Selected Reading: Fiction
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When We Were Wolves: Stories
by Jon Billman
The way Jon Billman writes it, Hams Fork, Wyoming, is a kind of latter-day Cicely, Alaska. You remember Cicely, the fictional town at the heart of TV's Northern Exposure? Hams Fork, the rough-and-tumble setting for most of the stories in Billman's first collection, gives it a run for its money in sheer volume of crazy artists, tough-talking schoolteachers, and plain old ornery cusses. This is a town where painting a rainbow-hued bare-chested mermaid on the water tower in the middle of the night qualifies as a major event. In Hams Fork, the men are boys, and are they ever bored. They chase away their boredom with drinking and adultery and doing stupid things in the wilderness.
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
by Melissa Bank
Jane Rosenal, the narrator of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is wise beyond her years. Not that that's saying much--since none of her elders, with the exception of her father, is particularly wise. At the age of 14, Jane watches her brother and his new girlfriend, searching for clues for how to fall in love, but by the end of the summer she's trying to figure out how not to fail in love. At twice that age, Jane quickly internalizes How to Meet and Marry Mr. Right, even though that retro manual is ruining her chances at happiness. In the intervening years, Melissa Bank's heroine struggles at love and work. The former often seems indistinguishable from the latter, and her experiences in book publishing inspire little in the way of affection. As Jane announces in "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Could Imagine": "I'd been a rising star at H----- until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane."Syrup
by Maxx Barry
Scat, a recent college graduate formerly known as Michael, is modest. He wants to have just one million-dollar idea. Once he dreams up the can't-fail Fukk Cola, everyone -- the girl of his dreams; Sneaky Pete, his inscrutable Asian roomate; and the blonder, bustier girl of his dreams -- tries to swipe his brilliantly nihilistic confection. A deft, satirical indictment of an industry that makes its living pushing satire, Syrup is understandably deep in hip meta references. What distinguishes the novel from, say, a Thomas Frank-style critique, is that it never gets mushy, even after Scat lands the girl. Instead of waking up one morning and wishing he was Michael again, Scat arises and checks his subconscious for marketable commodities.Perlman's Ordeal
by Brooks Hansen
Dr. August Perlman lives a well-regulated life. His Clinic for Suggestive Therapy is tremendously successful--mainly because he never takes on a patient he isn't sure he can cure. His personal life is remarkably free of muss and fuss, and he likes it that way; in fact, the only passion he truly surrenders to is classical music, particularly the works of the late composer Alexander Barrett. The year is 1906 and the field of psychotherapy is still in its infancy, struggling to establish itself as a real science and not the redheaded stepchild of supernatural bunkum. Indeed, Dr. Perlman is especially sensitive to anything that smacks of the mystical, so when a young girl he has only reluctantly accepted as a patient suddenly starts channeling the spirit of a long-dead divinity named Oona, he is not amused:Buxton Spice
by Oonya Kempadoo
Born in London, but raised in a flyspeck village in Guyana, Oonya Kempadoo has now preserved her youth in exquisite amber. Buxton Spice will no doubt be compared to the work of Jamaica Kincaid, and the analogy is actually an instructive one (beyond the fact that both authors are Caribbean women). Kempadoo too has found her own idiom for rendering the magical or mundane perceptions of childhood. Even so pedestrian an activity as rollerskating seems to be taking place for the first time:Music for Torching
by A. M. Homes
As Quentin Crisp used to say, "Don't keep up with the Joneses! Drag them down to your level!" This could be the motto of the suburbanites in A.M. Homes's fourth novel, Music for Torching. Homes has a subtle eye and ear for suburban reality, but beware: she is no mere satirist of what James Joyce called the "muddle crass." Behind each neat, bright lawn, vile lives writhe in darkness. On the surface, Paul and Elaine are conventionally competitive middle-aged, middle-class people with banal yearnings for French doors and a new deck. They have two strapping boys. Their neighbors Pat and George are prodigies of efficient family life. But alone with Elaine, Pat drops the Stepford Wife mask and stages loveless orgies atop the throbbing washer, amid the Downy and Fantastik and Bon Ami. Meanwhile, Paul beds a local wife and a sinister mistress. The nice old man down the street downloads Internet child porn. Local kids join the Boy Scouts and bite off teachers' fingers. It's all about lurid misery and false fronts: a minor character is named Claire Roth, surely alluding to the bitter relationship in Claire Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House and Philip Roth's I Married a Communist.
