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Michael Magras

FictionFamily Drama

Akin

Review by Michael Magras

Stories about the mysteries of childhood have often been at the heart of Emma Donoghue’s fiction, from the boy who spent his first five years imprisoned in Room to the 11-year-old girl who refused all food in The Wonder. The two characters at the heart of Akin grapple with the effects of difficult upbringings, and inner demons and the desire to understand them drive the present-day narrative.

It’s February in New York, and Noah Selvaggio is packing for an 80th birthday trip to Nice, France, where he was born. He hasn’t been to Nice since age 4, when his mother, Margot, sent him to live with his father in America. She stayed behind to care for her own father, a famous photographer, in the later years of World War II.

Noah married Joan, a fellow chemist, and they remained together for almost 40 years until her recent death from cancer. When Noah went through the belongings of his recently deceased younger sister, he found nine black-and-white photos from the 1930s and ’40s. Noah suspects that Margot had printed them herself. Part of the reason for his trip to Nice is to learn more about his mother and the places depicted in her pictures.

But before he leaves, he gets a call from Children’s Services asking him to be temporary guardian for Michael, his 11-year-old great-nephew. Michael’s father, Victor, is dead from an apparent overdose, and his mother is in jail. Noah is the closest available kin. Reluctantly, Noah agrees to take Michael, an ill-mannered potty-mouth fond of violent video games, on his journey.

What follows is an emotionally trying trip to France, with Noah struggling to keep Michael out of mischief as he pieces together the puzzle of the photographs, which suggest that Margot may have had greater involvement in the war than anyone in the family ever knew.

Akin isn’t as tightly plotted as Donoghue’s previous works, and many scenes play out like a Nice travelogue more than a novel. But Donoghue does an admirable job dramatizing the sacrifices people are often forced to make for younger generations, sometimes in unimaginably dangerous situations.

Stories about the mysteries of childhood have often been at the heart of Emma Donoghue’s fiction, from the boy who spent his first five years imprisoned in Room to the 11-year-old girl who refused all food in The Wonder. The two characters at the heart of Akin grapple with the effects of difficult upbringings, and inner […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Chances Are…

Review by Michael Magras

When you’re 66, like the three longtime buddies in Richard Russo’s latest novel, you’ve got lots of events to look back on. One of the most devastating events in the lives of these three men is the driving force of Chances Are . . .—a surprising work that is as much a mystery as a meditation on secrets and friendship.

The friendship began at Minerva, a Connecticut college, in the late 1960s, a time when nervous young men wondered whether their draft number would draw a tour of duty in Vietnam. The three college buddies, all of them on scholarship, met when they were hired to sling hash at dinners for Theta house, the least rebellious sorority on campus: Lincoln as server because he was the most handsome, Teddy as cook’s helper, Mickey as dishwasher.

Each man comes from a lower-class background, which Russo describes at length in a long prologue. Lincoln’s mother lost most of the family fortune after her parents died. She then married Wolfgang Amadeus Moser, known as Dub-Yay, a domineering man who ran a copper mine. Teddy was a bookish sort who suffered a basketball injury in high school that had lifelong repercussions. Mickey, a construction worker’s son, disliked school but was passionate about rock music. 

One of the common bonds the three men forged at college centered on Jacy Rockafellow, a child of privilege engaged to another child of privilege, a law student named Vance. Jacy’s engagement didn’t stop the three “hashers” from falling in love with her.

Then, in 1971, tragedy strikes. At Lincoln’s family’s house in Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, Jacy joined the three men for a farewell Memorial Day weekend. But Jacy disappeared and was never heard from again.

Now, as the 2016 presidential campaign begins, the old friends gather at the Chilmark house for a September get-together before Lincoln, now a commercial real estate broker, reluctantly sells the property. Much has changed in their lives, but one thing hasn’t— lingering questions about what happened to Jacy that weekend.

Fans of Russo’s work will know what to expect from Chances Are . . . , including the many scenes of male bonding and the colorful dialogue. If some of the material is familiar, the book is nevertheless a moving portrait of aging men who discover the world’s worst-kept secret: You may not know the people you thought you were closest to.

