Robert Weibezahl

NonfictionLiterature

Documenting a literary crush

Review by Robert Weibezahl

J.C. Hallman had only a passing awareness of writer Nicholson Baker when he quite impulsively became obsessed with the man and his work. He not only had erroneously thought that Baker was British, but considered him a “nonessential” writer. That indifference changed into fixation nearly overnight. Hallman plunged into all of Baker’s fiction and nonfiction, a project that morphed into the deeper contemplation of literature and life that he chronicles with candor, humor and insight in B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal.

Baker, of course, wrote his own such book: U and I, published early in his career, which grew out of a similar reader-for-writer mania, in this case Baker’s for John Updike. Logically, that volume provides a jumping off point for Hallman, but he quickly moves to Baker’s other early work, which, both fiction and nonfiction, is notable for its scrutiny of the minutia of daily life. In this unapologetically personal account, Hallman introduces us to his girlfriend, Catherine, a photographer who becomes a secondary pilgrim and often seemingly indifferent sounding board for his Baker enthusiasms. Their alternately passionate and thorny relationship plays out in the Midwest, Paris and Maine (where Baker lives), providing particular fodder as Hallman delves into Baker’s “sex trilogy.” The arms-length discourse that Hallman carries on with Baker through his books does eventually bring the two writers together when Hallman musters the nerve to arrange a meeting. Their two encounters are intriguing, if less than illuminating (full disclosure: I went to college with Baker, and these two clumsy scenes were sharply reminiscent of the single time, equally awkward, I was introduced by a mutual friend to the then-aspiring writer in the dining hall).

B & Me, fundamentally, is book about reading and the relationships we develop (usually from afar) with our favorite writers through their work. These relationships, Hallman suggests (and suggests that Baker is suggesting, too), are almost sexual in nature. “Nicholson Baker is not, and has never been, the true subject of this book,” Hallman writes near the end. “If I’ve been correct in suggesting that there’s something wrong with the state of modern literature, that the state of modern literature is like an aberrant state of mind, a state on the brink of breakdown and despair, then the problem is not that Nicholson Baker’s work has gone overlooked, however celebrated it may be. It’s that the whole world is slowly going mad and forgetting writers like Nicholson Baker, writers whose books truly need to be books.” [Hallman’s italics]

Hallman is an intelligent, passionate critic, and his fecund mind leads readers in many directions worth following. If his writing occasionally becomes slightly (but only slightly) insufferable as its struts across the page overly impressed with its own cleverness, and his decidedly clinical and off-putting (and not very erotic) descriptions of his own sex life do little more than distract from the larger issues at hand, those are minor quibbles. B & Me is an original, at once quirky and thought-provoking—a book in love with books and the power they can and should hold.

J.C. Hallman had only a passing awareness of writer Nicholson Baker when he quite impulsively became obsessed with the man and his work. He not only had erroneously thought that Baker was British, but considered him a “nonessential” writer. That indifference changed into fixation nearly overnight. Hallman plunged into all of Baker’s fiction and nonfiction, a project that morphed into the deeper contemplation of literature and life that he chronicles with candor, humor and insight in B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal.
NonfictionHistory

The key to the rise of L.A.

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Los Angeles would not exist as the sprawling, highly populated global center it is today were it not for one man. At the turn of the last century, William Mulholland, a civil servant self-educated in the ways of water engineering, all but willed Southern California’s future when he masterminded one of the greatest engineering projects of all time: the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Bringing massive amounts of water south to this day, this monumental achievement was wrapped in controversy from the start, and in our more conservation-oriented age, there is still resentment about how Los Angeles “stole” the water of the central Owens Valley, dooming that rural area to an arid fate. Still, even Mulholland’s critics concede that the colorful Irish immigrant was a visionary who shaped the way that precious water is controlled not only in California, but also throughout the West.

Mulholland’s story has been told before, but perhaps never so compellingly as Les Standiford tells it in Water to the Angels. Newly arrived in California, Mulholland began working for the water department as a well- and ditch-digger, but impressed the company president with his unvarnished candor and knowledge. Mulholland’s single-minded mission was to bring water to L.A., and, unlike many others, he never made a penny from the project beyond his public salary.

