Lauren Groff explored the strengths of community in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia. In Fates and Furies, she narrows her focus to the ultimate microcosm: a marriage. Told in two parts, first by a husband and then a wife, this unsettling novel looks at the myriad ways even the most devoted of couples keep secrets, betray one another and risk deceiving themselves. 

 Despite the allusions to epic myth and Greek tragedy, Fates and Furies opens like a fairy tale: with a marriage between a prince and princess. Handsome, charismatic Lancelot, known as Lotto, meets the palely beautiful Mathilde in college, and after a brief courtship, they marry. “Fates”—the first half of the novel—tells the story of Lotto’s affluent upbringing in Florida, his failed acting career and years of genteel poverty with Mathilde in their Village apartment. Estranged from his mother and drinking heavily, Lotto finds unexpected success as a playwright. The second half of the novel, aptly named “Furies,” tells Matilde’s considerably grimmer side of the story. From Mathilde’s perspective, Lotto is lazy and self-absorbed, the selfish son of an indulgent yet withholding mother. For Mathilde, family life means keeping Lotto content—but at the cost of holding on to some very closely guarded secrets of her own. What begins as the story of their union unravels into something else altogether. 

In a novel whose title invokes the grand sweep of an epic, there shouldn’t be any surprise when the domestic tale leaps into mythic territory: bouts of hubris, betrayal and thwarted power that spring from the pages of classical tragedies. At times, Groff’s characters, with their selfishness, lust and need for revenge, are more archetypal than living, breathing people. But Mathilde’s rage is as artful as it is destructive, and at its deepest, Fates and Furies suggests that her vengeance is a creative force as carefully wrought as any of Lotto’s dramas. 

 Fates and Furies is an ambitious and sometimes difficult novel about two charismatic people who, thrust out of the comforting nests of their birth families, seek security and solace in one another. Groff’s writing is intelligent, knowing and deliciously sexy. When Groff’s red-hot prose ignites Mathilde’s icy rage, Fates and Furies is something very special indeed.

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

“The one percent” has entered the lexicon to describe those lucky and/or greedy few for whom money is literally no object, recalling Fitzgerald’s adage that they are effectively superhuman. Robert Goolrick’s electric third novel, The Fall of Princes, instead points to Hemingway’s rejoinder: The only thing separating the rich from others is that they have more money. 

The novel is set in the 1980s, when greed was declared good and America was “the most heartless country on the planet.” Rooney is a Wall Street trader who buys and sells “the world before lunch” and then spends his evenings in a delirium of booze, coke and women. He consumes conspicuously and competitively, tones his body to Apollonian heights and seeks the company of the similarly well-heeled. But much like the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Rooney is empty at the core. A failed artist who thought fulfillment might come instead from wealth, he longs for something simpler: someone to love him, children to dote over. 

He also realizes that he is bisexual at a time when AIDS, still poorly understood, was decimating the gay community in New York. The most passionate parts of the novel concern this scourge and the fear it engendered among the libertines. As Rooney’s substance abuse intensifies, he engages in ever riskier behavior, descending rapidly down the social ladder until a trans streetwalker provides him with something like redemption.

This is no simple clone of The Wolf of Wall Street, despite its brazen celebration of sticking it to the common man. But the novel is not exactly a condemnation of avarice, either. Instead, it is a study in how “a big hoopla of vulgarity and testosterone” conspires to eradicate the better angels of a man’s nature. Rooney is a sheep who dons the wolf’s clothing, only to be devoured by it.

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

A white-hot novel documenting the friendship that arises between two very different women, Veronica is a heady, hallucinatory narrative—another walk on the wild side from a writer who has never shied from tackling potentially contentious topics. Mary Gaitskill’s work (which includes the short story that inspired the 2002 film Secretary) is often characterized by a dark eroticism and probes the raw emotional states of characters on the edge.

Veronica is narrated by a has-been fashion model named Allison whose career peaked during the ’70s, and who, having survived that era of glitter and excess, is now paying the price. Suffering from hepatitis C, Allison, all but broke, lives in California, in a drab quarter of San Rafael. The narrative spans only a single day, but it covers a great deal of ground, moving in and out of the present as the 46-year-old Allison looks back on her life. As a teenage runaway during the 1960s, she ends up in San Francisco, living in a purple rooming house and selling flowers in nightclubs, until she meets Alain, a bigwig in the modeling industry. He takes her as his mistress, and her ascent as a model ensues.

