10 minute read
2 A.M. IN LITTLE AMERICA by Ken Kalfus
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
overstayed his visa, when he meets Marlise, another refugee. For a brief stretch before the unnamed country’s politics turn fractious and they’re banished and separated, she becomes a friend, companion, and temporary refuge, and he looks for her—or for her afterimage—everywhere he goes from then on. About 10 years later, having bounced from place to place while his homeland’s civil conflict simmers on—and while xenophobic and tribal politics take root across the globe—Ron finds himself in one of the last nations that still welcomes castoffs from the once-great, once-smug power. He lives in a filthy banlieue he calls Little America, again in squalor, again with a steady job as a repairman of security-related electronics. The book is, as it keeps (nimbly) reminding us, a camera obscura: partly because indirect and tricky, bent, not-quite-trustable views are the nature of things; partly because of Ron’s marginal and scorned status; partly because he’s a loner; and partly due to an affliction that makes him see resemblances between people that may not be real (and on the flip side, differences that may not signify much), Ron can make out reality only indirectly, by way of mirrors and shades, and the image he ends up with is inverted, distorted, deeply mysterious. Then, when America’s bitter political split starts to replicate itself even in the ghetto— and when he encounters a strangely familiar female schoolmate and is pressed into service as an informant by a detective—the picture gets murkier, scarier, and more peculiar yet. Kalfus has always worked by ingenious indirection; his A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) is a 9/11 novel as seen through the comic lens of an imploding marriage. Here he does so again, and with similar success, creating a commentary on current American politics that never sets foot in America, takes place in a distant future, and takes pains (as its protagonist does) to avoid the overtly partisan.
A strange, highly compelling tale about what happens when American privilege and insulation get turned inside out.
HUNGRY TOWN
Kapcala, Jason West Virginia Univ. Press (288 pp.) $19.99 paper | March 1, 2022 978-1-952271-40-3
There appears to be no escape from the voracious appetite of this dead-end Rust Belt town, where the deserted mill symbolizes how little hope remains. The Lodi, Ohio, of this debut novel offers nothing to do, nowhere to go, and few prospects for anything better. In setting at least, hard-boiled crime fiction doesn’t come much harder boiled than this. Kids get in trouble, because what else is there to do? The good cops try to battle the disillusionment that has corroded the ideals of the bad cops. There are two seemingly distinct plotlines that must inevitably intersect. Stefani Rieux is one of the best and most decorated cops in Ohio, though she has combated the casual and relentless sexism of her colleagues throughout her career. Her partner, Harry Mulqueen, has her back and her trust. They also might be in love with each other, though neither is ready to admit it, perhaps partially because she is engaged to Harry’s slightly wealthier and more ambitious brother. They get called to the mill to investigate a disturbance, which involves kids shooting some amateur porn. Because of some heavy-handed treatment by another cop, one of the kids flees, jumps, and dies. There are repercussions for all of them and throughout the community. Around the same time, a young woman arrives in town after a series of foster homes have honed her survival instincts. She is fleeing from a grifter boyfriend and the mysterious disappearance of a young boy who had been left in her care. She finds a job at the local diner, which serves as a sanctuary for the regulars. Her story, the cops’ story, and the story of the dead kid and his survivors become enmeshed, but there can be no real resolution, not in a town like this.
There are plenty of stock characters here, but a literary flair lifts this above the routine procedural.
THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI
Khan, Uzma Aslam Deep Vellum (384 pp.) $26.95 | April 12, 2022 978-1-646-05164-9
Heaven or hell? Paradise or prison? The Andaman Islands in the early 1940s— the setting for Khan’s fifth novel—are rife with paradox. Years ago, in India, Haider Ali was convicted of a double homicide by the British government and transported to South Andaman Island, where he served out his jail term and was then given a hut to live in. His wife was sent with him and gave birth to two children. Now, at the height of World War II, the island’s residents are caught up in the battle between foreign empires, the British and the Japanese. The idyllic beauty of the islands conflicts with the horrors of prison life, indigence, and the ravages of war; the island is a microcosm of the cruel effects of British colonization, and Haider points out that “no Indian, not even one who had never been inside a jail, was free.” Nomi and Zee Ali, unlike their parents, are Local Borns coming of age within this complex geopolitical landscape. When the Japanese invade the island in 1942, the fragile existence the Alis have built in exile is shattered forever. In a historical novel that is both deeply researched and beautifully written, Khan shines light on a story little known outside the Andaman Islands and gives voice to the most vulnerable in this global narrative. At times, the first half of the novel can seem a bit disorienting with all of its figurative language, twists in chronology, and nuanced political situations. This may be intentional, though—a metaphor for the exiled inhabitants of the island who are ultimately portrayed as people without a country. Things pick up quickly in the second half as Nomi’s story hurtles to its heartbreaking but empowering conclusion.
Khan perfectly captures global history in all of its ironic and disorienting glory.
we measure the earth with our bodies
WE MEASURE THE EARTH WITH OUR BODIES
Lama, Tsering Yangzom Bloomsbury (368 pp.) $26.00 | May 17, 2022 978-1-63557-641-2
The aftereffects of the oppression of Tibetans across two continents and six decades power this domestic epic. Lama’s debut novel opens in 1960, a decade after China’s invasion of Tibet and shortly after a quelled uprising and exile of the Dalai Lama. Lhamo and Tenkyi, two sisters, are forced to leave for a refugee camp in Nepal and orphaned not long after. From there, the girls’ paths diverge: Lhamo remains in Nepal as the camp becomes a tent city, has a daughter, and attempts to maintain the spiritual traditions stamped out by the Chinese. Bookish Tenkyi, meanwhile, leaves for Canada and, by 2012, takes in Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, an aspiring scholar of Tibetan culture. The non-Tibetan academics Dolma meets are knowledgeable but also condescending, and Westerners’ callousness toward her heritage is symbolized by a statue of a “Nameless Saint” that Dolma believes is a stolen family heirloom. Dolma’s investigations bring her deeper into her family history, the ethically messy artifacts trade, and Tibetan spirituality, culminating in a trek to the edge of the country she’s exiled from. Lama’s delivery can be somewhat stiff—romantic interludes feel flat, and Dolma’s dialogue is sometimes sodden with explication of Tibetan political history and spiritual practice. But the novel thrives as a story about sisterhood, parenthood, and the heartpiercing feeling of exile. Dolma can’t bring herself to admire Toronto’s “Little Tibet” neighborhood, which she sees as a “copy of a copy of home. Another temporary stop in an endless journey.” (The frustrations are exemplified by Tenkyi’s dashed hopes of becoming a teacher; she works as a hotel housekeeper.) And Lama wisely gives the novel multiple narrators—Lhamo, Tenkyi, Dolma, and Samphel, a childhood friend of the sisters— who capture the breadth of Tibetan culture and the range of emotional impacts of separation.
A smart, sweeping story about the abuse and transformation of a culture stripped of its country.
young adult
