9 minute read
BELLE GREENE by Alexandra Lapierre; trans. by Tina Kover
that brings them together. Mitsutsuka and Fuyuko begin meeting regularly at a cafe, where they talk about all sorts of things but mainly about “the mysteries of light.” While their relationship is important to Fuyuko’s development, the women in her life are even more important. Through Fuyuko and the women around her, Kawakami has created a rich and notable examination of the varied ways women choose to live their lives and the gains and losses that come with the choices they’ve made. Hijiri is the same age as Fuyuko but her total opposite. She’s sex positive, prizes her independence, and speaks her mind. Kyoko is the founder of her own business, more traditional, and critical of Hijiri’s lifestyle. Noriko is in a sexless marriage and loves being a mother, but both she and her husband are having affairs. Fuyuko’s indecisiveness, of course, results in discontentment. She says of herself, “I had faked it the whole way. In all those years of doing whatever I was told to do, I had convinced myself that I was doing something consequential, in order to make excuses for myself, as I was doing right now, and perpetually dismissed the fact that I’d done nothing with my life, glossing over it all.” Kawakami writes with the tender and incisive sensibilities of a poet. She never prescribes the right way to live, but Fuyuko becomes a happier person because of her relationships with others.
An unforgettable and masterful work.
THE BODY BY THE SHORE
Khair, Tabish Interlink (224 pp.) $16.00 paper | April 19, 2022 978-1-62371-846-6
Beware the fungus among us. After attending an academic seminar, a group of scientists, all prominent in their various fields, suffer career setbacks and share an alarming tendency to die in peculiar accidents. This interdisciplinary group had met to explore a radical new theory recasting the conventional understanding of the nature of human life: What if the unique ability of Homo sapiens to think abstractly is the result of space-borne symbiotic microbes? As a sinister network of intelligence operatives maneuver to leverage this information, a frightened young Caribbean woman trapped on a decommissioned oil rig, a retired Danish policeman, and a former covert operative are drawn into the conspiracy as they struggle to puzzle out the strange circumstances confronting them. Khair’s cerebral thriller, set in a pandemic-ravaged near future, borrows liberally from the Michael Crichton playbook, animating classic suspense tropes with heady scientific speculation and dire warnings regarding the hubris of humans tampering with forces beyond their control. Khair centers the action in Denmark, cannily exploiting the country’s tidy, homogenous reputation to make trenchant observations about the unpredictable long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, a leitmotif that elegantly underscores the frequent authorial disquisitions on the mutative powers of microscopic organisms. The story’s real strength, however, lies in the shifting perspectives of his vividly realized characters, from the smart, resourceful woman stranded at sea to the reflexively racist but fundamentally decent old cop to the sophisticated and formidable secret agent; each is a fully dimensional and compelling point-of-view character, and their wildly divergent backgrounds and worldviews allow Khair to approach the novel’s questions about human nature from a variety of intriguing angles.
Familiar territory navigated with intelligence and grace.
BELLE GREENE
Lapierre, Alexandra Trans. by Tina Kover Europa Editions (480 pp.) $28.00 | June 14, 2022 978-1-60945-758-7
In this fictionalization of a true story, a young Black woman named Belle da Costa Green passes for White and rises to become the first director of J.P. Morgan’s library. In this extensively researched historical novel, we see Belle from the time she’s a young woman born Belle Greener, daughter of the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. After he abandons his family, Belle makes a pact with her mother and siblings to change their surname and pass for White. They swear secrecy. None will have children, for fear of being found out: “Six irrevocably intertwined fates, and if any one of them were to fall short, it would bring the others down with it.” Brilliant, bookish, and unsentimental, Belle gets a job at the Princeton library, where she meets Junius Spencer Morgan and eventually finds her way to his uncle J.P., who’s looking for someone to oversee his new project. Belle’s literary expertise helps her secure Morgan’s trust, and he rewards her with the responsibility of shaping the library’s collection. Belle closes herself off to thoughts of her heritage or her former life. Her focus on success remains singular. Morgan is mercurial and possessive. Belle is formidable. She’s torn by twin feelings: “the intoxication of feeling herself to be free, and the frustration of having to submit to the tyranny of her master.” Eventually, Morgan sends her to Europe to bid on items at auction; the library is entirely hers to shape. Yet she’s aware at all times that she has “a career based entirely on the protection of an individual more rich and powerful than [herself].” Tension builds as Belle tries to avoid losing the career that supports her family. As she tries to outbid the other collectors of the day in a new world that’s full of wealth and eager to grab up the world’s treasures, she presents a carefully shaped persona. She adopts a new background because she believes it’s the only way to succeed in a broken system. Passing for White puts Belle’s life at risk every day. She’s consumed by the library and her secret; scenes with her real-life historical counterparts are fleshed out with dialogue drawn from primary sources such as letters. Occasionally these conversations feel stilted, but Belle’s story is so exceptional that readers won’t mind.
