To describe Jill Ciment’s latest novel as the story of a supermold that colonizes a Brooklyn neighborhood and threatens to infest the entire city doesn’t even come close to doing it justice—though it’s factually accurate. Dressed in the guise of a thriller, Act of God is really a keenly intelligent story about the tangled bonds of sisterly love and the power of repentance and forgiveness.

Sixty-four-year-old twin sisters Edith and Kat Glasser share a rent-controlled apartment in a row house owned by Vida Cebu, an accomplished Shakespearean actress best known for her role in a commercial for a female sexual enhancement pill. When Edith, a retired law firm librarian, tries to enlist her landlord’s help in dealing with the phosphorescent mushroom-like growth that has sprouted in the apartment, her entreaties are ignored. Evacuation is followed by incineration, as the HAZMAT teams rush to contain the outbreak.

As her characters consider the insurance and landlord-tenant issues resulting from a conclusion that the alien growth is an act of God (“When did State Farm become religious?” Vida asks her insurance agent), Ciment orchestrates an increasingly complicated plot with consummate skill. There’s an unemployed Russian nanny who calls herself Ashley and who helps herself to rent-free accommodations in Vida’s building and elsewhere; a rekindled love affair between Kat and Frank, the building superintendent; and the existential crisis of Gladys, the Glasser sisters’ next-door-neighbor, who must figure out where she can relocate with her 17 cats in tow. It’s New York City at its most manic.

But the novel acquires real moral weight when the otherwise feckless Kat demands a penance from Vida that has nothing to do with financial compensation for the injury she’s inflicted on others by her casual indifference. Kat seeks “restorative justice”: nothing less than Vida’s acceptance of responsibility and an apology for her callousness. Watching Vida wrestle with this deceptively simple request makes us understand how hard it is to say the words, “I’m sorry.”

In fewer than 200 pages, Ciment has pulled off an admirable literary feat, creating a novel that moves at the speed of light, all the while urging us to pause and look inward.

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

Each new book by Booker Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) is, on the surface at least, vastly different from those that have come before. The Buried Giant—his first novel in almost 10 years—is no exception. This fable-like narrative, set in England just after the mythic reign of Arthur, chronicles the adventures of an elderly couple as they journey across a wild and rugged landscape. Old and forgetful, but still endearingly in love, Axl and Beatrice have been cast to the margins of their settlement, not even allowed candles for fear that they may do themselves harm. So, they decide to set out for their son’s village, which they believe they can reach with a few days’ travel. But the landscape abounds with human hostility and ignorance, as well as the shadowy possibility of ogres and other mythical beasts.

The couple, who are Britons and Christians, are joined mid-journey by a young Saxon knight, Wistan, as well as a boy, Edwin, whom the knight has rescued from the hands of superstitious villagers. This unlikely quartet meets an aging Sir Gawain, the last survivor of Arthur’s round table, in the woods, and makes its way to a fortress-turned-monastery.

Despite the swords and monsters, this is not the sex and violence fictional world of George R.R. Martin. Ishiguro has crafted a haunting allegory, rife with symbols and archetypes. Its deceptively simple narrative unfolds with the ease of a timeless fairy tale, and as with all classic fairy tales it works as a universal parable. Like much of Ishiguro’s work, The Buried Giant is about the clouds of memory, our human imperfections and our unresolved pasts. It is a welcome return by one of our most subtle, thought-provoking novelists.

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

It’s a favorite trick among literary novelists: use a classic work of literature as a launching pad for an investigation into favored themes. Jean Rhys did it with Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel of sorts to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. J.M. Coetzee has done it twice, first in Foe, in which he reimagined Robinson Crusoe from the perspective of a woman, and then, more daringly, in The Childhood of Jesus. Now essayist and playwright Caryl Phillips takes the work of a different Brontë—Emily—as the inspiration for his latest novel, The Lost Child.

In 1957, 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate Monica Johnson is set to give up her studies, much to her geography teacher father’s disappointment. She plans to marry Julius Wilson, a divorced grad student 10 years her senior, and follow him to the south coast of England. She does, and he gets a job at a polytechnic and founds a political organization devoted to anti-colonialism in his native West Indies.

