Lauren Bufferd

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.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Two sides, one coin

Review by Lauren Bufferd

How to Be Both, by the British writer Ali Smith, tells two interconnected stories. The first is about Georgina, known as George, a 1960s teenager outside of London grieving the death of her mother and taking her first tentative steps toward love. The other is the story of the 15th-century Italian painter Francesco del Cossa, a historical figure responsible for the remarkable frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy—and about whom very little else is known.

The twist here—and that word is used purposefully—is that, depending on the copy the reader picks up, either George’s or Francesco’s story could be presented first. Though reading one before the other obviously doesn’t change the outcome, it shows that the stories both precede and follow each other, like fibers in a strand of yarn.

The plot and the structure of How to Be Both play with many ideas and symbols, including androgyny, allegory and memory. Though it may sound intimidating, Smith makes the novel accessible and even fun. George is funny and earthy; a credible, albeit very articulate, teen. Francesco’s story is a picaresque masterpiece complete with brothels and a delicious rivalry. But Smith’s talent shines brightest in her tender depiction of the emotions that, like the underpaintings in a fresco, remain hidden but have a powerful impact.

 

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

How to Be Both, by the British writer Ali Smith, tells two interconnected stories. The first is about Georgina, known as George, a 1960s teenager outside of London grieving the death of her mother and taking her first tentative steps toward love. The other is the story of the 15th-century Italian painter Francesco del Cossa, a historical figure responsible for the remarkable frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy—and about whom very little else is known.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A father’s hidden life

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A Map of Betrayal, the new novel from the PEN/Faulkner-winning author Ha Jin (Waiting, Nanjing Requiem) is a haunting tale of two families and two countries that are linked together by the life of a single spy. When American-born professor of Asian Studies Lillian Shang inherits her father Gary’s journals, she uncovers details of his four-decade career as a spy for Communist China. But when history threatens to repeat itself in the next generation, Lillian must struggle with issues of loyalty and betrayal.

Using the diaries, Lillian follows her father from his early years as a secret agent working for Mao against the Nationalist army to his career as a U.S.-based spy feeding intelligence to China—but the most shocking revelation is that he left a wife and two children behind when he immigrated to the United States in 1950. Visiting the village where he once lived offers Lillian some understanding of her father’s choices and sheds light on the dynamics that shaped her own unhappy childhood. Gary’s first family was never told about his fate, nor did they ever benefit financially from his position. This triggers intense guilt over her own material advantages, and she thrusts herself into the personal lives of her newfound family—only to discover that her nephew, Ben, may be following in his grandfather’s footsteps.

The novel is told in chapters that alternate between Lillian’s present-day pursuit of her father’s story and Gary’s career from 1949 to his death in the late 1980s. Gary’s story, which is actually the more poignant of the two, is unfortunately occasionally rendered in a dense prose that reads like a textbook on American-Sino relations. Lillian’s chapters, however, reflect her aching personal sadness, and the novel closes with a delicate, ironic twist that one associates with the best of Jin’s fiction. A Map of Betrayal is the gripping story of a daughter coming to terms with her family history, set against a backdrop of political change.

 

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

A Map of Betrayal, the new novel from the PEN/Faulkner-winning author Ha Jin (Waiting, Nanjing Requiem) is a haunting tale of two families and two countries that are linked together by the life of a single spy. When American-born professor of Asian Studies Lillian Shang inherits her father Gary’s journals, she uncovers details of his four-decade career as a spy for Communist China. But when history threatens to repeat itself in the next generation, Lillian must struggle with issues of loyalty and betrayal.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Bob Marley’s historical ripple effect

Review by Lauren Bufferd

In December 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting. Marley sustained injuries in his arm and chest; his wife, Rita, was hit as she raced to protect their children; and his manager, Don Taylor, was also injured. In Marlon James’ powerful new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack is the centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaica in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the following decade.

Marley, here called “The Singer,” may be at the center of the story, but A Brief History of Seven Killings is a tapestry, not a portrait. James created an extensive cast of characters—gang leaders, CIA operatives, rogue agents, girlfriends, drug dealers, reporters and even a ghost or two—to tell this story of a country whose political instability was exploited by American interests, a tale that pulsates and spreads over three decades, traveling from Kingston to New York and back again.

