What would you do if you discovered a lost masterpiece that revealed the artist’s extreme prejudice? Or survived a war only to find yourself participating in political violence?
Ethical dilemmas and twists and turns of Jewish history are at the core of two new novels by Lauren Belfer and Stewart O’Nan.
Belfer’s sprawling novel And After the Fire spans two continents and several centuries and concerns a fictional music manuscript. It opens as an American soldier in Weimar grabs some sheet music to take home as a souvenir. After his death decades later, his niece, Susanna Kessler, discovers a cryptic note and what appears to be an unknown Bach cantata: one with lyrics influenced by an anti-Semitic sermon. Susanna must weigh the pros and cons of publicizing a work whose contents, by any standard, are offensive. Her epic search for the manuscript’s original owners leads her from New York’s rare book libraries to present-day Germany. She also encounters two historians who vie for the manuscript—as well as her romantic attentions.
Susanna’s journey is interspersed with the history of the manuscript itself. Originally a gift from Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedrich to his most talented pupil, Sara Itzig Levy, the cantata remained in the Levy family’s hands over many turbulent decades. Though the manuscript is a fiction, Levy is not: The daughter of a prominent Jewish banker, she was the aunt of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn and at the forefront of salon culture during the Enlightenment.
And After the Fire is sprinkled with other real-life historical figures, and Belfer is adept at revealing the complex politics and sentiments, including the religious biases, of 18th-century Europe. The important questions Belfer poses regarding the ethical complexities of art are engrossing, though her characters never come fully to life.
Stewart O’Nan’s gripping City of Secrets is also a moral thriller, but on a much different scale. It is tightly focused in time and place; the action takes place over the winter of 1946 and follows a handful of post-World War II refugees fighting for the creation of Israel against both Arab attack and Britain’s mandates. Recalling the novels of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, City of Secrets has a taut, noir-like flavor. Like O’Nan’s earlier novels, it features a displaced hero who, despite everything, still believes his life has purpose.
City of Secrets follows Brand, a Latvian whose mechanical skills allowed him to survive the death camps, though he lost everything else. Brand slipped easily into Jerusalem, his new identity and job provided by the Jewish underground. Spending his days as a taxi driver taking tourists to religious sites, he remains loyal to the members of his Haganah cell, accepting missions that grow ever more dangerous under the cell’s elusive leader, Asher. By the time Brand realizes what’s at stake, it is almost too late.
These compelling stories use history as a lens to examine issues that are still with us today.
This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
What would you do if you discovered a lost masterpiece that revealed the artist’s extreme prejudice? Or survived a war only to find yourself participating in political violence?
What sort of voices are shaping Australian fiction? Two new novels offer answers. Both are firsts for their authors, both were nominated for awards before they were even published and both are by women.
But here, the passing similarities end: Jane Harper’s The Dry is a contemporary murder mystery set in a rural town, while Emily Bitto’s The Strays takes the reader to Melbourne in the 1930s.
The Dry is one of the most talked-about debuts of the new year. During the worst drought of the century, Federal agent Aaron Falk is called back to Kiewarra, a small town in West Australia, to investigate a murder-suicide. His high school friend Luke Hadler appears to have murdered his wife and son before killing himself: another farmer pushed to the brink by the punishing weather.
As a favor to Hadler’s parents, Falk reluctantly launches an investigation with the help of local policeman Greg Raco. But most of the old residents of Kiewarra aren’t pleased to see Falk, who was run out of town 20 years earlier after being suspected in the death of his classmate Ellie Deacon. As Falk digs into the circumstances around Luke’s death, long-hidden mysteries and animosities begin to surface.
Harper’s story is tightly plotted and moves briskly, the tension as brittle and incendiary as the dried-out crops on the Kiewarra farms. Falk is a quintessential detective: introverted, reserved and deeply wounded. But it is the beautifully evoked landscape and the portrayal of a gloomy outpost on the edge of a desert that are the stars of the show.