Phillips intercuts the story of Monica, her two sons and her ensuing madness with scenes from Emily Brontë’s life. We see Brontë sick in bed, worrying along with the rest of the family about the fate of her brother, Branwell, and retreating into her imagination to work on a novel about a boy on the moors.

Despite the obvious parallels to Wuthering Heights—Monica is clearly meant to suggest a 20th-century Cathy—Phillips is too smart to simply put new clay on the same armature. He goes beyond the tale of Heathcliff and Cathy to create a biting commentary on empire and the vulnerability of family life. This is a devastating novel from one of our best writers.

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

Halfway through Rachel Basch’s third novel, The Listener, the reader gets the feeling that the title is ironic. Malcolm Dowd is a psychotherapist at the college in his town. His job is to listen; no doubt his skill at listening has saved the sanity or even the lives of the sad people who unburden themselves in his office. But when it comes to his own loved ones, Malcolm Dowd is about as deaf as a stump.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the loved ones Dowd listens to the least are the women in his life. These include his daughters Leah and Susannah; Cara, a musician who’s his off-and-on lover; and Jane, the betrayed wife of his feckless colleague. In Dowd, Basch seems to be describing the legions of men who feel astonished, annoyed and even betrayed when the women in their lives have problems, anxieties and secrets that don’t involve the men in their lives. Plus, Dowd is certain that he knows what’s best for these females—he’s a man, after all, as well as a shrink.

Fortunately for Dowd, a type of salvation might be found in his new patient, a college kid named Noah. Noah’s problems are more complex than Dowd is used to handling, and this alone is a source of fascination for the older man. Noah’s troubles force Dowd to truly attend to him. Also, the talented and exquisitely sensitive Noah is a great listener himself, especially to the women in his life: like his eccentric, if loving, mother and a Titian-haired friend who’s as conflicted as he is.

Basch is good at plumbing the preoccupations of self-obsessed middle-aged folks and quasi-incestuous New England college towns. But her take on the emotional dislocations of the millennial, not just Noah and his friends and foes, but Dowd’s somewhat embittered, somewhat spoiled daughters, is wonderfully excruciating. Clearly, this is an author who remembers her own late adolescence all too well. The result is not just writing that’s good, but writing that’s brave.

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

Reif Larsen waits 200 pages before betraying his literary lineage by using the phrase “gravity’s rainbow.” For in his sprawling, pyrotechnic second novel, I Am Radar, one is never far from Pynchon’s masterpiece, that once-groundbreaking combination of adolescent hilarity and theoretical physics. The authors share a soaring erudition and ambition—evidenced by the length and ostentation of their books. But where Pynchon’s main theme might be a paranoiac fear of annihilation and conspiracy, Larsen’s seems to be an affirmation of the pathetic randomness of life. It’s telling that his previous book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, was made into a film by the director of Amélie, and his new release resembles the joyful, madcap creations of Wes Anderson.

The “Radar” of the title is Radar Radmanovic, an American boy with Serbian roots. He was born with black skin even though his parents are white, and his mother’s desire that Radar be “normal” leads to their entanglement with an odd group of Norwegians who claim the ability to change skin color by electrochemical means. The Norwegians double as performance artists, offering shows in places as far-flung as Yugoslavia, Cambodia and the Congo, all recently embroiled in appalling wars.

This is maximalism of the maximum order, so the novel also includes dissertations on Nikola Tesla, Morse code, electromagnetic pulses and, perhaps inevitably, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s hapless cat. I Am Radar aims for nothing less than to encapsulate our “age of extremes” in fictional form, and Larsen rises to the challenge he has set. His prose is angelic, and while the effort to touch on everything threatens to make the book more noise than signal, it’s precisely the noise of modernity that novelists like Larsen are determined to convey. It’s an exhilarating ride.

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

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2015

It is almost impossible to choose the most memorable thing about James Hannaham’s powerful and daring second novel, Delicious Foods (a title suggestive of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”). It might be that one of its narrators is crack cocaine, or that one of its main characters loses his hands. It might be the evocative African-American slang and dialect. Or it might be the way the novel can be read as an extended metaphor for the situation of blacks in America.

