Lauren Bufferd

Joshua Ferris, who previously examined the culture of the contemporary workplace (Then We Came to the End) and family life (The Unnamed) turns his attention to social media in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. At first, the novel seems to be a satiric look at the way Facebook and Twitter could be used to hijack a person’s identity. But as the main character heads toward an existential crisis, it is clear that Ferris is also exploring how technology both connects us and reinforces our isolation.

Paul O’Rourke is a dentist with a successful practice in Manhattan. His long workdays are punctuated by feelings of unrequited love for his ex-girlfriend (also his receptionist), religious disagreements with his long-term hygienist Mrs. Convoy and frequent cigarette breaks. His evenings are scheduled around Red Sox games. He has put off using the Internet for personal or professional use, so when a professional-looking website appears, purporting to represent his dental practice, O’Rourke is both puzzled and angered by this inroad into his privacy. His outrage only increases when an active Facebook page and Twitter account appear, also under his name. But when the nature of the content turns personal, he can’t resist emailing back to the virtual Paul O’Rourke.

Once Paul engages with this fictional doppelganger, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour quickly becomes a farce aimed at identity theft, the lure and limitations of religion and the importance of shared belief. Paul is a lifelong loner, from a troubled family, so his yearning to be part of a community is counter-weighted by huge emotional risks.

As in his earlier novels, Ferris is both laugh-out-loud funny and even profound, often on the same page. Paul’s self-absorption can be wearying at times, but his journey to self-awareness is designed to be both amusing and thought provoking, allowing readers to take their own existential ride.

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

Is there anyone who hasn’t wondered which actions and incidents most gave shape to their lives? In Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl, Stella is the author of her own life, recounting her story in a series of gracefully drawn but honestly expressed episodes starting in the 1960s and running to the present day.

Told in a series of perfectly observed moments, Clever Girl is not about what you want your life to be, but what you do with what life hands you.

We first encounter Stella as a 10-year-old girl living with her mother in a small apartment in Bristol on the west coast of England. Though her mother alleges she is a widow, Stella comes to other conclusions about her absent father’s real whereabouts. A bright and dreamy girl, she spends time reading and riding at the local stables. When her mother remarries, Stella finds herself chafing against her stepfather’s conventional household, drawn instead to the freedoms promised by the more permissive 1970s and the opportunities brought by a scholarship to a prestigious school.

Clever Girl is less about what you want your life to be than what you do with what life hands you. By the time she is in her early 20s, Stella is a single mother with two children. School is an impossibility, and she makes ends meet by keeping house for an English professor and later working in an art gallery.

Stella reveals her story as a series of moments, almost like a picaresque novel. The connecting thread is her cleverness, here translated as intellectual capabilities as well as curiosity about life. Though at one point she feels as though books “have let her down,” it is still her acumen that allows her to provide the links between one incident and the next.

Hadley is a consummate writer who excels at the kind of honest material details that fully round every scene. As someone who was born at roughly the same time as Stella, I can assure you Hadley’s recreation of the decades from 1960 to 2000 is deliciously accurate. Clever Girl is an elegant and accomplished novel that will entertain but also make you contemplate the trajectory of your own life.

An unnamed, ingenue heroine. A dramatic location by the sea. A wealthy and cultured older gentleman. If this sounds like the plot of the beloved mystery Rebecca, it is—but Rachel Pastan’s third novel pays homage to the Daphne du Maurier classic while adding a few new twists. Alena’s young heroine is a curator at a small art museum in the Midwest. Visiting the Venice Biennale with her employer, she is introduced to Bernard Augustin, the wealthy and enigmatic founder of the Nauquasset, a museum on Cape Cod that specializes in cutting-edge work. The Nauk has been closed for two years, ever since the disappearance of the chief curator, Alena. When Augustin offers the position to our narrator, she is eager to prove herself, but she is soon drawn into deep emotional and ethical entanglements at the museum. 

The remaining staff at the Nauk is fiercely loyal to Alena’s memory, to the point of keeping her private office like a shrine. A performance artist whose violent imagery references the first Gulf War turns up, claiming Alena promised him the next exhibition, but the young curator finds herself drawn instead to the work of a local ceramicist—a conflict that leads to rifts among the museum staff. It is to Pastan’s credit that she makes the curatorial arguments as compelling as the mystery of Alena’s disappearance. 

For people who love Rebecca, there are all kind of allusions and asides—names, locations and plot points. The transformation of Mrs. Danvers to Agnes, the Nauk’s creepy bookkeeper and business manager, is especially clever. But Alena stands on its own, and Pastan’s experience working in a contemporary art museum brings a grounded reality to the running of a museum and the complex questions of identity, aesthetics and originality in contemporary art.