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.

Has Jonathan Safran Foer spent the 12 years since his last novel solely exchanging email LOLs with actress Natalie Portman? Not quite. Foer’s much-anticipated third novel, Here I Am, has arrived. And thankfully, whatever his weaknesses as an email writer, Foer is a heck of a novelist. 

Foer writes with crisp sentences, dexterous paragraphs and unswerving honesty—but he’s never completely won me over. His explosive debut, Everything Is Illuminated, and his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, were worthy reads, but labored to the finish like middle-distance runners in the final stages of a marathon. By contrast, Here I Am is frisky from the starting gun through the tape. Large in physical size and theme, it follows two dire situations unfolding simultaneously: the not-so-unusual implosion of a Jewish-American family and, ho hum, the destruction of the Middle East. 

Simply written yet complicated in the emotions it evokes, Here I Am can be construed as a cautionary tale.

Jacob and Julia Bloch live in Washington, D.C., with their three sons. Their marriage, in subtle decline for a while, free falls when Julia finds a series of X-rated texts on Jacob’s phone. At the same time, Jacob’s cousin and nephew arrive from Israel for the upcoming bar mitzvah of the Blochs’ oldest son, Sam. But no sooner do they hit town than an earthquake demolishes the Middle East, fracturing the region’s notoriously thin veneer of peace. Jacob, a man who seems almost paralyzed when faced with a decision of any consequence, must make choices that will alter—or even end—his life and the lives of his family. 

Simply written yet complicated in the emotions it evokes, Here I Am can be construed as a cautionary tale. And no, the lesson is not to hide your secret cell phone better. Without giving too much away, both the personal and political stories remind readers of the value of alliances.

Numerous parallels between Jacob Bloch and Foer mark this as a very personal novel. It also may be a great novel. Foer, just 25 when Everything Is Illuminated hit the shelves, is no stranger to the backhanded compliment, “man-child.” At 39, his writing has taken on a sly maturity that feels fresh and new. Here I Am is destined to be a polarizing, much-discussed novel. Love it or hate it, it is well worth your time.

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

It’s no secret that war tears families apart, including those comprised of militaristic parents and their pacifist offspring. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments.

Robert Quinlan, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran and professor of American history, lives in Florida with his wife, Darla, an art theorist. They’re enjoying tofu curry at a local co-op when a disheveled man with few teeth enters. Robert, thinking the man is a fellow Vietnam vet, buys him a meal. This encounter takes Robert back to his Vietnam service, where he was “one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills.” 

Robert’s younger brother, Jimmy, moved to Canada rather than serve in the war, a decision that angered their World War II-veteran father. Jimmy now makes high-end leather goods, has an open marriage with Linda, his wife of 24 years, and hasn’t seen his parents and brother for 46 years.

But with their 89-year-old father on the verge of death after a fall, Jimmy has to decide whether to return to the States and risk unleashing decades of “unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret.”

The disheveled man’s story, which Butler revisits throughout the book, feels extraneous, but Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty. There are marvelous descriptions throughout: When Robert dashes out of a banyan tree, “a needle-thin compression of air zips past his head.” As this provocative novel makes clear, each of us does what he or she must, but acts of conviction are rarely free of consequences.

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

A cursory peek into his backlist reveals that there is no such thing as a “typical” Colson Whitehead novel. Having tackled everything from post-apocalyptic zombie horror to jocular coming-of-age shenanigans in the Hamptons, this prizewinning author seems to have the philosophy that big risk equals big reward. So it should come as no surprise that The Underground Railroad, his sixth novel, is not only his most daring but also his very best—and most important—book to date. It’s also the latest selection of Oprah’s Book Club.

In The Underground Railroad, Whitehead dives into the past for the first time, transporting readers back to pre-Civil War America and the plantations of the South. We are introduced to Cora, a third-generation slave in Georgia who has never set foot off her master’s property and for whom the idea of fleeing is unthinkable—that is, until a fellow slave, Caesar, approaches her about hitching a ride on the rumored Underground Railroad to the North. With a ruthless slave catcher hot on their heels, they embark on a perilous journey through America in search of a freedom that feels increasingly elusive.

A sly reframing of Gulliver’s Travels within the traditional black slave narrative, The Underground Railroad is an arresting tale that puts Whitehead’s imagination and intelligence on full display. His inspired decision to have Cora adventure through the South by means of a literal subterranean locomotive suffuses the narrative with a fable-like quality, but Whitehead’s overall approach is far from whimsical. Throughout her journey, Cora is confronted with some of the most disgraceful facets of the period, from eugenics programs to the Fugitive Slave Act, and the narrative is frequently grim.

