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The Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick channels the political anger that is all the rage these days in this scorching family drama. The Reason You’re Alive is narrated with ire and eloquence by David Granger, a Vietnam vet in his late 60s who has just had brain surgery. It’s as if Holden Caulfield grew up to be a reflective, even soulful, Archie Bunker. David’s voice is intimate, personal, occasionally poetic and sensible, even sympathetic. He is, however, filled with right-wing rage directed at everybody—from the government that sent him off to war to his art-dealer son, Hank, a liberal and a hypocrite (two of David’s least favorite traits).

David is recounting his life story for an unspecified report, and we spiral back to his wartime experiences, the harrowing meeting that led to his marriage, the tragedy that followed and the roots of his rocky relationship with Hank. Like Holden, the one thing David seems to love unequivocally is a little girl—Hank’s 7-year-old daughter, Ella. The question coursing throughout The Reason You’re Alive is whether or not Ella—or anything—will prevent David from yielding to his darkest impulses.

For the first half of the novel, the force of David’s voice is electric. After some time, his rants begin to wear thin, dabbling in a certain kind of narrow-mindedness and self-pity we see in angry folks on both sides of the political aisle. The book does move toward an emotional conclusion, offering Hank and David an opportunity for redemption. For all of David’s political bluster, this is a touching, old-fashioned drama about the ties that sometimes choke, but always bind.

 

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

The Silver Linings Playbook author Matthew Quick channels the political anger that is all the rage these days in this scorching family drama. The Reason You’re Alive is narrated with ire and eloquence by David Granger, a Vietnam vet in his late 60s who has just had brain surgery.

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Paul Lynch’s new novel, Grace, opens with a jarring scene: Fourteen-year-old Grace is pulled out of her house one morning in 1845 and dragged to the killing stump by her pregnant mother, who then cuts off her daughter’s hair. Grace is dressed in men’s clothing and cast from the house as her mother declares, “You are the strong one now.” What ensues is a heartbreaking tale of desolation, hunger, loneliness and survival, set during the darkest hour in Irish history.

Lynch, who has garnered comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and Colm Tóibín for his previous works Red Sky in Morning and The Black Snow, has woven a sweeping novel that is difficult to properly categorize. While calling upon traditional Irish storytelling, Grace also feels vaguely Dickensian and unfolds through language that’s more like poetry than prose. Even through gruesome parts of the novel—such as the death of Grace’s younger brother or the mildly traumatic experience of her first menstruation—Lynch’s descriptions and turns of phrase are macabrely beautiful.

Readers follow Grace as she wanders the barren countryside, reinventing herself. She is a boy, a man, a cattle herd and even a thief. She speaks with ghosts and struggles to survive. Many would see her mother’s choice to cast her out as harsh, but in comparison to the hardships experienced in the novel, readers come to see that her mother’s choice was actually an act of love, an attempt to help Grace grow and save her from hunger, pain and potentially the hands of her mother’s new lover, Boggs.

Grace offers an intriguing perspective on the concepts of femininity and hardship, one that feels as though it has already claimed its place among great Irish literature.

 

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

Paul Lynch’s new novel, Grace, opens with a jarring scene: Fourteen-year-old Grace is pulled out of her house one morning in 1845 and dragged to the killing stump by her pregnant mother, who then cuts off her daughter’s hair. Grace is dressed in men’s clothing and cast from the house as her mother declares, “You are the strong one now.” What ensues is a heartbreaking tale of desolation, hunger, loneliness and survival, set during the darkest hour in Irish history.

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In the shadow of Wounded Knee, the characters in Alexandra Fuller’s debut novel strive to make, force or find their way. Life on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation reads as both humorous and heartbreaking in Quiet Until the Thaw. Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson are cousins, bound by shared ancestry and blood, but little else. Rick grows to appreciate and revere the ways of the land of his people, the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation; You Choose turns his back on the Rez and all it would teach him.

