Thane Tierney

FictionLiterary Fiction

Down these mean streaks a man must go

Review by Thane Tierney

One sunny morning in 2010, a man streaks—quite literally—against morning drive-time traffic on Los Angeles’ 110 Freeway, the gray scar etched into the left side of the city’s face. Talk about a Kodak moment, and it’s witnessed by multiple characters in the latest novel by Ivy Pochoda (The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street), who then backtracks from this freeze frame to uncover the forces that have impelled these human molecules to coagulate in this space.

Toggling back and forth between 2006 and 2010, Pochoda tugs on each character’s strand, disentangling it from the knot of LA traffic and the knot of interconnection to reveal a tapestry that is more gritty than pretty. It spans a landscape that stretches from the upper-middle class to the destitute, from Skid Row tents and Beverlywood McMansions to desiccated cabins in the high desert’s dystopian Wonder Valley.

We encounter good people who have done bad things, bad people who have done bad things (but occasionally can’t help doing good, if perhaps accidentally) and a whole bunch of folks looking for, if not necessarily redemption, at least a moment of grace. Pochoda is a master at homing in on the details of both exterior and interior landscapes and crafting characters so palpable that you can feel blood throbbing in their temples and rivulets of sweat evaporating off their necks.

It’s not a far stretch to consider Pochoda to be in the company of James Ellroy, Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker, but the two novelists that most often leap to mind as peers are Walter Mosley and National Book Award finalist Kem Nunn. It wouldn’t be a big surprise to find Wonder Valley on the short list for several awards itself.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Ivy Pochoda for Wonder Valley.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and spent several years commuting daily on the 110 from his home in Inglewood to his office at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. He never saw a naked guy jogging on it.

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

One sunny morning in 2010, a man streaks—quite literally—against morning drive-time traffic on Los Angeles’ 110 Freeway, the gray scar etched into the left side of the city’s face. Talk about a Kodak moment, and it’s witnessed by multiple characters in the latest novel by Ivy Pochoda (The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street), who then backtracks from this freeze frame to uncover the forces that have impelled these human molecules to coagulate in this space.

FictionDebut Fiction

What’s the buzz?

Review by Thane Tierney

Most of us don’t think about bees that much. Few of us know that there are over 20,000 species, and that fewer than 10 of these species produce honey. Or that one out of every three bites of food that we consume relies on them for pollination, and that without our apian friends, blueberries and cherries would more or less cease to exist.

So it might come as a bit of a surprise that Norwegian author and screenwriter Maja Lunde would choose the humble insect as an organizing principle for The History of Bees, her first novel for adults. But here’s the head fake: This book is about bees the same way Moby-Dick is a book about whales or The Moviegoer is about movies.

In some ways, her novel is reminiscent of the 1998 art film The Red Violin, in that it weaves together three fairly disparate stories spread across the better part of two and a half centuries, their only common touch point being the hives that brought honey, economic uncertainty and the possibility of ecological redemption.

Chapters shuttle back and forth between a 19th-century British biologist, a millennial-era American beekeeper and a Chinese hand-pollinator on the cusp of a dystopian 22nd century. At the outset, the connections between the three are opaque, but Lunde’s compelling narrative draws the reader in—more like a spider than a bee, actually. Much as in Ray Bradbury’s famed story “A Sound of Thunder,” the “butterfly effect” is in full effect, as decisions made long ago and far away influence outcomes in unpredictable but realistic ways.

And while it might be putting too fine a point on it, Lunde demonstrates how our social order mirrors that of the bees: Some of us are workers, some drones and a lucky few queens, but each contributes to the upkeep of the hive in ways we may never understand.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, CA, and spent several hundred dollars earlier this year to have a hive humanely removed from his home.

It might come as a bit of a surprise that Norwegian author and screenwriter Maja Lunde would choose the humble insect as an organizing principle for The History of Bees, her first novel for adults. But here’s the head fake: This book is about bees the same way Moby-Dick is a book about whales or The Moviegoer is about movies.

