A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
His literary arrival already hailed by the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, Ardashir Vakil has a reputation to live up to with this, his very first novel. Rushdie, who knows an authentic voice when he hears one, has excerpted Beach Boy in his new anthology of the most brilliant Indian writing of the past 50 years since his and Vakil’s native country gained independence in 1948. Both writers now live in London, but both are still emotionally immersed in the life of India’s most populous and varied city. They continue to live and breathe Bombay.
Beach Boy is in the classic mode of the coming-of-age story. Its hero is only a bit younger than usual a very precocious, even highly sexed eight-year-old. Cyrus Readymoney belongs to Bombay’s privileged Parsi class, those adherents to Zoroastrianism who have been largely Westernized. He feels no guilt about his family’s wealth in a city of grinding poverty, and his closest adult friend is a holdover from the Imperial regime, an eccentric and brilliantly evoked maharani. Rather neglected by his social (and adulterous) parents, Cyrus wanders all over Bombay, usually in search of Hindi and Hollywood cinema. He even pretends, with some success, to be an Indian child film star. His fantasy life injects both humor and pathos in Vakil’s portrait.
Set in the early ’70s, the novel is clearly autobiographical. Even if Vakil’s own adolescence didn’t so closely parallel Cyrus’s, the luxurious sensory detail of the story would reveal the author’s teeming memory of the sights, sounds, and, most of all, tastes of his setting. Cyrus loves to eat, and one of the richest pleasures of the book is in vicarious feasting. Wherever our young voyeur goes, he’s sure to find food and, with few exceptions, sure to relish it.
A bit of a thief and a rogue, an eavesdropper and a liar, Cyrus is reminiscent of Truffaut’s hero in The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut, Vakil lets the story unfold through character and incident, not formal plot. And the characters are vivid and unique from Cyrus’s love interest (the adopted daughter of the maharani) to his imperious Aunt Zenobia and his neighbor Mr. Krishnan, a thundering but lovable Communist. The boy’s immediate family only gradually come into focus, however, and for good reason. By the end of the novel, great sorrow will come to the Readymoneys, and Cyrus will confront a harsher world. With Arundhati Roy’s best-selling The God of Small Things and Vikram Chandra’s wonderful Love and Longing in Bombay, Indian literature seems to be entering a golden age. Beach Boy has been touched by Midas too, and Ardashir Vakil is on the threshold of what could be a gilded career.
His literary arrival already hailed by the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, Ardashir Vakil has a reputation to live up to with this, his very first novel. Rushdie, who knows an authentic voice when he hears one, has excerpted Beach Boy in his…
Lily King has been publishing fiction for more than 20 years, but in the last decade, she has earned a new level of acclaim and success with the two ravishing, highly praised novels Euphoria and Writers & Lovers. The latter landed on shelves two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down bookstores (and just about everything else in the world), so she was unable to do much in the way of promotion. She has greater hopes—and a scheduled book tour—for her collection of 10 startling short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter.
King’s new book takes the long view. The stories span the entirety of the 58-year-old writer’s career, and about half of them are new material, not previously published in magazines. In a call to her home in Maine, she explains that she fell in love with short stories in high school. She’s been keeping journals since fifth grade (and still has them all, lined up on three shelves in her office), but she didn’t dream of becoming a published writer until her discovery of the short story form.
“I hadn’t had a happy childhood, I hadn’t loved the cold. But here I am.”
“Short stories are much harder [to write] than novels,” she says. “They can be more satisfying because you get to the end faster and don’t have to carry the despair for years and years. If you don’t like them, you can walk away from them. But you can’t make the mistakes that you can make in a novel. You can’t have those weird little spasms that a novel allows.”
The stories here are layered, incisive, sometimes dark and often funny. The opening tale, “Creature,” is about 14-year-old Carol, a nascent writer who is hired by a wealthy woman who lives in a mansion on a rocky New England coastal promontory. For two or three weeks in summer, Carol is to be the live-in babysitter for the woman’s very young grandchildren. Carol’s services are meant to free up the children’s mother, Kay, to spend more time with her own mother. Even before the arrival of Kay’s ne’er-do-well brother, Hugh, Carol observes the silences between mother and daughter.
