“A gentle tale of love and loneliness.” out of esau
promising setup that turns out to be stronger than its execution, as the novel takes too long to reach its inevitable climax. Theroux is an acclaimed travel writer, and he brings those skills to bear in intermittent scenes vividly describing Cal’s gem-hunting work in places like Colombia and Zambia and some interesting aspects of the rare gem business. Inside this slow-paced novel there is a much more energetic one trying to emerge. A psychological thriller whose payoff doesn’t deliver on a protracted buildup.
A FAMILIAR STRANGER
Torre, A.R. Thomas & Mercer (287 pp.) $15.95 paper | Sept. 27, 2022 978-1-6625-0012-1
Troubled hearts meet troubled souls. Making a graceful fiction debut, Webster-Hein crafts a soulful novel set in a small Midwestern town. Like Kent Haruf ’s Holt, Colorado, and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Iowa, Webster-Hein’s Esau, Michigan, harbors lives of quiet desperation. It’s 1996, and Pastor Robert Glory has ministered at the Esau Baptist Church for 10 years, barely subsisting on a parsimonious salary. Part Native American (his mother is Cherokee, his father White), he is treated like an outsider by his self-satisfied, narrow-minded congregation. One day, he notices newcomers at Sunday service: a 30-something woman with two young children. The woman is lovely, and at the end of the service, looking into her dark eyes, he feels “a rising thrill”—perhaps, he fears, a forbidden temptation. Hein’s narrative unfolds in chapters told from the points of view of her central characters: Robert, 38, who was raised in foster homes and found order and consolation in the church; Susan Shearer, the newcomer, unhappily married to a domineering, possessive man; Randy, her husband, frustrated at his factory job, given to violent rages; Willa, their 9-year-old daughter, who will do anything to make peace at home; and Leotie, Robert’s mother, ill and aging, who was left poor, homeless, and helpless after her son was taken from her at the age of 8. Susan, seeing only a bleak future for herself and her children, struggles to live up to her wedding vows in a marriage that sometimes feels “like life without parole.” When she unburdens herself to the pastor, he counsels obedience and faith in God’s plan. His own faith, though, is wavering, shaken by Susan’s questioning and his undeniable attraction to her. “An alarm or a bell,” sounds within him, “either warning him of something or waking him up.” With characters yearning for intimacy and acceptance, Webster-Hein delicately probes the meanings of family, freedom, and desire. A gentle tale of love and loneliness.
y o u n g a d u lt
A Los Angeles Times obituary writer who likes to tweet riddles asking which of three imaginary characters will die becomes the center of a triple-twisted riddle of her own. Two months before the death of a woman the author doesn’t initially identify, Lillian Smith accidentally learns that her husband, financial manager Mike Smith, has spent the weekend at a posh Santa Barbara hotel with someone who wasn’t her. So she’s less inclined than usual to resist the advances of T-shirt printer David Laurent when he flirts with her. From that point on, as Lillian confesses alternately to her best friend, Sam Knight, and Lenny Thompson, a retired LAPD detective who tends the grounds at the cemetery where his 7-year-old daughter is buried, things go rapidly downhill. Fired from her job at the Times, Lillian starts a serious affair with David, who’s gotten her work at the marina where his boat is docked. Someone posts PG–rated but still damning video evidence of her affair online, where it’s watched by everyone she knows, including the high school classmates of her son, Jacob, who proceed to make his life miserable. And that’s all before the death of one of the principals. Torre is hoarding so many surprises that readers are bound to see one or two of them coming, but since everyone involved has secrets to hide from the other characters whose secrets they’re sure they know, the unwary, and maybe even the wary, should buckle up and prepare for a wild ride whose perfectly timed shocks won’t end till the last page. A whiplash suspenser that’s a model of its kind.
OUT OF ESAU
Webster-Hein, Michelle Counterpoint (336 pp.) $27.00 | Oct. 11, 2022 978-1-64009-412-3
THE TWO LIVES OF SARA
West, Catherine Adel Park Row Books (320 pp.) $27.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-778-33322-7
In the early 1960s, a pregnant Black woman flees Chicago and makes her way to Memphis. Sara’s life has been difficult, and in Memphis, she finds herself trying to hide from her demons—physical and mental—from back in Chicago. Her best friends, Naomi and Violet, helped her make her way to Memphis, where Naomi’s aunt |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 july 2022
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