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FictionShort StoriesLiterary Fiction

Denis Johnson’s final collection

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Ernest Hemingway once ventured that all American literature derives from Huckleberry Finn. By this he meant American literature elevates vernacular speech, befitting literature in a democracy. Denis Johnson’s posthumous anthology, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is superlative proof of that.

Johnson is best known for his Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke and short story collection Jesus’ Son. A pupil of Raymond Carver, he has garnered a reputation for the sordid and the hard-boiled. But only one story in his new collection, “The Starlight on Idaho,” might be called Carver-esque. It concerns a man in rehab and in fact is less Carver than Bukowski. It’s a no-hoper’s cri de coeur, avoiding the prevalent clichés of the rehab genre.

Johnson’s stories are that of a depleted and decadent civilization. He observes trains everywhere going off the rails. The joke of the title story, which is composed of many interlinked tales, is that modern life is distinctly lacking in largesse and sea maidens. The story “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist” is dedicated to Elvis, as the King is as close to mythology as such a society can come. Swirling speculations about Elvis’ supposed twin lost in childbirth reach a crescendo, which occurs just as the World Trade Center towers are struck and collapse.

Once a recovering addict, the late Johnson seems fixated on death and recovery. His stylistic range is certainly wondrous, straddling the starkness of “Starlight” and the hysterical realism of “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist.” Critics like B.R. Myers have found Johnson’s prose affected and artless, and one does wonder sometimes what purpose fiction serves if it doesn’t inspire. After all, even folksy Huckleberry Finn did that. But Johnson’s stories are pertinent and engaging. They hold up a mirror to society’s dregs and to that extent are flawless.

 

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

Ernest Hemingway once ventured that all American literature derives from Huckleberry Finn. By this he meant American literature elevates vernacular speech, befitting literature in a democracy. Denis Johnson’s posthumous anthology, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is superlative proof of that.

FictionSpeculative FictionLiterary Fiction

Red Clocks

Review by Leslie Hinson

The Biographer. The Daughter. The Wife. The Mender. The Explorer. Leni Zumas refers to her protagonists by these descriptors, invoking the reductive distance from which women are viewed in a patriarchal society: “That’s someone’s daughter.” They are also Ro, Mattie, Susan, Gin and Eivør—the dynamic women of Zumas’ magnificent second novel, Red Clocks.

Ro, a high school teacher, works tirelessly on her biography of the 19th-century trailblazing Faroese explorer Eivør Mínervudottír, who shucked societal norms for decades, ultimately freezing to death at age 42 on a polar expedition. Also 42, Ro dreams of having a child, but under the new Personhood Amendment and the “Every Child Needs Two” act, in vitro fertilization is banned, and adoption is reserved for married couples.

Mattie, 15, is Ro’s gifted student. She is pregnant and doesn’t want to be. Susan, a mother of two, is so unhappy with her nuclear family that she contemplates driving off a cliff. Gin, an introverted healer, becomes the subject of a witch-hunt after being accused of conspiring to perform an abortion.

Each woman explores her sense of self and what it means to be selfish or selfless about her desires and ambitions. Why can Eivør watch the gruesome slaughter of pilot whales but not lambs? Why can Mattie conceive an unwanted baby when Ro can’t get pregnant? Zumas plays with extremes, exposing the inner hypocrite in everyone, including the reader.

With spare prose that sets a tone as chilly and bleak as the Oregon coastal setting, Zumas doesn’t shy away from the grotesque while presenting a tale that’s haunting, thought provoking and painfully timely.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Leni Zumas for Red Clocks.

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

The Biographer. The Daughter. The Wife. The Mender. The Explorer. Leni Zumas refers to her protagonists by these descriptors, invoking the reductive distance from which women are viewed in a patriarchal society: “That’s someone’s daughter.” They are also Ro, Mattie, Susan, Gin and Eivør—the dynamic…
FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

Five journeys, five lives

Review by Lauren Bufferd

A State of Freedom, Neel Mukherjee’s bleak but beautifully constructed third novel, offers five loosely connected stories set in modern-day India. Five characters from diverse backgrounds experience displacement and devastation as they move from east to west, from village to city—even from life to death.

Mukherjee’s empathy for the underdog is apparent in the creation of his most resilient characters. Milly, who works as a maid, is forced to arrange her own kidnapping after her employers refuse to let her out of their house. Lakshman, whose chance encounter with a bear cub convinces him to leave his family, roams from village to village with the animal that he slowly trains to dance (though the training is extremely violent and gruesome, and may prove difficult for sensitive readers). Equally compelling is the London publisher visiting his parents in Bombay who defies strict cultural etiquette to involve himself in the personal life of the family cook, Renu. This almost comic piece, which has the domestic richness and class-consciousness of “Downton Abbey,” takes a grimmer turn when the publisher visits the village of the cook’s impoverished extended family.

