Michael Magras

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When one looks back upon a life, one remembers it as a series of noncontiguous fragments, with each discrete moment forming a picture of a person. Italian writer Sandro Veronesi knows this instinctively. In The Hummingbird, he presents just such a puzzle to create a unique portrait of an enigma of a man.

In a narrative that moves through seven decades, from 1959 to 2030, Veronesi chronicles the life of Marco Carrera, an ophthalmologist in the Italian village of Bolgheri. His mother nicknamed him “the hummingbird” because, until age 14, he was worryingly shorter than his peers. But Marco resembles a hummingbird not just in his childhood stature but also, as one character puts it, “because all [his] energy is spent keeping still.”

Nevertheless, much happens to this supposedly fixed entity. The book starts in 1999, when a therapist who has been treating Marco’s wife, Marina, risks his career to tell Marco, “I have reason to believe you may be in grave danger.”

In chapters that incorporate text messages, emails, phone conversations, love letters and even poetry, Veronesi describes the events that shape Marco’s life, including his and his wife’s infidelities; his five-decade correspondence with a woman he loved since he was 20; the death of Marco’s sister and his estrangement from his brother; the difficulties facing his daughter, Adele, who met with a child psychologist when she was little because she felt she had a restrictive thread attached to her back; and Marco’s later guardianship of Adele’s daughter, Miraijin.

The Hummingbird is a moving, black-humored work about family and the tragedies born of time and poor decisions. Veronesi has created complicated characters that don’t always behave nobly, are products of their time and are, from a literary standpoint, the richer for it. As the omniscient narrator observes, “There are those who—not moving at all—still manage to cover great distances.” That’s the message of this wise book: A hummingbird may seem stationary, but in its way, it can cover a lot of ground.

The complicated characters in Sandro Veronesi’s novel don’t always behave nobly and are, from a literary standpoint, the richer for it.
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Whatever one may think of Anthem, Noah Hawley’s latest literary thriller, no one could ever accuse the author and award-winning creator of the television series “Fargo” of skimping on plot. His action-stuffed follow-up to Before the Fall is an exciting cautionary tale that addresses just about every social ill facing Western civilization.

The action begins calmly enough: In 2009, a white judge named Margot Nadir and her second husband, a Black man named Remy, are watching their 9-year-old daughter, Story, sing the national anthem at a recital near their Brooklyn home. In a nice bit of foreboding, the Nadirs (one of the novel’s broad touches is their name) say they’re proud to “belong to the party of Lincoln” and feel that “the desire to belong, to be something, doesn’t make that dream come true.” As readers soon discover, their ambition, including Margot’s nomination to the Supreme Court, doesn’t shield them from real-world complexities and tragedies they could not have foreseen.

Hawley shifts the narrative a few years into the future, when a plague afflicts the world. As Hawley, one of the more skilled writers of pithy lines, puts it, “The summer our children began to kill themselves was the hottest in history.” Soon the crisis spreads worldwide, with more and more 12- to 25-year-olds taking their lives. Markets tank. Thousands die each day. And every victim scrawls “A11” near the site of their death.

Among them is Claire Oliver, the 17-year-old daughter of a pharmaceutical titan. Her death devastates her younger brother, Simon, who is sent to the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, where he hyperventilates into his omnipresent paper bag and contemplates the meaning of existence.

Hawley has further complications in store for Simon, and for the reader. An enigmatic Float resident who calls himself the Prophet tells Simon that God “has a mission for you”: to help build a new utopia. “The adults are lost. We, their children, are starting over.”

And that’s only the start. Anthem touches on just about every contentious topic one could name, from gun culture and climate change to race relations, extremist politicians and the “yelling box” that is the internet. The novel would have been stronger if Hawley had blended his themes more seamlessly into the narrative rather than letting his characters give speeches, but many of his painstakingly crafted scenes read like an action movie in book form. “We choose our reality,” one character says. Hawley’s novel reminds us to choose wisely.

“We choose our reality,” a character in Noah Hawley’s novel says. Anthem is a reminder to choose wisely.
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Parenthood can be a challenge, albeit a rewarding one, even under ideal circumstances. If a parent is facing an illness, however, the challenge is far greater. That’s what Sonya Moriarty, a former stage actor with alcoholism who is raising her 4-year-old son alone in Dublin, contends with in Bright Burning Things, the latest novel from actor and playwright Lisa Harding.

