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Becky Ohlsen

FictionDebut Fiction

A mystery weaves through two very different timelines

Review by Becky Ohlsen

As you’d imagine from the title, bats are a key element in Zachary Thomas Dodson’s intricately constructed and elaborately illustrated debut. But the book’s real spirit animal is the ouroboros: a snake eating its own tail. Built as a novel within a novel, with supporting material in the form of letters and journal pages and drawings (all reproduced here as if photocopied from an archive), Bats of the Republic follows a pair of adventurous young men, several generations apart, on similar missions.

The first of these is Zeke Thomas, an heir to a senate seat in the citystate of Texas in the year 2143. The post-disaster world he lives in is strictly controlled, with communities organized around “life phases” in order to facilitate repopulation. Most historical documents were lost in whatever disaster befell the planet, so now there’s a recording-and-archiving system with creepy parallels to the modern world, a nod to the perils of ceding privacy to government in exchange for security. Zeke’s trouble begins with a letter he inherits that was never opened or properly archived—a criminal offense. Will he report it?

Back in 1843, Zadock Thomas—an ancestor to Zeke—also has a problem caused by a mysterious, unopened letter. Zadock works at Chicago’s new Museum of Flying and is in love with the daughter of the museum’s founder. But just as he’s about to propose, his boss sends him on a mission to deliver a letter to a storied general in the embattled republic of Texas. If he doesn’t get back in time—or at all—his beloved will be forced to marry his awful cousin. Naturally, Zadock encounters every possible obstacle, including a cave filled with bats that may or may not be related to the bats that live in the archive of the future world. Will he make it back home?

The stories circle around and fold into each other (in one instance, literally) to delightful and dizzying effect. Dodson is a book designer, and the book is subtitled “an illuminated novel.” The often elaborate design serves the story, underscoring the various narrative voices and timelines, as well as adding visual texture. It’s a pleasure to get lost here, though you might be glad the author includes a few maps.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As you’d imagine from the title, bats are a key element in Zachary Thomas Dodson’s intricately constructed and elaborately illustrated debut. But the book’s real spirit animal is the ouroboros: a snake eating its own tail. Built as a novel within a novel, with supporting material in the form of letters and journal pages and drawings (all reproduced here as if photocopied from an archive), Bats of the Republic follows a pair of adventurous young men, several generations apart, on similar missions.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A witty look inside a grand castle

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Patrick deWitt’s novels don’t sneak up on you; they’re the kind you love instantly. His latest, Undermajordomo Minor (a follow-up to his Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers), is no exception. From the moment you tumble into its strange world, there is no other world. In that sense, and in its slightly mannered language, it’s like a fairy tale, although one with plenty of room inside for thoroughly modern, adult complications.

The story’s hero is Lucien (Lucy) Minor, a somewhat fussy, frail, proud young lad who’s leaving his village to take a job at a nearby castle, home of the Baron von Aux. Lucy has recently acquired a pipe and enjoys the mental image of himself smoking the pipe, although he doesn’t really know how to. “He adopted the carriage of one sitting in fathomless reflection,” deWitt writes, “though there was in fact no motion in his mind whatsoever.” But Lucy isn’t empty-headed at all; he’s just very self-conscious and lacking in experience of the world. Not for long, though.

Lucy’s direct supervisor at the castle is the majordomo, Mr. Olderglough, who quickly becomes fond of his new underling. Their banter is one of the many pleasures of the book; it’s sweet and brainy and feels genuinely affectionate despite being enjoyably theatrical. There’s also, of course, a love interest: Klara, the daughter of a charming thief Lucy encounters on the train to the castle—though she may be spoken for by the handsome soldier Adolphus, a hero in a confusing war being staged outside the castle grounds. And then there’s the baron himself, a mystery no one explains to Lucy until doing so becomes unavoidable. 