When you’re 66, like the three longtime buddies in Richard Russo’s latest novel, you’ve got lots of events to look back on. One of the most devastating events in the lives of these three men is the driving force of Chances Are . . .—a surprising work that is as much a mystery as a meditation on secrets and friendship.

FictionHistorical Fiction

When the Plums Are Ripe

Review by Michael Magras

A little-known chapter of World War II history, at least to most Western readers, is the effect of the war on Cameroon, which was under French administration. In 1940, Cameroon fell under Nazi control after France was occupied by Germany. Patrice Nganang chronicles the effect of these events on the small city of Edéa in When the Plums Are Ripe, a tale that is as poetic as it is harrowing.

Poetry is one of the passions of Pouka, an Edéa native who has returned from the capital city of Yaoundé in June 1940. In Yaoundé, “the heart of the country is revealed when the plums are ripe.” These are African plums, inexpensive delights so plentiful that fruit sellers have to discard unsold quantities into the streets each day. This makes them a perfect metaphor for what Cameroon did during the war, “when it sent off along the road through the desert its many sons . . . just like the fruit-sellers toss away each evening the plums they haven’t been able to grill.”

Pouka is one of Cameroon’s young men, although he is spared the war’s worst. He is an administrator who has worked with white people in the capital for the past three years. In intimate, old-fashioned prose (“Wait a moment, dear reader, for this is a scene he had played out for himself several times”), Nganang describes Pouka’s reason for returning home: to start a poetry circle, like one of his idols, Théophile Gautier, had done.

As the war intensifies, Pouka’s family members and friends are recruited to serve under General Leclerc and the Free French forces. Among them are Hebga, Pouka’s cousin, a boxer who “remained the area’s favorite son, just for the strength of his muscles,” and Philothée, a stutterer who is one of the few to show up for the poetry circle. In the midst of it all is M’bangue, Pouka’s father, known for dreams and predictions that invariably come true, although his latest seems preposterous: that Hitler will commit suicide.

The tone of some plot developments is too outlandish for the rest of the book, but When the Plums Are Ripe is a moving tribute to a people so little regarded that, as Nganang’s narrator puts it, if they appeared in Hollywood movies, they’d have no speaking parts, “their story told by a narrator off-screen—someone like me.”

A little-known chapter of World War II history, at least to most Western readers, is the effect of the war on Cameroon, which was under French administration. In 1940, Cameroon fell under Nazi control after France was occupied by Germany. Patrice Nganang chronicles the effect of these events on the small city of Edéa in When the Plums Are Ripe, a tale that is as poetic as it is harrowing.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Delayed Rays of a Star

Review by Michael Magras

Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong and Leni Riefenstahl were three of the most famous people in 20th-century cinema, no mean feat given the dominance of men in the cutthroat industry. And they each endured their share of prejudice, whether from accidents of birth or ill-advised associations.

Amanda Lee Koe charts the lives of these women in Delayed Rays of a Star, her debut novel. This century-spanning work dramatizes each woman’s rise and fall—from aspiring young actresses to elderly women looking back both on unwise decisions and the gatekeepers who never gave them their due.

The narrative begins in 1928, when Dietrich, relegated to cabaret gigs and bit parts in films, crashes the Berlin Press Ball on a producer’s last-minute invitation. There, she meets Wong, a Los Angeles native who is already an international star but who has dealt with more than her share of racism, from boys in school who made slit eyes at her to producers who commanded her to “scream like a Chinese” and said she’d be replaced if she declined. Neither woman could have known that they would embark on a brief romance, nor that four years later they would star together in Shanghai Express, one of the films thatbrought Dietrich the stardom she craved.

Also at the party is Riefenstahl, a photographer and wannabe actress who is angered years later when Dietrich beats her for the lead role in The Blue Angel. Most of her sections in the novel focus on her attempts to make the film Tiefland in the early 1940s and her cozy relationship with Hitler.

