BookPage starred review, January 2019

In so much of American history—or in so much of America’s interpretation of its own history—there is an air of pulp fiction. In retellings of the lives and doings of grand, almost mythological figures who shaped this country, the real and fantastical commingle, overlap, become inseparable. It is this fundamental inseparability that makes Jerome Charyn’s novel about the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt so much fun to read.

With its dimestore-comic cover design, The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King is presented as a kind of pulp pastiche of the 26th president’s thoroughly inimitable life. The book, which begins with Roosevelt’s childhood and follows him to the cusp of his presidency, leans hard on the real (and in many cases, likely inflated) events of the man’s life. But it is also a surprisingly poignant assessment of smaller, more universally human moments.

Two-thirds of the novel is set during the early and middle years of Roosevelt’s life—the years he fought in the sewer-dirty wars of New York City politics. Here, Charyn does his most impressive scene-setting work, placing the reader in the heart of late 19th-century Manhattan. The sense of place and the fundamentally ugly nature of big-city politics are consistent and convincing. By focusing on this part of Roosevelt’s life, rather than his Rough Rider days or his time as president, the bulk of the book works very well, and makes for a much more kinetic and less well-worn story.

Charyn has a gift for the unexpected, both linguistically and narratively: A snake wraps itself around a boy’s arm “like a living bandage,” and President McKinley has “the soft, sunken heart of a chocolate éclair.” The most emotionally resonant relationship in the book is between Roosevelt and Josephine, his pet mountain lion.

Deftly, Charyn interweaves what is real and invented about Roosevelt’s life, and the result is at once surprising and very entertaining.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In comparison to our current crop of dingy squillionaires and robber barons, the Vanderbilts, Belmonts and Astors were so much more entertaining, with their monstrous Fifth Avenue chateaux and even more monstrous “cottages,” their frivolous costume balls, their genteel contempt for the hoi polloi and their obsession with bloodlines, both their own and those of their thoroughbred racehorses. Therese Anne Fowler’s biographical novel isn’t about careless people, but people who care too much about the wrong stuff.

Alva Vanderbilt Belmont married for money, as did just about everyone else in her set. She hasn’t a scintilla of a sense of humor. She is a hypocrite and a coward. She may feel bad about letting her lady’s maid go because she is black, or for shunning one of her friends because he penned a silly book, but she does it anyway. She all but imprisons her beautiful, dimwitted daughter, Consuelo, because she wants her to marry the Duke of Marlborough and not the older, less well-heeled Winty Rutherfurd. (Fowler leaves out how Alva used to beat Consuelo with a riding crop but leaves in how she threatens to shoot Rutherfurd dead.) Fowler skillfully depicts both the doomed, cruel, ridiculous society that Alva married into and how she tries, in her plodding yet ruthless way, to navigate it. It is ever so tempting to believe that Edith Wharton’s ghastly Undine Spragg contains some of Alva’s DNA.

But don’t feel sorry for the Vanderbilt women. Both Alva and Consuelo lived to ripe old ages, and both gained some wisdom, no doubt born of pain. The end of Fowler’s absorbing book finds them at a suffragette rally in London’s Hyde Park, spellbound by the words of a true heroine who really knew how to buck the patriarchy. As the book says, “[Alva] was no Emmeline Pankhurst.” Indeed.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, November 2018

It might not be so wrong to review Edward Carey’s new novel, Little, with the simple declaration that it is exceptionally good. Filled with delightfully macabre illustrations, Little is about the journey of Marie Grosholtz, a rather odd-looking, diminutive child born in a tiny Swiss village in 1761. An orphan by the time she is 8, Marie finds herself in the care of the equally lonely and eccentric Dr. Curtius, a wax sculptor for the village hospital.

There, amid the real bones and organs, Marie is not scared but instead intrigued and anxious to learn the magic of plaster and wax to replicate anything at all. Soon, the master and his little apprentice escape to Paris, where they meet Widow Picot and her son, Edmond. With a head for business, the widow knows how to cash in on Dr. Curtius’ skills, and the Monkey House is born as a spectacle for the locals to marvel at wax heads of famous (and infamous) personalities. Money and fame follow, but not for Marie, whose unseemly looks overshadow her artistic talents, and she is banished as a worthless servant and denied money, power and love.

If this seems dark, it’s because it is. But Carey portrays Marie as one of the most ambitious characters you will ever meet. She is funny and kind, but above all, she is relentless in her pursuit of opportunities, which she first finds as a teacher to a princess at Versailles, then as a sculptor of wax head castings during the bloody French Revolution and later as the legendary Madame Tussaud. Marie is little only in name.

