“A strange, highly compelling tale about what happens when American privilege and insulation get turned inside out.” 2 a.m. in little america
Her paramour, Cyrus, died before the book opens, and she remains haunted by his memory. Her relationship with him also helped to distance her from her very religious family, described as “a cult of two parents and three siblings.” Francine has other reasons for wanting to stay away from her family, especially her father—who, we eventually learn, is capable of horrific acts. In the aftermath of Cyrus’ death, Francine finds that she’s returned to her family’s orbit even as she bonds with her new neighbors and attempts to find her own passions—including a love of tap dancing, sparked by a Gregory Hines performance. The most moving parts of this novel are when Huffey describes Francine having to stifle aspects of her truest self when around her family: “From now on, while in the Holy City of Monrovia she must always be a good Didwell, and pretend to go to church, and never mention the name of Cyrus, and honor Mr. Didwell’s status: perfect as God is perfect.” It’s at these moments when the book is most resonant. The tonal shifts between the comic and the harrowing are jarring at times, but Huffey’s empathy for her protagonist is tangible. A tonally uneven trip back to a bygone Californian age.
A POSTCARD FOR ANNIE
Jessen, Ida Trans. by Martin Aitken Archipelago (180 pp.) $18.00 paper | May 10, 2022 978-1-953861-22-1
These six short stories by award-winning Danish writer and translator Jessen take an unshrinking look at love in vari-
ous forms. A woman who makes a living reupholstering furniture finds herself reevaluating her husband after a visit from a dying friend. Trapped in her marriage by love and hope, she considers the other small-business owners in their seaside town: “Even in the crippling economic crisis, optimism prevailed, or perhaps more accurately stubborness [sic], indomitableness...making the best of a bad situation.” In another story, told from multiple points of view, the mother of two young children is murdered, and an elderly couple with information about the crime faces an agonizing choice. A translator in a sexually unsatisfying marriage fights with her husband, then reconciles, then fights again. “How horrid a love,” she thinks. Romantic or maternal, love demands a steep price. In the story “Mother and Son,” Lisbet imagines she can see her wayward 20-year-old “surrounded by a light so fierce that even a bitterly cold day in a dismal parking lot feels like unrequited love.” Jessen’s writing is graceful, unhurried, convincing. The narratives unfold in unexpected ways. In the title story, a young woman witnesses a bus accident and meets a man. The story then jumps ahead 20 years. Returning to the city where it happened, she reflects on how that small event changed her life and on the girl she’d been then. An awareness of time—whether years or eons—brightens otherwise bleak situations. The furniture repairer muses about the previous ice age: “Digging in the garden, she would find remains of seaweed embedded deep in the sandy soil. And far out on the open sea, fishermen would discover in their nets the roots of trees from a bygone forest. She took some measure of comfort in this, the knowledge that in time everything came round again.” The complexities of love and the passage of time enrich this insightful, original collection.
2 A.M. IN LITTLE AMERICA
Kalfus, Ken Milkweed (256 pp.) $25.00 | May 10, 2022 978-1-57131-144-3 From the undersung Kalfus, another tonally intricate triumph, this one about the bewilderment, alienation, and sheer strangeness of being a refugee. Ron Patterson is an American who fled his native land as civil war and chaos descended. At the book’s beginning he’s a 20-something migrant in an unnamed country, eking out a subsistence as a repairman, having 24
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15 march 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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