Standiford expertly weaves the internecine drama behind the building of the aqueduct with a modern inquiry into its legacy (and even touches upon the movie Chinatown, which used the bones of the story but played fast and loose with the facts). Water to the Angels leaves little doubt that the forward-thinking Mulholland was as original as the city he birthed.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Los Angeles would not exist as the sprawling, highly populated global center it is today were it not for one man. At the turn of the last century, William Mulholland, a civil servant self-educated in the ways of water engineering, all but willed Southern California’s future when he masterminded one of the greatest engineering projects of all time: the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
FictionDebut Fiction

An acclaimed Irish debut

Review by Robert Weibezahl

There is a strong tradition of Irish writers—William Trevor, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín come immediately to mind—who can turn the everyday details of an ordinary life into art. Add to these ranks Mary Costello, whose deceptively slender first novel, Academy Street, takes in the full measure of one woman’s quietly tragic life in fewer than 200 pages.

The novel begins and ends with a death at Easterfield, the Lohans’ big old house and farm in the west of Ireland. At age 3, young Tess does not fully understand the circumstances or the implications of her mother’s death, but she feels the loss deeply. A meditative and lonely child, she grows up alongside her older sisters and two brothers, her life unfolding in familiar patterns: She goes away for a time to boarding school, she moves to Dublin to study nursing, an older sister joins the Irish diaspora in New York, and Tess follows a few years later. Tess’ life in Manhattan continues largely in solitude, marked by a brief, hollow love affair and the demands of single motherhood at a time when there was little support for such a choice. As the years pass, the unimaginable will bring Tess to her knees emotionally, even as she continues to endure all with that distinctive variety of Irish fatalism.

Plot is largely secondary for Costello, who is more concerned with providing a portrait of the inner life, a thing she accomplishes with admirable deftness. Indeed, the external chronological touchstones—the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, Patty Hearst, 9/11—sometimes seem like tacked on, unwelcome distractions, although the latter will play an essential role in Tess’ story. It is a cliché to call a novel haunting, but thanks to Costello’s graceful prose and emotional honesty, Academy Street—which won the Irish Book Award for novel of the year over such heavy-hitters as Tóibín and David Mitchell—certainly stays with you.

 

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There is a strong tradition of Irish writers—William Trevor, Edna O’Brien and Colm Tóibín come immediately to mind—who can turn the everyday details of an ordinary life into art. Add to these ranks Mary Costello, whose deceptively slender first novel, Academy Street, takes in the full measure of one woman’s quietly tragic life in fewer than 200 pages.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A mythic masterwork

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Each new book by Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) is, on the surface at least, vastly different from those that have come before. The Buried Giant—his first novel in almost 10 years—is no exception. This fable-like narrative, set in England just after the mythic reign of Arthur, chronicles the adventures of an elderly couple as they journey across a wild and rugged landscape. Old and forgetful, but still endearingly in love, Axl and Beatrice have been cast to the margins of their settlement, not even allowed candles for fear that they may do themselves harm. So, they decide to set out for their son’s village, which they believe they can reach with a few days’ travel. But the landscape abounds with human hostility and ignorance, as well as the shadowy possibility of ogres and other mythical beasts.

The couple, who are Britons and Christians, are joined mid-journey by a young Saxon knight, Wistan, as well as a boy, Edwin, whom the knight has rescued from the hands of superstitious villagers. This unlikely quartet meets an aging Sir Gawain, the last survivor of Arthur’s round table, in the woods, and makes its way to a fortress-turned-monastery.

