Michael Magras

FictionHistorical Fiction

An elegant foray into Jean Rhys’ life

Review by Michael Magras

You won’t learn anything about her writing—the novel never mentions the title by which most readers know her, or any of her other works—but the Jean Rhys depicted in Caryl Phillips’ beguiling new novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, is not unlike the poorly treated and subjugated female characters from some of Rhys’ own books, among them Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark.

Phillips, a native of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and author of 2015’s magnificent The Lost Child, begins his tale in 1930s London. Gwendolen Williams (Rhys’ birth name) is unhappily married to her second husband, literary agent Leslie Tilden Smith. He has recently received a legacy from his late father. With the money, in the hope of repairing their relationship, he suggests a trip to Gwennie’s West Indies homeland, “for he understood how desperately she wished once again to see her birthplace.” 

From there, the novel goes back in time to Gwennie’s childhood on the island of Dominica. A series of vignettes follow her into adulthood and dramatize “her mother’s irrational fear of Negroes”; her time at a Cambridge boarding school, where English classmates ask questions such as, “Do you have monkeys in your family? I mean as relatives, not pets”; her attempts at a stage career; her relationships with many suitors; and her marriage to journalist Jean Lenglet, with whom she spends the 1920s in Paris and has two children, including a boy who dies at three weeks.

Readers of Phillips’ previous novels will recognize similar elements here, including the elegant formality of his prose and the criticisms of racism and colonialism. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a provocative portrait of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic authors.

You won’t learn anything about her writing—the novel never mentions the title by which most readers know her, or any of her other works—but the Jean Rhys depicted in Caryl Phillips’ beguiling new novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, is not unlike the poorly treated and subjugated female characters from some of Rhys’ own books, among them Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

A freewheeling, endlessly entertaining journey

Review by Michael Magras

Readers who experience a quiet thrill upon discovering an exciting new novel are likely to encounter that sensation when they read Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo’s second work of fiction (and her American debut), a fast-paced story of war refugees, militants and others fleeing conflict in modern- day Nigeria.

The book starts when Chike Ameobi, an officer stationed at a “barren army base” in the Niger Delta, deserts rather than participate in a mission he considers barbaric. Accompanying him is Private Yemi Oke, who shares Chike’s distaste for a commanding officer who wants to “string the scalps of his enemies into a belt.”

They begin a journey to Lagos in search of a better life. Along the way, several others join them, including Fineboy, a teenager who had joined the country’s militants to protest foreign countries taking Nigerian oil; 16-year-old Isoken, who is searching for her parents; and Oma, a woman escaping her wealthy husband, an oil industry employee who—as described in one of the novel’s many great lines—treats her like expensive shoes, “to be polished and glossed but, at the end of the day, to be trodden on.”

When they get to Lagos, they live under a bridge along with other impoverished Nigerians until Fineboy discovers an abandoned, furnished flat beneath a decrepit building. They learn that the flat belongs to Colonel Sandayo, Nigeria’s education minister, who is on the run after taking $10 million earmarked for the country’s failing schools.

Welcome to Lagos casts an entertainingly scathing eye on many aspects of Nigerian society, from oil-hungry corporations to ambitious reporters and the rivalries among ethnic groups. If some characters aren’t fully fleshed out, the novel’s breakneck pace and intricate plotting are nevertheless a treat to savor. This is a winning sophomore effort from a writer to watch.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers who experience a quiet thrill upon discovering an exciting new novel are likely to encounter that sensation when they read Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo’s second work of fiction (and her American debut), a fast-paced story of war refugees, militants and others fleeing conflict in modern- day Nigeria.

FictionWorld FictionHistorical Fiction

Folklore steeped in Mozambique history

Review by Michael Magras

Ngungunyane, nicknamed the Lion of Gaza, was the last emperor to rule the southern half of Mozambique in the late 19th century. Portuguese forces defeated him in 1895, and he died in exile in the Azores islands in 1906. Mozambican novelist Mia Couto has taken this story as the basis for a fictionalized trilogy about “the last days of the so-called State of Gaza.” The first book of the trilogy is Woman of the Ashes, which was nominated for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

Couto incorporates a dual-narrative technique and fantastical elements in his work, most notably in Sleepwalking Land, his famous work about the 1977-1992 Mozambican Civil War. He employs a similar structure here. One narrator is 15-year-old Imani, a black girl who lives on land claimed by two opposing factions, the Portuguese and the Lion of Gaza’s forces. The other narrator is Sergeant Germano de Melo, a former prisoner for mutiny who is sent by Portugal to superintend its conquest. Unapologetic about his country’s colonialism, he recruits Imani to assist him in the village’s garrison. But when he develops romantic feelings for her, he fears that he may be losing his mind and that the attraction will compromise his mission.

