Lauren Bufferd

FictionLiterary Fiction

Wild horses

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In lesser hands, the story told in Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare would be sentimental or even clichéd. An emotionally needy white woman takes in a tough inner-city girl whose life is transformed when she learns to ride horses at the neighboring stables. Cue the swelling music as the girl and horse ride into the sunset. But Gaitskill, whose novels and short stories have always delved full force into the most uncomfortable of situations, has instead produced a complex and nuanced look at love, loss and limitations. 

Ginger, an unsuccessful artist and former alcoholic, is mourning the death of her mentally ill sister and regretting her decision to remain childless. Ginger convinces her husband, Paul, to be a host family for the Fresh Air Fund, which allows inner-city kids to spend a few weeks in a rural environment. Twelve-year-old Velveteen Vargas from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, arrives at Ginger’s house in upstate New York, where they watch movies, read together and go for bike rides. The real transformation comes, however, when Velvet is introduced to the horses at the stable down the road. She proves to have a natural affinity for animals, especially one ornery mare, Fugly Girl.

The summer weeks turn into years, and the prickly connection between woman and girl grows into a bond that eventually encompasses Paul, Velvet’s mother and her little brother, Dante. Through shifting differences of status, income, ethnicities and needs, relationships are forged and, though the trust that is achieved may only be temporary, the two families are forever altered by the experience. 

Gaitskill and her former husband were a host family for the Fresh Air Fund, and she has explored some of this material in essays such as “Love Lessons” (2004) and “Lost Cat” (2009). The Mare splits the storytelling almost evenly between Ginger and Velvet, with Velvet’s mother and Paul occasionally offering their perspective. This division of the narrative provides a less one-sided look at the way both families are affected by Velvet’s choices. The Mare is a surprisingly tough, yet tender look at a delicate subject, told with fiery emotional honesty.

 

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

In lesser hands, the story told in Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare would be sentimental or even clichéd. An emotionally needy white woman takes in a tough inner-city girl whose life is transformed when she learns to ride horses at the neighboring stables. Cue the swelling music as the girl and horse ride into the sunset. But Gaitskill, whose novels and short stories have always delved full force into the most uncomfortable of situations, has instead produced a complex and nuanced look at love, loss and limitations.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A profound retelling of a late Shakespeare play

Review by Lauren Bufferd

For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed throughout the world— retold, reinterpreted and reinvented for each generation. Now, the Hogarth Shakespeare series is giving that opportunity to several of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists of our day. British writer Jeanette Winterson is the first to take on the challenge with The Gap of Time, a refashioning of The Winter’s Tale. Winterson’s own experience as an adopted child gives a special meaning to this story of an abandoned daughter. 

The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s late plays, tells the story of a king, Leontes, whose jealousy results in the death of his beloved wife and the banishment of his infant daughter, Perdita. Through a series of extraordinary (and coincidental) incidents, the family is reunited—although not before tragic losses lead to hard-won lessons. 

Winterson places the action in London of the late 1990s, a city reeling from one financial crisis after another. Leo is a successful corporate tycoon; Hermione, his wife, a popular singer; and Paulina is Leo’s longtime personal assistant and conscience. Xeno, a close friend of Leo since boarding school, is a game designer. He has been staying with the family, and when Leo begins to imagine there is more than friendship between Xeno and Hermione, his jealousy catches fire, and his behavior turns irrational. 

Shep and his son Clo are the ones to find the abandoned baby Perdita and raise her as family. They run a jazz club in an unnamed region that feels like rural Louisiana. When Perdita meets Zel, Xeno’s estranged son, he is working as a mechanic for the wily Autolycus—one of Shakespeare’s most lovable rogues who shows up here as a used car salesman and expert poker player who inadvertently brings the young lovers together. 

What makes The Gap of Time (the phrase is chosen from the introduction to Act IV and refers to the time between the abandonment and rediscovery of Perdita) so successful, is that Winterson not only cleverly updates the details of the 1610 original but also remains true to the play’s overarching themes of jealousy and revenge, forgiveness and redemption. Winterson has explored her own adoption in fiction (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) as well as memoir (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?). She has called The Winter’s Tale an important, almost talismanic text. The Gap of Time is true to one of Shakespeare’s most profound plays in part because Winterson brings to it her own personal story of loss and discovery.

