The dying town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, was fueled by the coal industry for generations, but now its only hope is natural gas. Bakerton sits atop an enormous deposit, which can only be accessed by fracking: violent drilling that leaves the surrounding ground poisoned.

The families with properties on the Marcellus Shale don’t know what fracking entails. They just know that a mysterious Texas company with the vaguely sinister name Dark Elephant Energy is offering them a golden ticket out of poverty. Never mind the past ravages mining has brought to their community. In Heat and Light, Jennifer Haigh reminds us of our short memories when it comes to choosing between our environment and our wallet.

Heat and Light is a searing novel that shows all sides of the fracking debate: the charismatic Texas businessman who sees natural gas as the future, the organic dairy farmers who see their livelihood threatened by pollution, the zealous environmentalist trying to organize opposition.

Haigh previously wrote about the 1940s heyday of real-life Bakerton in Baker Towers, and she returns in top form. Her writing is clear-eyed and nonjudgmental. A low-grade dread pervades every page of the book—the instability and uncertainty of a bad economy and limited choices. Haigh’s characters are deeply sympathetic; they are good people looking for a way forward. She delves into each of their lives, unfolding their flaws and histories for examination. Heat and Light is as thought-provoking as it gets, brilliantly written and resonant.

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

When Margaret’s fiancé is hospitalized for depression in the 1960s, she is shaken but ultimately unwilling to abandon the man she loves. Imagine Me Gone traces the aftershock of Margaret’s fateful choice as John’s condition ripples out over the subsequent decades, affecting not only their life together but the lives of their three children.

Although depression and anxiety are foes that many authors have explored in the pages of literature, it is hard to think of a novel that presents as nuanced and intimate a portrait of these diseases as Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone. Told from the perspectives of each of the five members of the family, the novel offers a shockingly raw portrayal of how mental illness afflicts individuals as well as families, sometimes tearing them apart but also binding them closer. But to simply label this as a book about depression—however expert its portrayal—minimizes what Haslett, a previous Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, has achieved with his third work of fiction. At its core, this is a pensive examination of the very human struggle to connect and find peace—with others and with ourselves—and the nature of time and how it passes. Haslett’s keen eye for and rigorous examination of the intricate messiness of family dynamics calls to mind Jonathan Franzen’s 21st-century masterpiece on intergenerational dysfunction, The Corrections, although Haslett’s approach, while at times playful, is ultimately more tender and sympathetic.

Imagine Me Gone is immensely personal and private, yet feels universal and ultimately essential in its scope. In its pages, Haslett has laid bare the agonies and ecstasies of the human condition and the familial ties that bind. The end result is a book that you do not read so much as feel, deeply and intensely in the very marrow of your bones.

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

It is fitting that for his final book, Jim Harrison returns to the novella, a form that he spent more than three decades breathing fresh life into. The Ancient Minstrel, a collection of two novellas and one longish short story, is the author unadorned, warty and ruminative as ever.

The title story is a quasi-memoir; a one-eyed writer more or less alone as he nears the end of his life. Only his obsessions remain: food, nature and sex, the last of which is front and center in this story. Much of the action involves the main character's pursuit and evasion of the bicycle-riding neighborhood nymphet who weeds his garden—think American Pie for the Sansabelt set.

There are a few asides along the way, as the writer explores his beloved France and tricks his estranged wife into housing a pig he buys on a whim. It’s plotless, vintage Harrison in its digressions and moody perseverations.

Eggs, my personal favorite, is the story of Catherine, a fiercely bright woman whose life begins and ends on a farm in the west, taking care of her beloved chickens. Old, alone, yet miles from frail, Catherine reminisces—on life in London during the Blitz, her quest to have a child and the thousands of seemingly meaningless choices that propel a quiet life, lived in the manner one wishes.

The Case of the Howling Buddha marks the swan song for Sunderson, Harrison’s oversexed, erratic gumshoe. Sunderson, whom Harrison fans will recognize from earlier novels, is doing what he does, infiltrating cults, having rash sex with alarmingly young women and ruing a generally wasted life. By the end, he is on the run, both literally and figuratively, one step ahead of a comeuppance he’s ambivalent about avoiding.