With recurring characters and motifs throughout its disparate chapters, A State of Freedom echoes the structure and themes of V.S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize-winning novel, In a Free State (1971), which also focused on the international effects of political and social disruption in five distinct stories. There’s also a bit of Henry James in the discernible tensions between Old World complexity and New World innocence, as well as the interplay between real life and the ghostly realm of the dead. But this is no pastiche; Mukherjee’s depiction of social inequalities and his belief that even the lowliest person has a story to be told is very much his own.

 

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

A State of Freedom, Neel Mukherjee’s bleak but beautifully constructed third novel, offers five loosely connected stories set in modern-day India. Five characters from diverse backgrounds experience displacement and devastation as they move from east to west, from village to city—even from life to death.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Song of a wanderer

Review by Stephenie Harrison

An inveterate free spirit, Lucia Bok is a dreamer and a seeker. It seems her brain and body never stop wandering, taking her from her first breaths in Tennessee to college in New York City and itinerant stints abroad in Latin America and Vietnam. But to what end? During her South American travels, she stumbles across the answer: The object of her quest is encapsulated by a Spanish word, querencia, which means “a place we’re most comfortable, where we know who we are, where we feel our most authentic selves.” This one word will define the rest of Lucia’s life and the battle she faces when her capricious eccentricities transform into full-blown psychoses, forcing her and her loved ones to discover where Lucia—and her illness—truly belongs in the world.

Mira T. Lee’s debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful, is an astonishing and imaginative chronicle of mental illness and the unbreakable bonds of family. Taking readers on a journey from the halls of a psychiatric ward to the remote countryside of Ecuador, Lee examines the enigma that is Lucia through various perspectives, bringing together in a discordant symphony the voices of her sister, her husband, her lover and even Lucia herself (in both her lucid and agitated states). In shimmering prose, Lee nimbly unfurls a story that slithers like a serpent back and forth through time and across the threshold between what is perceived and what is real, producing a nuanced view of a complex woman and what it means to love her.

Everything Here Is Beautiful boldly delves into mental illness’s profound impact on love and relationships, exploring tricky quandaries like to whom the burden of responsibility falls and whether it is possible to separate an individual from her illness. There are no easy answers to these questions, and Lee does not pretend otherwise. Instead, she presents us with a sensitive and elusive story of sisterhood and schizophrenia that is brimming with another one of Lucia’s favorite words: saudade, a deep, melancholic longing for a person or state that is absent.

This electrifying first novel is wistful, wise and utterly unforgettable.

 

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

Mira T. Lee’s debut novel, Everything Here Is Beautiful, is an astonishing and imaginative chronicle of mental illness and the unbreakable bonds of family.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A Yorkshire legend

Review by Michael Magras

One of the surprises on Britain’s Man Booker Prize shortlist last year was Elmet, the fine debut novel from Fiona Mozley. American readers now have the chance to experience the novel’s atmospheric writing and its vivid portrait of a family struggling to outrun its past.

As we learn from the Ted Hughes excerpt in the book’s epigraph, Elmet, where the novel is set, was “the last independent Celtic kingdom in England” that, centuries later, “were still a ‘badlands’, a sanctuary for refugees from the law.” Now part of modern-day Yorkshire, this area is still home to some shady characters. The narrator is 14-year-old Daniel, who lives with his older sister, Cathy, and their father, John, a “bearded giant” who once bare-knuckle boxed for money, in a bungalow that Daddy, as Daniel calls him, built from scratch in a copse far from the town where they used to live.

Cathy is the tougher sibling, rolling cigarettes and beating up schoolboys who try to assault her, while Daniel prefers to sit quietly under trees and learn about poetry from Vivien, a neighbor woman Daddy knows through the children’s mother, who was frequently absent during their early years.

The novel turns darker when a man named Price, an unscrupulous landlord, shows up at the bungalow. Price, whom Daddy once worked for, claims to hold the deed to the land Daddy built the house on and tells Daddy he has to work for him again if he wants to stay. As Daddy later tells his children, Price will cause “small nuisances” if they refuse.

The escalation of these nuisances constitutes much of Elmet’s drama. The gothic violence of the later pages is out of step with the earlier tone, but Elmet paints a memorable picture of fraught familial relationships and the perils of revenge.

