The teenage narrator of Jesse Ball’s heartbreaking sixth novel, How to Set a Fire and Why, is Lucia, but as far as the world is concerned, she is nameless and worthless. When the story opens, we learn that she’s functionally orphaned. Her father is dead, her mother driven to such madness that she no longer recognizes her own child. Reduced to penury, Lucia lives with her elderly aunt Lucy in a converted garage whose rent they can’t afford. At one point, Lucia’s shoes are so run down that her toes poke through.

What she does have is her father’s old Zippo, and even this gets her into trouble when she attacks a boy at her school for daring to touch it. This gets her sent to another school, where she falls in with a loosely organized bunch of teenage pyromaniacs. The idea of burning things up and burning things down, to inflict hurt on a world that has inflicted hurt on her, captures Lucia’s imagination.

At times, the reader may not like Lucia very much. She lies, she cheats, she steals; her thoughts about her peers are uncharitable, to put it mildly; she smarts off to authority figures, often to her detriment. On the other hand, she’s devoted to her aunt and goes out of her way to visit her psychotic mother. Other adult authority figures rarely respect her, the kids in school despise her, her petty crimes come about because a lot of the time she doesn’t even have money to buy food. 

Maybe, this angry, sad but hopeful book suggests, having no name has its benefits, especially for kids who have nothing to lose. In an age of grotesque inequality, it’s something to consider.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” In Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, PEN Center USA Fiction Award winner Ramona Ausubel explores that theme quite handily.

This ideal summer novel grapples with a Tolstoyan knapsack overflowing with Serious Themes: Love. Betrayal. Death. Wealth. Privilege. War. Coming of Age. And yet, Ausubel has nimbly managed to capture these in miniature, a mini solar system that orbits around the dollar, with a fluctuating gravitational pull that shapes and distorts all the objects in its sphere.

Make no mistake: Edgar and Fern Keating, the book’s protagonists, are easy to dislike. Not only are they suffused with the treacly bouquet of kids whose safety net allowed them to try on hardship as a fashion statement, but they make some staggeringly irresponsible choices. Long story short, the trust-fund babies’ trust fund runs out, and they are thrown into an existential crisis, to which they respond in unpredictable ways.

As the novel bounces back and forth in time (from 1966 to 1976), Ausubel peels away the layers of Edgar’s and Fern’s personae, offering nonjudgmental insight into the events that shaped them and their chosen trajectories. By the end of it all, anyone not rooting for the couple (and their irrepressible daughter, Cricket) to pull off an overtime win needs to look more within themselves than toward the author, who has stitched together an affecting and quietly powerful character study of people who are different than you and me.

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

With seven books to her credit, based on the law of averages alone you might think that Irish author Maggie O’Farrell would be due to deliver a dud. On the contrary: Her latest novel proves that practice really does make perfect. This Must Be the Place may be her best work to date.

O’Farrell returns to the topics that have become her literary bread and butter over the years: love, loss and the things that make—and break—a family. Daniel Sullivan has more than a passing familiarity with all three of these things. We first meet Daniel in 2015, living with his two young children and his reclusive wife on a remote patch of land in Ireland. However, as subsequent chapters jump between past and present, as well as other characters’ perspectives, the complex web of relationships and choices that have brought Daniel to this place and continue to shape his life are slowly illuminated. The result is an intricate and emotional jigsaw puzzle whose pieces interlock in immensely satisfying—and startling—ways.

Nimbly bounding though time and space, the narrative unfolds with a cinematic quality, and O’Farrell’s prose manages to be both intimate and expansive in its tone and keenly perceptive in its insights on the complexities of marriage. Beautiful and bittersweet, This Must Be the Place will make O’Farrell’s longtime fans swoon while prompting new readers to wonder why they’ve only just discovered her.