Fuller says much in few, well-chosen words, like the quiet Rick Overlooking Horse himself, who left the Rez to serve in Vietnam and came back burned in body but resolute in spirit. Winding through seminal events from the 1940s to the 2000s, Fuller muses on the nature of time itself, how it circles and returns, how cycles repeat themselves. You Choose wanders north, returns, becomes tribal chairman and then loses it all in a fit of rage. Rick finds his home in a meadow, tends wild horses, befriends buffalo and, late one night, becomes the caretaker for twin baby boys. A couple, Le-a Brings Plenty and Squanto, help raise them.

A nonfiction writer and memoirist, Fuller writes unhurriedly and with an economy of expression that is nonetheless evocative. Her characters’ lives and motivations—from You Choose and Rick to their guardian Mina; from Le-a and Squanto to the twin boys Jerusalem and Daniel—aren’t fully realized, but what is explored paints a vivid picture. As they search for belonging and meaning, every piece of the slowly unveiled story helps fill in the complicated puzzle of their relationships. You Choose’s and Rick’s paths meet time and time again until one last encounter, when the path of one becomes the path of the other in their seemingly fated intersection. Fuller writes: “Since all things are connected, always and for all time, there is no avoiding reunion.”

 

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

In the shadow of Wounded Knee, the characters in Alexandra Fuller’s debut novel strive to make, force or find their way. Life on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation reads as both humorous and heartbreaking in Quiet Until the Thaw. Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson are cousins, bound by shared ancestry and blood, but little else. Rick grows to appreciate and revere the ways of the land of his people, the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation; You Choose turns his back on the Rez and all it would teach him.

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Cassie Hugo, one of two women at the center of The Confusion of Languages, the touching debut novel by Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), has many reasons to be jealous of Margaret Brickshaw, the biggest of which is Margaret’s family. It’s May 2011, the time of the Arab Spring. Both women are married to soldiers who work for the U.S. embassy in Jordan. But while Cassie and Dan haven’t conceived a child in their nine-year marriage (including the two years they’ve lived in Amman), Margaret and Crick, new to Jordan, have a 15-month-old boy named Mather.

Cassie’s jealousy might have been less intense if Dan hadn’t signed them up to sponsor the new arrivals. But she does her best to befriend Margaret and hide her sadness whenever she holds Mather and thinks, “This is everything I want.”

On the morning of May 13, with the men on assignment in Italy, Margaret gets into a car accident and doesn’t return from embassy headquarters, where she was supposed to fill out paperwork. While Cassie babysits Mather, she reads Margaret’s journals, in which Margaret chronicled relationships with people she met in Jordan, including two guards, one of whom teaches her Arabic and, in a moving scene, invites her to dinner with his family.

Cassie suspects Margaret may be seeing one of these men and that the affair may explain her disappearance, a suspicion fueled by an enigmatic journal entry: “I must find him. I must make it right.”

The device of one character reading another’s journal is a cliché, but The Confusion of Languages is nonetheless a moving work about desire and the dislocation one might experience in a foreign land. As Fallon shrewdly makes clear, a friend can be as mysterious as the ways of another culture.

 

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

Cassie Hugo, one of two women at the center of The Confusion of Languages, the touching debut novel by Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), has many reasons to be jealous of Margaret Brickshaw, the biggest of which is Margaret’s family.

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Thrity Umrigar’s disturbing novel is going to be controversial. And it must be, for it deals head-on with race in America.

The story begins on a stiflingly hot day in 1991, when an African-American boy named Anton Vesper breaks a window to escape his apartment in a housing project. His crack-addicted mother, Juanita, has been gone for days. When Anton finally crawls out of the window, he opens his leg on a shard of glass, and the blood catches the attention of a passing cop.

