Kate Christensen’s novels hit that sweet spot between beach read and literary fiction. With unsparing wit and an eye for sensuous detail, she’s tackled subjects that range from the inhabitants of a singular Brooklyn apartment building (The Astral) to the emotional repercussions of the death of a family’s patriarch (The Great Man). Her sixth novel, The Last Cruise, is set during the final voyage of a vintage ocean liner on a two-week cruise to Hawaii.

Before heading off to the scrapyard, the Queen Isabella is making one last cruise that will emulate the bygone luxuries of the 1950s. Smoking is allowed on board, but internet and phone use are not. There are no children on board. For highbrow entertainment, the ship owners hired the Sabra Quartet, a notable Israeli string ensemble led by violinist Miriam Koslow, now well into her 70s. Below decks, Hungarian sous chef Mick Szabo toils away, lost in fantasies of vintage cocktails and lobster thermidor. Also on board are Christine Thorne, a journalist turned Maine farmer’s wife, and her writer friend Valerie.

Despite the rich food and evening entertainment, the effort to hearken back to an easier, sunnier decade (a decade, let’s remember, that wasn’t equally pleasant for everyone) can’t disguise the fact that the cruise is taking place in a fractured society on a disintegrating planet. Christine and Miriam become aware of the corners cut by the ship’s cynical owners, while Valerie begins to dig into the personal lives of the unhappy crew, hoping for an exclusive. Even Mick can’t help but notice the tensions rising among his staff as rumors begin to spread about layoffs planned by the cruise ship company. When a crisis hits—and boy, does it ever—the passengers find themselves facing the best and worst aspects of civilization.

The Last Cruise can be read as an analogy to our complex political present—the haves and have-nots divided on a floating world with a selfish wealthy owner that flies off as soon as disaster strikes. But it can also be enjoyed as a darkly humorous comedy of manners, with a diverse cast of characters and enough details about sex, food and drink to satisfy any reader.

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

Rebecca Makkai is a skilled and versatile writer whose work often contains a quietly comic edge. Her ambitious new novel, The Great Believers, is a change of pace, exploring the effects of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community in Chicago.

The novel begins in 1985. Nico Marcus has died from AIDS-related illnesses, and his parents have banned his partner and friends from attending the funeral. His friends have organized an unofficial wake at the home of local photographer Richard Campo, where gatherers include Yale Tishman, a development director at a university art gallery, and his partner Charlie Keene, editor and owner of the local gay newspaper. Also present is Nico’s fiercely loyal sister, Fiona. Her attachment to Nico’s circle has repercussions that echo decades later, as explored in the novel’s second storyline, set in 2015, which finds Fiona searching for her estranged daughter and staying with Richard, now a world-famous photographer living in Paris.

As is true of many novels with parallel narratives, one storyline initially seems more compelling than the other. Yale’s pursuit of a career-making donation of French art from an unlikely donor and the slow passage of the virus through his circle of friends overshadow the bumpy path of Fiona’s frantic, unfulfilling life. But when Fiona realizes the toll that being a caregiver has taken on her own life, the two stories come together in a way that honors the different forms of suffering on both sides.

As Makkai notes in the afterword, when a heterosexual woman writes a novel about AIDS, some may feel she has crossed “the line between allyship and appropriation.” But The Great Believers reminds us of the powerful connection between fiction and empathic imagination. Makkai does a superb job re-creating the atmosphere of bigotry and moral finger-pointing that existed even in a big city like Chicago during the early years of the epidemic, as well as the enormous changes wrought by compassionate activists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, artists and social workers who did so much to improve the lives and deaths of so many people, especially gay men.

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

Adrienne Celt’s second novel follows a young Russian émigré as she is drawn into a complex love triangle with a brilliant novelist and his ambitious wife. Told via a collection of diary entries, letters and documents bequeathed to an elite private high school in memory of the famous Russian novelist who briefly taught there, Invitation to a Bonfire is a cleverly constructed novel about love, obsession and revenge.

Zoe (Zoya) Andropova, an orphaned refugee from the newly formed Soviet Union, is enrolled as a charity case at an boarding school in New Jersey, where she tries her best to fit in with her wealthy classmates. After graduation, with no real options, Zoe takes a job in the school’s newly constructed greenhouse where she is cruelly bullied and ostracized by the students. Desperately lonely, she is especially vulnerable to the attentions of visiting writer Leo Orlov, a Russian émigré like herself. Even his imperious and calculating wife, Vera, whom Zoe remembers meeting in a Soviet youth group, isn’t a deterrent, and Lev and Zoe begin a passionate affair. Before Leo leaves on a dangerous (and fruitless) trip to the USSR to locate an early manuscript, he begs Zoe to help free him from the marriage. As they plan a future together, Zoe realizes that the relationship between the Orlovs is far more complex than she ever realized.

Lev and Vera are very loosely based on Nabokov and his wife, Vera. Vera was well known as the translator and critic of her husband’s most famous works, and the novel pays homage to the great writer in Celt’s use of an unreliable narrator and a title that’s echoes one of Nabokov’s earlier novels. But the cunning plot and Celt’s singular, sparkling prose are very much her own.

