Good on Paper, Rachel Cantor’s ingenious follow-up to 2014’s A Highly Unlikely Scenario, is set in the final months of 1999. Single mother Shira Greene is 44 and works as a temp at a company that makes prosthetic legs. She hates the job, and why wouldn’t she? Her dream is to be a writer and translator, a vocation life has forced her to put aside. Employment notwithstanding, Shira has a comfortable life. She and her 7-year-old daughter, Andi, share a Manhattan apartment with Shira’s friend Ahmad, an economics professor whom Andi thinks of as her real father.

Then Shira receives a telegram from Romei, a Nobel Prize-winning poet. Romei offers Shira the well-paying chance to translate his new work, a Dante-inspired piece dedicated to his wife. The job, however, isn’t as perfect as it seems. Romei’s work is all but untranslatable, with a storyline that bears a resemblance to one of Shira’s few published stories—a discovery that makes her question Romei’s true intent in hiring her.

Part of the fun of Good on Paper is the slow revelation of the mystery behind Romei’s request—which involves not only Shira and her mother, who abandoned her family when Shira was Andi’s age, but also Shira’s friend Benny, a bookstore owner and part-time rabbi known to rollerblade around New York in a cherry-red bodysuit. Don’t be fooled by the breeziness of the opening pages. Good on Paper is a challenging work, with translation serving as a metaphor for the search for another person’s intentions. Cantor’s witty novel is about the quest for the best path and the difficulty in finding it.

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

The story of an aging poet transplanted from Ireland to America
 as a young man, Thomas Murphy is itself pure poetry. Roger Rosenblatt’s return to fiction after several memoirs, including two moving books dealing with the aftermath of his daughter’s sudden death, is a brief but lovely rumination on one man’s irresistible impulse to savor life’s riches, even as losses mount and the ravages of age take their relentless toll.

Five decades after leaving the tiny island of Inishmaan (population 160) for New York City, Murphy finds himself facing eviction from his Upper West Side apartment and pressure from his daughter to seek medical attention for what she believes are the early stages of dementia. Dismissive of these threats to his independence, he prefers to live by the motto, “You never crash if you go full tilt,” devoting his days to crafting simple poems and sharing his love of verse with a small group of homeless people in a church rec room.

Even Murphy is surprised by the unexpected turn his life takes when a young man he meets in a bar presents him with a bizarre request: to deliver the news to the man’s wife, a blind woman, that her husband suffers from a terminal illness. That chance encounter opens into a tender, if unconventional, love story that Rosenblatt shares with grace and insight.

The novel’s principal appeal lies in the fresh and striking stream-of-consciousness voice of its protagonist. Murphy’s zest for life shines in every anecdote and observation, but it is tempered
by his consciousness of time’s passage, reflected in the deaths
of his wife and best friend and in his vivid memories of the harsh, beautiful world he left behind in Ireland. Rosenblatt has always demonstrated an affection for the play of words on the page, and in Murphy he’s created the perfect character to showcase that facility for language.

Thomas Murphy is an invigorating example of what it means, in the words of its protagonist, to “walk through the landscape of a life.” With a character as distinctive as this clear-eyed poet by our side, it’s a rewarding journey. 

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

Tessa Hadley is an alchemist, transforming everyday life into the stuff of brilliant fiction. In previous stories and novels, like 2014’s Clever Girl, the British writer has captured the beauty, messiness and irony of family life, especially marriages. Her new novel, The Past, keeps to the domestic sphere, examining the lives of four adult siblings who gather at a country house for the summer.

Ostensibly, the vacation is to decide whether or not to sell the vicarage, the gracefully decaying home where the four were raised by grandparents after their mother’s death from breast cancer. Sisters Harriet, Fran and Alice are also curious about their brother Roland’s third wife and eager to visit with teenage niece Molly. Kasim, the son of Alice’s ex-boyfriend, tags along and also takes an interest in Molly. Meanwhile Fran’s children, Ivy and Arthur, run wild, spy on the young couple and make an unsettling discovery in an abandoned cottage in the woods. Dignified, quiet Harriet, the oldest of the sisters, relishes her private time but soon finds herself responding to one of the house guests with a passion that even she can’t contain. 

