BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, December 2018

Arky Levin, a 50-year-old film score composer, has reached a strange moment in his life. Recently separated from his wife under disconcerting circumstances and estranged from his only child, Arky finds himself alone in a new apartment in New York and purposefully cut off from friends. This should provide the silence he craves to write his latest film score, but instead he just feels lost. In this frame of mind, he visits the Museum of Modern Art and discovers a performance piece called The Artist Is Present, based on a real 2010 performance by renowned artist Marina Abramović. In this piece, Abramović sits for 75 days at a table as throngs of visitors stand for hours to take turns sitting across from her, still and silent.

Using Abramović’s seven steps for creative projects—awareness, resistance, submission, work, reflection, courage and the gift—as an organizational device for her novel, author Heather Rose details the performance’s almost mystical effect on Arky and an array of other characters as they return to the piece day after day. Other characters include Abramović herself, a young Ph.D. student from Amsterdam, a recent widow from the South, a radio personality and even Abramović’s late mother, each of whom brings his or her own unique experiences and responses to the piece.

Already a winner of several literary prizes in Australia and short-listed for the Australian Literary Society’s 2017 Gold Medal, The Museum of Modern Love is an engaging, multifaceted meditation on the meaning of life and art. Rose sets this exploration in the context of one man’s compelling midlife search for direction as he observes Abramović’s fleeting art, which the novel intriguingly brings back to life. This is a brilliant find for any reader who enjoys grappling with the larger questions of life and literature, and it is an excellent choice for book clubs seeking thought-provoking discussion.

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

At the heart of Idra Novey’s poetic second novel, Those Who Knew, is an inherently political story that reveals the nature of toxic masculinity and its effects on the world. While sussing out the manifold fears that drive men’s often destructive pursuit of power, Novey explores the strength of women—which is so often rejected and abused in that pursuit—and troubles over silence in the face of abuse.

A college professor living in an unnamed island nation, Lena is uneasy with her family’s wealth in the aftermath of the country’s former dictatorial regime. Her friend, Olga, who runs a bookstore doubling as a weed shop, is an older survivor of the Terrible Years, when she and her lover were imprisoned and abused. As news breaks of the death of a young woman named Maria P., Lena grows suspicious of the involvement of a rising senator, Victor, with whom she’d been romantically involved in their collegiate years. With nothing to go on but the mysteriously materializing articles of clothing that she is sure belonged to Maria, Lena begins to question her own silence in the years since Victor nearly took Lena’s life in an enraged outburst.

Throughout this meditation on the role of silence, the story weaves together Olga’s daily bookshop log, news reports and interviews, ongoing scenes from Victor’s brother’s autobiographical stage plays and multiple points of view to present a world as richly nuanced as it is lacking in specifics of place and time.

With this novel, Novey provides a depiction of true strength through the community of survivors—those who have withstood tragedies enacted against them by powerful people who ultimately feared their own powerlessness.

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

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

It would spoil the pleasure of reading John Boyne’s latest novel to describe most of its plot points, but let’s just say Yorkshire-born Swift is more determined than your average aspiring writer. He has two dreams: to become a celebrated author, and to have a child. And he’ll steal from anyone, starting with 65-year-old German writer Erich Ackermann, whom Swift meets in 1988 when he’s a young waiter in Berlin.

Soon, Ackermann, a gay man with long-suppressed desires, asks the fulsome Swift to accompany him to literary events around the world. Ackermann also shares details of his past, including his membership in the Hitler Youth and a fateful wartime decision regarding a childhood friend.

Swift betrays Ackermann by using his story as the basis for Two Germans, his debut novel. Boyne then presents scenes, most of them told from the perspectives of other characters, that chronicle the extremes Swift pursues to further his career. No one is safe, including Dash Hardy, an older gay writer Swift accompanies to Gore Vidal’s Italian villa; Swift’s wife, Edith, whose literary career is poised to take off just when Swift’s has stalled; and even Swift’s own teenage son.

Boyne sometimes paints in broad strokes, but he compensates with many wonderful touches. Exchanges between Vidal and Swift are deliciously venomous, and the digs at contemporary publishing are spot-on, as when Swift describes a debut novel he dislikes as, “Bridget Jones meets A Clockwork Orange.”

A Ladder to the Sky is an entertaining, if deeply cynical, portrait of the literary world.

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

National Book Award finalist Elliot Ackerman’s latest novel, Waiting for Eden, is narrated by an unnamed soldier who died in the line of duty in Iraq but lingers to tell the story of his friend, Eden, and Eden’s wife, Mary.

Eden earned the nickname “BASE Jump” from his platoon after he leaped from the third deck one night, heavily intoxicated, but somehow landed on his feet. Beyond this incident, however, luck has been a stranger in Eden’s life.

Having enlisted in the military to escape the vapid life of a small Midwestern town, Eden soon encounters another disappointment, this time in his marriage to his high school girlfriend, Mary, as they struggle to have a child. Mary is desperate and willing to do anything to give Eden the child he wants and to keep him from re-enlisting. Mary succeeds in getting pregnant, but Eden figures out that he isn’t the father. Once again, to escape his woes, Eden leaves for Iraq, where his Humvee hits a pressure plate, killing all of his comrades, including his best friend and the father of Mary’s baby.

In the three years since the accident, the formerly 220-pound Eden has been reduced to 70 pounds and is in a vegetative state. On one side of the veil waits Mary and her daughter; on the other waits the narrator.

Ackerman has given us a war story that is packed with love, pain and guilt, but above all, it is a meditation on the legacies we leave behind.

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