11 minute read
THE FAMILY IZQUIERDO by Rubén Degollado
SECRET LIVES
de Castrique, Mark Poisoned Pen (288 pp.) $16.99 paper | Oct. 11, 2022 978-1-72825-830-0
Multiple shady characters spring into action when a Secret Service agent is murdered. Jonathan Finch is shot dead just outside the Crystal City apartments in Arlington, Virginia, while in the middle of an apparently felonious exchange involving cash and a satchel. Tenant Jesse Cooper, a student at nearby American University, cradles the dying Jonathan and hears his final words: “Tell Ethel the secret.” When she learns of the shooting, Crystal City landlady Ethel Fiona Crestwater immediately calls Cory Bradshaw, the head of the Secret Service, with the news that he’s lost an agent. One of the chief delights of de Castrique’s loopy crime yarn is that Ethel isn’t the frail, distracted septuagenarian she pretends to be but a whip-smart operator preeminent among the title characters. Det. Frank Mancini of the Arlington Police Department, who knows Ethel well, decides to investigate further with her and Bradshaw while trying to keep Jesse in the dark. Ethel does, however, give Jesse a gun for protection. Trevor Norwood, the man who killed Finch, is meanwhile plotting his own revenge. When FBI Director Rudy Hauser learns the identity of the dead man, he remembers him as “the key to twenty million dollars.” Bradshaw’s visit to Finch’s widow, Susan, muddies the water even further when she speculates that her husband may have committed suicide. An attack on Jesse brings FBI special agent Lisa Draper, yet another secretive soul, into the mix to begin her own investigation. De Castrique’s ubertwisty narrative strains credibility but consistently entertains.
A taut and crisply told thriller whose charmingly shady protagonist triumphs over a labyrinthine plot.
THE FAMILY IZQUIERDO
Degollado, Rubén Norton (304 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-393-86682-7
Three generations of Izquierdos tell the story of their family and the misfortunes believed to be caused by a curse. In 1958, Octavio Izquierdo and his wife, Guadalupe, begin building their life in McAllen, Texas. They buy a home and set up a painting and drywall business while dreaming of the good future their children will have—how these things will be their inheritance. But life isn’t always easy for the family. After discovering a goat hoof and a rooster foot buried in the yard, Octavio believes his jealous neighbor, Emiliano Contreras, has put a curse on the family. Ordinary disasters like miscarriages, accidents, and sadness are attributed to it. Years later, in declining health, Octavio is consumed by his belief in the curse, and he bounces around from nursing home to nursing home because none of the orderlies can keep him calm. His adult children aren’t sure if it really is a curse or a genetic predisposition to anxiety and susto. However, Dina, one of his daughters, refuses to leave her house after having what she believes is a prophetic nightmare showing Emiliano Contreras working with the devil to use grackles to put the evil eye on the Izquierdos. In this gloriously rich epic, we get to see a full picture of the family. Each interlocking chapter is told by a different character, unifying into a thoughtfully crafted history spanning decades. The characters, who are complex and tightly linked to one another, are enlivened by their belief in a mix of superstition, brujería, and Catholicism that feels both familiar and playful. Family celebrations like a Posada, a quinceañera, and the Fourth of July particularly highlight family dynamics. Though most of the stories focus on the Izquierdo family as a whole, there’s one called “La Milagrosa Selena” that is less a story and more a letter to the Diocese of Brownsville that advocates canonizing the queen of Tejano music, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez; it’s a surprising delight.
An instant Tejano classic.