Harrison, author of more than 40 books of prose and poetry, died on March 26. A tree-hugger who never shed his own rough bark, he has been compared to both Hemingway and Faulkner, so not surprisingly his characters are often confounding and contradictory, weepy men who brawl, tough guys who hole up for days reading poetry, women who can put a bullet through a man’s leg and then nurse him back to health. But for all their bad behavior, like the author himself they are softened by their ache for the love and the natural world—its deadliness and beauty.

Ian Schwartz reviews and reads from California.

"Behold the man," begins Ian McGuire's second novel, The North Water. Try not to read that as "Call me Ishmael" or as "See the child." For, in the first instance, like Moby Dick, it's a novel about a whaling ship and the parallels don't end there. And the second instance inaugurates Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, inspired in turn by Melville.

The novel's protagonist is a doctor named Sumner. A devotee of laudanum, Sumner uses the drug to process his service putting down the Indian Mutiny, when subcontinental sepoys rose up against their British masters. The crew of his ship is a crude bunch even by Melville's or McCarthy's standards, and recall the apocryphal description of British seamanship as consisting mainly of "rum, sodomy and the lash".

Indeed, sodomy becomes central to the novel, due to a devilish ingrate named Drax.  While ashore he rapes and then murders a young black boy. Later aboard ship another young person is discovered defiled and it falls to Sumner to unearth the perpetrator.  All this while McGuire describes in sanguine detail the butchery involved in the whaling trade, soon to be eclipsed by the trade in fossil fuels.

The novel's action proceeds in the Arctic, which becomes what the Congo was to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The food runs out, and the crew must resort to Jack London-esque feats of survival amidst the frozen waste. Yet first contact is made with the easygoing Eskimaux, for whom this seeming emptiness is a paradise of leisure and bounty. Sumner's encounters with them recall another novel, William Vollmann's The Rifles.

And the novel resembles Vollmann in style, for while McGuire leavens his prose with earthy (or maritime) lingo, it is dense without depth, and his few attempts at waxing philosophical seem strained.  He is best at dialogue and in his workmanlike descriptions of the gory labor entailed by the whaling endeavor.

Yet behold the man we do, and McGuire's novel is an unnerving reminder of the struggles of our civilization's past. Like Ishmael, Sumner is a memorable witness to the extremes humankind has approached for its survival.

Edna O’Brien, one of the jewels in the crown of Irish literature, has long given voice to her homeland’s tragic lyricism. At 85, O’Brien has lost none of her talent or fire. Indeed, her new novel, The Little Red Chairs—her first in a decade—may be the fiercest work of her estimable career.

Arriving in a small, off-the-beaten-track village in the west of Ireland, Vladimir Dragan sets up shop as a holistic healer. Handsome and darkly charismatic, the aging man charms the women of the community, particularly Fidelma, once the town beauty and now the 40-ish wife of an older man. Fidelma’s great sadness is never having had a child, and Vlad comes to represent her last chance to fulfill that dream. Soon pregnant, Fidelma has her happiness shattered when the past catches up with her mysterious lover. Vlad is arrested as a war criminal—a savage master of evil responsible for thousands of violent deaths during the Bosnian war. His exposure and extradition shocks the villagers, but Fidelma’s devastation goes beyond emotional despair as she endures an unthinkable act of retribution. 

The Little Red Chairs takes its title from a 2012 memorial installation in Sarajevo where 11,541 red chairs represented every Sarajevan killed during the 1,425-day siege. O’Brien comes at the story from many points of view—not only Fidelma and Vlad’s, but also those of others in the town, including an immigrant kitchen worker who is the first to recognize the war criminal—masterfully imbuing the novel with texture that complements the complexity of its collision of history and culture. 

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

Since Charles Bock’s unforgettable 2008 debut novel, Beautiful Children, seared us with its bleak portrait of teen runaways and the Vegas fringe, I’ve married, moved across the country, lived in three homes and fathered two children. And all the while, periodically, I’ve wondered, when the heck is this guy going to write another book?

