Margaret Drabble’s first novels, published in the 1960s, were brightly told tales about clever women venturing into academia or extramarital affairs. By the ’80s, her fiction had shifted to wide-angle views of intellectual communities in contemporary London or Cambridge, usually peopled by mid-career women. Drabble’s characters have continued to age along with her, and she brings her attention (and her wit) to the quality of aging as experienced by a group of friends approaching their 80s in her latest novel (her 19th!), The Dark Flood Rises.

Feisty Fran Stubbs is at the center of this mordant and thought-provoking work. Still independent and living alone, she is employed by a nonprofit researching senior-living accommodations. She delivers home-cooked meals to her mostly homebound ex-husband, Claude, and worries about her two adult children, Christopher and Poppet. Also in her orbit are old friends pursuing different solutions to retirement: Scholarly rake Bennet and his younger partner Ivor live a comfortable expat existence in the Canary Islands, and Josephine, a former neighbor from when both women were young mothers, now lives in a planned community for retired academics. 

There is not much plot in The Dark Flood Rises. Friends meet, have drinks, exchange gossip. There are accidents, hospital stays, reminiscences and two funerals, one expected, the other a surprise. Fran stays on the go, crisscrossing England in her mostly reliable car, at her happiest when spending the night in a comfortable room in a mid-level hotel chain. If she ponders anything, it’s how she can best ensure a good death for herself and her loved ones. Behind this web of aging and personal relationships, looming environmental and political disasters threaten to transform the only England she has ever known. 

In one of Josephine’s adult-ed classes, the students discuss the possibility of a Late Style—the form or manner an artist’s work takes late in life. Though one might think resolution and clarity best reflect the aged creative mind, an equal argument can be made for tenacity, intractability and a certain comfort with contradiction, all of which are found in this novel. More witty than morbid, The Dark Flood Rises may not be for everyone, but this wise assessment of aging by one of England’s most respected writers deserves our readerly attention. 

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

What does it really mean to be a good man? That’s the challenging question posed by Nickolas Butler (Shotgun Lovesongs) in The Hearts of Men, an earnest exploration of the best and worst of male behavior, set against the backdrop of that quintessential laboratory for shaping it: the Boy Scouts.

Beginning in 1962 and spanning 60 years, most of the action of Butler’s novel takes place at Camp Chippewa, a Boy Scout summer camp in Wisconsin’s north woods. In two generations, a world that emphasizes the value of knot-tying and compass reading gives way to the age of iPads and social media. Wilbur Whiteside is the autocratic Scoutmaster who leads the camp for decades until he’s succeeded by former camper Nelson Doughty, who is aware of the profound contrast between the generous and instructive Wilbur and his own abusive father.

When it comes to the Boy Scouts, Butler isn’t interested in exploring the controversy surrounding an organization one character dismisses as “a dogged fraternity of paramilitary Young Republicans desperately clinging to some nineteenth-century notion of goodness in a modern world,” but he does imply there’s an enduring benefit to its ethos. Several of the characters, including Wilbur and Nelson, fight in wars that range from World War I to Afghanistan, and whether their conduct is cowardly or heroic, Butler suggests that the experience profoundly shapes the way they live the rest of their lives. He’s perceptive enough to recognize that only a tiny minority of men will see combat, but that most will be tested in other ways that reveal character.

Novelist Jonathan Evison described Shotgun Lovesongs as a “good old-fashioned novel,” and that’s an equally fitting description of The Hearts of Men. Butler doesn’t make it hard to tell the admirable men from the ones who badly misbehave, but his role models aren’t lacking complexity or flaws. Writing without irony, in a style that brings to mind writers like Andre Dubus III and Tom Perrotta, Butler, who grew up and still lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, displays an intuitive feel for the values of his characters. He’s portrayed them with compassion in this kindhearted, affecting novel.

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

Some of our best artists seem blessed with a type of clairvoyance, or at least a deep understanding of the zeitgeist that feels like clairvoyance. This seems especially true of Joyce Carol Oates, who’s taken our peculiarly American darkness as her subject matter throughout her career. In her latest, A Book of American Martyrs, Oates is at her most incisive, wrenching and timely.

When extremist Luther Dunphy murders OB/GYN Augustus Voorhees and his driver, it’s clear that the two are American martyrs—but they are only ground zero. Their martyrdom spreads out in circles, like hard radiation, to make collateral damage of wives, children, parents, siblings and innocent bystanders. Even Dunphy is a martyr of sorts. He goes quietly when the cops come for him; he doesn’t plead for his life when he faces the death penalty. But Oates understands that “martyr” doesn’t mean “saint.” Both men are unyielding in their beliefs: For the evangelical Christian Dunphy, abortion is murder; for the atheist Voorhees, a woman’s right to her body is inviolable.