Woman in the Ashes is the sort of novel in which fish fly through the air, the soil bears the footprints of angels, and a bundle of animal pelts hides a deep abyss. The tension flags at times, but the book’s richness stems from its recognition that many forms of conflict rend nations and their people. War and colonial oppression are among the most devastating, but tensions also flare between races, among compatriots and within families.

This is a wise and powerful novel about war and its consequences.

Ngungunyane, nicknamed the Lion of Gaza, was the last emperor to rule the southern half of Mozambique in the late 19th century. Portuguese forces defeated him in 1895, and he died in exile in the Azores in 1906. Mozambican novelist Mia Couto has taken this story as the basis for a fictionalized trilogy about “the last days of the so-called State of Gaza.” The first book of the trilogy is Woman of the Ashes, which was nominated for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A celebration of a Filipino family

Review by Michael Magras

In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. Contemporary literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.

The novel—its title a play on America Is in the Heart, a 1946 semi-autobiographical novel by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan—begins with Paz, who is studying to become a nurse. While still in the Philippines, she meets her future husband, Pol De Vera, a talented orthopedic surgeon and “the Don Juan of the hospital.” Once they move to California, their roles reverse: Paz becomes the family breadwinner, while Pol works as a security guard. Their lives change further when, in 1990, they invite Hero, their niece thought to have died years earlier, to stay with them on a tourist visa.

Hero’s story is the focus of the novel, as she develops a close friendship with Roni, the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, and accompanies Roni on visits to faith healers who seek to cure the child’s eczema. Hero begins a relationship with Rosalyn, the daughter of one of the healers.

Castillo incorporates snippets of the Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan languages throughout her tale, and some of the novel’s most memorable scenes depict the decade Hero spends with an armed resistance group that fights against dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ government. If Castillo overdoes some details—she references food too often—America Is Not the Heart is still an earnest contribution to the ongoing discussion of immigrant life in America.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. Contemporary literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

Fifty years of notoriety

Review by Michael Magras

In his marvelous novel The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst spanned the 20th century to tell the story of an enigmatic poem and its relevance to generations of one family. He employs a similar structure in his new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multigenerational saga, this time focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy.

The first of the novel’s five sections is set in 1940. Several Oxford classmates, many of them gay, belong to a literary society. The students become infatuated with David Sparsholt, an aspiring engineer whom they first encounter as he exercises in front of an open window, “a figure in a gleaming singlet, steadily lifting and lowering a pair of hand-weights.” David has a girlfriend, but the classmates wonder if that might be a smokescreen. One student convinces David to pose nude for a drawing. Another is determined to sleep with him.

The novel’s main character, however, is Johnny Sparsholt, David’s son. Readers first meet Johnny in the mid-1960s when, at age 14, he’s vacationing with his parents and eager to pursue a romance with Bastien, an exchange student who’s staying with Johnny’s family. During this holiday, a scandal involving David’s secret affair brings ignominy to the family. The notoriety of the scandal weighs on openly gay Johnny for the next 50 years, as he becomes a celebrated painter and interacts with many of the people from his father’s past.

Hollinghurst has a tendency to use dialogue too obviously to convey background information, but the Jamesian elegance and psychological acuity of his previous novels grace The Sparsholt Affair as well. This is a moving work from one of modern literature’s finest authors.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his marvelous novel The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst spanned the 20th century to tell the story of an enigmatic poem and its relevance to generations of one family. He employs a similar structure in his new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multigenerational saga, this time focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Two novellas on a theme

Review by Michael Magras

Asymmetry, Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday’s debut, is a pair of novellas with a unique narrative shift. What begins as the story of a 25-year-old editorial assistant in early-2000s New York turns into the tale of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow on his way to Iraqi Kurdistan.

