Arlene McKanic

Let’s get the point of Laurence Gonzales’ novel out of the way right now: Lucy is about a girl who’s half human and half bonobo. Bonobos are a species of great apes, sometimes referred to as pygmy chimpanzees. Theoretically, they’re close enough relatives to humans to be able to interbreed, like horses and donkeys. Lucy’s biological father, a primatologist, was aware of this and after some ghastly experimentation managed to create her using a bonobo he’d named Leda. This after he’d tinkered with Leda’s genetics to make it more likely that her misbegotten pregnancy would come to term.

Now that we’ve got that matter settled, your reviewer is happy to report that Lucy is a compelling book, neither as macabre nor as kinky as one would fear. I’ve always figured that creatures with human intelligence coupled with an enraged chimpanzee’s lack of restraint would have turned the planet into radioactive rubble a long time ago, but Gonzales’ Lucy is an improbably delightful young lady: physically beautiful as well as loving, compassionate and highly intelligent. Yes, she barks at escalators until she learns better, violent rainstorms make her lose control, and she can pick up a grown man and toss him across the room, but other than that she’s human-normal. Indeed, one of the novel’s leitmotifs is Tom Petty’s “American Girl.”

Lucy is brought to America by Jenny Lowe, one of her father’s colleagues, after he and her mother, and much of her bonobo family, are murdered in the Congolese war. Lucy is fortunate not only to be adopted by Jenny, but to be surrounded by folks such as bubbly and steadfast Amanda, Harry—Jenny’s love interest—and even a wealthy couple who loan them their ranch when they have to go on the run from the inevitable, Mengele-level baddies.

Lucy pulls the reader in because of the sweet girl at its center, but the novel also makes one think about what it means to be human, and how love can be a bridge to understanding and acceptance.

You only think you know what you’re in for when Backseat Saints begins: “It was an airport gypsy who told me that I had to kill my husband.” Joshilyn Jackson’s fourth novel isn’t a series of funny, trashy set pieces out of Dogpatch; rather, the tale Jackson tells is grim, and unless you count the narrator’s dog and a few minor characters, there’s not one likable person in it.

It’s a testament to Jackson’s talent that we stick with her protagonist, Rose Mae Lolley (aka Ro Grandee), despite the fact that she’s vicious, impulsive, deceitful and about as dim as the aforementioned dog. She’s also the victim of a husband who’s even more of a monster than she is. We hope she either gets away for good or kills him, for there’s no doubt that the psychopathic Thom Grandee will one day kill her. By the time the book opens, he’s already come close a couple of times.

But Rose has been reared in violence and chaos since childhood. Her mother, a rare devout Catholic in the ironically named town of Fruiton, Alabama, abandoned her when she was eight. Claire Lolley left her daughter with a man who tried to eradicate his sorrow in drink, and when that didn’t work, he took his rage out on his young daughter—he first dislocated Rose’s shoulder when she was just nine. Since then Rose has only known to move from one bad man to another.

Jackson knows that suffering doesn’t necessarily make one saintly or compassionate; it’s just as likely to make one wary and dangerous. Rose resents her virtuous next door neighbor and steals from her. She sees nearly everyone as an enemy or someone to be dismissed, and when she finally tracks down her mother—a woman who’s almost as self-obsessed as she is—she behaves with a maddening, punitive childishness.

Jackson has a magical way with words, injecting fearless insight throughout the novel. Backseat Saints is rough going in places, but it succeeds because of Jackson’s insistence on telling the truth about Rose Mae and her dangerous and unhappy world. It’s the work of a first-rate writer.

Katie Burrelli, the protagonist of Michelle Boyajian’s Lies of the Heart, didn’t have the most satisfying life even before the death of her husband. She’s the kind of woman who has always seen herself as second best; not as pretty as her beautiful sister Dana, not as beloved by their parents, not as popular as her friends. Then she meets Nick while he’s fishing for clams in their native Rhode Island. They marry, and he becomes a speech therapist for developmentally challenged people while she becomes, halfheartedly, a documentary filmmaker.

Then Jerry, one of Nick’s clients, murders him. No one can explain why, least of all Jerry, a grown man with the I.Q. and comprehension of a child, who’d come to view Katie and Nick as surrogate parents. Jerry had grown so close to the Burrellis that they gave him his own room in their house, an act that, though well meant, was a tragic mistake.