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

In the year in which we mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler joins a distinguished group of writers that includes Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson in reinterpreting the bard’s works for Hogarth Press. Vinegar Girl transports The Taming of the Shrew from Padua to Tyler’s beloved Baltimore, and the product is a witty novel that reveals both the durability of Shakespeare’s themes and Tyler’s talent for creating pleasantly eccentric characters and engaging portraits of contemporary domestic life.

As someone who hates small children, Kate Battista couldn’t be more ill-suited for her work as a preschool teacher’s assistant. Her unfailing candor has put her job in jeopardy, and at 29 she is still living with her father, a fumbling, self-absorbed microbiology researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and a sullen sister half her age. Given Kate’s severely circumscribed prospects, it’s hardly surprising when her father seizes on the idea of having her wed his Russian research assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose visa is about to expire, saving him from deportation.

As preposterous as that union may seem, Tyler gives Kate a credible interior life, permitting her to wrestle with the absurdity of participating in what she thinks of as “human trafficking,” weighed against her fear that she’ll live out her days as the “old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father.” When her sister pleads with her to call off the wedding, Kate’s plaintive cry that “This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny,” resonates with real emotional force.

With the characteristic light touch of her 20 previous novels, Tyler plausibly depicts the halting evolution of Kate and Pyotr’s relationship as her family and friends look on with attitudes that range from bemusement to alarm. As befits such a genial comedy, the roadblocks that separate the couple from the altar are predictably mild, but Tyler deploys them to illuminate character, not garner unearned laughs. Vinegar Girl is a bittersweet novel that both honors and extends its source material.

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

Annie Proulx’s enthralling, multigenerational epic, Barkskins, opens in 1693 in the vast North Woods of New France (now Canada) with the arrival from France of two indentured woodcutters, or “barkskins.” René Sel feels with the first swings of his axe that he is “embarking on his life’s work.” But, blunted hatchet in hand, the ailing Charles Duquet can only nibble at his first tree. Duquet soon flees into the forest, changes his name to Duke and reappears as the canny founder of a Boston-based timber empire. Sel falls in love with a Mi’kmaw woman and fathers three children who mostly view themselves as native people.

The remainder of this 700-plus-page novel follows the lives of the Sel and Duke descendants up until 2013. The story unfolds against a background of social and political upheavals, beginning with the French and Indian war and ending with contemporary environmental conflicts. The Sels struggle to maintain a native culture as the natural world is altered by forces in which, for their own livelihoods, they must participate. The more powerful Duke family, whose timber interests eventually range throughout the world, has its own set of tragedies—and comedies.

Proulx’s human characters—their lives and deaths—are vividly conceived. Her portrayals of them are nuanced. In a recent interview, Proulx said she has been thinking about and researching this book for many years. It shows. Barkskins brims with a granular sense of human experience over a period of 300 years. And like many novels by excellent writers, Barkskins encourages understanding, if not empathy, for characters whose outlooks we might usually dismiss. The idea that the vast forests of North America could never be diminished, for example, is expressed often by her early characters. With hindsight, we scoff at such a notion today. But Proulx allows us to feel the reasonableness and need for such an outlook at the time, making us question our easy assumptions about people of the past.

And yet the most moving and most consistent character of Barkskins is the world’s forests. One of the great achievements of this novel is to create a sort of tragic personality for the environment. Proulx’s beautiful prose renders an exultant view of the life of forest worlds lost to us, in both their grandeur and their indifferent menace. It will be very difficult for someone to finish reading Barkskins without a deep sense of loss.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, July 2016

About three pages into Miss Jane I found myself both transfixed and perplexed. Who is this Brad Watson and why am I just now discovering him? A finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and Granta, he is certainly a known quantity. But finally with Miss Jane, it seems he has a novel that will break him out to the wider readership he so deserves. 

Set in Mercury, Mississippi, in the early 20th century, Miss Jane is the story of Jane Chisolm, a woman born with a genital birth defect that renders her “useless” in a time when a woman was intended for two purposes: marriage and motherhood. Contrary to other independent-minded literary heroines like Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or the unnamed narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Jane is not actively shunning social expectations, but rather forced into a life of solitude by circumstances beyond her control. But her curiosity, courage and resolve to live life on her terms places her in the company of these unique characters.