“Creature” exposes the divisions within families, the flinty coldness and deliberate, doting blindness of a certain kind of parent. In its surprising conclusion we understand the hard shift in awareness that will inform Carol’s future as a writer. But is it autobiographical?
Not quite, explains King, though it is set in the town where she grew up: Manchester, Massachusetts, renamed Manchester-by-the-Sea in 1989. “I feel I was straddling a lot of different worlds,” she says of those days. “My parents got divorced. My mother and I were in an apartment downtown without a lot of money. My father was up in the house on the point. Then my father remarried and remarried again. My mother remarried and we moved to a different part of town in a big house. I was both a babysitter trying to make money and then a person who sometimes lived in a big house.”
King’s experiences with this class dichotomy burn through this story collection, as do strong impulses instilled by years of babysitting, which she began at age 11 and continued until she was 32. “You step into somebody else’s family, and you have to intuit their whole ethos,” she says. “I’m interested in fitting in and not fitting in. How a situation in a house becomes very fraught. About the power, about everybody’s dysfunction.”
For the past few years, King and her family have lived in Portland, Maine, but the pandemic hit shortly after their move, so she still doesn’t feel completely settled. They previously lived in the smaller town of Yarmouth, but when her older daughter went off to college, her younger daughter lobbied for the family to move to Portland, “the big city.”
Now their house is on a hill, and King’s top-floor office gives her an expansive view of city rooftops and the Atlantic Ocean. Her husband, a writer and fine arts painter, has a studio on the top floor as well. His mother, also an artist, painted the vivid work that constitutes the cover art of Five Tuesdays in Winter. The full painting graces King’s living room.
Even after 20-plus years in Maine, King still expresses surprise to be living in New England. “When I left Massachusetts at the age of 18, I thought I would never, ever live in New England again,” she says. “And I didn’t for a long time. But I just kept kind of circling back and then leaving again and coming back.”
King’s life has taken her all over the U.S. and even to Valencia, Spain, but starting a family with her husband helped her make the decision to return. “It just seemed that I had to raise my kids with seasons,” she says. “With winter, with snow. I didn’t think it could happen because I hadn’t had a happy childhood, I hadn’t loved the cold. But here I am.”
The author of Euphoria and Writers & Lovers takes us into the memories that inspired a story in her terrific first collection.
ÊThe story at the core of Lost is simple: Parents who lost a child during the Russian invasion of Germany believe they have found him, years later, living in an orphanage. They undertake to reclaim him, only to be frustrated by a hopelessly bureaucratic process meant to determine whether their link to the boy is biological or imagined.
What makes the novel remarkable is the narrator’s perspective. The narrator is the second son of the questing parents, and as he tells the story his voice is strained alternately by jealousy, anger, isolation, and wonder. He never knew his brother as anything other than a photograph, and was therefore able to turn him into an ideal and a marker of uniqueness: none of his friends had dead brothers, after all; no one else he knew carried around a phantom double in his head. But when his parents reveal that the brother he thought was dead is not only alive but living a few towns over, and when they tell him that they are going to try to reclaim him, the narrator feels his self-made world begin to disintegrate. He constantly recalculates his jealousy quotient, trying to interpret the hereditary information his parents obtain through countless studies. He sees the results of these tests as mounting proof that the orphan in question is not his brother. His parents, of course, draw the opposite conclusion.
The book has an extremely dense, almost obsessed atmosphere. It evokes the stifling experience of a child dragged into an adult’s world where he is alien and also, by virtue of his alienation, wiser than the adults he suffers. Striking as it is in Treichel’s rendering, this obsessed voice would be too oppressive if it weren’t occasionally overwhelmed by the narrator’s wonder at some of the strangeness of his world. Ê Fortunately, Treichel delivers wonder as palpably as he does brooding. There is an especially vivid scene of the boy’s experience in the hands of a neo-phrenologist, a pseudoscientist who palpates the skull looking for hereditary information. The narrator’s first sight of his father’s naked feet is also striking, and it’s Treichel’s way of taking such a mundane moment and eking emotional significance out of it that provides the greatest rewards of this satisfying debut. ¦ George Weld is a writer in New York City.