But although there are plenty of mysteries in Undermajordomo Minor, nothing about them is frustrating. DeWitt explains exactly the right amount, in exactly the right tone, beginning to end.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Patrick deWitt’s novels don’t sneak up on you; they’re the kind you love instantly. His latest, Undermajordomo Minor (a follow-up to his Booker-shortlisted The Sisters Brothers), is no exception. From the moment you tumble into its strange world, there is no other world. In that sense, and in its slightly mannered language, it’s like a fairy tale, although one with plenty of room inside for thoroughly modern, adult complications.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionMysteryFantasy

A larger-than-life mystery in Lapland

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Lapland, in the far north of Sweden, is a strange and mysterious place, and this epic novel by Swedish author Stefan Spjut reflects every bit of its otherworldly mystery. It’s not a quick read; it’s the kind of book you want to live with for a while. Characters and situations are introduced without any explanation of their relationships to each other or their surroundings, but patient readers will be rewarded: Much of the book’s pleasure comes from the slow and shocking revelations of the story’s architecture as it progresses.

Shapeshifters begins in 1978, when a 4-year-old boy is abducted while he and his mother are vacationing at a cabin in northern Sweden. The mother swears a giant stole her son; no one believes her, and the mystery is never solved.

Twenty-five years later, a woman named Susso who runs a blog about mysterious creature sightings—Bigfoot, aliens and of course, because this is Sweden, trolls—gets a call from an old lady who has seen a strange person standing outside her house. Susso checks it out, and manages to get a photo of the creature, who looks vaguely but not exactly like a tiny old man. Soon after, the old lady’s grandson vanishes, and Susso finds herself at the heart of a missing-child investigation that lines up oddly with her search for the strange little man.

Elsewhere, an act of violence shatters a cult-like family of outsiders who maintain a guest house inhabited by unspecified but dangerous beings. Nothing about their situation is explained directly; we see them through the eyes of Seved, a young man whose relationship to the other adults is somewhere between servant and heir.

There’s much more: clever animals that aren’t what they seem, ineffective cops, territorial snowmobilers and the real story behind the shipwreck that killed famous Swedish artist John Bauer. As Susso’s and Seved’s paths converge, we gradually come to understand more and more about where they are and how they got there. The more we understand, the more disturbing it gets. At the risk of revealing too much, trolls aren’t the scariest thing in the book.

Though he preserves certain mysteries as long as he can, Spjut relates two aspects of the story with perfect clarity. One is the physical world: The natural landscape is vivid and specific, and crucial to the story, as befits any tale set in Lapland. The other is the day-to-day texture of life: how people talk, the importance of coffee, what the hotel restaurant tablecloth looks like. These details build a completely realistic world around equally realistic characters, which makes the strangeness at the story’s core all the more effective.

Lapland, in the far north of Sweden, is a strange and mysterious place, and this epic novel by Swedish author Stefan Spjut reflects every bit of its otherworldly mystery.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A highbrow beach read

Review by Becky Ohlsen

The Rocks, the second novel by Peter Nichols, has everything you’d hope for in a great beach read: a vivid Mediterranean setting, complicated entanglements, adventures at sea, some hanky-panky and a little heartbreak. But its sunny exterior conceals some sharp observations on human vulnerability and how easily self-preservation can calcify into mere selfishness.

The book begins in 2005 on the Spanish island of Mallorca, at what seems like the end of the story. Gerald and Lulu, both in their 80s, cross paths for the first time in decades. It’s not a happy reunion; we don’t know why, but we know they were married, briefly, 60 years ago. They argue, stumble and then—not 10 pages into the novel—they fall into the sea and drown.

From here, the novel telescopes into the past: 1995, 1966, all the way back to 1948. With each step back, we learn more about who Lulu and Gerald were, what led them to Mallorca and drove them apart, and why there’s such tension now between their two (unrelated) adult children. Each scene reconfigures the previous until at last the whole tragic story emerges. 

Most of the action takes place at The Rocks, Lulu’s seaside hotel, where a group of expats spend their summers. Lulu is a siren: ageless and beautiful, irresistible to men, but diamond-hard and pitiless. Gerald is quiet and kind, a yachtsman and writer who putters around among his olive trees. They’ve each made a life on the island, each remarried and had a child, but they’re worlds apart. The contrast between the way these two approach the paradise they’ve found shapes the whole novel and everyone in it.