Despite the swords and monsters, this is not the sex and violence fictional world of George R.R. Martin. Ishiguro has crafted a haunting allegory, rife with symbols and archetypes. Its deceptively simple narrative unfolds with the ease of a timeless fairy tale, and as with all classic fairy tales it works as a universal parable. Like much of Ishiguro’s work, The Buried Giant is about the clouds of memory, our human imperfections and our unresolved pasts. It is a welcome return by one of our most subtle, thought-provoking novelists.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Each new book by Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) is, on the surface at least, vastly different from those that have come before. The Buried Giant—his first novel in almost 10 years—is no exception. This fable-like narrative, set in England just after the mythic reign of Arthur, chronicles the adventures of an elderly couple as they journey across a wild and rugged landscape. Old and forgetful, but still endearingly in love, Axl and Beatrice have been cast to the margins of their settlement, not even allowed candles for fear that they may do themselves harm. So, they decide to set out for their son’s village, which they believe they can reach with a few days’ travel. But the landscape abounds with human hostility and ignorance, as well as the shadowy possibility of ogres and other mythical beasts.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A Spool of Blue Thread

Review by Robert Weibezahl

In 20 novels published over a remarkable 50-year period, Anne Tyler has staked her claim as our premier chronicler of the ordinary, imperfect American family. Set in Baltimore, like most of her work, A Spool of Blue Thread concerns just such a family. Abby and Red Whitshank and their four children are, from the outside, just like anyone else. Red is a second-generation building contractor, Abby a social worker, and the clan has long occupied a rambling house that Red’s father once built for another man. Like all families, they have had their ups and downs, their squabbles, resentments and misunderstandings, but nothing has irreparably damaged the household fabric.

That equilibrium gives way as Abby and Red age and their health begins to decline—Red suffering a small heart attack, Abby showing the first signs of dementia. The solution the grown children settle on is for youngest son, Stem, and his serene, unflappable wife, Nora, to move in with their three little boys, an arrangement that goes forward despite protests from the elder Whitshanks. But the cart is upset when prodigal son Denny shows up, miffed that he has not been the one asked to move in and care for his parents. Now, an emotional reckoning is at hand.

Swinging back to earlier times in Whitshank history, we see the full arc of the family’s story, each episode fleshing out the story until A Spool of Blue Thread becomes a deeper narrative about how families survive and endure. The work of some writers—Philip Roth and Henry James come to mind—becomes knottier and more ruminative as they age, but the prose of the now 73-year-old Tyler has become looser and less formal. Still, she has not lost her singular capacity for delineating the small, true details that make us who we are and govern how we bumble our way through the world.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

An evocative novel of an ordinary American family
FictionLiterary Fiction

Observing the lives of others

Review by Robert Weibezahl

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. In Rachel Cusk’s inventive novel, Outline, a parade of characters tell the sketchily drawn narrator their stories, and as these conversations or episodes unfold they weigh in on all manner of life’s issues, large and small—love and marriage, parenthood, aspirations and failures, even the age-old debate of dog vs. cat.

Through it all, the narrator, a writer who has come to Athens (not incidentally, the cradle of our Western narrative tradition) to teach a week-long class, remains largely an enigma. We glean that she has left two sons in England, and there are hints of some tragedy of love, but she tells us virtually nothing about herself, reserving her observations for those she encounters. Among these are an aging, thrice-divorced Greek whose romantic advances take her by surprise; a renowned lesbian poet; a fellow writing teacher seeking his own means of escape; and a diverse cluster of students, who tap the wellspring of storytelling in a stuffy summer classroom.

In each conversation, the narrator, who we ultimately discover is called Faye, remains on the edges, or as the title suggests, outside the lines of experience. As she considers the “outlines” of the life stories she is invited to consider, she only occasionally interjects her views.

Cusk, an intelligent and elegant writer, has set for herself a cunning task. By writing an essentially plot-free novel about our visceral need for telling stories, she is doing nothing less than subverting the central nature of narrative itself. What is remarkable about Outline is that, despite its nebulous form, it picks up momentum with a steady persuasiveness, even if it, quite intentionally, never arrives at a resolution. As we come to know those with whom she interacts, and bear witness to the ways in which their stories betray their hidden truths, we somehow come to know Faye, too. No matter how calculated her self-concealment or how hard she tries to remain emotionally detached, Faye cannot run from the personal narrative she is trying to escape. 

