Aspiring novelists are apt to underestimate the price the life exacts from an author. "Writing a book," said Orwell, "is a horrible, exhausting struggle." And quite often writers are as disastrous in their personal lives as they are exalted on the page. One such human tornado is the protagonist of Adam O'Fallon Price's bitter but authentic debut novel, The Grand Tour.

The writer, Richard, is a Vietnam veteran with a drinking problem, some failed marriages and an estranged daughter. The damaged Vietnam veteran is a Hollywood trope, but salable: after a few mediocre novels, Richard strikes gold with a war memoir. Portions of the memoir appear in Price's novel. They are unconvincing, but we later get a good if shocking explanation for this.

Price includes these excerpts because they are readings during Richard's book tour. Hence the novel's title, which also plays on yesteryear's upper-class romps through continental Europe. Yet Price's America is an ugly one, especially when seen through Richard's jaundiced eyes.

Richard’s companion on the tour is Vance, an impressionable 19-year-old who worships Richard for his writing but finds the person an unreliable nihilist. Richard has gravitas, but his writing is the only thing redeeming a life of conventional failure. (Orwell wrote about that too.) He even tells Vance to do something useful, to do anything but write.

The novel thus becomes an extended effort to justify itself against its subject's negations. Every occasion on which a blotto Richard ascends another dais is a grim triumph over human absurdity. He repeats his mantra to anyone who will listen: "The book sold."

Price, meanwhile, is a witty and mordant writer with substantial largeness of heart. He's akin to Frederick Exley, or a breezier Malcolm Lowry. For all the meretricious longueurs about Vietnam, the novel is one of the most believable American novels of the past few years, a kind of On the Road for the lumpenproletariat. Price may or may not be a wreck himself, but one hopes he doesn't take Richard's advice.

Growing up and growing apart from friends is an inevitable—and bittersweet—part of life, one that has been poignantly captured in Alice Adams’ debut novel, Invincible Summer. The novel starts in 1997 as four friends graduate on the brink of a new millennium, and takes them through 20 summers. 

Readers follow the characters through the decades, from the sunny coast of the Greek Islands to the rainy streets of London. Evie, the quiet and practical main character, finds her inner confidence while pursuing a high-profile finance job.The sweet and irresistibly lovable Benedict stays in academia to pursue a Ph.D. in physics, only to spend his life chasing scientific discoveries that are as frustrating as his love life. Added to the mix are cool siblings Sylvie and Lucien—who, despite their failures, are infinitely relatable characters. The creative Sylvie was marked from the start as a great artist but struggles to make her way in the real world, while her playboy brother works as a night club promoter.

Readers at any stage of life will see themselves within the pages of Invincible Summer and will recognize the terror of adulthood and the difficulties of keeping friendships alive. Adams, whose own background is as diverse as her characters’ (she has worked as a waitress and an investment banker, and has a B.A. in philosophy), particularly shines when focusing on Evie’s finance job. With beautiful attention to detail and keen observations on life, love and even finance, Adams has crafted a delightful novel that is as insightful as it is breezy.

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

In the Gospel of Matthew, God categorizes his flock as either obedient sheep, or goats who lack faith and compassion. But people are not so easily summed up in Joanna Cannon’s debut novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, a gentle story about the damage done by the secrets we keep and the judgments we make.

The novel opens in the mid-1970s in a suburban British housing estate called the Avenue, on a blisteringly hot summer day. The disappearance of a local woman, Mrs. Creasy, has residents on high alert, and the rumors are flying. Grace, a precocious 10-year-old, and her best friend, Tilly, decide to investigate. They start with the vicar, who delivers a confusing sermon on the whereabouts of God. Given this start, the girls become certain that if they can locate the Almighty, Mrs. Creasy is sure to follow.  

The spirited girls take their questions about faith from house to house, trying to make sense of the fragmented accounts and mixed messages they hear. What becomes clear to the reader, if not the girls, is that their neighbors are keeping a deadly secret—one that may have led to Mrs. Creasy’s departure. 

The novel is told from the points of view of the innocent but perceptive Grace and six of her neighbors, including the absent-minded Dorothy; Brian, kept on a short leash by his overbearing mother; and John Creasy, the increasingly frantic husband of the missing woman. The Avenue, with its flawed but sympathetic characters living chockablock on the suburban street, is Cannon’s most successful creation, and one in which her insight into the problems of ordinary people is most persuasive. Part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep presents our complicated world with compassion and humor, seen through a child’s eyes.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with author Joanna Cannon about The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.
 

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

In the near future, London labors under the rule of a brutal king. Suicide cults, spawned in America, are making their way around the world on a mission to kill animals as part of their path to ascendance. While technological marvels abound, access to them has been corrupted in ways that reward the rich and punish the poor. 