There is not a lot of action in The Past. The sisters gossip about their new sister-in-law. They play cards and drink gin, watch the growing flirtation between the two young adults and, together with their brother, wonder how long they can hold on to the vicarage—and if they even want to. But just as sure as mold is growing in the long unused pantry, past arguments and unresolved jealousies and resentments have been quietly building. The present resonates with the secrets the past holds. 

Hadley’s prose is irresistible and gorgeous. Descriptions of the land around the vicarage and cottage ring with a poetic intensity, and she richly evokes the sounds and smells of the outdoors: the bird calls, the wind, the summer rain moving through grasses and trees. Her thoughtful observations regarding the inner world of her characters and the outer landscape of their surroundings make this latest effort a novel of remarkable skill and scope. 

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, January 2016

It is impossible to explain fully the beautiful, haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. Magic? Genius? Certainly much of its power arises from the mesmerizing voice of Lucy Barton, teller of this tale. And much of it comes from the details of the story she slowly unfolds. Another piece of the explanation surely lies in the gaps in Lucy’s story that we readers must bridge with our own empathy and imagination. Still, My Name Is Lucy Barton is much larger and far more resonant than the sum of these parts.

The story begins with Lucy, now a published fiction writer, remembering a time, 20 or more years ago, when she was felled by an undiagnosable disease, a sort of visitation of sickness, and ended up in a New York City hospital for a prolonged stay. She was anguished to be separated from her two young daughters and her somewhat distant husband. Then, her mother, whom Lucy had not spoken to in years, came from Illinois to stay with her at the hospital. Their loving, gossipy conversations evoke conflicting emotions and vivid, if often understated, memories in Lucy about her and her siblings growing up in abject poverty, in a household rife with mental illness and abuse. The lifelong effects of that emotional and economic impoverishment, even for Lucy, the successful sibling, infuse her story in unexpected ways.

Toward the end of the book, as Lucy begins to write about the visit from her mother and her childhood memories, a writing teacher tells her: “People will go after you for combining poverty and abuse. Such a stupid word, ‘abuse,’ such a conventional, stupid word. . . . This is a story about love.”

My Name Is Lucy Barton is indeed about love, or really, the complexity of misshapen familial love. It is also a story of lasting emotional damage and resilience, and a writer’s commitment to the truth. The novel is also full of keen observations about how childhood travels forward into adulthood. Strout, who won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, has written a profound novel about the human experience that will stay with a reader for a long, long time.

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

Paradise City, which opens with a quote from the Guns and Roses song praising the virtues of a place full of possibilities, is a compassionate but upbeat look at four interlocking lives in contemporary London. Though it opens with a grim encounter between a wealthy businessman and a hotel maid, the novel is both thoughtful and witty, unafraid of tackling big subjects (sexual assault, political asylum) but also finding joy in the smallest of human connections.

The story alternates between four perspectives, the aforementioned self-made millionaire Sir Howard Pink and Ugandan political refugee Beatrice Kizza, who is supporting herself as a chambermaid. When Pink assaults Kizza in his hotel room, it sets off a chain of events that not only proves life changing for both of them but also draws in Esme Reade, a young and aspiring journalist desperate to get an interview with Pink. On the outskirts of the city, Carol Hetherington, a quiet widow, uncovers something in her neighbor’s garden while house-sitting that also has unexpected consequences for Pink.

Each character is well crafted and the book is filled with the kind of precise detail that makes the story come alive. Reade is the most engaging, perhaps because she shares the author’s occupation (author Elizabeth Day is an award-winning journalist who has worked for several major British newspapers). Paradise City is most persuasive in its depiction of newspaper politics, especially the jealousies and camaraderie of the newsroom; when Esme describes how it feels when an interview starts to go her way, there is an vibrancy there rooted in personal experience. Day’s work as a journalist also informs the novel’s brisk pace and its grabbed-from-the-headlines plot points.

London is the novel’s silent fifth character, a city that here welcomes those who come to change their life for the better or simply seek new fortunes. Though Paradise City resolves a little too tidily, it is an intelligent, well-written novel of depth and heart. 

