22 minute read
THE BLACKHOUSE by Carole Johnstone
the population has succumbed to a “Shark Flu” pandemic, but they’ve just “dipped.” Debut novelist Hood adroitly lays out his premise and explores the plague’s aftermath. In their suburban–NYC enclave, the couple are well insulated. There are plenty of “Formerly Occupied Homes” from which to “Manage Existing Resources”; most survivors keep their distance at first, but the neighborly nonviolent order survives. Bill and Penelope plant a garden. Bill even reopens his psychology practice to survivors, who barter for the talking cure. But Bill and Penelope learn from their daughter in California via ham radio that she too has survived—and seems on the verge of joining a cult. They decide their only course, their manifest destiny as parents, is to go west. What follows is a familiar but often entertaining hellscape picaresque. Hood smartly makes the marriage the story’s center, and some adventures/interludes—especially after they crash into a herd of cattle in Kansas, encounter roving lions (!), then find themselves in a picture-postcard town that’s abandoned but for a lonely siren who wants Bill to impregnate her—show wit and playfulness. Elsewhere, though, predictability sets in, often in the form of a right-mindedness that Bill projects and that the world, his secret co-conspirator, reflects back at him. Penelope and Bill fool macho nitwits playing soldier and flee while their guards watch porn, escaping into the arms of a much more withit feminist collective. They encounter a saintly Native American distributing medicine from an 18-wheeler, then a spectacularly cool and noble “BIPOC collective” that’s holding the Rockies, maintaining a buffer against the conspiracy-theory nut-job racists (wittily, Hood essentially calls them QVC-Anon) who’ve occupied Idaho, Utah, and Nevada.
Hood offers an entertaining update of the western migration tale, with ATVs and Camaros for covered wagons.
THE BLACKHOUSE
Johnstone, Carole Scribner (336 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 3, 2023 978-1-982-19967-8
Two stories separated by 25 years intertwine on an island at the far reaches of Scotland: A man tries to hide from who he used to be, and a woman tries to figure out if a man was murdered on the desolate island the day she was born.
In 1993, Robert Reid moves with his wife, Mary, and their son, Calum, to the small island of Kilmeray in the Outer Hebrides to become a farmer. He is plagued by memories of past misdeeds, and no matter how hard he tries and how hard he works, he cannot find the success in farming or the happiness in his family that he so desperately wants. In 2019, 25-year-old Maggie Anderson arrives on the island trying to figure out who she really is after her mother’s death. She is bipolar—this she has known since she was a teenager. She is also plagued with memories and dreams that don’t make sense, and when she was a child, she knew with absolute certainty that she had previously been a man named Andrew MacNeil and had been murdered. Her mother previously brought her to the island to try to find the truth: Was there an Andrew MacNeil? Had he been murdered? The villagers held firm that no one of that name had ever existed and that Maggie’s mother—though convinced she was a psychic and a witch and despite having many, many tricks up her sleeve—was not infallible. When Maggie visits as an adult, she finds a warmer welcome on the island, quickly becoming friends with Kelly, a single mom, and Will, a farmer who lives near her Airbnb. Fans of Tana French will embrace author Johnstone’s skill at weaving supernatural and setting-as-character aspects into her story, and readers of Lisa Jewell will enjoy her unexpected plotting and character development. The caliber of Johnstone’s writing and masterful storytelling will delight both.
This richly evocative story exists at the point where love, fear, guilt, bad decisions, psychosis, and mythology collide.