The Strays plunges the reader into a more cosmopolitan environment. On her first day of school, the socially tentative Lily is embraced by Eva, one of three daughters of the famous painter Evan Trentham and his wealthy wife, Helena. Growing up in a conventional Melbourne home in the 1930s, where an exciting evening is hot cocoa and a jigsaw puzzle, Lily is fascinated by the Trenthams’ rambling garden and the creative chaos of their family life, especially after Helena invites a group of fellow artists into the family home. This experiment in communal living, with its lack of rules and lively conversations and parties, seems delightful at first. But the youngest daughter, Heloise, troubled to begin with, becomes unnaturally close to her father’s greatest rival, with disastrous results.
The novel is told in a series of flashbacks by the adult Lily, who looks back with a bittersweet mixture of fondness and disgust at the benign neglect under which the girls were raised. When Eva comes back to town for a retrospective of her father’s work, Lily begins to wonder why she was drawn to the Trenthams in the first place.
Bitto loosely based the Trenthams on the Heide Circle, a group of Melbourne artists known for their unconventional lifestyles and named for the Heide communal house in which they lived. But The Strays is more of a psychological study than a historical one: As Lily begins to understand what happened at the Trenthams, she comes to terms with her role as a bystander to her own life. Told in both the breathless voice of an easily infatuated child and the more measured tones of a wiser adult, The Strays is a powerful tale of the consequences of creativity.
What sort of voices are shaping Australian fiction? Two new novels offer answers. Both are firsts for their authors, both were nominated for awards before they were even published and both are by women.
Both books examine the easy power of sexual desire and the troubled untangling of domestic ties. And despite the differences in time and place, both novels feature protagonists with a loneliness at their core—acutely aware of what divides them from their family and friends.
Daphne du Maurier’s classic Rebecca may be the ultimate second-wife story, and Lily Tuck uses it as a touchstone for her seventh novel. Sisters relates a very personal story of an unnamed narrator, her family—including her husband and stepchildren—and the all-too-real presence of her husband’s first wife known only as she. It is she that the narrator is fixated on, her marriage, her mothering style, her aptitude at the piano, even her dog. Nothing in the narrator’s experience can equal her husband’s first marriage, his life with her in France, even his affair and subsequent divorce. With a mixture of curiosity, envy and compulsion, the narrator’s preoccupation with her threatens all current relationships, not just with her husband but with his son and daughter as well.
Tuck eschews a climactic confrontation and prefers to quietly highlight the damage caused by obsession, exposing the risks of paying back betrayal with betrayal. Though the conclusion feels abrupt, the story is elegantly told and the portrait of a marriage unflinching.
Set against the turbulent politics of Nigeria in the 1980s, Ayobami Adebayo’s debut, Stay with Me, tells the story of a marriage that frays under the forces of fidelity and fertility. Yejide and Akin met and fell in love at university. Four years after they married, Yejide is running a successful salon, and Akin is comfortably employed as well. But they remain childless. The couple tries fertility doctors, healers, pilgrimages and charms until, under the pressure of Nigerian ideals of masculinity, Akin’s family insists he take a second wife, going so far as to bring the young woman to their home. To say this causes havoc would be an understatement. Yet, when Yejide finally does get pregnant, the results take an enormous toll on the couple.
Though the tragedies of Stay with Me are melodramatic in scope, Adebayo displays a quiet empathy when the couple confronts the truth of their fertility problems and struggle with sickle cell anemia (an enormous problem in Nigeria, where one in four people is infected). Stay with Me offers a unique look at a couple coping with biological forces that are out of their control and a marriage that is tested almost beyond endurance.
Though very different in style, scope and setting, these two novels are a welcome addition to the exploration of marriage in fiction, examining the boundaries and the limitlessness of love between two—or even three—people.
This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Love, fidelity, jealousy and desire are some of the issues explored in two new novels about marriage—one by a seasoned writer known for her brevity and psychological portraits, the other a debut by one of Nigeria’s freshest voices.
Sing to It is the much-anticipated new collection from Amy Hempel, her first since 2006, and Lot by Bryan Washington is a stellar debut set among the diverse neighborhoods of Houston. Both collections share a generosity of spirit rooted in our common humanity and the social desire to connect.