 

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

For more than 400 years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed throughout the world— retold, reinterpreted and reinvented for each generation. Now, the Hogarth Shakespeare series is giving that opportunity to several of the most acclaimed contemporary novelists of our day. British writer Jeanette Winterson is the first to take on the challenge with The Gap of Time, a refashioning of The Winter’s Tale. Winterson’s own experience as an adopted child gives a special meaning to this story of an abandoned daughter.
FictionDebut Fiction

Wandering through a life in memories

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Parnaz Foroutan’s debut, The Girl from the Garden, explores the fortunes of the Malacoutis, a wealthy Jewish family in Iran at the turn of the 20th century, as remembered by the family’s only surviving daughter, Mahboubeh. Now elderly and living in Los Angeles, Mahboubeh wanders her garden, awash in memories that seem more real than her California home. 

In Mahboubeh’s memory, her great aunt Rakhel is a bitter old woman yelling obscenities out of an open window. But she also imagines Rakhel as a very young wife. At a time when a woman’s value was measured by her fertility, Rakhel’s inability to get pregnant was cause for despair. Their infertility (blamed completely on Rakhel) proves torturous to her husband, Asher, and the situation worsens after Rakhel’s sister-in-law gives birth to a healthy boy. When Asher contemplates taking a second wife, Rakhel’s behavior becomes more and more violent. 

Foroutan was born in Iran, though she currently lives in Los Angeles, and the stories explored in The Girl from the Garden were inspired by her own family. Though the reader gets a taste of what the Iranian Jewish community was like, this is really a novel about the culture of women, from the ritual baths and other religious traditions to the gardens and distinctly gendered spaces of the home. The novel mimics cinematic techniques in which one scene dissolves into another, shifting seamlessly across decades and continents. We never learn Mahboubeh’s own story, but the sense of a personality forged by the sacrifice, betrayal and restrictions of the women who came before her will remain with the reader long after the book is over. 

 

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

Parnaz Foroutan’s debut, The Girl from the Garden, explores the fortunes of the Malacoutis, a wealthy Jewish family in Iran at the turn of the 20th century, as remembered by the family’s only surviving daughter, Mahboubeh. Now elderly and living in Los Angeles, Mahboubeh wanders her garden, awash in memories that seem more real than her California home.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The mythology of a marriage

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Lauren Groff explored the strengths of community in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. In Fates and Furies, she narrows her focus to the ultimate microcosm: a marriage. Told in two parts, first by a husband and then a wife, this unsettling novel looks at the myriad ways even the most devoted of couples keep secrets, betray one another and risk deceiving themselves. 

 Despite the allusions to epic myth and Greek tragedy, Fates and Furies opens like a fairy tale: with a marriage between a prince and princess. Handsome, charismatic Lancelot, known as Lotto, meets the palely beautiful Mathilde in college, and after a brief courtship, they marry. “Fates”—the first half of the novel—tells the story of Lotto’s affluent upbringing in Florida, his failed acting career and years of genteel poverty with Mathilde in their Village apartment. Estranged from his mother and drinking heavily, Lotto finds unexpected success as a playwright. The second half of the novel, aptly named “Furies,” tells Matilde’s considerably grimmer side of the story. From Mathilde’s perspective, Lotto is lazy and self-absorbed, the selfish son of an indulgent yet withholding mother. For Mathilde, family life means keeping Lotto content—but at the cost of holding on to some very closely guarded secrets of her own. What begins as the story of their union unravels into something else altogether. 

In a novel whose title invokes the grand sweep of an epic, there shouldn’t be any surprise when the domestic tale leaps into mythic territory: bouts of hubris, betrayal and thwarted power that spring from the pages of classical tragedies. At times, Groff’s characters, with their selfishness, lust and need for revenge, are more archetypal than living, breathing people. But Mathilde’s rage is as artful as it is destructive, and at its deepest, Fates and Furies suggests that her vengeance is a creative force as carefully wrought as any of Lotto’s dramas. 