An engaging story about a brilliant woman who risks everything.
so happy for you
SO HAPPY FOR YOU
Laskey, Celia Hanover Square Press (352 pp.) $26.99 | June 7, 2022 978-1-335-42690-1
Society’s obsession with unwed women leads to destruction. From the first line of Laskey’s novel, readers may wonder if they’re dealing with hyperbole or horror: “If you want to know the story of how my best friend and I ended up trying to kill each other, I should probably start with the night she asked me to be her maid of honor.” Robin Hawkins, a queer Brooklyn woman in her early 30s, is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on society’s pervasive focus on marriage. It’s a time when only 21% of people get married and 76% of marriages end in divorce, meaning “fewer people were buying houses and having kids, which meant suburbs became ghost towns and cities became wildly over-crowded...even though Americans were happier than ever….Happiness was not good for capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy.” Urged by her adviser to make her dissertation sexier by adding real-life case studies, Robin hesitantly agrees to be the maid of honor at her best friend Ellie’s wedding. From there, a series of increasingly sinister events unfolds, spurred on by Ellie’s desperation to bring good luck to her wedding and Robin’s growing unrest. The bridezilla trope is pretty well played out by now, and Laskey winks a little too much at The Handmaid’s Tale. Nevertheless, Laskey successfully creates an eerie tone for the novel and a discomforting closeness between Ellie and Robin, two women who share a deep bond forged in adolescence. Ultimately, the novel settles into the sweet spot of dystopia: just unrealistic enough to feel fantastical but grounded in sufficient reality for the reader to pose the question, could this really happen?
An exploration of a friendship brought to the brink.
A BLIND CORNER
Macy, Caitlin Little, Brown (224 pp.) $27.00 | June 21, 2022 978-0-316-43419-5
These seven stories center around women and girls who feel a need to prove themselves despite their socio-economic advantages or disadvantages, all of which make them uncomfortable. Class is always an issue here. While some stories concern girls striving to rise above their modest backgrounds, Macy mostly concentrates on women trying to find where they fit now that they’re among the elite. The opener, “One of Us,” sets the tone. Insecure young mother Frances has never felt quite comfortable among her privileged urban peers. Attending a dinner party with her husband in their new vacation community, Frances is desperate for acceptance. She convinces herself that the other guests’ drinking and lack of political correctness are charming until her new friends’ racism becomes too blatant to ignore. In the title story, another couple takes a vacation in Tuscany, where the wife’s insecurity as a wealthy traveler ruins her trip. In “Nude Hose” and “The Taker,” strange men disrupt smart young women’s planned trajectories, but only briefly. In “We Don’t Believe in That Crap,” two daughters knowingly watch less-than-appreciative reactions to their mother’s condescending, if well-intentioned, gestures of kindness to the less advantaged; yet the bourgeois discipline their parents have instilled in the girls proves valuable during an emergency. The collection’s penultimate story, “Residents Only,” offers a different yet complementary take on parents and children while clearly laying out the book’s themes. A woman on a trip to Acapulco with her two young daughters recognizes that the control the girls believe she maintains over their lives is a facade and that her desire to prove herself as more than just another upper-middle-class tourist is doomed even before the vacation goes disastrously wrong. In “The Little Rats,” the final story, a character comes full circle. A prep school scholarship student whose relative poverty becomes more obvious to her during a trip to France reappears 30 years later as a successful woman in true control of her life.
Macy’s lively, acute voice can edge toward cruelty but ultimately remains good-natured.
THE FALCON
Maldonado, Isabella Thomas & Mercer (333 pp.) $15.95 paper | June 28, 2022 978-1-5420-3562-0
FBI agent Nina Guerrera goes up against the unknown subject who’s kidnapping and assaulting students at an elite Phoenix university. Soon after Melissa Campbell becomes the sixth student at the Arizona Institute of Technology to fall victim to a man who follows obsessively well-established routines and documents each of his abductions with meticulous notes, a task force drawn from the Phoenix PD and the FBI discovers the mummified remains of her five predecessors in a cave beneath a city park. That’s not an encouraging sign for either Melissa or the authorities. The strain on Nina is especially intense, because Bianca Babbage, the whipsmart teenager she rescued from the streets five years ago and took under her wing, is visiting AIT to determine whether she should apply there to work with computer scientist Dr. Feldman or nanotech implant researcher Dr. Dawson. A tyro could see where this plot is headed, but Nina, along with her sometime partner, Phoenix PD Detective Javier Perez, and FBI Special Agents Jeffrey Wade, Kelly Breck, and Jake Kent, is so busy leaning on the principal suspect, acting AIT police chief Lt. Stan Hazel, that everything the kidnapper does takes the group completely by surprise, and the only person capable of getting the upper hand on a predator who treats his prey as falcons to
