Lauren Bufferd

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Strout is known for the remarkable empathy she shows her characters and for her tough yet truthful depiction of intimate relationships. Her moving new novel, The Burgess Boys, examines how patterns established in childhood can impact the choices we make as adults. When the three Burgesses, who lost their father in a freak accident, are called together over a crisis decades later, they are forced to forge a new set of family dynamics. 

Jim and Bob, the Burgess brothers, may have only moved from Maine to New York, but emotionally, they are far away from the little town of Shirley Falls where they grew up. Jim is a highly visible corporate lawyer, whose cases have brought him fame and some notoriety. His life with his wife Helen in a Park Slope brownstone seems just about perfect, even as they adjust to an empty nest. Younger brother Bob prefers a quieter life as a Legal Aid attorney and idolizes Jim, though he finds some of his career choices distasteful. Neither man maintains anything but the most casual connection with their hometown, and when Bob’s resentful twin, Susan, calls from Maine after her son Zach is charged with a hate crime, their lives are turned upside down. Zach, an isolated and lonely teenager, was caught throwing a pig’s head into the local mosque, and the brothers arrive back in Shirley Falls to handle his case. When the siblings are together once again, long-buried secrets about their father’s accidental death are uncovered and family loyalties and ties are tested.

This is familiar territory for Strout, whose previous books (Amy and Isabelle, Olive Kitteridge) were also set in Maine and featured families strained to their breaking point. Strout casts a wider net in The Burgess Boys, examining how the recent influx of Somalis to Shirley Falls has changed the fabric of the New England town. Her characters navigate the rich urban landscapes of Manhattan and gentrified Park Slope, which stand in stark contrast to the insularity of Shirley Falls. Strout based part of the story on an actual case, and her expertise as a lawyer offers much fruitful detail on the building of a legal case against Zach.

The Burgess Boys is an ambitious novel that weaves an intricate family drama shot through with the threads of race and class, though it occasionally suffers from a lack of focus—Zach’s story is sometimes overshadowed by the squabbling between the siblings and their spouses as they scramble to uncover the unsolvable mystery of their childhood. Nevertheless, Strout excels in constructing an intricate but believable web of family drama, and her ear for how siblings, husbands and wives really communicate makes for a deeply powerful story.

Sebastian Faulks is best known for rich historical novels like Charlotte Gray and Birdsong. In his new work, A Possible Life, history is used as a backdrop to explore what connects us, suggesting that there are certain commonalities of thought, feeling and experience despite differences of time and place. This beautifully written novel is actually five self-contained character studies moving from 19th-century France to 2027 Italy, with several stops in between. 

A Possible Life begins with Geoffrey, a British schoolmaster who volunteers to go to France as part of a special unit during WWII. He is captured by the Nazis and sent to a death camp in Poland, where he is put to work assisting with the incineration of men, women and children. He is changed by this experience, even, he suggests, at a molecular level. Faulks then moves to 19th-century London and the tale of young Billy, whose parents bring him to the workhouse after they can no longer afford to feed him. Billy’s rise from poverty to landlord, from orphan to parent, demonstrates how profoundly the circumstances of an individual can change in the course of a lifetime.

The next shift is to the near future with Elena, an Italian neuroscientist researching the mysteries of consciousness. Elena grows up in a farm, the kind of young girl who enjoys playing alone in the woods with only her imagination to keep her company. When her father brings home a young boy that he plans to adopt, Elena’s privacy is shattered. She never really recovers from the experience but uses those emotions as the basis for much of her research as an adult. Faulks moves from higher consciousness to barely conscious in the story of the ill-used servant Jeanne. Though she can barely express a sense of self, her life is illuminated by the Bible stories she hears in church. The final and longest story follows the career of Anya King, a Joni Mitchell-like singer songwriter in the late ’60s/early ’70s, told from the point of view of a man who falls deeply in love with her.

Each of the five characters in A Possible Life is searching for a connection with others and for meaning in their lives. With each choice, there is an awareness of a life not led and a crisis survived, often leading to a renewal of the spirit.  One could quibble over whether this is really a novel or a collection of stories, but that may be missing the point. For those of us who remember listening to music on albums, A Possible Life is most reminiscent of an LP—a gathering of distinct expressions that together make up a satisfying whole. 