One of the surprises on Britain’s Man Booker Prize shortlist last year was Elmet, the fine debut novel from Fiona Mozley. American readers now have the chance to experience the novel’s atmospheric writing and its vivid portrait of a family struggling to outrun its past.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Home is a long way from here

Review by Thane Tierney

The Scots didn’t invent stubbornness, but they perfected it, raised it to a high art where irresistible force and immovable object are sometimes locked like two neutron stars in a perilous dance. So it is with American immigrant Johnny MacKinnon and his Scottish son, Corran, in Laura Lee Smith’s second novel, The Ice House.

The elder MacKinnon is the COO of Bold City Ice in Jacksonville; his son is a recovering heroin addict and oil rig worker living near Loch Lomond. And while an actual ocean separates father and son, a more treacherous emotional ocean—strewn with a fair bit of ice—separates the two as well. On top of that, Johnny’s business is facing a potential bankruptcy due to a suspicious industrial accident, and he has been diagnosed with what might either be a benign cyst or a life-threatening tumor in his brain. Against his wife’s wishes and his doctor’s advice, MacKinnon decides to hit the road to the auld sod in order to—make amends? Find closure with his estranged son? Elicit a long-overdue apology? All of the above?

As the famous Scots poet Robert Burns noted, the best-laid schemes . . . well, you know. Not only were MacKinnon’s plans far from the best laid to begin with, but he’s also left his wife (who is the firm’s CEO) across the sea with a full slate of emotional, legal and financial calamities of her own. What could possibly go wrong?

Smith has a flair for creating three-dimensional characters who are flawed and heroic in the small ways that most of us are, and while her literary milieu is more chamber music than symphony, she is able to rivet the reader for more than 400 pages, which is no wee accomplishment.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and is descended from Scots who once lived on the Isle of Muck in the Inner Hebrides.

The Scots didn’t invent stubbornness, but they perfected it, raised it to a high art where irresistible force and immovable object are sometimes locked like two neutron stars in a perilous dance. So it is with American immigrant Johnny MacKinnon and his Scottish son, Corran, in Laura Lee Smith’s second novel, The Ice House.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A master writer’s final reflection

Review by Stephanie Koehler

Sam Shepard completed final edits on his life’s final book days before passing away in the summer of 2017. The last written work from the actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 55 plays is Spy of the First Person, a short but intense exploration of memory, mortality and ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The novella is presented as a series of loosely connected fragments, with spare and rhythmic prose that offers rich descriptions of places and memories. The nontraditional format tells of a man reflecting on his life in the face of grave illness. He meditates on family history, his role as a father and his increasing dependence on others as his physical form deteriorates. In visceral prose, Shepard describes the odd sensations and fatalism of the man’s body as it transforms around his still sharp mind. Much of the narrative is dedicated to the world of memory, and Shepard’s delicately prepared imagery evokes the scents of long-emptied apartments, the eclectic sounds of northern California neighborhoods and the colors of decades-old relationships.

For fans of Shepard’s plays or those who enjoy an experimental look at mortality, Spy of the First Person is unflinching in its examination and generous in its appreciation of life’s countless small beauties.

Sam Shepard completed final edits on his life’s final book days before passing away in the summer of 2017. The last written work from the actor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 55 plays is Spy of the First Person, a short but intense exploration of memory, mortality and ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

The way we were

Review by Hannah Phillips

Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve begins sharply, as Peri, a wealthy, middle-aged Turkish woman, makes her way to a dinner party. Suddenly, Peri finds herself face to face with a mugger, who takes her purse and shakes free its contents, including a cherished Polaroid.

Watching the Polaroid flutter to the ground, Peri recalls her early days at Oxford University, a time of personal uncertainty about the existence of God. She and the two women from the photograph—the devout Mona and the skeptical Shirin—are “the three daughters of Eve,” and together they take a seminar on God. Peri is instantly smitten with the mysterious professor, and as he pushes her to question her beliefs, she falls deeper for him—and begins to panic.

The novel alternates between the present—as Peri encounters snobby members of Istanbul’s middle class at the dinner party—and her traumatic memories of what happened with her professor. In striking, lovely language, Shafak considers Islamophobia, teacher-student relationships and terrorism of many kinds. Fresh and timely, this is an approachable novel of big ideas.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve begins sharply, as Peri, a wealthy, middle-aged Turkish woman, makes her way to a dinner party. Suddenly, Peri finds herself face to face with a mugger, who takes her purse and shakes free its contents, including a cherished Polaroid.

