BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, December 2016

Michael Chabon’s sparkling, richly satisfying new novel, Moonglow, is built from the stories of the so-called Greatest Generation. Specifically, stories told to him over the course of a week by his dying grandfather in 1989. While parts of the book are narrated by the author, and his mother and grandmother are prominent characters, this work of “fictional nonfiction” clearly belongs to the old man.

The novel unfolds in alternating threads showing different parts of his grandfather’s life, interspersed with scenes featuring the author as narrator. Chabon learns his grandfather is a brilliant, physical man, equally capable of fashioning—and using—a garrote and carving wooden horses for his daughter. We follow his work as a soldier tasked with kidnapping Nazi scientists before the Soviets can do the same; his postwar life loving a broken, secretive Frenchwoman during her descent into madness; and finally his days as a widower in a Florida retirement community, stalking a python that preys upon small pets. 

Despite heavy themes, delicious exchanges abound. One of my favorites comes during the Florida years when Devaughn, community security guard and reluctant Sancho Panza in the snake hunt, warns this dotty old geezer that he risks going to jail. “I’ve been in jail,” Chabon’s grandfather says. “I got a lot of reading done.” “I might like to re-estimate my opinion of you,” Devaughn replies.

More than 25 years after his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, there’s no need to re-estimate the opinion of Chabon. His writing is joyful, his timing and humor have grown only more impeccable, and his characters still live with you long after you turn the final page.
 

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"Acreage and financing were facts as basic as name and gender in Zebulon County," writes Jane Smiley in her new novel, which explores the lives of a farming family. One thousand acres of unmortgaged, unencumbered, fertile soil makes this Iowa farm the most elite in the county.

As the story reveals the characters' relationships with each other and with nature, the reader examines them as tenuous, ruthless and unreliable, following unfailingly the maxim of survival of the fittest. 

The book traces the lives of three daughters whose world changes when their elderly father unexpectedly retires and turns over the family farm to them. If you have read King Lear, you will recognize the scenario of a father's daughters ending up in a snarl.

The eldest, Ginny, is an amicable, accommodating woman whose world has never been challenged outside the isolated shelter of the family holdings. The middle sister, Rose, is a caustic, outspoken woman who feels this inheritance is the just reward for her years of laboring on the land and playing housekeeper to their father after their mother dies at an early age. The youngest daughter is Caroline, who has escaped this environment for a career as an attorney in New York City. 

As the legal corporation is formed, dividing the land three ways, Caroline expresses her doubts and bruises her father's ego. Here, Ginny says, "I saw that Caroline had mistakend what we were talking about, and spoken as a laywer when she should have spoken as a daughter. On the other hand, perhaps she hadn't mistaken anything at all and had simply spoken as  a woman rather than as a daughter. That was something, I realized in a flash, that Rose and I were pretty careful never to do."

The novel addresses a variety of family-related issues: dealing objectively with one's aging parents, redefining relationships with siblings in adulthood, adultery, the horror of memries, incest and its subsequent effects. Smiley's simple, straightforward writing makes these serious subjects easy to read, yet amid the simplicity, A Thousand Acres will speak to readers on many levels.

It’s a pleasure to report that at age 81, Ward Just is still turning out penetrating studies of mature adults wrestling with life’s profound challenges, often in the public arena. His latest, the story of a lifelong newspaperman whose career takes him from small-town Indiana to Washington, D.C., is a strong addition to that consistently excellent body of work.

The Eastern Shore’s episodic narrative traverses the life of Ned Ayres, whose eagerness to pursue a career in journalism impels him to forgo college to take a job with the Herman, Indiana, Press-Gazette. During his tenure as city editor, the paper’s debate over whether to expose a respected local businessman’s criminal past reminds Ned of both journalism’s propensity for the “discovering of secrets with little attention paid to the consequences,” and of the fact that “the first version was always wrong, if only slightly.” 

After intermediate stops in Indianapolis and Chicago, Ned arrives in Washington in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination, eventually rising to the position of editor-in-chief of a newspaper that calls to mind the Washington Post. When his career ends in 2005, he retires to a decaying manor house on the Chesapeake Bay, where he struggles to write a memoir that will do justice to the profession to which he’s devoted himself so single-mindedly. The house once hosted a senator’s sparkling dinner parties, gatherings that Ned attended. Now it brings to mind his beloved newspaper business, “still handsome, but no longer stately.” 