It’s been seven years since Zadie Smith’s last novel, On Beauty, and it’s fair to say that her fans are excited about NW. This highly anticipated novel has many qualities associated with this talented young British novelist, including a strong sense of place, an eye for diversity and an ear for dialogue, but this ambitious work unfolds in an unconventional manner that’s more Virginia Woolf than E.M. Forster.

NW is set in Smith’s home turf of northwest London, in and around the Caldwell Housing Estates. The neighborhood is a patchwork of British urban diversity—African, Jamaican and Irish; Pentecostal and Rastafarian—and home to four childhood friends, Leah, Natalie, Nathan and Felix. Now adults, they live only streets apart, though due to varying degrees of ambition, desire and luck, they might as well inhabit different worlds. That is, until the afternoon a stranger comes to Leah’s door begging for help, launching a chain of events that pulls the four of them together again.

The heart of the book is the friendship between Natalie and Leah, who met when Natalie saved Leah from drowning, pulling her out of the kiddie pool by her red braids. Though both girls aspired to leave the Estate, their lives took different directions. Natalie changed her name from Keisha, went to college and then law school, and married an Italian-Caribbean money manager. Leah also attended college and married a Frenchman from Marseille by way of Morocco, but their economic situation is not nearly so comfortable. The women’s friendship is marked by unspoken conflicts over money, children and jobs, yet their shared roots bind them indivisibly. The young men from the Estate have less luck. Felix struggles to maintain sobriety and a steady job as a mechanic, while Nathan, the bad boy of the neighborhood, sinks deeper and deeper into a thug life as a dealer and a pimp.

Rather than move from point A to B, the action in NW dips, shifts and changes direction, beginning with Leah and Natalie as married adults, then following Felix for a single day. In the longest segment of the book, a series of brief vignettes (some just a single paragraph or a few sentences) trace Natalie’s life from childhood to the present, culminating in an intense encounter with Nathan that reveals how little—and yet, how much—they have in common.

The effect is more collage than group portrait, but despite the novel’s unconventional mode of storytelling, NW takes place in familiar Smith territory—an urban environment filled with articulate, richly drawn and often very funny characters. Toward the end of the novel, Leah asks her friend why they were able to move out of the Estate when so many others were dragged down. Though Natalie has an answer, the question lingers. In NW, Smith offers a robust novel bursting with life: a timely exploration of money, morals, class and authenticity that asks if we are ever truly the sole authors of our own fate.

Michael Frayn is perhaps best known as an award-winning playwright, especially for his theatrical farce, Noises-Off. But he is also an accomplished novelist. His new novel Skios is a dizzying send-up of foreign travel and academic foundations, combined with stock comic elements such as mistaken identity, identical suitcases and taxi drivers who don’t speak English.

The novel is set at the Fred Toppler Foundation, a dreamy mix of white walls, blue waters and cascading bougainvillea on the gorgeous Greek island of Skios. The Foundation is run to perfection by the ultra-competent Nikki Hook, Mrs. Toppler’s personal assistant, whose genial temper and blonde good looks mask her loneliness and ambition. Ms. Hook has arranged for Dr. Norman Wilfred, a notable in the world of science management, to give the annual Foundation lecture in front of an international high-paying audience. At the airport, she mistakenly picks up Oliver Fox, an impulsive womanizer with tousled hair and a dazzling smile who has come to Greece to hook up with Georgie, a woman he picked up in a bar when her boyfriend stepped away for a mere minute. While Nikki and Oliver head off to the Foundation, the hapless Dr. Wilfred, after picking up the wrong luggage, gets taken to a rented villa, where Georgie awaits.

You can see where this is going. Skios unravels like an anxiety dream where the sense of things slipping out of control increases with every step. Each time the novel shifts toward resolution, something happens that spins everything else out of control. The series of misunderstandings continues unabated as Oliver’s former girlfriend arrives at the island, along with a cast of Russian oligarchs and American investors with their own nefarious agenda.

Skios gets interesting when Frayn plays with the genre, suggesting we often believe what we want to believe. People can convince themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, that a young and handsome playboy is a middle-aged and frumpy renowned scientist. This insight, along with Frayn’s sharp-eyed satire of the academic culture circuit, provides some food for thought among the froth.