The murder and the trial, which take up most of the book, send Katie into a spiral of anger and grief. She’s angry with her family, her friends, Nick’s coworkers; that they all seem to be on Jerry’s side enrages both her and the reader, until we learn better. Over the course of the book we also learn that Katie’s marriage to Nick, like everything else in her life, wasn’t as idyllic as she would have liked it to be. Though they passionately loved each other, Nick—handsome, talented and a bit self-pitying—could be cruel to her, and Katie was an expert at constructing maddening little head games—some of which involved innocent Jerry.

Boyajian’s writing style is deeply sensuous, even startling. The book begins with Katie imagining the path the bullet took through her husband’s brain, and the final snuffing of his consciousness. The author conveys Katie’s inability to communicate with people around her by having nearly everyone stutter, stop in mid-sentence, mumble and evade. Jerry’s own frustrations with language lead to rages Katie’s lawyer tries to use against him. The exception to this reticence is Katie’s dad, who talks too much, and at the top of his lungs; he’s not quite comic relief. We’re not surprised to learn that Katie can’t quite finish the film she’s making about two Holocaust survivors, a man and woman who have found peace and deep love despite the horrors they endured. Katie learns, just in time, that the Cohens have much to teach her about compassion and tolerance.

Lies of the Heart is a remarkable debut novel. We can only hope to hear much more from Michelle Boyajian.

What if one morning your hard-working, loving, sensible father woke up and decided he wanted to run away with the circus? And then you had to tell your mother about it? This is only the beginning of Frank Delaney’s passionate bildungsroman—for there is worse to come. The coming-of-age story told by Benedict McCarthy is not only especially tough, it’s still haunting him in his old age. And if he’s telling it now, after being born in Ireland around 1914, he’s an elderly chap indeed.

Speaking of 1914, Delaney’s interweaving of Ben’s radical loss of innocence with Ireland’s own maturation is a touch of brilliance. The action takes place mostly in 1932, an election year. The McCarthys—Harry, Louise and Ben—live in a bucolic near-paradise in southwest Ireland. They love and respect one another, and one gets the feeling that if “The Catastrophe” (as they call the circus-disappearance-act) hadn’t happened, Ben would have never left home.

Traveling circuses and vaudeville troupes are fairly common and provide much-needed entertainment for hard-working folk like the McCarthys. Harry begins to attend Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, whose eponymous star is a beautiful, much younger woman with a shady background, though its shadiness isn’t all of her own doing. He falls insanely, adolescently in love with her, and the betrayed Louise tasks their son with bringing him back at all costs. The results are even more catastrophic.

The book’s complicated plot takes in such elements as embezzlement, murder, blackmail, Celtic myth, real-life figures like Eamon de Valera—who helps Ben in his quest to set his world aright—and a bitterly snarky ventriloquist’s dummy named Blarney. Delaney, once a judge for the Booker Prize, writes with a beauty, compassion and depth that reminds one of William Trevor. He also has a peculiarly Catholic belief in forgiveness and atonement, and there is much in this story to forgive and atone for. Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show is an inventive, amazing work.

Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

T. Greenwood's novel Two Rivers begins with a lynching—or does it? We learn later that the incident happens in 1968, not 1928, and in Vermont, not Mississippi. We also learn that one of the possible participants, Harper, lost his pregnant wife that same night. When the action fast-forwards to 1980, we see Harper save an odd-eyed pregnant girl from a train wreck. Are these events all somehow related?

Two Rivers is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder, with its quiet New England town shadowed by tragedy, and of Sherwood Anderson, with its sense of desperate loneliness and regret. It's as if the loneliness that has plagued Harper since the death of his wife—the beautiful and ebullient Betsy, a girl he'd loved since they were 12 years old—has reached out and infected the landscape. The novel, after all, is set in autumn, a time of fading and gathering cold.Even the protagonist's name, Harper, calls to mind To Kill a Mockingbird, with its painful racial entanglements also set in a small town. Yet the girl Harper saves from the train wreck, who calls herself Marguerite, brings warmth and hope to Harper and his daughter Shelly, who was born that dreadful night and whose 12th birthday Harper nearly forgets. Marguerite, a black girl from the South who claims to have been exiled from her own town because of her pregnancy, is completely comfortable with these white folks she's never met. Why?

Along with Harper, Shelly, Marguerite and Betsy, Greenwood fills her novel with memorable characters, especially in the flashback chapters. There's Harper's mother, the town misfit, aflame with her indignation at injustice and whose passion for the civil rights movement seems to have led to her death. Harper's father, by contrast, is sad and passive. There's Harper's not-quite friend Brooder, a veteran disfigured in Vietnam, who was also in love with Betsy. Did his love for her lead him to do what he did the night the black man was lynched? It's to Greenwood's credit that she answers her novel's mysteries in ways that are believable, that make you feel the sadness that informs her characters' lives.