Nichols writes with authority and clear affection, especially on anything boat-related. (He has also written a memoir about sailing a wooden boat across the Atlantic.) He can subtly and effectively inhabit multiple voices: a Spanish officer at a port-city jail, the jazz guitarist who plays Sunday nights at the hotel, even the seedy English rake with an appetite for seduction. With its large cast of eccentrics and their ever-shifting relationships, The Rocks feels a bit like the literary equivalent of a good Netflix binge: a guilty pleasure well-crafted enough that you don’t actually have to feel guilty about it.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The Rocks, the second novel by Peter Nichols, has everything you’d hope for in a great beach read: a vivid Mediterranean setting, complicated entanglements, adventures at sea, some hanky-panky and a little heartbreak. But its sunny exterior conceals some sharp observations on human vulnerability and how easily self-preservation can calcify into mere selfishness.
Science Fiction

A world divided by four

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Remember those scholastic-aptitude tests you took in grade school, the ones that told you what kind of career path you should follow? Those tests and their ilk take on a much more ominous significance in light of Rupert Thomson's new novel, Divided Kingdom.

A near-future science-fiction odyssey, the book is set in England after a revolution in which the powers-that-be have sorted people into four categories: "not according to economic status or social position, not according to colour, race or creed, but according to psychology, according to type," as one leader puts it. The divisions are named after what medicine has traditionally called the body's humours: yellow bile (choleric), black bile (melancholic), phlegm (phlegmatic) and blood (sanguine). This "rearrangement," as it's called, disturbingly echoes such long-since-abandoned practices as eugenics and phrenology, and the results are as chaotic and disastrous as one might expect. Children are ripped from the arms of their parents, husbands and wives are parted, and the four groups are moved into four separate quarters, each enclosed by insurmountable concrete walls.

The book's narrator, Thomas Parry (his post-rearrangement name), is among the first batch of children taken from his parents and moved. Luckily for him he's designated sanguine, the "best" of the four humours. He's placed in a grim boarding school with other "Children of the Red Quarter" and indoctrinated with the principles of the system. When he's old enough, he is assigned to a new family, or what's left of it: a bereaved father whose wife has been relocated, and an adopted sister with whom Thomas immediately and irrevocably falls in love. He is encouraged to spy on this new family; later, he is secretly hired to work for the government, and his ability to assimilate makes him good at the job. Even then, though, you can sense rebellion lurking under his calm surface.

When Thomas suddenly snaps, while on a work trip to the Yellow Quarter, he sets out on a fascinating journey that confirms his doubts about the efficacy of the divided kingdom. His motivations, though, are hardly political; what he really wants, even before he realizes it, is to find his mother and the scraps of a childhood he lost when his new life began. It's a universal desire, and one that demonstrates just how difficult it is to define and categorize something as complicated as a human being.

 

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

 

Remember those scholastic-aptitude tests you took in grade school, the ones that told you what kind of career path you should follow? Those tests and their ilk take on a much more ominous significance in light of Rupert Thomson's newest novel, Divided Kingdom.

FictionShort Stories

Stories from behind the veil

Review by Becky Ohlsen

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, February 2015

Kelly Link tends to inspire a range of comparisons to other authors—usually, some blend of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami—but, in fact, nobody writes stories like hers. Link’s fantastical worlds feel utterly real, partly because they’re intensely matter-of-fact. Her characters are sassy, moody and cool, and they never, ever make any big deal out of the fact that there are monsters, aliens, vampires or ghosts hanging around, or that they might stumble into a pocket universe or some alternate dimension. Mostly they’re concerned with cute guys and flirting and drinks, plus occasionally needing to save the world.

If that sounds light, it’s not meant to. Link, who has written three previous short-story collections and co-edited several anthologies with her husband, Gavin J. Grant, is often hilarious, but her stories still break your heart. The best thing to compare her writing to might be “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” with its perfect combo of dark wit, sex and tragedy. Get in Trouble contains nine stories, which include maybe two happy endings, maybe zero, depending on how you look at them. She’s never been one to wrap things up in tidy fashion.

The tales here range from fairy tales to space opera. Sometimes you’re halfway through before you even know what kind of world you’re in, but that’s OK, because Link guides you so carefully that you’d follow her anywhere. There’s an amateur cyberstalker at a superhero convention who, naturally, gets more than she bargained for (“Secret Identity”). There’s a girl whose job as a caretaker of summer houses is not what it seems (“The Summer People”), a rich far-future playboy who falls for the wrong person (“Valley of the Girls”), a woman driven to distraction by her shadow (“Light”).

