Tom Deignan

FictionLiterary Fiction

A couple makes an irresistible offer

Review by Tom Deignan

For better or worse, Joyce Maynard is best known for her memoir At Home in the World, which chronicled (among other things) a year-long love affair Maynard had with J.D Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive Catcher in the Rye author was 53. It should be added, however, that Maynard has slowly but surely compiled an impressive body of fiction, including 2009’s Labor Day, which was turned into a 2013 film starring Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet. 

Maynard’s latest is the cleverly titled Under the Influence. Helen’s marriage to Dwight, initially exciting, has fallen apart. Then one evening, a habit of drinking too much wine before bed has disastrous consequences: Helen loses custody of her beloved son, Ollie. Having kicked booze, Helen—a photographer who must also do catering service to make extra money—meets and falls under the influence of a glamorous, wealthy “magic couple” named Ava and Swift. They seem to be everything Helen wants to be—and more importantly, they offer to help Helen win back custody of Ollie. 

At times Maynard’s characters are drawn a touch heavy-handed, so that readers are likely to see the looming problems in Helen’s life long before she does. Nevertheless, Maynard deftly portrays Helen’s sense of helplessness and vulnerability as events build to a disturbing climax. Under the Influence is ultimately an absorbing portrait of complex characters confronting real problems.

 

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

Update: A previous version of this review listed Josh Brolin as an Oscar winner. We have corrected the error online.

For better or worse, Joyce Maynard is best known for her memoir At Home in the World, which chronicled (among other things) a year-long love affair Maynard had with J.D Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive Catcher in the Rye author was 53. It should be added, however, that Maynard has slowly but surely compiled an impressive body of fiction, including 2009’s Labor Day, which was turned into a 2013 film starring Oscar winners Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet.
FictionDebut Fiction

Don’t call her damaged goods

Review by Tom Deignan

From John Wray’s Lowboy to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, contemporary authors have boldly chronicled the minds, trials and tribulations of characters facing a range of cognitive and neurological challenges. Michelle Adelman’s debut, Piece of Mind, fits neatly into this genre.

Adelman’s protagonist, Lucy, was struck by a car when she was 3, leaving her with a traumatic brain injury "before it was trendy," as Lucy wryly offers in the novel’s blackly comic opening line. There’s a dash of Silver Linings Playbook in this portrait of an entire family confronting these challenges, as well as in the book’s unlikely romance.

Strong coffee, art (many pencil sketches are actually included in the book) and the Central Park Zoo have lent a semblance of structure to Lucy’s life, but she still struggles mightily. As if her physical injury weren’t enough, Lucy and her younger brother, Nate, lost their mother at a young age. This leaves Lucy seeing ghosts and relying on her father, who attempts to nudge his now 27-year-old daughter into the real world. These efforts are sometimes practical, occasionally hapless, but always loving. Which is why it is such a blow when Lucy’s father is felled by a heart attack, forcing Nate to assume a parental role he is not ready for. Strong coffee, art (many pencil sketches are actually included in the book) and the Central Park Zoo have lent a semblance of structure to Lucy’s life, but she still struggles mightily.

Piece of Mind lightens up when Lucy meets Frank at a Manhattan coffee shop. Frank’s got familial and social problems of his own, and as he and Lucy (quite awkwardly) grow closer, they have to figure out if they are the solutions to their respective troubles or, instead, just a new set of very complex problems. Adelman’s spare prose ably captures Lucy’s inner workings, though the book’s flashes of black comedy may make some readers hungry for more to lighten up the more somber proceedings. In the end, a colorful minor character named Enid pushes Lucy to fulfill the promise implicit in the Moliere quote that serves as this often touching novel’s epigraph: “The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.”

From John Wray’s Lowboy to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, contemporary authors have boldly chronicled the minds, trials and tribulations of characters facing a range of cognitive and neurological challenges. Michelle Adelman’s debut, Piece of Mind, fits neatly into this genre.
FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Marriage meltdown

Review by Tom Deignan

From Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Gone Girl, contemporary marriage has frequently been subject to scathing literary portrayals. Andria Williams, however, may well be the first to set marital tribulations against the backdrop of a (literal) nuclear meltdown. Given this, ahem, explosive premise, it’s interesting to note that Williams’ debut eschews the extremities favored by the likes of Edward Albee or Gillian Flynn. The Longest Night is a closely observed study with its feet planted firmly in domestic realism. This is not to imply that Williams shies away from harsh truths. The subtlety she employs makes the novel’s twists and turns—and especially its conclusion—all the more affecting, even devastating.

