20 minute read
FACTORY GIRLS by Michelle Gallen
THE INK BLACK HEART
Galbraith, Robert Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (1024 pp.) $32.00 | Aug. 30, 2022 978-0-316-41303-9
An overblown whodunit by Galbraith, nom de plume of one J.K. Rowling, pitting Robin Ellacott and Cormoran Strike against a murderous online troll.
On the internet, everyone can hear you scream. To boot, as a very bad actor named Anomie puts it, “nobody’s who they say they are.” Robin and Cormoran have quite the task on their hands when Edie Ledwell, a cartoonist whose show, The Ink Black Heart, is a hit on YouTube and has just been bought by Netflix, turns up to ask for help in chasing down an online group, Anomie at its helm, that has built an online game around her show. Grumbles Anomie, “She’s shitting all over the fans, saying they’re thick for liking our game.” Edie doesn’t last long; conveniently, she winds up in London’s Highgate Cemetery, ready for planting. All suspicion in what’s now a murder case points to Anomie, a slippery character. Is he (or she) a criminal mastermind, or just some creepy kid living in mom’s basement? It takes Robin and Cormoran reams of online chat–thick prose to discover the truth, sussing out the identities of characters with noms de net like Paperwhite and Fiendly1. Online identities are fluid, of course, which doesn’t help when the problem is how to lay down a coherent storyline, but it soon becomes apparent that, indeed, no one is quite who they say they are. One more thing is sure: Rowling, the subject of recent controversy, plays out her current preoccupations against an up-to-the-minute backdrop: Edie is accused of “multiple alleged transgressions, particularly against the disabled,” while a contemporary comes under the gun for having “ ‘misgendered’ a prominent trans woman,” minor plot points in a belabored narrative dotted with appearances by pedophiles, neo-Nazi cultists, “beta males,” incels, an obnoxious pickup artist, and a young woman who ends her sentences on a “rising inflection.” Who did the dastardly deed? After a thousand pages of this, the reader is likely to no longer care.
Long, loose, and lax.
FACTORY GIRLS
Gallen, Michelle Algonquin (240 pp.) $17.99 paper | Nov. 29, 2022 978-1-64375-245-7
A teenage girl comes of age working at a factory during the last days of the Troubles. Maeve Murray has one goal in the summer of 1994: to get out of her small town in Northern Ireland and escape to London for university. But she won’t know whether that’s possible until she gets her exam results, and in the meantime, she and her two closest friends, Caroline Jackson and Aoife O’Neill, decide to earn money working at the local shirt-making factory. The factory, which is managed by smarmy, handsy, and distressingly handsome Englishman Andy Strawbridge, is a rare space where Catholics and Protestants are forced to coexist despite the constant threat of sectarian violence. For one summer, everything in Maeve’s life is on the brink of change: her education, her relationships with friends and family, and even the factory, a precarious social experiment vulnerable to both sectarian strife and “optimisation” that could crush workers from both factions. Gallen, who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, reconstructs this era vividly. Her characters speak in dialect, but, more importantly, their understanding of the world is shaped by their experience of the Troubles. Maeve wishes to escape the sectarian environment in which she’s been raised while also viewing Protestants with suspicion, confusion, and, at times, lust. Gallen’s mastery of her protagonist’s psychology renders this muddle comprehensible, sympathetic, and, above
robert ludlam’s the blackbriar genesis
all, funny. Truly humorous novels are hard to come by, but Gallen’s writing is full of genuine bite. Maeve shares her creator’s wit and insight: “[Tony] Blair looked like the sort of toothy creature you’d see in a Free Presbyterian church,” she reflects, “a man who believed way too hard in the wrong thing.”
A sensationally entertaining novel that’s deeper than it first appears.
ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE BLACKBRIAR GENESIS
Gervais, Simon Putnam (416 pp.) $28.00 | Oct. 18, 2022 978-0-593-41997-7
Gervais, a talented thriller writer, launches a new Ludlum series.