FictionComic Fiction

Looking for love in all the wrong places

Review by Thane Tierney

There’s a joke that pretty much encapsulates the central Weltanschauung (outlook) of Alissa Nutting’s latest novel, Made for Love: “Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also terrifying and confusing.”

Nutting, the award-winning author of Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, drops us in the middle of a mildly dystopian near-future (2019), in which her ensemble cast resembles a box of emotionally damaged (and delightfully neurotic) misfit toys. Hazel Green is trying to escape a loveless marriage to high-tech magnate Byron Gogol, whose character combines elements of Steve Jobs, Svengali and Humbert Humbert. In order to put some distance between herself and her cyber-stalking soon-to-be-ex, she unexpectedly moves into her widower father’s double-wide, where he is residing with Diane, a disturbingly lifelike sex doll. Meanwhile, Jasper Kesper’s accidental amorous encounter with a dolphin has turned him from a con artist and gigolo into an unwitting cetophile.

What could possibly go wrong?

Turns out that William Congreve got it wrong when he opined back in 1697 that “Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” All Hazel wants is to get away from a seemingly omnipotent husband who has planted a chip in her head (so as to effect a digital mind meld). It’s Byron who is filled with a sort of low-affect fury, because Hazel’s defiance represents a personal and professional setback, both of which he finds unacceptable.

All these madcap threads weave into a tapestry worthy of such surreal comic authors as Christopher Moore or Dave Barry, but the novel is underpinned by a profound meditation on the nature of love, and how it not only comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, but also materials and species.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and likes dolphins, but draws the line there.

There’s a joke that pretty much encapsulates the central Weltanschauung (outlook) of Alissa Nutting’s latest novel, Made for Love: “Tell someone you love them today, because life is short. But shout it at them in German, because life is also terrifying and confusing.”

Science Fiction & FantasyFictionScience Fiction

The first days of a stranger nation

Review by Thane Tierney

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Nicholas Espinoza—better known as Hubert, Etc, and later still as Etcetera—is something of a head fake in Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow’s utopian futurist novel, Walkaway. With a name like that, it’s not a wild bet that he’d be the axis around which the novel spins.

But it’s a sucker’s bet. The novel rotates around twin axes, one being a dissection and critique of capitalism in a world that has an excess of unequally distributed resources, the other being Natalie Redwater (aka “Iceweasel”), the daughter of a “zottarich” mover and shaker.

Though Doctorow cites Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as an influence, Walkaway’s paternal grandparents are Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange; on its mom’s side, they’re Stranger from a Strange Land and Walden Two. Like all of those (and the rather less admirable Atlas Shrugged), it can get a little mansplainy as it trots out philosophy.

To wit: Hubert, Etc, dismissively appraises meritocracy by arguing, “‘We’re the best people we know, we’re on top, therefore we have a meritocracy. How do we know we’re the best? Because we’re on top. QED.’ The most amazing thing about ‘meritocracy’ is that so many brilliant captains of industry haven’t noticed that it’s made of such radioactively obvious bullshit you could spot it in orbit.”

The bohemian dropouts in this society, the “walkaways,” (of which Hubert, Etc, and Natalie are two) march off the grid into abandoned hinterlands in search of their own new world order, and when it appears that they may have solved the riddle of death, the stakes for flipping the bird at the establishment rise dramatically.

It may take a beat or two for the non-Wired reader to spool up to speed, but Doctorow has crafted the sexiest egalitarian radical hacktivist squatter-culture philosophical techno-thriller of the year, if not the decade.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and has a mere two middle names.

Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Nicholas Espinoza—better known as Hubert, Etc, and later still as Etcetera—is something of a head fake in Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow’s utopian futurist novel, Walkaway. With a name like that, it’s not a wild bet that he’d be the axis around which the novel spins.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Rebuilding from the rubble

Review by Thane Tierney

It may not be your biggest fear, but it’s probably in the top five: being buried alive. As a rule, we don’t really celebrate our miners much while they’re around, but when a disaster happens, we’re all over them: the movie The 33, about the San José Mine disaster in Chile; the folk song “The Ballad of Springhill,” about the 1958 Nova Scotia cave-in; the Bee Gees’ first pop hit, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” about an imaginary tragedy; Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.”

Inspired by the notorious Sunshine Mine fire of 1972, novelist Kevin Canty’s The Underworld imagines life in the town from shortly before the disaster to right around the time the real healing begins. 

Somehow it seems particularly appropriate for this book to come along at a point in our national history when miners and their livelihoods are often near the center of public debate. Mining is not glamorous work, but Canty drills beneath the surface stereotype to uncover a rich vein of subterranean complexity.

David Wright, the book’s primary protagonist among a vivid ensemble cast, comes from a mining family that feels the impact of the disaster keenly. Like many from the company town, he’s ambivalent about his home, but he’s taking his first tentative steps to break its gravitational bonds, distinguishing him from most of his peers. It would be easy—and wrong—to portray him as either victor or victim, and Canty does here what he did so well in earlier novels such as Winslow in Love and Everything: He plants himself at the corner of Human and Hero and describes what he sees, a journalist of the soul. 

Canty’s publisher cites Russell Banks and Richard Ford as his esteemed literary antecedents, but Canty’s care with prose recalls Raymond Carver, and his empathy for the common man extends a bloodline that reaches back to the likes of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan. Like his New Yorker colleague John McPhee, Canty has a gift for turning the commonplace into the extraordinary by asking the right questions and allowing the truth to unfold.

 

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

It may not be your biggest fear, but it’s probably in the top five: being buried alive. As a rule, we don’t really celebrate our miners much while they’re around, but when a disaster happens, we’re all over them: the movie The 33, about the San José Mine disaster in Chile; the folk song “The Ballad of Springhill,” about the 1958 Nova Scotia cave-in; the Bee Gees’ first pop hit, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” about an imaginary tragedy; Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.”

FictionLiterary FictionHorror

The tale of the tape

Review by Thane Tierney

About midway through his latest novel, Universal Harvester, author John Darnielle drops a potent clue to a larger reveal, but in typical Midwest fashion, it’s unadorned, unheralded, that one massive bass lurking beneath the deceptively calm waters of an otherwise unassuming lake.

Here it is: “You have to get inside to see anything worth seeing, you have to listen long enough to hear the music. Or possibly that’s just a thing you tell yourself when it becomes clear you won’t be leaving. Sometimes that seems more likely. It’s hard to say for sure.”

Darnielle, who is probably best known in pop culture as the prime mover behind the celebrated lo-fi indie band The Mountain Goats, was also nominated for the National Book Award with his NY Times bestselling debut novel, Wolf in White Van. In Universal Harvester, he explores the role of novelist as tarot card reader; as he uncovers each scene, he seems to say, “This could mean X, or it could mean the opposite of X. Let’s flip over the next card to see what it reveals.” The plot springs from a series of unexplained and vaguely disturbing scenes that continue to show up on videotapes rented from an indie store in the hamlet of Nevada (pronounced Ne-VAY-dah), Iowa. Slacker clerk Jeremy Heldt gradually—and a little reluctantly—immerses himself in attempting to unravel the mysteries of what the footage is, where it came from, and what it means.

The spirit of the Under Toad from John Irving’s The World According to Garp hangs heavy over this novel. Corn fields that appear benign under the noonday sun turn sinister after dark, basements and barns conceal clandestine confrontations, shadow and substance play tag in imagination and reality. One almost expects Rod Serling to step out in an epilogue, wrapping everything up with a neat bow, but Darnielle refuses to make it that easy for the reader. Universal Harvester both demands one’s attention and rewards it, but ambiguity is interwoven throughout its warp and weft. Out there on the lit-fic frontier where horror meets mystery and reaches for something beyond, that’s the ultimate achievement.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, CA, and has actually driven through Nevada, Iowa.

