other Stars bursts with a Mediterranean ease and exuberance.

The Sun and Other Stars bursts with a Mediterranean ease and exuberance. It can be very funny, though sometimes not funny enough, as the author revels in digs at other nationalities, from tight-fisted Germans to overfed Americans. The Italians don't escape either, with elders bemoaning the corruption of soccer by excessive pay, while they themselves act as farcically as their politicians.

But this is no elegy to soccer's past. Like Etto, the prose is energetic and carefree, reminiscent perhaps of Dave Eggers or Salman Rushdie. This lighthearted and affectionate novel could help transform soccer into more than just an adjective that precedes “mom.”

America is anomalous, as insular as its two oceans suggest. Consider the game known stateside as soccer and elsewhere as football. An American would struggle to name a global soccer star, despite their commanding astronomical salaries and divine admiration. The Sun and Other Stars, by Chicago author Brigid Pasulka, offers a glimpse into the glamour and goofiness of the so-called "beautiful game.”

FictionHistorical Fiction

Living with loss

Review by Kenneth Champeon

As World War II is to the United States, a conflict endlessly memorialized, representing the nation's crowning achievement before its inevitable decline, so World War I is to Great Britain. Little surprise, then, that on the latter war's centennial, another novel that centers on it should appear: Wake, by British author Anna Hope. As the homonym title suggests, however, Wake is less about the war than its aftermath. It's also less about men than women.

These women include Hettie, who dances for pay with crippled ex-soldiers; Evelyn, a former munitions factory employee now charged with addressing veterans' complaints; and Ada, a mother mourning her allegedly KIA son Michael. Unearthing Michael's true fate ties the women's stories together, and the truth is far from fodder for patriotic song.

The unifying male is Evelyn's brother, Ed, who charms Hettie with his wild talk about anarchism, his boozy vulnerability and his fondness for jazz and cocaine. These are Ed's ways of coping with impotence brought about by service as a captain. Meanwhile, Evelyn has stumbled on Michael's story through a visit from a brother-in-arms, while Ada consults psychics in a desperate attempt to commune with her son.

It has become fashionable to present apparently disparate plots that cleverly converge in the end. Hope can be forgiven for falling for this trope, as her characters are vivid and credible, which is harder to achieve than literary legerdemain. There is a peculiarly British, phlegmatic heroism in the women's efforts to recover from a very unheroic war.  Their dignity matches that of the forsaken veterans, forced to beg or sell trifles in the streets.

“Good prose,” said Orwell, “is like a windowpane.” By that criterion Hope's is an achievement: Rarely, as too often happens in contemporary fiction, does the writer's ego enter into the writing. Instead, Hope lets the story and the characters do the work. That said, the novel's anti-war message could hardly be less obvious. Witness Ed saying, before an admittedly fatuous Armistice Day celebration, that neither side had been victorious. "War wins." True enough in this war, but as fatuous as that celebration when applied to others.

Still, Wake is an impressive first novel. It’s a potent reminder that the scars of WWI on the British psyche run deep, and Hope’s postwar, feminine twist on the usual guys-mud-and-guts treatment make it a unique, engaging read.

As World War II is to the United States, a conflict endlessly memorialized, representing the nation's crowning achievement before its inevitable decline, so World War I is to Great Britain. Little surprise, then, that on the latter war's centennial, another novel that centers on it should appear: Wake, by British author Anna Hope. As the homonym title suggests, however, Wake is less about the war than its aftermath. It's also less about men than women.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A broken family seeks vengeance

Review by Kenneth Champeon

V.S. Naipaul said of the writing of Vladimir Nabokov: "It's bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?" James Scott has been compared, justifiably, to Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy. But his debut novel, The Kept, as bleak as McCarthy and as lush as Ondaatje, seems at times an assemblage of beautiful sentences without purpose.

Set in the sunless chill of fin-de-siècle upstate New York, the novel opens with a massacre. Teenager Caleb has seen all his siblings and his father murdered by three assailants. Traumatized and jumpy, Caleb then mistakenly shoots his purported mother Elspeth, but not fatally. Thus begins the pair's often poignant quest to find those responsible. Eventually it's learned that this seemingly random attack was motivated by sterile midwife Elspeth's having stolen all her children from her clients. It may not be credible that the retribution for this would be to kill those same children, but there's no debating Caleb's indignation, even after he learns the truth.

In the meantime, Elspeth impersonates a man to get work preparing ice for sale, while Caleb befriends a golden-hearted prostitute and some other outlandish, McCarthy-esque types. Scott expends a lot of gunpowder and has characters quote the Bible in solemn tones, but to compensate for the lack of narrative force the language is made to sing like Ondaatje's.