In Miss Jane, Watson creates a rural Mississippi that exudes Southern gothic at its very best. Jane is a heroine considered by most in her community, including her family, to be damaged goods. And yet, through her relationship with a country doctor who supports and advocates for her, and the gentle boy who loves her despite her abnormality, Jane emerges as the member of her family who experiences the truest forms of love and connection. 

Like the peacocks that the doctor raises on his farm, Jane’s strange yet beautiful spirit possesses a haunting, anachronistic beauty. Miss Jane is a truly original novel with a character that readers will cherish. Watson has delivered a striking and unforgettable portrait.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a behind the book feature about Miss Jane.
 

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

As the winter of 1963 encroaches on Gunflint, Minnesota, Harry Eide and his 18-year-old son, Gustav, set off into the wilderness in a canoe. As the two face the ice and snow, they must also confront the demons, both real and metaphorical, that follow them from Gunflint. What happens to them out in the elements is a secret father and son will share for decades.

Thirty years later, an elderly Harry—demented by the passing years—heads out again into the cold, alone this time, vanishing into the vastness that could have so easily claimed both himself and his son many winters before. When Harry is pronounced dead, a troubled Gus finally shares the story of that first wilderness trek. 

Minneapolis author Peter Geye has touched on themes of family and wilderness in his previous novels, Safe from the Sea and The Lighthouse Road, both set in Minnesota. In Wintering, Geye has woven an artfully crafted tale of the special bond between father and son, the complexity of nature—both human and otherwise—and the idea that, sometimes, one must venture out to find a way back.

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

In Dear Fang, With Love, the second novel from Rufi Thorpe, Lucas is given a singular opportunity to show kindness to the daughter he doesn’t know all that well, even though she’s 17. He and his ex-girlfriend, Katya, had Vera when they were teenagers themselves. Lucas didn’t meet Vera until she was 5 and has been in and out of her life ever since. It is only when the mind of this beautiful, strange and brilliant young woman finally breaks that he steps into the gap, as it were. His solution is to take her to Lithuania, the home of their ancestors, including one who escaped the Nazis and Lithuania for a prosaic life in America.

Even though Vera doesn’t know much about her traumatized great-grandmother, the effect Lithuania has on her is dramatic. Thorpe’s depiction of mental illness is painfully accurate. She shows how Vera’s intelligence and imagination are tangled up with her mental issues, through both her ramblings on her laptop and her increasingly desperate and delusional emails to Fang, the boyfriend she left behind in California. Thorpe also understands the utter helplessness felt by a sick person’s loved ones. Lucas, who doesn’t even know how to parent a teenager who’s psychologically normal—are any teenagers psychologically normal?—is out of his league with Vera. 

But Lucas is a kind if flawed man, and he uses that kindness to lead his unhappy daughter from the brink. In one astonishing, terrifying scene, he does so literally. This is what a parent does, says Thorpe’s wise and sad book.

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

Twenty-three years after creating the benighted town of North Bath, New York in his novel Nobody's Fool, Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo (Empire Falls) invites readers back to find that while the lot of most of the town's inhabitants hasn't improved much, their lives and loves provide ample fodder for a fresh tragicomic encounter with the human condition.

Everybody's Fool unfolds over a steamy Memorial Day weekend that begins with the funeral of Judge Barton Flatt—an event that's marred by police chief Douglas Raymer's tumble into the open grave—and includes murder, savage beatings, the escape of poisonous snakes, lightning strikes and a couple of nervous breakdowns.

