BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, May 2018

Much of the action of Rachel Kushner’s brilliant new novel is set in California prisons. She has done her research, and the novel is filled with distressing factual details like death-row inmates sewing sandbags and prison staff using a powerful, probably toxic disinfectant called Cell Block 64. And of course there are the stultifying, dehumanizing prison routines.

But the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape.

The novel’s central character is Romy Hall. We meet her as she is being transported from a Los Angeles jail to Stanville, a prison in California’s agricultural heartland where she is to serve two life sentences. She is 29, born to a cruel mother in a San Francisco neighborhood that bears little resemblance to the high-tech mecca of today. She is the mother of a young son she worries about obsessively. Until she fled a stalker by moving with her son to Los Angeles, she hustled as a lap dancer at a place called the Mars Room in downtown San Francisco. We don’t learn the details until late in the novel, but we know that because of her ineffectual lawyer, she ends up in prison for killing her stalker.

Kushner (Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers) is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Kushner for The Mars Room.

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

This prescient, achingly real novel comes on the heels of the latest school massacre in Parkland, Florida, where 17 high school students and teachers died on Valentine’s Day.

How to Be Safe explores the many questions that crop up, clockwork-style, after every all-too-frequent American school shooting: Was the shooter bullied? Whose gun did he use? Why is the shooter always a white male? Would a good guy with a gun have stopped the bad guy? How did everyone miss the red flags? How does the community heal and more forward?

Former English teacher Anna Crawford is still licking her wounds after being suspended from her job when she hears that the unthinkable has happened in her town of Seldom Falls, Pennsylvania: A kid entered the school and mowed down his classmates. In the confusing aftermath, Anna briefly finds herself a person of interest. Everyone knows her complicated history: She is a local girl whose brother has done stints in jail for drug crimes, and her father killed himself when she was 24. Sometimes she says strange things. Sometimes she drinks. Like so many women, she’s been abused and mistreated by men.

Reporters crawl all over the town, flashing Anna’s picture on television screens until police exonerate her. But even after she’s cleared, Anna’s view of Seldom Falls—and its view of her—has changed forever.

Despite its searing subject matter, How to Be Safe is beautifully written. It’s also occasionally funny (a state senator declares, “As of this day, we are declaring an all-out war on violence.”). Author Tom McAllister (The Young Widower’s Handbook) presents a clear indictment of modern America’s sickness: a toxic mix of disappearing jobs and opioids and misogyny and isolation and violence. He’s not afraid to give voice to the issue that so many politicians step around. As he makes clear, there are solutions.

Instead, the town arms its teachers and debates what the inevitable memorial will look like. “Each memorial represents a collective commitment not to remembering, but to whitewashing the memories, to creating a more palatable version of the memory for ourselves to hold on to and repeat and eventually accept as the truth,” Anna says. “The memorials were there to hide failures, not to be critical of them. Every memory is false, and with each subsequent remembering, it becomes even more false.”

Award-winning writer Chris Offutt is the author of the New York Times notable book The Good Brother (1997), as well as several excellent story collections and memoirs. His bleak, savage depictions of rural down-and-outers combine the literary style of James Dickey with the noir chops of Daniel Woodrell. He owns a well-deserved reputation as a writer’s writer. Fresh off his 2016 memoir, My Father, the Pornographer, Offutt returns with his second novel, his first in over two decades. While Country Dark, a tale of family loyalty and violence in the hills of Kentucky, does not measure up to those past efforts, it’s still a slick bit of backwoods devilry.

The book spans around 20 years in the life of Tucker, a Korean War veteran, and his wife, Rhonda. Sliced into four sections and arranged chronologically, it opens in 1954 as 17-year-old Tucker walks the last 100 miles home after his discharge from the army. In the course of a day or two, Tucker confiscates a salesman’s pistol, saves 14-year-old Rhonda from rape—which, coming at the hands of her brutal uncle, means Offutt isn’t exactly slaying a hillbilly stereotype—and proposes marriage.

Leap ahead a decade: Tucker is running moonshine and scrambling to take care of his wife and five kids. Four of the children have such serious intellectual disabilities that state workers decide to institutionalize them. This doesn’t sit well with Tucker, a man fiercely protective of his family, and the threat touches off a violent chain of events that will alter the lives of everyone involved forever.

Tense and atmospheric, Country Dark is firmly rooted in time and place, with the verisimilitude expected from a writer who has made the shadowy hills of Kentucky his own.

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

“Listen. There’s something you need to hear.” This early line from National Book Award winner Richard Powers’ vast, magnificent and disturbing new novel could be its epigraph. These words are spoken in the voice of the trees, who are the real protagonists of the story. The beauty of the trees, their antiquity, their shocking imperilment at our hands, their desire to communicate to us the imminent threats to our mutual survival—all these truths join in one song of celebration and lament.

The first half of the book presents a set of individual stories—an array of human temperaments and predicaments as manifold as Charles Dickens’ or Leo Tolstoy’s. There’s a maverick botanist and a cynical sociologist, a billionaire video-game inventor and a wounded Vietnam veteran, an artist from Midwestern pioneer stock and a burned-out undergraduate. And more. The trees deliver to all nine characters an annunciation as epoch-making as any in the Bible: We bring you tidings of great joy, and also we are all totally fracked. Through this forest of interconnected human beings, Powers never loses the trees.