ÊThe story at the core of Lost is simple: Parents who lost a child during the Russian invasion of Germany believe they have found him, years later, living in an orphanage. They undertake to reclaim him, only to be frustrated by a hopelessly bureaucratic process…
Readers will remember Socrates Fortlow, the hero of Walter Mosley’s riveting new book Walkin’ the Dog, from the author’s acclaimed short story collection Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Although he has been out of prison for nine years at the start of Mosley’s new book, the ex-convict-murderer turned boxboy is still a man dominated by his violent past. Socrates lives on the margins of society, in two abandoned rooms in a Watts alley. He cooks on a butane stove and wears leather sandals rescued out of a trash can. He is constantly aware of his own capacity for anger and violence, unable to shake the fists out of his hands. Yet, like the philosopher whose name he shares, Socrates is a wise and thoughtful man, and he has made many friends since leaving prison. He has become a surrogate father to a young boy named Darryl, helping to keep him in school and out of trouble. His boss at the Bounty Supermarket wants to promote him to produce manager. He has a girlfriend and even a pet, a friendly, two-legged dog named Killer. Slowly but surely, Socrates is working his way toward a more mainstream life.
In the process, however, he must confront both his own beliefs about himself and society’s expectations of him. His struggles provide a forum for Mosley to explore complex racial issues and examine the effects of prejudice and inequality in our society. Over the course of the book, which falls somewhere between a novel and a collection of thematically connected short stories, Socrates comes to define himself and to win a figurative freedom that matches his literal one. It’s not what would you do for men like us. It’s what will you do, Socrates tells a fellow ex-convict. We got to see past being guilty what’s done is done. You still responsible, you cain’t never make it up, but you got to try. Through realistic dialogue and excellent use of detail, Mosley animates the burly ex-con, as well as fascinating supporting characters like Lavant Hall, a soprano-voiced rebel with a pencil-thin mustache and a fondness for perfume. Readers will leave this provocative book hoping that Socrates Fortlow is still out there somewhere, teaching us all what it means to be a free and responsible man. ¦ Beth Duris works for the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia.
Readers will remember Socrates Fortlow, the hero of Walter Mosley's riveting new book Walkin' the Dog, from the author's acclaimed short story collection Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. Although he has been out of prison for nine years at the start of Mosley's new book, the…
Southern literature is filled with characters like the ones who inhabit Crazy in Alabama. Anyone who has ever lived in the South has encountered one or two of the real-life prototypes at one time or another. Anyone born in the South automatically thinks that writers are describing his or her friends and family.
Everyone knows who they are: the reluctant hero (especially in the area of race relations); the young boy or girl with the old soul who helps lead the way to goodness and redemption; the pot-bellied, redneck villain; the family matriarch; and last, but certainly not least, the beautiful heroine, who, despite being somewhat crazy (and maybe a little evil, although Lord don’t you know she only did evil things because she was forced into it by an alcoholic man), manages to win the reader’s love and admiration.
Mark Childress’s Crazy in Alabama has all those characters — and plenty more to spare. Peejoe Bullis is the 12-year-old narrator of the story (set in 1965), who hears more than he wants to hear about marital relations from his Aunt Lucille, who has fed her husband rat poison and severed his head because he wouldn’t allow her to audition for a part in the Beverly Hillbillies. (Look, she says, yanking his head out of a large Tupperware container, it’s your Uncle Chester.)
When Aunt Lucille takes off for Hollywood, carrying her husband’s head with her as a good luck charm, Peejoe and his older brother Wiley are sent packing to live with Lucille’s brother, Uncle Dove, a mortician who also serves as the county coroner.
As Lucille heads west in a stolen Cadillac, a fully loaded pistol in her purse, Peejoe becomes embroiled in a civil rights demonstration that ultimately brings Martin Luther King Jr. and Alabama Governor George Wallace to town. As Peejoe sides with the civil rights demonstrators, Aunt Lucille gets her big break on the Beverly Hillbillies.
Crazy in Alabama has been made into a motion picture that will be released in early October. It co-stars Melanie Griffith, who seems absolutely perfect for the role of the dizzy-but-lovable Lucille. The screenplay was written by the author (a rarity in Hollywood), so it almost certainly will remain true to the book.
Alabama-born Mark Childress has written a flawless novel. It is almost impossible to find a misstep anywhere in the 434-page book. His sparse prose has the energy and punch of a Crimson Tide running back.
Equally impressive is the author’s technique of merging the Southern literary tradition with the sensibilities of a nonfiction expose. His use of actual historical figures and events gives the story a real sense of believability.