Addiction seems to be the only constant that connects Sonya’s theatrical past and her maternal present. She even acknowledges that the ease with which she polishes off multiple bottles of wine in one sitting is “what made me such a great actress: extreme and electric.”

Extreme and electric are qualities she could get away with when directors bought fancy cars for her. Now that her world involves driving her beat-up old car to the grocery store to buy the orange-colored food that her son will eat, those attributes are less glamorous.

In a devastating early sequence, Sonya takes Tommy and their dog, Herbie, to the beach, only to get drunk that night, come dangerously close to burning down the house and wake up the next afternoon to find her son and dog missing.

The brisk narrative then shifts to Sonya’s attempts at maintaining sobriety and reclaiming her son’s trust. They begin when her father, absent from her life for the past two years, forces her to enter a rehabilitation program. Harding introduces characters who, for better or worse, affect Sonya’s efforts, from the neighbor who keeps a close eye on her to the nuns who care for her at the Catholic-run center and a counselor whose interest becomes more personal, and more insistent, as Sonya recovers.

Much of the story is predictable, but a ride can still be pleasant even when you know where you’re going. Sympathetic readers will feel pangs for Sonya’s experiences, and Harding’s descriptions of intensified sensations are unforgettable, from rain that “sounds like artillery fire” when it strikes a windowpane to cracks in the hospital ceiling that look like “portals to another world.” Bright Burning Things is a redemptive portrait of addiction and the extreme emotions of a parent in distress

The latest novel from actor-playwright Lisa Harding is a redemptive portrait of addiction and the extreme emotions of a parent in distress.
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“I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal,” Mr. Emerson tells Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s novel A Room With a View. It’s a beautiful sentiment, one that Sarah Winman incorporates into Still Life, along with other enduring realities, such as the transcendence of art and the pain of war.

Winman’s fourth novel is a gambol through some of the major events of the mid-20th century, and much of the action occurs in Italy. It opens in 1944, as Ulysses Temper, a young private in the British army, is driving through Florence. Evelyn Skinner, a 64-year-old English art historian, waves down his jeep. She’s in Italy to “liaise with the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers” and locate artworks sequestered from museums and churches. He gives her a ride.

From there, Winman takes the reader through 35 years of world history, from World War II to the moon landing to natural disasters in Florence, as seen through the eyes of her characters.

After the war, Ulysses returns to London, where he resumes work on the globe-manufacturing business he took over from his father. He spends time at a pub called the Stout and Parrot, where denizens include Col, the owner; piano player Pete; Ulysses’ unfaithful spouse, Peg; their daughter, Alys; and a blue parrot named Claude.

An unexpected inheritance prompts Ulysses to leave London and return to Florence. Winman’s plot at times relies too heavily on moments of serendipity like this one, but readers will nonetheless be charmed by Ulysses’ attempts to set up a pensione, as well as by Evelyn’s parallel story and her many lovers, and the ways in which her life and Ulysses’ become linked.

Still Life is, ultimately, a celebration of Italy, with loving descriptions of its buildings and countryside, of old women gossiping on stone benches, of Tuscany’s “thick forests of chestnut trees and fields of sunflowers.” It’s light yet satisfying, like foamed milk atop a cappuccino.

Sarah Winman’s fourth novel is light yet satisfying, like foamed milk atop a cappuccino.
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Some people would have you believe that short stories are the literary equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, a place to hone your skills until you’re ready for a bigger and more prestigious stage. But as masters such as Alice Munro have proven, a great short story is no less of an achievement than a great novel.

These four collections demonstrate that a new generation of authors is happy to experiment with the possibilities of the short form.

The most audacious collection here is Only the Animals by the South African and Australian writer Ceridwen Dovey. How’s this for a daring conceit: Each story is written from the perspective of an animal killed in a conflict wrought by humans. And an author appears in almost every narrative.