In Cairo, a State Department official barely survives a violent attack, getting the story off to a rip-roaring start. Then in Prague, a car bomb obliterates an Operation Treadstone assassin (no, not Jason Bourne, of whom there is passing mention), and an organization called Blackbriar dispatches operatives Helen Jouvert and Donovan Wade to the Czech Republic to investigate. They are a smart, gutsy duo who are not romantically involved, but stay tuned for future episodes. Blackbriar is a hush-hush outfit contracted by the Department of National Intelligence that, unlike the FBI, doesn’t have to worry about rules and stuff. It is a Black Ops counterintelligence program designed to neutralize hostile foreign intelligence operations “by any means necessary” and is so secret that “not even POTUS” knows about it. (Um, really? Is this what America is coming to?) Blackbriar differs from Treadstone in that it is “mostly defensive, going after whoever wants to steal our government’s secrets.” Anyway, Russians persuade four forever-fighting Mexican drug cartels to put aside their differences and join them in undermining the hated United States. In a joint operation called Proyecto Verdad, the Russkies will provide the technological know-how to launch a cyberattack against the United States, and the cartels will kick in a ton of
cash. As readers will expect, bloodletting abounds. Donovan Wade puts it this way: “A round to the chest and an eight-inch cut deep into one’s throat is a one-way ticket to the big guy.” In his lifetime, Robert Ludlum wrote 27 thrillers. Since Ludlum’s 2001 death, Eric Van Lustbader and others collectively have written about 30 more, all set in the dangerous world of assassins and international intrigue. This is the first contribution by Gervais, and his style fits right in.
An action-packed thriller worthy of the Ludlum legacy.
TEAM PHOTOGRAPH
Haldeman, Lauren Sarabande Books (152 pp.) $22.00 paper | Nov. 8, 2022 978-1-956046-00-7
Poet and graphic novelist Haldeman uses full pages of both sequential art and poetry to tell the story of a contemporary poet’s encounters with ghosts near a Civil War battle site and how the experience shaped her work.
The narrator has the head of a wolf, as does every living person in her story—youth soccer league teammates; Civil War soldiers; her dead brother; Walt Whitman—while the heads of the faceless ghosts are bulbous, fluorescent balloons. The reason for the lupine cast isn’t explained until the epilogue, and anthropomorphism need not always be explained, but here explanation enhances what has preceded it and underscores the book’s powerful structure. Each chapter opens with graphic-novel backstory and ends with pages of poetry on otherwise blank pages, following a girl who grew up seeing ghosts in and around her Virginia home and came to poetry as an attempt to explain these phantasms, then presenting the poetry the experiences inspired. The form of her poems evolves as she follows different threads through soccer fields and a memorial park that a century and a half ago hosted a series of chaotic battles that littered the woods with amputated limbs. Haldeman’s art has an evocative simplicity, with heavy lines eschewing finer details but still wringing remarkable expressions from the wolf faces of her cast. She imbues her characters with a lanky physicality that enlivens the soccer scenes. The story touches on the savagery of war, hypnagogia, indoctrination of nationalism via sports, racism, appropriation, and the development of craft; earnest engagement with these erudite topics attempts to compensate for occasionally cursory exploration. Some eerie paranormal scenes described only in the poetry sections beg for graphicnovel interpretations, but perhaps some things seen can only be evoked, not reproduced.
A stylish meditation on bookish inspiration.
LECH
Lippmann, Sara Tortoise Books (319 pp.) $18.99 paper | Oct. 18, 2022 978-1-94895-469-3
A motley crew of neighbors gets through the summer of 2014 in Sullivan County, New York. Lippmann’s first novel after two story collections features an ensemble cast of characters ranging from vintage quirky to seriously damaged, all with complicated backstories and interlocking current problems. The eponymous Lech is Ira Lecher, a 66-year-old divorcé who lives up to his name. He rents
out a room to visitors in his house on Murmur Lake, aka Murder Lake due to a drowning years back. Lech’s current guests are a young woman named Beth and her precocious, allergy-ridden, almost-5-year-old son, Zach. Beth is fleeing New York City and her irritating husband after an abortion: “Two days have passed since the D&C about which she’s told no one. (The procedure sounded like a mall shop for tweens. I love your top. Did you get that at D&C?)” Lippmann’s rapid-fire narrative style seems to pay homage to Borscht Belt schtick, but here and elsewhere it can be hard to know what emotion is expected from the reader concerning disturbing sexual situations and unhappy characters. Tzvi, for example, is a Hasidic Jew and a drug dealer—“He is servicing a need. Better him than a shegetz [non-Jewish boy].” Bada bing. But Tzvi is also the son of the woman who drowned—he was only 3 years old at the time—and is still haunted by the mysteries of that loss. If it sounds like there’s a lot to try to make sense of in this novel, there is, including what is arguably the main plotline, which is about a grifter-y real estate agent trying to interest investors in the property surrounding Murmur Lake, which neither Lech nor the creepy farmer who owns the adjoining parcel wants to sell. This storyline and others unfold in brief chapters alternating among the points of view of five of the characters.