As in its predecessor, in the heart of this chaos is the roguish Donald "Sully" Sullivan, whose fortunes have improved after he inherits the home of the town's former eighth grade English teacher, but who still spends most of his days at a local lunch counter or at one of North Bath's downmarket taverns. Sharing center stage with him this time is Chief Raymer, still in mourning over the death of his wife a year earlier in a bizarre accident on the day she planned to leave him for her lover. The return of Roy Purdy, a recidivist burglar and thug who is the ex-son-in-law of Sully's former lover Ruth, darkens the story and generates most of the action that drives it forward.

For all of Russo's deft comic sensibility and the occasionally antic quality of the novel's plot, he successfully sidesteps the trap of slapstick humor. Instead, whether it's Chief Raymer's obsession with a garage door opener he believes will reveal the identity of his wife's lover, or Sully's encounter with mortality as he realizes the two years he's been given by a VA cardiologist are "probably closer to one," Russo is more intent on placing the interior lives of these characters under a microscope than he is in making sport of their obvious flaws. And with all its frustrated dreams of development, Russo makes it clear that foul-smelling North Bath, like hundreds of small towns across America, is destined for a sad fate.

Everybody's Fool is an old-fashioned novel in the best sense of that word, inviting readers to slip comfortably between its covers knowing they're in the hands of a writer who understands the foibles of human nature and can plumb its dark corners with empathy, understanding and wit.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Richard Russo about Everybody's Fool. 

Not even a quarter of the way through Patricia Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean, readers will realize they’re getting sort of angry. Narrated by Reina, a young woman who emigrated with her family from Cartagena, Colombia to Miami, these pages are a compendium of the lousy ways men can treat women and the reasons women put up with it. Babies are tossed from bridges because men think their women are cheating on them. Reina’s parents got married because her father raped her mother and her mother wanted to avoid scandal. Reina allows all manner of men to paw at her. She is utterly devoted to her incarcerated brother despite his lack of remorse as a child murderer. Does he return such devotion? Not a chance.

Reina is resigned to all this; she expects nothing of men when it comes to commitment, responsibility or even respect. But then she meets Nesto.

Nesto is not like any man Reina has ever met. An orisha-worshipping Cuban émigré, he is genuinely interested in how she thinks and feels. He longs for the children he left back in Cuba—and he even had them with the same woman, to whom he was once married. Very few things have worked out in Reina’s life. Can she take a chance on this gentle, handsome, enigmatic man?

Reina and Nesto’s story is enhanced by Engel’s sensuous writing. The reader can see the different shades of blue of the ocean, the greens of palms and sea grapes, the smells of the semi-tropics. But Engel’s compassion for her people, the poverty-stricken Hispanic immigrants and refugees who’ve jumped from the fire of their native countries into the frying pan of the United States, is boundless. She even makes you understand why the men around Reina do what they do, even if she doesn’t absolve them. The Veins of the Ocean reminds us of the importance of love, respect, family and forgiveness.

If you’re thinking the Romantic myth of the suffering artist is dead and gone—well, think again. English novelist Benjamin Wood embraces the bluesy old song with gleeful gusto and uninhibited nostalgia in his second novel, The Ecliptic. His artist-heroine is as suffering as they come. Born into postwar, working-class Glasgow, Elspeth “Ellie” Conroy has to achieve her vocation as a painter against considerable odds, not least of which is her striking beauty.

Ellie tells her own tale, expressing at least two or three times on every page the terms of her self-doubt or self-loathing. As an ambitious woman in the patriarchal London art world of the early 1960s, she must define herself in the shadow of mentors, dealers, critics, lovers and psychiatrists. Sometimes these roles coalesce into a single figure. No matter if these fellows are good or bad; the point is that they make her suffer, driving her to extremes of self-injury and psychological ruin, paralyzing her even as she is on the verge of a breakthrough (the “ecliptic” of the title serves as the elusive image of this goal).

