THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DU BOIS

“If this isn’t the Great American Novel, it’s a mighty attempt at achieving one.”

the love songs of w.e.b. du bois

Skirt quickly becomes popular with the cliquey other workers, and the Woman in the Yellow Cardigan remains as invisible as ever. Meanwhile, she keeps following the Woman in the Purple Skirt: listening in on her conversations, tracking her purchases, and waiting outside her apartment. Imamura’s pacing is as deft and quick as the best thrillers, but her prose is also understated and quietly subtle. Occasionally the dialogue can feel somewhat canned: “She’s quick about her work,” one of the other hotel workers says, and the response is, “Uh-huh. She sure is.” Still, this is a minor complaint of a novel that is, overall, a resounding success.

A subtly ominous story about voyeurism and the danger of losing yourself in someone else.

Jeffers, Honorée Fanonne Harper/HarperCollins (816 pp.) $28.99 | Jul. 27, 2021 978-0-06-294-293-7

A sprawling, ambitious debut novel that is as impassioned in promoting Black women’s autonomy as it is insistent on acknowledging our common humanity. Ailey Pearl Garfield, the protagonist of this epochal saga, is a compelling mélange of intellectual curiosity, scathing observation, and volatile emotion. Though her grandmother may have preferred that she join the parade of medical doctors in their family, Ailey is destined to become a historian. Her journey toward that goal, fraught with heartache, upheaval, and conflict from her childhood through adolescence and collegiate years, is interwoven with the results of her inquiry into her family history. That history is deeply rooted in the Georgia town of Chicasetta, where Ailey’s Black ancestors were enslaved and exploited by a “White Man with Strange Eyes” named Samuel Pinchard, who not only brutalized and demeaned his slaves, but also haphazardly procreated with them over the decades before the Civil War. The “songs” interspersed throughout the book, chronicling in vivid, sometimes-graphic detail the antebellum lives of Ailey’s forbears, are bridges linking Ailey’s own coming-of-age travails in what is referred to only as the City. Precocious, outspoken, and sensitive, Ailey often tests the patience of the grown-ups in her life, especially her parents, Geoff and Belle, whose own arduous passage to love and marriage through the 1950s and ’60s is among the many subplots crowding this capacious, time-traversing narrative. The story always swerves back to Chicasetta, where Ailey spends her summers, and her encounters with friends and relations, the most notable of whom is her beloved Uncle Root, a retired professor at a historically Black college where he’d first made the acquaintance of the novel’s eponymous scholar/activist. In her first novel, Jeffers, a celebrated poet, manages the difficult task of blending the sweeping with the intimate, and, as in most big books, she risks stress-testing some of her own narrative threads. Still, the sturdiest of those threads can throb with haunting poignancy, as in the account of Ailey’s promisingbut-troubled sister, Lydia, which can stand alone as a masterful deconstruction of addiction’s origins and outcomes.

If this isn’t the Great American Novel, it’s a mighty attempt

at achieving one.

A SONG EVERLASTING

Jin, Ha Pantheon (352 pp.) $26.95 | Jul. 27, 2021 978-1-5247-4879-1

A Chinese singer tries to avoid becoming a political pawn after a tour of the United States puts him at odds with his government. Though 37 years old and a well-established vocalist in his native China, Yao Tian seems curiously naïve and passive. Things seem to happen to him; he doesn’t make them happen. At the end of his government-sponsored troupe’s American tour, he’s invited by a political activist he knew in China to perform at a celebration for Taiwan’s National Day. He accepts, not out of any political convictions but because the fee he’s offered will cover part of his daughter’s tuition at an expensive Beijing prep school. The performance lands him in trouble back home, where he’s threatened with the losses of employment and his passport. Those threats compel him to return to the United States, where he hopes his wife and daughter can eventually join him. The rest of the matter-of-fact narrative documents his life in America and the attempts by the Chinese government to besmirch his reputation, to turn what happens to him into a morality play about the consequences for an artist who betrays his homeland. Written with terse command, in short chapters and without literary flourish, the novel itself is no morality tale. Things happen, life is lived, a very different life than the one Tian might have known had he agreed to quit performing abroad and embarrassing his country. Far from his family and native culture, he processes personal tragedy, professional upheaval, and unlikely romance. Downward mobility takes his performing career from the concert hall to casinos to performing on the streets. Yet he doesn’t seem to regret his exchange of collective security in China for individual freedom in the U.S. Though he had never considered himself particularly political, he becomes more acutely aware of the political dimensions of his position. As he loses some of his voice as a singer, he gains more of a voice as a songwriter. He makes a life for himself, and it is one that both surprises and satisfies him.