THE MAZE
DeMille, Nelson Scribner (464 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 11, 2022 978-1-5011-0178-6
Book 8 in DeMille’s John Corey series unlocks a complex murder mystery set on Fire Island. The jokes start right away: “You can’t drink all day unless you start in the morning.” Corey is a former NYPD homicide detective, and he’s currently “NYU—New York Unemployed.” He has plenty of enemies, like the Russian SVR intelligence service, which wants him dead—but waiting for that plotline to develop is like waiting for Godot. Ex-lover Det. Beth Penrose conveys an offer that he become a consultant to Security Solutions Investigative Services, “a very tacky private investigative agency” located on Suffolk County farmland with a giant hedge maze as a neighbor. Though Beth doesn’t say so, the plan seems to be that Corey will be her confidential informant, getting inside Security Solutions to learn if it has any connection to the killings of nine young Long Island women. Security Solutions is a fun-loving outfit, with after-hours parties like Thirsty Thursdays. You’ve got your booze, your broads with names like Tiffany, your cops both present and ex, your politicians, a disbarred lawyer—fertile and dangerous grounds for Corey’s snooping. Like the maze, the plot has “twisting paths with lots of dead ends,” but “you have to wake up real early to pull one over on John Corey.” But before the guns start blasting, he fires his “pocket rocket” into a willing woman, a suspect named Amy. “Emission accomplished,” he later muses. Ah yes, Corey has a million sex jokes that would have teenagers TikTok-ing “ROFLMAO.” Are there nude beaches in Bermuda? He’d love to check
out the Bermuda triangles. Is tonight “poker night? Or poke her night?” And why do strippers have names like Tiffany and not Best Buy? Anyway, Corey hasn’t settled down with a woman: “Ospreys mate for life,” he states. “But are they happy?” Oh yes, again with the plot: There’s a tough, unsolved murder case with interlocking crimes and suspects that ends in a fiery finish.
A well-done crime yarn but not for the straight-laced or those prone to fantods.
UNLEASHED
Emmons, Cai Dutton (304 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-593-47144-9
What seems like your basic California wine country empty-nest story goes off in wildly unexpected directions. At the outset of Emmons’ novel, we are introduced to three unhappy people. Lu is the wife of George, a Sonoma vintner and art collector who’s lost interest in her and is toying with having an affair with Marley, a local artist. As the book opens, the couple is taking their daughter, Pippa, and her cat to college in LA. Though Pippa is now relentlessly cruel to her mother, Lu still pines for their one-time inseparability and is laid low by her daughter’s departure, confronting for the first time the mismatch of her marriage and her disdain for the rich neighborhood women who are supposed to be her friends. As these
BEHIND THE BOOK Properties Of Thirst
Marianne Wiggins’ ninth novel was nearly done when she suffered a stroke. This is how it finally came to be published
BY AMY REITER
Lara Porzak
As compelling as Marianne Wiggins’ novel Properties of Thirst (Simon & Schuster, Aug. 2) is, the story behind its completion may be even more so. In June 2016, when Wiggins was chapters away from finishing the book—which Kirkus describes as a “sweeping, cinematic story of love and family set against the dramatic backdrop of World War II and the American West”—she suffered a massive stroke.
“It affected my whole fabric of reality: walking, centering myself in a landscape,” Wiggins, now 74, says over Zoom. She is sitting beside her daughter, photographer Lara Porzak, 55, in the home they now share in Venice, California—its decor the epitome of literary-artistic bohemian cool.
Wiggins, who was a tenured professor at the University of Southern California, despite never having attended college, speaks clearly and thoughtfully. At one point, she pauses to consider whether an adverb or adjective is correct and then rewords her sentence entirely. But at other moments she can’t remember, for instance, the order in which events occurred, and Porzak fills in the gaps. “Together, we make one memory,” Porzak says.
Following the stroke, Wiggins says, “I don’t think I had an active imagination because so much of my brain power was being utilized by a conscious effort to recover my physical control. You have to exercise imaginative muscles, and I let those atrophy.”
As Wiggins shifted from hospital to hospital, beginning that recovery, Porzak read to her, eventually turning to her mother’s own words, the unfinished manuscript that would become Properties of Thirst.
They also strengthened Porzak’s resolve. Although the book had been more than a decade in the making and reflected Wiggins’ strong, supple command of language, plot, and character and her facility for exquisitely limning landscapes both external and internal, its prospects for publication suddenly dimmed. Porzak couldn’t bear to see her mother’s work go unread.