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. In Rachel Cusk’s inventive novel, Outline, a parade of characters tell the sketchily drawn narrator their stories, and as these conversations or episodes unfold they weigh in on all manner of life’s issues,…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Navigating a changing Ireland

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Nora Webster, never strays from the quiet, deceptive simplicity of its storytelling, and yet this persuasive portrait of a compelling woman blossoms into something greater than the sum of its parts. Set in a small town in County Wexford, Ireland, in the early 1970s, it is the story of a mother navigating the first, tentative days and months of a premature widowhood.

Only in her early 40s, Nora has been left with four children—two daughters away at school and two younger sons still at home—after the untimely death of her beloved husband Maurice. She is a fiercely independent, intelligent and private woman, who pushes against the narrow margins of the nosy, hidebound town where she has lived most of her life. She must make some tough choices, both practical and emotional: whether to sell the family’s beloved cottage; whether to return to work at the suffocating office where she was employed before she married; how best to raise the children, particularly her visibly troubled son, Donal, who has grown asocial and developed a stammer since his father’s death. Suffering no fools gladly, Nora must nonetheless coexist with her parochial neighbors and interfering relatives as she attempts to figure out her next move in a time and culture where women had a prescribed “proper” place.

While she sometimes fails to acknowledge her own sorrow, Nora never wallows in self-pity, and while she may long for the love and protection she had with Maurice, her momentum is forward-facing, both due to her temperament and by necessity. 

On the surface a domestic novel, Nora Webster also touches on the politics of Ireland during the Troubles, as well as the country’s firm, if complicated, relationship with Catholicism. With understated grace, Tóibín—who has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize—has turned a seemingly straightforward story of one woman’s widowhood into a wider exploration of family, community and country.

 

 

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

Colm Tóibín’s new novel, Nora Webster, never strays from the quiet, deceptive simplicity of its storytelling, and yet this persuasive portrait of a compelling woman blossoms into something greater than the sum of its parts. Set in a small town in County Wexford, Ireland, in the early 1970s, it is the story of a mother navigating the first, tentative days and months of a premature widowhood.
FictionShort Stories

Past and present collide in four novellas

Review by Robert Weibezahl

“We all forget things,” says a character in one of the four engaging novellas Mary Gordon collects in The Liar’s Wife. “We must.” Yet despite this sage observation, it is really the act of remembering past associations that serves as a common thread in this beautifullyrendered book. Gordon writes about young, intelligent women and men in the throes of self-discovery at formative junctures in their lives. Each story also has a European connection, which, though sometimes incidental to the main intent of the story, seems to accentuate how innately different the American psyche can be from the old-world one our forebears left behind.

Gordon writes about young, intelligent women and men in the throes of self-discovery at formative junctures in their lives.

The title novella is a story of forced reflection. Jocelyn, a well-heeled, 70-something retired scientist, has her well-ordered life disrupted when the first husband she married and divorced in her 20s appears at her doorstep. Now dying of cancer and heading back to his native Ireland, Johnny is an itinerant musician and inveterate charmer who took his bride to Dublin all those years ago—a place whose foreignness unnerved her and which she quickly fled when Johnny’s mendacious nature became apparent. Now, all these decades later, this liar’s reappearance revives unacknowledged regrets.

“Fine Arts” follows Theresa, a brilliant if sheltered graduate student, to Lucca, Italy, where she is escaping an ill-advised affair with her advisor and searching for the spark of inspiration to ignite her dissertation. In the small Tuscan city, she meets an elderly art collector and, for perhaps the first time in her life, upturns the cart of her narrowly prescribed life.

As their titles would suggest, “Simone Weil in New York” and “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana” hinge on imagined American episodes in the lives of two of great midcentury European intellectuals. But the central characters in these stories are not Weil and Mann, but two “ordinary” people they encounter. The Weil story finds Genevieve, a young French mother, living in Manhattan as her American husband fights in the South Pacific. One day, Genevieve bumps into the enigmatic Weil, who had been her teacher in France, on the Upper West Side. She invites the awkward woman back into her life, battling the discomfort and awe she has always felt around this at once spiritual and abrasive woman.