Hempel is known for her brevity, and of the 15 stories here, 10 are less than three pages long. In some cases, an idea is succinctly stated and explored in less than three paragraphs. But there’s nothing minimal about the contents. Hempel packs a great deal into the briefest of fictions, creating balanced and nuanced stories of longing, love and loss.
Despite her creative thrift, it’s in the longer stories that Hempel’s empathy and ready wit shine. In “A Full-Service Shelter,” inspired by the author’s real-life dedication to animal advocacy, she repeats the opening phrase of each paragraph to drive home both the passion and futility in caring for abandoned, abused dogs. Most affecting is the novella “Cloudland,” about an unnamed middle-aged woman who is haunted by memories of a daughter given up for adoption. These recollections are made more painful when she hears a horrible rumor about the long-shuttered agency. The narrative shifts subtly in time, circling back and jumping ahead, revealing the character’s tenacity as well as her despair.
Washington’s brilliant and visceral Lot lives up to the considerable amount of buzz it has already received. Each story is named for a different Houston neighborhood, and roughly half concern a young man whose life is complicated by an adulterous father, a drug–hustling brother and a growing attraction to men. Though this main character is refreshingly straightforward about his sexuality, his relatives respond with shame, embarrassment and, in the case of his brother, violence.
The remainder of the stories emanate from locations across the sprawling Texan city. In “Alief,” through a first-person plural voice, neighborhood residents consider their role as they collectively witness a love affair that’s turned violent. “Peggy Park” recalls the pleasures of a pickup baseball team. In the book’s centerpiece story, “Waugh,” the two main characters are a young hustler and his pimp, and the focus is less on the hazards of their profession than on the bonds of trust and friendship that exist between them. Washington’s strong ear for dialogue and his lack of sentimentality serve these stories well.
Though their styles are different, Washington and Hempel capture both the harshness and the tenderness of the world. The stories are romantic but not corny and fiercely moral without being judgmental, capturing the complexities that make up a community.
Spring brings two new story collections from masters of the form—one new and one well-established.
While searching through her dead mother’s possessions, Anna Bain finds an old journal of her father’s, a discovery that she hopes will offer clarity about a person she never really knew. So begins Chibundu Onuzo’s third novel, Sankofa, an enjoyably readable novel that raises questions of belonging and the search for personal roots.
Francis Aggrey’s diary offers important clues about his identity. He was a young student from a small West African country, here fictionalized as Bamana but bearing some resemblance to Ghana, and attended college in 1970s London. He boarded with a white Welsh family and began a romantic relationship with the younger daughter, Bronwen—Anna’s mother—before becoming involved in radical politics and returning to Bamana.
Anna is shocked to find out that after years of political activism, Francis became the prime minister of his country under the name Kofi Adjei. Even more amazing, the former leader is still alive. Upon learning this information, Anna finds herself at a crux in her own life, separated from her husband and with no real ties to London, and so she journeys to Bamana to find her father.
One of the strengths of Sankofa is that Anna must consistently confront notions of difference and acceptance. She was never comfortable growing up biracial in 1980s London, and her experience in Bamana is no less disorienting, especially because she passes for white among the local population. It is even more challenging for her to hear reports about her father that aren’t positive; as much as he has accomplished for his country, there are rumors that he suppressed free speech and quashed student rebellions. Yet there is no question that for Anna, meeting her father provides a sense of stability and of self that she’s never really known.
Onuzo’s disarmingly frank novel contends with complex issues of identity and prejudice, and it doesn’t sugarcoat its depiction of the fractured history of a developing country. Onuzo sets Anna on a path that can only be completed when she begins to come to terms with her past.
Chibudno Onuzo’s novel is enjoyably readable and disarmingly frank as it follows a woman in search of her father.
The map of modern American fiction is scattered with urban spaces, from cafés and diners to beauty parlors and laundries. These public areas function like the old town square, providing a place for locals to rub shoulders, gossip, hang out and people-watch. The Bubble, a New Orleans Laundromat, is one of these iconic spots in More of this World or Maybe Another, a book of linked stories by new author Barb Johnson. The Bubble is owned by Delia and her partner Maggie, and it serves as a gathering place for many in their diverse Mid-City community, embracing gay and straight; black, white and Latino; the recent immigrants and the old-timers.