Originally published in 1993, Crazy in Alabama has just been re-issued as a paperback to coincide with the release of the movie. This reviewer somehow missed the book the first time around, but is grateful he was given a second chance to read it.
Is it possible to laugh at murder?
You’d better read this book before you answer that question.
Mississippi-born James L. Dickerson’s most recent book is Last Suppers: If the World Ended Tomorrow, What Would Be Your Last Meal? (Lebhar-Friedman Books).
Southern literature is filled with characters like the ones who inhabit Crazy in Alabama. Anyone who has ever lived in the South has encountered one or two of the real-life prototypes at one time or another. Anyone born in the South automatically thinks that writers…
Some poets have the power to illuminate and articulate the most secluded parts of a reader’s heart and mind. In these new books, three renowned poets offer compassion and fresh perspectives on the human experience.
Such Color
Such Color: New and Selected Poems provides a welcome overview of the career of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. The cumulative effects of history and identity are central to much of the work in this magisterial book. In poems such as “A Hunger So Honed,” Smith probes human motivation and the nature of desire: “perhaps we live best / In the spaces between loves, / That unconscious roving, / The heart its own rough animal.”
Smith also explores Blackness as a communal experience, one that connects her with past generations and those to come. In “Photo of Sugarcane Plantation Workers, Jamaica, 1891,” she sees herself in the figures captured on camera: “I would be standing there, too. / Standing, then made to leap up / into the air. Made to curl / and heave and cringe. . . .” These are poems of possibility, as Smith considers the past while looking for a way forward.
Goldenrod
Communication in all its varying modes is a recurring theme, from social media posts and handwritten notes to the unexpected autocorrections of text messages. “In the Grand Scheme of Things” explores the limits of language: “We say the naked eye / as if the eye could be clothed. . . . We say that’s not how / the world works as if the world works.” Throughout this wise, lucid collection, Smith captures the wonder and bewilderment that come with being human. She’s excellent company for readers in need of connection.
In Maggie Smith’s wonderfully companionable collection of poems, Goldenrod, she takes on timeless topics such as nature, history, family and memory. In “Ohio Cento,” she writes, “What we know of ourselves / gets compressed, layered. Remembering / is an anniversary; every minute a commemoration / of being.”
Poet Warrior
In her beautifully executed memoir Poet Warrior, Joy Harjo recalls her upbringing as a member of the Muscogee tribe in Oklahoma and reflects upon her development as a writer. Harjo, who is serving her third term as U.S. Poet Laureate, grew up with an abusive stepfather and a creative, hardworking mother. She learned early on that literature could provide solace and escape, and she takes stock of her poetic influences in the book, counting Audre Lorde and N. Scott Momaday as key figures in her development.
Harjo mixes poetry and prose, history and memory, Native lore and family stories to create a collagelike account of her experiences. “As I near the last doorway of my present life, I am trying to understand the restless path on which I have traveled,” she writes. Fans of nonfiction and poetry alike will savor this sublime memoir.
Lord Berners the name can hardly be uttered without a sniff and a smirk. The author’s full name says it all: Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baronet, 14th Baron Berners. This peer of England, the last of his line, lived during the period (1883-1950) when the privileges of the aristocracy fell rapidly into anachronism and absurdity. The stories and short novels collected in this edition can be read as fables of this decline, a haunting mixture of hilarity and melancholy that could only have come from the pen of a man called by his own biographer The Last Eccentric. Lord Berners’s writing tends to be funny in a way that only a very small number of brilliant English writers have the levitating capacity to be, and he ought to be read only when uninhibited laughter is an option. Take the scene in the novella The Camel, in which Mr. Scrimgeour, the church organist, bungles the vicar’s entry on Sunday morning with a disastrous performance.
Lord Berners’s prose is at all times beautiful, as clean as an English lawn, just as sharply cut, and with just as many surprising felicities to the senses. It would perhaps be nearest the mark to call his writing musical, especially since this self-same Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson was also an outstanding musician, whom Igor Stravinsky considered the best mid-century English composer. Music features centrally in the 1941 novel Count Omega, whose composer-hero succumbs to his own ambition. It is a comic twist on the Faust legend, a striking forerunner to Thomas Mann’s tragic musical novel Doctor Faustus, which appeared only a few years later.