 Fates and Furies is an ambitious and sometimes difficult novel about two charismatic people who, thrust out of the comforting nests of their birth families, seek security and solace in one another. Groff’s writing is intelligent, knowing and deliciously sexy. When Groff’s red-hot prose ignites Mathilde’s icy rage, Fates and Furies is something very special indeed.

 

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

Lauren Groff explored the strengths of community in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. In Fates and Furies, she narrows her focus to the ultimate microcosm: a marriage. Told in two parts, first by a husband and then a wife, this unsettling novel looks at the myriad ways even the most devoted of couples keep secrets, betray one another and risk deceiving themselves.
FictionWorld Fiction

The Incarnations

Review by Lauren Bufferd

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, August 2015

Susan Barker’s daring new novel, The Incarnations, begins in 2008, just months before the opening of the Beijing Olympics. The city is grimy and polluted behind the burst of new construction. After nights spent in the dense traffic of the city’s multiple ring roads, taxi driver Wang returns home exhausted to his wife and daughter. A rare visit with his invalid father and vicious stepmother, an aging femme fatale, doesn’t add much pleasure to Wang’s already lonely existence, but things take a turn for the bizarre when an anonymous letter, tucked into the visor of his cab, assures Wang that he is the reincarnated soul mate of the sender.

Letters continue to appear, each accompanied by a story drawn from more than a thousand years of Chinese history. In each life, Wang and the sender inhabit different roles and relationships, yet every letter tells a tale similar in its depictions of betrayal, lust and obsession. With each communication, the sender grows closer, increasing Wang’s unease and memories of his unhappy childhood, his mentally ill mother and his own hospitalization for depression.

The past-life stories in The Incarnations are culled from some of the bloodiest moments in Chinese history, from the invasion of Genghis Khan to the Opium Wars and the Cultural Revolution. Barker is unsparing in her depiction of China’s political and social excesses, and the closer the stories get to the present, the harder it is to dismiss them as ancient history or folktale. The novel’s shifts from the distant past to the present are seamless, and the bittersweet twist at the book’s finale will have readers searching back through the novel for clues to the ending.

Barker has explored the world of ghosts before: Characters from both of her previous novels (Sayonara Bar and The Orientalist and the Ghost) were haunted by visitors from beyond the grave—but never were the stakes so high. Barker, who grew up in East London with a British father and Chinese Malaysian mother, spent several years in China researching The Incarnations. She skillfully combines history, the supernatural and the everyday in a novel that suggests that the past is never really past, while providing a cracking good read.

Susan Barker skillfully combines history, the supernatural and the everyday in a novel that suggests that the past is never really past, while providing a cracking good read. 
FictionShort Stories

A collection of tales inspired by history

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Rebecca Makkai’ s novels—The Borrower and The Hundred Year House—have established her as one of the most talented literary voices today. Her short fiction has been selected for The Best American Short Stories four years in a row. Now the acclaimed writer returns with Music for Wartime, an anticipated collection of short stories, several of which were inspired by the lives of her paternal grandparents.

Like the librarian in The Borrower whose honesty is tested when young boy hides out in the local library, many of these stories feature ordinary people beset by highly unusual circumstances.  After a university professor accidently kills a rare bird in “Painted Ocean, Painted Ship,” she is plagued by bad luck that puts both her job and her romantic life in jeopardy. A reality show producer manipulates an on-air love affair as her own relationship crumbles in “The November Story.” Other stories have an air of fable about them:  “The Miracle Year of Little Fork” is about a community buffeted by extreme weather after the death of a circus elephant and in “The Singing Women,” a story stunning in its brevity, a composer records the folk songs of two women in a village slated for destruction.

In a 2013 Harpers essay, Makkai wrote thoughtfully about the complex political and creative  legacy left behind by her Hungarian grandparents. These topics and related matters are explored in three re-workings of family anecdotes, as well as “Exposition” and “Suspension,” in which Makkai digs into emotionally loaded issues of memory and heritage. Although these stories pose more questions than they answer, they still carry a powerful charge and hopefully are a promise of more to come.

