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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.

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.

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In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. Contemporary literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.

The novel—its title a play on America Is in the Heart, a 1946 semi-autobiographical novel by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan—begins with Paz, who is studying to become a nurse. While still in the Philippines, she meets her future husband, Pol De Vera, a talented orthopedic surgeon and “the Don Juan of the hospital.” Once they move to California, their roles reverse: Paz becomes the family breadwinner, while Pol works as a security guard. Their lives change further when, in 1990, they invite Hero, their niece thought to have died years earlier, to stay with them on a tourist visa.

Hero’s story is the focus of the novel, as she develops a close friendship with Roni, the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, and accompanies Roni on visits to faith healers who seek to cure the child’s eczema. Hero begins a relationship with Rosalyn, the daughter of one of the healers.

Castillo incorporates snippets of the Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan languages throughout her tale, and some of the novel’s most memorable scenes depict the decade Hero spends with an armed resistance group that fights against dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ government. If Castillo overdoes some details—she references food too often—America Is Not the Heart is still an earnest contribution to the ongoing discussion of immigrant life in America.

 

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

In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. Contemporary literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah’s magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.

“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.

“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.

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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.

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.

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Madeline Miller’s enthralling second novel may be about a goddess, but it has a lot to say about what it means to be a woman. In Circe, the acclaimed author of The Song of Achilles (which won the Orange Prize in 2012) unfurls the story of the legendary witch from Homer’s Odyssey with lyric intensity.

Circe grows up in the palace of her father, the sun god Helios, listening to stories of the legendary fall of the Titans and conflicts among the gods. Like all immortals, Helios is ruthless, capricious and obsessed with maintaining his status. Circe, a goddess without exceptional beauty or discernible power, is sidelined in his court, unworthy of even being married off. It isn’t until Circe falls in love with a mortal that she realizes she has the ability to bless or harm others through transfiguration—a discovery that causes her to be labeled a threat. Helios exiles her to a remote island; there, she is able to further develop her skills with pharmakeia, the art of using plants and herbs to perform magic.

Though sailors occasionally attempt to seek shelter on her island’s shores, Circe protects herself by transforming any men with bad intentions into pigs. As centuries roll by, key encounters with gods and humans alike punctuate her isolated existence—a meeting with Medea and a shocking midwifery scene are particularly mesmerizing. Eventually, Circe’s connections with others force her to embrace her powers, breach her exile and choose her destiny.

Miller, who studied classics at Brown University and teaches high school Greek and Latin, paints a vivid picture of classical Greece: the mindset of its people, the beauty of its landscapes, the details of daily tasks. The elemental allure of mythology, with its magic and mystery and questions of fate and free will, is presented here with added freshness that comes from seeing this world from a female perspective. Like its heroine, this is a novel to underestimate at your peril.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Madeline Miller for Circe.

The acclaimed author of The Song of Achilles unfurls the story of the legendary witch from Homer’s Odyssey with lyric intensity.
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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.

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.

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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.

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 […]
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In his marvelous novel The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst spanned the 20th century to tell the story of an enigmatic poem and its relevance to generations of one family. He employs a similar structure in his new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multigenerational saga, this time focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy.

The first of the novel’s five sections is set in 1940. Several Oxford classmates, many of them gay, belong to a literary society. The students become infatuated with David Sparsholt, an aspiring engineer whom they first encounter as he exercises in front of an open window, “a figure in a gleaming singlet, steadily lifting and lowering a pair of hand-weights.” David has a girlfriend, but the classmates wonder if that might be a smokescreen. One student convinces David to pose nude for a drawing. Another is determined to sleep with him.

The novel’s main character, however, is Johnny Sparsholt, David’s son. Readers first meet Johnny in the mid-1960s when, at age 14, he’s vacationing with his parents and eager to pursue a romance with Bastien, an exchange student who’s staying with Johnny’s family. During this holiday, a scandal involving David’s secret affair brings ignominy to the family. The notoriety of the scandal weighs on openly gay Johnny for the next 50 years, as he becomes a celebrated painter and interacts with many of the people from his father’s past.

Hollinghurst has a tendency to use dialogue too obviously to convey background information, but the Jamesian elegance and psychological acuity of his previous novels grace The Sparsholt Affair as well. This is a moving work from one of modern literature’s finest authors.