FictionLiterary Fiction

This house is a home

Review by Deborah Donovan

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, December 2017

The third novel by Australian author Ashley Hay is an engrossing and insightful portrait of two women living in Brisbane, Australia: Elsie, now in her 90s, a widow of 40 years and recently relocated to an assisted living facility by her children; and Lucy, a 30-something mother of a 2-year-old and wife to Ben, a journalist.

Elsie has just sold her home of 60 years to Lucy’s young family. Throughout the novel, Hay moves back and forth through Elsie’s years, giving the reader introspective looks into her life: from her days as a vibrant, adventurous young woman to her years mothering her twins, Elaine and Don; from the time she stepped out of her ordinary life to have her portrait painted to the present day, when she looks into her mirror at “the facility” and says to herself, “I have no idea who you are or why you’re here.”

Lucy’s chapters revolve around the difficulties of new motherhood—the crying, the late nights, the sudden, obstinate behavior of her young son. She increasingly takes out her frustrations on her husband, whom she sees as blissfully removed from most of the childrearing as he enjoys his daily routine at the newspaper and his frequent work-related trips abroad.

Numerous scenes in this thoughtful novel will linger in the reader’s memory—like Elsie’s husband, Clem, graciously reaching out to an old neighbor who divorced and moved away, but could be found “wandering around his old neighborhood, looking for his past.” Or the night when Clem dies in his sleep at age 54, when Elsie realizes that “suddenly all the plans they’d thought of making were too late.”

A lyrically written portrayal of the lives of two women tied together by memories and the house they share, A Hundred Small Lessons is sure to be enjoyed by readers of Kate Morton, another Brisbane author.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The third novel by Australian author Ashley Hay is an engrossing and insightful portrait of two women living in Brisbane, Australia: Elsie, now in her 90s, a widow of 40 years and recently relocated to an assisted living facility by her children; and Lucy, a 30-something mother of a 2-year-old and wife to Ben, a journalist.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Thanks for nothing

Review by Michael Alec Rose

When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.

Adam turned to the bottle after his career as a rock musician spiraled, after his beloved partner Johanna in the band lost her mind, after he realized he’d been chasing the wrong dream. A recovering alcoholic is still an alcoholic, and Adam can barely endure the pressure of a Thanksgiving family reunion. This is where the novel opens, zooming in on Adam in the middle of the nightmare, camped out on a bed in the basement of his childhood home, barely able to face the “music” of his family’s crushing pity, and their even more crushing hope for him.

Marissa slept with an old flame she met on a flight she was working. Being a flight attendant wasn’t something she’d planned on, any more than being unfaithful to her husband, any more than the terrible weight of feeling constantly inadequate as a wife, a daughter-in-law, a human being. Now she’s pregnant with the other man’s child. Now she’s on her guilty way to her in-laws’ house for Thanksgiving, barely able to face the “music” of his family’s crushing contempt, and their even more crushing kindness towards her.

This is the day Marissa and Adam, total strangers, meet at the restaurant of a hotel lobby near the airport. They have nothing in common except for their despair and their inability to confront their own enormous predicaments. Beware! These two lost souls do not redeem each other. In Feldman’s hands, life is too true and too weird for such a happy ending.

With consummate compassion, Feldman takes note of every awkward movement of their unlikely, painful, comical and consequentially graceful Thanksgiving together.

When it comes to hitting rock bottom, Joshua Max Feldman is a deft recording angel. Both in his first novel, The Book of Jonah, and now again in Start Without Me, Feldman shines a loving and unsparing light on ordinary persons at the worst moments of their lives.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

A family in the wreckage

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A new novel about Hurricane Katrina could seem like retreading ancient history. That was before Hurricane Harvey made an ocean of southeast Texas and harassed Louisiana. Before Irma smashed into the Caribbean and Florida, and Maria into Puerto Rico. All made landfall close to the 12th anniversary of Katrina, which left wounds that are still raw.

C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel draws its title from a Japanese phrase signifying ephemerality, but it doubles as a description of New Orleans after Katrina. As a fictional retelling thereof, the book has few superiors. In Babst’s phrase, Katrina was a “hate crime of municipal proportion,” referring to the racial disparity in the storm’s victims.

Reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, The Floating World is also a meditation on kinship and family history. Like Franzen’s chaotic family, the one here is ambivalent toward their hometown. Before Katrina, the protagonist, Del, escaped to New York. After Katrina, the family patriarch sinks into assisted living. Their relations with each other and the world are stormy. One of them might have committed a murder.