Jamaican gang leaders Papa Lo, the head or “Don” of Copenhagen City, a slum area of Kingston, and his successor and sometime-rival Josey Wales, together with their enforcer, Weeper, dominate illegal activity on the island. When their younger associates ramp up the violence, the gangs are drawn into an even more dangerous world, one with ties to drug trafficking and, ultimately, the crack houses of New York and other American cities.

This is not an easy book. It’s complicated and bloody; the dialogue harsh and often profane. However, James—who won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award for The Book of Night Women, a clear-eyed and often brutal look at slavery in 18th-century Jamaica—is a superb craftsman, managing multiple characters and storylines with an elegance that is almost at odds with the gritty content. Behind the thuggery and carnage lies a belief that deliverance can be achieved through knowledge and self-awareness, which is very much in keeping with Marley’s legacy.

As the singer said in “Redemption Song,” the true cost of political freedom requires us to “emancipate yourself from mental slavery/none but ourselves can free our minds.” In A Brief History, James’ willingness to look squarely at his country’s difficult past makes this an important book—and a remarkable one.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with James about A Brief History of Seven Killings. 

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

In December 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting. Marley sustained injuries in his arm and chest; his wife, Rita, was hit as she raced to protect their children; and his manager, Don Taylor, was also injured. In Marlon James’ powerful new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack is the centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaica in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the following decade.
FictionDebut Fiction

Meet your new favorite feminist heroine

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Newcomers to Caitlin Moran’s candor and upfront feminist sensibility should prepare themselves: How to Build a Girl is an earthy, sometimes outrageous but always funny story about a 1990s teenager from an eccentric family in a Northern England council house who becomes a rock critic.

Overweight, sexually inexperienced and poor, Johanna Morrigan takes stock and finds herself sadly wanting. She decides to re-create herself, first naming herself after Oscar Wilde’s niece Dolly, known for her wit and tempestuous living, and then choosing a new look: a swoosh of black eyeliner and a top hat (the latter in homage to Slash, of Guns ‘n’ Roses fame). Terrified that her family is going to lose their benefits and convinced that she can make money as a writer (like Jo in Little Women), she lands a gig as a rock critic, tentatively submitting the occasional record critique but quickly moving up the pop journalism ladder to full-length concert reviews and features. Finally, to her delight, she goes from being a “kissless virgin” to, again in her words, a “Lady Sex Adventurer.”   

Moran writes explicitly about sex and brilliantly about music, especially the ways in which adolescents take refuge, express themselves and sometimes even find reasons to live through the work of the artists they love. But class and poverty also play an enormous role in this novel, to Moran’s credit. Johanna’s family and life in Wolverhampton are depicted with dignity and an understanding of how much is at stake.

Like Jo March, Johanna is cheerful, literate and resourceful, much as one imagines the teenage Moran might have been. (Fans of Moran’s feminist manifesto/memoir, How to Be a Woman, will realize that Johanna’s journey resembles Moran’s own trajectory from council housing to magazine staff by the age of 16.) But after putting in so much work to change her life, Johanna finds she doesn’t much like the results. What do you do, she wonders, when you’ve built yourself up, only to realize you’ve used the wrong materials? This sincerely told and truly funny tale provides a sympathetic and enlightening answer.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Caitlin Moran about How to Build a Girl.

Newcomers to Caitlin Moran’s candor and upfront feminist sensibility should prepare themselves: How to Build a Girl is an earthy, sometimes outrageous but always funny story about a 1990s teenager from an eccentric family in a Northern England council house who becomes a rock critic.

FictionPopular Fiction

When talent becomes a heavy burden

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Dan Kelly, the protagonist of Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, is not a likable character. He’s not likable in the novel’s first pages, when he’s a scholarship student at a posh boys’ school in Australia, and he remains unlikable at the end, when he’s a 30-something who doesn’t know what to do with his life. However, by the end of the book, we understand Dan, a little. This is why you will stay with Barracuda, why you will keep turning the pages even as you grit your teeth.