 

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

In his marvelous novel The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst spanned the 20th century to tell the story of an enigmatic poem and its relevance to generations of one family. He employs a similar structure in his new novel, The Sparsholt Affair, another multigenerational saga, this time focusing on the Sparsholts and the effect a highly public midcentury scandal has on their family and legacy.

When a father learns his life is nearing its end, he’s left to reckon with what remains. His wife preceded him in death, and he isn’t surprised that his own is imminent. But the couple’s adult son, who has Down syndrome, will outlive him. The father wants to embrace every day he has left with his child, while also ensuring his son will be OK in a world without him.

The father, previously a doctor, signs up for a job as an unusual census taker for a secretive government bureau. The position offers the pair an excuse to do something the father and mother had long discussed: He and his son will travel the country, from municipality A to Z, and meet the country’s citizens along the way.

As the pair travels, novelist Jesse Ball slowly reveals that the trip isn’t about the census so much as the people who fill a life and a place. The unnamed father and son meet people of all sorts, some welcoming and some skeptical of the man who will mark them with a census tattoo.

Ball’s spare prose centers on the father’s inner monologue and in the process offers a glimpse of a person facing his inevitable end. “I was a better doctor for having had my son,” the father reflects, “for it left me with a basic stance—that I should not expect anything in particular from anyone, a humility vested not so much in an appraisal of myself, as in a lack of confidence in valuation and prediction.”

Census is a thoughtful, introspective novel that may leave readers contemplating the value of their own relations and inner lives.

 

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

When a father learns his life is nearing its end, he’s left to reckon with what remains. His wife preceded him in death, and he isn’t surprised that his own is imminent. But the couple’s adult son, who has Down syndrome, will outlive him. The father wants to embrace every day he has left with his child, while also ensuring his son will be OK in a world without him.

Four years after a veteran of the war in Afghanistan was paralyzed by an IED explosion, he suddenly rises from his wheelchair in the parking lot of a Biloxi, Mississippi, convenience store—and that’s when Jonathan Miles’ smart exploration of everything from the excesses of American popular culture to the deepest aspects of religious belief roars to life.

At first, former high school football star Cameron Harris’ seemingly miraculous recovery sparks bewilderment in his physician, which soon curdles into outright skepticism. And when Cameron and his sister, Tanya, become the stars of a reality TV show called “Miracle Man,” and a Vatican representative arrives to investigate the possibility that Cameron’s recovery may be the second miracle necessary to elevate a deceased archbishop to sainthood, the stakes grow impossibly higher.

As the need to explain Cameron’s sudden recovery becomes more intense, Miles gradually unwraps a secret that has the potential to upend the young man’s newfound celebrity. Whether it’s a terrifying firefight in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan or the fervor that swirls around the Biloxi convenience store as it’s transformed, with the spreading news of Cameron’s “miracle,” into a place that’s like “someone opened a Cracker Barrel at Lourdes,” the novel is a vivid portrait of our need to believe and its unintended consequences.

Miles (Dear American Airlines) cleverly disguises his new novel as a work of investigative reporting, even going so far as to thank his fictional creations in his acknowledgments. For all he does to make the book appear as a work of journalism, Miles doesn’t sacrifice his characters’ inner lives to the demands of his well-orchestrated plot. Anatomy of a Miracle is a thoughtful modern morality play that’s as current as the latest internet meme and as timeless as the foundations of faith.

 

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

Four years after a veteran of the war in Afghanistan was paralyzed by an IED explosion, he suddenly rises from his wheelchair in the parking lot of a Biloxi, Mississippi, convenience store—and that’s when Jonathan Miles’ smart exploration of everything from the excesses of American popular culture to the deepest aspects of religious belief roars to life.

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At the core of Shobha Rao’s magnificent and heart-wrenching debut novel is a unique friendship forged between two young women from a small Indian village. Poornima and Savitha’s bond sustains them despite insurmountable odds; their first obstacle is simply being born into a community that celebrates the births of sons but considers daughters as objects to be married off as soon as possible.

After 15-year-old Poornima’s mother dies and the traditional year of mourning has passed, her father contacts the local matchmaker to find her a suitable husband. At the same time, Poornima meets Savitha, who is a year older than Poornima and from an even poorer family. With three younger sisters, a chronically ill father and a mother who cleans houses, Savitha is forced to scour the garbage dumps daily for food, or perhaps something to sell.