Wiggins’ 2003 novel, Evidence of Things Unseen, was a finalist for a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, but in Porzak’s estimation, Properties of Thirst contained some of Wiggins’ most beautiful work, including one chapter, bringing nuance and empathy to a previously unsympathetic character, that Porzak calls “a perfect thing.”
“There was no way I was not going to get this out in the world for other people to read.” Porzak says.
So the daughter set about sorting through her mother’s many notebooks.
Wiggins, the author of eight previous novels over five decades, has always written longhand. Describing herself as “not a very good typist,” she began the practice before the computer era, carrying a notebook everywhere, jotting down notes. An extensive traveler, Wiggins enjoys “the mobility of being a longhand writer,” she says. “I am my own writing machine.”
Wiggins, who has been married three times, including to author Salman Rushdie, also kept a pen and paper by her bed-
side, pre-stroke, because, she says, scenes sometimes come to her in dreams.
Along with Wiggins’ written notes, Porzak parsed the recollections of the handful of friends with whom her mother had discussed the book’s ending, grilling each for details. Mercifully, Porzak also had a brief “Dear Reader” message, in which Wiggins had laid out her intentions, to guide her.
When, during the height of the pandemic, Porzak’s photography work slowed down, mother and daughter put their time at home into the arduous work they had already begun: painstakingly piecing together the book’s final chapters.
“We would talk about an adjective for three days,” Porzak recalls.
Porzak chronicles the process in the short, unflinchingly honest documentary film Marianne, co-directed with Rebecca Ressler, which recently won an award at Visions du Réel film festival in Nyon, Switzerland. In it, the effects of Wiggins’ stroke are apparent (she must be reminded to brush her teeth), as are her hard-earned wisdom (“Identity really coheres to memory, and when memory goes, it affects identity,” she muses), her stinging wit (“Have you looked at Lara’s nose, really?” she asks, to prompt a halt in filming), earthy sensuality (she shimmies, bare-bottomed, to Ray Charles’ “Mary Ann”), and writer’s vanity (“I’m the genius…me, me, me,” she declares, eliciting Porzak’s lovingly amused disgust).
So, too, is Porzak’s dedication to her mother and her work. Witness this exchange from the film:
Wiggins: Lara, you can’t save what I never wrote.…I never wrote it. So you can’t save it. Porzak: But…I’m trying to save the ending. I’m looking in all your notebooks. I’m marking things. I’ve spent years searching for the ending. And now you’re telling me— Wiggins: —I never wrote it. Porzak: We’ve done so many edits. I think we edited something really beautiful out unfortunately.…[She reads from her mother’s notes] “You can’t save what you don’t love. He knew that. But when you love something. The only thing worth doing with your life is to try to save it.” Wiggins [considering]: Well, I don’t think it’s the only thing worth doing.
Also on candid display are Porzak’s understandable moments of frustration.
After a protracted session struggling over the wording of a single line, Wiggins begins to lose focus: “I want to tell you something,” Porzak says, her voice full of emotion. “This is your book. I’m trying to [effing] help you finish the [effing] book. It’s been three [effing] years, day in and day out, of me doing this. I need you to rally.”
Clearly, Wiggins rallied enough to complete the novel, although one planned chapter—in which she’d intended to depict Schiff, one of the novel’s main characters, helping to write the Japanese constitution—was omitted.
“I am not a writer. It was way too hard for me. We just didn’t put that chapter in,” Porzak says.
Ultimately, Properties of Thirst stands as a testament to not only the considerable talent of a writer, but also the devotion of her daughter. Helping her mother complete her work, Porzak says, tearing up, “is the greatest thing I ever did.”
Wiggins, for her part, acknowledges her exceptional good fortune in having her daughter “step into” her professional life. “It’s such a bonus that my child actually knows what I’m up against,” the author says.
Asked whether she hopes to write again, Wiggins displays the resolve distinct to both mother and daughter. “Yes, of course,” she says. “I will.”
Amy Reiter is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Properties of Thirst received a starred review in the July 15, 2022, issue.