As much as these stories are rooted in the neighborhood, it is four characters whose paths cross that are the centerpiece of the book. The title story, “More of This World or Maybe Another,” introduces Delia, then a teenager in rural Louisiana, on the eve of a school dance, when her strong feelings for her date’s sister threaten to upend her world. After moving into the city to pursue his music, her younger brother Dooley’s life is shattered by a devastating accident. Their friend Pudge survives years of painful teasing, but his adult years are spent wandering the streets in an alcoholic haze, spying on his teenage son, Luis. And in the final story, “St. Luis of Palmyra,” Luis finds refuge and peace in an abandoned car across from the Laundromat. The family one is born to and, more importantly, the one these characters piece together from friends, neighbors and co-workers, is paramount.
Johnson, who spent years working as a carpenter before pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing, creates complex, intensely human characters, almost impossible not to care about. Each story is suffused with warmth and empathy, focusing on those singular moments in life, painful or ecstatic and sometimes both, when everything changes. If there is a fault here, it is that some of the individual stories don’t hold up well on their own. Gathered together, however, More of This World or Maybe Another is a strong debut full of heart and memorable moments.
Lauren Buffered writes from Nashville.
The map of modern American fiction is scattered with urban spaces, from cafés and diners to beauty parlors and laundries. These public areas function like the old town square, providing a place for locals to rub shoulders, gossip, hang out and people-watch. The Bubble, a…
In the 1930s, Franklin County, Virginia, held a dubious distinction: nearly 100 percent of the population was illegally trading in liquor. Sherwood Anderson called it "the wettest section" of the United States, positing that even after Prohibition had ended, the moonshine continued to flow. These facts are the starting point for Matt Bondurant's gritty novel based on the lives of his grandfather and great – uncles, who were notorious bootleggers in Franklin and who also testified in the county's most infamous federal trial. For his fictionalized account, Bondurant listened to family stories and combed through archives, news clippings and court transcripts to get the details, but as he points out in the afterword, it was his job to explore the emotional truths behind the action.
Bondurant imagines that the devastating loss of their mother and sisters in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 had great impact on the Bondurant sons – Howard, Forrest and Jack – who within a decade had become active in the illicit manufacture and transporting of liquor. The novel's action sweeps from a violent attack against Forrest in 1928 to an unsolved crime six years later when two men were hospitalized, one castrated, and the other with legs shattered from hip to ankle. The crime attracted the American writer Sherwood Anderson, who came to the area in hopes of writing an article about a mysterious female bootlegger and the upcoming federal trial. Stymied by the overwhelming silence of the community, Anderson took to the county roads, trying to find the Bondurant brothers and break the secrecy surrounding the violence.
Bondurant has immersed himself in the sights, smells and sounds of rural Virginia, and the novel has almost a documentary feel. His rich descriptions of the county landscapes and the hardscrabble lives of its inhabitants invoke the small – town streets and struggling characters of Anderson's best known novel, Winesburg, Ohio. At the same time, the action builds with the tension of a good thriller.
One caveat to the more sensitive reader: The Wettest County in the World is extremely graphic, with multiple descriptions of physical injury, brutality and sadistic behavior. There are tender moments, however, all the more lovely for their infrequency.
In the 1930s, Franklin County, Virginia, held a dubious distinction: nearly 100 percent of the population was illegally trading in liquor. Sherwood Anderson called it "the wettest section" of the United States, positing that even after Prohibition had ended, the moonshine continued to flow. These…
When Embers was published in English in 2001, it ignited the career of a Hungarian author little known outside his native country. Embers was declared a lost masterpiece, the book topped bestseller lists both in Europe and the United States, and turned the world’s literary attentions to the life and work of novelist Sándor Márai. Márai had published 46 books, mostly fiction, before leaving Hungary in 1948. He lived in Paris, Rome, New York and San Diego where he died in the late 1980s, alone and largely forgotten. Since the success of Embers, his novels are being translated into English, the most recent being Portraits of a Marriage, a startlingly honest dissection of a romantic triangle set against a dying society.