Brief encounters can have as big an impact as a lifelong relationship. Similarly, a short work of fiction can resonate more deeply than longer volumes. That’s the case with Like Family, the elegiac new novella by Paolo Giordano. In this deceptively simple tale of a widowed nanny who, we learn on the first page, has died, Giordano shows us how lives can intersect in profound and unexpected ways.

The unnamed 35-year-old narrator is a physicist who isn’t sure whether his university contract, soon to expire, will be renewed. His wife, Nora, is an interior designer. When Nora is bedridden due to a difficult pregnancy, the couple hires a childless, elderly woman known as Mrs. A. The couple nicknames her Babette because, like the Isak Dinesen character, she prepares large, fancy meals for her employers. After their son, Emanuele, is born, the couple hires Mrs. A to stay on as a nanny and housekeeper. A fastidious woman who, each morning, rewashes the dishes the narrator had washed the night before, she becomes so much a part of their family that she accompanies the family on Emanuele’s first day of school.

After only eight years in the family’s employment, however, Mrs. A calls one morning to say that she can no longer work for them. The reason she cites is that she’s tired. But a subsequent diagnosis reveals the real reason: She has stage four lung cancer. Among the many insults the disease inflicts is that she has to stop attending church because her incessant coughing, amplified by the church’s acoustics, disturbs the other parishioners.

The obvious meaning of the book’s title is that Mrs. A is like a member of the family, just as she thinks of Emanuele as the grandson she and her late husband never had. But the book also asks us to consider what constitutes a family. This poignant work points out that there is no one way to define a family, and that, in any definition, the primary ingredient is the ability to love.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It takes a bold author to write about an event which is so historically hazy that even the novel’s narrator wonders, “How many people even remember it?”

That’s Karen Olsson’s thirty-something protagonist Helen Atherton, referring to the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.  Helen’s father, Tim, was an ambitious Washington operative who got caught up in the scandal and ultimately resigned, under circumstances that still baffle Helen and her two sisters well into the first decade of the 21st century, when the bulk of this novel is set.  Thankfully, All the Houses is more of a family novel than a political or historical one.  The best scenes are the often awkward, occasionally touching ones between Tim (who is recovering from a heart attack) and Helen, whose efforts at screenwriting in L.A. have flopped, and who finds herself back in D.C.  This puts Helen on a collision course with her older sister Courtney, with whom she has always had a tumultuous relationship.  “The urge to annihilate each other had always been there,” Helen notes, “tamed over the years but never uprooted.”  In fact, the family scenes in All the Houses can be so vivid and charged that much of the political and historical material pales in comparison.

Though she’s written a previous novel called Waterloo, Olsson is primarily a journalist, so much of her prose is straightforward, though there are pleasant flourishes (one aging political player has a “wrinkled face like a face etched on money”) and touching moments, including a scene featuring Helen watching Tim change a tire.  Olsson’s readers will need some tolerance for adult characters who still bicker over their high school years.  Nevertheless, Olsson’s portrait of family tension manages to be unsentimental and unsettling, without venturing into bleakness—even if the book’s title does come from Franz Kafka’s diaries. In the end, if you think of a nation as a kind of family, then one of Helen’s questions certainly resonates far beyond the Athertons: “Was everybody angry in every family?”

Golden Age, the third and final volume of Jane Smiley’s splendid The Last Hundred Years trilogy, opens during a 1987 family reunion at the Langdon family farm in Iowa. Gathered are the surviving children and a number of grandchildren of Walter and Rosanna Langdon, the progenitors and subject of the trilogy’s first volume, Some Luck, which began in 1923. By this point, readers know intimately many of these characters and are familiar with the affections and antagonisms that bind and separate parents and children, aunts and uncles, husband and wives, brothers, sisters and cousins. These ups and downs only proliferate as the story unfolds, until this final episode concludes in 2019. A long-alienated husband and wife find a surprising, loving accommodation late in their marriage, for example, and the love-hate relationship of twin brothers Michael, a high-flying venture capitalist, and Richie, a well-intentioned congressman, goes completely off the rails.

These problematic familial relationships are explored with biting intelligence, great narrative skill, good humor and generosity of spirit. In fact, her humanely realized characters are what make these novels so addictive. But the Langdons never live outside of American history. They are increasingly urban, urbane and politically and socially sophisticated. The family farm is constantly under threat from a trend toward agriculturally destructive but economically advantageous factory farms, and climate change puts arable land in play for international investors. But for Smiley the demise of rural life, of small-town community relationships, has environmental and political consequences. In her final chapters, Smiley offers a warning about America’s future.