A cat owned by Colette escapes from the author’s car and witnesses horrors on the front lines in France during World War I. Chimpanzees in Germany who are being trained to adopt human characteristics become more refined even as food rationing dehumanizes men and women. A dolphin born into captivity writes to Sylvia Plath, “a human writer who meant something to me,” to explain the circumstances by which the dolphin performed echolocation activities for the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program.

Seeing events through an animal’s eyes gives us an outsider’s perspective on major events in recent history, including atrocities like the rise of Nazi Germany and the wars in the Middle East. In forcing us to do so, Dovey suggests that some animals have a capacity for empathy that humans would do well to emulate.

RUSSIAN JEWELS
The Tsar of Love and Techno is an intricately structured and powerful collection. These interconnected stories set in Russia span more than 70 years. They begin with the tale of Roman Markin, a “correction artist” who works for the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation. His job is to airbrush images of political dissenters out of photographs and paintings. One of the dissenters is his younger brother, Vaska.

In memory of his brother, Roman draws tiny portraits of Vaska in the pictures he censors, including a photo of a ballerina who looks like Vaska’s widow and a painting of a dacha in a pasture. The painting links tales of the ballerina’s granddaughter, a telephone operator at a nickel combine who wins the Miss Siberia pageant and marries the 14th richest man in Russia; a former deputy art director who, after the 1999 bombing of Chechnya, is forced to become head of the Chechen Tourist Bureau; and a soldier who carries a mix tape his brother gave him before his first tour of duty.

This collection showcases Marra’s wit and his gift for unforgettable details, such as when a soldier fires a round into the earth to loosen it before he digs a grave. Some characters are capable of great brutality, whereas others are capable of declaring that no invention is “more humane, more elegant, more generous” than the wheelchair ramp. The Tsar of Love and Techno is the work of an elegant and generous writer. 

EVERYDAY PROBLEMS
Lauren Holmes’ debut, Barbara the Slut and Other People, is lighter fare than the previous books, but don’t equate light with inconsequential. Holmes’ deceptively breezy stories focus on women grappling with sexual politics and make important observations about challenges faced by millennials.

A 20-year-old woman from Los Angeles travels to Acapulco to see her distant mother and to announce that she’s a lesbian. “Mike Anonymous” is a quietly devastating story of a woman who works at a clinic that helps people with sexually transmitted diseases, and of a married Japanese man convinced that he’s HIV positive. And in the title story, a high school senior applies to Princeton and struggles to lose the reputation she earned several times over in 11th grade.

Holmes, whose work has appeared in outlets like Granta and Guernica, has a keen ear for dialogue and a sharp memory for the high school life, as proven in the description of a student who “removed her retainer with her tongue and spit it onto her desk every time she was about to say something in class.” Barbara the Slut contains surprisingly tender depictions of love and family, which show that you should never judge a book by its title.

HOME TO KANSAS
Andrew Malan Milward focuses on the rich history of his home state of Kansas in his second collection, I Was a Revolutionary. Milward’s hometown of Lawrence has been the site of significant moments in American history, including pro-slavery guerrillas’ 1863 massacre of abolitionists—the largest act of domestic terrorism until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He recreates many such historical moments in these stories.

The protagonist of “The Burning of Lawrence,” which chronicles the 1863 killings, is the Confederate guerrilla fighter William Quantrill. “The Americanist,” a modern-day story about a gay couple, invokes John Romulus Brinkley, the “Goat Gland Doctor” of the 1920s who injected goat testicles into men to improve their virility. “What Is to Be Done?” presents the eccentric sculptor Samuel Perry Dinsmoor, a retired teacher who, in later years, was known to lecture about socialism to a roomful of invisible students.

Milward’s habit of providing excessive historical detail diminishes the tension at times, but when he minimizes background information, as he does in the brilliant title piece, the results are compelling. There are lovely, unexpected touches: A pro-slavery fighter in “The Burning of Lawrence” trashes an abolitionist’s home, but pauses long enough to play the family’s organ with “long-dormant familiarity.” 

Throughout the book, Milward makes astute observations about politics, not only about the political climate of past eras but also of our own—a rarity in contemporary American fiction.

Who says short-story writers occupy a low rung on the literary hierarchy? As these collections prove, great short fiction not only is its own major league but also boasts an impressive lineup that any contingent would envy.