As a child, Dan showed great promise as a swimmer and was singled out by his coach as being the fastest, strongest and best of all the boys on the team. Unfortunately, it seems like the adoring Coach Torma either never informs Dan that he’s going to lose a few races even at the height of his powers, or the admonition never sinks in. So when Dan loses one race, he gives up swimming—it will be years before he even swims for pleasure.

Though Dan is called Barracuda because of his swimming chops, he also resembles the fish for his sheer viciousness. He attacks everyone around him, verbally, mentally and even physically. His aggression doesn’t even stop with his loved ones, who include his worshipful mother, a Greek immigrant, his brother, sister and hardworking Dad, an immigrant from Scotland. Only Dan’s best friend, Demet, can stand up to him, and that’s because she’s as mean as he is.

But Barracuda also has insightful things to say about the immigrant experience in Australia and the persistence of family and friendship bonds. This exploration of the mind of a bitter man who destroyed his own dreams is an absorbing if difficult work.

 

Dan Kelly, the protagonist of Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, is not a likable character. He’s not likable in the novel’s first pages, when he’s a scholarship student at a posh boys’ school in Australia, and he remains unlikable at the end, when he’s a 30-something who doesn’t know what to do with his life. However, by the end of the book, we understand Dan, a little. This is why you will stay with Barracuda, why you will keep turning the pages even as you grit your teeth.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Strangers in the house

Review by Lauren Bufferd

It is 1922, and England and her citizens are still recovering from the upheaval of the First World War: High unemployment, disillusioned ex-soldiers and severely strained circumstances are commonplace. Twenty-seven-year-old Frances Wray and her mother are living in South London. Both of Frances’ brothers died in the war, and her father’s recent death left the two women close to financial ruin. Even with the dismissal of servants and Frances taking over the housework and meals, the Wrays no longer have enough to live on. Their decision to take in lodgers, or “paying guests” as they genteelly refer to them, leads to an event as ultimately life-altering as the war itself.

The Wrays’ lodgers are a young married couple, Leonard and Lillian Barber. The lack of privacy and the added noise prove troublesome, but Frances, who is cut off from people her own age, puts up with Leonard’s overly familiar conversation and is drawn to Lily’s artistic nature and seductive good looks. The budding friendship between the two women deepens, and when Frances confesses her sexual attraction to women, Lily is intrigued and reciprocates. Their affair reveals the cracks in the Barbers’ marriage as well as the depths of Frances’ loneliness. When a marital argument leads to a fatal accident, the novel swiftly transforms from a romance about forbidden love to a fast-paced courtroom drama, and Frances finds herself in the middle of an ethical dilemma that casts a deep shadow on her relationship with Lily.

Fans of Sarah Waters’ previous novels (Fingersmith, The Little Stranger) know that she is a gifted storyteller with a way of bringing historical eras to life. She is sensitive to the telling details of character and class. Some of the strongest sections of The Paying Guests depict Frances’ discomfort as she navigates uneasily between her mother’s expectations and those of the Barbers; as bold as she may be in her desires, she is easily discomfited by the middle-class lodgings and speech of Lily’s mother and sisters. In addition, the hidden nature of the women’s relationship proves a double-edged sword—though Frances wishes she could proclaim her love out loud, she also knows that its very invisibility keeps her safe. With the swiftly shifting mores of postwar British society as a backdrop, Waters once again provides a singular novel of psychological tension, emotional depth and historical detail.

 

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

It is 1922, and England and her citizens are still recovering from the upheaval of the First World War: High unemployment, disillusioned ex-soldiers and severely strained circumstances are commonplace. Twenty-seven-year-old Frances Wray and her mother are living in South London. Both of Frances’ brothers died in the war, and her father’s recent death left the two women close to financial ruin. Even with the dismissal of servants and Frances taking over the housework and meals, the Wrays no longer have enough to live on. Their decision to take in lodgers, or “paying guests” as they genteelly refer to them, leads to an event as ultimately life-altering as the war itself.
FictionLiterary Fiction

An estate’s hidden history

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Rebecca Makkai’s The Hundred-Year House is an appealing mixture: part archival mystery, part ghost story, part historical novel, starring a house with as much personality as Manderley or Hill House. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place.