Well, nearly eight years after showing up on the New York Times Notable Books of the Year list, Bock gives us Alice & Oliver, at once a heart-wrenching story of a young couple’s world crumbling and an explanation, of sorts, of just where Bock has been all these years.

In 2009, when their daughter was six months old, Bock’s wife, Diana, was diagnosed with cancer. She died two-and-a-half years later. Out of that time comes this book.

Alice and Oliver Culvert are the parents of a newborn named Doe. It is 1993, and they live in New York City’s edgy (at the time) Meatpacking District. They are both creative people: Oliver writes code and Alice works steadily in the fashion world. We meet Alice first. She is healthy for about two inches of type. In paragraph one she coughs up blood on the street. On page six she is nearly dead. By page 12, Alice has cancer, and this powerful, riveting book becomes an exercise in keeping your lip from trembling.

As Alice’s treatment begins, she and Oliver are the perfect couple, very much in love. Oliver bares his teeth at cancer, and toggles between being Alice’s protector and her jailer. But Alice deteriorates, and the duo is worn down by the labyrinthine medical system and the lacerating effects of treatment and uncertainty. They turn away from each other. Alice has a bizarre, fraught encounter with an alcoholic musician named Mervyn, who hits on her in the hospital—somehow without being totally repulsive. Oliver, meanwhile, finds himself adrift when not sitting bedside, and explores outlets that may prove poisonous to their marriage.

Bock, unsurprisingly, says he cannot imagine a more difficult book to write. Nor is it, emotionally, an easy read. Yet this deep, honest and layered exploration of disease is not depressing. On the contrary, it’s a life-affirming portrait of people trying their best while enduring the worst.

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

Though terrorist acts may have different motivations, they share a common factor: the suffering wrought on the victims’ families. That point is dramatized with chilling effectiveness in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, a novel in which questions of politics and religion are rarely far from the thoughts of its main characters.

Mahajan, whose 2008 debut novel, Family Planning, was published in nine countries, begins his story with a 1996 marketplace bombing in India. The Khuranas, who are Hindu, have sent their two young sons to an open-air market to pick up their television from an electrician. The boys bring their Muslim friend Mansoor, the Ahmeds’ only child, along. An explosion “under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800” kills the Khurana boys, but spares Mansoor. His injury seems minor at first, but when he gets to America years later to study computer science, his wrist and neck pains become so severe that he’s unable to type.

The novel shifts perspective throughout to encompass multiple viewpoints and demonstrate the intersection of lives affected by that initial blast, including Mansoor, who abandons his secularity after he experiences prejudice; a bomb maker named Shaukat “Shockie” Guru; and a Muslim activist who becomes more radicalized as the novel progresses.

The focus wanders a bit during detailed passages about Indian politics and Mansoor’s religious conversion, but this remains a compelling story about extremism and its effects. Much of the writing is beautiful and evocative, as when the bereaved Khuranas awake to find “two parallel lines of salt” on their sheets from “shoulders soggy with tears” after the death of their sons. Some terrorist acts have relatively few casualties, but as Mahajan eloquently points out, even small acts of violence have devastating repercussions. In the world of political terrorism, there are no small bombs.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, April 2016

Australian author Dominic Smith has brought historic events and vibrant places to life in books like The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre and Bright and Distant Shores. His fourth novel, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, centers on a single 17th-century painting that changes the course of three lives over four centuries and across several continents. 

The novel has three narrative threads. In 1631, Sara de Vos became the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the Dutch Guild of St. Luke. By 1957, her only known remaining work, “At the Edge of a Wood,” hangs in the bedroom of Marty de Groot, a wealthy patent lawyer in Manhattan. In the shabbier reaches of Brooklyn, Ellie Shipley, an art history graduate student with a background in art restoration, is approached about creating a forgery. Shortly after, the de Vos is stolen, and the clues lead to Ellie’s grimy studio. 