BEHIND THE BOOK Dr. No
Percival Everett cribs a title—and a plot—from James Bond to fashion a novel only he could write
BY GENE SEYMOUR
Michael Avedon
Percival Everett has been called a “seriously playful” writer, and his penchant for dark humor places him squarely in the tradition of idiosyncratic fiction writers like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and even such acerbic, seemingly anomalous influences as Herman Melville and Chester Himes. It’s plausible that the 65-year-old Everett’s productivity and range exceed theirs despite his relative stature as a cult author. His 27 novels and story collections vary wildly in topic and genre. His 1994 Western spoof, God’s Country, was followed in 1996 by Watershed, a more straightforward contemporary Western. He has also written boldly inventive variations on Greek mythology such as 1987’s For Her Dark Skin, a fresh spin on Medea’s tale, and 1997’s Frenzy, about the transformative experiences of Dionysus’ assistant, Vlepo. He has also challenged hidebound racial attitudes in such works as 2001’s Erasure, about the pigeonholing of African American writers, 2009’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier, whose title character is really (and pointedly) named “Not Sidney Poitier” and last year’s The Trees, longlisted for the Booker Prize, which uses the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till as a springboard to a burlesque modern-day mystery/comedy.
His latest novel, Dr. No (Graywolf, Nov. 1), is prototypical Everett in its droll wit, thematic irreverence, and philosophical tomfoolery. It cheekily borrows both a title and a plotline from Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel to expound on the concept of nothing, or negation, one that Everett has engaged in many novels and stories. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it a “good place to begin finding out why Everett has such a devoted cult.”
Interviewed by phone from Los Angeles, where he’s taught English literature and writing for decades at the University of Southern California, Everett says he’d never read the Fleming novels but thought more about the six decades of James Bond movies they inspired in fashioning his pastiche.
“I have some affection for the Bond movies,” he says, in wry, measured tones evoking his deadpan style on the page. “But it’s limited somewhat by their vacuity. And I think it’s the vacuity that I wanted to deal with, essentially, this middle-aged guy acting out these fantasies of sex and global adventure. They may as well be Woody Allen [comedies]. But I wasn’t trying to play off any Bond story so much as the consciousness behind the movies.”
Everett also takes the unusual (for him) step of making his narrator/protagonist a lead char-
acter from one of his previous novels. Ralph Townsend, the mute genius child from Everett’s 1999 novel, Glyph, is here a grown-up mathematics professor at Brown University who now calls himself Wala Kitu, both words meaning nothing in Tagalog and Swahili, respectively. Ralph/Wala, who according to his creator is still “on the spectrum,” is being paid a hefty sum by a multimillionaire and aspiring supervillain named John Milton Bradley Sill to help him rob Fort Knox as Bond antagonist Auric Goldfinger once tried to do.
Everett’s nonplussed hero, who couldn’t be less Bondian in both nature and tactics, seems haphazardly borne from place to place (Washington, D.C., Corsica, Miami, and eventually Kentucky) and from peril to peril, one of which includes a homicidal, sex-starved Black android named Gloria whose wardrobe and hairstyle are constantly changing.
Everett’s facility with plotting, here and elsewhere, is one of his underrated traits. Nevertheless, he concedes, “I’m no good at making it up as I go along. But I think anybody who does any kind of exploring with a plot…well, a map is merely an excuse to get lost. And you can change your mind at any point, especially if there’s a river that pops up somewhere that wasn’t there before.”
Basically, he says, “I’m open to what serves the story. There are always reasons for writing which are private and, you know, philosophical. I’m always trying to serve that. And I don’t always know the best way to serve it until I get into it.”
How, he is asked, did the concept of nothing enter this novel, or any of the other novels, including Glyph, where the idea is probed?
“I don’t know. If I did, I probably wouldn’t write novels about it,” he says. “I love puzzles.…I like things that are difficult to understand. I like things that I don’t understand. I still try to understand, in some way, string theory, and I read about it all the time and I can’t tell you one thing about it.”
One suspects that unraveling a Percival Everett narrative, whether in short or long form, is what makes them fun for his readers, especially those who enjoy the process of unraveling for its own sake. Dr. No is a blackout-comedy maze of red herrings, misleading assertions, and selfdeceptions. Though neither Everett nor his protagonist say so explicitly, the commensurate folly of both the novel’s situations and the characters’ actions appears to reflect or represent society’s fumbling efforts to compensate for its fear of nothing or nothingness.
