13 minute read
THE BOOK OF GOOSE by Yiyun Li
mother in the dark
techniques” is a pill-popping wreck who can hardly keep himself and his family together, but his observational powers rival those of Sherlock Holmes. He looks at a cop’s hand and deduces that he’d been at the firing range that day, that he has tennis elbow but doesn’t play tennis, and that the crown of his watch is about to fall off because of movements caused by his suppressed neurosis. Remarkable snap observations, Micaela observes. Not really, Rekke replies. It’s just one of many from this gem of a character. The complex plot includes the CIA with references to Abu Ghraib and the Salt Pit prison, but that’s not the main focus. The ending hints at a Rekke-Vargas sequel, and that would be most welcome.
Kudos to Lagercrantz and translator Giles for a compelling read.
THE BOOK OF GOOSE
Li, Yiyun Farrar, Straus and Giroux (368 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-0-374-60634-3
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story—and is it your story to tell? (Apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda.) Inseparable young teens Agnès and Fabienne share a world they’ve created for themselves in rural, ruined, post–World War II France. Fabienne is unschooled and rebellious, while the more passive Agnès is disenfranchised from her schoolmates and family members. A “game” concocted by the girls—that of writing stories so the world will (ostensibly) know how they lived—launches a series of events that propels Agnès to Paris and London and into the publishing world and a finishing school, while Fabienne remains at home in their rural village, tending to farm animals. The arc of their intense adolescent friendship comes under Agnès’ critical lens when she learns of Fabienne’s death after years of emotional and geographic distance between the two. Now freed to write her own story, Agnès narrates the course of events which thrust her into the world as a teen prodigy at the same time she was removed, reluctantly, from Fabienne’s orbit. Li’s measured and exquisite delivery of Agnès’ revelations conveys the balance and rebalance of the girls’ relationship over time but also illuminates the motivations of writers (fame, revenge, escape) and how power within a relationship mutates and exploits. The combination the girls bring to their intimate relationship and endeavors (one seeking to experience things she could not achieve alone, the other providing the experiences) leads Agnès first to believe they were two halves of a whole. Knives, minerals, oranges, and the game of Rock Paper Scissors sneak into Agnès’ narrative as she relates the trajectory of a once-unbreakable union. The relative hardness of those substances is a clue to understanding it all.
Stunners: Li’s memorable duo, their lives, their losses.
MOTHER IN THE DARK
Maiuri, Kayla Riverhead (304 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 9, 2022 978-0-59308-6-421
A daughter tells the grim story of the effects of her mother’s mental illness. Most of this debut novel takes place during the childhood of its narrator, Anna, with occasional chapters set when she is in her 20s; her mother, Diana, is at the center of the book. When Anna and her two younger sisters, Lia and Sofia, are small, their family lives in the working-class neighborhood near Boston that Diana grew up in and where she has the support of family and friends. But when her husband moves them to a raw new suburb where she knows no one, she spirals into mental illness. The author writes insightfully about a child’s perceptions of growing up amid neglect and conflict, and she depicts those conditions vividly. But for long stretches
those details take over the story and become repetitious: She puts in every long-unwashed nightgown, every sink full of slimy water and crusty dishes, every meal scrounged by the kids from empty cupboards, every embarrassing public incident, every insult from Diana’s lips—but never an attempt on anyone’s part to seek help. The girls’ father undergoes his own deterioration, drinking heavily. As children, the sisters cling together, but as they become teens they sometimes turn on each other. The one positive constant in young Anna’s life is her best friend, Vera. They move to New York and live together while going to college, but even though Anna cuts off contact with her family, the past pushes its way in. For all of the family’s members, it seems the truly crushing force is not mental illness itself but the urge to keep it secret.
A bleakly effective narrative.
BOOK OF EXTRAORDINARY TRAGEDIES
Meno, Joe Akashic (352 pp.) $17.95 paper | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-63614-061-2
One-time musical prodigy Aleks begins to lose his hearing at age 10, and by 20 he’s trying to keep his family of five off the streets, out of jail, and alive. Wolfgang Amadeus Aleksandar Fa, aka Aleks, lives on the South Side of Chicago with his ailing mother; his older sister, Isobel; her daughter, Jazz; and his younger brother, Daniel. Aleks tries to hold down odd jobs to pay the bills, but he’s equally as liable to walk away from one as to show up to work at it. He’s expelled from community college for plagiarism. Isobel drinks, smokes, does drugs, dates the wrong sorts of men, and generally might not be paying enough attention to 3-year-old Jazz. Jazz is biting classmates in preschool. Daniel, 13, is stealing luggage from unsuspecting travelers at the airport, dressing like a ghost, and taking a bow and arrows to school. To add fuel to the fire, “kuzyn” Benny and Aleks’ absentee father take turns entangling Aleks in criminal activities. If these maladies of choice weren’t enough, there are a litany of circumstances beyond the characters’ control, all setting them further down the path to failure, not the least of which is the looming financial crisis that comes to be known as the Great Recession. Readers have an inherent desire to see talent recognized and to see it overcome adversity. Nothing drives the compulsion to follow Aleks and company to their literary conclusion more than this. At heart, these are good people, in tough circumstances, making the same mistakes that many of us make. Will they allow themselves the chance to obtain happiness?