Darlene is a young and talented black woman on her way to a comfortable middle-class existence when her husband Nat disappears in Louisiana. No thinking person will be surprised when the investigation into his death proves feeble. This injustice leads the devastated Darlene down the road of addiction, ultimately to the point of abandoning her 11-year-old son, Eddie. Darlene ends up on the “Delicious Foods” farm, where the payment is partially in crack, harvesting, of all things, watermelons. The farm resembles a plantation or prison, its owners sadistic and criminal, and Darlene struggles to break her addiction and reunite with Eddie.

Delicious Foods does suffer occasionally from a kind of MFA-itis, in which the subject matter takes a backseat to showcase the writing. Hannaham’s frequent references to astronomical phenomena suggest that all human suffering is nugatory in the cosmic scale, allowing for less opportunity to lament or even celebrate his characters. These flaws are, however, far outweighed by its virtues. Delicious Foods is fiercely imaginative and passionate. There are echoes here of Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, even at times of Zola or Kafka. The investigation of Nat’s disappearance is not the only instance of racism in law enforcement; in that respect, the novel is timely, even prophetic. Few novels leap off the page as this one does. Delicious Foods is a cri de coeur from a very talented and engaging writer.

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

It’s a glad thing when a reader encounters a character so compelling that you want to punch him in the nose. Such abhorrence—it’s not really hatred—can be as pleasurable in its own way as love. Such is the aggravation caused by Jonas Karlsson’s weird, insufferably arrogant, not quite neuro-normal protagonist in the crisp, novella-length book The Room.

The story takes place in Sweden. The protagonist’s name is Björn. After being quietly fired from one job where he was also intolerable, he takes a job in the open-plan office of some sort of Authority. There, he takes his superiority over everyone for granted. He’s a bully and a misogynist, and we ache for someone to tell him off, if not punch him out. But this is Scandinavia, so there’s none of that. (One wonders what would have happened to Björn if he’d been an office drone in New York. For one thing, there would be no book because something unfortunate and needful would have happened to him by page five.)

Then, Björn discovers a room in a place where no room can be. It’s a plain office with filing cabinets, a desk and such, but only he can see its door and only he can go through it. The reader thinks, “Lovely, he’s not only a toe rag but he’s delusional as well.” But Karlsson’s adroitness as a writer is such that we begin to doubt. Björn experiences this ordinary room in such detail that we begin to wonder whether he might really be telling the truth—after all, Björn’s a piece of misery, but is he crazy? Besides, his timeouts in that room help him excel so much at his job that he comes to believe, sort of rightly, that he can’t be fired.

The Room, a modern, Bartleby-like examination of the tyranny of radical individualism, does mess with one's head, but in a most pleasurable way.

For those who argue that global capitalism is in the midst of a second Gilded Age, Canadian novelist Stephen Marche’s second novel (after Raymond and Hannah) offers an intriguing genre-crossing allegory for the rapacity and relentlessness of that economic philosophy.

Marche’s narrator, Jamie Cabot, a struggling New York freelance journalist, channels Nick Carraway in this story of the Wylies, the eighth-richest family in the world, whose male members just happen to be werewolves. From his humble beginnings as the son of an immigrant barber in a small mill town near Pittsburgh, Dale Wylie launches a radio station in the Depression-era Midwest that eventually becomes a globe-spanning media conglomerate. The novel follows the family through the next two generations, climaxing in the death of Dale’s grandson Ben, the discovery of whose frozen body in northern Alberta opens the story.

In his portrayal of the Wylie men (and Ben’s adopted Chinese sister, Poppy), Marche conveys the ambivalence that surrounds the accumulation of a fortune so vast it “enables the fulfillment that eludes ordinary life.” Whether it’s Dale acquiring a British media empire or his son George entering the Chinese market on the eve of its emergence as an economic superpower, the preternatural skill of the Wylie men in creating a life of “fluid, effortless expansion” is matched only by their determination to live in near obscurity.