In its depiction of the claustrophobia of life in a town “like so many in Middle America with an absence of commotion,” The Eastern Shore evokes the spirit of works like William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Just’s portrait of the contemporary newspaper business and of the machinations of Washington’s political class is as realistic as today’s headlines. The languid pacing won’t appeal to readers hungry for dramatic action and frequent plot twists, but Just’s finely calibrated appreciation of the flaws of human character and his talent for gazing without blinking into the darkest corners of the human heart continue to distinguish him as a writer of keen intellect and insight.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What if you took everything super away from a superhero? He might have his power and a pitiable origin story, but all the justice and morality is stripped away. That’s Alexander Bruno, the globe-trotting, tuxedo-wearing gambler whose memories of his own telepathy are tinged by confusion, sadness and a mysterious blot that keeps him from being able to see, either with his literal vision or with his second sight.

When we meet Bruno in Berlin, he seems on the precipice of a comeback, playing backgammon with an easy mark. But the easy score gets complicated—and that turns out to be just the beginning of his problems. As the world becomes more and more blurred by the block to Bruno’s eyesight, the exciting trajectory of his life is thwarted, eventually sending him back home to Berkeley, the place where he was raised by a flower child more interested in sleeping in parks and experimenting with drugs than being a mom. It’s also where he went to high school with Keith Stolarsky—a totally forgettable classmate who is now an incredibly wealthy owner of cheesy theme restaurants and monuments to consumerism.

Bruno is turned off by Keith and mystified by how he attracted his genuinely arresting girlfriend, Tira, to whom Bruno feels a deep connection. Keith is the most natural choice for a villain, a sloppy archnemesis for Bruno’s suave telepathic gambler. But instead of putting up a fight, Bruno accepts money and help from Keith. Eventually, his promising life devolves into a sort of sad blackmail, the end of a spectacularly bad bet that grows dangerously bloated before it collapses. The twists, turns and sagging morality of A Gambler’s Anatomy may be a bit much for some, but fans of Lethem’s dystopian genre-hopping will find a new antihero to adore.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

David Szalay, named one of Granta’s best young British novelists in 2013, has written a book that lives up to such an award. Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, All That Man Is, a striking novel-in-stories, offers a piece-by-piece portrait of what it means to be human. The novel is made up of short, 30-page glimpses into the lives of nine men who are all at different stages in life and struggling with existential crises: Two British teenagers go on a trip to Germany and have to determine how to spend their time; a lazy boy from France gets fired by his own uncle and has a bizarre holiday in Cyprus; a work-obsessed newspaper editor from Copenhagen destroys a minister’s career by divulging details of his affair; a fitness trainer is roped into being a security guard for a beautiful woman who secretly works as a prostitute; a prestigious professor negotiates an affair with a student; a Russian weighs heavy thoughts of suicide; and a political figure recovering from a heart operation comes to grips with his own mortality.

With razor-sharp writing and lyrical vocabulary, All That Man Is never misses a beat. The men’s stories are defined and independent, but Szalay manages to weave in similar themes and echoes of past narratives (one man reveals that a prime minister’s mistress is pregnant and plans to get an abortion while the next story portrays a professor with a student girlfriend who discovers she’s pregnant and struggles with her decision, for example).

The novel almost seems to grow up itself—the age of each character increases as the book progresses, and the first narratives touch on concepts of teenage boredom and not feeling capable while the last few describe men who must accept the ideas of discontent and dying. All That Man Is also explores the spectrum of male relationships to women: Females morph from sexual objects to deeply complex humans who make life both richer and more complicated. Szalay has written an illuminating and enthralling work that will delight novel-readers and short story enthusiasts alike. 

One would be hard-pressed to come up with a title less likely to attract readers than the one attached to Nell Zink’s third novel. But anyone put off by it will miss out on a quirky and consistently engaging story about the millennial generation’s circuitous journey to find its way in the world.

The “Nicotine” of the novel’s title is a decrepit house in a “heroin-type neighborhood” of Jersey City that was the childhood home of Norman Baker, an “animist drug freak” whose medical clinic in Brazil attracted a group of passionate followers. When Norman’s devoted daughter, Penny, is evicted from his Upper West Side apartment after his death, she decides to explore the possibility of taking up residence at Nicotine, and arrives to find the house has been occupied by a group of activists united only by their passion for tobacco products. Soon the romantic lives of these characters entangle with those of Penny and her much older stepbrother, Matt, in ways that would make the term “it’s complicated” an understatement.

Zink’s fast-paced chronicle of the couplings and uncouplings that ensue amid a group that includes women named Sorry and Jazz and a self-avowed asexual bicycle activist is smart and never predictable. Though she was born a generation earlier than most of her characters, Zink is keenly attuned to the emotional weather that swirls around them. Based on the trials of Penny and her friends, she gives us reason to be optimistic about the millenials’ maturation, even as they seem destined to encounter a unique brand of stumbles along the way.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Mercury, Margot Livesey’s eighth and perhaps most psychologically penetrating novel, describes a family destroyed by obsession, passion and secrecy. The fact that the object of desire is a horse does not take away from the novel’s intensity, or the depths to which it fearlessly dives. 