Invitation to a Bonfire is part noir, part coming of age and a wholly enjoyable read.

“You see, the trick in life is learning how to see differently. . . . Castiglione taught the Chinese about perspective—parallel lines versus converging lines.”

Helen Gibbs is a captive, if not exactly rapt, audience when an art dealer shares this theory. Helen is a British journalist whose assignments carry her around the world and often lead to conversations with interesting and self-important people. Though she isn’t certain she fully grasped the idea, Helen leaves the interview and reflects on the meaning in her own life: “If you lived your life along parallel lines, it didn’t matter where you stood, things would always look the same. If, on the other hand, you lived your life along converging lines, it did matter where you stood because place determined perspective—standing in one place, things looked one way, in another—a different way. So the trick was to figure out where to stand.”

What does that mean for Helen’s relationship with her husband, financier Christopher Delavaux? The couple met on Mexico’s west coast. Their courtship, marriage and careers carry them to equally exotic and cosmopolitan locales: Saint-Tropez, Tangier, New York City. Their relationship plays out on stages accessible almost exclusively through power or wealth. Those factors, much like the romance of the locations themselves, can blur the distinction between what is and what you wish to be.

In A Theory of Love, novelist Margaret Bradham Thornton (Charleston) examines a single relationship and how it is affected by life events both mundane and dramatic. Thornton’s sophomore novel combines its protagonist’s rich inner world with her and her husband’s high-profile, high-stakes careers. Readers will be left, like Helen, contemplating how the parallel or converging lines of their lives affect their relationships.

Fredrik Backman’s engrossing fifth book is a sequel to Beartown, his 2017 novel set in a small town on the edge of a Swedish forest. As Us Against You opens, Beartown’s future is threatened: first by the possible closure of its only factory, and second by the bankruptcy faced by the town’s hockey club. Hockey isn’t merely a game to the town’s inhabitants—their whole lives revolve around the Bears’ wins and losses.

Beartown’s anxiety is further fueled by a major shift in the Bears’ team roster. After the rape of the general manager’s daughter, Maya, by a team member, as chronicled in Beartown, the team was torn apart. Some Bears abandoned the team and joined the Bulls from the neighboring town of Hed. Those who stayed in Beartown are some of the best players, but the remaining team lacks the size and experience of the Bulls.

Backman’s latest saga focuses on the first hockey season following the schism, brilliantly portraying the way each magnetic character copes with the hatred and violence that has engulfed these two small towns as their teams prepare to do battle. Maya struggles to move on from her traumatic experience, constantly aware that many blame her for the team’s demise. Her best friend, Ana, carelessly reveals that their friend Benji, one of the team’s best players, is gay. Maya’s parents, Peter and Kira, constantly face backlash from a town that blames their report of Maya’s rape for the team’s problems. Vidar, the younger brother of one of the town bullies, is mysteriously released from a detention camp to be the Bears’ goalie. Ramona, a widow who runs the local bar, lovingly supports the pack of “hooligans” who resort to violence in support of their team. The new Bears coach is a woman, an ex-professional player who struggles to gain the acceptance of the town and her players. And lurking in the background is a Wizard of Oz-like figure—a politician trying to manipulate the team and factory to enrich his own pockets.

Backman stirs this volatile mélange of disparate characters until the inevitable explosion occurs, leaving Beartown sadder but perhaps wiser than before. His depiction of this small town will resonate especially with readers who struggle with the racism, homophobia and misogyny that exist in their own communities.

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

In the trilogy of intriguing novels that she completes with Kudos, Rachel Cusk has routinely subverted essential ideas of narrative and storytelling. Each book is made up of a series of monologues about both intimate and public concerns, which are delivered by passing characters and filtered through the lens of a deceptively impassive witness (a writer, Faye, whose sketchy personal details align closely to Cusk’s own).

On first encounter, the novels seem to have very little plot (arguably, the second book, Transit, has the most), but far from random, their episodic forward momentum makes them curiously hard to put down. In Outline, Faye travels to Greece to teach a writing course, and in Transit she moves back to London, newly divorced, to renovate a flat. The third book finds her attending two writer’s conferences, each in an unidentified European location at once faceless and unique. Kudos might be seen as Cusk’s response to Brexit—the specter of that controversial decision hovers over the novel, which in part is about impossible choices we must all eventually make about staying or leaving. There are also ripples of other contemporary discontents—the encroaching dissatisfaction of once-privileged white men, the perennial gender divide and the death of literature in our postliterate world.

On one level, Cusk lampoons the insular literary world, with its intellectual puffery and self-congratulatory prize giving (i.e. kudos), as she deviously exiles Faye to far-flung backwaters. But Cusk, like Faye, refuses to undermine the seriousness that lurks beneath the sometimes inappropriate, sometimes self-important, often uncomfortable observations of those she meets. “The human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it,” one characters says, and ultimately this truth is what Cusk tirelessly seeks to circumvent. In the end, one can’t help but hear echoes of E.M. Forster’s elusive advice: Only connect.

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