As different as these stories are, they all in some way play with expectations. There are surprises on every page. Nothing is what it seems; everything is much more. In short, Kelly Link is magic.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kelly Link tends to inspire a range of comparisons to other authors—usually, some blend of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami—but, in fact, nobody writes stories like hers. Link’s fantastical worlds feel utterly real, partly because they’re intensely matter-of-fact. Her characters are sassy, moody and cool, and they never, ever make any big deal out of the fact that there are monsters, aliens, vampires or ghosts hanging around, or that they might stumble into a pocket universe or some alternate dimension. Mostly they’re concerned with cute guys and flirting and drinks, plus occasionally needing to save the world.
FictionWorld FictionDebut Fiction

A quirky portrait of the grouch next door

Review by Becky Ohlsen

At first glance, Ove looks like a Grumpy Old Man with a Saab—a typical curmudgeon, not the type whose depths one is tempted to plumb. In fact, unless you like being scowled at, scolded, insulted and having doors slammed in your face, you might just decide to avoid him altogether. He wouldn’t mind; the only person he wants to see is his wife, who died six months ago.

Luckily for Ove, certain types of people see a grump as a project. One such, a pregnant Swedish-Iranian named Parvaneh, moves in nearby with her family and instantly gets under Ove’s skin, in both senses. It soon becomes clear that this is a story about the rewards of looking beyond the surface.

Despite appearances, Ove is neither a xenophobe nor exactly a misanthrope; he just likes things to be the way they should. Rules are rules. Each morning he patrols the neighborhood to make sure all is just so. Parvaneh and her family’s arrival—in which they drive in the strictly no-driving zone, etc.—heralds a series of challenges to Ove’s preferred order. Worse, people keep interfering with his plans to join his wife. Ove finds his grief is not enough to let him off the hook. Like it or not, he can’t turn his back on the changing world.

A Man Called Ove—which made its blogger author a Swedish literary superstar in 2013—takes a wry look at modern Sweden, particularly the way its older, stodgier generations are coping with change. It’s a fascinating, hilarious and occasionally heartrending portrait. Buried sadness forms the story’s core, yet the writing is light and charming, the descriptions inventive. (Asked what he’s doing in the garage, for instance, Ove answers “with a sound more or less like when you try to move a bathtub by dragging it across some tiles.”)

The third-person narration has some quirky perspective shifts: Sometimes we’re inside Ove’s head, knowing and feeling what he knows and feels, but other times we sort of hover near his shoulders, watching him with authorial fondness. For the most part, though, watching Ove from any vantage point is a pleasure.

At first glance, Ove looks like a Grumpy Old Man with a Saab—a typical curmudgeon, not the type whose depths one is tempted to plumb. In fact, unless you like being scowled at, scolded, insulted and having doors slammed in your face, you might just decide to avoid him altogether. He wouldn’t mind; the only person he wants to see is his wife, who died six months ago.
FictionWorld Fiction

A mind-bending saga

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Celebrated Japanese author Minae Mizumura’s third work of fiction, the coyly titled A True Novel, is vast, and we’re not just talking about the hefty page count—though it IS quite a brick, at nearly 900 pages, and has been broken into two volumes. But what’s really enormous is the span of the story, in both time and territory, not to mention the ever-shifting gradations of the socioeconomic class system of modern Japan. Mizumura covers a lot of ground here. The 165-page prologue is your first clue.

That prologue—really more of a frame—explains how this novel came to be. It’s told in the first person by a writer named Minae Mizumura, and its job is to introduce us to the novel’s centerpiece, a mysterious man called Taro Azuma. At first we see only glimpses of Taro. Minae meets him in the '60s, when she’s a little girl and he’s a 20-something private chauffer for an American who does business with her father. An encounter many years later with a young Japanese man, Yusuke, brings back Minae’s memories of that time—as well as a ready-made story for the author’s next book. Or at least that’s the conceit of the prologue; it’s hard to tell how much if any of the framing story is “true” (much of it bears more than a passing resemblance to the author’s own upbringing) and it doesn’t really matter, anyway.