In Folly, the opening novella, Ezra Blazer, a novelist in his 70s who suffers from many ailments, passes on his knowledge of books and music to Alice, an editorial assistant with whom he is having an affair. In her spare time, Alice writes about “War. Dictatorships. World affairs.” In Madness, the second novella, economist Amar Ala Jaafari experiences firsthand the war and dictatorships that Alice writes about, especially during flashbacks to war-torn Iraq and when he encounters the casual racism of border control agents.

The first section of Asymmetry feels sketchy, but the novel gains considerable momentum in Madness. The prose becomes poetic and precise, as when Halliday writes that the bustle in Heathrow “had a kind of prolonged regularity to it, like a jazz improvisation that, for all its deviations, never loses its beat.”

Both novellas deal with insecurity and death, and Halliday draws connections between the two seemingly disparate stories in many ways. For example, in Madness, Amar refers to Saul Bellow’s line from Humboldt’s Gift: “Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.” The same reference appears in Folly.

In a third and final section, wherein the two novellas come together, Ezra tells an interviewer, “We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium.” Asymmetry is a thoughtful look at many forms of disorder and the eternal struggle to reconcile them.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Asymmetry, Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday’s debut, is a pair of novellas with a unique narrative shift. What begins as the story of a 25-year-old editorial assistant in early-2000s New York turns into the tale of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow on his way to Iraqi Kurdistan.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A Yorkshire legend

Review by Michael Magras

One of the surprises on Britain’s Man Booker Prize shortlist last year was Elmet, the fine debut novel from Fiona Mozley. American readers now have the chance to experience the novel’s atmospheric writing and its vivid portrait of a family struggling to outrun its past.

As we learn from the Ted Hughes excerpt in the book’s epigraph, Elmet, where the novel is set, was “the last independent Celtic kingdom in England” that, centuries later, “were still a ‘badlands’, a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” Now part of modern-day Yorkshire, this area is still home to some shady characters. The narrator is 14-year-old Daniel, who lives with his older sister, Cathy, and their father, John, a “bearded giant” who once bare-knuckle boxed for money, in a bungalow that Daddy, as Daniel calls him, built from scratch in a copse far from the town where they used to live.

Cathy is the tougher sibling, rolling cigarettes and beating up schoolboys who try to assault her, while Daniel prefers to sit quietly under trees and learn about poetry from Vivien, a neighbor woman Daddy knows through the children’s mother, who was frequently absent during their early years.

The novel turns darker when a man named Price, an unscrupulous landlord, shows up at the bungalow. Price, whom Daddy once worked for, claims to hold the deed to the land Daddy built the house on and tells Daddy he has to work for him again if he wants to stay. As Daddy later tells his children, Price will cause “small nuisances” if they refuse.

The escalation of these nuisances constitutes much of Elmet’s drama. The gothic violence of the later pages is out of step with the earlier tone, but Elmet paints a memorable picture of fraught familial relationships and the perils of revenge.

One of the surprises on Britain’s Man Booker Prize shortlist last year was Elmet, the fine debut novel from Fiona Mozley. American readers now have the chance to experience the novel’s atmospheric writing and its vivid portrait of a family struggling to outrun its past.

FictionSpeculative Fiction

Future Home of the Living God

Review by Michael Magras

Add Louise Erdrich (LaRose, The Round House) to the growing list of literary authors to dabble in dystopian fiction. Her latest work, Future Home of the Living God, imagines a frightening, not-too-distant time, made all the more terrifying by its plausibility. The U.S. Congress has expanded a set of policies that began as the Patriot Act so that pregnant women can be “sequestered in hospitals in order to give birth under controlled circumstances.”

The reason for this expansion is not made immediately clear, but it becomes apparent through the story of 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, “the adopted child of Minneapolis liberals.” Born on an Ojibwe reservation, Cedar has never known her biological parents. As the novel opens, it’s been a year since Cedar’s birth mother sent her a letter asking if they could meet. Cedar ignored the request. But now that Cedar is four months pregnant, her perspective has changed, and she decides to meet her birth parents. But that’s not all that has changed. A biological disaster has occurred, “evolution has reversed,” and pregnant women are sent to detention centers so they can be monitored. Cedar is of particular interest to authorities, as they believe she is carrying one of the few “normal” babies not suffering from abnormalities.

Written as a diary to her unborn child, Future Home of the Living God chronicles Cedar’s experiences and the mysterious personages she encounters, most notably an omnipresent figure named Mother who appears on turned-off computer monitors and coos, “How are you feeling? I care. I’d like to know.”