In First Childhood, the first of his two splendid and equally funny autobiographies (both published last year by Turtle Point Press), Lord Berners describes a portrait of his Victorian grandmother which hung in the dining-room at her estate. It showed her dressed in a rather elaborate evening gown of the period, smiling benevolently in complete disregard of a terrific thunderstorm that was approaching her in the background. He goes on to remark that the picture might, in fact, have stood for an allegory of the later Victorian period. In Lord Berners’s own time, the storm had broken. The fact that he continued to smile benevolently through his wonderful stories is both a touch of his class and his class’s last hurrah.
Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.
Lord Berners the name can hardly be uttered without a sniff and a smirk. The author's full name says it all: Sir Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Baronet, 14th Baron Berners. This peer of England, the last of his line, lived during the period (1883-1950) when the…
Like her hit 2020 debut, Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy’s second novel spirals into the recesses of the heart, exploring climate change and human behavior through the story of one woman’s fraught life.
In Once There Were Wolves (8.5 hours), Inti keeps more company with animals than with people. Her work involves releasing wolves into the Scottish Highlands, a controversial venture that arouses suspicion—and then violence—from farmers. The wolves’ presence will allow forests to regrow by forcing deer to keep moving, but the local villagers can’t see beyond the threat to their lives and livestock. Having grown up between a hardline, back-to-the-land father and a mother whose professional expertise is in domestic abuse, Inti’s nurtured cynicism competes with the kindness and goodness she experiences from her sister and a handful of other close relationships.
In the audiobook, master voice actor Saskia Maarleveld keeps the book’s intrigue high. Her breathless delivery captures Inti’s sensitivity and other characters’ misgivings of one another, heightening the tension between domesticity and wildness. Maarleveld also drives home the book’s global expanse through a medley of expert accents, including Canadian, Australian and Scottish.
Will Self likes taking risks. His last novel, Great Apes, followed the stressed-out life of a psychologist who awakened one morning as a chimpanzee. In his essays Self has stalked prime ministers and fought British rock stars. His work breeds controversy, and his method welcomes experiment. Needless to say anything new by him is noteworthy.
In Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys, Self mixes the plausible with the absurd. Within this collection of short stories you will find a rock of crack cocaine as large as a hotel and meet a lexicographer who has learned to communicate with insects. These new stories turn a fun house mirror on modern circumstance. Their humor is grotesque, ticklish, and daft.
Take A Story for Europe for example. Here, Self plays on the fears and troubles of new parents. Worried that their toddler’s linguistic skills aren’t developing, Miriam and Daniel Green take their two-year-old to the doctor. A bewildered child development specialist informs the anxiety-taxed couple that their son is not only fine but also fully fluent in business German.
Elsewhere, in the poetically titled Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo: A Manual, Self takes us into the mind of a panicky adulterer. Nervous to the point of trauma, Self’s protagonist hallucinates that he is 60 feet tall. Incapable of hiding from his spouse because of his size, the guilty giant pleads with his wife for forgiveness, telling her that the palm-sized woman he has been caught with is nothing but a toy. No, these are not bad jokes or out-takes from The Twilight Zone, these are quintessential Will Self creations. For all their outrageousness, these tales radiate a narrative charm. For every goofy plot turn you’ll find an equally well plotted character or adroitly spun metaphor. Whether dealing with nerdy parents or hardened drug addicts, Self nails his subjects with an exacting, invigorating stylistic temper like that of the truly great satirists. Surely Self is one of them if that’s not too immodest a proposal.
Will Self likes taking risks. His last novel, Great Apes, followed the stressed-out life of a psychologist who awakened one morning as a chimpanzee. In his essays Self has stalked prime ministers and fought British rock stars. His work breeds controversy, and his method welcomes…
Julian Barnes’s concern with the ways we reconstruct, or even invent, the past has been a rich theme in several of his books (Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters). But in England, England his first novel in six years that theme has its strongest vehicle to date. Whether the past belongs to the lifetime of a single individual or to the historical annals of Barnes’s native England, it is a slippery proposition. How do you distinguish the authentic from the phony, truth from embroidery? Barnes’s answer is: much of the time, you can’t.