About midway through his latest novel, Universal Harvester, author John Darnielle drops a potent clue to a larger reveal, but in typical Midwest fashion, it’s unadorned, unheralded, that one massive bass lurking beneath the deceptively calm waters of an otherwise unassuming lake.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Finding a home after the war

Review by Thane Tierney

When he’s not making philosophical pronouncements or asking difficult questions, 13-year-old Attila Beck functions as the moral axis around which Joseph Kertes’ slender yet consequential new novel, The Afterlife of Stars, revolves. Kertes, a Hungarian refugee who escaped to Canada after the revolution of 1956, won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction for his previous novel, Gratitude, which also featured the Beck clan. In this book, set 11 years after the end of World War II in Budapest, it’s not the family’s Jewishness that constitutes the existential threat, but their Hungarian identity, as a revolution against Soviet control is brutally crushed in less than two weeks.

Playing Tonto to Attila’s Lone Ranger (and sometimes Estragon to his Vladimir), younger sibling Robert tells the tale of the family’s escape with a clear-eyed innocence that belies his experience as they are driven from Budapest to Paris to some unnamed Canadian destination.

Part of what makes the book so compelling is its sympathetic portrayal of political refugees at a time when they are frequently misunderstood at best, and demonized at worst. And while Hungary’s then-oppressor, the Soviet Union, no longer exists, recent Russian incursions into Ukraine (and Syria) offer a potent reminder of how, even in the course of a single novelist’s lifetime, history can repeat itself.

But the beating heart of this book is the relationship between Robert and Attila, a remarkable pair of brothers whose bond goes beyond affection, beyond shared history, beyond blood. They are two young men who, once met, you’ll never forget.

 

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

When he’s not making philosophical pronouncements or asking difficult questions, 13-year-old Attila Beck functions as the moral axis around which Joseph Kertes’ slender yet consequential new novel, The Afterlife of Stars, revolves.
FictionPopular Fiction

A small life in the balance

Review by Thane Tierney

At a time when race relations loom larger in the public eye than any decade since the 1960s, New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult has plunged into the deep end of the conversation with Small Great Things, a tale of prejudice, tragedy, justice, privilege and conflict.

The title comes from a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way.” And for the most part, the book’s protagonist, nurse Ruth Jefferson, is the personification of that ideal. Unfortunately, fate deals her a nearly unwinnable set of cards when she is alone in the nursery as young Davis Bauer goes into cardiac arrest. Normally, her instincts would kick in immediately, but this baby is different: He’s the son of white supremacist parents who have explicitly directed that no person of color be allowed to care for him. And Ruth is black. For a few critical moments, Ruth wonders whether she should violate the order and potentially lose her job, or jump in, knowing that she will soon be able to turn him over to another nurse.

Unfortunately, Murphy’s Law ruled the nursery that night.

After a code blue is called and an expert team—including Ruth, who is pressed into service despite the directive—races through its paces to try to save young Davis, but the baby dies. Running through the postmortem in her head, Ruth wonders if her initial hesitation contributed to the child’s death.

She’s not the only one. Ruth gets charged with one count of murder and one count of negligent homicide. Suddenly the respected nurse is just another defendant, whose future hangs on the ability of her white public defender, Kennedy McQuarrie, to figure out some strategy that will keep her client out of jail.

While riveting, this is by no means an easy book; all the players have virtues and flaws, and uncomfortable questions are raised on virtually every page. And while a few of her characters embody behaviors that some might find formulaic, Picoult navigates the waters like a seasoned journalist, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, trying to do the small things in a great way. The first step to solving a problem is recognizing it; the second is trying to speak about it honestly, and whatever readers think of the result, Picoult has made a genuine effort here, as she details both in her author’s note and her acknowledgements. It’s a laudable attempt, and no small thing.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and tries to steer clear of both hospitals and courts.