A wealthy white judge named David Coleman learns of Anton’s plight and agrees to foster the bright, beautiful but undereducated child. David quickly falls in love with Anton; after a while, so does his wife, Delores. They adopt him. Anton comes to love his adoptive parents, too—deeply, genuinely. But the whole setup is so very wrong. It is wrong to the point that David—so loving, supportive and liberal—can be considered nothing less than the novel’s villain.

The fact remains that David stole a child from his mother. He blackmails Juanita and steals Anton the way a slave owner would steal a slave child from his mother. David wanted something and took it.

Fannie Hurst’s groundbreaking 1933 novel Imitation of Life was made into several movies and at least one song by the Supremes, and all of these versions end with the child, who has passed for white, begging forgiveness of their poor black mother who’s died of a broken heart caused by the child’s rejection. In the age of Obama, Anton doesn’t have to pass for white to grow up in privilege and to seek power as an adult. But in Umrigar’s thought-provoking tale, there’s a whole lot of forgiving to be done.

Thrity Umrigar’s disturbing novel is going to be controversial. And it must be, for it deals head-on with race in America.

If you were ill and undergoing expensive treatments, you’d probably be willing to go to some extremes to pay those bills. That’s certainly the case for Mary Parsons, who fled a Southern childhood burdened by religion for New York City. Mary’s chronic pain seems hopeless until her college roommate, Chandra, introduces her to Ed and the practice of pneuma adaptive kinesthesia, or PAKing. Each session is pricey, although Mary doesn’t know exactly how Ed makes her feel so much better. That doesn’t matter, though, as long as she can cover Ed’s exorbitant fees.

That’s why she turns to Craigslist and ends up with a too-good-to-be-true (if strange) new job: emotional girlfriend to actor Kurt Sky. Sky’s Girlfriend Experiment casts different women in a number of roles that, together, represent the sum of a girlfriend. Mary hasn’t been in a relationship herself in quite some time. And Chandra has gone missing, leaving Mary even more of a loner than usual. The experiment leaves her reminiscing about her ex-boyfriend and the parents whose religion drove her first to her aunt, then to the city. What is the nature of relationships, anyway?

In her second novel, Catherine Lacey (Nobody Is Ever Missing) sends readers on an emotional and intellectual trip. The researchers behind the Girlfriend Experiment utilize technology to track—and then manipulate—both physical and emotional responses. Mary’s growing entanglement with Kurt leaves her questioning how people relate to one another. It’s a daunting question, and the reader, like Mary, will be left looking inward for the answers.

If you were ill and undergoing expensive treatments, you’d probably be willing to go to some extremes to pay those bills. That’s certainly the case for Mary Parsons, who fled a Southern childhood burdened by religion for New York City. Mary’s chronic pain seems hopeless until her college roommate, Chandra, introduces her to Ed and the practice of pneuma adaptive kinesthesia, or PAKing. Each session is pricey, although Mary doesn’t know exactly how Ed makes her feel so much better. That doesn’t matter, though, as long as she can cover Ed’s exorbitant fees.

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The smells are the tip-off that something bad is about to happen. To use the Jamaican slang from Augustown, Kei Miller’s excellent new novel, the April 1982 day in which a calamitous event is about to occur is “the day of the autoclaps,” a day of impending disaster, trouble on top of trouble.

At first, the day doesn’t seem unusual, but the woman at the center of this novel set in the poor, eponymous Jamaican town certainly is. Ganja-smoking Ma Taffy was blinded many years earlier when hundreds of rats crashed through her ceiling and attacked her eyes. The injury heightened her sense of smell: She can detect ripening mangoes and Otaheite apples as well as the tragedy that will involve her great-nephew, 6-year-old Kaia, and a group known as Babylon.

Kaia comes home from school one day—he lives with Ma Taffy and his mother, Gina—with his dreadlocks cut off. His teacher, a stern man who struggles to comb out his afro and fears his move to the city will result in “the weakening of his moral fortitude,” hacked off the Rastafarian boy’s dreads. This act of violence sets off a series of events and recollections, including the story of Alexander Bedward, the 1920s town preacher who claimed that he could fly; and the school’s modern-day principal, a wealthy white woman who hires Gina to be her housekeeper without knowing the secret behind the black woman’s connection to her family.