For the right reader, this jigsaw puzzle of a novel will be a pleasure.
THE LAST PARTY
Mackintosh, Clare Sourcebooks Landmark (432 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 8, 2022 978-1-72825-096-0
Layers of historical and social context deepen the allure of this icy murder mystery set in North Wales. When Rhys Lloyd’s dead body is discovered during the traditional New Year’s polar swim in the village of Cwm Coed, it quickly becomes apparent that there is no lack of suspects; many people wished to see him dead. As the owner of The Shore, a new resort community, Rhys was a polarizing figure despite having grown up in the village. As the lake and the new mansions lie right on the border between England and Wales—and represent the fraught history of these countries— police officers from both sides are assigned to the case: Ffion Morgan, a local girl trying to live down her own history as “Ffion Wyllt” (Wild Ffion) and get back on her feet after a divorce, and Leo Brady, haunted by a decision he made that may cost him joint custody of his young son. Neither are they exactly strangers to one another, having spent one night together that was never supposed to mean more than that. Ffion and Leo must navigate their own tension—sexual and otherwise—as well as the historic tension between their countries and the extreme hierarchy of social class as it pertains to both their wealthy victim and their suspects. Mackintosh offers multiple perspectives as the chapters both move forward from New Year’s Day and back into the past. As with most successful mysteries, the identity of the murderer, once revealed after a few red herrings, is both stunning and tragically logical. While the movement through time and perspective can sometimes be a little jarring, and makes the novel read slowly at first, the resolution—of not only the mystery, but also the relationships and side plots— offers a deep acceptance of human fragility and complexity.
Come to meet the interestingly dysfunctional characters; stay to cheer them on with a full heart.
winterland
WINTERLAND
Meadows, Rae Henry Holt (288 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 29, 2022 978-1-2508-3452-2
Meadows’ absorbing fifth novel follows a promising young Soviet gymnast as she enters a ruthless sports system that emphasizes winning at all costs. It is 1973 in the remote Arctic mining town of Norilsk, where 8-year-old Anya lives with her father, Yuri, who’s employed at the local metalworks. Katerina, Anya’s mother, disappeared three years ago, and it was speculated at the time that the former Bolshoi ballerina might have returned to Moscow or even defected. Despite the shadow cast by her mother’s disappearance and her father’s own loss of status within the Communist Party, Anya’s gymnastic potential has deemed her “an asset to the Soviet Union.” When she is selected to train with Anatoly Popov, Anya embarks on a physical and emotional journey that takes her from a run-down gym in Norilsk to the famed national gymnastics training center at Round Lake in preparation for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. In an alternating storyline, Vera, Anya’s elderly neighbor and confidante, recalls her privileged pre-revolutionary childhood and her years in a Siberian labor camp that also killed her husband and son. Writing with a confidence based on excellent research, Meadows vividly depicts the Soviet training system— and its abuses—without taxing readers with too many technical terms. Some of the era’s greatest stars (Ludmilla Tourischeva, Nellie Kim, Olga Korbut) make brief appearances, representing a competitive gymnastics that is transitioning from traditional balletic artistry to a more athletic—and riskier—style. If there’s a flaw in this smoothly paced novel, it’s the lack of conflict motivating its characters to action. Although well drawn, they are passive figures living in a society that allows for no individual agency. Also, the book’s final section covering the collapse of the Soviet Union feels rushed.
An enlightening portrait of a now-vanished world.