In addition to introducing the central character, novel’s prologue also ushers in one of the main themes of the novel: stored memories, secrets hidden within stories, accessible only from particular locations and usually painful to dredge up. Minae, the narrator, struggles with telling Taro’s story because it means opening up the locked “magic chest” inside her that contains her memories of Japan and all her complicated feelings about having left that country for the United States. In one way or another, everyone in the novel shares this struggle.

Minae’s prologue eventually gives way to another framework: the story she hears from Yusuke, who recounts the story he heard from Fumiko, a maid who knew Taro from childhood. It’s a love story, partly modeled on Wuthering Heights, with a troubling twist in the final pages that casts an unsettling light on everything before it. But the stories around that love story are what really fascinate. The novel—which was serialized upon its original publication in Japan, and has been ably translated by Julie Winters Carpenter—encompasses generations and continents, and Mizumura’s unfussy prose draws clear pictures of the various shifting cultural patterns and behaviors. During the decades covered here, Japan’s economic situation changes, classes merge and trade places and Western style goes in and out of fashion. In the end, it’s no surprise that the great love at the story’s center fights to survive, given all that’s going on around it.

Celebrated Japanese author Minae Mizumura’s third work of fiction, the coyly titled A True Novel, is vast, and we’re not just talking about the hefty page count—though it IS quite a brick, at nearly 900 pages, and has been broken into two volumes. But what’s really enormous is the span of the story, in both time […]
Nonfiction

The consequences of the human race

Review by Becky Ohlsen

If there’s one thing we humans are good at, it’s surviving. Look at us go: “Over the past two centuries,” writes environmental journalist Alan Weisman in Countdown, “we have become brilliant at beating back diseases or preemptively protecting ourselves from them. . . . Through much of the world, we’ve doubled average human lifespans from under 40 years to nearly 80.”

In fact, we’re so good at surviving that we’re about to self-destruct; our planet runneth over. “Saving more lives than anyone in history also means there are more lives, period,” he writes. The dilemma: “how to keep growing . . . in a space that does not grow.”

In 2007’s best-selling The World Without Us, Weisman envisioned an Earth free of people, describing in vivid detail the impressive speed with which it might recover. His new book looks at what we must do if we intend to have both a healthy planet and a thriving human race. The problem, in his view, is clear: There are simply too many of us. The solution is a whole lot murkier.

Talking about population control is a tricky business, balancing altruism and self-interest. Family planning is OK for “them,” out of the question for “us.” Nobody wants to starve, but nobody wants their line to die out, either; if only half your babies live, you tend to have lots of them, even if more means hungrier.

Weisman avoids us-vs.-them generalizations by getting down to a micro level. Shrinking resources are a global emergency, so he goes everywhere: Pakistan, Japan, Uganda, Iran, Costa Rica, Jerusalem, Beijing. In each place he talks with people about their families, how they feel about how many children they have and whether that’s changed since their parents’ generation. Some have managed successfully and happily to reduce their family size, while others believe that big families are their only chance to beat their rivals—a sort of genetic arms race.

The stories Weisman tells are equally fascinating and maddening. He knows what’s at stake, but he also understands how people feel. He finds no easy answers, but in most places he finds people willing to take the long view.

If there’s one thing we humans are good at, it’s surviving. Look at us go: “Over the past two centuries,” writes environmental journalist Alan Weisman in Countdown, “we have become brilliant at beating back diseases or preemptively protecting ourselves from them. . . . Through much of the world, we’ve doubled average human lifespans from […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

A war between families, a boy caught in the middle

Review by Becky Ohlsen

It’s rare these days to find a novel about two people in love in which their love story is not the main story. Larry Watson’s latest, Let Him Go, is not about its two main characters falling in love, or falling out of love; it’s set in the happily ever after, but it isn’t about that, either. George and Margaret Blackledge are about 40 years into a solid marriage. It’s clear from the beginning that they’re crazy about each other, in that comfortable, secure, bickering-included way that comes from being married for ages. They’ve been through a lot, but they have been through it together.