If the novel’s tone is inconsistent, Augustown is nonetheless an accomplished and riveting work, with traces of magical realism. And its central theme is, sadly, all too relevant: Generations change, but prejudices persist.

 

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

The smells are the tip-off that something bad is about to happen. To use the Jamaican slang from Augustown, Kei Miller’s excellent new novel, the April 1982 day in which a calamitous event is about to occur is “the day of the autoclaps,” a day of impending disaster, trouble on top of trouble.

Review by

Grief Cottage, Gail Godwin’s latest novel, opens with a newly orphaned boy grappling with his mother’s fatal accident.

As his late mother never revealed the identity of his father, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to an island off the coast of South Carolina to live with his great-aunt Charlotte, a reclusive artist whose paintings of seascapes and rustic summer cottages are popular with tourists. With an empty month to fill before school begins, Marcus is engaged by the safe hatching of sea turtles as they make their arduous journeys to the ocean. But his attention is also drawn to a desolate, abandoned house—the Grief Cottage, where an adolescent boy and his parents vanished during a hurricane half a century before.

With Charlotte holed up in her studio and drinking heavily, Marcus is left increasingly on his own. He is convinced that the ghost of the dead boy is trying to contact him and visits the cottage daily, until finally the spirit reveals himself. At the same time, Marcus befriends several of the island’s most notable residents, who fill in details of the island’s history and provide context to the story of the ill-fated family.

Like Henry James’ classic The Turn of the Screw, Grief Cottage is less a paranormal thriller than an exploration of the psyche’s creative tactics to survive trauma. The closer Marcus gets to the truth, the more the stories of past and present merge, until the dead are able to provide answers for the living.

Marcus’ precociousness occasionally requires a suspension of disbelief as total as any faith in the supernatural. Despite that, Godwin shows she is still at the top of her craft, using the fragile link between living and spirit to illuminate a young man’s coming of age in this keenly observed, powerful novel.

 

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

Grief Cottage, Gail Godwin’s latest novel, opens with a newly orphaned boy grappling with his mother’s fatal accident. As his late mother never revealed the identity of his father, 11-year-old Marcus is sent to an island off the coast of South Carolina to live with his great-aunt Charlotte, a reclusive artist whose paintings of seascapes and rustic summer cottages are popular with tourists. With an empty month to fill before school begins, Marcus is engaged by the safe hatching of sea turtles as they make their arduous journeys to the ocean. But his attention is also drawn to a desolate, abandoned house—the Grief Cottage, where an adolescent boy and his parents vanished during a hurricane half a century before.

Review by

Maile Meloy specializes in writing short fiction about privileged but emotionally fragile characters who are self-aware to an almost destructive degree, and who can be startled by their own dark thoughts. Meloy delves deeply and expertly into these personalities, plumbing the repercussions of various events in their worlds. In her new novel, she takes that approach and revs it up to top speed.

Do Not Become Alarmed starts as two cousins and their families are setting out on a cruise to South America. At first everything is pleasantly relaxing, but things quickly begin to go wrong. Persuaded to take a day off the ship, the two families are divided: The men go golfing, while the women take their kids on a zip-line tour. Almost immediately, complications arise for the zip-lining crew. Their vehicle breaks down, and when they go for a swim at a nearby beach, the kids disappear. It’s any parent’s worst nightmare: You’ve lost your kids, and it’s your fault.

The book moves at a rapid-fire pace through the events that follow, as the kids get into deeper and deeper trouble and their parents become ever more distraught. The story is told from as many viewpoints as there are characters, and everyone gets at least one chapter. Meloy skillfully analyzes each person’s reaction to his or her situation in remarkably efficient prose that never scrimps on detail or emotional impact. It’s a grim story told with a light touch, and it’s completely addictive.

