TWO NURSES, SMOKING by David Means

THE GODDESS EFFECT

Marikar, Sheila Yasmin Little A (288 pp.) $24.95 | Oct. 1, 2022 978-1-5420-3955-0

A boutique fitness studio promises life-changing wellness but hides a dark secret. When Anita, an Indian American woman in her early 30s, decides to uproot her life and leave her stable job in New York City to move to Los Angeles, she’s positive she knows what she’s doing—or at least that’s what she tells everyone. Lying about a guaranteed job opportunity at news outlet Gonzo, Anita says goodbye to her overbearing mother and moves into the Gig, a collective housing community: “I had this wild idea that if I changed my surroundings, maybe I’d become a different person, a better person, a success, how if I put three thousand miles between myself and my mom, maybe I wouldn’t care so much about disappointing her, about not being a dutiful Indian daughter.” Anita tells herself that as soon as she gets settled, she’ll follow up on leads with Gonzo, but instead she devotes all her time to attending classes at the Goddess Effect, a fitness studio that the Daily Mail had called “ayahuasca meets SoulCycle.” Anita’s life becomes completely intertwined with both the Goddess Effect and its elusive founder, Venus von Turnen. But, of course, the promises of wellness are not all they’re cracked up to be, and with a little probing Anita begins to uncover the Goddess Effect’s seedy underbelly. Marikar’s writing is occasionally awkward, with banter that isn’t witty and product placement shoehorned into the text (has anyone ever referred to their credit card as their “Capital One”?). That said, Marikar successfully provides larger-than-life caricatures of wellness industry denizens and LA residents at large as well as an outrageous mystery waiting to be exposed.

An exploration of how far a person will go for self-actualization.

TWO NURSES, SMOKING

Means, David Farrar, Straus and Giroux (224 pp.) $26.00 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-0-374-60608-4

There’s nothing quite like a David Means story. Jangly, elliptical, apparently autobiographical in some sense (but maybe not), his work functions like a series of Russian nesting dolls, one layer leading inexorably to the next. The 10 pieces in his sixth collection—he is also the author of the novel Hystopia (2016)—begin with small scenes, anecdotal encounters: the hospital workers in the title story, “somewhat lonely-looking figures, taking a smoke break, back behind a trailer, leaning toward each other as they talked softly beside a row of neatly trimmed bushes”; the man in the grief encounter group “who lost his teenage daughter two years ago, chasing after a Frisbee into the road.” Means is a genius of the fragment: Some of the narratives here include subtitled sections, a strategy that recalls “Two Ruminations on a Homeless Brother,” which appeared in Instructions for a Funeral (2019). But even those that don’t work this way build their effects incrementally, moving back and forth from the action to the reflective eye of the narrator, who bears a striking resemblance to the author himself. Means makes this clear from the opening story, “Clementine, Carmelita, Dog,” which he narrates from the perspective of a canine even as he acknowledges the challenges of doing so. “I wish I could make words be dog,” he writes, “…find the way to inhabit the true dynamic, to imagine a world not defined by notions of power, or morality, or memory, or sentiment, but instead by pure instinct.” What he’s addressing are the limitations of literature as well as its possibilities. This conundrum sits at the center of this remarkable set of stories, which seek to destabilize the illusions of fiction even as they embrace and heighten them. How does he do it? Let’s call it presence, both that of the characters and of the writer, whose language lives and grows by such an interplay. “Do your best to be as specific as possible while also bending around the truth so as to protect the living,” he implores in “The Depletion Prompts.”

These brilliant stories exist in the space between desire and complication.

THE BETRAYED

Melvin, Reine Arcache Europa Editions (464 pp.) $28.00 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-60945-773-0

Violence and chicanery, love and survival, poverty and careless opulence: Everything’s in play in Melvin’s sprawling family saga set in the Philippines. Lali and Pilar—two daughters of a political dissident who, with his family, fled their homeland for California—have fundamentally different temperaments. Outgoing Lali seeks attention and experience, while the more reserved Pilar is devoted to her family’s honor and preserving its legacy. More importantly, Lali is in a relationship with Arturo, the godson of an authoritarian strongman, their father’s rival, who shares characteristics with former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. After the girls’ father is assassinated, Arturo whisks the family to Manila and the safety that will be afforded to them as part of his family. Lali (now married to Arturo), Pilar, and their mother return to a fraught political situation, and their private lives become enmeshed in a political web of shifting alliances and byzantine dealmaking. When Lali becomes pregnant, subtle shifts occur in the balance of power (emotional and sexual) between the sisters, and both young women embark on paths unimaginable to them earlier.