Everett has only a glancing familiarity with Seinfeld, everybody’s favorite sitcom about nothing. But he insists that his own take on nothing is very different from that iconic TV show.
Got it?
Gene Seymour is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn and has written for the Nation, the Washington Post, and CNN.com. Dr. No received a starred review in the Sept. 15, 2022, issue.
gunk baby
SLEEP NO MORE
Krentz, Jayne Ann Berkley (336 pp.) $24.99 | Jan. 3, 2023 978-0-593-33782-0
A man who suspects he witnessed a murder asks a podcaster for help solving the crime. Months ago, author Ambrose Drake blacked out under mysterious circumstances during a writers’ conference in San Diego. When he woke up, he discovered his latent talent for aura-reading had intensified to a full-fledged psychic ability. Ambrose can now open a window in his mind and “read” a person’s aura with such accuracy that he can predict their future actions. Unfortunately, this new talent comes with terrible side effects: vivid nightmares and bouts of dangerous sleepwalking. His family convinces him to go to a sleep-study clinic in Carnelian, California, but instead of finding answers there, he witnesses a murder. Convinced no one will believe him, he phones in a tip to Pallas Llewellyn, one of the hosts of the Lost Night Files, a popular podcast that investigates paranormal mysteries. Pallas and both of her co-hosts also experienced bouts of amnesia followed by an enhancement of their paranormal abilities, and they hope their podcast will help them uncover the truth about what happened to them. Pallas and Ambrose quickly realize they might both have been unwilling test subjects…but to what end? They team up and use the podcast as cover for their investigation. Pallas and Ambrose uncover evidence that indicates the murder might be a small part of a larger conspiracy involving powerful hallucinogenic drugs being tested at the sleep clinic. The relationship between Pallas and Ambrose begins with wary suspicion and evolves to friendship, but the romance between them is never more than a subplot. This book is the first in a new series, and the interesting paranormal world and unsolved plotlines will keep readers clamoring for future titles.
A richly layered mystery full of pleasing paranormal elements from a master of the genre.
GUNK BABY
Lau, Jamie Marina Astra House (352 pp.) $17.00 paper | Dec. 13, 2022 978-1-662-60145-3
The second novel by young Australian writer Lau is a maximalist caper set in the most achingly existential of modern locales: a suburban shopping mall. Twenty-four-year-old Leen is adrift in her life. She and her mother settled in Par Mars, a suburb of carefully anonymizing subdivisions, when Leen was a child because they were attracted to “the tiredness of it, the bored unattractiveness of it, the lonely, antisocial nature of it, that made [them] both look inward.” Both her parents have since moved on, and Leen is left crashing somewhat indefinitely in her friend Doms’ living room, taking courses in massage therapy, and watching analysis videos of movies on her phone. With seed money from her peripatetic father and instruction from her mother—who has recently started a “healing business” in Hong Kong—Leen opens an ear-cleaning and massage studio in the Topic Heights shopping center, which sits in the center of the Par Mars suburb and represents “the exact summation of every need and personality of the people residing in its hem.” Though both Par Mars and Topic Heights strive to create the impression of regulation, order, and predictably scaled progress, there are signs that things are starting to come loose at the seams. Vic, Doms’ Nigerian boyfriend, is beaten in the street in a possibly racially motivated attack, and the rising unrest among the low-wage workers in Topic Heights is an expression of the growing social divide between people like Peggy—the CEO of the shopping complex who facilitates drug-fueled swinger parties at her hilltop house on the coastal side of the estates—and people like Jean Paul, a nihilist
the dream builders
pharmacy assistant who hosts social resistance meetings at the East Par Mars Community Center. As her business founders, Leen becomes increasingly involved with Jean Paul’s Resistance Acts—which begin as essentially harmless pranks against Topic Heights management but quickly escalate into psychological torment and then real bodily harm—even as she starts to doubt the purity of his proletariat motives. Lau’s second novel treads similar ground as Pink Mountain on Locust Island (2020), her debut take on Gen Z alienation, but with a hyperconscious maximalism that occasionally overwhelms the reader with the equity of its attention. There is so much to see in this novel that the reader is sometimes at a loss for where to look.