But when, a few years later, Alain betrays her, Allison’s career stalls, and she is forced to work at an ad agency in New York. There, she meets Veronica, an editor with attitude. Outspoken, brash, older by a decade, Veronica is frumpy and unhip, the antithesis of Allison and an improbable ally. Yet the two develop an enduring friendship, and the durability of their bond stands in contrast to the disposability of Allison’s relationships with her fellow models and with various lovers.

Learning that Veronica has AIDS, which she contracted from a promiscuous, bisexual boyfriend, triggers a complex range of emotions in Allison, including feelings of guilt. In the end, she finds in Veronica’s decline a reflection of her own journey, as her looks begin to fade, and she is forced to come to terms with her humanity. Gaitskill’s lively portrayal of the carefree ’70s and affluent ’80s, her superlative powers of description and delicate handling of sensitive topics have resulted in a profound narrative about beauty and mortality, loss and redemption.

A white-hot novel documenting the friendship that arises between two very different women, Veronica is a heady, hallucinatory narrative—another walk on the wild side from a writer who has never shied from tackling potentially contentious topics. Mary Gaitskill’s work (which includes the short story that inspired the 2002 film Secretary) is often characterized by a dark eroticism and probes the raw emotional states of characters on the edge.

Veronica is narrated by a has-been fashion model named Allison whose career peaked during the ’70s, and who, having survived that era of glitter and excess, is now paying the price. Suffering from hepatitis C, Allison, all but broke, lives in California, in a drab quarter of San Rafael. The narrative spans only a single day, but it covers a great deal of ground, moving in and out of the present as the 46-year-old Allison looks back on her life. As a teenage runaway during the 1960s, she ends up in San Francisco, living in a purple rooming house and selling flowers in nightclubs, until she meets Alain, a bigwig in the modeling industry. He takes her as his mistress, and her ascent as a model ensues.

But when, a few years later, Alain betrays her, Allison’s career stalls, and she is forced to work at an ad agency in New York. There, she meets Veronica, an editor with attitude. Outspoken, brash, older by a decade, Veronica is frumpy and unhip, the antithesis of Allison and an improbable ally. Yet the two develop an enduring friendship, and the durability of their bond stands in contrast to the disposability of Allison’s relationships with her fellow models and with various lovers.

Learning that Veronica has AIDS, which she contracted from a promiscuous, bisexual boyfriend, triggers a complex range of emotions in Allison, including feelings of guilt. In the end, she finds in Veronica’s decline a reflection of her own journey, as her looks begin to fade, and she is forced to come to terms with her humanity. Gaitskill’s lively portrayal of the carefree ’70s and affluent ’80s, her superlative powers of description and delicate handling of sensitive topic matter have resulted in a profound narrative about beauty and mortality, loss and redemption.

British novelist Amanda Coe’s The Love She Left Behind is a tart family drama that examines how a selfish act of adultery mars the lives of adult children a generation after its occurrence. In this, her second novel, Coe demonstrates a keen eye for the intricate dynamics of family life and an even sharper ear for the language we use both to conceal and to wound.

Thirty years after what began as a “big love story” in the late 1970s, Patrick Conway’s marriage has ended with the death of his wife, Sara. The playwright, author of a controversial drama about Britain’s Falklands War but unproductive thereafter, consoles himself with alcohol and cigarettes in his crumbling Cornwall homestead. Sara’s children, Nigel, a London lawyer, and Louise, a struggling mother to a sullen teenage daughter, bear the scars of their mother’s choice to abandon them for a life with Patrick. In Nigel’s case it’s a lifelong battle with gastrointestinal problems, while Louise seeks solace in a psychic’s advice.  

Coe flashes back to Nigel and Louise’s lives as teenagers, as they did their best to cope with Sara’s departure. An ill-matched pair, their differences are played out in their disagreement over what will become of Patrick’s house after his death. Whatever chance they had for a normal relationship, Coe suggests, was lost when their mother chose Patrick over them.

Family life is complicated by the presence of Mia, a graduate student who’s writing her thesis on Patrick’s work. Whether her involvement with a man who’s old enough to be her grandfather will develop into something more adds intrigue to the novel’s plot. 