The Mann story recounts the experience of a smart, if callow teenager’s brief brush with the German novelist, who comes to the boy’s high school to rally support against the Nazi threat. Looking back from many years’ distance, the now old man considers how Mann, as abrasive in his way as Weil was in hers, nonetheless forever changed the perceptions of his younger self.

Partly for commercial reasons—too long for a magazine, too short for a full-fledged book—the novella is an underutilized form, but Gordon shows a great affinity for its necessary constraints. In each 60-or-so-page story she manages to compress a trove of details, giving readers wholly fleshed worlds to savor and contemplate.

 

“We all forget things,” says a character in one of the four engaging novellas Mary Gordon collects in The Liar’s Wife. “We must.” Yet despite this sage observation, it is really the act of remembering past associations that serves as a common thread in this beautifully-rendered book. Gordon writes about young, intelligent women and men in the throes of self-discovery at formative junctures in their lives.
FictionSatire

Skewering the shortlist

Review by Robert Weibezahl

Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost for Words is a breezy, yet biting satirical novel about the internecine intrigue that unfolds behind the scenes of a major book award that is clearly a thinly disguised version of the Booker Prize. St. Aubyn, whose own novel, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for that honor, writes in the great pithy British tradition of David Lodge and Muriel Spark, infusing a deceptively lighthearted surface wit with more trenchant intent.

The committee for the prestigious Elysian Prize (funded by a multinational that, among its many controversies, genetically modifies crops by crossing vegetables with animals) is headed by Malcolm Craig, a backbench MP hoping to raise his public profile. The rather ragtag team of judges includes a popular newspaper columnist, an actor, an Oxbridge academic (who, no doubt rightly, believes she is the only member who knows anything about literature) and the ancient prize committee chairman’s erstwhile secretary/mistress, who now writes popular thrillers. None bothers to read more than a handful of the hundreds of books submitted, embracing titles to which they are already predisposed. The inevitable alliances form amid polite quarrels.

The proceedings reach a fever pitch, albeit in a restrained, polite English manner, as the longlist becomes the shortlist and the winner proves difficult to decide. No one is spared as St. Aubyn skewers the literary “elite” and aspirants alike. In one typically sly development, one of the presumed frontrunners, literary star Katherine Burns, is not even in the running. An editorial assistant mistakenly sent in the manuscript for a cookbook instead of Burns’ novel (the cookbook, viewed as a postmodern experiment in narrative, makes the list).

Delightfully entertaining, Lost for Words nonetheless casts a cold eye on the very nature of awards, and questions whether they in any way reflect the quality and permanence of the art they ostensibly celebrate.

 

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

Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost for Words is a breezy, yet biting satirical novel about the internecine intrigue that unfolds behind the scenes of a major book award that is clearly a thinly disguised version of the Booker Prize. St. Aubyn, whose own novel, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for that honor, writes in the great pithy British tradition of David Lodge and Muriel Spark, infusing a deceptively lighthearted surface wit with more trenchant intent.

FictionShort Stories

Stories of the connections that shape us

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The characters in the compelling stories novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano collects in The Other Language are displaced—both geographically and in matters of the heart. Mostly women, but a few men as well, they are educated, well-heeled and discontent, adrift in an ever-contracting world that has clouded the notion of home.

The title story—one of the finest—begins with an enticing Alice Munro-like premise: A 12-year-old Italian girl and her family vacation in a small Greek village in the wake of her mother’s mystery-shrouded death. There she substitutes one English brother for another as her object of affection, carrying the complicated memory through the years until adult truths clarify the meaning of the events. Another richly layered story, “The Presence of Men,” is built on a clash of cultures as a Roman woman, scarred by divorce, seeks refuge in a village in a remote corner of Italy. The inroads she makes into local acceptance are jarred when her Hollywood agent brother and his movie star client show up and upset the delicate balance. In “An Indian Soirée,” reminiscent of the atmospheric, incisive stories of the late Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a couple has come to the subcontinent for an extended sojourn, and in one the space of one morning their marriage falls apart.