Even as she anatomizes this latest American schism, Oates touches on her usual obsessions. We have the almost casual brutality with which men treat women. Parents fail in a million ways, but only mothers are not forgiven for it. Pregnancy and childbirth are, at best, biological tragedies. There’s boxing. Yet Oates finds a path to empathy, compassion and perhaps even reconciliation. Once again, Oates proves that she remains one of our most necessary authors.

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

When it comes to oddball families, no author puts the “fun” in “dysfunctional” quite like Kevin Wilson. Having previously explored the indelible influences of nature and nurture in his cheeky debut, The Family Fang, Wilson wades deeper into the complexities of child-rearing and family life in Perfect Little World.

Pregnant by her emotionally unstable high school art teacher, Izzy Poole finds herself facing single motherhood at the ripe old age of 18. So when Izzy meets Dr. Preston Grind, a child psychologist who tells her a study he’s launching will cover all of Izzy and her child’s needs as well as provide them with a built-in family, it seems like a dream come true. The only catch? Izzy must cohabitate with nine other families for 10 years and agree to co-parent and love their children as though they were her own. Reasoning that if two parents are better than one, 20 must be even more of an advantage, Izzy agrees.

In light and lively prose that practically tap dances on the page, Wilson shrewdly probes the intricate tensions and machinations that lie at the core of this eccentric family unit. Throughout the narrative, there is the ever-increasing sense that all families—like all systems—are ultimately trending towards chaos, yet Wilson’s story is infused with a tenderhearted hopefulness. For fans of whimsical family dramas and character-driven novels, Perfect Little World is a provocative and uplifting read.

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

In her new novel, the always intriguing Ali Smith portrays an odd friendship between a centenarian and the neighbor girl—now a young woman—he cared for in her childhood. Smith blends conventional realist narrative with passages that read almost like prose poems to create an elegiac story that’s decidedly more than the sum of its parts.

Daniel Gluck, once a songwriter and former “unofficial babysitter” to Elisabeth Demand, awaits his death in a nursing home. In the present, we penetrate Daniel’s consciousness to share some of his hallucinatory dreams, and through flashbacks, Smith gently reveals how this kindly, unassuming man served as a mentor to his young charge. Now in her early 30s, Elisabeth is a junior lecturer in art history, struggling with her doctoral thesis.

Drawing back from this intimate tableau, Autumn also offers a piercing view of an unsettled England in the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit vote. “All across the country,” Smith writes in a terse chapter whose every sentence begins with those words, “there was misery and rejoicing,” echoing the opening passage of A Tale of Two Cities, quoted by Elisabeth in her bedside reading to Daniel.

Much of this novel’s pleasure flows from Smith’s supple prose. She indulges in word play with an almost Joycean zest (offering an homage to him in a brief allusion to his iconic Dubliners story, “The Dead”). Autumn is the first installment of a projected quartet of “seasonal” novels. Impressionistic in character, it’s a book to be read less for any conventional plot than for its skill in stimulating a reflective mood.

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

If you are not charmed by Lillian Boxfish, then there may be no hope for you.

Lillian—in her green velvet dress, orange fire lipstick, blue fedora and mink coat—doesn’t dress, in her words, “like a typical old lady.” And when Lillian finds herself on an improbable journey through the gritty streets of Manhattan on New Year’s Eve in 1984, readers soon learn that the 85-year-old Ms. Boxfish doesn’t walk, think or live like an old lady either.

Poet Kathleen Rooney’s second novel was inspired by the life of Depression-era advertising doyenne Margaret Fishback, who became the highest paid female ad copywriter in the world. Lauded by society pages for her beauty and wit, Fishback also gained praise and popularity as a poet and writer of modern etiquette guides.

As Lillian weaves her way through New York City, recalling her life and loves, we are treated (yes, treated) to the melancholy humor of a woman who knows she is drifting out of place and yet right at home at the same time. It is inescapably sad to accompany an elderly lady while she ponders the persons and places she has outlived. Yet Lillian’s grace is in her ability to rise above nostalgia.

For some, Lillian will be the stranger you meet who unexpectedly makes your day more pleasant; for others, Lillian will become a fast friend. Either way, the fresh air will do you good.

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

There’s more than one way to feel like a stranger in a foreign land. The pleasant way is to travel to a vacation spot, but a more unnerving sense of dislocation comes when one is a party to a faltering marriage. Katie Kitamura explores this theme in her new novel, A Separation, a quietly devastating story of a childless, London-based couple on the verge of divorce.

The unnamed narrator works as a translator, though we never learn her country of origin. When the novel begins, Christopher, the narrator’s husband, has been in Greece for a month to conduct research for a book, a general-interest “study of mourning rituals around the world”—an odd topic, the narrator thinks, for a “careless flirt” in his early 40s who has never suffered loss. When Christopher’s mother can’t reach him in Greece, she worries that something is wrong. Unaware of the couple’s six-month separation, she buys the narrator a ticket to go and investigate. What follows is a psychologically rich story involving a female hotel clerk, a “widely admired weeper” known for her musical lamentations and a murder.