At a time when race relations loom larger in the public eye than any decade since the 1960s, New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult has plunged into the deep end of the conversation with Small Great Things, a tale of prejudice, tragedy, justice, privilege and conflict.

FictionSatire

A Floridian flight of fancy

Review by Thane Tierney

The latest book from Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, Razor Girl, has a plot that gets pretty crazy, out-of-control and hilariously cockamamie. Then again, it’s set in Florida. For all we know, the inspiration could have come off the Herald’s front page. 

When talent agent Lane Coolman’s rented car gets rear-ended 27 miles out of Key West, it’s not so much an accident as an on-purpose. The causative agent is a stunning young redhead who claims to have been distracted while performing some personal grooming that should not be undertaken with a straight razor in a car at all, let alone while driving. As a consequence, Coolman never makes it to the onstage performance of his client, faux-redneck reality star Buck Nance (né Matthew Romberg), and as a consequence, said gig goes sideways in extravagant fashion. 

Nance narrowly manages to escape the mayhem he caused at The Parched Pirate, but then he drops off the grid entirely, setting his agency’s honchos alight with what passes for concern in Hollywood. And when they realize that perhaps Buck’s disappearance might be good for his show, “Bayou Brethren,” they set in motion a chain of events that leads to kidnapping, manslaughter, redemption and an ever-evolving set of deal memos.

This, of course, is only one through-line in the novel, whose disparate strands end up woven tighter than a macramé lanyard by story’s end. Along the way we meet a detective who’s been busted down to vermin inspector; a Mafia don nicknamed Big Noogie; a grifter who schemes to import sand from Cuba; a class-action shyster; a Syrian immigrant whose vacation cruise takes a deadly turn; a cross-section of the “Nance” clan, who fuse Honey Boo-Boo’s low-rent splendor with the Kardashians’ relentless drive for self-promotion . . . and of course, the Razor Girl herself.

Only a skilled verbal stunt pilot like Hiaasen could bring this flight of fancy in for a safe landing, but there’s definitely some turbulence along the way, so you’ll want to keep those seat belts fastened.

RELATED CONTENT: Read an interview with Carl Hiaasen about Razor Girl.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The latest book from Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen, Razor Girl, has a plot that gets pretty crazy, out-of-control and hilariously cockamamie. Then again, it’s set in Florida. For all we know, the inspiration could have come off the Herald’s front page.
FictionLiterary Fiction

When the trust fund runs dry

Review by Thane Tierney

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” In Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, PEN Center USA Fiction Award winner Ramona Ausubel explores that theme quite handily.

This ideal summer novel grapples with a Tolstoyan knapsack overflowing with Serious Themes: Love. Betrayal. Death. Wealth. Privilege. War. Coming of Age. And yet, Ausubel has nimbly managed to capture these in miniature, a mini solar system that orbits around the dollar, with a fluctuating gravitational pull that shapes and distorts all the objects in its sphere.

Make no mistake: Edgar and Fern Keating, the book’s protagonists, are easy to dislike. Not only are they suffused with the treacly bouquet of kids whose safety net allowed them to try on hardship as a fashion statement, but they make some staggeringly irresponsible choices. Long story short, the trust-fund babies’ trust fund runs out, and they are thrown into an existential crisis, to which they respond in unpredictable ways.

As the novel bounces back and forth in time (from 1966 to 1976), Ausubel peels away the layers of Edgar’s and Fern’s personae, offering nonjudgmental insight into the events that shaped them and their chosen trajectories. By the end of it all, anyone not rooting for the couple (and their irrepressible daughter, Cricket) to pull off an overtime win needs to look more within themselves than toward the author, who has stitched together an affecting and quietly powerful character study of people who are different than you and me.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” In Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, PEN Center USA Fiction Award winner Ramona Ausubel explores that theme quite handily.
FictionHumor

A husband and wife take on a high-stakes legal case

Review by Thane Tierney

Every professional thrown in contact with the public has at least one client who’s, to put it charitably, challenging. But the husband-and-wife attorney team of Joe and Lisa Stone have managed, in “Petty Lettie” VanSandt, to have landed an international gold medal champion. Irascible, tattooed, litigious, paranoid, antisocial and capricious—and it goes downhill from there. Fortunately, Joe has a patient mien, which turns out to be both the source of affection and affliction in The Jezebel Remedy, the fourth novel from Virginia Circuit Court Judge Martin Clark.