To be fair, McCarthy's novels aren't heavy on plot. Instead they depict Americans adrift, beholden in equal measure to sanctimony and barbarism, everyone homeless and unknown. (This is a theme of Ondaatje's too, on an international backdrop.) Elspeth's wish to manufacture a family and Caleb's loyalty to false kin both point to a very American desperation for normalcy and purpose amidst the moral degeneracy of life on civilization's fringes. Both characters thus attain a fragile nobility, Elspeth sometimes recalling the formidable matriarch Addie of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Whether the reader cares is another matter.

And this recalls Naipaul's dig at Nabokov. The Kept is a well-written debut showcasing the kind of disciplined, often willfully spare but treacly prose taught in the writing programs filling Scott's biography. It is violent and mock-somber in the grand American manner. But as Gertrude Stein once chided Hemingway, when presented with his story about a sordid backwoods sexual assault, it may paint a picture. But would you want to hang it on your wall?

James Scott has been compared, justifiably, to Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy. But his debut novel, The Kept, as bleak as McCarthy and as lush as Ondaatje, seems at times an assemblage of beautiful sentences without purpose.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

From Nova Scotia to France’s front lines

Review by Kenneth Champeon

In the dispiriting list of pointless wars, few were more pointless than the one associated with the Somme or Passchendaele. The Great War saw tens of thousands die in an inglorious miasma of gas and mud. Yet the contribution made by Canadians to this carnage is seldom highlighted—that is, until P.S. Duffy’s first novel, The Cartographer of No Man’s Land.

The novel is divided between Nova Scotia, where Angus MacGrath lived, and France, where he fights. Angus joins the war to find his brother-in-law Ebbin, who is missing and presumed dead. A talented artist raised by a pacifist, Angus had hoped to be a peaceable cartographer, but finds himself instead amid the barbed wire and vast graveyards.

Meanwhile, the Nova Scotians worry about local Germans whose loyalties are suspect, like Mr. Heist, a teacher. When Heist builds an observatory, the authorities decide he’s crossed a line.

The contrasts between the home and war fronts are stark. At home is buttered rum, while on the battlefield, soldiers obsess about squares of chocolate. Home represents the freedom of the ubiquitous sea, while the soldiers suffer the trenches’ claustrophobia. Still, the wounded Angus resists being invalided out. Despite the war’s futility, he remains committed to his troops.

Duffy writes well—if occasionally sentimentally—about war’s privations. Her heroes are not reticent Hemingway types, and her descriptions, especially those of battle, are rich. The novel succeeds most in evoking the Canadian maritimes, whose resilient seafaring ways Duffy, a native whose family has lived in Nova Scotia for generations, is amply qualified to address.

Duffy says of Angus on his return home, “He would not talk about the war. He barely talked at all.” Yet to him and his unsung Canadian comrades Duffy has given a memorable voice.

In the dispiriting list of pointless wars, few were more pointless than the one associated with the Somme or Passchendaele. The Great War saw tens of thousands die in an inglorious miasma of gas and mud. Yet the contribution made by Canadians to this carnage is seldom highlighted—that is, until P.S. Duffy’s first novel, The […]
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

The clever and the stupid

Review by Kenneth Champeon

The recent history of South Africa is often reduced to the Boer Wars and the anti-apartheid struggle. Less well known is that the country has a sizable Jewish population, which also had to confront war and prejudice. Seeking to redress this gap is The Lion Seeker, the first novel by Kenneth Bonert, a South African born to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.

The novel's protagonist is Isaac, whose mother divides humanity into the Clevers and the Stupids. Clevers, if they require jobs, get comfy office gigs, while the Stupids are condemned to manual labor. Much of the novel is dedicated to Isaac's (mostly stupid) efforts to make a living in various trades and schemes, with the ultimate end of cleverly buying (not stupidly mortgaging) a home for his mother.

Meanwhile, Spain is falling to the Fascists, Hitler is seizing Czechoslovakia and the European Jews are facing increasingly dire assaults on their persons and property. Not that this is unprecedented to the South African Jews, as many of them had fled Russian pogroms in ages past.

The role that Britain's colonies played in the war effort is another underrepresented history. Thousands of South Africans participated. These include Isaac, who enlists when his moneymaking flounders. People often ask: Why didn't the Jews fight Hitler? Countless Jews did. In any case, Isaac barely survives the war and returns to resume his quest for home ownership. But he also learns that his mother has buried the history of Isaac's "cousin" Avrom, who turns out to be closer to Isaac than he thought.

