4 minute read
THE FAVOR by Nora Murphy
efforts of Clement’s father to repeat the big win he had with a horse he trained. Gambling, borrowing money, and tensions over debt pervade the Killeaton household. Elsewhere, the narrative follows Clement, a clever loner who creates miniature racetracks and farms in his backyard, prepares elaborate horse races using marbles, copes with bullies, and tries to learn about sex from schoolgirls who generally delight in deflecting his efforts. Murnane is skilled at closely observed scenes and quite funny at times, but he will likely frustrate readers looking for conventional fiction. The chief pleasures here are his departures from convention, eccentricities of tone and diction, and flights of fancy, all trademarks of his later fiction. In one example, Clement is studying the light coming through his front door’s green-gold glass panel when the narration takes off for two pages of long, complex sentences about colorful creatures and oddly shaped cities and great journeys. It’s a glimpse of the writer finding his own path and an esthetic springboard in the parsing of the ripples and riffs of a boy’s imagination when not waylaid by sex and saints and bullies.
An essential entry in this exceptional writer’s corpus.
THE FAVOR
Murphy, Nora Minotaur (288 pp.) $27.99 | May 31, 2022 978-1-2508-2242-0
Family attorney Murphy’s first novel is an unnerving feminist retake on Strangers on a Train. Even though they’ve never met, Leah Dawson and McKenna Hawkins have a lot in common. They’re “roughly the same height, with pretty features, blue eyes, and long blond hair.” They live in the same neighborhood in suburban Clarkstown, Maryland. They’re both childless, well-educated professionals—Leah’s an attorney, McKenna’s a pediatrician—married to even more successful colleagues. And both of their husbands are domestic abusers who seek to control every aspect of their lives. Psychiatrist Zackary Hawkins has pressed McKenna relentlessly to quit her job; divorce attorney Liam Dawson arranged for Leah to get fired from hers. As a result, Leah has withdrawn from most of her friendship groups, spent almost no time with her beloved mother and brother, and spiraled into nonstop drinking. One night, while she’s out walking around the neighborhood in lieu of doing the more strenuous exercise urged by Liam, who blames her illness a few months earlier for her miscarriage, she happens to pass the Hawkins house and sees a disturbing interaction between husband and wife. Fascinated and repelled, she keeps returning to look in on her counterpart until one fateful night when just looking isn’t enough. Leah’s intervention in to McKenna’s domestic crisis irreversibly changes the lives of both women even though the involvement of Detective Jordan Harrison, of the Clarkstown Police, doesn’t intensify the nightmare; it just transposes it into a new key and threatens to prolong it indefinitely.
Strikes an unsettling chord from the beginning and never lets go.
NERUDA ON THE PARK
Natera, Cleyvis Ballantine (336 pp.) $28.00 | May 17, 2022 978-0-593-35848-1
An upwardly mobile young Manhattan lawyer and her parents react to the gentrification of their Dominican neighborhood in Natera’s debut novel. Since her Ivy League education and job in corporate law have already made her an outsider, early signs of gentrification don’t bother Luz, who lives in the (fictional) Nothar Park neighborhood of struggling immigrants with her mother, Eusebia, and policeman father, Vladimir. Then 29-year-old Luz is suddenly laid off by her firm for no apparent cause and begins questioning her identity as a woman-of-color careerist. Meanwhile, after
condemned to cymru
bumping her head in a fall, Eusebia transforms into a determined crusader, organizing Nothar Park neighbors to scare the gentrifiers away by staging arranged crimes. Formerly nurturing Eusebia becomes detached and increasingly resentful as long suppressed grief and grievances surrounding Vladimir’s original decision to move to New York resurface. They swell once she learns that he has secretly been building a retirement home for them back in the Dominican Republic. News that their apartment building is going condo and offering renter buyouts exacerbates the schism in the marriage. Vladimir is thrilled, Eusebia furiously resistant. Caught between her parents, Luz is conflicted, especially since her new lover—White, rich, and entitled but endearingly vulnerable—turns out to be the gentrifying developer. While Luz finds herself increasingly drawn into his privileged orbit, she also discovers unexpectedly meaningful joy using her legal chops gratis to solve her neighbors’ immigration and insurance problems when their involvement in Eusebia’s “crimes” backfires. As Eusebia and Luz engage in a classic mother-daughter battle over control and independence, the juxtaposition of their confused inner lives shapes the plot with unpredictable curves that confound the usual left-right political didactics. Instead, through these women, Natera plays with definitions of home and material and spiritual success, showing how the personal and political can become confused even when a cause, or a crime, seems straightforward.
A savvy melodrama, warmhearted and as astute as a lawyer’s brief.
CONDEMNED TO CYMRU
Nicholls, M.J. Sagging Meniscus Press (214 pp.) $20.00 paper | May 1, 2022 978-1-952386-24-4
An experimental comic romp encompassing Wales, literature, and mommy issues.
The setup for Nicholls’ novel is deliberately absurd: After a war between