The story itself is a simple one of love: requited, sought after and betrayed. Peter is married first to Ilona, a woman of his own class, and then Judit, a servant from his mother’s house. Both marriages end in divorce. For Ilona, marriage was about achieving perfection—the ideal house, the right friends, though her love for Peter was sincere. For Judit, marriage was a step to personal and financial freedom, and Peter’s desire for her simply means to her end. Behind this threesome floats the enigmatic figure of the writer Lázár, to whom all three characters turn in their romantic quest. Much of the action takes place in the relatively peaceful years between the two wars, though over the course of the novel, the aftermath of the World War II and the Soviet invasion of Hungary push each character to his or her ultimate destinations.
The story is told in three sections from the point of view of each of the main characters—Ilona, Peter and Judit—with a brief coda from Judit’s unnamed lover, settled in the New York of the 1950s. Because each monologue is written as if the character were actually speaking to another person, the effect is one of listening to a close friend confide intimate details about their personal life. Ilona’s despair at her crumbling marriage, Peter’s dense philosophical inquiries, and Judit’s fierce ambition drive each narratives, but only the reader can put all the facts together and see past the purely subjective truths each character offers.
Beyond the personal stories is the sense of the world crumbling, the invasion of Hungary first by the Nazis and then the Soviets and the destruction of cultural values that could not be replaced. This loss is most visible in the character of Lázár, the writer who stops writing after the war and spends the end of his life reading Hungarian dictionaries, relishing the words that describe a world that no longer exists. Lázár, who never speaks for himself but is seen and described through others’ eyes, may be a stand-in for the author. Márai also vowed to stop writing after the Germans marched into Hungary—a vow that, luckily for his readers, he did not keep.
Lauren Bufferd writes from Nashville.
When Embers was published in English in 2001, it ignited the career of a Hungarian author little known outside his native country. Embers was declared a lost masterpiece, the book topped bestseller lists both in Europe and the United States, and turned the world’s literary…
What would lead an 18-year-old from an upper-middle-class, secular background to embrace a life of religious orthodoxy and political radicalism? Pearl Abraham’s new novel American Taliban asks just this question. Though there are obvious parallels to the life of John Walker Lindh, Abraham does more than merely borrow the facts. Her thoughtful approach to the characters and honest appraisal of the events make what could have been merely provocative into a challenging and effective novel.
Supported by open-minded—if indulgent—parents, John Jude Parrish is spending a carefree gap year surfing and skateboarding in the Outer Banks and reading extensively. His widely cast intellectual net encompasses Dylan, Rumi, the Tao and Walt Whitman, and he is eager to share ideas with new friends in online chat rooms. When a skateboarding accident puts him out of commission, he throws his considerable energies into learning Sufi poetry and decides to pursue an Arabic language program in Brooklyn. There he becomes more interested in Islam, and when a fellow student suggests he go abroad for further study, John travels to Pakistan. The immersion into Muslim culture cements his decision to convert to Islam.
One of John’s inspirations is the great 19th-century traveler-scholar Richard Burton, and his plan is to create a similarly Romantic expedition for himself. But the 21st century, with the attacks of September 11 a mere month away, proves an inhospitable time for this kind of excursion.
Although each action leads John closer to a treasonous radicalism, the novel clearly illustrates that the individual steps of his spiritual and intellectual journey are perfectly plausible. John’s personal quest forces him to open up to new ideas about religion and sexuality as well as to acknowledge his desire to be part of “a larger undefinable truth” while still retaining his individuality. But even Abraham’s considerable skill as a novelist does not fully illuminate John’s ultimate decision to move from philosopher to extremist.
The final segment of American Taliban takes place in the fall of 2001. John has disappeared, travel to Pakistan has been halted, and John’s mother is obsessed with John Walker Lindh, the young American found fighting alongside the Taliban. The abrupt shift in the conclusion feels rushed and almost derails the balanced tone and well-considered plot. But a novel like this encourages the reader to pay attention to the world and to ponder complex issues, and for that, despite its flaws, American Taliban should be a must-read for anyone interested in current events.