Music for Wartime has two masterpieces: “The Cross,” about a cellist who returns home from teaching at a summer music camp to find a cross on her lawn marking the spot of an automobile fatality and “The Museum of the Dearly Departed” about the aftermath of a gas leak in a residential building in Chicago. Both stories are quintessential Makkai—witty, intelligent, a little irreverent, but not afraid to venture into emotional territory. 

Rebecca Makkai’ s novels—The Borrower and The Hundred Year House—have established her as one of the most talented literary voices today. Her short fiction has been selected for The Best American Short Stories four years in a row. Now the acclaimed writer returns with Music for Wartime, an anticipated collection of short stories, several of which were inspired by the lives of her paternal grandparents.
FictionPopular Fiction

A dreamy summer vacation house

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Brenda Bowen’s Enchanted August opens with two women spotting a battered index card on a bulletin board promising a summer of spring water, blueberries and sea glass on Little Lost Island, Maine. If this sounds familiar, it may be because of the similarity to the opening of Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim’s beloved 1922 novel of four women whose lives are transformed by a summer in an Italian castle. Bowen has refashioned the classic, relocating the action but keeping the character names and the spirit of lives reinvented by new surroundings.

As in Enchanted April, the summer vacation house hosts a group of initially mismatched, unhappy people. Lottie Wilkes and Rose Arbuthnot are stressed by the pressures of city life and feel estranged from their distracted husbands. Caroline Dester is a beautiful actress trying to sort out her stalled career. In Bowen’s most clever twist, the character of Beverly Fisher is an old man. Back in New York, cottage owner Robert hopes that this year the rental will bring him true love at last. After a rough start, the island begins to work its magic. 

Though both novels move swiftly toward a neat resolution, Enchanted August never quite reaches the depth of the original, perhaps because women’s lives were so much more restricted in the 1920s. Nevertheless, Bowen, who has worked as a children’s publisher and author, has created a charming and witty update with a setting that could not be more appealing—from the woodland fairy houses and twin turrets in the island cottage to the rocky beaches and all-day lobster bakes. Enchanted August reminds us that sometimes it just takes a change of scenery to reveal that love is right in front of us. 

 

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

Brenda Bowen’s Enchanted August opens with two women spotting a battered index card on a bulletin board promising a summer of spring water, blueberries and sea glass on Little Lost Island, Maine. If this sounds familiar, it may be because of the similarity to the opening of Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim’s beloved 1922 novel of four women whose lives are transformed by a summer in an Italian castle. Bowen has refashioned the classic, relocating the action but keeping the character names and the spirit of lives reinvented by new surroundings.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Adapting to life in modern Manhattan

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s to British suffragettes during World War I. In her most recent novel, The Sunken Cathedral, Walbert tunes in to a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city recently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth.

Marie and Simone met as war brides on a Brooklyn playground after World War II. Now widowed and in their 80s, they remain engaged and adventurous. At Simone’s urging, they join a painting class at the School of Inspired Arts in a rundown Chelsea tenement taught by Sid Morris, another aging New Yorker buffeted by the city’s changes. Marie’s tenant, Elizabeth, tries to make sense of life in a post-9/11 city, but her anxiety isn’t helped by her son’s school, where the weekly disaster preparedness program is called “What If?” Back in class, Marie’s classmate Helen makes detailed paintings of underwater scenes recalling Hurricane Sandy and other vicious storms that threaten the island.

Walbert’s New York is haunted by strange weather and flood zones, by emergency drills at the public schools, and the destruction of local landmarks to make way for luxury condos. But the city and her citizens are resilient as well. The tapestry of voices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert’s use of footnotes, which allow her characters’ thoughts to move freely from the present to the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories, especially Marie’s traumatic wartime childhood in France and Elizabeth’s haunted recollections of a cousin’s tragic accident.

The Sunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussy that itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from the sea. Like Debussy’s impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyrical imagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious, elegiac and occasionally even funny, The Sunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught in a time of unease and change—and a striking portrait of the way we live now.

 

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

RELATED CONTENT: Read an interview with Kate Walbert about The Sunken Cathedral.

 

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s to British suffragettes during World War I. In her most recent novel, The Sunken Cathedral, Walbert tunes in to a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city recently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A family navigates changing times

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Readers met the Langdon family in Some Luck, the first novel in Jane Smiley’s trilogy about an American family and an Iowa farm. A straightforward, almost old-fashioned novel, it opened in 1920 and covered the following 33 years—one year per chapter—in the lives of Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their six children with tenderness and surprisingly subtle humor. Now, in the more ominously titled Early Warning, Smiley casts an even wider net, as the Langdon children, now grown to adulthood and with children of their own, navigate the immense social changes of the 1960s and ’70s.

When Early Warning opens, Walter, the Langdon patriarch, has died. Only Joe remains to work the land; his brothers and sisters have married and fanned out across the country from San Francisco to Chicago to Washington, D.C. The next generation of Langdons have their own non-rural challenges—twin boys who are vicious rivals, a troubled daughter drawn to the notorious Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple and a risk-taking son who drops out of college to fight in Vietnam. Character traits and personalities jump generations, and events that seemed peripheral in Some Luck circle back to affect the family in later decades. As land values sour and plunge, the Langford family farm is almost a character in itself, mimicking the fortunes of the various siblings. Toward the novel’s end, the appearance of a previously unknown family member provides an important opportunity for intergenerational healing.

Smiley’s narrative captures many of the touchstones of America’s postwar events and social changes: the Cold War, Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, the women’s movement, AIDS—yet the novel rarely feels generic. Like Some Luck, Early Warning focuses on the prosaic as much as the singular, and it is what each of her finely drawn characters does with what is handed to them that makes the novel so engaging. While Early Warning lacks some of the encompassing warmth of its predecessor, the strength of Smiley’s storytelling will keep readers hooked and looking forward to the third and final volume.

 

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

Readers met the Langdon family in Some Luck, the first novel in Jane Smiley’s trilogy about an American family and an Iowa farm. A straightforward, almost old-fashioned novel, it opened in 1920 and covered the following 33 years—one year per chapter—in the lives of Walter and Rosanna Langdon and their six children with tenderness and surprisingly subtle humor. Now, in the more ominously titled Early Warning, Smiley casts an even wider net, as the Langdon children, now grown to adulthood and with children of their own, navigate the immense social changes of the 1960s and ’70s.
FictionDebut Fiction

A 17th-century siren

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Venetia Stanley was a great beauty of her day, sought after by poets and painters eager to pay homage to her good looks. Her early death in 1633 has remained a mystery over the centuries, some accusing her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby, of murder and others ascribing her demise to the toxic beauty treatments she was rumored to have used. Hermione Eyre’s brilliant debut, Viper Wine, explores the perils of achieving beauty at all costs, set against a backdrop of the political and social upheaval of 17th-century London.

After years of marriage and motherhood, Venetia fears her looks are fading and turns to her husband’s alchemical experiments for a cure. When he refuses to help, she seeks out chemist Lancelot Choice, whose viper wine, a cordial distilled from snake blood, is said to invigorate the skin and restore youth. But the remedy takes a terrible toll. Meanwhile, other women in and around the court of Charles I seek similar cures, and the dangerous elixir becomes all the rage.

Eyre notes the obvious parallels between Venetia’s search for perfection and today’s obsession with youth by sprinkling the text with quotes on celebrity from the likes of Naomi Campbell and Andy Warhol, as well as mentioning modern beauty regimens with dangerous downsides, such as Botox and bee venom. Intensifying the novel’s postmodern edge, Digby’s thoughts are occasionally bombarded by 20th-century phenomena: He hears Joy Division at a courtly dance, quotes Neil Armstrong as he scans the heavens and perceives computer code in an alchemical text. Open to these dazzling wonders that flow to him, unbidden, across the centuries, Digby proves himself a true renaissance man, part of his world but anticipating our own.