Deep Background
by David Corn
When President Bob Hanover is shot point-blank during a White House press conference, just weeks before he's scheduled to accept his party's nomination for re-election, Nick Addis--a trusted aide--happens to be in the midst of investigating an old real estate transaction involving Hanover and his wife (back when he was the governor of Louisiana) that has come back to haunt them. Meanwhile, Clarence Dunne, the head of the Secret Service detail charged with guarding Hanover's life, has been shut out of the subsequent investigation, but continues to do legwork on his own. Of course, Dunne and Addis cross paths, and they in turn eventually meet Julia Lancette, a beautiful CIA analyst whose specialty lies in tracking down the agency's rogue elements. In the midst of all this intrigue, Addis is also under pressure to choose sides between the former vice president and the first lady as the nominating convention draws near.The Abyssinian: A Novel
by Jean-Christophe Rufin, Willard Wood (Translator)
At the heart of Jean-Christophe Rufin's marvelous first novel is a nugget of truth: in the year 1699, Louis XIV of France sent an embassy to the King of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). From this small fact Rufin has spun a mesmerizing tale of adventure, romance, and political intrigue that is one part Alexandre Dumas and two parts Rafael Sabatini, with just a dash of Brian Moore thrown in for good measure.The hero of this epic tale is Jean-Baptiste Poncet, a young French doctor who has been practicing medicine without a license in Cairo. Poncet first comes to the notice of the authorities when the French consul in Egypt receives a secret message from a Jesuit priest commanding him in Louis's name to send a diplomatic mission to the king of Abyssinia. Foreigners--especially Christians--have not been welcome in that country since the Jesuits were expelled 50 years before, and a regular delegation would almost certainly be killed. When the consul, Monsieur de Maillet, hears that the Abyssinian monarch requires a doctor, however, he devises a plan to send Poncet both to cure and to convince the king to send a return delegation to Versailles.
Headlong: A Novel
by Michael Frayn
With its sumptuous surfaces and alluring sense of gravitas, classic Dutch painting has fascinated writers for centuries. It's easy to see why. Giant religious representations and gaudy classical scenes already have the weight of literature behind them. But an enigmatic portrait or dimly lit interior seems like a virtual incubator for narrative, and now Michael Frayn joins the Netherlandish fray in Headlong, which features a Bruegel canvas in the starring role.The other star of the novel is youngish art historian Martin Clay (a Hugh Grant character gone to fat), who identifies the lost Bruegel in a tumbledown country home. The picture elicits an immediate shock of recognition:
Who's Irish?
by Gish Jen
Nobody writes about the immigrant experience like Gish Jen. What sets her apart from other ethnic writers is the wide-angle lens she turns not only on her own Chinese American ethnic group, but on Jewish Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, and just about any other hyphenate you'd care to name. Though her tales are filtered through an Asian experience, they are, at heart, the quintessential American story of immigration, assimilation, and occasional tensions with other ethnic communities. The title story, for example, is a neat variation on a time-worn theme: mothers and daughters. The narrator is an elderly Chinese woman whose thoroughly assimilated daughter, Natalie, has married into an Irish American family. Natalie is successful; her husband, John, is not. Natalie's mother comments early on:
Notes of a Desolate Man (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
by Tien-Wen Chu, Howard Goldblatt (Translator)
"I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man," cries the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground. The narrator of Chu Tien-Wen's Notes of a Desolate Man might amend that to "I am not a sick man ... but I am by no means well." Xiao Shao has reached the age of 40 only to feel that his life has run its course. His close childhood friend has recently succumbed to AIDS, and while he remains "unbelievably, amazingly" free from infection, Ah Yao's death has sent him spiraling into depression. Like Dostoyevsky's hero, Xiao suffers from a profound alienation--as a Chinese deeply engaged with Western thought, as a gay man still coming to terms with his sexuality, and, by extension, as a Taiwanese citizen both cut off from and bound to the mainland. T'ien-Wen's narrative intercuts his reflections on the nature of desire with ruminations on culture both high and low--from Fellini and Goethe to Michael Jackson and Barbra Streisand. The result is a remarkable chronicle of life on the artistic, political, and sexual margins. A 1994 winner of the China Times Novel Prize, this dense, intelligent, deliberately paced novel is no less insightful for having been written not by a gay man, but by a woman: an author of 15 previous books and one of Taiwan's leading intellectuals. Her convincing account of Xiao's inner life is a testament to the powers of the creative imagination to transcend difference. --Chloe ByrneThe Story of a Million Years
