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.

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.