As the United States exits two protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget that nearly 100,000 defense-related Americans remain in Japan, a country with which the U.S. ceased hostilities nearly 70 years ago. The American bases occupy about one-fifth of Okinawa, an island unfortunate to have served as a rampart for the Japanese mainland during the war and as an aircraft carrier for the Americans after it. Above the East China Sea by Sarah Bird attempts to bridge the gap between these two phases in Okinawan history.

Luz is a modern American army brat, in Okinawa because of her gung-ho military mother. In her crass way, she tries to navigate global transience and her own mélange of ancestries. The other narrator is Takimo, a wartime Okinawan teen convinced that Japan is invincible and that her emperor is divine. She is forced to suffer all manner of privation on the road to disillusionment with the imperial cause.

That these two eventually become connected Hollywood-style may go without saying. But the contrasts between them are fascinating. During World War II the Americans were hardly innocent of demonizing the Japanese, but Takimo reminds us that the demonization went both ways. Luz, for her part, gets a schooling in East-Asian ancestor worship and filial duty that helps her better accept her mother’s idiosyncrasies and the premature death of her soldier sister.

Once herself an American in Okinawa, Bird knows her subject; the novel displays keen appreciation and sympathy for the Okinawans and their culture. The prose could benefit from more showing and less telling, as the cliché goes, but the voices of the girls are convincing.

The American presence in Okinawa remains controversial, whether because it desiccates a vibrant island or because soldiers there occasionally go berserk and assault the locals. Above the East China Sea provides welcome context to the news reports from an island whose pivotal place in global power politics remains mostly unexamined.

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

Writer Kaui Hart Hemmings had a lot to live up to with her second novel: Her best-selling, polished debut, The Descendants, was made into an Oscar-winning film starring George Clooney. With The Possibilities, she delivers on her early promise while making a striking departure setting-wise, moving from the tropical islands of her native Hawaii to the snowy mountains of Colorado.

After Sarah St. John’s 22-year-old son Cully dies in a skiing accident, she struggles to return to life. Her job as a co-host of a Breckenridge travel show (the kind of cheesy production that is shown on hotel TV channels) suddenly seems meaningless. Her widowed dad, who has been staying with her, seems to be making that arrangement permanent. And Cully’s dad Billy, whom Sarah never married, is back in the picture in a confusing way. Then a lovely but mysterious young woman named Kit shows up at Sarah’s house, with news that will send the family reeling.

Sarah hits the road with Billy, her dad, her best friend and Kit, heading to a memorial service at Cully’s college. This motley crew finds out a lot about themselves and each other, and they’re forced to make some difficult choices. And yet, Hemmings manages to make this road trip as hilarious as it is touching, punctuated with knockout dialogue.

Hemmings has a unique voice—both sensitive and humorous. In her hands, Sarah is all-too-human, a middle-aged woman who struggles to redefine herself after losing the child she raised mostly on her own. “I close my eyes and imagine his possibilities, the different hues of his self, what his face would look like in ten years, the kind of man he would be,” Sarah says. “He never had the chance to become himself. He never had the chance to be anyone else.”

While The Possibilities is a book ostensibly about death, it is at its core really about life—in all its messy, funny, hurtful, confusing and transcendent moments.  

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

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Kaui Hart Hemmings about The Possibilities.

Joshua Ferris, who previously examined the culture of the contemporary workplace (Then We Came to the End) and family life (The Unnamed) turns his attention to social media in To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. At first, the novel seems to be a satiric look at the way Facebook and Twitter could be used to hijack a person’s identity. But as the main character heads toward an existential crisis, it is clear that Ferris is also exploring how technology both connects us and reinforces our isolation.

Paul O’Rourke is a dentist with a successful practice in Manhattan. His long workdays are punctuated by feelings of unrequited love for his ex-girlfriend (also his receptionist), religious disagreements with his long-term hygienist Mrs. Convoy and frequent cigarette breaks. His evenings are scheduled around Red Sox games. He has put off using the Internet for personal or professional use, so when a professional-looking website appears, purporting to represent his dental practice, O’Rourke is both puzzled and angered by this inroad into his privacy. His outrage only increases when an active Facebook page and Twitter account appear, also under his name. But when the nature of the content turns personal, he can’t resist emailing back to the virtual Paul O’Rourke.

Once Paul engages with this fictional doppelganger, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour quickly becomes a farce aimed at identity theft, the lure and limitations of religion and the importance of shared belief. Paul is a lifelong loner, from a troubled family, so his yearning to be part of a community is counter-weighted by huge emotional risks.

As in his earlier novels, Ferris is both laugh-out-loud funny and even profound, often on the same page. Paul’s self-absorption can be wearying at times, but his journey to self-awareness is designed to be both amusing and thought provoking, allowing readers to take their own existential ride.

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

Mona Simpson’s sixth novel, Casebook, visits the country of divorce through the eyes of California teenager and Sherlock Holmes wannabe, Miles Adler-Hart. Aided by his sidekick Hector (living through the aftermath of his own parents’ breakup), Miles recounts their earnest, if often fumbling, effort to make sense of the emotional disturbance that inevitably surrounds even the most amicable end of a marriage and the survivors’ halting attempts to rebuild their lives. Simpson brings this all off with style, blending pathos with humor to create an appealing story.

A teen investigates his mother’s latest boyfriend in Mona Simpson’s Casebook.

Miles’ and Hector’s sleuthing attempts to pierce the veil that surrounds Eli Lee, a man they’re told works for the National Science Foundation in Washington, and who’s dating Miles’ mother, Irene, a mathematician who teaches at UCLA. As Irene’s attraction to Eli deepens, the boys discover pieces of his story that become increasingly implausible, spurring the boys to ever more daring investigative feats, from crude wiretaps to long bus treks from Santa Monica to Pasadena. Their exploits eventually connect them with a sympathetic detective, Ben Orion, who brings a cool realism to their quest.

The success of any novel that relies on the voice of a quirky narrator ultimately turns on the author’s skill in making that protagonist both realistic and sympathetic. Simpson artfully captures Miles’ longing for an emotionally stable home and his yearning for his mother’s happiness. As determined as he is to unearth Eli Lee’s story, his adventures aren’t completely single-minded, as when he and Hector establish a thriving business selling soup in their high school or when they (both straight) become active in the school’s gay and lesbian student organization. Simpson doesn’t fall short either in portraying adults like Irene, who struggles in the gulf that separates the inexplicable (to her) end of her marriage and the beginning of a new life.

Impenetrable as their parents’ lives are to them in placid times, how much more so is that the case when children undergo the wrenching experience of divorce? In this wistful and knowing novel, Mona Simpson penetrates some of that mystery, ultimately winning us over to the side of her endearing cast of characters.

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

Leah Hager Cohen’s new novel, No Book but the World, takes its title from a quote by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Ava and her younger brother, Fred, were raised by progressive parents who followed Rousseau’s “free” education and parenting model, letting their children discover the world on their own and without inhibitions or formal constrictions. Memories of their imaginative childhood in the woods flood forth as an adult Ava visits the town where her brother is now in jail. Ava recollects Fred’s oddities—his broken speech, his raging tantrums, his aversion to eye contact and touch—but also his focus, his empathy, his innocence. With a 12-year-old boy dead and news accounts suggesting her brother is responsible, Ava races to piece together a story that she feels only she can tell—one of misunderstanding, but also of deep fraternal love.

Amid the suspense, Cohen’s new novel is also a coming-of-age story that examines the pressures of following in familial footsteps. Though Fred lives out his father’s experiment in the woods with almost no formal schooling, Ava begs to attend school—the first of many decisions that eventually estrange her from her father. Yet Ava can’t fully separate herself from her upbringing, and is not wholly of one world or the other.

No Book but the World gives readers ideas to chew on every step of the way, questioning the obligations we have to our families, the struggle to love people who are difficult to love, the ways the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences affect our understanding of other people’s actions, and the tension between freedom and societal norms. A captivating look at the unwavering focus and innocence of children and the capacity of memory, No Book but the World is the work of a masterful storyteller.

Who risks the most when a literary lion well into his ninth decade writes a novel? The legend, who is putting his legacy on the line, or the longtime reader, who shoulders the load of vicarious shame in the event the book is a mess?

With In Paradise, readers can rest assured the risk is worthwhile. In fact, it feels that Peter Matthiessen’s more than 60 years of professional writing has led to this, his most deft exploration into that crimped, fallible piece of meat called the human heart. In a dark, powerful and relevant novel, Matthiessen takes on Auschwitz and its legacy.

Polish-born Clements Olin is a middle-aged American poet. His family fled Poland as the Nazis were invading. In 1996, he returns, joining scores of other visitors at the notorious death camp. For a week, they will pray, meditate and bear witness to the atrocities that took place there. They will sleep in the barracks where the guards once slept. They will try, ultimately, to make sense of the unknowable horror that affected their own lives.

Clements is a self-proclaimed observer. He listens to the arguments about good and bad Germans, the complicity of the Polish citizenry, the guilt and responsibility Jews have in their own annihilation. He strikes up a dangerously close-to-improper friendship with a Catholic novitiate, a joyless young woman whose outspoken condemnation of her church’s passive role in the Holocaust gets her into trouble.

But Clements is a sham. A gradual reveal shows us he has more ties to the camp than first thought. He is even more of a searcher than the others. He is looking for his past, and for answers to questions he knows he should have asked long ago.
It may be in dubious taste to refer to an 86-year-old as among the last of a dying breed, but Matthiessen, a three-time National Book Award winner—twice for the same book, The Snow Leopard—self-confessed spy and co-founder of the prestigious Paris Review, has made a career of following his curiosity around the globe. A naturalist as much as a novelist, he’s explored the animal kingdom in places so remote the fauna outnumbered the people. That is especially pertinent now, when a whole generation of authors considers the L train from Brooklyn into Manhattan a schlep.