A family of gifted individuals can’t seem to stop sabotaging their own lives, but you’ll want them to.
LET NO ONE SLEEP
Millás, Juan José Trans. by Thomas Bunstead Bellevue Literary Press (208 pp.) $16.99 paper | Aug. 23, 2022 978-1-942658-93-1
A woman’s change in careers leads to a bizarre series of obsessions. The protagonist of Millás’ novel wrangles with driving a taxi, the nature of desire, and the opera Turandot. That would be Lucía, who begins the book working in an office but soon takes a test to become a taxi driver and embraces her new line of work—and occasionally has assignations with her passengers. That summary doesn’t entirely convey how strange this novel can get, however. Lucía views a number of the people she encounters as bird people, noting of one man that “his nose was an eagle’s beak.” Later, she asks one of her passengers if he’s “never cheated on [his] wife with a Mama Bird before?” The other surreal strand in this book is Lucía’s obsession with Turandot, a Puccini opera about a Chinese princess whose suitors face the prospect of death while attempting to win her hand. Occasionally, Lucía blurs the lines between herself and the fictional character, donning makeup and telling one passenger, “I’m a Chinese princess. Haven’t you looked at my eyes? My name’s Turandot.” Lucía has a fascination with an actor named Braulio Botas, who also has an interest in the overlap of life and art; late in the book, he tells her, “I’ve been looking for a door that connects with reality, and you opened that door with the story of your life.” It’s heady stuff which takes a deeply visceral turn at novel’s end. It doesn’t always click perfectly—and there are fascinating implications of its premise that the novel doesn’t address—but the bizarre assemblage of elements Millás brings together here makes for a memorable read.
A strange and often transgressive exploration of art and intimacy.
THE LAST TO VANISH
Miranda, Megan Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner (352 pp.) $27.99 | July 26, 2022 978-1-982147-31-0
When a man arrives at a North Carolina mountain hotel looking for clues to his journalist brother’s recent disappearance, the trail that he and the inn’s young manager start to follow leads them back to a sequence of unsolved cases, decades apart, that involve other missing hikers and that may be rooted in the town’s deepest secrets.
Labeled by the national press as “the most dangerous town in North Carolina,” Cutter’s Pass is a pretty place in which hikers have over the years had a tendency to vanish. There were the Fraternity Four, as a group of students came to be
babysitter
called, who disappeared in 1997; Alice Kelly in 2012; Farrah Jordan in 2019; and Landon West in 2022. To Abby Lovett, however, Cutter’s Pass, and in particular the town’s hotel, the Passage Inn, has become her adopted home and her refuge from a troubled past. As manager of the inn, Abby has come to know everybody, to love the wild mountain trails, and to learn that appearances can be deceptive. “Things here were designed to appear more fragile than they were,” she notes of the inn’s folksy touches, “but reinforced, because they had to be. We lived in the mountains, on the edge of the woods, subject to the whims of weather and the forces of nature.” In economical yet elegant descriptions, author Miranda repeatedly conjures up this untamed natural world even as she unspools a labyrinthine plot that has its roots in the distant past but that originates in the present when Trey West appears one stormy night at the Passage Inn. “He believed he could find them all,” Abby realizes when she and Trey, drawn to each other and into the quest for Trey’s missing brother, find a clue that links the most recent mystery to each of the ones that went before. The novel’s characters are deftly sketched and its suspense is nicely tightened, though the plot finally loses itself somewhat in a tangle of strained connections.
A richly atmospheric thriller with a plucky heroine.