Don Stevenson is an optometrist; his wife, Viv, worked as a hedge fund manager until the opportunity to manage a riding stable with a childhood friend revived her former dreams of being a champion rider. The Stevensons live in suburban Boston, close to Don’s parents. Their two young children are well adjusted and happy. But when Hilary, a newcomer to town, brings the thoroughbred Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everything changes. Viv becomes infatuated with the animal. Don is slow to notice how the changes in Viv’s behavior threaten both their lives and their livelihood. Even after he realizes she is spending some of their savings on Mercury’s care and feeding, passivity keeps him from acting until it is too late.

Mercury is a novel about seeing and not seeing, about the connection between secrecy and separateness. It is about the toll taken when we don’t pay attention and how easily lack of trust can creep into the best of marriages.

It is about literal blindness and abstract recklessness. Livesey has tremendous command over her material and unites a love of horses from her Scottish childhood and interest in the mechanics of vision to her almost uncanny perception of human behaviors. Mercury is a brilliant, unsettling novel that may make you wonder how well you know your partner. 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Margot Livesey about Mercury.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest, is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, in which contemporary authors reimagine some of the Bard’s most famous plays. The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, a former duke exiled with his daughter, Miranda, to a deserted island, where he studies sorcery and plots revenge. Hag-Seed sticks close to the play’s themes of magic, retribution and illusion, yet Atwood finds a way to root the story in contemporary Canada with satisfying results. 

Felix is about to stage a brand new production of The Tempest, starring himself as Prospero, when he is unceremoniously ousted from his position as artistic director at the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Widowed and still mourning the death of his young daughter, Miranda, he moves to an isolated farmhouse in the country, changes his name to Mr. Duke and indulges in dreams of vengeance and painful memories of his lost family. Over a decade later, Felix is running a drama program in a local prison. When rumors reach him that funding for the program is going to be cut and that the politicians who hold the purse strings have ties to his former workplace, the opportunity to retaliate is too promising to pass up. Felix decides that the time is right for the inmates to perform The Tempest. 

Used to more swashbuckling fare, like Macbeth and Henry IV, the prisoners are reluctant to take on a play with fairies, monsters and songs. But Felix finds ways to engage his cast. Soon, the inmates are fighting over playing the spirit Ariel and writing additional tunes for Caliban. Incarceration allows them to identify with the characters who are most confined by circumstances, and as much as Felix exploits their empathy, he is also transformed by it. 

Atwood has tremendous fun with Hag-Seed. Those who know the play will especially enjoy her artful treatment of its more poignant storylines. But even someone unfamiliar with Shakespeare will by entertained by this compelling tale of enchantment and second chances, and the rough magic it so delightfully embodies.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Queens resident Leah Kaplan gets a phone call from someone she worked with in San Francisco a decade earlier, she can’t possibly foresee the strange events that are about to happen. The unexpected journey that takes her back to California and away from Hans, her husband of five years, is the driving force behind The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky’s odd and entertaining new novel.

Leah had yet to earn her MFA when she worked at the University of California’s Facilities Management Department, writing job descriptions for custodians and engineers. Shortly before Leah left, her boss, Judy, took her to lunch in her “dream come true”: a “blindingly red” sports car she had wanted all her life.

Flash forward 10 years, when a former coworker calls to say that Judy died in an accident involving the red car and has left the car to Leah. The novel then takes a surreal turn. Leah hears Judy’s voice in her head. She travels West for the funeral, where everyone from former colleagues to total strangers wants to sleep with her. Judy’s car may be possessed: First, it fixes itself; then people who drive it have trouble keeping to a safe speed. Then Leah begins to suspect that Judy’s death may not have been an accident. 

Well before Dermansky mentions him, it’s clear we’re in the realm of Haruki Murakami: the staccato rhythm and short sentences; the presence of cats, if only in cartoon form on T-shirts; dialogue that’s not quite real speech. There’s even a Japanese motel clerk who, like many Murakami characters, is obsessed with American culture. If The Red Car doesn’t quite equal the bizarre beauty of the master’s finest work, it’s still a fun and addictive read. “Follow the signs,” deceased Judy advises Leah. Readers who do the same will enter a dreamlike world that is as familiar as it is skewed.

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Loner, protagonist David Federman has a quirk: When he hears a word or a name, he likes to turn it backward in his mind, reversing the letters so they spell something different. “Star” becomes “rats.” “Pupils” becomes “slipup.” “Lived” becomes “devil.” Most of the words he switches around become incoherent, recognizable only to himself. David’s wordplay comes off as geeky and sweet; he seems ready to bloom in college.

But the shy kid we’re introduced to in chapter one soon grows as twisted and bizarre as his mirrored words. We learn that he views his new friends as disposable pawns and his fellow students only in terms of what they can do for him. The limited interactions he has with girls—with one girl in particular—grow heavy with innuendo and implications in his own mind.