As the subject matter demands, The Lion Seeker is an ambitious novel. Sometimes its ambition gets the better of it: Bonert's facility with and delight in language, including the incorporation of Afrikaans slang and what the characters call “Jewish,” can disrupt the storytelling. This becomes less so as the novel progresses—Bonert's Joycean aspirations take a back seat to his compelling historical tale, and the reader is less required to peer through thickets of linguistic virtuosity to see Isaac courting a girl or cuckolding an abusive colleague.

The novel ends somberly. Having become acquainted with the South African Jews, we are shown the appalling fate of those remaining in Lithuania. But the novel also ends with the more heartening creation of two much-awaited homes: Isaac's house in South Africa and the nascent state of Israel.

The recent history of South Africa is often reduced to the Boer Wars and the anti-apartheid struggle. Less well known is that the country has a sizable Jewish population, which also had to confront war and prejudice. Seeking to redress this gap is The Lion Seeker, the first novel by Kenneth Bonert, a South African […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Wartime secrets left behind

Review by Kenneth Champeon

In the 1990s, a war in Sierra Leone killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the country. Yet writer Aminatta Forna, who is from Sierra Leone, has dedicated her absorbing new novel, The Hired Man, to that other 1990s war-torn region, Yugoslavia, thus subtly illuminating the prolonged aftereffects of all wars.

Duro is a Croat living in the ghostly town of Gost. One day, an Englishwoman named Laura arrives with her son and daughter. Laura has purchased an old house, and enlists Duro’s help in refurbishing it—including uncovering an obscured mosaic. The gradual unveiling of its contents mirrors Duro’s gradual revelations about the area’s violent past.

At first, that past seems far away. Duro’s present life is unremarkable. He likes his coffee and daily exercise, delights in repairs and ends his days with a beer at the local pub. He becomes fond, even protective, of Laura and her children, and shares with them his country’s natural treasures, including endless fields of wildflowers. But beneath the calm beauty is pain: The wildflowers exist because the fields are mine-strewn and thus off-limits. Eventually we learn that Duro participated in the fighting, that the ownership of Laura’s house is contentious and that she is acutely vulnerable to the area’s lingering animosities.

Forna’s decision to write from the perspective of a Croatian man is risky, but Duro is exceedingly convincing: melancholy, not maudlin; stoical, not hard-boiled. He tries to be hospitable and open to Laura while playing down his loss. “Laura,” he muses, “was one of those people who preferred the music of a lie to the discordance of truth.” His memories of the war are an impressive record of the so-called banality of evil.

Nowadays, Croatia’s beaches are as popular as the war was abhorrent, but Forna’s point is taken. Whether you’re gazing at Angkor Wat, dining in once-occupied Paris or having your burek and rakija in Gost, you’re standing on haunted ground.

In the 1990s, a war in Sierra Leone killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the country. Yet writer Aminatta Forna, who is from Sierra Leone, has dedicated her absorbing new novel, The Hired Man, to that other 1990s war-torn region, Yugoslavia, thus subtly illuminating the prolonged aftereffects of all wars. Duro is a […]
FictionWorld Fiction

Life and death surround a young Haitian girl

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A portrait of Haiti derived from facts alone would be grim. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from catastrophic deforestation and is frequently visited by the United States military. In 2010, an earthquake added insult to perennial injury.

Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, Claire of the Sea Light, offers a somewhat different picture. Deforestation rates a mention. And yes, the justice system is corrupt or nonexistent. But her portrait of Haiti’s people makes for a crucial difference. The living is decidedly not easy, but there’s summertime here in spades.

Claire is a young girl whose mother died while delivering her. Her father, adoring but unfit, makes the painful decision to offer her to a woman whose own daughter has died in a traffic accident as comical as it was tragic. In a parallel storyline, the local schoolmaster’s son, who joined the “dyaspora” to Miami, returns home and must face having raped his household’s servant girl and fathered a son by her. What’s more, his one true love was actually a man who fell to bullets long before.

Somehow, Danticat’s sweet touch makes this bad medicine go down. Her prose is simple and concrete, her characters vivid and warm. There is a timelessness about this tale that elevates it almost to parable. It recalls other novels of the Caribbean, from The Old Man and the Sea to A House for Mr. Biswas. Almost 20 years after Breath, Eyes, Memory and Krik? Krak!, Danticat has become the Naipaul of her generation.

Though Danticat resides in Miami, this novel’s strongest character is the one who stays behind. Her reasoning? “She liked her ghosts nearby.”