Funny, bold, capacious, and more than a little exhausting— this book mirrors modern life.
MOONRISE OVER NEW JESSUP
Minnicks, Jamila Algonquin (336 pp.) $28.00 | Jan. 10, 2023 978-1-643-75246-4
A Southern community confronts the meaning of Black power. In a warmly appealing book debut, Minnicks, winner of the 2021 PEN/ Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, considers the fraught question of integration from the perspective of an all-Black community in rural Alabama. It’s 1957, and Alice Young is on her way to Birmingham after fleeing abuse in the segregated town where she grew up. Getting off the bus to stretch her legs, she is incredulous to find herself in a place with no “WHITES ONLY signs and backdoor Negro entrances.” New Jessup, she learns, had been established by freedmen who separated from the White community “across the woods,” where they had worked “from field to house and everywhere inside.” Even after Whites tried to run the Black people of New Jessup off the land, they rebuilt and set down roots, started thriving businesses, a school, a hospital, and farms. But, Alice soon discovers, there are troubles: A growing national movement for desegregation has incited dissension. Some in New Jessup agree with the NAACP that integration will be favorable for Blacks; others, that “independence, and not mixing” is a better goal. In New Jessup, the independence movement is adopted by the National Negro Advancement Society, whose aim is “keeping folks from across the woods outta our hair and our pockets for good!” Alice would prefer to distance herself from politics, but she becomes immersed in the controversy when she falls in love with an NNAS activist. How, the NNAS asks, can separation work for Negro communities? Will integration mean equal rights—or merely upending lives for something neither Blacks nor Whites want? What is a viable path to real power? Minnicks’ impassioned characters struggle with those questions as they think about the consequences of court-mandated integration and the reality of living in a society where, Alice realizes, “not all unwelcoming is posted in the window at eye level.”
A thoughtful look at a complex issue.
THE DREAM BUILDERS
Mukherjee, Oindrila Tin House (384 pp.) $17.95 paper | Jan. 10, 2023 978-1-953534-63-7
Losses great and small haunt the denizens of a glittering new city in India. In the summer of 2018, Maneka Roy, who’s lived in the U.S. for a dozen years, visits the rising and opulent city of Hrishipur to visit her father after the death
of her mother. Natives of Calcutta, where they brought her up, Maneka’s parents had relocated to Hrishipur so her mother could pursue a longed-for teaching career after her husband’s retirement. (Once there, they ominously lost most of their modest nest egg when the development including the dream apartment they had invested in goes bust.) Maneka is drawn into the varied social circle inhabited by Ramona, an old acquaintance now living in Hrishipur. One of the “beautiful girls” back in high school, Ramona seems emblematic of the glitz and glamour of the Oz-like new city. Through a series of interlocking accounts, each told from the perspective of someone in or attached to Ramona’s orbit, Mukherjee reveals the actual forces at work behind the glamorous facade of the dream city: loneliness, frustration, classism, misogyny, economic uncertainty, jealousy, disenfranchisement…and worry. People striving to get ahead or stay afloat in Hrishipur lose much-needed jobs, fear the loss of those jobs, and fight battles with ennui and increasingly competitive global market forces. Looming above this all, like an actual illuminated beacon, are the Trump Towers being (contentiously) developed by a famous U.S. developer and his family. Tensions between a traditional way of life and a more modern global approach are exemplified by Maneka’s father’s wish to return to the comforts of Calcutta. His wife’s death has left him alone in a place where he knows few and where the exclusive malls and shops hold little allure for him. Hrishipur itself assumes a characterlike role in this narrative woven from many detailed threads.