All of this sounds archetypal enough; but Wood has an ace up his narrative sleeve that pushes the novel into uncanny territory—namely, an island off the coast of Turkey, where suffering artists (a whole colony of them!) are sent by their sponsors in order to recapture their wayward muse. Portmantle is the name of the colony, a dream haven, a sort of purgatory where world-famous writers, painters, architects—and, crucially, a 17-year-old graphic novel genius—can burn off the sins of their aesthetic excesses or failures of artistic nerve. Here, Ellie seems to be on the path to reclamation. But it’s just one more detour into the inevitable inferno of being an artist. The enchanted reader of Wood’s novel cannot help feeling that if Elspeth Conroy had only put as much painstaking artfulness into her painting as she has given to writing her own life, she could have been another Picasso.

Michael Alec Rose is a professor of music at Vanderbilt University.

Don DeLillo’s novels are not for the faint of heart. Though not especially complex in style—he writes with a spare, arid lyricism—they have continually challenged readers with a dark worldview tied to the here and now. DeLillo is about to turn 80, so it might not be surprising that his new novel, Zero K, centers on death. Ever the visionary though, he has taken the subject in an unusual direction: the world of Cryonic suspension, where the dying are frozen, to be resurrected in the future when medicine has caught up to their maladies.

The novel is narrated not by one of the dying (except in the sense that we are all dying), but by Jeffrey, the 30-something son of billionaire Ross, whose second wife, Artis, is close to death. The three travel to a remote desert facility in a former Soviet republic where her “Convergence” will take place. Unsurprisingly, the state-of-the-art compound is an odd, futuristic place, isolated and conducive to meditative rumination, inspiring Jeff to all manner of thoughts about life and death (the first half of the novel, perhaps consciously, is reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain). As Artis approaches her final hours, Ross decides that he will expedite his own death in order to be with her. His procedure will take place in an area called Zero K, shorthand for absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. 

 Zero K is about death, and the ageless question of whether we should have control over our own mortality, but it is equally about life and the complications that unite to make each of us who we are. Jeff is a highly flawed individual, struggling with OCD and obsessed with words, forever battling feelings of paternal abandonment and the inability to form lasting relationships. When he does enter a tentative romance with a woman, a single mother with a teenage son she adopted as an orphan from Ukraine, the novel seems to go in a new direction. But it circles back to the Convergence in its final pages, striving for a measure of optimism and hope amid a narrative of inevitability and despair. Ever uncompromising in his assessments, DeLillo has written another uneasy dissection of how we live and all we struggle to overcome. Still, one can’t help but notice that if spelled out with a cardinal number, the book’s title becomes “OK.”

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

From the very first page of her new novel, LaRose, Louise Erdrich heaves readers into the tumultuous world of two families shackled together by grief: the Ironses and the Raviches. While stalking a buck along the border of his property, Landreaux Iron, a decent yet complicated family man, accidentally shoots and kills his best friend’s 5-year-old son. Tormented, Landreaux turns to an ancient Ojibwe tradition: “Our son will be your son now,” Landreaux says as he bequeaths the young LaRose to the Ravich family. While LaRose’s adoption does bring relief to the grief-stricken Raviches, complications inevitably arise. LaRose’s presence can only do so much to soothe Nola, his new mother, who is struggling with thoughts of suicide. Meanwhile, Landreaux is pursued by a vengeful townsman who begins digging around for information, suspecting a cover-up on the day of the accident. 

A National Book Award-winning author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Erdrich is a master of the literary form. Throughout the present-day narrative, Erdrich weaves the ancestral legacy of LaRose’s namesake. The seamless blending of the ancient and the modern is a familiar technique in Erdrich’s storytelling. In the contemporary passages, Erdrich’s prose is terse, almost staccato, but when she dips into the ancestral interludes, her voice is at its strongest and richest. Describing an ancestor’s tuberculosis, she writes, “Finally, in its own ecstasy to live, the being seized her. It sank hot iron knives into her bones. It kept snipping her lungs into elaborate paper valentines.” 

Through complex, dynamic characters and resonant human conflict, Erdrich gives readers the space to ponder atonement, the emotional bonds of family and the ways in which tradition can both orient and obscure our sense of right and wrong.

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