 

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

Maile Meloy specializes in writing short fiction about privileged but emotionally fragile characters who are self-aware to an almost destructive degree, and who can be startled by their own dark thoughts. Meloy delves deeply and expertly into these personalities, plumbing the repercussions of various events in their worlds. In her new novel, she takes that approach and revs it up to top speed.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, June 2017

The sophomore effort of a novelist whose debut made a splash is fraught with high expectations that all too often go unmet. Arundhati Roy presents a special case. It’s been two decades since she won the Booker Prize and wide acclaim for The God of Small Things. But in the intervening years her nonfiction and activism have drawn comparisons to Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, underscores this veer toward politics.

The novel is one of the most polemical in recent memory, and the characters act as animators of these polemics. Expressed with her usual musical precision, Roy’s anger has many targets. The rise of the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi is one bête noire. Another is India’s continued possession of the Muslim-majority Kashmir region.

Roy’s first novel arrived weeks before India’s first nuclear test—which she condemned—and commentators saw the novel and the test as assertions of a rising India. Her second novel is an indictment of an India drunk on power, mistreating its poor and minorities. Ever the contrarian, Roy defends Kashmiris who seek self-determination. To Roy this is a matter not only of justice but also of survival—of India as a heterogeneous, secular state and of South Asian civilization. Experts consider Kashmir to be the most likely flashpoint for a nuclear war.

More a mosaic than a traditional, coherent story, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness sometimes resembles James Joyce’s Ulysses. Even in style it ramifies, and Roy’s characters are a jumble—similar to India’s welter of competing adversities, which V.S. Naipaul described as a “million mutinies.” The God of Small Things was a lively, virtuosic performance. In its successor, disgust is a recurring theme, and Indian media will likely pan it for anti-Indian propensities. But Roy’s love for the people of India is clear. She doesn’t hate India; what she hates is oppression.

 

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

The sophomore effort of a novelist whose debut made a splash is fraught with high expectations that all too often go unmet. Arundhati Roy presents a special case. It’s been two decades since she won the Booker Prize and wide acclaim for The God of Small Things. But in the intervening years her nonfiction and activism have drawn comparisons to Noam Chomsky and Vandana Shiva. Her new novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, underscores this veer toward politics.

Peddling dangerous drugs to faltering countries has made many a developing nation great. The British sold opium to the Chinese at gunpoint. The American colonies got the British hooked on tobacco. And now Mexico floods the U.S. with the drug du jour. Philip Caputo’s novel Some Rise by Sin concerns one battle in the so-called “war on drugs,” down Mexico way.

Its main character could have walked out of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Riordan is an American missionary priest tending to the flock of a place called San Patricio. He likes his tipple, drives a Harley and reads Marcus Aurelius. He is also acrophobic in a country where drug cartels are liable to toss people off cliffs. Joining Riordan in San Patricio are two American lovers, Pamela and Lisette. Pamela is a bipolar artist on various medications; Lisette a doctor. Both seem even more out of place in Mexico than Riordan, who gets into trouble when a hired assassin admits her crime during confession. Riordan must consider breaking his vows of confidentiality. In another nod to Greene, he dwells on the “problem of evil,” viz. how a benevolent Creator allows malevolence.

Caputo does not bog down in theology. His novel is one of action, recalling nothing so much as “Breaking Bad.” But Some Rise by Sin does offer the occasional insight. Caputo points out that the surge in Mexican immigration to the U.S. resulted from NAFTA; the treaty flooded Mexico with cheap American produce, displacing Mexicans from their farms. And Caputo seems aware of the irony that Riordan, in the crosshairs of the drug war, is a fan of tequila and Ambien.

The overall lesson of the novel is a powerful one: Economics trumps morality in shaping the fate of nations.