A portrait of Haiti derived from facts alone would be grim. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, suffers from catastrophic deforestation and is frequently visited by the United States military. In 2010, an earthquake added insult to perennial injury. Edwidge Danticat’s new novel, Claire of the Sea Light, offers a somewhat different […]
FictionDebut Fiction

Growing up, despite the odds

Review by Kenneth Champeon

The Fields—the first novel by Kevin Maher, a journalist originally from Dublin—stars Jim Finnegan, a 14-year-old with a potty mouth and a heart of tarnished silver. He hangs with a gang of toughs who swill lager and try to trump each other’s sexual conquests. Yet the lasses are no shrinking violets. Jim’s five (count ’em) sisters are as ominous as the witches in Macbeth.

During the course of this somewhat picaresque story, Jim faces some serious challenges, including the accidental pregnancy of his girlfriend, Saidhbh, and an unfortunate relationship with an abusive priest. Though Jim’s studies suffer, as does his relationship with Saidhbh, he endures these with incredible fortitude, and despite its sordid subject matter, The Fields is brimming with humor and cheer. This is particularly true of Jim’s outrageous family, whose determination to be joyful amid gloom—or gloomy amid joy—is integral to the Irish sensibility, as when Jim’s “mam” and her friends gleefully deplore lives cut short: “Cancer, death, only twenty! It’s music to their ears, like the sound of a starter gun.”

Maher’s prose has a manic, scabrous quality, like the ravings of a Guinness-fueled publican. He writes less like Joyce and more like Céline. Indeed, the only reference to Joyce is when a character suggests that a companion volume to Dubliners could be called “Ireland’s a Bit Rubbish and Has No Jobs.”

It’s a small miracle whenever any adolescent survives, and Jim emerges with all his chakras intact (after another zany subplot involving New Age training in London). But one hopes for Jim what Larkin hoped for: “No God any more, or sweating in the dark / About hell and that, or having to hide / What you think of the priest.”

The Fields—the first novel by Kevin Maher, a journalist originally from Dublin—stars Jim Finnegan, a 14-year-old with a potty mouth and a heart of tarnished silver. He hangs with a gang of toughs who swill lager and try to trump each other’s sexual conquests. Yet the lasses are no shrinking violets. Jim’s five (count ’em) […]
Fiction

A not-too-distant alternate American timeline

Review by Kenneth Champeon

The logician Kurt Gödel, who contemplated becoming an American citizen, decided that the Constitution had loopholes big enough to drive a dictatorship through. His insight is vindicated by Frederic C. Rich’s Christian Nation, a speculative novel in which militant evangelicals incrementally take over the American government and proceed to eviscerate the Constitution.

It’s 2009, and John McCain is president. After dying rather precipitously, he is replaced by Sarah Palin. She quickly loses what little credibility she had, and drifts. That is, until terrorists down several American planes using surface-to-air missiles. Martial law is declared.

Meanwhile, FOX News has merged with a family values organization, spawning a “Teavangelical” mouthpiece. Homeschooling grows in prevalence in order to inculcate Christian values. A state law banning abortion snowballs into a reversal of Roe v. Wade. Finally, after the election of the dryly named President Jordan, God usurps the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.

After the real 2004 election, a satirical map circulated, designating the blue states as “The United States of Canada” while the red states became “Jesusland.” In Christian Nation, several blue states form a “Secular Bloc” constituting nearly half of the country’s wealth. This bloc is then invaded by the federal military, with San Francisco and New York bearing the brunt.

This scenario would be terrifying if it weren’t occasionally ludicrous. Picture now-governor Mike Bloomberg discussing the Siege of Leningrad, or the protagonist pleading with him, “Mike . . . think of the gays.” At moments like this, Christian Nation flounders as fiction. But as a primer on how extremists can contort the law, it can be very compelling. Rich, a lawyer, might well have chosen to write a legal history instead. His command of relevant legislation is frequently devastating.

Though John McCain did not win the 2008 election, in recent years controversial actions like drone strikes, invasions of privacy and unlawful detainment have been condoned in part due to greater worries over terrorism. So it’s not for us to say, “It can’t happen here.” This disturbing book argues that much of it already has.

The logician Kurt Gödel, who contemplated becoming an American citizen, decided that the Constitution had loopholes big enough to drive a dictatorship through. His insight is vindicated by Frederic C. Rich’s Christian Nation, a speculative novel in which militant evangelicals incrementally take over the American government and proceed to eviscerate the Constitution. It’s 2009, and […]

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