Jones, and William Melvin Kelley. And like many pomo works, the plotting gets convoluted as City attempts to untangle the various threads of his personal history. But the struggle is part of the point. Laymon wants to position his complicated hero as part of a throughline of violence against Blacks across decades, from microaggressions to lynching. City proclaims that the Long Division he’s reading is “about tomorrow and yesterday and the magic of love.” That’s also true, if obliquely, of the novel Laymon has written. A sui generis, sometimes woolly exploration of the complexity and long reach of racism.
WHAT YOU CAN SEE FROM HERE
Leky, Mariana Trans. by Lewis, Tess Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $27.00 | Jun. 22, 2021 978-0-374-28882-2 A girl in a charming German town weathers loss and tries to map out her life. Many of the delights in German author Leky’s new novel are whimsical, but even if whimsy is not your preference, it’s impossible to escape her spell. And why would you want to escape such an entertaining diversion, anyway? The book takes place in a charming Western German village full of oddballs and dreamers: A little boy who longs to be a weight lifter; a Buddhist-leaning optician who refuses to confess his true love; a woman determined to be sad; a husband who wants to roam and the wife who wants to leave him. Our guide through the Westerwald is Luisa, a 10-year-old girl whose life is upended when her grandmother Selma dreams of an okapi. Whenever the creature appears to Selma, someone in town dies within 24 hours. The villagers are understandably worried now: “They kept clear of the good-natured cows who, they believed, might go berserk that day.” How Selma’s vision plays out changes the town and Luisa forever. Yet even as death makes its mark on the town, the bubbling force of life goes on as Luisa grows up and falls in love with a monk whose vow of celibacy is in peril from their first meeting. Leky’s bemused affection for her characters is apparent on every page, and it’s infectious. This is a generous and funny novel, though Leky doesn’t shy away from the ache of separation and the painful aftermath of loss. Her townspeople accept their fates with sorrow but also good humor and determination. “You can’t always choose which adventure you’re made for,” Luisa says. But we leave Leky’s world knowing that every ordinary day holds the potential for something wonderful. A warm novel with a light comic touch.
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M, KING’S BODYGUARD
Leonard, Niall Pantheon (272 pp.) $23.99 | Jul. 13, 2021 978-1-5247-4905-7
In 1901, as the crowned heads of Europe arrive in London for Queen Victoria’s funeral, a Scotland Yard detective assigned to protect the new king, Edward VII, must outwit a foreign assassin whose target may in fact be Kaiser
Wilhelm of Germany. This lively and assured historical drama opens as the reign of “tiny, and shrewd” Queen Victoria is replaced by that of her libidinous son, Albert, aka Edward VII, whose bodyguard, William Melville, is the novel’s world-weary narrator. “A Catholic peasant promoted far above his station,” as he jokingly puts it, Melville has risen to Detective Chief Superintendent “through tenacity, low cunning and [his] own clumping fists.” Irish by birth and suspicious by nature, he knows that the imminent royal funeral procession, as it winds through London, will become, “for terrorists...one long shooting gallery, with every prize a jackpot.” European anarchists are Melville’s main suspects (“how I despised these fanatics”), and, sure enough, villainous zealots promptly materialize, leading Melville on a merry chase, though he quickly sniffs out the existence of a murderous plot far more labyrinthine than one prompted by pure ideology. “Politics is a stately dance with poisoned daggers,” he observes, as he begins to doubt even his German sidekick, Gustav Steinhauer, who is the kaiser’s master spy and therefore on the right side. Or is he? Both Melville and Steinhauer, along with many other characters, are based on historical personages, and their portraits—along with that of stinking, foggy London—are finely drawn. The narrative pace never flags, and even the obligatory scenes of shootouts, explosions, and hurtling locomotives are refreshingly vivid. The novel’s quieter moments are, however, its best, and none is better than its final twist. “Let’s just say I work with certain people who share your concerns about developments on the Continent,” an aristocratic stranger says, inviting Melville for a chat at his club. “We could use a man of your experience.” So the next installment has surely begun. A briskly paced, richly atmospheric historical thriller.
THE LUMINOUS NOVEL
Levrero, Mario Trans. by McDermott, Annie And Other Stories (431 pp.) $19.95 paper | Aug. 3, 2021 978-1-91350-501-1
A masterwork of meta-referentiality by the late Uruguayan writer Levrero (1940-2004). Our narrator, Levrero himself, is a grumbler of Dostoyevskian proportions,