 

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

Some people would have you believe that short stories are the literary equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, a place to hone your skills until you’re ready for a bigger and more prestigious stage. But as masters such as Alice Munro have proven, a great short story is no less of an achievement than a great novel. These four collections demonstrate that a new generation of authors is happy to experiment with the possibilities of the short form.
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Whatever one may think of politics, one has to concede that elections provide juicy material for works of fiction. Two new novels offer very different portraits of modern politics, yet share common traits, including an insider’s view of the political process and sacrifices required in the quest for power.

The feistier of the two novels is The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear, by Stuart Stevens, a political consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The Dow has plummeted, and the government has divided Google into separate companies. When the incumbent Republican president chooses not to seek re-election, two candidates vie to replace him: Hilda Smith, the sitting vice-president, and Armstrong George, the fire-breathing Colorado governor who—sound familiar?—wants to build a large security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The narrator is J.D. Callahan, Smith’s campaign manager, who hopes a Smith victory will help him become a pundit with his own TV show. First, however, he has to get through the GOP convention, which, coincidentally, is in Callahan’s native New Orleans. His job is complicated, however, by his two half-brothers: one a former felon who wants financial help for his run for public office, and the other a neo-Nazi who owns a strip club and may be responsible for bombs that have imperiled the convention. The humor may be too broad for some readers, but this funny, fast-paced novel offers a perspective that only a seasoned campaign strategist like Stevens could provide.

Jennifer Close’s latest, The Hopefuls, set during the first six years of the Obama administration, is a more somber affair. Beth, our narrator, moves from her beloved New York to D.C. so her husband, Matt, can pursue his dream of entering politics. (Close moved to D.C. with her own husband, who also worked on the Obama campaign.)

Shortly after their arrival, Matt and Beth meet Jimmy Dillon, who works in the White House travel office, and his wife, Ashleigh, a Texas gal who tells Beth minutes after meeting her, “I can just tell we’re going to be best friends.”

The couples grow close, but Matt soon becomes jealous of Jimmy’s more exciting job, with duties that include flying to Hawaii to perform advance work for the Obamas’ vacation and playing golf with the President. After Obama’s re-election, Jimmy moves to Texas with Ashleigh to run for railroad commissioner and asks Matt to manage his campaign. But the campaign puts a strain on both marriages, especially when Jimmy starts spending time alone with Beth. 

Unlike Stevens’ book, The Hopefuls focuses on a retail form of politics: going door-to-door, attending church picnics, canvassing for votes. Yet both novels entertain with keenly observed inner-circle perspectives and shrewd insight into how personal politics can become.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Whatever one may think of politics, one has to concede that elections provide juicy material for works of fiction. Two new novels offer very different portraits of modern politics, yet share common traits, including an insider’s view of the political process and sacrifices required in the quest for power.
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These novels put a literary spin on the sport of baseball, recognizing its metaphorical resonance. 


The best works of fiction are often about much more than their ostensible subjects. Novels like The Natural by Bernard Malamud and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach may be set among ballplayers, but the richness of these works lies in their nuanced depictions of ambition and despair. Gish Jen’s The Resisters and Emily Nemens’ The Cactus League have very different perspectives, but they both deal with insecurity: about work, aging, and, especially in the first book, life. 

The more experimental of the two, The Resisters is a dystopian work set in the near future, and it uses baseball to comment on the ease with which totalitarianism can overtake a country. America is now AutoAmerica. The populace is divided into the “angel-fair” Netted—whose job is to produce—and “copper-toned” Surplus, lesser folk whose job is to consume. Among the latter are Grant, the book’s narrator; his wife, Eleanor; and their only child, Gwen.

Eleanor’s work as a lawyer got her in trouble with the AI-run surveillance state known as Aunt Nettie. She has recently returned from jail, but she risks further incarceration by taking a case against the government’s use of a winnowing agent, put into foods to weaken the Surplus. But the government is mainly interested in Gwen, a pitching prodigy so talented that, as a baby, she hit the same spot on the wall every time she threw stuffed animals out of her crib. 