BABYSITTER
Oates, Joyce Carol Knopf (448 pp.) $30.00 | Aug. 23, 2022 978-0-593-53517-2
In 1977 Detroit, a serial killer stalks the streets while an insecure housewife commits adultery with a dangerous stranger. Hannah Jarrett, 39, appears to want for nothing. Her husband, Wes, is an investment banker from a prominent local family. The couple has two young children, an impressive house in an affluent community, and a live-in housekeeper. However, Hannah believes
that “if a woman is not desired, a woman does not exist,” and since Wes has largely lost interest, it’s a thrill when a man touches her wrist at a charity gala and asks, “Which one are you?” He reveals only his initials—Y.K.—and suggests they meet when he returns to town on business. Hannah assents but assumes Y.K. will forget her. Then, two weeks later, he telephones. She visits his hotel intending harmless flirtation; instead, he assaults her. Still, Hannah delights in the notion of having a lover, and the next time Y.K. calls, she comes running— a decision whose ripple effects prove cataclysmic. Meanwhile, a predator dubbed Babysitter terrorizes the county, abducting, raping, and murdering White kids and then publicly displaying their naked bodies. Though Wes believes Babysitter is a Black city-dweller and buys a gun in anticipation of a race war, Hannah fears Babysitter is someone closer to home. The book’s languorous pacing feels at odds with its pulp underpinnings, but on the balance, Oates paints an unflinching portrait of 1970s upper-middle-class America, touching on issues of racism, classism, and institutional abuse while exploring society’s tendency to value women solely in relation to the role they fill—be it wife, mother, or sexual object.
A searing work of slow-burning domestic noir.
ON JAVA ROAD
Osborne, Lawrence Hogarth (240 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 2, 2022 978-0-593-24232-2
An atmospheric thriller set in a Hong Kong convulsed by student protests and China’s heavy-handed response to them circa 2019. Adrian Gyle is a veteran British reporter, a 20-year resident of Hong Kong who has access to the city’s elites thanks to the charming, reckless Jimmy Tang, his old university friend. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a young woman Adrian meets through Jimmy; she’s both a child of wealth and influence and a fearless frontline street protester (her legs bear splotches from the blue dye authorities fire from water cannons to disperse and identify activists). But to call this a mystery may mislead a bit. The book is like a whodunit turned inside out, with what might usually be background—the precisely and evocatively drawn setting, especially—at center and the plot mostly crowding in around the edges. Hong Kong comes fiercely alive on the page, and Osborne’s command of complex history, geography, and politics (and poetry) is nuanced and sure-handed. He captures, too, Gyle’s feeling of wistful alienhood, the jadedness that approaches but never quite gets to cynicism. Some of the detail—especially about fashion, food, and drink—does pall a bit, but Osborne’s strategy is mostly successful: The reader senses early on that the disappearance, like the larger mystery it’s embedded in, the case of Hong Kong’s fate, won’t—can’t— have a simple solution. Decisive conclusions, it seems implied, require an arrogance like that Tacitus referred to (Osborne quotes it here) when he wrote about invaders who “make a desert and call it peace.” Solutions belong only to those who can ruthlessly enforce them, and the reader—like the batteredfrom-all-sides Gyle and like the ordinary residents of Hong Kong—can have no illusions about that.
Moody and compelling.
ROOM AND BOARD
Parker, Miriam Dutton (304 pp.) $16.99 paper | Aug. 16, 2022 978-1-5247-4450-2
A disgraced publicist seeks a new beginning by agreeing to be a dorm mother at her old boarding school. Gillian Brodie never imagined herself returning to her sleepy Sonoma boarding school at age 38, but then again, this past year was full of surprises. After she erroneously trusted a client who’d been accused of sexual abuse, Gillian’s successful career as a celebrity publicist shattered. Dubbed “the playboy’s publicist” and approached by other sexual harassers wanting her to represent them, she decided to close her New York City firm and take an offer to be a dorm mother at Glen Ellen Academy—trying to see it “not as an admission of defeat, but as a new beginning.” While Gillian is grateful for the opportunity to return to Glen Ellen, she remains haunted by an older betrayal, this one involving her best friend from school days, Miranda. Gillian and Miranda had both vowed never to act on their romantic feelings for the final member of their trio, Aiden, but then Gillian discovered that her two friends had been secretly dating for months. Despite Gillian’s subsequent Yale education and glamorous career, Aiden was “a kind of bittersweet reminder of the one thing that she’d never gotten to have.” That is, until Gillian learns she’s dorm mother to a girl named Rainbow, whose single father is none other than Aiden. As Gillian navigates being a guardian to several needy teenagers and beginning a new relationship with Aiden, her return to Glen Ellen helps unravel years of trust issues and missed opportunities. Parker’s novel explores second chances in a beautiful setting—the picturesque academy and delectable wine country scenery bring out the best in her writing. Beyond depictions of Sonoma, however, Parker’s novel is disappointing. Gillian’s character never feels fully explained, and when compared to students like pathological liar Bunny or eccentric twins Farrah and Freddy, her personality is dry.