The house in question is Laurelfield, a historic estate on Chicago’s wealthy North Shore. Built as a private home for the Devohr family, it was briefly an artist’s colony and then a private home once again. Since the story is told from the present to the past, each segment reveals a new facet of the house’s history or an important clue to a character’s identity.

The story begins in 1999, with husband and wife Doug and Zee living in the coach house at Laurelfield, thanks to the generosity of Zee’s mother, Grace, whose family owns the estate. Doug is supposed to be completing a biography of obscure poet Edwin Parfitt, who was a resident of the artist colony at Laurelfield, but he is instead secretly ghostwriting a young adult series. After Zee’s stepfather invites his son and daughter-in-law, Case and Miriam, to move into the coach house with the other young couple, Doug finds himself infatuated with Miriam. When Miriam agrees to help Doug locate the colony archives, they discover long-held secrets that threaten Doug’s marriage and the existence of Laurelfield as the 100-year history of the house and its residents is slowly unfurled.

Both the story and the telling of The Hundred-Year House are more ambitious than Makkai’s acclaimed first novel, The Borrower, but this novel is similarly infused with a respect for literature and literary culture, as well as a wry sense of humor. Though no one character ever knows all the house’s secrets, the reader does, and putting all the facts together is half the fun of this clever and utterly delightful work of fiction.

 

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

Rebecca Makkai’s The Hundred-Year House is an appealing mixture: part archival mystery, part ghost story, part historical novel, starring a house with as much personality as Manderley or Hill House. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place.
FictionDebut Fiction

An immigrant between two worlds

Review by Lauren Bufferd

Slava Gelman has it made in Boris Fishman’s debut, The Replacement Life. With a junior staff position at a prestigious literary magazine, a Manhattan apartment and an assimilated American girlfriend, he’s more than just miles away from his childhood in Minsk or the Russian enclave in Brooklyn where the rest of his family lives. But when Slava is woken by an early morning phone call from his mother telling him his grandmother has died, his carefully constructed life threatens to come crashing down around him.

Self-effacing and quiet, Slava’s grandmother was a Holocaust survivor who chose not to share the stories of her wartime experience in the Minsk ghetto. After her funeral, Slava’s grandfather, Yevgeny, who spent the war in hiding, pressures Slava into falsifying a restitution letter to the German government based on his wife’s experience. Once other friends and neighbors hear what Slava has done, they come with similar requests, convinced that their experience as Jews and as second-class citizens in the Soviet Union entitles them to a similar payout, even if they didn’t spend the war in camps or ghettos. Slava is consumed with guilt over not knowing his grandmother’s story, though he is torn between wanting to help and a kind of moral disgust at his neighbors who want to profit from tragedy. At the same time, he knows the letters are his best work, better than anything he’s written for the magazine. Most troubling of all is his nagging suspicion that this fraud may be just. Perhaps all suffering should be rewarded.

The Replacement Life is beautifully written and occasionally quite funny, but the novel struggles in finding the right balance between Slava’s moral dilemma and the more quotidian depictions of love and work. Fishman was inspired by his grandmother’s life and real-life instances of Russian immigrants forging restitution requests, elements which offer an additional layer to the already complicated paradox of remaining loyal to one’s community while moving bravely into a new world. 

Slava Gelman has it made in Boris Fishman’s debut, The Replacement Life. With a junior staff position at a prestigious literary magazine, a Manhattan apartment and an assimilated American girlfriend, he’s more than just miles away from his childhood in Minsk or the Russian enclave in Brooklyn where the rest of his family lives. But when Slava is woken by an early morning phone call from his mother, his carefully constructed life threatens to come crashing down around him.

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A life lived through touch alone

Review by Lauren Bufferd

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, June 2014

The best historical fiction offers readers a new look at a well-known subject, or illuminates an episode or individual that has been lost to history. Playwright Kimberly Elkins achieves the latter in What Is Visible, a strikingly original debut novel about Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind person to communicate through finger spelling.