What would lead an 18-year-old from an upper-middle-class, secular background to embrace a life of religious orthodoxy and political radicalism? Pearl Abraham’s new novel American Taliban asks just this question. Though there are obvious parallels to the life of John Walker Lindh, Abraham does more…
Lauren Groff’s fourth novel, her highly anticipated follow-up to Fates and Furies (2015), takes place almost 800 years ago, yet it feels both current and timely. Set in a small convent in 12th-century England, Matrix looks back in time to comment astutely on the world as we now know it, exploring big ideas about faith, gender, community and individualism.
Abbess Marie is based in part on Marie de France, France’s earliest known female poet and one of the country’s most well-regarded literary stylists. As a teenager, Groff’s fictional Marie is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court and sent to molder in an impoverished abbey. Marie soon rises to the senior position of abbess, and she transforms the convent into a thriving estate.
Marie’s modifications to the abbey are guided by visions that draw imagery from the real Marie de France’s tales of courtly love. These visions are the motivation and impetus for many of Marie’s boldest innovations: the successful scriptorium where gorgeous new manuscripts are produced; the abbess house where Marie offers comfort and privacy; and the impenetrable labyrinth that girds the abbey, protecting the women who live inside.
Groff brings a bold originality to Matrix and a compassion for her characters, no matter how prickly some of them may be. This is a heartening story of one woman’s vision and creativity, unthwarted and flourishing, despite all odds.
A 12th-century abbess deserves to be your next literary hero. Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies, shares how she found refuge in her latest novel’s community of nuns.
Lauren Groff’s fourth novel, Matrix, is a mesmerizing portrait of a remarkable nun in 12th-century England who oversees an abbey in a rapidly changing and sometimes hostile environment. After Groff’s previous books, which have explored small towns, utopian communities and Floridian flora and fauna, my most pressing questions for the author can be boiled down to, why a novel about nuns? And why now?
“Those are the questions,” Groff says with a laugh, speaking by video call from a writer’s retreat in Italy. She traces the novel’s genesis back to three years ago, when she was at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, working on a very different novel, one she hopes that at some point will come into the world. “I was surrounded by artists and scholars that were doing things that were so far beyond my ken,” she recalls. “Every day was like a mini-explosion in my brain.”
She attended a lecture on medieval nuns by Dr. Katie Bugyis, who has researched the lives of nuns based on the liturgy they produced and used. “It was as if she had opened up my brain and threw her light in,” Groff says. “I knew it was the next thing I was going to write.”
“Awe is the most powerful emotion I know, because within awe, there is fear, there is love, there is wonder.”
Marie, the nun protagonist of Matrix, is banished from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court at age 17 and sent to live in a penurious abbey. Awkward and miserable, Marie makes the best of her situation and soon rises to the senior position of abbess. Bit by bit she transforms the tumbledown, muddy convent into a prosperous estate with verdant fields, healthy flocks and a successful scriptorium, protected by a forest labyrinth and Marie’s shrewd awareness of shifting political winds. Along the way, she is inspired by spiritual visions and memories of her mother’s family, whom she accompanied on the early Crusades.
Marie’s story is based on that of Marie de France, considered to be one of France’s most important writers and the country’s first acknowledged female poet. So little is known about Marie that her biography is merely outline; Groff describes trying to research her as “being handed a poetic form.”
But we do know some things about her, Groff says. “We know approximately when she lived and where. We know she was a noble or gentlewoman because she was able to write in several languages. She was educated at a time when most women were not. And most importantly, we know what she wrote: fables and lais,” or narrative poems of courtly love.
Elements from Marie’s lais appear throughout Matrix, which is rich with furled rosebuds, blooming trees and enclosed gardens. “It was a joyous experience to go back to the lais, which I knew from college, and to create her life from the work,” Groff says. “I know it’s the opposite of what scholars do, but I’m not a scholar, I’m a fiction writer.”
Groff did a tremendous amount of research for Matrix, including visiting a small Benedictine convent in Connecticut where she was struck by the strong ties of kinship and community. “I was profoundly moved by the way the older nuns, who are not far from death, are cared for by the people who love them so deeply,” she says. “It’s a definition of family that is not often represented in the outside world.”