If parts of this novel are pulpier than Erdrich’s previous work, the result is still a chilling work of speculative fiction and a bracing cautionary tale about environmental deterioration and the importance of women’s control of their own bodies.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Erdrich channels Atwood in our Top Pick in Fiction, November 2017.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Many voices, singing in one city

Review by Michael Magras

It’s an old but effective technique: the use of oral histories—interviews with witnesses to past events—to paint a picture of an era through multiple perspectives. Cristina García (Dreaming in Cuban) employs this technique to great effect in Here in Berlin, a quilt of a novel that creates a hypnotic portrait of the former East German city during and after World War II.

A Cuban-American writer known as the Visitor returns to Germany after leaving 31 years ago to find stories about “the human fallout from Cuba’s long association with the Soviet bloc.” What follows are brief chapters in which residents of Berlin, including World War II survivors now living in nursing homes, share their stories. Among them are Ernesto, a former night watchman of a Cuban electric-fan factory who spent five months as a POW on a German submarine, and one of the few female lawyers in Germany after the war, whose job was to defend clients on trial for war crimes.

These histories range from grimly humorous (such as the story about the Ministry of Culture official whose superiors asked him to invent a dance craze that would “give the West a (managed) run for its money” and learned an “unexpurgated mambo” from a Cuban agent) to chilling (an unrepentant former Nazi criminal boasts about his wartime actions).

If some of the histories are sketchy, most provide a powerful evocation of the continuing effect of the Nazi era on Berlin’s inhabitants. As the Visitor states at the end of the novel, there is “poetry in the listening.” And that’s what Here in Berlin is: a poetic pastiche of rationalizations and regrets, and a testament to the challenge of reconciling a difficult past.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Cristina García for Here in Berlin.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s an old but effective technique: the use of oral histories—interviews with witnesses to past events—to paint a picture of an era through multiple perspectives. Cristina García (Dreaming in Cuban) employs this technique to great effect in Here in Berlin, a quilt of a novel that creates a hypnotic portrait of the former East German city during and after World War II.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Review by Michael Magras

From the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward’s (Salvage the Bones) new novel, you know you’re in for a unique experience among the pecan trees and dusty roads of rural Mississippi. This intricately layered story combines mystical elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day American South.

Ward shifts perspective among three characters: 13-year-old mixed-race boy Jojo, who lives with his mother and toddler sister, Kayla, in the home of his black grandparents, Mam and Pop; Leonie, Jojo’s black mother, who struggles with drug addiction and sees visions of her murdered brother; and Richie, a young boy who died decades earlier and whom 15-year-old Pop knew when they were at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

Jojo’s white father, Michael, the son of a man who abhors Leonie because she’s the black woman “his son had babies with,” has been in Parchman for many years. When Leonie learns of Michael’s release, she, Jojo and Kayla drive across Mississippi to pick him up. But the trip, which includes unexpected illnesses and a stop for drugs that Leonie wants to sell, is more eventful than the family had anticipated.

Visitations from dead people, tales of snakes that turn into “scaly birds” whose feathers allow recipients to fly—this material would have felt mannered in the hands of a lesser writer. But Ward skillfully weaves realistic and supernatural elements into a powerful narrative. The writing, though matter-of-fact in its depiction of prejudice, is poetic throughout, as when Jojo says that, as Michael hugs him after a fight with Leonie, “something in his face was pulled tight, wrong, like underneath his skin he was crisscrossed with tape.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing is an important work from an astute observer of race relations in 21st-century America.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Jesmyn Ward for Sing, Unburied, Sing.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From the opening pages of Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward’s (Salvage the Bones) new novel, you know you’re in for a unique experience among the pecan trees and dusty roads of rural Mississippi. This intricately layered story combines mystical elements with a brutal view of racial tensions in the modern-day American South.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Love and poetry

Review by Michael Magras

One might question some of her choices, but no one could accuse Maria Pierce, the protagonist of New People, Danzy Senna’s provocative new novel, of ordinariness. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that she—like her equally light-skinned, dreadlocked fiancé, Khalil, whom she met at Stanford in the early 1990s—is biracial. They are two of society’s “New People,” children born to mixed-race couples in the late ’60s and early ’70s, offspring she calls “the progeny of the Renaissance of Interracial Unions.”