Written with great control, the novel unfolds as surprisingly as life often does.

SUMMER OF LOVE AND EVIL

Kinnamon, Michael Publerati (250 pp.) $16.95 paper | May 1, 2021 978-0-9979137-5-0

A teenage boy’s life in 1960s rural Iowa. Before he departs for college at Drake University in Des Moines in the fall of 1967, high school valedictorian Charles Weaver must endure one more long summer in the tiny (pop. 2,500) southern Iowa town of Lockwood. With the assistance of his father, a lawyer and member of the city council, he lands a job on the city street crew, patching potholes and spraying oil on unpaved streets to tamp down the dust. Charles’ romance with Frankie, who happens to be the daughter of his irascible boss, displays occasional sparks without ever truly catching fire. These relationships offer intriguing opportunities to investigate themes of economic and social class that Kinnamon doesn’t explore in depth. From the Fourth of July parade to the county fair to a Pentecostal service, he effectively evokes the atmosphere and daily rhythms of small-town life, though this skill isn’t matched by an ability to create either emotionally complex characters or compelling action. For an intelligent 18-year-old, Charlie seems curiously unreflective, and the closest the novel comes to a moment of real narrative tension is when he and his co-worker Jerry discover a charred body at the site of a fire that destroys a historic church. Unfortunately, the mystery surrounding that event is never fully developed. Save for the occasional allusion to the Vietnam War or the urban riots of that summer, Lockwood, a town whose center is decaying and whose surrounding farms are being acquired by corporate agricultural interests, also seems oddly divorced from the America of its time. Kinnamon’s treatment of his subject is earnest, but his palpable affection for Charlie and most of his other characters doesn’t translate into a memorable reading experience.

A sincere coming-of-age novel that fails to deliver on its promise.

SILVER TEARS

Läckberg, Camilla Knopf (320 pp.) $21.49 | Jul. 6, 2021 978-0-525-65799-6

Faye Adelheim returns to defend Revenge, her cosmetics company, from a hostile takeover. As she searches for the name of her opponent, can she also protect her daughter and find true love? Läckberg’s second novel about the brilliant economist who overcame a stifling marriage certainly draws on the strengths of the first: The plot careens at breakneck speed through steamy sex scenes, startling revelations, and flashbacks to Faye’s very dark childhood riddled with rape and murder. What the story lacks in believability (there are poorly planned murders, successful executives who spend inordinate amounts of time drinking without any repercussions, and a heroine who fails to learn from her own mistakes), it more than makes up for with soap-opera–level drama and fireworks. It all begins with Faye having set up house in Italy with her mother and her daughter, Julienne. Faye had framed her ex-husband, Jack, for killing Julienne, though Julienne is secretly still alive, and now Jack has escaped from jail. Meanwhile, a shadowy figure has begun buying up shares of Revenge from Faye’s investors— women who have been loyal up to now, because everyone in Faye’s circle sees the company as a way to strike back at oppressive men. What could possibly be inducing them to sell? As Faye sets out to investigate, she meets David, an angel investor in a bad marriage, and soon the sexual sparks fly. Always ready to support women who need a helping hand, Faye picks up a few new employees along her journey, including Ylva, another smart economist and Jack’s former mistress, and Alice, the ex-wife of Henrik, Jack’s former business partner. Although Faye has a few blind spots that prevent her from recognizing her nemesis, the women band together to save the company and commit some mayhem of their own.

A scandal-filled page-turner sure to delight the beach-read crowd.

LONG DIVISION

Laymon, Kiese Scribner (304 pp.) $13.99 paper | Jun. 1, 2021 978-1-982174-82-8

A revised version of Laymon’s elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism. The first novel by Laymon, initially published in 2013, is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies. In one, it’s 2013 and Citoyen, aka City, is a Mississippi high schooler vying to win a national title in the “Can You Use That Word in a Sentence” competition, a kind of spelling bee for syntax. City’s onstage explosion (over the fraught, contentious word niggardly) goes viral, prompting him to escape to his grandmother’s home, where he pores over Long Division, a novel that purports to explain the recent, muchdiscussed disappearance of Baize, a local Black girl. City’s stint with his grandmother is marked by confrontations with racists and extreme payback against them as well as contemplations of racist language from the N-word on down. The novel’s second part is Long Division itself, in which City is a teenager in 1985 who, with the help of his friend Shalaya, finds a portal in the woods that sends them forward to 2013, where Baize is an aspiring rapper, and back to 1964, where he’s forced to confront the Ku Klux Klan. In style and structure, Laymon’s novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and ’70s—Toni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl