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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.