Kitamura finds a clever parallel between the art of translation and marriage: the struggle to be faithful, which, as the narrator states, is “an impossible task because there are multiple and contradictory ways” of achieving fidelity. As this coolly elegant work makes clear, the definition of fealty may vary depending on whom you ask.

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

Reed Karaim’s second novel, The Winter in Anna, is a memorable story of a young man whose life is irrevocably altered by a woman with a tragic past.

Purposeless and confused after his father’s stroke, 20-year-old Eric Valery abandons college for a weekly newspaper in tiny Shannon, North Dakota, “where the Midwest becomes the West.” When the news editor makes one mistake too many, a reluctant Eric is given control of the paper. He inherits a staff of three, including Anna, a beautiful reporter about 10 years older and a hundred years wiser than Eric. Anna is as scarred by the world as Eric is unmarked. Yet over the course of a year, they become friends and confidants—there is a tangible “will they or won’t they” vibe—as Eric tries to make sense of his father’s collapse and the guilt he feels. Much more slowly, Anna reveals herself, and in fits and starts we learn about her horrible marriage and the unbearable burden she carries. 

It’s a foregone conclusion that things won’t end well. Narrated by a much older Eric, the novel opens with Anna committing suicide by guzzling a quart of bleach in an anonymous Midwestern motel. 

The Winter in Anna is both thoughtful and introspective, in the tradition of Pat Conroy and Ward Just, whose own coming-of-age tale, An Unfinished Season, comes to mind while reading this one. Karaim, a freelance writer and author of the well-received political novel If Men Were Angels, doesn’t break new ground, but each of his words is impactful and chosen with care. He possesses the subtle, significant ability to build tension slowly and evenly, urging you to devour this smallish novel in one gulp.

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

In the middle of the night, an electrical fire sparks in the basement of an apartment building. The outcome is set early: The people inside are likely to die. Colin Thubron steps up to the challenge of making his readers care about characters they will soon lose as he tells each tenant’s story. 

In one flat, a priest reflects upon the seed of his faith and the heart-wrenching circumstances that permanently uprooted him from his beliefs. A neurosurgeon sleeps alone despite having worked up the courage to recently get engaged. Across the hall resides a woman who dedicated her life to the study of butterflies. In the basement, a photographer has turned to drugs to fulfill a life left empty by uninspired work and disappointing loves. The oldest tenant mulls over the still-tender memories of his younger years at boarding school. A world traveler contemplates a transformative trip to India during which he revisited the town where he was raised. 

All seven tenants experience overlapping struggles and joys that suture their stories together. At times it seems as though Thubron has created only one character with many lifetimes, while still allowing each to be somehow unique, giving the novel an allegorical tone.

Thubron is a seasoned author and a master of travel writing. He creates magnificent imagery through truly remarkable vocabulary that is often too precise to define with the use of context clues alone. The most rewarding aspect of Night of Fire is that it is left open to interpretation, making it a perfect pick for a book club discussion. It is not necessarily a quick read, but it certainly lingers in the mind.

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

With Transit, the inspired British writer Rachel Cusk continues a trilogy of spare and elusive novels she began with Outline. The narrator of these books is a woman writer called Faye, a name that, appropriately, means confidence or trust—for these novels comprise a series of episodes wherein the narrator remains an aloof interlocutor, prompting thoughtful confessional stories from others while revealing little about herself. 

The basic setup—divorced mother of two boys (Faye) moves back to London where she embarks on the renovations of a ramshackle house—provides a nominal structure, as well as two seemingly conflicting qualities: humor and a creeping fatalism. This relocation is just one meaning of the word “transit” explored, though, as the different characters she encounters speak of life changes both bold and banal. With a therapist’s remove, Faye draws out the stories—an old boyfriend left behind 15 years before, a gay hairdresser settling into middle age, a cousin who escaped a bad marriage and is now navigating the uncertain waters of a new one, a bestselling memoirist with a nightmare boyhood to expunge, the displaced Albanian and Polish men working on her flat. Taken individually, these confessionals are singularly entertaining, because Cusk is an unequaled observer of what takes place on the periphery, and she has a keen ear for hearing and recording the ways that people reveal themselves both through what they say and what they do not. Yet it is the cumulative effect of these narratives that gives this largely plot-free novel its power. 

With literary sleight of hand, Cusk is playing narrative tricks, and Transit, like Outline before it, slowly reveals much about Faye, too, no matter how concealed she tries to remain. Transit is a brilliant meditation on change, freedom and the ways we construct our lives, one true or false narrative at a time.

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