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. 

Two-time Man Booker Prize winner (Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) Peter Carey’s 13th novel is a darkly satiric tale of cyber activism, modern Australian history and the exhilaration and perils of advocacy journalism.

Facing financial ruin after a six-figure defamation judgment, Sydney journalist Felix Moore, “a socialist and a servant of the truth,” is recruited by an eccentric real estate developer to tell the story of Gaby Baillieux. This young hacker, known as “Angel,” has launched a computer worm that simultaneously freed thousands of prisoners in Australia and the United States. Apart from his need for quick cash, Felix’s willingness to take on the project is fueled by his own political inclinations.

The first third of the novel is narrated in Felix’s lively, cynical voice as he describes how he’s been placed in a “privileged role where I might be both a witness and participant in a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states.” From there, Carey shifts to the third person, as Felix, spirited away to an isolated location, wrestles with the challenge of turning the tape-recorded recollections of two unreliable narrators—Gaby and her mother Celine, an actress and wife of a member of Australia’s Parliament—into a serviceable work.

Carey, who reportedly turned down an offer to ghostwrite the memoir of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, infuses the novel with a distinct political perspective. Through Felix, he describes the events of 1975, when Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was deposed in what Carey suggests was a CIA-led coup provoked by Whitlam’s withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam. In another subplot, he describes the at times comic efforts of Gaby and her lover, Frederic Matovic, to thwart the activities of a chemical manufacturer they believe has introduced dioxin into Melbourne’s water supply.

Felix Moore and the other characters in Amnesia clearly believe we’re living in an age where “the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.” Even if you disagree, you still can enjoy this intricate and unusual story.

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

How to Be Both, by the British writer Ali Smith, tells two interconnected stories. The first is about Georgina, known as George, a 1960s teenager outside of London grieving the death of her mother and taking her first tentative steps toward love. The other is the story of the 15th-century Italian painter Francesco del Cossa, a historical figure responsible for the remarkable frescos in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy—and about whom very little else is known.

The twist here—and that word is used purposefully—is that, depending on the copy the reader picks up, either George’s or Francesco’s story could be presented first. Though reading one before the other obviously doesn’t change the outcome, it shows that the stories both precede and follow each other, like fibers in a strand of yarn.

The plot and the structure of How to Be Both play with many ideas and symbols, including androgyny, allegory and memory. Though it may sound intimidating, Smith makes the novel accessible and even fun. George is funny and earthy; a credible, albeit very articulate, teen. Francesco’s story is a picaresque masterpiece complete with brothels and a delicious rivalry. But Smith’s talent shines brightest in her tender depiction of the emotions that, like the underpaintings in a fresco, remain hidden but have a powerful impact.

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Settlement is a community of about 100 people who live outside of the view of the rest of America, tucked away on a patch of land near Egypt, Maine. This curious collective, the focus of Carolyn Chute’s latest novel, Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves, is not altogether unlike the one inhabited by Chute herself. The author and her husband live off the grid in Parsonfield, Maine, where they run the 2nd Maine Militia and rely on the community around them for sustenance.

In Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves, the story pings from one character to another so often that icons and an appendix help readers keep tabs on who’s who. Those notations are also a helpful reference for those who have read Chute’s previous novel in this planned “four-ojilly,” The School on Heart’s Content Road, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Those who haven’t yet dived in shouldn’t worry, though; in a brief foreword, Chute notes that each of these four books will stand alone, with some characters playing more prominent roles in one story than another.

Ivy Morelli takes center stage here. She is determined to uncover the truth about charges of physical and sexual abose that tipsters have lobbed at Gordon St. Onge, the charismatic heart of the Settlement. The 20-something reporter tails St. Onge with dogged determination, noting his every move as well as details about who he’s with, what he’s wearing, even whether or not his companions are buckled up as she tails them in a car. 

Chute’s odd cadence makes for a memorable read, her stories unfolding like a train of thought. Fans of the author’s previous work will find much to like here, as Chute dives into St. Onge’s mysterious dealings while leaving plenty to ponder in the series’ two forthcoming books.

Gina B. Nahai’s fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., is a book full of enchantments and mysteries. The mystery that launches her tale is a contemporary murder: On a morning in June 2013, Neda Raiis, the wife of a Iranian-Jewish exile named Raphael’s Son, reports finding her husband with his throat slit in an idling car at the gate of their Los Angeles mansion. By the time the police arrive, his body has disappeared.

Raphael’s Son, we quickly learn, has cheated almost everyone in the L.A. Iranian-Jewish community in an elaborate Ponzi scheme, with a vengeance beyond anything Bernie Madoff could have conceived. In fact, “he reveled in the harm he had inflicted upon everyone else.” Is he really dead, members of the community wonder, while readers will wonder about the source of his implacable anger.

For insight into Raphael’s Son’s vengeful nature, Nahai carries us to Tehran in 1952, and into the heart of a powerful, wealthy Iranian-Jewish family, the Soleymans. We follow their fates through the reign of the Shah of Iran, the tumultuous Iranian revolution and then into exile.

Nahai populates her story of old Tehran with elements of magical realism. Raphael Soleyman has a heart that glows through his skin after dark, attracting a following of fireflies, nocturnal birds and restless ghosts on the nights he sleepwalks through the city. Elizabeth Soleyman radiates the smell of the sea, which inspires nostalgia and confusion among those around her.

This is irresistible storytelling. No surprise there. Nahai’s second novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, was a finalist for the Orange Prize, and her third, Caspian Rain, was an L.A. Times Best Book of the Year. But what really sets The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. apart is how Nahai uses her estimable gifts to offer a nuanced, sometimes satirical portrait of the tight-knit Iranian-Jewish exile community in Los Angeles and to illuminate the historic disruptions to life in Iran that brought them here. It’s a fascinating read.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

With the publication of The Lay of the Land in 2006, it appeared Richard Ford had written the final chapter in the story of Frank Bascombe, one that began with The Sportswriter and continued with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day. Happily, Ford has given readers one last chance to enjoy his knowing, wry protagonist.

Like each of the novels in the Bascombe trilogy, the four long stories that make up Let Me Be Frank with You are set on the eve of a holiday, in this case Christmas 2012. Sixty-eight-year-old Frank has retired from selling real estate, but in the first story, “I’m Here,” which sets the mostly elegiac tone of the book, he returns to the home he once owned on the New Jersey shore to witness firsthand the devastation (“Nagasaki-by-the-sea”) wrought by Hurricane Sandy.

In the other stories, he has an unsettling encounter with a woman who once lived in the house he and his wife occupy, visits his ex-wife in the “state-of-the-art, staged-care facility” where she’s moved after her diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and pays a call on a dying friend. Each of these stories is told in Frank’s candid, confiding voice, one Ford has so artfully channeled and kept fresh through the nearly 1,600 pages that comprise the four books.

For all the razor sharpness of his observations, Frank is no misanthrope. He spends some of his time greeting soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and reads novels to the blind. He’s a survivor who’s overcome prostate cancer and the loss of one son in childhood. Though his wit tends toward the acerbic, there’s an undercurrent of gratitude for everything that’s come to him in a life he feels he’s lived about as well as one man can. That’s no small accomplishment, Ford seems to say. Anyone who’s followed that life since it first appeared on the page can only feel a similar gratitude to Ford for having created it.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.