Veronica is the object of David’s affection, and the book grows darker as his choices lead him from crushing on her, to stalking her, to becoming truly frightening in his actions toward her and others. As readers, we’re left off-balance, not quite sure whether Veronica is being played by David, or if she’s part of the game. The fact that the banalities of David’s life are so familiar makes his behavior all the more creepy, and author Teddy Wayne (The Love Song of Jonny Valentine) deftly weaves in literary allusions, to Macbeth and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in particular, that add another layer to the narrative.

Loner is a genre mashup—coming-of-age meets thriller—and the result is magnetic. Campus gender dynamics is a hot topic in the media, but Loner takes us back to the very beginning, tracing how small choices and hidden motivations lead to those attention-getting headlines. The reader has a front-row seat as David turns his privilege inside-out, twists the kindness of strangers into something perverse and loses the life he could have lived—and although that journey isn’t always pleasant, it’s incredibly compelling. 

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the whole country talking about identity politics, racism and cultural awareness, Peter Ho Davies’ provocative new novel could not be more timely. Told from the points of view of four different characters over a century and a half, The Fortunes documents the history of the Chinese in America beginning in the mid-1800s. The pattern of 19th-century immigration and current Chinese adoptions is comprised of first men, and then girls, without families. With this in mind, Davies re-envisions the genre of the multigenerational saga. 

The novel’s artful structure allows for four distinct stories, three of which are drawn from historical sources. The son of a prostitute and a white man, or “ghost,” Ah Ling is sold off to a laundry in California. By 1860, he had become a personal assistant to a railroad baron, but then chose to work alongside his countrymen on the transcontinental railroad. The second story is told by Anna May Wong. Born in the United States, Wong was Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star, yet she repeatedly lost key roles to white actresses playing in yellowface. Four decades later, an unnamed friend of Vincent Chin’s remembers the night Chin was beaten to death outside a Detroit bar during the height of the import auto scare of the early 1980s. Finally, in the last section, Mike Smith, a biracial writer, and his Caucasian wife, Nola, travel to China to adopt a baby girl. In each of these stories, Davies’ characters wrestle with their Chinese identity and what it means to become an American. 

The scope and research of The Fortunes is impressive, but what makes the novel memorable is the honesty of each narrative voice, whether it’s the loneliness of Ah Ling, the bitter wit of Anna May Wong, or the unease of Vincent’s friend as he sifts through his memories of that terrible night. But it is the utter intimacy and introspection of the final section, “Pearl,” that digs the deepest. Though it is the section told with the most humor, this is the one that will break your heart. Davies, whose previous novel, The Welsh Girl, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize, has written a masterful, perceptive and very modern look at identity, migration and the intertwined histories of the United States and China.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In novels like Atonement and Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has enjoyed playing tricks with questions of his narrator’s identity. His devilishly clever and darkly humorous novel Nutshell takes another step in that direction, revealing the arc of a bizarre murder plot from the point of view of the ultimate unreliable narrator: a child in utero, two weeks away from birth.

McEwan’s startlingly precocious protagonist lodges uneasily in the womb of Trudy Cairncross, who is separated from her husband John—an uninspired poet and owner of a modest poetry publishing house—and living in the decaying Georgian mansion in an upscale London neighborhood that was John’s childhood home. Trudy and her lover, Claude, a property developer who happens to be John’s younger brother, appear to have in common only their mutual lust (whose manifestations the narrator rather graphically describes from his own intimate perspective) and a shared desire to see John dead. 

Without giving too much away, it’s safe to say that Trudy and Claude’s scheme unfolds with all the deftness one would expect from a pair of amateur killers. Apart from his terror at the prospect of his father’s demise, the narrator has a dawning fear that he’s little more than an inconvenient afterthought in the conspirators’ minds. His own future may include spending some of his early days in prison and the rest of his childhood in a “brutal tower block.”

Whether it’s a “joyous, blushful Pinot Noir” or a “gooseberried Sauvignon,” the sense-deprived but enthusiastic narrator is given to precise cataloging of his mother’s wine consumption—clearly excessive for a woman in her third trimester, but understandable for one hoping to obliterate her consciousness of the terrible deed she and her lover are about to commit. He’s also a cheeky and surprisingly well-informed commentator on the problems of the world (owing, perhaps, to the podcasts his mother devours). For all that, he hungers to enter that world, imagining himself someday as an octogenarian ringing in the 22nd century: “Healthy desire or mere greed,” he muses, “I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness.”

In Nutshell, McEwan cleverly pulls off what might be little more than a gimmick in the hands of a lesser novelist. That he persuades us to suspend our disbelief so readily here is a testament to his consummate skill.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.