When the story begins, though, Margaret is about to take off. She isn’t leaving: She’s hunting. It’s 1951, and the Blackledges live on the edge of the Badlands in North Dakota. They’ve lost their son, James, and his twin sister lives elsewhere, remote and disinterested. But James had a son—their grandson, Jimmie—and Margaret is determined to find Jimmie and bring him home, where he belongs. Margaret is nothing if not determined, so George, naturally, accompanies her on the search. As the author puts it, “No, there was never any doubt what George would do.”

Except that there is doubt, here and there. Or rather, there are surprises, from both George and Margaret. The narrative has a shifting omniscience that lets us see only so far into the thoughts of any given character, just enough to feel as if we know them. One of the ideas the novel explores is the question of inevitability, to what degree character affects the course of anyone’s journey—“how fixed and foreseeable are human lives,” as Watson puts it. But there’s nothing predetermined or predictable about what happens when the Blackledges find their grandson, Jimmie, age 4, and his sweet mother, Lorna. Lorna has married wild, handsome Donnie Weboy, and she and her son are bound up in the Weboy clan in the town of Gladstone, Montana. And the Weboy clan of Gladstone is no good—as George and Margaret quickly discover.

When the two families collide in a fight for the boy, high melodrama ensues. In a few places it’s almost too much, but Watson has perfect tone control. Besides, having given us the beautiful, meandering first third of the novel, in which we follow George and Margaret as they make their lovely way toward this battle, spending nights in jail cots and borrowed pastures, sipping coffee and watching the streets from cafe windows, gently looking after each other—having given us that, Watson can do anything. We are his.

It’s rare these days to find a novel about two people in love in which their love story is not the main story. Larry Watson’s latest, Let Him Go, is not about its two main characters falling in love, or falling out of love; it’s set in the happily ever after, but it isn’t about […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Still burning, generations later

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Added to the list of things one shouldn’t judge a book by: page count. Daniel Woodrell’s ninth novel, and his first since 2006’s Winter’s Bone (which became an award-winning feature film in 2010), is less than 200 pages long. But thanks to Woodrell’s rich storytelling, this slim novel has the feel of an epic.

The story centers on a real-life incident—the explosion of a Missouri dance hall in 1929—reimagined as fiction. One by one, in alternating and sometimes overlapping scenes, those who survived the blast recall those who were lost in it. Adding another few layers of intrigue and perspective, the novel is narrated by Alek, a young man remembering the story as he heard it one summer in 1965 from his grandmother, Alma, whose sister was among those killed in the disaster.

Alma fascinates and scares her grandson equally: She’s a stern, reserved woman with a “pinched, hostile nature,” “dark obsessions” and a “primal need for revenge,” Alek says. Her story is essentially a ghost story, and it has a strong hold on the boy. She doles it out slowly, in bits and pieces, with many satisfying digressions. “She would at times leave the public horror and give me her quiet account of the sad and criminal love affair that took her sister Ruby away from us all,” Alek recalls.

The novel has the feel of someone going through an old family photo album, dredging up odd facts and anecdotes about this or that person. The mystery at the center of this storytelling mosaic is, of course, just what caused the dance hall to explode: Who is responsible? And why? And how is it that the truth has not come out, even after all these years? By the time we learn the answer, or at least Alma’s answer, it feels somehow both inevitable and entirely unexpected.

But it’s not the mystery that keeps the story moving. It’s the gossip. As ever, Woodrell is a master of exposing to daylight the darkest corners of the human psyche. His miniature portraits of the local characters, even those that are only a page or two long, make the town vivid and real, and the result is a larger sense of loss. We know these people, not just the main players but the rest of the town; any one of them could have been at the heart of the story. This small book holds a wide world.

Added to the list of things one shouldn’t judge a book by: page count. Daniel Woodrell’s ninth novel, and his first since 2006’s Winter’s Bone (which became an award-winning feature film in 2010), is less than 200 pages long. But thanks to Woodrell’s rich storytelling, this slim novel has the feel of an epic. The […]
Nonfiction

An after-dinner adventure

Review by Becky Ohlsen

With the smallest shift in marketing, Mary Roach could singlehandedly triple the rate of pleasure reading among teenage boys. She writes about exactly the things that fascinate them: outer space, human bodies and especially all the weird, smelly, slimy, loud, hilarious byproducts of said bodies. In her latest, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Roach follows the process of digestion from beginning to inglorious end. Though her subject matter is the stuff of sixth-grade humor, her approach is (slightly) more serious, and substantially more journalistic.