Each human character suffers a deadly ordeal of some kind. One literally dies for 70 seconds. Others come very close to dying or (no less terrible) bear witness to the violent death or near-death of a loved one. These dreadful brushes with mortality allow them to hear the trees’ difficult truths.

In the second half of The Overstory, the individual stories become intertwined and contrapuntally complicated. Laws and lives are both broken. There can be no happy ending. But to paraphrase Václav Havel, hope is not the same thing as optimism. The Overstory dramatizes this idea on the grandest scale. I have never read anything so pessimistic and yet so hopeful.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Powers for The Overstory.

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

Growing up in the shadow of his larger-than-life father—the artist Bear Bavinsky—Pinch has always been in the role of admirer. It’s the role, in fact, of nearly everyone in Bear’s orbit: his many wives and lovers, his 17 children, his ardent fans. They admire his work, marvel at his big personality and ignore his infidelities and shortcomings as a parent of children scattered around the globe.

Pinch grows up in Rome, his mother a Canadian potter who manages to beguile Bear for a few years before he decamps for New York and his next family. Pinch is a quiet boy, not fully embraced by the Italian children in his neighborhood because of his exotic North American background and unorthodox family. He turns to the canvas, first mimicking his father’s distinctive style before finding his own point of view. By the time he is a gawky 15-year-old, he is painting daily, his own kind of awkward teenage love affair. “Pinch hesitates at the brink—then kisses color to canvas, first a peck, bristles probing as he stoops to the easel, which he has not yet raised to his new adolescent height.”

But then Pinch brings a painting to New York for Bear’s assessment.

“Son of mine, I think the world of you. You know that,” Bear tells him. “So I got to tell you, kiddo. You’re not an artist. And you never will be.”

Pinch tucks his canvases away, settling into a life of academia, only returning to painting decades later in a risky attempt to cement the Bavinsky legacy—his father’s and his own.

Tom Rachman is the author of the indescribably good 2010 bestseller The Imperfectionists. The Italian Teacher is another superbly poignant novel featuring deeply imperfect people making deeply human decisions. It is about loyalty, the power and pretension of art and, most of all, the ties that bind.

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

In Aminatta Forna’s fourth novel, Happiness, the collision of two strangers on a London bridge sets in motion a series of events involving a missing child, a mysterious court case and city-dwelling foxes.

When animal biologist Jean Turane is knocked down by Attila Asare on Waterloo Bridge, she is in pursuit of a fox whose behavior she’s been chronicling as part of a larger study on urban wildlife. Attila, a noted psychologist from Ghana, is on his way to a dinner. Both have devoted their professional lives to understanding and interpreting behavior, whether in child soldiers or animals, and find that their initial meeting, however accidental, reveals they have much in common. Attila is in town to present a paper on war-related post-traumatic stress disorder but also plans to visit family and to check in on Rose, a former lover and co-worker diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Over the next 10 days, Attila’s niece is swept up in an immigration crackdown, and Rose’s needs prove ill served by the nursing home, while Jean gets drawn more deeply into a citywide fox-culling controversy. Both Attila and Jane turn to neighborhood residents—mostly North African immigrants—to assist them in their searches for missing relatives and elusive foxes, and their relationship evolves from allies to lovers.

When Attila is asked to be an expert witness in a court case involving a woman from Sierra Leone accused of arson, he begins to re-evaluate the causal links between suffering and trauma, and starts to question the nature of happiness itself.

Forna has explored war and its aftermath before, most notably in her memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, which centered on her father’s execution for false charges of treason during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Happiness is a different kind of book—less dramatic, but with the delicacy and strength of a spider’s web. An understated but piercing narrative of great compassion, Happiness trades action for a thoughtful study of adaptability and the empathic bonds shared between humans and animals.

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

It’s been 12 years since the publication of Uzodinma Iweala’s astounding debut, Beasts of No Nation, a novel of West African political unrest narrated by a child. With his second novel, Speak No Evil, Iweala once again allows a young voice to ring clearly, shattering assumptions and demanding attention for unavoidable truths—this time about being black, queer and the child of successful immigrants in the United States.

High schooler Niru, the son of affluent, conservative Nigerian parents in Washington, D.C., tries to follow his parents’ wishes (he’s attending Harvard premed next fall), and his sexual awakening as a gay man comes with self-loathing and shame. He begs God for deliverance, and after his father drags him to Nigeria to “cure” his homosexuality, Niru attempts to block out his desires. But then Niru meets Damien, who makes it impossible to ignore his true feelings.

The majority of Speak No Evil unfolds through Niru’s perspective, but there is a shorter, final section told by his best friend, a white girl named Meredith. Her section, set six years later, recalls a horrifying act of violence. For this tragedy to be told from a white heterosexual character’s perspective is a crushing blow to Niru’s story—who gets to have a voice, after all? But those who get the last word have the greatest responsibility, and for all the mistakes made in Niru’s life—by his family and by himself—and for all the wealth and security his family possesses, it does not fall to the black child of immigrants to fix the American system’s deepest cruelties.

This graceful, consuming tale of differences, imbalances and prejudices is necessary reading.

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