Mukherjee artfully demonstrates that even a new civilization can have its discontents.
all the dark places
ALL THE DARK PLACES
Parlato, Terri Kensington (320 pp.) $27.00 | Dec. 27, 2022 978-1-49673-856-1
A suburban Massachusetts couple’s contented veneer is shattered by a murder that leads to, well, some really dark places. Her friends probably could be forgiven for thinking that Molly Bradley is the heroine of a cozy mystery. She lives in lovely Graybridge, Massachusetts; she works in a bookstore; she’s married to a psychologist everyone loves. Molly’s dreams of happiness end the morning after Dr. Jay Bradley’s 40th birthday party, when she awakens to find him dead on the floor of his home office, his throat cut. Det. Rita Myers, whose first-person narrative alternates with Molly’s, naturally wants to talk to the friends who gathered for the party. But nothing said by any of them—Molly’s BFF, Kim Pearson, and her husband, Josh; Jay’s partner, Dr. Elise Westmore, and her husband, Scott; and Jay’s hockey buddy, Cal Ferris, and his wife, Laken—can hold a candle to Molly’s own history, which was known only to Jay. Abducted as a child along with a friend and neighbor, she was imprisoned in a basement and repeatedly molested, and she’s suffered ever since from the dreadful knowledge that the other victim didn’t survive. Now the news that Jay was contacting imprisoned felons for a possible book and the discovery in his filing cabinet of a necklace belonging to the missing Annalise Robb threatens to bring Molly’s past crashing back into her carefully constructed present. And the phone calls she gets from someone claiming to know all about that basement and determined to return her to captivity force her sorrow at not having children, and even her grief about her husband, into supporting roles as she struggles to take charge of her own life.
A creepy debut most notable for the nightmares it finds beneath apparently untroubled surfaces.
SEVEN EMPTY HOUSES
Schweblin, Samanta Trans. by Megan McDowell Riverhead (208 pp.) $25.00 | Oct. 18, 2022 978-0-525-54139-4
Empty homes, emptied lives, and emptying memories: Life’s—particularly family life’s—many emptinesses and emptyings abound in this ethereal collection. Although its original Spanish publication preceded that of Little Eyes (2020), the author’s most recent translation into English, this collection may feel like a progression from McDowell’s translations of Schweblin’s other works, which dwell more squarely in the fantastic and the speculative, often pushing into nightmare territory, and into a quieter, more human-centered and realism-bound world—though one thrumming with just as much eerie tension, as Schweblin evokes the uncanny in the human rather than placing the human in the uncanny. In “None of That,” a woman finally discovers an appreciation for her mother’s unusual pastime. In “My Parents and My Children,” a man confronts an uncomfortable situation he has been drawn into with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend when she asks him to bring his probably unsound and decidedly nudist parents to visit their children at a rented vacation home. A neighbor considers what might be driving a recurring cycle in “It Happens All the Time in This House,” where the woman next door throws her late son’s clothes over their fence and her husband comes, unfailingly, to retrieve them. “Breath From the Depths,” the collection’s emotional pinnacle, introduces Lola, a paranoid and housebound elderly woman who’s outlasted her will to live and her capacity to do anything about it, as her memory empties alongside the contents of her home. “Forty Centimeters Squared” finds an unnamed woman, after moving away to Spain, returned to Buenos Aires, her belongings packed in a storage unit and with no home to call her own. “An Unlucky Man” follows a girl whose younger sister’s antics have resulted in a trip to the hospital, where she is forgotten and ignored until she meets the unluckiest man in the world in the waiting room, who takes her on a birthday adventure that ends badly but might easily have ended even worse. And, finally, in “Out,” a woman steps out of the morass of what appears to be a failing relationship and, for a moment, into new possibilities, guided by a mysterious maintenance man who claims to have been fixing her building’s fire escape—a self-described escapist.