DISLOCATIONS
Molloy, Sylvia Trans. by Jennifer Croft Charco Press (150 pp.) $15.95 paper | Nov. 1, 2022 978-1-9138-6735-5
In brief, plangent paragraphs, Molloy offer snapshots of the advancing loss of a friend “who is coming apart before my very eyes.” Like flashes from a lighthouse, Argentinian writer Molloy offers sudden, extremely short glimpses and apercus—while also posing complicated questions—concerning her friend and longtime associate M.L., who is disappearing into incapacity and remoteness due to memory loss. Their relationship has spanned 45 years and includes professional connections, like collaboration on writing articles, as well as more profound links, such as sharing their particular language, “an at-home Spanish….A home from another era,” words used by mothers or grandmothers, evocative of roots and recognition. “When talking to her I feel—or I felt—connected to a past that is not entirely illusory. And with a place: that of before.” Molloy remembers M.L. as she used to be: “witty, ironic, snobby, critical, at times even malicious.” Now tended by carers, M.L. has forgotten how to sign her name. She no longer remembers to avoid the foods she used to dislike and will soon forget how to eat, what to chew, when to swallow. She is using tactile memory—the feel of things—to replace the mental instinct. Not only tragic and valedictory, these fragments are also philosophical: “How does someone who remembers nothing speak in the first person? What is the location of that ‘I’, once the memory has come undone?” And on another level, there’s an attempt to scrutinize and secure a relationship by one party as the other fades. What will happen when Molloy stops recording their interactions? Who will be abandoning whom? These are the final, unanswerable, guilty enquiries.
Often chilling, occasionally banal, this ultrashort work fully inhabits its very specific terrain.
SOMEDAY, MAYBE
Nwabineli, Onyi Graydon House (384 pp.) $27.99 | Nov. 1, 2022 978-1-525-89980-5
A young widow comes to terms with her husband’s sudden death. College sweethearts Eve and Quentin, affectionately called Q, have been happily married for 10 years, living in London. When Eve discovers her husband’s body on New Year’s Eve, her life’s trajectory—and their life together— is cleaved down the center into Before and After. Quentin, born to the White, “semi-royal” Morrow family, has died by suicide— and Eve had no idea he was even suffering. Eve’s world shrinks down to nearly nothing as she navigates her pain, sadness, and guilt. Her close Nigerian family and best friend, Bee, hover close while she refuses to do anything or eat anything other than painnumbing pills. Without a suicide note, Eve and those closest to Q, including his mother, Aspen—who has always been horrible to Eve and who becomes even worse in the wake of her son’s death— struggle to understand how this could happen. As months pass, Eve knows that her family hopes and prays she will soon feel like herself again, and she begins to resent them despite herself: “To grieve is to frighten the people you love.” An accidental discovery made halfway through the novel changes the course of Eve’s life once again. The novel’s second half offers a slow, hard-earned journey toward healing, which is aided by a well-wrought cast of characters who offer Eve opportunities to figure out who she is now, without Q. Though some readers may find the book unrelenting, Nwabineli’s stunning insight and prose offer a true and honest portrayal of grief as vast, unending, and ever changing; she also meditates on themes of forgiveness, hope, and the endless love of family and friends.
Nwabineli’s debut is deeply moving, tender, and, against all odds, funny.
A BURNING OBSESSION
Omer, Mike Thomas & Mercer (381 pp.) $11.99 paper | Nov. 8, 2022 978-1-5420-3432-6
A criminal profiler and a hostage negotiator go up against a murderous cult leader from the negotiator’s past— and, to a lesser extent, up against each other. Years after surviving the Wilcox Cult Massacre, Lt. Abby Mullen, NYPD, gets wind of a cult leader out West who’s evidently just as obsessed with punishing his enemies by fire as Moses Wilcox was when she was a child— his child. In the first of many non-surprises, the new firebug turns out to be Wilcox, risen from the ashes and now calling himself Father Moses Williams. Abby, who has plenty of traumatic background experience but zero official standing, does her best to push her way into the investigation, but FBI agent Tatum Gray isn’t terribly receptive, and consulting profiler Dr. Zoe Bentley is downright hostile. Impervious to their lack of encouragement and desperate for a chance to neutralize Wilcox at last, Abby continues to crash their party at every opportunity. In the meantime, Wilcox, whose messianic preaching to his rapt followers conceals nothing more original than a drive for sex, coercive power, and coerced sex, has set his sights on a new target: Delilah Eckert, who’s taken her two children and gone on the run from her abusive husband, Brad. Wilcox’s followers swarm around Delilah like cartoon minions, assuring her constantly what a great mother she is, and she’s soon addicted to this community of affirmation and easy prey for their leader. Whenever Wilcox senses danger, he has his devoted disciples set fire to their lodgings and move on from Wyoming to Idaho to California. The flames grow ever higher, but suspense never rises above a simmer.
Notable mainly for uniting the author’s two franchise investigators. Let’s see what happens next.