England, England’s other themes relate to the nature of nationhood, the excesses of a free-market economy, the fraudulence of the tourism industry, the search for love, and the possibility of personal salvation. Yet, being a novel by Julian Barnes, it is not ponderous; it is masterfully plotted, stylish, vivacious, and devilishly funny. Barnes, who loves French literature, has the withering wit, and frequently the moral stance, of Moliere.
Like a Moliere protagonist, the novel’s central character bears the corporate title Appointed Cynic. Her name is Martha Cochrane, and the corporation she serves is Pitco, a multinational kingdom ruled by the megalomaniacal Sir Jack Pitman. We are a few decades into the next millennium, when Sir Jack, a kind of Rupert Murdoch/Donald Trump with Rabelaisian overtones, decides to crown his career by creating the ultimate theme park. Occupying the entire geography of the Isle of Wight, this leisure world encapsulates all of England’s best-known landmarks and offers recreations of as many incidents from British history as the average Joe has ever heard of. The island with its replicas of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, and Buckingham Palace in time becomes more English than the mainland; it is therefore christened England, England. The old country, robbed of its vital tourist revenue and its standing in the European Union, gradually regresses into a near-feudal state. Even the royal family moves to the island, where their duties are minimal waving to crowds of tourists and their salaries large.
Julian Barnes is philosophical, like Iris Murdoch; narratively innovative, like John Fowles; satirical, like David Lodge; funny, like Tom Sharpe; erudite, like A. S. Byatt. Yet he is altogether, fascinatingly himself as any reader of England, England will gratefully discover.
Randall Curb is an essayist and reviewer in Greensboro, Alabama.
Julian Barnes's concern with the ways we reconstruct, or even invent, the past has been a rich theme in several of his books (Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters). But in England, England his first novel in six years that…
The fanfare for this mammoth 770-page World War II novel sounded a dissonant chord or two. Is author James Thackara a literary genius with the depth of Dostoyevsky and Melville, as his publicists rave? Or is he, as some critics grouse, a pretentious poseur? In fact, The Book of Kings turns out to be one of the most ambitious, eccentric, morally driven books ever run off a press.
At its most frustrating, it is indeed grandiose in the manner of self-taught philosophy. Lyrical passages are artificially sweetened. But for much of its length, inspired writing gives impassioned witness to the destruction of 50 million human beings by totalitarian ideas, insane or wicked tyrants, and feckless democracies. Thackara reminds those who have forgotten and teaches those who never knew that World War II was more about evil than about heroism.
This is not the blue-collar combat experience of American moviemaking. The major characters of The Book of Kings, beginning with four young men who room together at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1930s, move at the highest levels of European society, government, or military life. One of them knows Hitler; his friend becomes a world-renowned antifascist writer. Others include a famous film star and an important Wagnerian soprano. These grand beings have highly attenuated emotions.
Nonetheless, most will directly experience the horrors of the war, and the novel thus becomes propaganda at its most idealistic and benign. When portraying concentration camp atrocities or battlefield slaughter in high-resolution detail, Thackara’s elevated language accurately hits the high key of his humanistic theme.
Unfortunately, the cat’s out of the bag in postwar episodes. Elevated dialogue becomes pompous or goofy when the guns fall silent; noble ideas curdle into elitist fantasies. For a humanitarian, Thackara has a disturbing penchant for believing his characters superior to the bulk of humanity. Even so, this original if flawed novel is rewarding for its view of the war as primarily a European tragedy, its high-minded if self-righteous aims, and its stunning scenes of credible action in a world gone morally dark.
Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, recently received The Stephen Crane Literary Award.
The fanfare for this mammoth 770-page World War II novel sounded a dissonant chord or two. Is author James Thackara a literary genius with the depth of Dostoyevsky and Melville, as his publicists rave? Or is he, as some critics grouse, a pretentious poseur? In…
Thirteen-year-old Weldon Applegate (as remembered by 99-year-old Weldon Applegate) is the unlikely hero of Josh Ritter’s The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All (7 hours). Set in Cordelia, Idaho, a lumber town at the end of the lumberjack era, and populated by ghosts, witches and demons, this rollicking tall tale is as true and honest as the honed edge of a jack’s favorite ax.
Ritter is a renowned singer-songwriter, and his language is exquisite, especially when describing the grandeur of a winter forest or the subtle evil of a greedy man. His nuanced narration gives an authentic voice to both young and ancient Weldon, endowing him with wisdom, humor and valor while never losing sight of the terrible beauty of his vanished world. Ritter’s talents as a ballad singer make this audiobook, which includes an original song, a special pleasure.