Seven compelling explorations of vacancy in another perfectly spare and atmospheric translation.
TWO STEPS ONWARD
Simsion, Graeme & Anne Buist Text (368 pp.) $14.95 paper | Dec. 6, 2022 978-1-922458-86-5
After one of them is diagnosed with a terminal illness, friends and lovers reconnect as they take on a pilgrimage to Rome. Three years ago, Zoe, an American cartoonist from San Francisco, and Martin, an English engineer from Sheffield, met and fell in love while walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela from France to Western Spain. Ultimately, Zoe couldn’t give up her life in America, and they parted as friends. Now, Zoe is back in France, about to take another journey with her college friend Camille, who has just found out she has multiple sclerosis. This time, they’ll be walking the Chemin d’Assise to Rome, where Camille hopes to see the pope. Thanks to some miscommunication,
they’re joined by Martin; his 20-year-old daughter, Sarah; and Bernhard, a college student who walked the Camino with them. Gilbert, Camille’s now not-so-ex-husband, is also along for the hike. With almost a thousand miles to go to Rome, there’s plenty of time for relationships to grow and wither while feelings long unspoken make their ways to the surface. In this follow-up to Two Steps Forward (2018), the husband-and-wife writing team of Simsion and Buist again divide the book into alternating chapters told from Zoe’s and Martin’s points of view. Unfortunately, most of Zoe’s and Martin’s character growth happened in the previous book, and characters with weightier journeys, such as Sarah, Camille, and Gilbert, are tragically overlooked. An emphasis, for better or for worse, is put on practicality when it comes to emotions, and that seems to sum up most of the writing: The bones of the story are there, but the feelings surrounding them seem to be stripped away. The descriptions of the towns and inns the characters stay in along the way are vivid, but the pilgrims themselves are drab.
A scenic yet tepid tale.
MARGOT
Steavenson, Wendell Norton (288 pp.) $28.95 | Jan. 24, 2023 978-1-324-02084-4
Journalist-turned-novelist Steavenson follows a young woman’s quest for fulfillment from a privileged, unhappy childhood through graduation from Radcliffe in 1968. The author skillfully sets the scene with 8-year-old Margot Thornsen’s fall from a treehouse. Her self-absorbed mother’s reaction to the diagnosis of a concussion? “Don’t whine,” she tells her weeping daughter as the wound is stitched shut. Once-bold, adventurous Margot is transformed overnight into a cautious, fearful child, though this seems an inevitable reaction to Mother’s constant criticism. Margot’s growth spurt to 6 feet is viewed by Peggy Vanderloep Thornsen as one more impediment to her finding a suitable husband, along with the girl’s mystifying interest in science and regrettable tendency to do well in school. Steavenson depicts her characters with very broad strokes, and the 1950s and ’60s landscape is decidedly generic, but her portrait of the post–WWII American upper class, on the brink of change but still implacably bound to old ways, is unquestionably compelling. Margot’s fascination with biochemistry, which blossoms at Radcliffe into a determination to pursue a career as a scientist, is as credible and engaging as her ongoing infatuation with Trip Merryweather, the boy from the mansion next door. Forever keeping Margot on a string while he pursues prettier girls, Trip is one of the many strongly delineated secondary characters. They include Trip’s much more sympathetic older brother, Richie, a medical student; Margot’s free-spirited friend Maddy, whom Richie helps get a safe though illegal abortion; and Sandy Full, who casts a sardonic eye on the cluelessness of the privileged from his vantage point as the son of someone who “married the help.” The extent to which Margot is enclosed by this world can be judged by her thought when Sandy says he’s from Philly. “Frilly? Was that somewhere in Connecticut?” Her liberation from this stifling cocoon is only partially complete, as the novel ends with her departure for London, leaving behind a whole lot of unfinished business that blatantly signals there will be a sequel.