“What happens in the heart simply happens,” wrote poet Ted Hughes, whose observation provides one of the epigraphs for The Love She Left Behind. Whether or not that offhanded explanation for infidelity suffices to ease the pain of children who survive divorce, Coe coolly reminds us that it is a fact of life. 

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

If only Alan Turing had received this much respect while he was alive. One of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, Turing helped the Allies crack intercepted code messages from Nazi Germany during World War II, but he died in 1954 of an apparent suicide after his conviction for what Britain then called “homosexual offenses.” He was the subject of the 2014 film The Imitation Game and is one of five characters whose “voices” provide the narrative drive in Speak, Louisa Hall’s fascinating cautionary tale of the role artificial intelligence can and should play in our society.

In 2040, Stephen R. Chinn, onetime computer science wunderkind, is in a Texas correctional institution. The inventor of babybots—lifelike dolls—Chinn was imprisoned after the girls who “parented” his creations began to suffer debilitating illnesses. The artificial intelligence program used for the babybots is MARY3, whose memory contains only information gleaned from the book’s other narrators. These include a 17th-century Englishwoman forced into marriage before sailing with her family to America; a Jewish refugee and ponytailed Harvard professor; a paralyzed former babybot owner who confides in MARY3; and Turing, whom we see in letters he wrote to the mother of Christopher Morcom, the schoolmate he had a crush on in the late 1920s.

Speak poses a provocative question: What if artificial intelligence could be used to help people communicate across eras? The result is a book that achieves a tough combination: It’s frightening and highly scientific, yet also poignant. In the memoir he composes from prison, Chinn writes that a computer programmer is the creator of a universe in which he dictates all laws. Speak asks whether a macrocosm devoid of feeling is one worth creating.

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

There is a scene in Stephanie Kallos’ new novel in which protagonist Charles Marlow is describing all the clichés associated with an archetypal film on autism. It feels like a wink at the reader, as this book contains many of these same clichés. Yet Language Arts takes enough of a fresh approach to its subject to make it a riveting read.

As the title suggests, Marlow is a language arts teacher: He has taught for more than 20 years at a private sixth- through 12th-grade school in the Seattle area. He’s a respected educator who has a strong relationship with his students. 

He is also the recently divorced father of a severely autistic institutionalized son and has just sent his beloved daughter off to college in New York. As he suffers through the malaise of empty-nest syndrome, he polishes off multiple bottles of wine while digging through a pile of dusty items that track his daughter’s childhood. 

But old report cards and tea sets aren’t the only vestiges of the past Marlow finds himself facing. An article in his local paper quickly brings him back to another language arts classroom, where, as a misfit fourth-grader, he endured a traumatic experience that colored his life for years to come. 

Kallos moves back and forth in time, and among characters, in a story that deftly mixes family drama, neuroscience, mystery and an exploration of the dying art of handwriting that is far more intriguing than it might sound. Along with becoming intimately acquainted with Marlow, readers will find themselves inside the minds of his unreachable son; his daughter, whom he enjoys writing long handwritten letters to; and even a dementia patient in his son’s art program.

A twist toward the end of the novel could have varying effects on the reading audience; some may find it fascinating while others may feel manipulated. However, Kallos—whose 2004 debut, Broken for You, became a hit with book clubs—has enough skill as a storyteller to pull it off. And you’re likely to find yourself rereading it at least once to fully absorb what you may have missed the first time around. 

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

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s to British suffragettes during World War I. In her most recent novel, The Sunken Cathedral, Walbert tunes in to a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city recently altered by climate change, tragedy and new wealth.

Marie and Simone met as war brides on a Brooklyn playground after World War II. Now widowed and in their 80s, they remain engaged and adventurous. At Simone’s urging, they join a painting class at the School of Inspired Arts in a rundown Chelsea tenement taught by Sid Morris, another aging New Yorker buffeted by the city’s changes. Marie’s tenant, Elizabeth, tries to make sense of life in a post-9/11 city, but her anxiety isn’t helped by her son’s school, where the weekly disaster preparedness program is called “What If?” Back in class, Marie’s classmate Helen makes detailed paintings of underwater scenes recalling Hurricane Sandy and other vicious storms that threaten the island.