The Deep South can seem fatalistic at the best of times, but the hurricane dragged this to new depths. Babst evokes Katrina’s symbology, like the Xs marking houses containing the deceased. She also revisits discussions about whether NOLA has a future in light of rising seas, to what extent the city’s devil-may-care ethos contributed to its destruction, and how the media fed off the Big Easy’s pain.

The author resists the temptation to turn her novel into a tract or advocacy—not that it lacks passion. To the contrary, the novel is very much of our irritable, harried times.

Like Harvey, Katrina was not just a storm but also a reconfiguration of a community. Babst’s novel is an invaluable record of that social devastation—and a warning of the devastations like Harvey to come.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel draws its title from a Japanese phrase signifying ephemerality, but it doubles as a description of New Orleans after Katrina. As a fictional retelling thereof, the book has few superiors. In Babst’s phrase, Katrina was a “hate crime of municipal proportion,” referring to the racial disparity in the storm’s victims.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Down these mean streaks a man must go

Review by Thane Tierney

One sunny morning in 2010, a man streaks—quite literally—against morning drive-time traffic on Los Angeles’ 110 Freeway, the gray scar etched into the left side of the city’s face. Talk about a Kodak moment, and it’s witnessed by multiple characters in the latest novel by Ivy Pochoda (The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street), who then backtracks from this freeze frame to uncover the forces that have impelled these human molecules to coagulate in this space.

Toggling back and forth between 2006 and 2010, Pochoda tugs on each character’s strand, disentangling it from the knot of LA traffic and the knot of interconnection to reveal a tapestry that is more gritty than pretty. It spans a landscape that stretches from the upper-middle class to the destitute, from Skid Row tents and Beverlywood McMansions to desiccated cabins in the high desert’s dystopian Wonder Valley.

We encounter good people who have done bad things, bad people who have done bad things (but occasionally can’t help doing good, if perhaps accidentally) and a whole bunch of folks looking for, if not necessarily redemption, at least a moment of grace. Pochoda is a master at homing in on the details of both exterior and interior landscapes and crafting characters so palpable that you can feel blood throbbing in their temples and rivulets of sweat evaporating off their necks.

It’s not a far stretch to consider Pochoda to be in the company of James Ellroy, Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker, but the two novelists that most often leap to mind as peers are Walter Mosley and National Book Award finalist Kem Nunn. It wouldn’t be a big surprise to find Wonder Valley on the short list for several awards itself.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Ivy Pochoda for Wonder Valley.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and spent several years commuting daily on the 110 from his home in Inglewood to his office at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. He never saw a naked guy jogging on it.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One sunny morning in 2010, a man streaks—quite literally—against morning drive-time traffic on Los Angeles’ 110 Freeway, the gray scar etched into the left side of the city’s face. Talk about a Kodak moment, and it’s witnessed by multiple characters in the latest novel by Ivy Pochoda (The Art of Disappearing, Visitation Street), who then backtracks from this freeze frame to uncover the forces that have impelled these human molecules to coagulate in this space.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A community in pieces

Review by G. Robert Frazier

Come what may, life goes on. And on. And on. That’s the hauntingly real premise of Jon McGregor’s fascinating new novel, Reservoir 13.

After a young girl—Rebecca or Becky or Bex Shaw—goes missing on New Year’s Eve on the frozen moors of an unnamed English village, the community members each must deal with her loss in their own way. Some mourn longer than others. Some have constant dreams and fears of what may have befallen her. Others hold onto the slimmest of hopes that she will be found safe and sound. Most manage to let go and move on, even though the hurt of that day always remains. McGregor chronicles it all over a period of 13 long, tiresome years.

Unlike most novels that delve closely into the life of a main protagonist, McGregor distances the reader in a more omniscient fashion, picking and choosing whom to look in on and when. Sharing only fleeting glimpses of their lives like an unattached observer, McGregor darts in and out of the lives of his characters in seemingly random fashion. Chapters are divided into years, years into quick flashes of months or days—moments in time all indelibly etched into the fabric of the community, into the souls of the people therein, and into the hearts and minds of readers.

Despite the unusual style—no direct dialogue and no paragraph breaks here—McGregor’s lyrical prose and sense of detail totally immerse the reader. Reaching the end of a chapter is like coming up for a brief gulp of air before diving in to see what happens next.

The novel was longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, though it was edged off the shortlist. McGregor also made the longlist in 2002 with his debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.

Come what may, life goes on. And on. And on. That’s the hauntingly real premise of Jon McGregor’s fascinating new novel, Reservoir 13.

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