by David Huddle
David Huddle's first novel is masterful and often stunning, so carefully written that the words shimmer with purpose and necessity. Essentially the tale of two couples who have known each other since they were all teenagers, The Story of a Million Years follows Marcy and Allen, Uta and Jimmy as they try to keep going through storms of nostalgia, grief, manic lust. The foursome have been together so long that they all know the same songs. Sometimes Uta dreams about Allen, and Jimmy has long been convinced he loves Marcy, but as time moves on, these hushed-up desires become smooth and polished, like stones. Moving back and forth through various points of view and instances, Huddle brilliantly captures the sense of marriage as a system of secrets, in which certain memories and infidelities are held close like shields, talismans that protect the self from being subsumed altogether by the structures we build around love, the houses we build to contain our impulses.Walkin' the Dog
by Walter Mosley
Once he had dreamed up the Easy Rawlins series, with its colored-coded titles and suave protagonist, Walter Mosley could have coasted for the rest of his life. Instead he delved into impressionistic fiction (RL's Dream) and sci-fi (Blue Light)--and came up with his own variant on Ellison's invisible man, a forbidding ex-con named Socrates Fortlow. The author first introduced this inner-city philosopher in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, allowing him to vault one ethical hurdle after another. Now Socrates returns in Walkin' the Dog, still operating out of his tiny Watts apartment, still figuring precisely what to make of his freedom.Like his dog, Killer--a spirited mutt who's missing his two hind legs--Socrates has to contend with a number of severe handicaps. Forget the fact that he's a black man in a white society. He's also the fall guy for every crime committed in the vicinity, a scapegoat of near-biblical proportions:
All Quiet on the Orient Express
by Magnus Mills
Magnus Mills may have single-handedly invented a new fictional genre: the Kafkaesque novel of work. First, his Booker-shortlisted The Restraint of Beasts brought to fence-building the kind of black humor found in a Coen brothers movie. Now, in All Quiet on the Orient Express, Mills turns his deadpan prose on some very odd jobs, indeed. The unnamed narrator is on holiday for a few weeks, camping in England's Lake District before beginning an extended journey to India. He sees no reason not to agree when the campground owner--the sinister Tommy Parker, who seems mainly to engage in "buying and selling"--asks him to help out with a simple chore. As this is a Magnus Mills novel, however, no chore can possibly be simple. Through error or bad luck, one task leads to another, and the narrator quickly finds himself trapped by his own passivity and a very English reluctance to cause a fuss. Soon he's doing homework for Parker's daughter, being kicked on and off the darts team at the local pub, and learning how to perform a series of menial jobs. ("Have you ever operated a circular saw?" "Driven a tractor before?" "What are you like with a hammer and nails?")Going to Pot
by Jill Laurimore
The main character in this cheerfully cynical and deeply funny first novel is a great old pile of a house in Britain: the ancestral manse of the Harley-Wrights. In 1987, Fliss and Ivor, their children, and Ivor's impossible mum, Titty, inhabit Little Watling Hall. Fliss and Ivor are trying desperately to stave off the bank long enough to sell a family collection of commemorative drinking vessels. There's an unctuous antiques dealer (Barney), a fabulously rich American collector (CZ), and his minion-lawyer (Tom), who comes to assess the deal. Fliss has to deal with Tom because Barney feels Tom needs to buy into the whole British experience. The household disasters that follow are exaggerated but hilarious, like a Marx Brothers movie with Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics. There's no blood to be drawn, as all the characters are cardboard, but the whole skewers British genteel poverty and American rapaciousness so thoroughly, and with such a catalog of familiar household disasters writ large, that it is impossible not to have a good time. GraceAnne DeCandidoPlainsong
by Kent Haruf
Plainsong, according to Kent Haruf's epigraph, is "any simple and unadorned melody or air." It's a perfect description of this lovely, rough-edged book, set on the very edge of the Colorado plains. Tom Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife can't--or won't--get out of bed; the McPherons are two bachelor brothers who know little about the world beyond their farm gate; Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant 17-year-old with no place to turn. Their lives parallel each other in much the same way any small-town lives would--until Maggie Jones, another teacher, makes them intersect. Even as she tries to draw Guthrie out of his black cloud, she sends Victoria to live with the two elderly McPheron brothers, who know far more about cattle than about teenage girls. Trying to console her when she think she's hurt her baby, the best lie they can come up with is this: "I knew of a heifer we had one time that was carrying a calf, and she got a length of fencewire down her some way and it never hurt her or the calf."