Motivated by plans to build a TeamAmerica that can defeat ChinRussia in the Olympics, Aunt Nettie’s scheme to recruit Gwen from the Surplus’ underground league gives the book its considerable tension. Detailed world building slows the story down, but The Resisters is still a chilling critique of capitalism and a warning about how governments can exploit inequality for nefarious means.

Insecurity is also a driving force behind The Cactus League by Paris Review editor Nemens. A more conventional work, this book’s linked stories revolve around Jason Goodyear, two-time MVP for the Los Angeles Lions, as his team arrives at its new spring training park in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Goodyear’s narrative role, however, is more utility player than star. He appears only peripherally in these stories, most of which focus on the people around him. Among them are young players wondering if they’ll make the opening-day roster, veterans fretting that they’re past their prime, middle-aged women trying to seduce young players, even elderly organists scrounging for gigs. Nemens breaks up these stories with musings from a sportswriter keen to get the scoop on the clean-cut, enigmatic Goodyear. 

The device of the sportswriter as a sort of one-person Greek chorus is unnecessary. More compelling are the stories themselves, which culminate in a depiction of Goodyear in apparent decline, dealing with a divorce and reduced to living alone in a cinder-block building on the stadium grounds. 

In Summer of ’49, David Halberstam wrote that young boys who dreamed of baseball careers were enthralled by the “binding national myth” of the game. As The Resisters and The Cactus League demonstrate, the myth endures, but what a fragile fantasy it can be.

These novels from Gish Jen and Emily Nemens put a literary spin on the sport of baseball, recognizing its metaphorical resonance. 
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Listen to a 9-year-old, and you could learn a lot about the world. That’s the benefit that Swiv’s absent father would derive if he were to read the letter that constitutes Fight Night, Miriam Toews’ brilliant new book, in which she triumphs over a tough assignment: to write an entire novel in the voice of a child.

Assignments are nothing new to Swiv. As she relays to her father in this letter, she’s been kicked out of her school near Toronto because of her “lashing out tone” after an incident during Choice Time. Now she’s at home with her actor mother and grandmother, and Swiv and Grandma swap homework assignments. For example, Swiv instructs Grandma to compose a letter to Gord, the baby that Mom is carrying.

Toews gives Swiv a voice that is sophisticated, childlike and utterly believable. Readers can see where Swiv gets her pugnaciousness: Mom has been known to rail against capitalism and get into arguments with clerks at tasteful card shops. Mom has reasons to be on edge, however. She’s dealing not only with a pregnancy and an absent husband but also with backstage experiences that have instilled distrust in her profession.

Then there’s Grandma, a free spirit who speaks in what Swiv calls a secret language and is passionate about Toronto Raptors basketball. Her joie de vivre, however, belies a dark history that Toews slowly reveals as the story progresses. 

The novel features a supporting cast of men that allows Toews to comment on examples of the patriarchy at work, from Grandma’s religious older brothers, who packed her off to Nebraska to get a husband and study the Bible after their father died, to directors who subject Mom to callous treatment. This material could have been strident, but the wonder of Fight Night is that it’s a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who have learned to fight against adversity. “You play hard to the end, Swiv,” Grandma tells her as they watch the Raptors on TV. “To the buzzer. There is no alternative.” You could learn a lot from grandmothers, too.

Miriam Toews’ Fight Night is a wonder, a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who never back down.
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You never know what a person might be going through. A famous novelist may be plagued by insecurity. A childhood friend who grew up in a manor house may have epilepsy. Good fortune isn’t always the panacea some would believe.

Sally Rooney (Normal People) knows this well. Her first two novels were laser-sharp investigations into the lives of characters in their 20s and early 30s. She continues this work in her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, an ambitious novel that deepens her earlier themes.

As with Rooney’s debut, Conversations With Friends, the new book focuses on a quartet of characters. Alice is a novelist with mixed feelings about her early success. She says of her public persona, “I hate her with all my energy,” animosity that leads to a spell in a psychiatric hospital.

After years in New York, she moves to Dublin and meets Felix, who works in a warehouse. She invites him to Rome for an event promoting the Italian translation of her book. Their relationship deepens but not without tension over the imbalances between them.

Meanwhile, Alice’s university friend Eileen has become a low-paid editorial assistant. She has rediscovered feelings for Simon, who grew up in the aforementioned manor house and is deeply religious.