The novel opens with a brief prologue set in 1961, which finds Paul Collier, an operator for a small nuclear reactor, in a panic as the reactor melts down. Williams then takes us back to 1959, introducing Paul’s wife, Nat, and their two young daughters. Paul and Nat are new to Idaho Falls, and the latter is thrust into the demands of being a military wife and a young mother. Then there are the Colliers’ neighbors, a toxic couple who offer a fearful glimpse into marital days yet to come, and who set in motion the figurative and literal explosions which propel The Longest Night.

Williams—herself the wife of an active-duty naval officer who has been stationed all over the U.S.—captures the nomadic nature of military life well, and she treats her flawed characters with humanity and dignity. Ultimately, The Longest Night is not only a revealing story of a community gripped by Cold War paranoia, but also an unsettling portrait of commitment and desire.

From Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Gone Girl, contemporary marriage has frequently been subject to scathing literary portrayals. Andria Williams, however, may well be the first to set marital tribulations against the backdrop of a (literal) nuclear meltdown. Given this, ahem, explosive premise, it’s interesting to note that Williams’ debut eschews the extremities favored by the likes of Edward Albee or Gillian Flynn. The Longest Night is a closely observed study with its feet planted firmly in domestic realism.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A family caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal

Review by Tom Deignan

It takes a bold author to write about an event which is so historically hazy that even the novel’s narrator wonders, “How many people even remember it?”

That’s Karen Olsson’s thirty-something protagonist Helen Atherton, referring to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.  Helen’s father, Tim, was an ambitious Washington operative who got caught up in the scandal and ultimately resigned, under circumstances that still baffle Helen and her two sisters well into the first decade of the 21st century, when the bulk of this novel is set.  Thankfully, All the Houses is more of a family novel than a political or historical one.  The best scenes are the often awkward, occasionally touching ones between Tim (who is recovering from a heart attack) and Helen, whose efforts at screenwriting in L.A. have flopped, and who finds herself back in D.C.  This puts Helen on a collision course with her older sister Courtney, with whom she has always had a tumultuous relationship.  “The urge to annihilate each other had always been there,” Helen notes, “tamed over the years but never uprooted.”  In fact, the family scenes in All the Houses can be so vivid and charged that much of the political and historical material pales in comparison.

Though she’s written a previous novel called Waterloo, Olsson is primarily a journalist, so much of her prose is straightforward, though there are pleasant flourishes (one aging political player has a “wrinkled face like a face etched on money”) and touching moments, including a scene featuring Helen watching Tim change a tire.  Olsson’s readers will need some tolerance for adult characters who still bicker over their high school years.  Nevertheless, Olsson’s portrait of family tension manages to be unsentimental and unsettling, without venturing into bleakness—even if the book’s title does come from Franz Kafka’s diaries. In the end, if you think of a nation as a kind of family, then one of Helen’s questions certainly resonates far beyond the Athertons: “Was everybody angry in every family?”

It takes a bold author to write about an event which is so historically hazy that even the novel’s narrator wonders, “How many people even remember it?”
FictionDebut Fiction

A dark and visceral exploration of family

Review by Tom Deignan

Memoirist and literary agent Bill Clegg (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man) has now conquered the world of literary fiction with his searing debut, Did You Ever Have a Family. As a boy “wakes to the sound of sirens,” we learn that an explosion has taken the life of a bride and groom just before their wedding day. Clegg then slowly, intricately reveals the wider ramifications of this unthinkable tragedy through the eyes of more than a dozen characters. The title (from an Alan Shapiro poem) most deeply refers to June Reid, who lost the most in the explosion that fateful day. But Clegg’s wide lens compels the reader to think deeply about what a family is and how they influence us, for better or worse. 

The pain in this novel is raw and visceral, though there are brilliant, subtle touches as well. In one scene, a mother and son have a talk they should have had a long time ago. Across the street, “two teenage boys scrape paint from the house,” a revealing image of painstakingly stripping away the past. Ultimately, readers of Did You Ever Have a Family will be reminded of both Faulkner (in Clegg’s dark material and kaleidoscopic storytelling) and Colum McCann (in the genuine search for meaning or redemption amid tragedy). 

Clegg’s novel is not for every reader. In addition to the bleak events, the flashbacks and lack of dialogue can become a bit wearisome. Nevertheless, Clegg has produced an insightful portrait of adversity. The characters, by and large, are memorable and their struggles genuine. One of Clegg’s guilt-wracked characters describes the reflection of the night sky on a lake as “both ominous and beautiful.” The same can be said of Did You Ever Have a Family.