She begins on a dreamy note: “How lovely to picture one’s dinner making its way down a tranquil, winding waterway, digestion and excretion no more upsetting or off-putting than a cruise along the Rhine.” Alas, most of us don’t particularly like thinking about our food once we’ve eaten it. “The prevailing attitude,” she notes with regret, “is one of disgust.”

Roach wants us to get over it already. And she’s persuasive, thanks to her trademark blend of goofball humor and sincere devotion to her subject. She wants to know what makes us tick, physically and philosophically. While talking spit with scientist Erika Silletti, Roach acknowledges, “I am honestly curious about saliva, but I am also curious about obsession and its role in scientific inquiry.”

The woman clearly loves her job. She gets to interview people who spend their days classifying bad smells, testing dog food flavors, measuring the colons of eating-contest winners. She has a “favorite snake digestion expert.” It’s hard not to share her delight when she finds a rabbi to quote on the subject of whether human hair is kosher and it turns out his last name is “Blech.” Later, when she’s tracing the use of digestive enzymes (aka spit) in stain removal, she interviews “a chemist named Luis Spitz,” then “a detergent industry consultant named Keith Grime.” The giggling is almost audible through the page.

Roach also writes excellent footnotes, draws vivid if unorthodox comparisons (she likens a colonoscope to a bartender’s soda gun) and asks all the questions you’re too self-conscious to Google, plus others that have never occurred to you (can farts cure cancer?). Along the way she sneaks in sly critiques of bureaucracy, bigotry, animal cruelty and other less-than-noble human behavior. You may be grossed out, but you’ll also be impressed.

With the smallest shift in marketing, Mary Roach could singlehandedly triple the rate of pleasure reading among teenage boys. She writes about exactly the things that fascinate them: outer space, human bodies and especially all the weird, smelly, slimy, loud, hilarious byproducts of said bodies. In her latest, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Roach […]
Fiction

Lost in a mansion of the mind

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Late in her new novel, describing the pronouncements of a woman with early dementia, Lydia Millet writes, “With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again.” You could say the same of Millet herself. She’s interested in the molecular and the global, and in the mundane middle distance only as seen from a perspective that makes it wild and terrifying or glorious and unreal.

Magnificence—about a woman who inherits a mansion filled with taxidermy—is the third in a trilogy, though you don’t need to have read the others to enjoy it. In all three books, Millet forces you instantly and fully into the mind of someone you might not ordinarily like at all: a money-obsessed developer (T., in How the Dead Dream), an IRS man (Hal in Ghost Lights), and here, Hal’s adulterous wife and T.’s employee, Susan. But Millet does like them; she takes an interest, so you do, too. Turns out, up close, they’re not at all what you thought. They are the familiar made strange.

Susan, for example, probably looks from afar like any aging wife. But she is seriously cracked. Of course, she’s cracked in that particularly off-kilter, calm, sardonic Millet way. She’s the type who slides the word “technically” (also the word “pederasty”) into a description of the weather at a funeral. Her husband’s funeral. She can have a breakdown and ironic insights simultaneously, seamlessly. She is at least as funny as she is haunted.

Like its predecessors, though, the novel has weight as well as hilarity. One of Millet’s obsessions is how massive we are, as a species; globally, we take up so much room. We steamroller the earth, not noticing until it’s too late the rarity of everything we’ve trampled. The centerpiece of this book, Susan’s inherited house, becomes a museum of lost and trampled things. When she finds it, she is lost herself, and it’s almost too perfect for her to believe: “The universe showed off its symbolic perfection; the atoms bragged.” Gradually the house fills with other lost souls, lost minds, lost loves. And up close, or from very far away, they start to seem less lost than found.

Late in her new novel, describing the pronouncements of a woman with early dementia, Lydia Millet writes, “With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again.” You could say the same of Millet herself. She’s interested in the molecular and the global, and in […]

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