Born in New Hampshire in 1829, Laura Bridgman lost all her senses except for touch by the time she was 2 years old. She was sent to Perkins Institute as a child, where, under the tutelage of founder Samuel Gridley Howe, she was taught to read, write and communicate through a manual alphabet of letters tapped into her hand—a system that years later, she taught a poor Irish orphan named Annie Sullivan. Bridgman was a celebrity of her time; she was regularly featured in Perkins’ Exhibition Days, and there was even a Laura Bridgman doll. After Charles Dickens wrote about her in his American Notes, she received international acclaim and was considered one of the most famous women of the 19th century, second only to Queen Victoria. Yet few people know about her today.

Elkins follows Laura from her teenage years at Perkins through adulthood. Elkins’ Laura is temperamental, intensely focused—perhaps because her modes of communication were so limited—and blessed with a sharp wit. Though Laura is the primary narrator, her story is also told by the brilliant but controlling Howe, with whom Laura had a complex relationship; his wife, the poet Julia Ward Howe; and Laura’s teacher, Sarah Wright, from whom she was tragically parted too soon. It unfolds against a background rich with progressive and social causes, from women’s suffrage to abolitionism.

What Is Visible marries historical research with lyrical and sometimes starkly honest writing, creating an intriguing novel about an educational experiment that touches issues of gender, philosophy, religion and history. Elkins may occasionally venture into undocumented areas, such as Laura’s sexuality, but her choices are informed and have emotional depth and resonance. What Is Visible is a convincing portrayal of a uniquely interior world and the deeply human need to feel and connect, despite the body’s limitations.

 

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

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Kimberly Elkins about this book.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, June 2014

The best historical fiction offers readers a new look at a well-known subject, or illuminates an episode or individual that has been lost to history. Playwright Kimberly Elkins achieves the latter in What Is Visible, a strikingly original debut novel about Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind person to communicate through finger spelling.

FictionDebut Fiction

Opening all five eyes to the truth

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A beehive is a place of order, control, maybe even oppression. In Laline Paull’s debut novel, The Bees, Flora 717 is a sterile worker bee from the lowest caste of an orchard hive. Like her sisters, she is bound by the motto to accept, obey and serve. But during a period of famine and environmental crisis, Flora is asked to take on new tasks: first, feeding the newborns in the hive’s nursery and then becoming a forager, flying freely in search of pollen and nectar. Her size and strength make her a formidable worker, and she proves to be a quick learner. But each change in role brings Flora access to new wisdom about the hive—and eventually puts her in conflict with the Queen, as well as the fertility police and the priestesses, an elite group of bees closest to the queen who keep the hive in order. Soon, Flora must decide where her loyalties lie and whether blind obedience to the rules is really in the best interest of her community.

Dystopian fiction only works when there is a character who is able to see the cracks in the system, and Flora is the perfect heroine: resourceful, brave and able to take the kinds of chances that her sisters cannot, a reminder that even nature is ever-changing. Paull has created a credible version of the complex world of the bee: the stunningly complicated hive—part palace, part convent—the countryside, filled with flowers aching to be pollinated, and the Myriad, or foes of the bee, including crows, spiders, wasps and, of course, people. Most impressive of all, even the most extreme actions and concepts in the novel—the expulsion of the drones, the fertility police, the hive mind—are true to known bee behavior, with some poetic license, of course. 

Readers may recognize elements drawn from the work of Atwood, Orwell and even The Hunger Games, but The Bees is very much its own creation: a dystopian thriller, a love story and a plea for the plight of the honeybees. The Bees is a tremendous work of literature, told with suspense and passion. You will never look at the activity in your flower garden the same way again.

 

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

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Laline Paull about The Bees.

A beehive is a place of order, control, maybe even oppression. In Laline Paull’s debut novel, The Bees, Flora 717 is a sterile worker bee from the lowest caste of an orchard hive. Like her sisters, she is bound by the motto to accept, obey and serve. But during a period of famine and environmental crisis, Flora is asked to take on new tasks: first, feeding the newborns in the hive’s nursery and then becoming a forager, flying freely in search of pollen and nectar. Her size and strength make her a formidable worker, and she proves to be a quick learner.

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