Decades later, Ellie is a prominent curator in Sydney, mounting an exhibition on women painters of the Dutch Golden Age. Both paintings—the original and the forgery—are en route to her museum, and Ellie is forced to confront what she did. Behind the contemporary mystery of the forged work are questions about de Vos herself and what led her to break with convention, despite the strict Guild rules governing women painters and subject matter. Though the way these elements intersect may be guessed by astute readers early on, the pleasure here is watching Smith control all three stories—the pertinent questions are answered in ways that not only convince, but also satisfy. 

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos does what the best books can do: sweep the reader into unfamiliar worlds filled with intriguing characters. The immense challenges faced by women in the arts, both past and present, are also skillfully rendered, and the gritty details—from behind-the-scenes museum work to the formulas of an art forger—are managed with finesse. Smith’s characters are so real and the novel plotted so thoughtfully that one finishes with a sigh of contentment. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos is a true pleasure to read.

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

Add the female protagonist of Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin’s moving new novel, to the roster of characters who have grappled with the age-old question of art vs. domesticity. Should one lead a life dedicated to an artistic pursuit—in this case, the writing of poetry—or to one’s family? The dilemma her protagonist faces may be eternal, but the device Grushin uses to tell her story is unique: Each of the 40 chapters occurs in a room of either a library or the narrator’s current residence.

The shifts in Grushin’s narrative style are a subtle way to underscore the difficulty of this question. The opening chapters, during which the unnamed protagonist grows up in Russia, are told in first person present tense. In these enchanting early pages, we learn that the narrator is prone to visions, first of a mermaid who sifts through her mother’s jewels, and then of a bearded, barefoot man who encourages the narrator’s artistic inclinations.

Later, when she attends university in the United States, the novel shifts to first person past tense. While her ambitious childhood friend Olga, the first Soviet to attend an American university, gives interviews and enjoys the limelight, the narrator quietly pursues her degree and experiments with writing poetry cycles.

The novel is told in third person, once the protagonist marries Paul Caldwell, a business major from a wealthy family. Soon, the woman who once dressed in thrift-store clothing is living in a fancy home with a ballroom and gold-plated faucets. Now referred to as Mrs. Caldwell, she gives up her artistic dreams and becomes stay-at-home mom to six children. But she fantasizes about the life she could have had and wonders whether she made the right choices.

Grushin occasionally succumbs to cliché, such as having the narrator examine her reflection in a mirror before assessing her life, but, for the most part, Forty Rooms is a sensitive and exquisitely told meditation on the pleasures of art.

Helen Oyeyemi, who was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013, continues to intrigue with her first collection of stories What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. Each of the nine playful stories centers around a key, both metaphorical and literal, opening doors to the kind of fantastical plots and insightful observations that readers have come to expect from her.

Oyeyemi’s stories carry with them more than a whiff of fairy tales—from the opener, “Books and Roses,” about two women in Barcelona whose search for lost loved ones lead them from a private library to a secret locked garden, to “Dornicka and the St. Martin’s Day Goose,” a fractured take on Little Red Riding Hood. “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” is the sinister story of puppeteers in thrall to their puppets with echoes of Pinocchio’s existential desire for realness and the chill of adolescents competing for sexual attention. Cautionary tales such as “Sorry Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” and “If a Book is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That” remind the reader that sometimes things are off limits for good reasons. Though the stories’ plots are not linked, recurring characters pop up in more than one tale, and several are students or teachers at the school of puppetry that serves as the setting of some of the collection’s spookiest moments. Despite the allusions to haunted houses, padlocked gardens and murderous tyrants, the tone is cheerful and the stories surprisingly upbeat; in “A Brief History of the Homely Wench Society,” the conclusion is downright sentimental.

 Oyeyemi has been inspired by African folklore and ghost stories since her debut, The Icarus Girl, and here she pulls from sources as varied as Cuban mythology, Edgar Allen Poe and the Brothers Grimm. Though a few convoluted tales fall flat, the best are cleverly crafted to both embody and subvert the archetypes they explore. Her enthusiasm for a world where witches and phantoms coexist with psychiatrists and graduate students is infectious. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours leaves readers with the captivating notion that behind every locked door lies additional mysteries.