Throughout the book, Alice and Eileen exchange long emails. Interspersed among them are disquisitions on socialism versus capitalism, political conservatism and whether the nature of beauty can survive in a social-media era.

Unlike Rooney’s previous novels, parts of this one feel self-consciously artsy, with a chapter-long backstory and paragraphs that run for many pages. But on the way to its heartfelt destination, this flight is still smooth despite brief, mild turbulence. Rooney writes with uncommon perceptiveness, and her ability to find deeper meaning in small details, such as knowing how a friend takes his coffee, remains unparalleled.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a brutally honest portrait of flawed characters determined to prove “that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care.”

Sally Rooney writes with uncommon perceptiveness, and her ability to find deeper meaning in small details remains unparalleled.
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Just as the protagonist of Lorna Mott Comes Home returns to the United States after 18 years in France, author Diane Johnson returns to fiction 13 years after her last novel, Lulu in Marrakech. But while Johnson’s reemergence will be welcome news to fans of her leisurely writing style, the reception to Lorna Mott’s San Francisco homecoming varies among the book’s characters.

Art historian Lorna lands stateside at the time of “the handsome new president, Obama.” She has left her second husband, Armand-Loup, and his “wild infidelity” back in their French town of Pont-les-Puits. As Johnson memorably shows, the U.S. has changed during Lorna’s absence. Astronomical property prices and increased homelessness are two of many manifestations of a widening wealth chasm.

Lorna’s three grown kids from her first marriage are also different. Divorced Peggy makes crafts such as personalized dog collars to make ends meet. Ex-hippie Hams and his pregnant wife, Misty, struggle financially. Curt had “a thriving software enterprise” until a bike accident put him in a five-month coma. He’s now in Southeast Asia, trying to find himself. Complicating the picture further are Lorna’s first husband, Ran; his wife, Amy, “a Silicon Valley millionairess”; and their daughter, 15-year-old Gilda, who gets pregnant by a Stanford-bound 20-year-old.

Sound complicated? It is, but delightfully so, and that’s before an unusual complexity: In Pont-les-Puits, mudslides dislodge the bones of people interred in a cemetery, including those of an American painter. French authorities have named Lorna as the painter’s next of kin and would like for her to pay for his reinterment.

Lorna Mott Comes Home takes time to develop its characters, much like the works of Henry James and Edith Wharton, the comedy-of-manners forebears to whom Johnson is often compared. But admirers will savor the ease with which Johnson moves from one storyline to the next. 

Early in the novel, Lorna gives a poorly received lecture on medieval tapestries that had “a romantic history of being lost, hidden, forgotten through the centuries.” That’s the poignant essence of this novel. Like those tapestries, a life is fragile and vulnerable to being forgotten, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful.

Diane Johnson’s return to American fiction, 13 years after her last novel, will be welcome news to fans of her leisurely writing style.
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Of the many questions one might ask after a tragedy, one of the likeliest is: What if? What if the victims had been elsewhere on the day of the disaster? That’s the question Francis Spufford addresses in his graceful second novel, Light Perpetual.

The story begins with a devastating fictional variation on an actual event. On a Saturday in 1944, “an eager crowd of women” comes to a Woolworths in the English town of Bexford to see a wartime novelty: a shipment of shiny new saucepans. Everyone is having fun until a V-2 warhead crashes through the ceiling and “in a ten-thousandth of a second” sends plaster and bricks and roof tiles everywhere. Among the dead are five children.

But what if the bomb had landed farther away? Spufford imagines the lives those five children might have led, starting in 1949, when each would have been 10 years old, and revisits them every 15 years. The result is a clever commentary on the changes in Western society as seen through Spufford’s characters. There’s Alec, who works as a newspaper compositor before desktop publishing threatens his profession; Vern, a wannabe real estate mogul who isn’t averse to shady dealings; Jo, who tries to forge a music career in a male-dominated era; her sister, Val, who falls for a skinhead; and Ben, who grapples with schizophrenia and its repercussions.