An irresistible tale, Little will please all readers, especially those who love period adventures and old-fashioned stories of triumph over human folly.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Carey for Little.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

War “is all failed plans and improvising,” muses a character in Abigail DeWitt’s third novel, News of Our Loved Ones. Though liberating, D-Day brings the worst horror upon the Delasalle family, as a bomb destroys the family’s home in Caen and splinters the survivors’ lives. For 18-year-old Geneviève Delasalle, this is a seminal moment to which she returns throughout her life, and years later, it fuels the stories that enthrall her boisterous American children, especially her daughter Polly. For Geneviève’s extended family in France, it is a constant presence, even as decades pass.

Set primarily during events surrounding World War II, News of Our Loved Ones functions less as a cohesive, plot-driven narrative and more like a collection of short stories, a string of vignettes or character studies. The chapters, some of which were published previously on their own, feel a bit truncated, and often a strong narrative thread is obscured by this abruptness. Still, DeWitt is ambitious with her latest novel, told from several perspectives through time, ranging across France to America and back again. The lives of her characters intertwine in a widening maze of infidelity, loss and secrecy, as the war links generations together as much as it tears those bonds apart.

While the shifts in time and point of view could have been more deftly handled, DeWitt’s strengths lie in keen emotional observation and the portrayal of her characters’ inner turmoil. DeWitt poetically illuminates her characters’ lives, weaving in and out like a knitting needle through wool.

Brodie Moncur, the protagonist of William Boyd’s latest novel, has a gift: His perfect pitch and attention to detail make him a once-in-a-generation piano tuner, employable anywhere in the world. He takes his skills from Edinburgh to Paris and St. Petersburg, working with some of the most renowned musicians of the late 19th century. Even bloody bouts of tuberculosis don’t dim his prospects.

But his brilliance is threatened by his love for an unattainable woman. Lika Blum, a mediocre Russian singer, lives with John Kilbarron, one of Brodie’s main clients. Brodie is drawn to Lika’s blonde beauty, her kindness and the way she fills him with contentment “like a powerful liquor; like some ambrosial, aphrodisiacal tonic invading every blood vessel and capillary in his body.”

Soon enough, though, it becomes clear that Brodie gives in to his feelings at his own peril. Kilbarron is a drunk and a drug user, and his manager brother is not above threats to get the best deal for his brother—and himself. After their illicit love affair turns deadly, Brodie and Lika find themselves on the run across Europe, and Lika faces a terrible choice to ensure her lover’s safety.

Boyd, the author of more than a dozen novels, including Any Human Heart and A Good Man in Africa, is exceptionally good at evoking a vivid sense of place. He takes us to the gloomy Scottish countryside and the Mediterranean shores of Nice, enveloping the reader in a time in European history when horses are being replaced by cars, women still have few choices, and men can settle their feuds without the interference of law. Love Is Blind is a cautionary tale in how passion can both lift up and destroy lives.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón returns for the fourth and final time to his gothic Barcelona and (every book lover’s fantasy) the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. In The Labyrinth of the Spirits, Zafón introduces Alicia Gris, a fierce, courageous but damaged young woman who was orphaned during the Spanish Civil War and recruited to become a member of the Spanish secret police. Already disillusioned at 29 with the darker demands of her work, Alicia reluctantly agrees to investigate one final case for her boss, Leandro Montalvo, in exchange for her freedom. She and her partner, Juan Manuel Vargas, must investigate the disappearance of Spain’s Minister of Culture, Mauricio Valls.

When Alicia discovers a copy of a rare book by Victor Mataix hidden in Valls’ desk, she and Vargas start down a twisting path that leads them back to Barcelona and eventually reveals connections between Valls’ mysterious disappearance and a series of atrocities committed years earlier during the corrupt Franco regime. At the same time, Alicia must confront her own complicated past, which includes a return to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War provides the perfect setting for Zafón’s novel, with its shadowed, misty labyrinth of streets, foreboding buildings and sinister sense of corruption. The plot is exquisitely intricate, like an elaborate steampunk timepiece. Alicia, a fragile but ferociously formidable, vampire-like seductress, is unforgettable. The pacing is exceptional, with its incessant, rolling waves of tension. Even the dialogue is remarkably sharp and fresh.

The Labyrinth of the Spirits is a masterpiece more than worthy of sharing a shelf with its bestselling predecessors, The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven. For those who have read Zafón’s earlier novels, some loose ends are finally resolved. Readers’ one regret will be that Labyrinth is the last in this ingenious cycle.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.