Paris Trance: A Romance
by Geoff Dyer
Recipe for a millennial novel about twentysomethings living abroad: Take two couples and combine with equal parts desperation and languid slacking. Gently blend with just a pinch of romance. Actually, on second thought, just dump a whole lot of sex into the pot and bring to a boil. Sprinkle with lengthy discussions about the merits of particular movies, directors, etc. Finally, just add drugs. Ready to serve!Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance is full of these ingredients. Luke and Alex are Englishmen living in Paris, spending their days packing books in a warehouse and spending their free time playing football and quoting sections of dialogue from Blade Runner. Soon they hook up with their respective mates--Luke with Nicole, Alex with Sahra--and proceed to party heavily.
Local Girls
by Alice Hoffman
More than a collection of short stories, yet not quite a novel, Local Girls occupies an undefined territory between these two forms. The local girls in question are Gretel Samuelson, her best friend, Jill, her mother, Franny, and Franny's cousin Margot--four characters who weave in and out of each of the 15 related stories that chronicle the rocky years of Gretel's adolescence. That hers will be a tough row to hoe is immediately apparent in the first story, "Dear Diary," in which Alice Hoffman introduces the Samuelson family just as they are being swallowed up by the fissures that have cracked them apart. "Long before the plane touched down in Miami we could hear our parents arguing," Gretel tells us of a family vacation to Florida; "and at the hotel room they locked themselves in their room. If you ask me, working so hard at being married can backfire." It is the end of the marriage that has lasting ramifications, however, as we discover in later stories: Gretel's brilliant older brother, Jason, becomes a drug addict; their mother must battle cancer alone; and Gretel becomes involved in a destructive relationship with a drug dealer. All pretty depressing plot points, to be sure, yet Hoffman's luminous prose combined with Gretel's tart and funny perspective keeps the reader eagerly turning the pages until the very end.The Catastrophist
by Ronan Bennett
Perhaps it takes a writer with Ronan Bennett's peculiar personal history to write so compelling a novel about the place where politics and art intersect. By the time he was 23, Bennett, an Irish Catholic from Northern Ireland, had already spent five years in and out of various jails, charged with politically motivated crimes he'd never committed. He then traded in prison walls for the rarified halls of academia, studying for a Ph.D. in history before embarking on a new career as a fiction writer. Though at first The Catastrophist, set in the Congo during its bid for independence from Belgium, may seem a far cry from Belfast in the '70s, Bennett uses his hard-won wisdom to examine the role of the artist in a political conflict.A Gesture Life
by Chang-Rae Lee
Never judge a book by its cover--or, for that matter, by its name. Otherwise you might overlook A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee's fine if awkwardly entitled follow-up to Native Speaker. As he did in his debut, the author explores the dilemma of being an outsider--and the corrupt, heartbreaking bargains an outsider will make to adapt to his surroundings. The protagonist, Franklin Hata, has actually spent his whole life donning one variety or another of existential camouflage. First, as a native-born Korean, he bends over backwards to fit into Japanese culture, circa 1944. Then he attempts a similar bit of environmental adaptation in postwar America--more specifically, in the slumbering New York suburb of Bedley Run. But in neither case does he quite succeed, which gives the novel its peculiar, faltering sense of tragedy.