It’s November 1996. Maria and Khalil, subjects of a documentary about biracial children, live in Brooklyn as she works on a dissertation about the Jonestown massacre. She’s the sort of well-meaning person who speaks in broken English when talking to someone with a foreign accent. And she is the adopted daughter of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, woman who—like a poet Maria has recently become infatuated with—was “old-school” black, with dark skin rather than the “octoroon-gray eyes or butterscotch skin” of New People.

The poet, a “shaved-head black man,” and Maria’s infatuation with him are the sparks for much of the novel’s drama. Her obsession is so intense that she tracks down the poet at his apartment building. But before Maria can knock on his door, his confused white neighbor mistakes her for her Spanish nanny. Maria’s willingness to go along with the charade of being the baby’s nurse, even to the point of adopting a Spanish accent, is one of many ways Senna dramatizes Maria’s uncertainty and despair over the direction of her life.

Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Expertly plotted and full of dark humor, New People is a thoughtful and unforgettable look at race and class at the dawn of the 21st century.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Reading between the lines

Review by Michael Magras

Cassie Hugo, one of two women at the center of The Confusion of Languages, the touching debut novel by Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), has many reasons to be jealous of Margaret Brickshaw, the biggest of which is Margaret’s family. It’s May 2011, the time of the Arab Spring. Both women are married to soldiers who work for the U.S. embassy in Jordan. But while Cassie and Dan haven’t conceived a child in their nine-year marriage (including the two years they’ve lived in Amman), Margaret and Crick, new to Jordan, have a 15-month-old boy named Mather.

Cassie’s jealousy might have been less intense if Dan hadn’t signed them up to sponsor the new arrivals. But she does her best to befriend Margaret and hide her sadness whenever she holds Mather and thinks, “This is everything I want.”

On the morning of May 13, with the men on assignment in Italy, Margaret gets into a car accident and doesn’t return from embassy headquarters, where she was supposed to fill out paperwork. While Cassie babysits Mather, she reads Margaret’s journals, in which Margaret chronicled relationships with people she met in Jordan, including two guards, one of whom teaches her Arabic and, in a moving scene, invites her to dinner with his family.

Cassie suspects Margaret may be seeing one of these men and that the affair may explain her disappearance, a suspicion fueled by an enigmatic journal entry: “I must find him. I must make it right.”

The device of one character reading another’s journal is a cliché, but The Confusion of Languages is nonetheless a moving work about desire and the dislocation one might experience in a foreign land. As Fallon shrewdly makes clear, a friend can be as mysterious as the ways of another culture.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Cassie Hugo, one of two women at the center of The Confusion of Languages, the touching debut novel by Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), has many reasons to be jealous of Margaret Brickshaw, the biggest of which is Margaret’s family.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

The ripple effect of one terrible day

Review by Michael Magras

The smells are the tip-off that something bad is about to happen. To use the Jamaican slang from Augustown, Kei Miller’s excellent new novel, the April 1982 day in which a calamitous event is about to occur is “the day of the autoclaps,” a day of impending disaster, trouble on top of trouble.

At first, the day doesn’t seem unusual, but the woman at the center of this novel set in the poor, eponymous Jamaican town certainly is. Ganja-smoking Ma Taffy was blinded many years earlier when hundreds of rats crashed through her ceiling and attacked her eyes. The injury heightened her sense of smell: She can detect ripening mangoes and Otaheite apples as well as the tragedy that will involve her great-nephew, 6-year-old Kaia, and a group known as Babylon.

Kaia comes home from school one day—he lives with Ma Taffy and his mother, Gina—with his dreadlocks cut off. His teacher, a stern man who struggles to comb out his afro and fears his move to the city will result in “the weakening of his moral fortitude,” hacked off the Rastafarian boy’s dreads. This act of violence sets off a series of events and recollections, including the story of Alexander Bedward, the 1920s town preacher who claimed that he could fly; and the school’s modern-day principal, a wealthy white woman who hires Gina to be her housekeeper without knowing the secret behind the black woman’s connection to her family.

If the novel’s tone is inconsistent, Augustown is nonetheless an accomplished and riveting work, with traces of magical realism. And its central theme is, sadly, all too relevant: Generations change, but prejudices persist.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The smells are the tip-off that something bad is about to happen. To use the Jamaican slang from Augustown, Kei Miller’s excellent new novel, the April 1982 day in which a calamitous event is about to occur is “the day of the autoclaps,” a day of impending disaster, trouble on top of trouble.

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