Groff drew from this idyllic setting to create her fictional community of sisters. Marie’s convent is a place of female friendships and love affairs, scholarship and learning. It’s a refuge for outsider women and those with untapped talents, ranging from engineering to calligraphy to animal husbandry. “I wanted to live in a world of women,” Groff says. “I wanted to hear women’s voices, experience only a female gaze.”
Examining the balance of community and the individual is nothing new for Groff, whose novels The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia also examined small-town life and intentional communities. Even Fates and Furies depicts a closed community of two people whose insular marriage makes it difficult for anyone else to penetrate their intense bond.
“You know,” Groff remarks ruefully, “I keep thinking I’m writing a brand-new book, but maybe I’m writing the same thing every time. I was raised in the small town of Cooperstown, New York, and I was utterly fascinated by the way individuals acted within a tight and closed community. It was early training for storytelling to be among growing, living stories of other people that you could watch out of the corner of your eye. A small place in the middle of nowhere was a real petri dish for understanding human behavior.”
“It was such an exciting feeling, like an electrical charge, to see biblical stories echoing in literature.”
Even though the world of Matrix could not seem further away from 21st-century America, Groff is well aware of how current affairs informed the writing of her new novel—and indeed, all of her work. “It’s very much in our national DNA to insist on the importance of the individual,” she says. “But a country cannot be a country without the collective, and right now the pressure points between these two courses are rising. My work struggles with this paradox and explores how Americans are choosing to live.”
At several points in the novel, Marie experiences striking visions that she does not share with the other nuns but rather keeps in a series of private notebooks. These visions draw imagery and language from the Bible, a seminal book in Groff’s upbringing and an early step to her lifelong love of literature.
Groff was raised in the Presbyterian church, where her father was a deacon, and she remembers the church of her childhood as a vaulted, soaring space, “like the inside of a whale.” The experience of being in communion with others while singing or praying had a meaningful aesthetic impact. But it was the stories from the Bible that hooked her.
“Stories are the thing that made me a person,” she says. “I was the kind of kid who was filled with religious fervor. I had a beautiful little Bible with fine tissue pages and gilt edges. I would sit and read it at night, just trying to get through all the begats and the thous, and just be filled with this unappeasable longing for the stories. And then I started seeing the stories reflected back at me from the other things I was reading. It was such an exciting feeling, like an electrical charge, to see biblical stories echoing in literature.”
Over time, Groff explains, literature took the place of religion. “I’ve become a secular believer, if that makes sense. I believe in the goodness of humanity. I am moved by the natural world in a way that is akin to the kinds of things I experienced as a child. When I am writing, I try to give the reader a few of those moments of wonder and awe. Awe is the most powerful emotion I know, because within awe, there is fear, there is love, there is wonder.”
The awe-filled moments in Matrix are too many to count, whether in the poetry of Marie’s visions, her longing for friends who are far away or the vivid descriptions of the creation of the labyrinth, a structure associated with religious contemplation that in Groff’s hands becomes a symbol, a weapon and a line of defense.
Marie conceives of the labyrinth less as a place for the nuns to find peace and more as an instrument to separate themselves from the outside world, which she perceives as dangerous and threatening. For Groff, the symbol of the labyrinth goes even deeper. She read about ancient ruins in England that had been buried underground over centuries and were now re-emerging. “Because of climate change and the wet ground drying out, the impressions of these ruins are literally coming up from the earth and becoming apparent,” she says. “I loved that idea of a hidden structure that only through trauma could be revealed. The novel is structured around the shape of a labyrinth, although it’s deeply embedded and I’m not sure anyone can see it. But it’s there.”
Matrix tells a tale of the astounding ingenuity, strength and female companionship that flourished during an era of intense patriarchal oppression. Matrix is the Latin word for mother, but additional definitions include a plant whose seeds were used for producing other plants, a grid, an organizational structure and, perhaps most significantly, “the bedrock in geology in which you find gems.”
Groff has created a labyrinth of jewel-like moments, selected from an incredible woman’s life during a time ostensibly far away from our own, and transformed it into a novel that is perfect for right now.