 

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

Memoirist and literary agent Bill Clegg (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man) has now conquered the world of literary fiction with his searing debut, Did You Ever Have a Family. As a boy “wakes to the sound of sirens,” we learn that an explosion has taken the life of a bride and groom just before their wedding day. Clegg then slowly, intricately reveals the wider ramifications of this unthinkable tragedy through the eyes of more than a dozen characters.
FictionDebut Fiction

The grace of growing up

Review by Tom Deignan

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s doomed Puritans and Flannery O’Connor’s cursed freaks, right up to Marilynne Robinson’s devout, reserved Midwesterners, there is a rich tradition of religious novels in American literature. Val Brelinski explores similar themes in her provocatively titled debut novel The Girl Who Slept With God. Brelinski, who has served as a fellow and lecturer at Stanford, clearly drew upon her own life to write this book. She grew up in Idaho, a daughter of devout evangelical Christians, just like Grace and Jory, the troubled teens at the center of her novel. After a brief, compelling opening, which finds Jory in a “house of . . . exile,” running off to meet a mystery man in an ice cream truck, Brelinski downshifts to introduce us to the Quanbeck family: Jory, 14, and Grace, 17; their younger sister, Frances, their father, Oren (a devoutly religious professor of science) and their sickly, unstable mother. It is 1970, and Grace has returned from a missionary trip to Mexico pregnant. Equal parts enraged and perplexed, Oren banishes Grace and Jory, who’s having her own coming-of-age problems. This means a new school and new friends for the withdrawn Jory, as well an outgoing neighbor named Mrs. Kleinfelter. By the time the man in the ice cream truck arrives, Grace and Jory have built themselves an alternative—and possibly more supportive—family.

The Girl Who Slept With God is not without flaws: The family sparring occasionally becomes tedious and some dialogue could have been pruned. But Brelinkski builds a realistic depiction of Jory's struggles with school, love, clothes and even her own body. And she commendably avoids the pitfalls of so many books, movies and TV shows by examining religion with depth and complexity. The narrative momentum builds impressively as Jory uncovers secrets and confronts painful truths about family, love, religion and growing up.

 

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s doomed Puritans and Flannery O’Connor’s cursed freaks, right up to Marilynne Robinson’s devout, reserved Midwesterners, there is a rich tradition of religious novels in American literature. Val Brelinski explores similar themes in her provocatively titled debut novel The Girl Who Slept With God.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionThriller

A Second Life

Review by Tom Deignan

English audiologist-turned-author S.J. Watson made a big splash with his debut thriller, Before I Go to Sleep, in 2011. The book chronicled the struggles of a woman who suffers from an acute form of amnesia, and has to reconstruct the details of her life every day when she wakes up. Nicole Kidman starred in the much-anticipated (though tepidly received) big-screen version of Watson’s book, which was translated into over 40 languages.

Watson mines similar themes—the slippery nature of memory and reality, a married woman confronting some serious inner demons—in his follow up, A Second Life. The crippling effects of amnesia are here replaced by the rabbit hole of social media, where people are free to reinvent themselves—sometimes to disastrous, even murderous, results. Julia leads a seemingly placid life in London, though it’s not long before we learn about her dark past: alcoholism, a son who is, in fact, not hers biologically, a youthful bohemian phase she can’t quite let go of. When the tragic news arrives that Julia’s sister has been murdered, old wounds severely aggravate new ones.

Watson’s depiction of Julia’s familial and domestic struggles are convincing, particularly the little wars husbands and wives wage. Julia—whose sister’s death “sliced [her] life in two”—literally becomes another person (online) in pursuit of her sister’s killer. She also drifts into a romantic affair that quickly becomes disturbing on a number of levels, though it must be added that Watson’s portrayal of the dark side of Internet hook-ups feels rather dated, even if it is meant to be a reflection of Julia’s naivete. The eventual solution will either read as bold and risky, or simply frustrating. Either way, Watson can’t be accused of skimping on the twists and turns.

A life sliced in two in A Second Life.
FictionDebut Fiction

A classic heroine moves to Queens

Review by Tom Deignan

Charlotte Brontë makes her way to 21st-century New York City by way of Korea in this latest spin on Jane Eyre from first-time author Patricia Park. The title character is Jane Re, “a honhyol, a mixed-blood,” with a Korean mother and American father. As if the “Koreanish” Jane (as she describes herself) does not already feel like an outsider, her parents die, and she is shipped off to live with her gruff uncle in Flushing, Queens—an enclave that is “all Korean, all the time,” and where “your personal business was communal property.”

Re Jane is breezy and accessible, at its best when portraying Jane’s haplessness and frustration. “I traveled nearly seven thousand miles across the globe to escape societal censure only to end up in the second-largest Korean community in the Western World,” she says wryly of her childhood move to the U.S.

The Jane Eyre connection here is substantial (a key character even shares the pen name under which Brontë published her masterpiece), though not slavish, which makes sense given that Park’s interest in feminism goes beyond the Women’s Studies professor who plays an important role in the book.