Josh Ritter’s talents as a ballad singer make this audiobook, which includes an original song, a special pleasure.
I can think of a thousand things that inspired me to write New York, My Village. I can tell stories of how my first impressions of the Bronx, New York, during my first visit to America in August 1993 have continued to fertilize my imagination. I can tell you of how my life as a former Catholic seminarian/priest got me to see racism from the unique angle of the Holy of Holies. I can tell you how shocked I was to discover the whiteness and racism of the big American publishing houses as I auctioned my first book, the story collection Say You’re One of Them (Little, Brown, 2008). I can tell you how New York City bedbugs ate up my peace in 2013 and of my fears that I would spread the bugs to the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, where I was a fellow. I can tell you how a group of African American professionals from Atlanta, Georgia—which the author Anthony Grooms brought together in 2014—encouraged me to set my writing in America so I could write about racism.
But suffice it to share with you how the first two chapters of New York, My Village were inspired by an American visa interview in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2004.
I was living in Nigeria when I landed an admission to the Helen Zell Writers’ Program of the University of Michigan. It meant the world to me. I’d always loved Midwestern America, having studied in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1990s. Though the U.S. visa process in Nigeria had always felt like being dragged to court, I didn’t foresee any major difficulties, since this was going to be my fourth visa.
I showed up early in the morning at the embassy. Because of the crowds of visa applicants, I finally got interviewed around 3 p.m. The fact that I was nursing a cold didn’t help matters. Because of the embassy’s powerful air conditioning, I was sniffling and clearing my throat the whole time. But I’d say I was coping well with the extremely tense atmosphere.
The American consular officers can ask you anything. ANYTHING. They can even insult your accent or mock your country if they feel like it. I’ve attempted to capture the terror that is a Western embassy visa process in the developing world in the opening pages of New York, My Village. But that day in the American embassy, decked out in my Roman collar, nothing could have shocked me more than when my interviewer asked me to write him a short story to prove I was a writer.
Thinking this write-me-a-story thing was a joke, I shrugged and giggled and told him the University of Michigan and other programs had already ascertained I was a writer, hence the admission and scholarship offers. He pretended he didn’t hear me and chattily asked why I wanted to be a fiction writer and not a poet. “Maybe someday I’ll also write poetry, sir,” I said as I stood there before his booth. In the silence that followed his nod, I was confident I’d secured the visa. But looking beyond my jubilant face, he slid me a pen and paper, insisting I write a story. When I looked lost, he started typing into his computer.
My fingers began to tremble with shock, then anger. I wanted so much to spit in the face of this consular officer. I kept clearing my throat, though I wanted to blow my nose and pour mucus all over him, his computer and the booth. Yet I wore a pleasant face, because as they say, it’s only when the mosquito lands on your balls that you realize there are ways to solve a problem without violence.
Nobody had ever abused my writing talent like this interviewer! If I remember correctly, this man wasn’t even angry at me. He seemed pleased that he could get fresh writing out of me at visa point—as in gun point. I’d never drafted a short story in a week, much less in a few minutes. My quickest draft took two sleepless weeks and resulted in the shortest story in my collection, “What Language Is That?” And apart from the fact that my fingers were too sweaty to hold the pen, I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote longhand. To be asked to do this, at what seemed like the biggest test of my talent, felt totally cruel.
“Sir, could I sit down to write the story?” I remember murmuring.
“Mr. Akpan, that won’t be necessary,” he said, smiling like he was saving me from being lazy. “Just a short story. Nothing long.”
I tried to write on the booth counter. It would also be the first time I wrote a story while standing up. And I prefer to write at night.
“My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever.”
Even in the best of situations, my stories do everything to sabotage me. They do everything not to submit to my dreams. I wake up some days without enough faith even to love the “lovely” passages I’ve written. It’s always a fight, a long, drawn-out war whose battles I win one at a time, mainly because I run away to fight another day or week or year.
My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever, or till I miraculously discover how to show the invisible connections and bonds and spirit between the disparate characters and parts. I must rewrite countless times “to get in the reader’s face,” as Stephen King puts it. I live in admiration of those who publish a book every other year. But during that interview, I doubt even the most productive of authors could’ve written anything.