Poornima’s father, a sari weaver, is looking for someone to sit at his dead wife’s loom to help increase his output, so Savitha fills that position and becomes Poornima’s close friend. Despite her dire circumstances, Savitha is full of joy and hope—feelings that Poornima has all but forgotten.

When a probable match for Poornima is found in a distant village, the girls plan ways to stay in touch after the marriage. But suddenly Savitha becomes the victim of a horrific crime, and she disappears—without telling Poornima where she is going.

Rao fills the second half of her captivating novel with the devastating circumstances that engulf these young women over the next several years. From extreme cruelty to kidnapping and entrapment in a sexual slavery ring, each traumatic experience keeps them separated by thousands of miles, and finding a way to meet again seems impossible.

Girls Burn Brighter focuses an enlightening lens on contemporary headlines that often seem abstract. Readers of Rao’s vital, vibrant novel will not soon forget these two strong, driven young women.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book essay from Shobha Rao on Girls Burn Brighter.

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

At the core of Shobha Rao’s magnificent and heart-wrenching debut novel is a unique friendship forged between two young women from a small Indian village. Poornima and Savitha’s bond sustains them despite insurmountable odds; their first obstacle is simply being born into a community that celebrates the births of sons but considers daughters as objects to be married off as soon as possible.

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Given the fractures that mark the history of the United States and the many immigrants who call this nation home, it’s not particularly surprising that so much of American storytelling gravitates toward the familial, seeks shelter in that blood-bound country within the country. What has been said best about American life in the realm of fiction has often been said through the prism of the American family.

It is squarely through the door of the familial that Luis Alberto Urrea’s dizzying new novel, The House of Broken Angels, enters the pantheon and takes its rightful place alongside the best contemporary accounting of what it means to belong in this country of endless otherness.

The novel takes place both in chronological time and in violation of it. It follows the de la Cruz clan, “an American family, which happens to be from Mexico.” The family’s eldest, Mamá América, has died. Her son, the family patriarch Miguel Angel de la Cruz, is also dying, but he attempts to ward off death long enough to organize back-to-back family gatherings: his mother’s funeral and his own final birthday party. The narrative—sometimes bittersweet, sometimes uproarious—swoops between these two events and the personal histories of their attendees.

Urrea writes in exhilarating but controlled slashes, wielding a machete that cuts like a scalpel. Every page comes alive with scent, taste and, perhaps most movingly, touch. The novel’s most affecting characters are passing through the tail end of life. They carry the burden of a shared history, and in this way their smallest, most delicate interactions—the brush of a hand, the sight of scarred and sagging skin—are alive with the weight of all that once was. The House of Broken Angels is about a quintessentially American family, a family that came north looking for heaven but found that “heaven was a blueprint.” But it’s also about what it means to look back on a life and, with total honesty, take stock.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Urrea for The House of Broken Angels.

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

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, March 2018

Some novels try to make you see or feel or think; others are a kind of intellectual indulgence for the author and those in the know. Ned Beauman’s new novel is one such inside joke—likely to be amusing to those who get it, exasperating to those who don’t. The person laughing loudest may indeed be Beauman himself.

Madness Is Better Than Defeat revolves around a Hollywood production of a film called Hearts in Darkness. But despite this title—and the novel’s epigram, which also alludes to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—the film isn’t about a Colonel Kurtz, but rather about a “Coutts.” The filming takes place not in colonial Congo but at a Mayan temple in Honduras in the 1930s. This tropical locale acts as a kind of quicksand for hapless Caucasians, as the shoot transforms into a 20-year standoff that tangentially involves the CIA and their sordid work ousting leaders for American corporations.

There is none of Conrad’s brooding in the latest energetic novel by Beauman, who uses a lot of what he calls “ten-dollar words” as he mocks Conrad’s plodding, Slavic style. He assumes familiarity with Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and makes repeated nods to philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who believed reality consisted only of ideas. There’s a boat called the SS Alterity. Get it? Maybe not.

At its best, Beauman’s novel calls to mind a younger Thomas Pynchon. But an older Pynchon wrote that serious literature shows a real awareness of death. He also reflected that to start with ideas and derive characters from them was a mug’s game. Beauman’s command of the language is first-rate, and the breadth of his ideas vindicates his philosophy degree from Cambridge. But by Pynchon’s reckoning, Beauman’s cavalier attitude toward death makes him unserious. His characters are but shadows of Beauman’s thoughts.

For a novel so concerned with darkness, it’s unexpectedly lightweight.

An indulgent jungle invention

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