6 minute read
HOW TO FALL OUT OF LOVE MADLY by Jana Casale
A TIDY ENDING
Cannon, Joanna Scribner (352 pp.) $26.99 | Aug. 2, 2022 978-1-982185-57-2
Cannon’s third novel centers on a Welshwoman with a secret traumatic past in a town with a possible serial killer. What are the salient details in this story? Cannon, a master of obfuscation, makes it hard to tell. There is Linda, the narrator, certainly. She is married to Terry. She is miserable. Her childhood was ruined by allegations toward her father—sexual abuse or misconduct is implied—and his subsequent death. She and her mother relocated to the undistinguished English town where the book takes place. She is 43. As the book opens, a murder victim has been found in town, the second in recent times. Linda seems to spot a clue watching the press conference on TV but doesn’t say what it is. Meanwhile, she becomes obsessed with Rebecca Finch, former resident of her house, whose luxe catalogs still arrive in the mail. Linda is a slippery one, as a character and as a narrator. She describes to the reader, over and over again, how things are. What people are like. What people do or will believe. And she often sounds astute. But when she narrates herself in social settings, she seems tragically awkward and friendless. Time goes on and the bodies pile up. Linda stalks Rebecca and makes her acquaintance. So much time is spent on Linda’s daily movements and musings, so much time on the Rebecca plot. The murders are a hot topic in the neighborhood, but are they even important? Where will it all lead? Will it be satisfying? The ending is not, as promised, tidy.
An exercise in red herrings.
HOW TO FALL OUT OF LOVE MADLY
Casale, Jana Dial Press (352 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 2, 2022 978-0-593-44772-7
Three young women come to terms with the roles of the men in their lives and the sad fact that they put them there. “I can’t hear them having sex, but I did hear her say one time, ‘There’s no way I’m doing that.’ And I can’t help but wonder what it is she doesn’t want to do....And if she won’t do it, would I? I don’t think so, but when she said that I wanted to scream out and say, ‘I’ll do it!’ ” This is Joy, who is hopelessly in love with her roommate Theo, who has an exquisitely beautiful girlfriend named Celine who frequently stays over and...yeah. In an even-more-impressive continuation of the work she began with her debut, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky (2018), Casale has again taken the detritus of women’s inner lives—the things we wished had never happened, the thoughts we wished we’d never had, the endless self-flagellation about our bodies—and made something funny, warm, and compelling; something sisterly in the finest sense of the word. Joy and her roommate, Annie, take Theo as a third housemate to help make ends meet, but then Annie’s boyfriend, Jason, invites her to move in with him. This would be more of a win if Annie didn’t have to manage every single interaction she has with Jason to avoid irritating him, asking something of him, or frightening him off. In one bitterly funny scene, he lights up the whole house with candles in order to tell her he’s not ready to get married but someday he will be. Casale’s narrative voice is deadpan, funny, and clean without being faux flat or pretentious. She controls the narrative not seamlessly but with interesting flexes of the storytelling muscle. Sometimes she tells you what’s going on from a God’s-eye view. “This is where Joy could have spared herself.” “Here was where so much came together for Annie.” Other times she lets us directly into the women’s internal monologues, with first-person sections. The most fascinating of these belongs to Celine, a person who has to live with being so attractive that it’s all anyone can ever think about.
Casale is an American Sally Rooney, so smart about friendship and love.
tomorrow in shanghai
TOMORROW IN SHANGHAI And Other Stories
Chai, May-lee Blair (166 pp.) $17.95 paper | Aug. 30, 2022 978-1-94946-786-4
Tales showing the tension and turmoil experienced by Chinese and Chinese American characters facing the binaries of city and country, men and women, home and away.
In “The Nanny,” the longest story from Chai’s second collection—following Useful Phrases for Immigrants (2018)—a woman named Anping travels to the New Shanghai Colony on Mars to work as a nanny for a 4-year-old girl. Anping is excited to earn a much higher salary than she had been, though most of the money will go toward paying down her debt back on Earth. As the story unfolds, Anping discovers there is much she doesn’t know about her new employers. Unlike “The Nanny,” most of the stories here are firmly grounded in an all-too-familiar America, and the secrets they hold are hidden only to those who refuse to see them. Chai’s narrators are often young Chinese Americans who experience racism in persistent, erosive ways. In “The Monkey King of Sichuan,” two women meet up and discuss their former professor, an expert in Asian studies, who sexually harassed one of them during their graduate program. Several of the stories feature protagonists similar to Chai herself—the daughter of a Chinese father and a White American mother. In “Jia” (the Chinese word for family or home), Lu-lu, a little girl newly arrived in the Midwest with her parents, is shocked to discover her neighbors’ open disdain for her family. (We see a college-aged Lu-lu in the following story, “Slow Train to Beijing,” falling in love with a woman engaged to a White male doctoral student.) Chai is straightforward in style, but her earnest, astute chronicling of the impact of the cruelties that people inflict on each other, whether in a small town on Earth or on a terraformed Mars, is powerful.
Chai bears cleareyed witness, with righteous anger swirling beneath her pellucid prose.
CHRYSALIS
Child, Lincoln Doubleday (336 pp.) $26.00 | July 12, 2022 978-0-385-54367-5
This sixth in Child’s Jeremy Logan series pits the vaunted enigmatologist against high-tech evil. A scientist falls, with the help of an ax in his back, down a deep crevasse on an Alaskan glacier. Later, a business mogul suffers an apoplectic, bloody death in a Manhattan business meeting. Then a Beechcraft pilot fatally crashes for no obvious reason. All three are members of the board of directors for the mega-company named Chrysalis, and the connection among their sudden demises is a mystery. So the company urgently requests the assistance of Jeremy Logan, a paranormal sleuth who has at least five major successes under his belt. He drives his Lotus to a facility hidden deep in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It’s a highly secure, secret building shaped like a torus, or doughnut. There, he meets with both techs and execs and receives complete authority to investigate—to ask any question of anyone inside the complex. Chrysalis is about to launch the newest version of its Venture product, and they are afraid that someone has programmed it to kill its users. Meanwhile, Logan is highly enamored of their current technology and already uses a virtual assistant called Pythia until his equipment is upgraded to the silken-voiced and ever so helpful Grace. “Grace, you’re a peach,” he tells her. “No, Jeremy,” she replies, “I am a virtual assistant.” It happens that the torus contains “a nest of fire ants,” and as Logan pokes and prods, people continue to die. What hath Chrysalis wrought? A killing machine? Whatever malware might drive the new device, humans amply supplement with intra-doughnut gunfights. Grace, Logan, and the dead mogul