This powerful, necessary novel is hard to take, yet impossible to turn away from. It doesn’t shy away from questioning the depths of human depravity, nor is it ashamed to admit that there are no real answers.

Australian-born author Evie Wyld’s novels ask tough questions without seeking easy answers. In her debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, she explored the impact of World War II and the Vietnam War on a single Australian family. Her new book, All the Birds, Singing, follows Jake Whyte, a young Australian woman living on a remote sheep farm on an island off the coast of England. When someone—or something—attacks her sheep, Jake is plunged into paranoia, brought on in part by her isolation, but also because of the secrets she carries about her childhood.

All the Birds, Singing has two narrative strands. The first follows Jake as she tries to track down the beast that threatens her livelihood. The second moves back in time, slowly piecing together—in reverse—what led her from family and friends to the lonely English outpost.

Where the English side of the story is fueled by disembodied fears and perhaps even a ghostly creature, the Australian side is rooted in clear memory and the kind of cause-and-effect storytelling made more powerful because it is told in reverse. It is to Wyld’s credit that she can maintain the mystery until the final pages.

Wyld excels in the intimate details that make up the relationship between humans and animals. Both continents are rich with flora and fauna—sheep, of course, but also blowflies, spiders and the singing birds of the title. Best of all are Jake’s interactions with the dogs in the novel, her faithful companion Dog and the decidedly creepy Kelly, a four-legged Mrs. Danvers.

Despite Jake’s gruff exterior, this is not a book about loneliness or even isolation. There are moments of connection and human kindness, from her fellow sheep shearers in Australia to her crusty English neighbor, Don. When a stranger named Lloyd shows up on her farm, he is less a menace than a fellow wounded soul, and the novel suggests that theirs is a friendship that could deepen. Wyld once again creates a complex character who may find recovery in small acts of kindness.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, April 2014

The title of Maggie Shipstead’s second novel, Astonish Me, is a fitting one indeed. It’s a request, a demand, a dare, all wrapped up in two little words, heavy with promise. And like the prima ballerina at the heart of the novel itself, Shipstead delivers a glorious story that does exactly what it says it will.

Superficially, Astonish Me is about the world of professional ballet: It is the story of Joan, a woman whose life is first shaped by her love of dance, and then by her love for an extraordinary Russian dancer (and defector). We follow Joan back and forth through time, from girl to grown woman, watching as passion propels her forward, heedless of the consequences and pain that are the ultimate fallout from such explosive affaires de coeur. As Joan’s pirouettes slowly morph into downward spirals both on and off the stage, the novel becomes a deeply thoughtful meditation on the relentless pursuit of perfection and just how far we’re willing to go for love.

Astonish Me is an awful lot of fun to read—the plot moves at a quick clip and is deeply engrossing—but it has a satisfying weight and delicious darkness that undercuts the sudsier elements. Shipstead’s writing isn’t showy, but dazzles nonetheless with vivid imagery and startling turns of phrase. Given that her last novel, Seating Arrangements, won the Dylan Thomas prize, there is a lot riding on this follow-up; far from a sophomore slump, this novel proves that Shipstead’s star is still on the rise as she pushes herself to exhilarating new heights. For those who might dismiss the book as “chick lit” masquerading as serious fiction, rest assured that Astonish Me is as nuanced and delightful as any reader could ever hope for a book to be.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Maggie Shipstead for Astonish Me.

Is there anyone who hasn’t wondered which actions and incidents most gave shape to their lives? In Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl, Stella is the author of her own life, recounting her story in a series of gracefully drawn but honestly expressed episodes starting in the 1960s and running to the present day.

Told in a series of perfectly observed moments, Clever Girl is not about what you want your life to be, but what you do with what life hands you.

We first encounter Stella as a 10-year-old girl living with her mother in a small apartment in Bristol on the west coast of England. Though her mother alleges she is a widow, Stella comes to other conclusions about her absent father’s real whereabouts. A bright and dreamy girl, she spends time reading and riding at the local stables. When her mother remarries, Stella finds herself chafing against her stepfather’s conventional household, drawn instead to the freedoms promised by the more permissive 1970s and the opportunities brought by a scholarship to a prestigious school.

Clever Girl is less about what you want your life to be than what you do with what life hands you. By the time she is in her early 20s, Stella is a single mother with two children. School is an impossibility, and she makes ends meet by keeping house for an English professor and later working in an art gallery.

Stella reveals her story as a series of moments, almost like a picaresque novel. The connecting thread is her cleverness, here translated as intellectual capabilities as well as curiosity about life. Though at one point she feels as though books “have let her down,” it is still her acumen that allows her to provide the links between one incident and the next.

Hadley is a consummate writer who excels at the kind of honest material details that fully round every scene. As someone who was born at roughly the same time as Stella, I can assure you Hadley’s recreation of the decades from 1960 to 2000 is deliciously accurate. Clever Girl is an elegant and accomplished novel that will entertain but also make you contemplate the trajectory of your own life.