As proven in his New York Times Notable debut, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, Clark has a practiced ear for the subtlety and nuance of everyday existence. While the lawyer couple clearly have affection for one another, Joe’s wife is getting twitchy after 20 years of “community center Zumba classes, flannel, mismatched silver, lukewarm champagne and box steps every December 31, matted fleece bedroom slippers and sex so mission control she could count down the seconds between her husband biting her neck and squeezing her breast.”

When the Stones’ cantankerous client turns up dead just days after amending her will for the umpteenth time, both Joe’s unflappable demeanor and Lisa’s near occasion of adultery set the stage for a series of events that could find them disbarred, bankrupted or worse. It appears that a seemingly useless formula for a compound called “Wound Velvet,” left among the deceased woman’s estate, has more value than her executor (Joe) could possibly have known, to the degree that a multinational corporation is willing to do whatever it takes to secure the patent . . . even if they have to crush the Stones to do it.

Unlike many legal thrillers, The Jezebel Remedy doesn’t turn on high-tension courtroom theatrics to make its impact, though it’s plenty clear from the legal proceedings documented in its pages that Clark knows his way around the bench. Instead, he crafts a portrait of fine but flawed humans who find themselves unexpectedly thrust into the deep end of a system where the law can be either a life raft or a dead weight, depending on who gets to make the final judgment call.

 

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

Every professional thrown in contact with the public has at least one client who’s, to put it charitably, challenging. But the husband-and-wife attorney team of Joe and Lisa Stone managed to land an international gold medal champion in The Jezebel Remedy, the fourth novel from Virginia Circuit Court Judge Martin Clark.
FictionHistorical Fiction

From obscurity to fame and back again—and again

Review by Thane Tierney

It’s been quite a run lately for Civil War-era African Americans. Not only was Solomon Northrup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, adapted into a triple Academy Award winner (including Best Picture), but now author Jeffery Renard Allen has resurrected the career—if perhaps not quite the true life story—of Thomas Greene Wiggins, also known as Blind Tom, in his second novel, Song of the Shank. Wiggins was perhaps the most unlikely of stars ever thrust on the international stage; sightless, probably autistic, heavyset (though somewhat handsome in a rough-hewn way) and, for the first 16 years of his life, a slave.

Some people have suggested that Blind Tom never ultimately escaped his "previous condition of servitude," but that’s another story for another time.

In many ways, Allen treats language in Song of the Shank the way an Impressionist approached paint: a little color laid on a canvas in a bold swipe meant to signify something much more complex than itself. Stand too close, and it’s a nearly indecipherable jumble of form and light and shadow; step back, and an image emerges, but it calls upon all the senses of the viewer to bring it into focus and give it meaning.

Allen is remarkably fluid with time and perspective as well. The novel opens in 1866, but hopscotches back as far as 1849 and forward to 1869, roughly the first third of Blind Tom’s life. And while some of that extraordinary life has been fairly well documented—Wiggins was the first African American ever to give a command performance at the White House, at the request of President James Buchanan—many of its details are speculative. It’s here that Allen grabs the reins and gallops as if astride a thoroughbred. While some critics have compare his storytelling to that of Beckett, Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, perhaps the more appropriate point of reference is Walter Mosley’s depiction of Robert Johnson in his 1995 tour de force, RL’s Dream.

Unlike Johnson, Blind Tom didn’t leave any actual recordings behind (though pianist John Davis released an excellent re-creation of Wiggins’ work in 2000), but both of their lives were surrounded by myth, and the gaps allow Allen a wide berth in reimagining a mosaic that forms a fairly complete, if somewhat fragmented, portrait.