At the bottom of this decadent society exist the Indigents, a growing segment of people addicted to an insidious hallucinogen, Flôt. Among the lowest of these poor and lost is Cuthbert Handley, whose life was upended when a childhood accident claimed his beloved brother decades earlier. Now homeless and deep in the clutches of a Flôt addiction, Cuthbert begins to hear the voices of animals in the London Zoo, which has become the last repository of many species on Earth. Their calls drive Cuthbert to an action that will either plunge society into chaos, or save it.

A magnificently textured story, Night of the Animals benefits from author Bill Broun’s liberal use of Midlands dialect, which reinforces Cuthbert’s unshakable connection to his past and its native folklore. Likewise, the animals’ speech is tethered to their origins and experience. As the distinction between the voices of the creatures and the internal whispers of Cuthbert’s addiction fades, Broun maintains a remarkable balance between magic and madness. This strange tale is both cautionary and captivating.

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

There’s friendship, and then there’s friendship that borders on obsession. That sort of bond draws two people together as though they’re on a crash course with destiny. They begin to mimic each other’s actions and speech patterns. They dress alike. They exist in a magical world that only they can understand.

That’s what happens when Hannah Dexter finds herself pulled into Lacey Champlain’s orbit.

Lacey is the new girl in Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, a town where teenagers are expected to play by the rules and anything else is unimaginable. After Halloween of 1991, one of Battle Creek’s golden children turns up in the woods, dead by an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. The town’s residents are left asking, what could cause such a popular athlete to do such a thing?

Lacey and Dex—as Hannah’s best friend rechristens her—are curious, but more concerned with the world that’s left. With Nirvana as their soundtrack, the duo wreaks havoc on the small town. Signs of satanic worship unnerved the community even before the teenage suicide, and the girls aren’t afraid to join in the mischief.

Or well, Lacey isn’t. She’s always had something to run from; her mother became pregnant by mistake, and Lacey’s father left the family when she was small. Her mother toted Lacey to concerts—after which Mrs. Champlain would head backstage, toddler in tow, to canoodle with the band. Mrs. Champlain has attempted to straighten up, though, and the move to Battle Creek is part of that. After all, now she’s got a new husband (“the Bastard”) and a son (Bastard Jr.). Lacey is all that’s bringing her down.

The awkward Dex is an eager student, grateful for the connection she’s always lacked. Never mind that she’s not crazy about Kurt Cobain’s voice and that it hadn’t occurred to her to hate the name Hannah. She’ll follow where her soul sister leads, no matter how dark the path.

And indeed, it is dark.

Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire proves the young-adult novelist can write tales for adults every bit as powerful as those that have driven her past success. By unveiling the story in alternating perspectives by Lacey and Dex, with interludes from others, Wasserman slowly peels back the layers of teenage friendship. What’s left is a compelling study of the forces that draw people together.

"The windiest militant trash/Important Persons shout." Thus wrote Auden on the eve of WWII, but we hear the same bluster on today's campaign trail. Harry Parker's Anatomy of a Soldier is a somber reminder of what war does to actual soldiers.

The novel recalls Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. It considers soldiers from the perspective of the objects associated with them. These objects do, in fact, narrate the novel. This is a bold, possibly gimmicky approach. It is effective for some objects—a drone, for instance, or a Kalashnikov. It is less effective for others, like boots. Indeed the narration sometimes approaches the homoerotic. "He moved his hand up my shaft," to choose one example, about a rifle. A catheter's thoughts about BA5799 are best left unsaid.

BA5799 has a name: Tom Barnes. But the author may suggest that we treat soldiers like objects. When killed, we dispose of them. When damaged, we repair them with prosthetics. This happens to Barnes. We know this because his prothesis says so. And bystanders sometimes think he resembles a robot. But soldiers are not robots. Barnes feels remorse and sorrow. He loves a woman and he sometimes loves war.

Like Parker, Barnes serves with the British Army in a country like Afghanistan. Barnes offers $2,000 to a father whose son the British Army kills. Parker is commendable for trying to include such stories. But occupier and occupied resent the occupation. They believe it has only worsened things. Even so, Barnes holds no grudge against his attackers. Convalescing back home, he insists he would buy them a drink.

Parker seems to be aiming for Hemingway. At its best, the novel recalls the first devastating chapter of A Farewell to Arms. But elsewhere Parker is less terse and more sentimental. He is more late, boozy Hemingway than otherwise. When Parker writes that in war "no one wins" he is trafficking in a cliche that lends no solution to war's problems. 