Though he no doubt will be delighted if this novel is a popular success, Marche isn’t simply another literary novelist who’s decided to season his work with some commercial flourishes. His brief digressions into a psychiatric case study of “lycanthropy as a narcissistic delusion” or of the history of accounts of werewolves, dating back to The Epic of Gilgamesh nearly 4,000 years ago, show a serious engagement with that theme and lend texture to the story.

“The rich should be different from you and me but they’re not,” Jamie Cabot observes, turning F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous formulation on its head. This convincing portrait of how money can satisfy material wants without slaking emotional hunger tells a tale that cautions while it entertains.

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

David Treuer’s fourth novel, Prudence, is set in northern Minnesota, near the Leech Lake Reservation where he grew up. It opens in August 1942, as Frankie Washburn is returning to the Pines, the resort owned by his parents, for a brief visit before joining the war as a bombardier. The reunion is fraught with negative memories from the past, especially the distance between Frankie and his father, Jonathan. Frankie’s sexual orientation, although never mentioned, is planted like a wall between them. Frankie’s mother is oblivious, her main concern in life being the upkeep of the Pines itself.

She is aided in this endeavor not by Jonathan, but by Felix, an older Indian who also served over the years as Frankie’s surrogate father, teaching him and Billy, a young Indian neighbor, all he knew about hunting, fishing, boating and crafting things out of wood.

Across the river from the Pines is a German POW camp, and on the day Frankie returns, a search is in progress for an escaped prisoner. Felix, Frankie, two of his friends from Princeton and Billy join in. The day ends in a tragedy that reverberates throughout the remainder of this acutely emotional novel, touching each character and dictating the course of each of their lives—most of all Prudence, a young Indian girl.

Prudence’s backstory is meted out gradually, and the way her life intersects with Frankie’s becomes the crux of this powerful story. In one of many flashbacks, Frankie muses on “the heavy fog of sadness” that hung over his childhood—a fog that engulfs Treuer’s mesmerizing, beautifully told novel like a cocoon.

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

In 20 novels published over a remarkable 50-year period, Anne Tyler has staked her claim as our premier chronicler of the ordinary, imperfect American family. Set in Baltimore, like most of her work, A Spool of Blue Thread concerns just such a family. Abby and Red Whitshank and their four children are, from the outside, just like anyone else. Red is a second-generation building contractor, Abby a social worker, and the clan has long occupied a rambling house that Red’s father once built for another man. Like all families, they have had their ups and downs, their squabbles, resentments and misunderstandings, but nothing has irreparably damaged the household fabric.

That equilibrium gives way as Abby and Red age and their health begins to decline—Red suffering a small heart attack, Abby showing the first signs of dementia. The solution the grown children settle on is for youngest son, Stem, and his serene, unflappable wife, Nora, to move in with their three little boys, an arrangement that goes forward despite protests from the elder Whitshanks. But the cart is upset when prodigal son Denny shows up, miffed that he has not been the one asked to move in and care for his parents. Now, an emotional reckoning is at hand.

Swinging back to earlier times in Whitshank history, we see the full arc of the family’s story, each episode fleshing out the story until A Spool of Blue Thread becomes a deeper narrative about how families survive and endure. The work of some writers—Philip Roth and Henry James come to mind—becomes knottier and more ruminative as they age, but the prose of the now 73-year-old Tyler has become looser and less formal. Still, she has not lost her singular capacity for delineating the small, true details that make us who we are and govern how we bumble our way through the world.

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

Scott Blackwood’s latest addition to the Texas literary canon, See How Small, is a brilliant, heartbreaking meditation on grief, parenthood and time.

The history of Austin, Texas contains enough violence to rival the Old Testament, from the Servant Girl Annihilator of the 1880s to the UT Tower sniper in 1966. But Blackwood’s visceral new novel was inspired by a more recent tragedy: The 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders, which remain a cold case to this day.

“Before the men with guns bound and gagged us with our own bras and panties right after closing time, a few things happened: one of us hid inside her mouth the opal class ring her boyfriend had given her. . . . The youngest of us, who always threw up before gym class because she was afraid of being naked, realized that this time she wouldn’t.”