Whitehead exercises his artistic license, deviating from the historical record to create an augmented reality. But his skillful balancing of intellect and fact with emotion and highly nuanced storytelling only makes the meditation on the insidious values that allow prejudice and brutality to continue to flourish all the more indelible. Chilling in its timeliness, The Underground Railroad is a devastating  literary masterpiece that should be considered required reading.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our interview with Colson Whitehead on The Underground Railroad.

When Nick Maguire moves his wife, Phoebe, and their 2-year-old son, Jackson, from Boston to Southern California, he hopes to put their rocky past behind them. But as quickly becomes apparent in Carousel Court, Joe McGinniss Jr.’s intense new novel, some bruises need more than time and distance to heal.

Nick, who makes his living producing corporate films, accepts a job as a production manager with a boutique firm in Encino. Phoebe, a former analyst at a financial-services firm in Boston, had an affair with the lead partner, known only as JW. Now, she sells (and takes) anxiety medicine for a pharmaceutical firm. Well aware of her attractiveness, she employs a unique method of enticing male doctors to buy her products.

One of the biggest motivators for the move occurred when Phoebe, exhausted and high on Klonopin, slammed her car into an idling truck and nearly killed Jackson. Nick’s plan had been to move West, buy an investment property to upgrade, and give Phoebe time to regain her stability.

But when Nick’s job offer falls through, he becomes a repo man who pretends to own some of the repossessed homes and rents them to unsuspecting tenants. He and Phoebe feel stuck in their own neighborhood, Carousel Court, with neighbors so fearful of one another that some of them sleep in tents and carry guns. And all of this is before JW contacts Phoebe with promises of future employment and the prospect of further infidelity.

Despite repetitive elements, Carousel Court is a searing indictment of excess ambition and a dark portrait of the bitterness that forms when life and careers don’t work out as planned. As McGinniss makes clear, no amount of fancy buttercream carpeting or expensive organic cherimoya will mask the pain of a strained marriage. But as one character says, “Maybe there is something approaching salvation to be found in all these dead houses.” The same is true of seemingly moribund marriages: They may be on the verge of collapse, but maybe some of them still have value.

Readers who have ever turned to a book to get out of a slump are going to love Ann Hood’s The Book That Matters Most. The story begins on a festive December night in downtown Providence where Ava, a middle-aged French professor, is feeling anything but festive after discovering her husband’s infidelity. Like a film reel, memories of her once perfect life keep running in her head and no number of martinis can push the stop button. Miles away in Paris, Ava’s daughter, Maggie, is going through a crisis of her own after a failed attempt at writing a novel. Both women are desperate for something to pull them out of their misery.

Ava meets her savior in the form of a book club headed by her librarian friend, Cate, where each member must choose the book that matters most to her for the club to read. Hesitant at first about fitting in and even making the grave mistake of Netflixing her first book, Ava soon finds the comfort she is looking for in the books and the club members.  

With Maggie, on the other hand, Hood takes us on a roller coaster ride through drug addiction, poor choices in men and her desperation to write. She finds a lifeline in a tiny bookstore run by a mysterious and stoic American expat. 

Getting lost and then being found would in itself make for a wonderful story, but Hood adds another layer of complexity, linking the parallel journeys of mother and daughter in an unexpected way. The Book That Matters Most is an engrossing tale that reminds us of the power of the written word to comfort the soul.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book feature by Ann Hood on The Book That Matters Most.
 

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

Lara Vapnyar’s absorbing new novel is about immigrating to America, where life must be managed despite dashed hopes and disappointments. Expanding the reach of her previous novels, The Scent of Pine and Memoirs of a Muse, Still Here explores the overlapping lives of a quartet of friends who struggle with love and ambition in their chosen country. 

Vica, Vadik, Sergey and Regina met as students in Moscow. Though each of them has achieved their dream of coming to America, life in the Big Apple is not what they expected. Sergey has one disastrous low-level job after another and spends most of his energy trying to perfect Virtual Grave, an app that will allow people to preserve their online presence after death. Putting aside plans for medical school, his spirited wife, Vica, struggles to keep the family financially solvent. Sergey’s old girlfriend Regina, now married to a wealthy American businessman, mourns her former career as a translator and her place at the center of Moscow’s rich literary culture, while Sergey’s best friend, Vadik, moves from neighborhood to neighborhood and girlfriend to girlfriend, searching for the woman and the sense of opportunity he found on his very first night in New York.

The creation of Virtual Grave proves the focus of much of the action as the four friends debate its potential value, how best to market it and what the app reveals about the commercial culture surrounding death. But these discussions also spur questions about how to define success and what it really means to leave a legacy. 

Vapnyar is a brilliant observer of the differences between Russian culture and American life, especially the cosmopolitan, urban variety—and despite the fatalistic worldview of her characters, the author’s belief that miracles do happen provides much humor. A piercing novel about the absurdities of the digital age, Still Here is also the finest kind of comedy of manners, as much a snapshot of how we live now as were the 19th-century novels of Anthony Trollope and George Eliot.

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

The protagonist of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, is hardly a model of parental rectitude: She abandons her home and dental practice in Ohio to traverse Alaska in a rickety RV with her two children. Starting from this dubious premise, Eggers weaves an engaging story of second chances and the fierce beauty of maternal love.

Approaching age 40, Josie is haunted by a malpractice case filed by a former patient whose litigious son-in-law claims she missed evidence of an oral cancer in a routine dental examination. Her guilt over that incident is surpassed only by the anguish she feels over the death of another patient, a young Marine who was killed in Afghanistan. 

While Josie’s tenuous hold on rationality propels the novel, Eggers gives her a pair of appealing traveling companions. Her 8-year-old son, Peter, is “far more reasonable and kind and wise than his mother,” personality traits that come in handy for dealing with his 5-year-old sister, Ana, who’s “tuned to a different galactic frequency.” Both children demonstrate remarkable resilience, resigning themselves to the fact that there’s “no longer any logical pattern to their lives.”

This tiny crew navigates a craft north from Anchorage, on Alaska’s highways and back roads. Along the way, they take in a magic show on a cruise ship, meet a veteran of one of America’s lesser-known conflicts—the invasion of Grenada—and live in a cottage on the site of an abandoned silver mine. Eggers captures the essential weirdness of this journey while firmly anchoring it to Josie’s emotional crisis.

Heroes of the Frontier seems at first an ironic description of this tiny band. But what Eggers shows so convincingly is that there’s a certain heroism in trading a disastrous life for the vague glimpse of a new one. It’s a vote for the optimistic notion that tomorrow has the potential to be better than today.

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

In The Unseen World, Liz Moore’s third novel, the Philadelphia-based author invites us into the unpredictable world of 12-year old Ada Sibelius and her brilliant, socially inept father, David, who works in a computer science lab in Boston. When Ada’s father goes missing, she is led down a difficult path to discover his true past. Toggling between the early computing world of the 1980s and a San Francisco tech start-up in 2009, the novel follows the development of intelligent technology—from early language programming to modern-day virtual reality simulations—effortlessly fusing themes of advancing technology and human psychology in an ambitious, poignant story. 

Moore’s lyrical language is coupled with a crystalline vision of her characters. Lionhearted Ada, whom we follow from childhood to adulthood, is unforgettable: brainy, guarded yet full of curiosity and passion. The supporting cast also shines. An irresistible page-turner with a heart-stopping ending, The Unseen World winds its way through mystery, heartbreak and mortality with an acute sense of what it means to be human.

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

In his first novel, On Love, philosopher Alain de Botton catalogued the process of falling in and out of love, putting his own unique and perceptive spin on the modern day love story. Now, over two decades later, de Botton finds himself deeply fascinated by another facet of love, one that literature and films too often neglect: Having fallen in love and committed ourselves to another person, what is it like to have been married awhile? He explores the question of how love changes and evolves when sustained over time with astounding insight in his latest novel, The Course of Love.

Superficially, The Course of Love is the story of Rabih and Kirsten, who follow a relatively well-trod path: They meet, they fall in love, they get married, they have kids and one of them even has an affair. Normally it would be poor form to reveal the milestones in their relationship upfront, but de Botton is seemingly less concerned with what happens between Rabih and Kristen than he is with why it happens and, more importantly, what this reveals about the nature of romantic love and attachment. Throughout the book, he approaches the pair with an air of impartial detachment and the plot is frequently punctuated by philosophical and psychological reflections, resulting in something that resembles a fascinating case study of a marriage more than a traditional novel. Delving deep into his characters’ psyches and explicitly dissecting their inner yearnings and motivations for his readers’ instruction and enlightenment, de Botton has effectively crafted an intellectual love story that somewhat paradoxically manages to clinical in its tone yet extremely intimate in its scope.

The Course of Love is not a fairy-tale love story; it is unlikely to make readers palms sweat or hearts flutter, but this book clearly means to challenge the conventions of what makes us swoon and which elements of love, in all its complexities, we celebrate. As de Botton painstakingly documents, the reality of “happily ever after” is rarely easy or pretty, but as Shakespeare famously wrote, “the course of true love never did run smooth.” If The Course of Love is any indication, not only does de Botton agree, but perhaps we—as well as love—are all the better for it.