Victor Lodato’s Edgar and Lucy is a strangely alluring saga that, with every turn of the page, lures the reader in with stunning writing and simmering tension.

The novel follows 8-year-old Edgar Allan Fini, a skinny Albino boy who is torn between loving two women in his life: his young mother, Lucy, who, while capable of motherly devotion at times, is trying to figure out her own life surrounded by various “suitors” and impaired by alcohol. Then there’s Florence, Edgar’s traditional Italian grandmother and caregiver who feels broken whenever Edgar is away. All three are bound by the loss of Lucy’s late husband, Frank Fini, who took his own life after suffering from mental illness. Still coping with grief, each member of the trio deals with Frank’s absence in different ways, and each one uses his death as a catalyst for their actions.

When Edgar disappears with a mysterious man, Lucy searches high and low for him, a quest that enraptures his suburban New Jersey hometown. The reader is thrown into the hunt as well, and suddenly, the novel’s 544 pages race by, while touching on such themes as the meaning of family and motherhood, suicide and the afterlife. This is where author Lodato’s background as a playwright becomes invaluable; the action moves with a fluid, nearly perfect pace, and readers may feel as if they are watching a play they can’t step away from.

Lodato, whose 2009 debut novel Mathilda Savitch won the PEN USA Award for Fiction, writes with clarity and punch, making this evocative tale of loss and redemption one you won’t be able to put it down.

Hari Kunzru’s fifth novel, White Tears, is a time-bending mystery that focuses on America’s struggles with race and the blues music that grew out of those struggles. 

Seth runs a recording studio in New York City with his best friend, Carter, who is an heir to a billion-dollar family fortune. On a walk around the city, Seth unintentionally records a chess player’s victory chants as he passes by. Upon hearing the playback, Carter becomes obsessed with the recording. While Seth only remembers hearing a snippet of song, the recording reveals five full verses. Carter pairs the vocal with a blues guitar track and tries to sell it as a long-lost recording from the 1920s by Charlie Shaw, a name he made up. When an elderly record collector forcibly pursues the offer, Seth starts to realize that he has stumbled upon a force much larger than coincidence alone. Charlie Shaw was not just someone Carter made up; he was someone trying to find Carter. When the nefarious history of Carter’s family business is revealed, Seth makes a pilgrimage to the South with Carter’s sister to piece together a ghost story and hopefully repay the family debts that have manifested as Charlie Shaw.

Kunzru’s insight into the world of audio production is as impressive as his knowledge of early-20th-century blues artists. He tackles issues such as white privilege through characters that are often less than likable and juxtaposes them with the racial violence of previous decades.

Navigating time and landscape in a way that is subtly disorienting, the novel is instantly engrossing and a definite must-read. 

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

It may not be your biggest fear, but it’s probably in the top five: being buried alive. As a rule, we don’t really celebrate our miners much while they’re around, but when a disaster happens, we’re all over them: the movie The 33, about the San José Mine disaster in Chile; the folk song “The Ballad of Springhill,” about the 1958 Nova Scotia cave-in; the Bee Gees’ first pop hit, “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” about an imaginary tragedy; Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.”

Inspired by the notorious Sunshine Mine fire of 1972, novelist Kevin Canty’s The Underworld imagines life in the town from shortly before the disaster to right around the time the real healing begins. 

Somehow it seems particularly appropriate for this book to come along at a point in our national history when miners and their livelihoods are often near the center of public debate. Mining is not glamorous work, but Canty drills beneath the surface stereotype to uncover a rich vein of subterranean complexity.

David Wright, the book’s primary protagonist among a vivid ensemble cast, comes from a mining family that feels the impact of the disaster keenly. Like many from the company town, he’s ambivalent about his home, but he’s taking his first tentative steps to break its gravitational bonds, distinguishing him from most of his peers. It would be easy—and wrong—to portray him as either victor or victim, and Canty does here what he did so well in earlier novels such as Winslow in Love and Everything: He plants himself at the corner of Human and Hero and describes what he sees, a journalist of the soul. 

Canty’s publisher cites Russell Banks and Richard Ford as his esteemed literary antecedents, but Canty’s care with prose recalls Raymond Carver, and his empathy for the common man extends a bloodline that reaches back to the likes of John Steinbeck and William Saroyan. Like his New Yorker colleague John McPhee, Canty has a gift for turning the commonplace into the extraordinary by asking the right questions and allowing the truth to unfold.

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

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.