Light Perpetual derives considerable power from dramatizing the experiences its characters missed: the chance to build and lose a fortune, to see one’s dreams realized or else rerouted toward more modest achievements, or just to hold a loved one’s hand. Spufford shrewdly reminds readers that tragedy deprives the world of not only noble people but also scoundrels, and this fact is part of the fabric of history.

Late in the novel, Jo says of her attempts to become a recording star, “But none of it worked out! None of it went anywhere,” to which her son replies, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t any good.” That’s the biggest message of this book: A road might lead to a dead end, but the journey could still be worthwhile.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Featuring vibrant characters, all of whom have rich interior lives, Francis Spufford’s novel is perfect for audio.

The biggest message of Francis Spufford’s second novel is that a road might lead to a dead end, but the journey could still be worthwhile.
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Readers of Helen Oyeyemi’s latest mind-teaser will know they’re in for an unusual experience when the novel’s narrator, a 38-year-old hypnotist, begins the story by describing a set of Czech days-of-the-week underwear, a gift from a former boyfriend. And that’s before the narrator boards a train for a “non-honeymoon honeymoon” with his current love and their pet mongoose. Such is the uncommonly inventive setup of Peaces.

Otto Shin is one half of “a starry-eyed young couple” and has happily adopted the surname of his partner, Xavier. As the novel begins, they and their mongoose have boarded a sleeper train called The Lucky Day at their local station “in deepest Kent.” The ride was a gift from Xavier’s aunt. But, in one of the novel’s many engagingly bizarre flourishes, Otto and Xavier don’t quite know where they’re going. Even more curious: When Xavier calls his aunt from the train to check in on her, she says she’s in the company of someone named Yuri. Yuri claims to be a friend of Xavier’s, but Xavier doesn’t know who he is.

That’s just the start of the book’s many complications. Soon Otto and Xavier meet the train’s owner, Ava Kapoor, a theremin player who lives full time on The Lucky Day and has her own pet mongoose. Ava is days away from collecting an inheritance, but a series of events threatens her bounty. Among the characters that deepen the plot are a composer named Karel, who wrote a piece Ava used to play; Karel’s mysterious son, Přem; and a doctor assigned to assess Ava’s state of mind.

The story’s second half is convoluted, and Oyeyemi tends to overwrite, as when she describes a photo of a “fainting couch upholstered in brocade the color of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing.” But fans of the British writer’s previous work, such as the PEN award-winning What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, will enjoy this novel’s surreal twists and imaginative scenarios. Peaces is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.

Helen Oyeyemi’s latest is like the work of a hypnotist: Those open to its allure will inevitably fall under its thrall.
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Anyone who has read Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpieces knows that, in his works, little is as it first appears. Situations are not quite as his unreliable narrators believe. First-person protagonists speak in formal prose that sounds not quite right. And his later works are wonderfully unclassifiable—not quite detective fiction or dystopian sagas but borrowing from these forms while veering into original terrain.

He continues his genre-twisting ways with Klara and the Sun, a return to the dystopian tenor of Never Let Me Go that, like that work, explores whether science could—or should—manipulate the future.

Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend available for purchase. Like Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day, she speaks in quirky locutions such as “I was able to bring several speculations together.” She and other AFs are on display in a store, where the prime real estate is the front window. The advantages of that position include access to the Sun, from which AFs derive “nourishment.”

A teenager named Josie, suffering from an unspecified illness, insists that her Mother purchase Klara. What follows is the story of Josie’s home life and Klara’s role in the family’s affairs. Among them are the Mother’s trauma from the death of another daughter, a young man sweet on Josie and, most provocatively, the issue of whether science can correct injustices wrought by illness or one’s station in life.

Ishiguro is an expert at slowly doling out information to build tension. The wonder of this book is that he incorporates many elements, from environmental damage to genetic testing, without the story seeming heavy-handed.

But the predominant theme in Klara and the Sun is loneliness. “Humans, in their wish to escape loneliness,” Klara says, “made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.” As Ishiguro notes in this brilliant book, each person has their own Sun, a source that gives them strength, and feels enervated when the source leaves them in shadow.

Kazuo Ishiguro continues his genre-twisting ways with Klara and the Sun, a return to the dystopian tenor of Never Let Me Go that, like that work, explores whether science could—or should—manipulate the future.

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