A number of stories are set in Africa, where Marciano has lived. “The Club,” with the indomitable Mrs. D’Costa at its center, quietly explores class and race in post-colonial Kenya. “Big Island, Small Island” reunites two lost souls who realize it is impossible, indeed useless, to try to recreate the past. And “Quantum Theory,” set in Africa and New York, offers a bittersweet meditation on the significant difference between falling in love and being in love.

Many of these nine well-crafted and entertaining stories are built on chance encounters, and in Marciano’s assured hands the reader accepts the intervention of fate without question. These are stories about finding love in a fragile world, but even more, about all of the connections—past and present—that shape us and anchor us in place.

The characters in the compelling stories novelist and screenwriter Francesca Marciano collects in The Other Language are displaced—both geographically and in matters of the heart. Mostly women, but a few men as well, they are educated, well-heeled and discontent, adrift in an ever-contracting world that has clouded the notion of home.
Nonfiction

A classic at 75

Review by Robert Weibezahl

When The Grapes of Wrath was published 75 years ago, on April 14, 1939, it was an immediate critical and commercial success, topping bestseller lists and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In our own less print-oriented age, it is hard to imagine a book having the explosive cultural and political impact that Steinbeck’s masterpiece had across the nation—immediate and divisive—although its never-waning popularity still speaks to the novel’s power and relevance. Steinbeck specialist Susan Shillinglaw, for 18 years director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University and currently scholar in residence at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, celebrates that relevance in On Reading The Grapes of Wrath, a concise yet penetrating study of the genesis of the book and its interlocking themes.

Steinbeck wrote that, “There are five layers in this book; a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.” Borrowing this notion of layers—which Steinbeck himself borrowed from his friend, the pioneering marine biologist Ed Ricketts—Shillinglaw finds her own five, delving into the text for surface clarity, associations, histories, universal symbols and, finally, what she calls emergence, or breaking through to something finer or purer than the sum of its parts. This somewhat academic conceit might be lost on the casual reader, but it does give shape to the book and provides Shillinglaw with a welcome platform for sharing a plethora of “back story” details about the writing of The Grapes of Wrath.

An astute critic, Shillinglaw looks at such archetypal characters as Tom and Ma Joad with fresh eyes, placing them in the context of their own story and in the greater contexts of history and literature. She explores Steinbeck’s progressive political affiliations and commitment as an advocate for social justice (first fueled by his wife, Carol, to whom the novel is dedicated) and how they inspired his fictional portrayal of the exploitation of migrant workers. Underlying themes of women, religion, ecology, class and, of course, the land, inform Shillinglaw’s incisive appreciation of the novel.

The enduring power of The Grapes of Wrath rests in its urgency, Shillinglaw says. “It is not a novel of social reform, not a book that poses solutions to the economic, ecological, and sociological challenges of the 1930s. It is not a novel advocating higher wages or better housing or kinder owners, although surely Steinbeck would have endorsed all of that. Instead his message is a message to the human heart, capable of ‘thinking, feeling, intuition, sensation.’” The Grapes of Wrath is, in short, what any great and lasting book must be: timeless, compelling, universal.

When The Grapes of Wrath was published 75 years ago, on April 14, 1939, it was an immediate critical and commercial success, topping bestseller lists and winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In our own less print-oriented age, it is hard to imagine a book having the explosive cultural and political impact that Steinbeck’s masterpiece had across the nation—immediate and divisive—although its never-waning popularity still speaks to the novel’s power and relevance.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A mystery inside an enigma

Review by Robert Weibezahl

A Kafkaesque premise rests at the center of Jesse Ball’s intriguing fourth novel, Silence Once Begun. Oda Sotatsu, a 29-year-old man, is arrested in Osaka for his involvement in the disappearance of eight elderly people. The police have a signed confession from Oda, and he refuses to speak in his own defense. Indeed, he refuses to speak at all. But, as readers, we know that Oda did not commit the crime: He has signed the confession having lost a wager made with another man, Sato Kakuzo, and the man’s girlfriend, Jito Joo. Why has Oda admitted to something he didn’t do, and why is he willing to die for it?