Jane’s Rochester is an unhappily married Irish-Italian Brooklyn native who must also contend with a surly young daughter, although he moves a little more quickly than Brontë’s brooding hunk. Readers may differ on the ultimate plausibility of his relationship with our heroine, and occasionally Park’s chatty tone becomes flat or needlessly melodramatic. Nevertheless, Park offers real insight into assimilationist struggles in comments such as “Immigrant households did not talk about Derrida or The New York Review of Books. Conversation was a luxury, rendered in broken fits and starts.”

Some of Re Jane’s most intriguing sections unfold during an impulsive post-9/11 return to Seoul, where Jane lands a job teaching English, and where she must make a major decision about her love life, thus adding yet another layer of confusion to her sense of cultural conflict.

None of the conflicts here are resolved in particularly shocking ways, but Park’s portrait of Korean-American life feels authentic and is ultimately endearing. Charlotte Brontë would be proud.

 

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

Charlotte Brontë makes her way to 21st-century New York City by way of Korea in this latest spin on Jane Eyre from first-time author Patricia Park. The title character is Jane Re, “a honhyol, a mixed-blood,” with a Korean mother and American father. As if the “Koreanish” Jane (as she describes herself) does not already feel like an outsider, her parents die, and she is shipped off to live with her gruff uncle in Flushing, Queens—an enclave that is “all Korean, all the time,” and where “your personal business was communal property.”
Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

On the heels of a ghost

Review by Tom Deignan

The great Richard Price (Clockers, Lush Life) dons a new literary persona as Harry Brandt for this crackling thriller. Haunted NYPD Detective Billy Graves' very name suggests not only his bleak working hours but also a death that landed him on the, well, graveyard shift. Det. Graves is a second-generation cop and had been a rising star until a mishap killed an innocent bystander, leaving Graves with a ghost—a crook that got away.

Several of Graves’ equally dysfunctional co-workers are similarly haunted by these “whites,” bad guys “who had committed criminal obscenities . . . then walked away untouched by justice.” To call these cops flawed would be like describing the Grand Canyon as a mere hole in the ground, but they are also dedicated. Perhaps too much so, as Graves begins connecting the dots when his “white” turns up dead.

The Whites is ultimately not quite as intricate or poetic (or long) as Price’s best work. It is a great read nonetheless, laugh-out-loud funny at times, whether the source of the humor is grim, mundane or—in the case of a handcuffed lawnmower—downright absurd. Price’s best passages are rooted in his peerless urban realism, though he also has lots of fun letting the plot drift away from the realm of strict plausibility. None of this makes The Whites any less entertaining, nor should this obscure genuinely emotional elements of the story, including Graves’ shaky but loving marriage and a touching mystery involving a hematologist.

So long as your tolerance for NYPD lingo (“One PP,” anybody?) is high, and your patience for cops who bend (or obliterate) the rules even higher, The Whites is (either) an impressive debut or a high-octane addition to the already-impressive Price oeuvre.

The great Richard Price (Clockers, Lush Life) dons a new literary persona as Harry Brandt for this crackling thriller. Haunted NYPD Detective Billy Graves' very name suggests not only his bleak working hours but also a death that landed him on the, well, graveyard shift.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Great evil within the human heart

Review by Tom Deignan

It’s no easy feat to cast a German who admits to cheering Hitler’s election as the lead detective in a murder mystery. But readers quickly discover that little is as it seems in this dark historical thriller based on an actual gruesome crime spree that shook Nazi Germany in the months before the U.S. entered World War II.

Georg Heuser, a talented, young detective who emphasizes to the reader that he never technically joined the Nazi party, is teamed up with a grizzled veteran to find the so-called S-Bahn murderer, who not only violently kills women but also seems to get a sexual thrill out of doing so. Ostland alternates between Heuser’s investigation and that of Paula Siebert, who is sent to Europe more than a decade after WWII’s end to look into Nazi war crimes, including Heuser’s. How did the ambitious Heuser—who went to great lengths to distinguish himself from the thuggish Nazis he loathed—become yet another war criminal? That is the question that propels this insightful novel, which makes strong use of historical events and figures to create two compelling narratives.

Author David Thomas occasionally relies too heavily on telling rather than showing (Heuser superfluously describes himself as “filled with ambition and determination”), and the dialogue at times falls flat. But Heuser is an undoubtedly disturbing and fascinating character, while the (fictional) Siebert stands in for the horrified reader as we learn of the inhuman depths to which Heuser, and so many like him, sank in the name of some grotesque program of racial purity. The S-Bahn killings, Thomas makes painfully clear, foreshadowed the more widespread horrors that Heuser and his comrades inflicted on the civilized world.

It’s no easy feat to cast a German who admits to cheering Hitler’s election as the lead detective in a murder mystery. But readers quickly discover that little is as it seems in this dark historical thriller based on an actual gruesome crime spree that shook Nazi Germany in the months before the U.S. entered World War II.

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