Hemingway broke ground writing about the price that modern war exacts. Parker, too, provides an antidote to the latest windiest militant trash Important Persons shout. 

When asked about their ethnicity, people in Appalachia are the most likely to reply that they are Americans. So perhaps it is fitting that American noir writing seems to have relocated to Appalachia. Think of Cormac McCarthy's Suttree and the derivative writings of Chris Offutt. But little feels derivative about Lee Clay Johnson's debut, Nitro Mountain. It is an excellent specimen, appalling in its subject matter but deft in execution.

The novel begins with Leon, a nullity facing a DUI charge. He floats between gigs as a bass player and a job at "Foodville.” One day a villain named Arnett intoxicates him on Robot, a mix of meth and heroin. Leon and Arnett share a love interest, a sassy and ferocious woman named Jennifer, who convinces Leon to poison Arnett. This initiates a train of violence so breathtaking it's a wonder the town and its people survive. Fueling the violence is what Arnett calls splo, aka moonshine.

Appalachia was always hardscrabble and forsaken. But even amidst the coal era it had social cohesion and national worth. In Johnson's version, a woman's best career is turning tricks or soft porn. For men there's military service, or hauling trash or selling blood. Or music. "Now that the coal's gone," says one character, "music's our only damn export." There's no Main Street. There are only boarded-up buildings dwarfed by superstores and fast food joints.

Nitro Mountain comes recommended by David Gates, whose novel Jernigan also studied American life on the skids. Both novels are intelligent and sympathetic portraits of hard-up people making bad, justifiable decisions. Much of Nitro Mountain occurs in bars soundtracked by electronic lottery and Hank Williams. "Nothing's as sad," writes Johnson, "as the sound of happy hour ending."

Johnson's savage prose more than compensates for the maudlin milieu. Today a need for haste infects most writers. Johnson forces you to slow down. The language is bold, arresting and well-timed. The main characters are also drawn with depth and sincerity. This is especially true of Jennifer. Her faint hopes for a better life are overcome by the necessity of surviving in this one. The novel's finale is sordid and irreversible, recalling perhaps The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

But this is a novel about Americans, which is to say about freedom. Its characters are hard-pressed and lamentable. But they think themselves free, and to that extent, they are.

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, is the literary equivalent of spiked chocolate mousse: the lightest of confections, but with a powerful kick. Danler, a former waitress, has fashioned a breezy piece of fiction that dramatizes the behind-the-scenes activities of a posh Manhattan restaurant in exact and unsparing detail. This episodic novel’s depiction of staff members who bandy profanities and snort the harshest drugs is so precise and vividly rendered that, the next time you patronize a fancy eatery, you may wonder what those smiling greeters are up to behind the swinging door.

In June 2006, a 22-year-old English major named Tess arrives in New York from her Midwestern hometown and gets a job as a back waiter at Union Square’s most popular restaurant. Tess is such a novice about food that, when she’s asked during her interview to name “the five noble grapes of Bordeaux,” she “pictured cartoon grapes wearing crowns on their heads, welcoming me to their châteaux.”

The owner hires Tess, however, because he sees her as a “fifty-one percenter,” a person who has the empathy and work ethic lacking in many restaurant employees. Soon, Tess is part of a crew that includes a chef who demands that no one speak to him while he cooks, a food runner who writes screenplays and the bartender with whom Tess is smitten.

Occasionally, Danler tries too hard to be literary, but for the most part, Sweetbitter is a feast of coarse dialogue and industry insight. “You will stumble on secrets,” Tess says early in the novel. So will readers of this entertaining debut.

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

There are pet people, and there are people who don’t understand pet people. If you’re the latter, Lily and the Octopus may not be the book for you.

Debut novelist Steven Rowley is a pet person, as evidenced by every page of this book. It’s clear from the outset that author and character alike are taken with Lily, the dachshund at the center of this emotional, big-hearted novel. Take, for example, the first words of narrator Ted Flask: “Thursday nights are the nights my dog, Lily, and I set aside to talk about boys we think are cute. . . . . We get into long debates over the Ryans. I’m a Gosling man, whereas she’s a Reynolds gal, even though she can’t name a single movie of his that she would ever watch twice.” But 12-year-old Lily has an unwanted companion—a tumor Ted dubs “the octopus.” Ted will stop at nothing to keep his pet safe, but it may not be enough.

Whether it’s Lily! Exclaiming! Her! Emotions! or Ted quietly wondering how to prolong his best friend’s life, Rowley’s characters are rich and relatable. In fact, they’re so fully realized that this book’s appeal may not be limited to pet people after all: Lily and the Octopus will move anyone who has ever loved an animal, but it can also help those who don’t understand the rest of us.

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