Viper Wine occasionally bogs down in the detailed descriptions of Digby’s esoteric experiments, but Eyre’s stylish flair and sense of invention is truly impressive. Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Viper Wine is a historic fantasy reminding us of the limitless reaches of the imagination.

 

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

Venetia Stanley was a great beauty of her day, sought after by poets and painters eager to pay homage to her good looks. Her early death in 1633 has remained a mystery over the centuries, some accusing her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby, of murder and others ascribing her demise to the toxic beauty treatments she was rumored to have used. Hermione Eyre’s brilliant debut, Viper Wine, explores the perils of achieving beauty at all costs, set against a backdrop of the political and social upheaval of 17th-century London.
NonfictionMusicMemoir

A post-punk pioneer’s unflinching memoir

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Kim Gordon’s memoir, Girl in a Band, begins and ends with two seminal gigs, the final Sonic Youth concert in 2011 that also marked the end of her marriage to front man Thurston Moore and last year’s induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when Gordon was invited to sing with the remaining members of Nirvana. These experiences, each cathartic in their own way and each described in Gordon’s carefully crafted but emotionally frank language, set the tone for this remarkable book, one that is passionate without self-pity, revealing but not gossipy and never smug. Gordon’s honesty provides a remarkable window into a personality often regarded as the Queen of Cool but who here shows herself to be as sensitive as she is fearless.

Now just over 60, Gordon recalls growing up in Southern California, Hong Kong and Hawaii, her distant parents and her complicated relationship with her older brother who was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic but whose untreated illness proved a torment for much of her early life. Gordon moved to New York in 1980 to pursue a career in art, cobbling together typical low-paying jobs in bookstores, copy shops and galleries. She was introduced to Thurston Moore by a mutual friend and they were together for the next 30 years, forming Sonic Youth in 1981 and marrying three years later.

In the second half of the book, Gordon explores select songs, records and projects drawn from three decades-worth of work including collaborations such as her fashion label X-girl and producing Hole’s first record Pretty on the Inside. Continuing her ties to the art community, Gordon’s essays and criticism appeared in venues as diverse as Art Forum and Spin as well as countless small ’zines of the 1980s and ’90s.

Gordon evokes the spirit of the early ’80s in New York and writes persuasively about bringing a feminist sensibility to the boys club of rock and roll and touring as a new mother. Still, many fans will be reading this memoir to find the dirt behind the break-up of her marriage. Gordon seems aware of this and, while she gives Moore credit as a creative partner and father, she can’t hide her broken heart or the fact that their split ended not just their marriage but the band—her identity as a wife and a band member dissolved in a single stroke.

But her work as an artist continued. Post-divorce, Gordon continued to thrive, forming the experimental duo Body/Head with guitarist Tim Nace and making conceptual and visual art in both New York and Los Angeles. Gordon’s willingness to take stock, not just rehash old wounds, and recreate herself, even honestly admitting that she doesn’t know quite who she is yet, make Girl in a Band the story of a true artist’s journey. 

Kim Gordon’s memoir, Girl in a Band, begins and ends with two seminal gigs, the final Sonic Youth concert in 2011 that also marked the end of her marriage to front man Thurston Moore and last year’s induction ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when Gordon was invited to sing with the remaining members of Nirvana. These experiences, each cathartic in their own way and each described in Gordon’s carefully crafted but emotionally frank language, set the tone for this remarkable book, one that is passionate without self-pity, revealing but not gossipy and never smug. Gordon’s honesty provides a remarkable window into a personality often regarded as the Queen of Cool but who here shows herself to be as sensitive as she is fearless.
FictionShort Stories

An intriguing collection of character studies

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Edith Pearlman has been publishing award-winning stories since the late 1970s, but became more widely known in 2012, when her story collection Binocular Vision won both the PEN/Malamud and National Book Critics Circle awards and was a finalist for numerous others. Her new collection, Honeydew, gathers tales from the last 15 years, each one a closely observed look at the ordinary graces and sorrows of everyday life.