Like any unsolved crime, this novel haunts us.

A journalist, named Jesse Ball in the postmodern fashion, is haunted by this long forgotten incident and sets out to discover the truth. In a series of interviews—with Oda’s disgraced family, a prison guard, the sensationalist newspaper reporter who covered the trial and, in the end, Joo and Kakuzo themselves—he pieces together the strange series of events. Unfolding like a documentary film, the narrative “truth” changes with each person’s version of things, which, of course, often reflects the teller in the best light. The reader is left to determine which story is closest to what really occurred.

By setting the novel in Japan, the American writer is inviting comparison to Kurosawa’s classic film, Rashomon, and Ball has acknowledged his debt to Kobo Abe and Shusaku Endo as well. Japanese notions of family honor and public shame are central, although the underlying themes are universal. An epigraph stating that it is a work of fiction partially based on fact adds a tantalizing element to a story about the nature of truth-telling—is it derived from an actual miscarriage of justice, one wonders, or is Ball manipulating us here, too? Even at its close, when everything has been (mostly) explained, the reader is intentionally left with unanswered questions about Oda’s  somewhat inexplicable sense of honor and Joo’s complicated declarations of love, among other things. Ball’s calculated use of silence is masterful, and the novel haunts us, like any unsolved crime.

A Kafkaesque premise rests at the center of Jesse Ball’s intriguing fourth novel, Silence Once Begun. Oda Sotatsu, a 29-year-old man, is arrested in Osaka for his involvement in the disappearance of eight elderly people. The police have a signed confession from Oda, and he refuses to speak in his own defense. Indeed, he refuses to speak at all. But, as readers, we know that Oda did not commit the crime: He has signed the confession having lost a wager made with another man, Sato Kakuzo, and the man’s girlfriend, Jito Joo. Why has Oda admitted to something he didn’t do, and why is he willing to die for it?

FictionDebut Fiction

Return to Sierra Leone

Review by Robert Weibezahl

The gentle, folktale-like narrative style of Ishmael Beah’s compelling debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, belies the endemic injustice and brutality in the story it tells. The Sierra Leone-born Beah, now living in the U.S., first shared his country’s dark reality with A Long Way Gone, a memoir of his violent experiences as a child soldier during its harrowing civil war. For his first work of fiction, Beah again takes readers to his West African homeland with the story of a rural village, ravaged and abandoned during the war, attempting an uneasy rebirth.

The author of the bestseller 'A Long Way Gone' presents a soaring work of fiction.

The first to return to Imperi are three elders, who honor the unidentifiable dead by burying their bones. Soon others begin to come back and repopulate the town, including two teachers, Bockarie and Benjamin, both idealists who believe in the future despite the ugly past they have witnessed. A former child soldier, simply called the Colonel, becomes the “Man in Charge” of a group of damaged orphans like himself, including a repentant boy once forced to amputate the hands of the innocent.

At first the town enjoys a degree of success in getting back on its feet, but everything changes when a foreign-owned mining company returns to extract the rich vein of rutile from the earth. The exploitation of the land and the cheap, expendable labor force drawn from the native population devastates the town, the mining company paying little heed to local traditions. Each successive tragedy—a polluted water source, the rapes of local girls, the unrecorded deaths of workers in industrial accidents—further tears the fabric of Imperi. Still, the elders hold onto a diminishing hope.

Beah writes with a quiet confidence that borrows much from the oral tradition in which he was raised. His arresting style also bears a debt to an earlier generation of post-colonial writers such as Chinua Achebe. The last few chapters, when Bockarie and his family leave Imperi and try their luck in the capital city of Freetown, are less successful than the rest of the book—hurried and a bit overstuffed with incident—but Radiance of Tomorrow is an impressive fiction debut by a talented writer with a singular tale to tell.

The gentle, folktale-like narrative style of Ishmael Beah’s compelling debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, belies the endemic injustice and brutality in the story it tells. The Sierra Leone-born Beah, now living in the U.S., first shared his country’s dark reality with A Long Way…

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