Walbert’s New York is haunted by strange weather and flood zones, by emergency drills at the public schools, and the destruction of local landmarks to make way for luxury condos. But the city and her citizens are resilient as well. The tapestry of voices weave a rich pattern, and the novel is strengthened by Walbert’s use of footnotes, which allow her characters’ thoughts to move freely from the present to the past, uncovering private or previously unshared memories, especially Marie’s traumatic wartime childhood in France and Elizabeth’s haunted recollections of a cousin’s tragic accident.

The Sunken Cathedral is a reference to a piano sonata by Debussy that itself alludes to the mythical story of a cathedral that rises up from the sea. Like Debussy’s impressionistic music, the novel is poetic, full of lyrical imagery and subtle shifts of tone. Ambitious, elegiac and occasionally even funny, The Sunken Cathedral is an emotionally resonant story of people caught in a time of unease and change—and a striking portrait of the way we live now.

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

RELATED CONTENT: Read an interview with Kate Walbert about The Sunken Cathedral.

When an author begins a novel with “And then there was the day”—as Kent Haruf begins Our Souls at Night, a brief, final testament completed shortly before his death last November—you know he knows we know what he’s talking about. This is Holt, Colorado. 

Over three decades, Haruf has given us six novels counting up all of Holt’s days, beginning with The Tie That Binds in 1984. That title is a principle that covers a lot of ground, straight through to this last one, which brings us to the day “when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.” Addie and Louis are old neighbors, both widowed, children grown and gone, both lonely but used to it. Addie asks Louis if he’d like to sleep with her. Just sleep, that’s all, to keep her company, and maybe talk about things, too. Louis agrees. It becomes an amazing tie, full of unexpected grace, a chance to go back with each other over their ordinary and extraordinary lives. Their pact binds others to them as well—an ancient neighbor, the troubled grandson of a broken home and a sweet dog from the county pound. 

Townsfolk and family members don’t much like the idea of Addie and Louis sleeping together. This happiness, arrived so late, is a scandal to those others. Haruf is our finest observer of the conflict between duty and love, making goodness almost impossible. It’s the little space inside the “almost” that counts the most, though. We are blessed to have such an excellent final book from this great writer. 

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

The Rocks, the second novel by Peter Nichols, has everything you’d hope for in a great beach read: a vivid Mediterranean setting, complicated entanglements, adventures at sea, some hanky-panky and a little heartbreak. But its sunny exterior conceals some sharp observations on human vulnerability and how easily self-preservation can calcify into mere selfishness.

The book begins in 2005 on the Spanish island of Mallorca, at what seems like the end of the story. Gerald and Lulu, both in their 80s, cross paths for the first time in decades. It’s not a happy reunion; we don’t know why, but we know they were married, briefly, 60 years ago. They argue, stumble and then—not 10 pages into the novel—they fall into the sea and drown.

From here, the novel telescopes into the past: 1995, 1966, all the way back to 1948. With each step back, we learn more about who Lulu and Gerald were, what led them to Mallorca and drove them apart, and why there’s such tension now between their two (unrelated) adult children. Each scene reconfigures the previous until at last the whole tragic story emerges. 

Most of the action takes place at The Rocks, Lulu’s seaside hotel, where a group of expats spend their summers. Lulu is a siren: ageless and beautiful, irresistible to men, but diamond-hard and pitiless. Gerald is quiet and kind, a yachtsman and writer who putters around among his olive trees. They’ve each made a life on the island, each remarried and had a child, but they’re worlds apart. The contrast between the way these two approach the paradise they’ve found shapes the whole novel and everyone in it.

Nichols writes with authority and clear affection, especially on anything boat-related. (He has also written a memoir about sailing a wooden boat across the Atlantic.) He can subtly and effectively inhabit multiple voices: a Spanish officer at a port-city jail, the jazz guitarist who plays Sunday nights at the hotel, even the seedy English rake with an appetite for seduction. With its large cast of eccentrics and their ever-shifting relationships, The Rocks feels a bit like the literary equivalent of a good Netflix binge: a guilty pleasure well-crafted enough that you don’t actually have to feel guilty about it.

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

The central characters in The Daylight Marriage, Hannah and Lovell Hall, married young. She wanted stability; He wanted a chance at love. But as the years passed, resentments and unmet desires festered below the surface of their neat facade, creating a rift between the husband and wife that seemed insurmountable.