Peel My Love Like an Onion: A Novel
by Ana Castillo
Ana Castillo's voice is one of self-confident, hypnotic melancholy. Peel My Love Like an Onion, her fifth book, often reads like a diary rather than a novel--full of dashed-off midnight eloquence but unformed. It's the story of Carmen Santos, a flamenco dancer whose right leg is shriveled from polio. Her family moved from Mexico to Chicago before she was born: "My first language was Spanish but I am not really Mexican. I guess I am Chicago-Mexican." Castillo sees the immigrant experience as a minefield of ironies. Carmen works at the Domino's in the airport as a way of being a productive American, thus gaining her father's respect. One morning on a "power walk" she realizes that the shoes she is wearing may have been made in a sweatshop by some distant relative from "somewhere... very foreign, like seaweed-and-black-fungus-in-French-Vietnamese-soup foreign."Jem (And Sam)
by Ferdinand Mount
Perhaps the only urge stronger than to write a diary of one's own is the compulsion to read someone else's. Anaïs Nin's fiction is nowhere near as widely read as the many volumes of her journals, while Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl is required reading in schools around the world. And Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century British civil servant, would most likely have sunk into complete obscurity if not for the lively reckoning he kept of the times he lived in, the people he knew, and what he thought about it all. Because of his diary, Pepys's life is an open book; but what of the myriad personalities he mentions in passing? In Jem (and Sam), Ferdinand Mount uses his putative ancestor Jeremiah Mount, a real-life drinking companion of the great diarist, as a springboard into the tumultuous 1600s.Lost
by Hans Ulrich Treichel, Carol Brown Janeway (Translator)
Although Hans-Ulrich Treichel has already published seven volumes of poetry and miscellaneous prose, his first novel has produced the biggest splash yet, both in his native Germany and abroad. Initially this seems a little surprising. Lost is a small book whose expressive resources are constricted on one side by the narrator's youth (he's 8) and on the other by his emotional range (from mild to deep perplexity). Yet Treichel's plot has an elementary and irresistible power. As we learn, the narrator and his parents are beneficiaries of the postwar German boom, now living in East Prussia. There is, however, a missing piece from this family portrait: an older brother, reluctantly abandoned to a bystander during the Russian advance in 1945. The parents are tortured by this fact, while the narrator, forced to study the single remaining photo of his sibling, takes a more laissez-faire approach:The Sun King
by David Ignatius
This is an appealing novel, one in which Ignatius displays his customary feel for inside-the-Beltway mores.A splendid, star-crossed Gatsby update that roasts on the same skewer Washington's power elite and the journalists they so easily seduce. Imagine Ted Turner buying the Washington Post just so he could woo Sally Quinn. Departing from his spy-thriller beat (A Firing Offense, 1997, etc.), Post columnist Ignatius offers a wickedly cynical insider account of irresistibly charming billionaire Carl Sandburg (``Sandy'') Galvin's purchase of the stodgy, respected Washington Sun and Tribune (a dead ringer for the Post, despite Ignatius's denial of this and many other factual congruencies), whose Pulitzer-winning foreign editor, Candace Ridgway, loved and left him back at Harvard. ...
The Anniversary and Other Stories
by Louis Auchincloss
Louis Auchincloss had four decades to perfect his art before embarking on this, his 55th book, and all that practice shows. The prose in The Anniversary, a collection of nine short stories, harks back to an earlier age--the days of Henry James and Edith Wharton, when every word counted and every sentence was polished to a high gloss. Indeed, those years are Auchincloss's fictional stomping grounds, as well; his tales stretch from the closing decades of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th, but stop resolutely short of the tumultuous 1960s and beyond. In one, "The Virginia Redbird," James even makes a cameo appearance as a visitor to the London home of the heroine who, in typical Jamesian fashion, has entered into marriage for all the wrong reasons. The title story shows off Auchincloss's many strengths: carefully crafted prose, psychological acuity, and a complex narrative that looks easier to recount than it really is. The protagonist, a minister, reflects on the peculiar circumstances of his 25th wedding anniversary with a woman who had run off to Italy with another man and stayed away for five years before eventually returning. Auchincloss obviously delights in the intricacies of public versus private responses to this betrayal, and the eventual resolution to the story is as satisfying as it is elegant.
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