HABILIS
Quinn, Alyssa Dzanc (216 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-950539-47-5
An experimental novel weaving a present-day identity crisis around stories of our millennia-old ancestors. A common book-blurb cliché declares that fiction is about “what makes us human.” In this unusually structured, engaging debut novel, Quinn attempts to address the matter anthropologically. One thread of the novel features Lucy, a woman attending a dance party at a museum, surrounded by exhibits of human artifacts and anthropological dioramas. Braided around Lucy’s story are descriptions of particular examples of human ancestors—including, of course, the ancient hominid Lucy—and Lucy’s backstory, in which she was abandoned as an infant and is eventually adopted. And later in the book, woven around all this, Quinn lightly fictionalizes the story of famous anthropologist Mary Leakey, who, along with her husband and son, was responsible for some of the biggest finds in the 20th century around human evolution, including the Homo habilis of the novel’s title. (And yet another thread features Sukhjinder Saleem, an Indian man in the late 1800s recruited to assist on an archeological dig.) Quinn’s (very) long view of history, her interest in myth and science, and her fragmentary, sometimes abstracted prose all echo work by Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson, but Quinn isn’t a mimic. She writes engrossingly about the human need to acquire language, both scientifically and through Lucy’s struggles to be heard and understood. And Quinn mixes up styles to articulate that struggle, from academic to lyrical to abstract (“Language does not fossilize. This is all speculation. This is all lies. Let us not speak of it. Let us leave it in the earth”). We know a lot about our human history, Quinn notes, but her novel emphasizes that we’re still fumbling to make sense of what makes us human.
An eccentric, stylish, smart debut.
AESTHETICA
Rowbottom, Allie Soho (264 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 22, 2022 978-1-641-29400-3
A former Instagram model prepares for a surgery that promises to undo all her previous cosmetic procedures in this dark and poignant debut. Anna is 35, and she has a face she no longer recognizes. After years of fillers and lifts—not all of which have aged well—she has the opportunity to begin aging naturally again if she goes through with the risky Aesthetica™ procedure. This surgery has its own artificiality; it won’t just remove implants and scar tissue but involves stretching her skin to create the lines that would have presumably formed if Anna hadn’t ever used Botox. Whereas her previous cosmetic procedures brought her closer to a symmetrical, consumable Instagram ideal, Aesthetica™ can restore Anna’s resemblance to her grandmother, a resemblance her mother always cherished. On the eve of the operation, Anna unravels the past that led her here—in particular, the power games and sexual abuse she experienced with her boyfriend and manager, Jake—and the relationships with her mother and her childhood best friend, Leah, she alternately shied away from and chased. Rowbottom’s prose moves back and forth from striking imagery to staccato simplicity (“Jake led me through the club, walking with a languid gait, his shoulders rolled back so that his heart looked open and imperiled. We sat at a sticky banquette”), which gives it an entrancing quality, like the best social media algorithms. While structurally the novel is conventional, tracking a naïve young woman’s entrapment in a sordid world and her reawakening as an adult, Rowbottom’s specificity about one moment in internet culture and the contradictory ideologies about autonomy and desire young women must parse make it worthwhile reading.
A challenging, compassionate novel about the aftermath of exploitation and packaged youth.
DEFENDING ALICE A Novel of Love and Race in the Roaring Twenties
Stratton, Richard HarperVia (576 pp.) $28.99 | Nov. 22, 2022 978-0-063-11546-0
A tale about a tense legal battle over race and love, based on the sensational 1924 case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander in White Plains, New York.
Leonard Kip Rhinelander, “pampered scion of an aristocratic bloodline,” meets and falls in love with Alice Jones, a beautiful, alluring young woman of English and West Indian background. The attraction is mutual, and she appears to be indifferent to his wealth. They run off and marry, the news of which is too much for Leonard’s domineering and racist father, Philip, who has his son kidnapped. Leonard, who has a weak backbone, sues for annulment of his own marriage, with expensive lawyers paid for and under the orders of Philip. The grounds? Alice supposedly tricked Leonard into thinking she was White. Defending Alice, attorney Lee Parsons Davis warns her that the trial will be nasty and brutal. Indeed, Leonard’s lawyers look out only for Philip’s interest, portraying Leonard as a stuttering, “brain-tied idiot” defrauded by a whore who just wants a piece of the family fortune. The marriage must be annulled! Thus unfolds an epic courtroom clash that gains national headlines for weeks. Tension builds for both courtroom and reader. The existence of love letters comes to light—Leonard apparently wrote some doozies describing sex acts Davis deems disgusting, unnatural, even illegal. But will