After their deaths, Elizabeth, Zadie and Meredith watch the town try to move on and visit the thoughts of people they knew in life. Kate Ulrich, mother of the first two girls, asks, “How do you start over with the future gouged out?” Jack Dewey, the fireman who discovered their bodies, speaks to the girls in his dreams, where they continue to age. Rosa Heller, a reporter for the Austin Chronicle, works for years to piece together the mystery. And Hollis Finger, a veteran whose head injury makes it impossible for him to keep track of linear time, may be the only witness who can identify either of the murderers. 

Like Blackwood’s first novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, See How Small is grounded by piercing details and a palpable sense of place. Comparisons to The Lovely Bones are inevitable, but Blackwood’s layered work is vastly more adult in scope, tone and execution, and has more in common with Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (minus the dinosaurs). This novel is surreal, emotional and nuanced.

RELATED CONTENT: Read Scott Blackwood's behind-the-book essay about See How Small.

In Michael Crummey’s novel, Sweetland, a Newfoundlander named Queenie offers some literary criticism. Concerning books about her province, she says: “It was a torture to get through them. They were every one depressing. . . . Or nothing happened. Or there was no point to the story.” She adds that they are unrecognizable and probably written by outsiders.

Does Newfoundlander Crummey rise to Queenie’s challenge? Readers may decide for themselves. But what Sweetland lacks in sweetness and light, it makes up for in authenticity.

The title refers to an island and one of its eponymous residents, 70-year-old Moses Sweetland, who makes some of Cormac McCarthy’s surlier characters seem like Holly Golightly. The Canadian government is so convinced of the island’s hopelessness that it will generously pay its inhabitants to relocate. This provokes a battle between Sweetland and the prosperous mainland.

Once, fishing supported the communities along the North Atlantic coast. With the collapse of the cod stocks and fish populations through overfishing and climate change, this support is increasingly tenuous. Sweetland is thus in part a parable of how environmental collapse and social collapse are one. Crummey’s Newfoundland has become, at best, a remittance economy and, at worst, a stopover for Sri Lankan refugees headed to Toronto.

Sweetland is purposeful, and it certainly evokes the rawness and fragility of life in Newfoundland. It is not, however, an advertisement for the place, as Crummey devotes pages of rather self-consciously muscular prose to food preparation or to Sweetland grumbling like King Lear in various squalls— admitting with grave understatement that he “sounded slightly unhinged.”

Sweetland is both a testament to human resilience and a keen study of where that resilience shades into cussedness and derangement.

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

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. In Rachel Cusk’s inventive novel, Outline, a parade of characters tell the sketchily drawn narrator their stories, and as these conversations or episodes unfold they weigh in on all manner of life’s issues, large and small—love and marriage, parenthood, aspirations and failures, even the age-old debate of dog vs. cat.

Through it all, the narrator, a writer who has come to Athens (not incidentally, the cradle of our Western narrative tradition) to teach a week-long class, remains largely an enigma. We glean that she has left two sons in England, and there are hints of some tragedy of love, but she tells us virtually nothing about herself, reserving her observations for those she encounters. Among these are an aging, thrice-divorced Greek whose romantic advances take her by surprise; a renowned lesbian poet; a fellow writing teacher seeking his own means of escape; and a diverse cluster of students, who tap the wellspring of storytelling in a stuffy summer classroom.

In each conversation, the narrator, who we ultimately discover is called Faye, remains on the edges, or as the title suggests, outside the lines of experience. As she considers the “outlines” of the life stories she is invited to consider, she only occasionally interjects her views.

Cusk, an intelligent and elegant writer, has set for herself a cunning task. By writing an essentially plot-free novel about our visceral need for telling stories, she is doing nothing less than subverting the central nature of narrative itself. What is remarkable about Outline is that, despite its nebulous form, it picks up momentum with a steady persuasiveness, even if it, quite intentionally, never arrives at a resolution. As we come to know those with whom she interacts, and bear witness to the ways in which their stories betray their hidden truths, we somehow come to know Faye, too. No matter how calculated her self-concealment or how hard she tries to remain emotionally detached, Faye cannot run from the personal narrative she is trying to escape.