Reviews by Mark Luce
We are not given to superlatives, though we are often told this is something readers like. The top ten movies? The three best ways to rotate your tires? The sexiest man alive?
Any fool will tell you that there are a lot of fine novels published each year from new writers just starting out. Whether or not the following are the best of the season, they are mighty good. These talented folk are raising the stakes for next year's new writers, and if they aren't the season's three best debuts, they're close enough.
Bringing Out the Dead, by Joe Connelly
Alfred A. Knopf, $23
ISBN 0375400400
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Emergency Medical Technicians see things every day the rest of us hope we will never see -- wacked-out junkies, cardiac arrests, dismembered bodies and gunshot victims. Their days are marked not by hours but by calls and saves.Why subject yourself to such a gruesome job? Many do it for the rush of saving lives, for cheating death again and again with quick hands, quicker driving and the quickest decision-making around. But as Joe Connelly describes in his intense debut "Bringing Out the Dead," all the trauma has haunting emotional repercussions.
Connelly worked ten years as a paramedic in New York, which provides the basis for his protagonist, Frank Pierce, a shell of a medic who has lost the thrill and satisfaction of his work. Now, Pierce plods through his graveyard shift with whiskey-laced coffee, unaware of his surroundings and increasingly nearing a snapping point.
The novel excites and repels as Connelly takes readers on a breakneck ambulance ride through dank alleys, crowded hospitals and the freakish dregs that give Hell's Kitchen its name. What is so fascinating about the prose isn't just Connelly's stark, commanding power, but his ability to chronicle a particular kind of occupational madness. He carefully mines the unstable psyche of Frank, who wallows in drink, cloudy memories and repeatedly sees a vision of Rose, an 18-year-old asthmatic he says "he helped to kill" by his lack of action.
The New York City of "Bringing Out the Dead" doesn't sleep, instead it is a continual waking apocalyptic nightmare, providing a gritty, surreal backdrop for this harrowing portrait of a man completely consumed with, and simultaneously by, his work.
Newfangled, by Debra Monroe
Simon & Schuster, $22
ISBN 0684819058
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Maidie Bonasso long ago drifted from her parents, siblings and ex-husbands in order to tame the emotional dislocation that has punctuated her nomadic existence. Despite her attempts to the contrary, Maidie sees the people in her life, acquaintance, neighbors and co-workers, in the same sort of temporary vein that she sees her work as the curator of the Museum of History and Domestic Economy. For Maidie, feelings, like exhibits, can be forced into an intellectual framework, examined and then treated properly or placed into storage.It is from such competing awareness that Debra Monroe weaves her thoughtful debut novel "Newfangled," a travelogue of the human heart. Maidie, after leaving the sullen, abusive Jack, finally finds professional happiness by overseeing a collection of women's history artifacts at a museum struggling for accreditation and suffering from petty board in-fighting. Nevertheless, at the museum Maidie lets her intellect run free, endlessly contemplating the vanishing nature of women's traditional work. She steadfastly refuses to look at the artifacts as nostalgia, instead looking at the cracks, the untold stories. But in her newfangled emotional life, Maidie comes to understand that she can't apply that type of cool rationality to her own emotional fault lines.
Even as Maidie desires contact, she pushes away those closest to her, like Rex, the rugged movie-prop man who spins simple stories. He's too simple, she tells herself, too much another prop. And as she sets out to Oklahoma for an academic conference she again feels trapped by a man. Or does she?
Monroe's languid prose skirts across the page with an understated elegance, looping gracefully from present to past and back again. And in many ways (though presumably unintentional) "Newfangled" lays out a map of the minefield of love, in turn giving the reader a way to maneuver through it safely.
The novel is the perfect rainy-day book, a melancholic tale that slowly, surely blossoms into a story of redemption, reconciliation and that sliver of hope we all rightly hang onto.
Aaron, Approximately, by Zachary Lazar
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Poor Aaron Bright. He doesn't just have bad days, he has bad decades. When only eight, Bright sees his father die in a bizarre parachute accident/radio stunt. He routinely gets beat up at private school, gets inordinately drunk at his own bar mitzvah, can't seem to figure out how to talk to girls, and changes his identity from punk to leftist humanitarian to preppy to poet as quickly as he loses jobs.But hey, he's trying. And eventually, the quirky protagonist of Zachary Lazar's impressive debut "Aaron, Approximately," will figure it all out, and if he can keep himself together long enough, he may even get the girl.
Lazar's buoyant Bildungsroman weaves through the cultural minutiae of the 1970s and '80s, and brilliantly captures what matters most to teenage boys: being accepted, being hip, the Stones' "Exile on Main Street," beer, and, of course, girls. A child of a malaise-filled Denver suburb, Aaron slouches his way toward adultdom with conflicting notions of self-importance and self-loathing. He's smart, but doesn't try. Funny, but morose. Lonely, but afraid to commit. And as he clumsily stomps through Latin America after college, he comes to realize that having a goal, or God forbid, a plan, doesn't mean he's selling out, it just means he's human.
Aaron will undoubtedly remind readers of another fragile youngster, the Alexander Portnoy of Philip Roth. While not as self-abusive or sophisticated as Portnoy, Aaron is equally devilish and charming, absurd and endearing. Lazar pulls off this arc of a childhood with elan and, perhaps more important, humor that rings with particularly painful recognition.
Lazar's subject matter has been done to death: twentysomething writer who pens an at least partial autobiography. However, unlike many of his unfulfilling Gen-X novelist counterparts, Lazar trades the genre's characteristic cheap hyper-ironic glibness for the honest sentiment of a lovable goof. The result is an extremely striking debut that renders the floundering angst of adolescence in its powerful poignancy, glorious confusion and unfocused bitterness.
Mark Luce is a writer who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
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