For better or worse, Joyce Maynard is best known for her memoir At Home in the World, which chronicled (among other things) a year-long love affair Maynard had with J.D Salinger when she was 18 and the reclusive Catcher in the Rye author was 53. It should be added, however, that Maynard has slowly but surely compiled an impressive body of fiction, including 2009’s Labor Day, which was turned into a 2013 film starring Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet. 

Maynard’s latest is the cleverly titled Under the Influence. Helen’s marriage to Dwight, initially exciting, has fallen apart. Then one evening, a habit of drinking too much wine before bed has disastrous consequences: Helen loses custody of her beloved son, Ollie. Having kicked booze, Helen—a photographer who must also do catering service to make extra money—meets and falls under the influence of a glamorous, wealthy “magic couple” named Ava and Swift. They seem to be everything Helen wants to be—and more importantly, they offer to help Helen win back custody of Ollie. 

At times Maynard’s characters are drawn a touch heavy-handed, so that readers are likely to see the looming problems in Helen’s life long before she does. Nevertheless, Maynard deftly portrays Helen’s sense of helplessness and vulnerability as events build to a disturbing climax. Under the Influence is ultimately an absorbing portrait of complex characters confronting real problems.

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

Update: A previous version of this review listed Josh Brolin as an Oscar winner. We have corrected the error online.

Dexter Palmer’s second novel, Version Control, is the kind of rich, multilayered book that often feels like it is raising more questions than answers. The first is the question of exactly what type of book it is: Is it a deeply personal story of a marriage and the human condition, or is it a cerebral exploration of the world of astrophysics and time travel? Is it science fiction or literary fiction? 

A description does little to clear this matter up. Version Control tells the story of married couple Rebecca and Philip Wright. Rebecca works in customer support for a web-based dating service, while Philip is a scientist who has been toiling on what some might call a time machine (though he adamantly refers to it as a “causality violation device”) that has made him a joke in the physics community. Though the two have known heartbreak and disappointment, their life together is generally comfortable. Yet Rebecca can’t shake the feeling that the world is “wrong.” Could Philip’s device be the way to set things right? Or might it actually be the source of Rebecca’s anxiety and unease?

Expansive in scope, Version Control burrows into issues of science and technology, religion, relationships, racism and free will. It would be easy for issues to overshadow the story, but Palmer—who has a Ph.D. in English from Princeton—deftly keeps the many components in harmony. The result is an intellectual novel that feels surprisingly intimate and accessible. Weighty yet emotionally rewarding, Version Control will appeal to all curious readers, regardless of their scientific background.

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

The latest novel from the bestselling author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel, is a story told in three parts, featuring three men, each dealing with the loss of a loved one. 

We start in the early 1900s in Lisbon, where Tomás grapples with the unexpected loss of his lover and their son by deciding to walk only backwards as a show of contempt for God. Stranger still is his mission to use his rich uncle’s automobile to find a treasure that he believes will forever shake faith in Christianity, furthering his defiance of heaven. These heavy themes of death and religion are lightened by humorous (sometimes laugh out loud) depictions of the results of Tomás’ backward motion, as well as his utter ineptitude with the car.

In the second section, set 35 years later, we meet Dr. Eusebio Lozora, a pathologist. This fan of Agatha Christie murder mysteries finds himself performing an equally riveting medical autopsy that is somehow linked to Tomás’ tragedy. Grief is the main theme here, which Martel skillfully uses to challenge all of the doctor’s scientific knowledge. 

In the final section, another 50 years have passed. In Ontario, Canada, we meet Senator Peter Tovy, who is falling to pieces personally and professionally after the loss of his beloved wife. An unusual and unexpected course of action makes him the owner of a chimpanzee, Odo, with whom he decides to live in his ancestral village in the high mountains of Portugal. There, history reveals itself with time, decisively connecting the three parts of the novel. 

After such a gripping and detailed narrative, the final conclusion seems a little too sudden and unanticipated. Even so, The High Mountains of Portugal doesn’t disappoint in its twists and turns, which leave the reader working like a detective to connect all the dots. Filled with humor, sadness, love and adventure, it’s a perfect balance for those who want a feel-good book that still provides an insight into the human psyche.

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