“Sir, it takes me a loooong time to write a story,” I said.
“No, this shouldn’t take long,” my interviewer said.
“I could show you the samples that got me into Michigan from my laptop.”
“Come on, you can do it!”
He was distracted by a colleague who entered his booth to ask a question. But the impatience in my interviewer’s voice had warned me that, as our people say, he had both the yam and the knife. I was a beggar.
Even my eyes refused to focus on the paper he’d given me. Instead, they focused on my shoes, which seemed very far away or as though they belonged to someone else. I felt stupid, as if this man were trying to prove that I’d scammed my way to Michigan. I was afraid he saw me as a criminal he must stop from reaching the shores of his country. I began to understand those who think that the sole purpose of immigration departments is to keep people out of their countries.
Still my mind was blank. Nope, it wasn’t blank—it was scalded by anger and humiliation and shame. My mind started bubbling with cusses instead of sentences for the opening of a story. I wanted to tell him to go “hug a transformer,” as we say in Nigeria, meaning to go and electrocute yourself with the highest voltage possible. I wanted to cuss the whole embassy: “Efiig ijire nyine . . . may hernia swell your testicles!” (One of my Black characters in New York, My Village says this when white church ushers want to flush him from a New Jersey church.)
The consular officer couldn’t even let me think up a short story in peace; he kept looking at his watch and telling me to hurry up, reminding me he still had many people to interview. He’d become more impatient, more restless. His powers over me meant he also had the luxury to show how he really felt. He tried to make me feel as though I was the one holding up his important job, locking up hundreds of people all day in this embassy. And what options did I have but to stand there and let him torture me? This sense of powerlessness was the height of my violation. Even my cold felt strange, as though the mucus in my nostril was slowly turning into sand and blocking my breathing.
Even when I tried to sublimate my horrible mental state with prayers, they still came out raw. “Oh, the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” I prayed silently, “please, don’t let this f**king asshole of an American destroy my American dream! Oh, Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints and angels, move and intercede for the grace for me to be calm to write this stupid story. Don’t wait till my situation becomes hopeless, just so that you can dispatch Saint Jude, patron of hopeless causes, that perpetual latecomer!”
– – – – –
But heaven knew I needed this visa more than anything. I had always believed that America would develop my writing. And that afternoon, it calmed me to remember that this America terrorizing me now was the same America doling out MFA scholarships to our army of new Nigerian talents.
Prudence meant I quietly ate the shit of this short story-writing humiliation. After all, I’d already done the hard part, getting admission into Michigan. I’d lived through five anxious months as the MFA program read earlier versions of “An Ex-Mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom” (both of which made 2005 and 2006 editions of The New Yorker). Now to buoy my spirit, I tried to remember the sweet, welcoming emails from my would-be Michigan writing professors: Eileen Pollack, Nick Delbanco and Peter Ho Davies. They said they loved my writing and would help me become a better writer. They said they loved my imagery and voice—even if I chose another program.
After about 15 minutes of wracking my brain, I managed to come up with two stupid sentences: I could never have known **** was a thief until that night. You would never have believed he could have treated me like this. I didn’t want to show this to him. I believed I’d flunked the interview since I couldn’t write beyond these two lines. But I was tired of him harrying me and worried about the people still waiting to be interviewed, so I held my breath and slid the paper back to him.
“So, Mr. Akpan, what happened next?” he asked excitedly after reading it aloud.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No, I really want to know what he did.”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“But you can just tell me what he did. Just summarize. It’s really gripping.”
“I would have to create the whole story from scratch and then summarize.”
Disappointed, he shrugged and asked how I was going to pay for my MFA since I’d rejected Michigan’s scholarship offer. I said my church would. But since I’d forgotten to bring the church’s financial statement, he became very quiet and still, his face hardened like he was going to finally nail me. I just kept saying I’d bring it the following day, knowing that providing this paperwork would be less difficult than writing the two-liner. I babbled and begged till he took my passport and said to come for the visa in two days’ time. I thanked him and loosened my collar and sauntered out, whistling a song of gratitude to the Virgin Mary.
An unusual request during a visa interview left Uwem Akpan, author of the bestselling story collection Say You’re One of Them, scrambling to find his voice. It also helped to spark his first novel, New York, My Village.
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