Always a beauty, Hannah grew up impulsive and spunky, a member of an upper-class family who took luxurious vacations and lived in mansions. Lovell, a climate scientist, was raised squarely in the middle class, in a home where emotions were more reserved and everything was practical. Despite their differences, the two try form a life together: Lovell works at his university job, which provides a distraction from his tenuous home life, and Hannah takes care of their two children, Janine and Ethan, and works a part-time job at a flower shop.

But after Hannah disappears the morning following an explosive argument with Lovell, questions arise not only from the community and the police but from within the family; Janine and Ethan grapple with the absence of their mother while also suspecting their father of involvement. While trying to deal with the intricacies of Hannah’s disappearance, Lovell must also attempt hold his loosely knit family together.

The Daylight Marriage is structured in two sets of chapters that alternate between Hannah’s and Lovell’s respective viewpoints, keeping the pages turning as the stories of love, loss, growth and grief progress.

Heidi Pitlor is a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and published her first novel, The Birthdays, in 2006. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007, and lives outside Boston with her husband and twin son and daughter. In The Daylight Marriage, she combines two distinct stories in one—a suspenseful crime narrative and the story of a failing relationship—to form a novel that captures readers from the first page on.

Bosnian-born author Aleksandar Hemon’s fiction has always been a sobering, sometimes bleak look at the lives of immigrants and exiles in Chicago who are not unlike the writer himself (see The Lazarus Project and Love and Obstacles). But in a dramatic change of pace and tone, his new novel, The Making of Zombie Wars, is an eccentric comedy, albeit one with the same level of subtlety and resonance we’re accustomed to from Hemon, a MacArthur “genius grant” winner.

An aspiring writer from an affluent Chicago suburb who never finishes anything he starts, Joshua Levin has never had to suffer much. His life is “a warm blanket,” in contrast to the lives of the immigrants he teaches as an ESL instructor, and his creative endeavors have been as futile and disheartening as the Cubs at nearby Wrigley Field. That is, until Joshua comes up with an idea for a script called Zombie Wars that could be his big break, and the sad but beautiful Bosnian woman in his class, Ana, starts to seduce him.

Of course, Ana is married, and Joshua just moved in with his girlfriend. As Ana turns his life upside down, Joshua finally has some real-life drama to funnel into his writing. Excerpts from Joshua’s script draw parallels between a zombie apocalypse and the culture-cannibalizing effects of war and exile, be it in Hemon’s native Bosnia or in Iraq, which U.S. forces have only just begun to invade when the novel opens in 2003.

As the story oscillates between hysterical and heartbreaking, Hemon once again renders the city of Chicago authentically, forgoing the whitewashed suburbs of John Hughes movies and invoking the city’s social and cultural realities as faithfully as Alex Kotlowitz. The wit and intelligence of The Making of Zombie Wars should please Hemon fans and entice new readers.

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

The latest work from Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison is puzzling until you realize that it’s actually a fairy tale. How else to describe a story about a woman who is so bereft without the man in her life that the lack of him causes her to regress back to childhood—literally. Bride, the book’s beautiful, very young cosmetics tycoon, slowly loses all the physical signifiers of womanhood. Even the holes in her pierced ears close up.

Also strange are the circumstances of Bride’s birth. Named Lula Ann Bridewell, she is born a dark-skinned baby to parents who take refuge in their light skin and “good” hair. The sight of Lula Ann repels them to the point that her mother doesn’t want to touch her and insists she call her “Sweetness” instead of “Mother.” Lula Ann’s father eventually abandons his wife and child altogether. The reader believes that Sweetness’ hard-heartedness comes not only from her internalized racism but also from a desire to protect her daughter. 

Sweetness also mentions that her husband was a porter and that Lula Ann was born in the ’90s. At first, this reviewer thought it was the 1890s, but no, Lula Ann was born in the 1990s, which makes her parents’ attitude even more disturbing. Do light-skinned African American parents still reject their dark-skinned children? And who names a child born in 1991 or so “Lula Ann”?

But again, this slim and accessible book is a fairy tale, and fairy tales are timeless. It’s not so much about race but about wounded children, not to mention how pain is passed along—and how pain can be healed, at least partially. Bride has been hurt by her mother’s rejection and has hurt others in return; her lover has been forever scarred by the murder of an adored older brother.

Though this will likely be considered a minor work from one of our greatest novelists, God Help the Child is gracefully written and full of surprises.

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