Author photo by Eli Sinkus
Matrix author Lauren Groff shares how she found refuge in her latest novel’s community of nuns. “It’s a definition of family that is not often represented in the outside world.”
The author of several historical mysteries and a wild reworking of Jane Eyre (the Edgar Award-nominated Jane Steele), Lyndsay Faye brings considerable skills and irreverent humor to The King of Infinite Space, a contemporary reimagining of Hamlet set in and around a New York City theater.
Benjamin Dane is both fabulously wealthy and kept on just this side of sanity by a slew of medications. He is the son of Jackson and Trudy, owners of the prestigious New World’s Stage. After Jackson dies under mysterious circumstances, Trudy immediately marries her brother-in-law, Claude. In mourning and struggling with his suicidal impulses, Benjamin uncovers a videotape from a paranoid-seeming Jackson, who names Claude as his murderer.
Distraught, Benjamin reaches out to Horatio Patel, a friend from graduate school who left New York after the two men had a one-night stand. Horatio returns from England to console his friend and aid in Benjamin’s plan to denounce his mother and uncle at the theater’s annual fundraising gala. Benjamin’s ex-girlfriend, Lia Brahms, wants to help, but her job as a florist’s assistant keeps her too busy.
Faye’s knowledge of Shakespeare extends well past Hamlet, as The King of Infinite Space name-checks characters from several of the Bard’s plays, from Ariel, the all-knowing doorman at the New World; to the meddling event coordinator Robin Goodfellow; to the three weird sisters who manage the flower shop where Lia is employed and who specialize in bouquets that heal, cure and maybe even alter the future.
Lush and magical, thoughtful and provocative, The King of Infinite Space is a remarkable achievement, staying true to Shakespeare’s tragic play in ways that will surprise and delight while reveling in neurodivergence, queer attraction and quantum physics. Though the buildup is slow and Benjamin’s philosophical meanderings occasionally digressive, this is a novel to stick with for its rewards of a surprising plot and Faye’s delightful storytelling.
The King of Infinite Space is a remarkable achievement, staying true to Hamlet’s tragic plot in ways that will surprise and delight.
While Old Man Tucker is out collecting ginseng in the hills of eastern Kentucky, he discovers the dead body of local woman Nonnie Johnson. Newly promoted Sheriff Linda Hardin, hoping for a quick resolution to her first murder case, asks her brother, Mick, a military homicide investigator, to help find the killer. So begins Chris Offutt’s The Killing Hills.
A veteran of wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Mick returned home on personal leave to patch things up with his estranged pregnant wife. But now he’s AWOL and just barely managing to stay one step ahead of the military police. He spends most of his time camping out at his grandfather’s abandoned cabin, hiking the surrounding hills and drinking too much.
Despite having been away from home for more than a decade, Mick’s knowledge of the land and the community is still strong, thanks to his close observation and hard-won intimacies. Traveling from holler to holler, appraising the landscape and gaining the respect of his gun-toting neighbors, Mick is a valuable asset to Linda, who is mired in local politics and saddled with an incompetent assistant with ties to the area’s fading coal industry.
The Killing Hills has all the marks of a classic thriller, but its murder plot is secondary to the Appalachian setting. Offutt’s small-town Kentucky is a place of tightknit families, long-held grudges, chemical dependency and simmering violence. One of Offutt’s strengths is his familiarity with the area’s folkways, flora and people, a trait he shares with Mick and has demonstrated in his previous fiction, memoirs and work as a writer on television dramas such as “True Detective.”
A rural noir with attitude to spare, The Killing Hills moves as briskly as a well-constructed miniseries, right down to its unanswered questions that carry the hopeful possibility of a sequel.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly indicated that Offutt worked on “True Blood,” not “True Detective.”
A rural noir with attitude to spare, The Killing Hills moves as briskly as a well-constructed miniseries.
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Groff was raised in the Presbyterian church, where her father was a deacon, and she remembers the church of her childhood as a vaulted, soaring space, “like the inside of a whale.” The experience of being in communion with others while singing or praying had a meaningful aesthetic impact. But it was the stories from the Bible that hooked her.
