4 minute read
THE WONDERS by Elena Medel; trans. by Lizzie Davis & Thomas Bunstead
the wonders
meets again some years later; soon they are lovers and have a son. Korelitz deftly limns this tension-riddled setup and the resulting Oppenheimer family dysfunction. Harrison, supersmart and arrogant, looks down on his siblings. Shut-off Lewyn seems to have imbibed his brother’s dismissive assessment of him. Sally keeps secrets from herself and others. Johanna, wracked by a longing for connection neither her children nor husband care to fulfill, learns of Salo’s other family on the eve of the triplets’ departure for college and decides to have the fourth embryo thawed and gestated by a surrogate; Phoebe is born in June 2000, shortly before Lewyn and Sally depart for determinedly separate lives at Cornell and Harrison for an ultra-alternative school that, somewhat paradoxically, nurtures his aggressively conservative views. Part 2, which chronicles the triplets’ college years, is long and at times alienating; Korelitz makes no attempt to soften the siblings’ often mean behavior, which climaxes in an ugly scene at their 19th birthday party in September 2001. It pays off in Part 3, narrated by latecomer Phoebe, now 17 and charged with healing her family’s gaping wounds. The resolution, complete with a wedding, persuasively and touchingly affirms that even the most damaged people can grow and change.
A bit slow in the middle section but on balance, a satisfyingly twisty tale rooted in complex characterizations.
STRANGERS WE KNOW
Marr, Elle Thomas & Mercer (284 pp.) $15.95 paper | May 1, 2022 978-1-5420-3277-3
A San Francisco copy editor finally meets her birth family up in Washington under the worst possible circumstances. After Ivy Hon submits her DNA to a testing company, she’s delighted to learn that Lottie Montagne, a first cousin she never knew she had, is also on their registry, and she’s even more excited when Lottie invites her for a visit so that she can meet her other relatives—though not her mother, Tatum Caine, who vanished shortly after giving birth to Ivy and giving her up for adoption. But the fly in the ointment is a monster: Special Agent Ballo of the FBI tells Ivy that her DNA is also a match for the Full Moon Killer, who’s murdered at least eight young women since 1988 and who, after several years off, has recently come roaring back to life. As if it weren’t stressful enough to be introducing herself for the first time to her birth relatives— imperious Grandma Aggie; Aggie’s ex-cop son, Terry; her sister, Tristen the taxidermist; her disapproving brother, Phillip; and the blessedly normal-seeming Lottie—now Ivy has to wonder which one of them is a serial killer. It’s a great setup, but Marr, who zigzags among the viewpoints of Ivy, Tatum, and a third party who seems more and more likely to be the Full Moon Killer, keeps upping the stakes like a compulsive gambler. The childhood secrets! The seductive men! The abusive sex cult! The authority figures who can’t be trusted! And on top of everything else, the approach of the full moon!
Don’t look behind you. Or in front of you. Or off to the side either.
THE WONDERS
Medel, Elena Trans. by Lizzie Davis & Thomas Bunstead Algonquin (240 pp.) $26.95 | March 1, 2022 978-1-64375-211-2
Prizewinning Spanish poet Medel’s debut novel examines the lives of three generations of women in Madrid with an unsparing eye.
A series of interlocking narratives about María, Carmen, and Alicia—all working-class women who find themselves in the capital city for varied reasons—the novel traces
transformations in Spanish life, culture, and politics from the end of the Franco era to the 21st century. The lives of Medel’s three protagonists, however, remain tied to their troubling economic circumstances, and a telling epigraph from Philip Larkin (“Clearly money has something to do with life”) provides a clue to the direction the women’s stories will take. A teenage pregnancy forces unmarried María out of her family’s modest provincial home to the city, away from her baby, Carmen, and into a series of demanding, physically exhausting jobs. Carmen’s apparently good fortunes turn after the suicide of her debt-burdened husband, and she and her school-age daughters struggle in the aftermath. Alicia, one of Carmen’s daughters, is haunted by her father’s death and floats through life with a lackluster retail job, stultifying marriage, and a habit of picking up random men for brief, distracting sexual encounters. Economic insecurity forces all three to compromise dreams and life choices, and some notes of their lives echo in the others (albeit in ways unrecognized by the women). The 2018 Women’s March in Madrid frames the beginning and end points of the novel and allows Medel to bring some of her major players together on one stage even if they are acting in their own dramas. The translation from Spanish of Medel’s unvarnished look at three constrained lives is unsentimental and direct.
Money changes everything (if you can get your hands on it).
DELPHINE JONES TAKES A CHANCE
Morrey, Beth Putnam (336 pp.) $27.00 | April 5, 2022 978-0-525-54247-6
A 28-year-old single mother in London who had a child at 17 starts to make small changes to get out of the rut she’s in.
Delphine Jones didn’t mean to get pregnant at 16, but it happened anyway. Now 28, she’s still living in the basement flat she grew up in with her father, her mother