That he pieced together anything readable at all, given the paucity of actual documentary evidence, is testament to the tenacity of Allen’s decade-long research journey and his narrative prowess. But that’s damning the novel with faint praise. He’s managed to gather the caustic consequences of fame, a mini-history of American race relations, Reconstruction, the solitary interior life of an artist, and a whole lot more, between the covers of a book worthy of any attentive reader’s notice.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, less than a mile from where Ray Charles, Lowell Fulson and Ella Fitzgerald are buried.

 

It’s been quite a run lately for Civil War-era African Americans. Not only was Solomon Northrup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, adapted into a triple Academy Award winner (including Best Picture), but now author Jeffery Renard Allen has resurrected the career—if perhaps not quite the true life story—of Thomas Greene Wiggins, also known as Blind Tom, in his second novel, Song of the Shank. Wiggins was perhaps the most unlikely of stars ever thrust on the international stage; sightless, probably autistic, heavyset (though somewhat handsome in a rough-hewn way) and, for the first 16 years of his life, a slave.

FictionLiterary Fiction

An itch that can’t quite get scratched

Review by Thane Tierney

Every one of us has a handful—at least—of Nagging Questions That Seemingly Can’t Be Answered. Some of them are spiritual or existential, some of them concern the future or the past, some of them relate to half-remembered relationships or half-forgotten events. And like loose fillings, they just get in our grill and tantalize us. Our daily ability to cope with the frustration of their existence in some ways defines us, or at least describes us, as adults.

In Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, McSweeney’s founder (and 2012 National Book Award finalist for A Hologram for the King) Dave Eggers breaks out of the blocks at record-setting pace, depositing the reader, his protagonist and a captive astronaut in an abandoned building without even so much as a how-de-do. And then things begin to get strange. Because Thomas, his rookie kidnapper-turned-inquisitor, doesn’t merely have baggage; he’s towing a whole fantasy freight train in the crazy-quilt mass of his misfiring synapses.

At first, Thomas merely wants to probe the mind of an astronaut acquaintance he once considered a hero. But riddles, like potato chips, are addictive, and Thomas can’t content himself to stop with the first one. Without giving away too much of the plot, Thomas actions begin to resemble the plate spinners one used to see at the circus or on “Ed Sullivan,” racing against time and gravity at the ragged edge of composure.

Eggers has written this slender novel entirely in dialogue, and not in the way one is used to seeing it. To wit, this interchange between Thomas and Kev (the astronaut):

—See, this bends my mind. Cornerback on the football team, 4.0. MIT for engineering. Then you speak Urdu and become an astronaut with NASA and now it’s defunded.

—It’s not defunded. The funding is going elsewhere.

—Into little robots. WALL-Es that putter around Mars.

—There’s real value to that.

—Kev, c’mon.

A couple hundred pages of that may seem a bit like a five-mile sprint, but it’s actually a groove fairly easily settled into, and it nimbly underscores the urgency of the circumstances.

Leave it to Eggers to play up the situation’s moral ambiguity as well, much as he did in last year’s The Circle. Virtually every character in the book combines nobility and culpability, and while their grays may not present themselves in 50 shades, at least none of them are painted in black and white.

In terms of pacing, Your Fathers would seemingly advance itself as a terrific beach read, but the plot lends itself to a little overcast. That said, it deserves to be shortlisted for the summer, an outstanding travelling companion for a coast-to-coast flight . . . especially if you’re stuck in a middle seat.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Los Angeles, and never, ever flies cross-country without at least three books in his carry-on.

In Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, McSweeney’s founder (and 2012 National Book Award finalist for A Hologram for the King) Dave Eggers breaks out of the blocks at record-setting pace, depositing the reader, his protagonist and a captive astronaut in an abandoned building without even so much as a how-de-do.

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