As with the previous volumes in the trilogy, Smiley devotes a chapter to each year. With an increasing number of grandchildren and great grandchildren, this requires an astonishing facility for stage management. Smiley makes compelling narrative choices, and Golden Age reverberates with shocks and surprises. So in the end, Smiley’s title for this final volume feels ironic. Looking back over 100 years of Langdon family struggles and recognizing our nostalgia for an imagined American past, a reader may wonder: Has America seen the last of its Golden Age?

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In lesser hands, the story told in Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare would be sentimental or even clichéd. An emotionally needy white woman takes in a tough inner-city girl whose life is transformed when she learns to ride horses at the neighboring stables. Cue the swelling music as the girl and horse ride into the sunset. But Gaitskill, whose novels and short stories have always delved full force into the most uncomfortable of situations, has instead produced a complex and nuanced look at love, loss and limitations. 

Ginger, an unsuccessful artist and former alcoholic, is mourning the death of her mentally ill sister and regretting her decision to remain childless. Ginger convinces her husband, Paul, to be a host family for the Fresh Air Fund, which allows inner-city kids to spend a few weeks in a rural environment. Twelve-year-old Velveteen Vargas from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, arrives at Ginger’s house in upstate New York, where they watch movies, read together and go for bike rides. The real transformation comes, however, when Velvet is introduced to the horses at the stable down the road. She proves to have a natural affinity for animals, especially one ornery mare, Fugly Girl.

The summer weeks turn into years, and the prickly connection between woman and girl grows into a bond that eventually encompasses Paul, Velvet’s mother and her little brother, Dante. Through shifting differences of status, income, ethnicities and needs, relationships are forged and, though the trust that is achieved may only be temporary, the two families are forever altered by the experience. 

Gaitskill and her former husband were a host family for the Fresh Air Fund, and she has explored some of this material in essays such as “Love Lessons” (2004) and “Lost Cat” (2009). The Mare splits the storytelling almost evenly between Ginger and Velvet, with Velvet’s mother and Paul occasionally offering their perspective. This division of the narrative provides a less one-sided look at the way both families are affected by Velvet’s choices. The Mare is a surprisingly tough, yet tender look at a delicate subject, told with fiery emotional honesty.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Paul Murray’s hilarious and surreal third novel is once again set in his home country of Ireland. In the wake of the financial crisis, Dublin is full of half-completed construction projects and Occupy-style protest camps, but the financial sector of the city is set apart, mirroring the separation between the people whose lives financial policy affects and those who set it.

Claude Martingale is one of the latter. A French expat who chose investment banking as a career after majoring in philosophy, Claude doesn’t have much of a life outside work. But when he realizes the mysterious man following him around is a writer purportedly interested in turning Claude’s life into the great Irish novel, Claude suddenly starts to take an interest in the direction of his hitherto aimless narrative. 

And that’s only the beginning of the action in The Mark and the Void, which is part office comedy, part manifesto and part satire—a tricky combination for any writer. At times the book feels the weight, and none of the characters are quite as lovable as those of Murray’s 2010 breakout hit, the transcendent Skippy Dies. Still, they are vivid and surprising. And Murray’s rare talent for combining humor with big ideas is on full display. He draws parallels between financial capitalism and social media: Just as capital is only important for what can be derived from it, your life is only as valuable as the story you can use it to tell; in both cases, what is real is ignored. Yet nearly every page contains at least one laugh-out-loud line. When a coworker says that she and Claude “get on like a house on fire,” he thinks, “I picture the flames, the screaming. ‘Yes,’ I say.” 

The Mark and the Void is the welcome return of one of literature’s most intelligent voices.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, November 2015

David Mitchell’s novel Slade House first came to life as a short story delivered in 140-character bursts on Twitter. That story, “The Right Sort,” is now the first entry in a chilling novel in stories that’s an intriguing companion piece to Mitchell’s 2014 novel, The Bone Clocks, an intricate saga of a war between two groups of time travelers.