Most of the stories in Honeydew take place in Goldolphin, a fictional suburb of Boston peopled with professors, beauticians and shopkeepers. In “Dream Children,” an au pair finds frightening paintings of her charges hidden around the house and discovers that the images are created with the same intent that keeps her secretly brewing herbal potions for the children’s continued good health. The title story (included in The Best American Short Stories 2012) encompasses infidelity, pregnancy and an anorexic teenager who imagines herself as an insect, yet, by the story’s close, a new baby is born, weight is cautiously regained and relationships have shifted into more harmonious circumstances. At least for the time being.

Many of Pearlman’s most memorable characters are observers and listeners. In linked stories (“Puck,” “Assisted Living”), Rennie, the proprietor of the antique store Forget-Me-Not, keeps as close an eye on her customers as she does the teapots and Victorian jewelry in her shop. In one of the collection’s most vivid stories, “Wait and See,” Lyle is born with pentachromatic vision, a condition that allows him to see depths and variations of color that most humans aren’t privy to—and which proves to be both a blessing and a curse.

Like Lyle’s vision, Pearlman’s prose shimmers, and the stories are filled with beguiling details of color, taste and smell. Pearlman knows—and seems to care about—each of her characters, even the most irritating, and no matter their age, gender or race, they are drawn incisively and with empathy. Though the collection lacks the range of Binocular Vision, Honeydew is a solid group of stories by a very great writer indeed.

 

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

Edith Pearlman has been publishing award-winning stories since the late 1970s, but became more widely known in 2012, when her story collection Binocular Vision won both the PEN/Malamud and National Book Critics Circle awards and was a finalist for numerous others. Her new collection, Honeydew, gathers tales from the last 15 years, each one a closely observed look at the ordinary graces and sorrows of everyday life.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Exploring Fitzgerald’s last days

Review by Lauren Bufferd

It’s easy to forget that by the time he was 41, F. Scott Fitzgerald was washed up. His books were out of print, magazines weren’t interested in his stories and his monthly royalties were down to pocket change. In 1937, he went to Hollywood, where he struggled to make a living writing screenplays, barely staying one step ahead of his creditors. It is these lean years that Stewart O’Nan examines in his brilliant biographical novel West of Sunset.

When Fitzgerald arrived in Hollywood, his wife, Zelda, was in a mental hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and their daughter, Scottie, was lodged in an East Coast boarding school. Overcome with guilt and plagued by the alcohol addiction that would lead to a fatal heart attack just three years later, Fitzgerald worked as a studio screenwriter for projects both notable (Gone with the Wind) and forgotten (A Yank at Oxford), surrounded by colleagues such as Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Humphrey Bogart. At the same time, he met and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a British gossip columnist with her own complicated past. Their relationship sustained him and also made it possible for him to work on his final novel, The Last Tycoon. But he still returned east regularly to see Zelda or take her on small trips—once, he even brought her to her family’s home in Alabama for a trial stay.

O’Nan has always found the drama inherent in hard work (Last Night at the Lobster) and in the nuances of personal relationships (Emily, Alone), and West of Sunset combines both. As glamorous a subject as Hollywood in the 1930s is, the small moments work best in this poignant novel: the guilt Fitzgerald feels over not spending his holidays with his wife and daughter; the awkward friendship between Scottie and Sheilah; and the struggles that Fitzgerald has alone with his typewriter. O’Nan handles these situations with the utmost sympathy. He paints a deeply personal portrait of a man on his last legs—financially, creatively and physically—and as painful as the subject matter is, it is also a pleasure to read. West of Sunset is truly one great writer exploring the life and work of another.

 

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

It’s easy to forget that by the time he was 41, F. Scott Fitzgerald was washed up. His books were out of print, magazines weren’t interested in his stories and his monthly royalties were down to pocket change. In 1937, he went to Hollywood, where he struggled to make a living writing screenplays, barely staying one step ahead of his creditors. It is these lean years that Stewart O’Nan examines in his brilliant biographical novel West of Sunset.

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