Peddling dangerous drugs to faltering countries has made many a developing nation great. The British sold opium to the Chinese at gunpoint. The American colonies got the British hooked on tobacco. And now Mexico floods the U.S. with the drug du jour. Philip Caputo’s novel Some Rise by Sin concerns one battle in the so-called “war on drugs,” down Mexico way.

Joshua Ferris has published three brilliant novels, each focusing on the difficulty and dark comedy of our interactions with each other in the 21st century. In The Dinner Party, he has gathered his short stories from the past decade into a single volume.

Throughout these 11 stories, the range of settings and characters makes for a recurring sense of surprise: There is a New York City reimagined as a multiverse of sliding subway doors; the geriatric purgatory of Florida redeemed by fatal kindness; a Prague scarier than the one Kafka imagined; and a trailer parked somewhere in the Wal-Mart kingdom of the South, the site of a country song sung in reverse (you get your girl back, or your truck, or your life).

One of the best stories, “The Pilot” (first published in The New Yorker), diagnoses the decline and fall of a hopeful television writer in Los Angeles, who thinks he “needs a new pair of eyes” for the script of his pilot. What Leonard really needs is the sanity that eludes him and his entire generation of would-be auteurs. Readers may find themselves returning to the final three paragraphs over and over again, to revisit their beauty, tragedy and humor.

Reading a collection of short stories by an emerging master of the form is one of the great literary pleasures, especially when the writer treats them as a set of variations on a powerful theme. A steady ground bass pulses through all of Ferris’ narratives: the fatefulness of our lives, the uncanny and often hilarious (and even sometimes cruel, devastatingly so in the title story) ways in which our fragile hearts and massive egos determine our destinies. If this theme goes back to Sophocles, it also goes fast forward, right into our perplexed, all-too-modern souls.

Joshua Ferris has published three brilliant novels, each focusing on the difficulty and dark comedy of our interactions with each other in the 21st century. In The Dinner Party, he has gathered his short stories from the past decade into a single volume.

Review by

Mary Gordon has been writing compelling books about faith, love and family for four decades. In There Your Heart Lies, her eighth novel, she examines the ways political idealism and religious fanaticism shape the choices of a privileged but naive Catholic woman in the mid-20th century.

At 19, Marian Taylor breaks with her wealthy New York family after the death of her beloved younger brother and sails to Spain to join the forces fighting Franco. Assisting in hospitals, she meets a Spanish doctor, gets pregnant, marries him and just as quickly loses him to sepsis. Forced to live with his parents in rural Spain and surrender her baby to her domineering mother-in-law, Marian becomes completely dependent on a family and a culture as rigid as the one she left behind. Only a friendship with Isabel, the village doctor, offers Marian sanctuary, as well as means to a possible escape back to the United States after a decade of misery.

But Marian has long kept this part of her life secret. Now in her 90s and living comfortably in Rhode Island, it is only when she is diagnosed with cancer that she begins to open up about these experiences with her live-in granddaughter, Amelia. The intensity of Marian’s experience prompts Amelia to make a journey to Spain to reconcile her grandmother’s past with her own uncertain prospects.

Gordon’s novels often feature personal dramas set against a backdrop of political or religious change, and here she touches on the violence of soldiers, clerics and citizens on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, as well as the kind of inflexible religious household in which Marian was raised. But There Your Heart Lies also depicts pleasure in the loving bonds between generations and in acts of generosity and selflessness between friends.

Marian is a classic Gordon heroine—sheltered but passionate and loyal to a fault. In contrast, Amelia’s search for self cannot compete with the drama and urgency of Marian’s time in Spain. This is a historically satisfying novel and, when Marian is center stage, an emotionally satisfying one as well.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Mary Gordon for There Your Heart Lies.

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

Mary Gordon has been writing compelling books about faith, love and family for four decades. In There Your Heart Lies, her eighth novel, she examines the ways political idealism and religious fanaticism shape the choices of a privileged but naive Catholic woman in the mid-20th century.

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