Set in an unnamed English factory town “more passed through than stopped at,” the action of Slade House unfolds at precise nine-year intervals on the last Saturday in October, in and around the imposing house that provides the novel’s title. Accessed through a black iron door in a brick wall flanking an impossibly narrow alley, it’s a virtual-reality canvas that becomes the scene for a succession of harrowing set pieces featuring twins Norah and Jonah Grayer, soul vampires compelled to find new victims to fuel their dream of eternal life. 

Though the novel’s narrative structure becomes obvious after the second tale, Mitchell is such an ingenious writer that each encounter with the shape-shifting character of Slade House feels both fresh and consistently spooky. The fate of each victim—whether an adolescent boy, a lustful police officer or a university student exploring the paranormal—is equally disturbing, as we grasp that fate in real time while hoping somehow it can be altered. And in the final story, “Astronauts,” set in 2015, Mitchell demonstrates how skillfully he’s able to maintain a high level of suspense as he simultaneously upends our expectations.

Mitchell’s tales can be enjoyed both by readers who want to decode their sometimes puzzling logic while deconstructing terms like “psychoesoterica” and “psychovoltage,” and those who are content simply to surrender themselves to the power of a scary story. Familiarity with Mitchell’s work is not required to appreciate Slade House, but his fans will delight in references to characters and scenes from earlier novels, which align with his intent to build what he has called an “übernovel” that links his persistent themes. 

“Tonight feels like a board game co-designed by M.C. Escher on a bender and Stephen King in a fever,” one character muses. That sly description offers an apt summary of a work that almost demands to be read in a single sitting. Just be sure to leave the lights on when you do.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

National Book Award winner Lily Tuck has lived a life that often informs her stories. She was born in Paris, has lived in Thailand, Uruguay and Peru, and now resides in New York City and Maine, providing plenty of fodder for her characters and their adventures. 

That’s perhaps more evident in her latest book, The Double Life of Liliane, than ever before. The semi-autobiographical novel follows the introverted, observant Liliane through some of her most formative years. Following her parents’ divorce, the child lives a life divided between her German-born, movie-maker father, Rudy, who lives in Italy, and her artistic mother, Irene, who has places in Paris and New York.

The Double Life overflows with fraught relationships, with Liliane in many ways pulled between her parents. Irene saw Rudy merely as a means of escape. Rudy, on the other hand, loved Irene and continues to question Liliane about her mother’s welfare long after the divorce.

The novel’s structure is atypical, composed of scenes that provide glimpses into the lives of Liliane, Irene, Rudy and their family rather than a straight narrative. Using photos and documents as well as text, Tuck braids together family history that spans multiple continents and generations. Tales of World Wars, immigration and new marriages are intertwined with smaller moments in a girl’s life, such as schoolwork and friends.

Through its sprawling recollections and period photos and documents from Tuck’s personal collection, she creates an intimate portrait of a life that, much like her own, has spanned continents.

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans, leaving behind empty streets, ruined art and a skeleton crew of old-guard residents. The discovery of a dead body in a historic hotel couldn’t come at a worse time for the understaffed, struggling New Orleans police force. The murder reopens the investigation into the decades-old theft of a highly valued European painting, which causes the lives of four people to intersect. 

Johanna owns a studio in the city’s Lower Quarter, where she restores paintings by both local and notable artists. Work represents reinvention to Johanna, who has a dark past and owes her career to Clay Fontenot, a disreputable, wealthy young man from an old-money New Orleans family.

Bartending pays Marion’s bills, but hiring herself out to men with a taste for BDSM comes in handy when cash is tight. It’s in the second role that she meets Clay. She doesn’t allow herself much time for reflection—except on her love of painting, and how it might factor into her future.

Elizam, who goes by Eli for short, is an art thief, fresh out of prison. His skills landed him a job at an art recovery office, where he is assigned the task of finding a missing painting in New Orleans—the same painting tied to the dead body found in the old hotel. More than Eli’s job is on the line should he not recover the painting: They will send him back to jail if he fails.

The characters are all vivid, but the star of the show is New Orleans itself, which author Elise Blackwell (Hunger) brings forth in all its steamy, noir-ish glory. The Lower Quarter is a riveting narrative about crime, art, violence and renewal in a city that embodies all four. 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.