Many of the novel’s most affecting scenes are of the women in old age: bedridden 88-year-old Dietrich puttering around her Paris apartment and receiving mysterious calls from a 17-year-old boy who quotes Rilke to her; Wong reduced to being offered commercials in which she would have to sport a Fu Manchu mustache made of toothpaste; and 101-year-old Riefenstahl, determined “to set things straight” decades after her Nazi propaganda work.

The novel is sometimes overwritten, but Delayed Rays of a Star is a heartfelt tribute to extraordinary women who helped define modern cinema and a reminder that discrimination has always come in many guises.

Delayed Rays of a Star is a heartfelt tribute to extraordinary women who helped define modern cinema and a reminder that discrimination, then as now, comes in many guises.
FictionPopular Fiction

The Great Unexpected

Review by Michael Magras

If you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone who becomes a lifelong friend for 50 years or more. But while an encounter with a kindred soul in your 70s won’t lead to a 50-year friendship, perhaps it can provide a reason to believe that life still has pleasures to offer. That’s the insight that drives The Great Unexpected, Irish novelist Dan Mooney’s follow-up to his debut, Me, Myself and Them. Another of the book’s insights—not new, but timely in this day of polarization—is that two people of disparate backgrounds can forge the unlikeliest friendship.

And what two fellows could seemingly be less alike than Joel Monroe and Frank de Selby? Joel owned a garage before he and Lucey, his beloved wife of 49 years, moved into the Hilltop Nursing Home. Lucey had brightened their room with flowers and baby pictures of their daughter, Eva. But ever since Lucey died, Joel has been morose and distant. He is convinced that the only way out of his misery is to commit suicide.

After a second roommate dies, the home moves Frank de Selby into Joel’s room. A former soap opera actor who wears colorful silk scarves, Frank has “a youthfulness about him, a certain quality of energy and vitality that seemed to make a lie of all the wrinkles.” Soon, Joel and Frank are sharing painful secrets, concocting plans to help Joel kill himself and breaking out of the home to go to pubs—escapes that infuriate not only the head nurse known as “the Rhino” but also Eva, who insists that Joel be confined to the home for his own safety.

The Great Unexpected often plays like a sitcom, but the novel also captures the heartache of elderly people realizing that they are no longer in charge of their lives. Yet it offers a glimmer of hope. In one of their late-night escapades, Joel and Frank sneak into an old theater where Frank used to perform: “Another aging monument that someone had once loved allowed to fall to ruin because not enough people cared.” The parallel between that theater and a senior’s life is obvious. With a little help, good days may lie ahead, so maybe don’t get out the wrecking ball just yet.

If you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone who becomes a lifelong friend for 50 years or more. But while an encounter with a kindred soul in your 70s won’t lead to a 50-year friendship, perhaps it can provide a reason to believe that life still has pleasures to offer. That’s the insight that drives The Great Unexpected, Irish novelist Dan Mooney’s follow-up to his debut, Me, Myself and Them. Another of the book’s insights—not new, but timely in this day of polarization—is that two people of disparate backgrounds can forge the unlikeliest friendship.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Patsy

Review by Michael Magras

Desperation can lead a person to extreme decisions they wouldn’t otherwise countenance. For a parent, what could be more heart-wrenching than the choice to leave one’s child behind and move to another country in search of a better life? That’s the decision made by the title character of Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s follow-up to her assured debut, Here Comes the Sun. But one of the satisfying nuances of her second novel is that this heartache is only partly due to the knowledge that, by emigrating from Jamaica to America, single mother Patsy will leave behind her 6-year-old daughter, Tru.

As the novel opens, it’s 1998, and Patsy is still in love with her childhood friend Cicely, who moved to America several years earlier. Patsy hopes to secure a tourist visa—her previous application was declined two years earlier with no explanation—and rekindle their romance. Soon, Patsy leaves Tru and Mama G, her religious mother who collects Jesus figurines, and flies to New York, where Cicely meets her at the airport.

Patsy’s surprise upon reuniting with her friend is one of the many turns this novel takes. Cicely lives in a brownstone in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, is married to an abusive would-be real estate mogul and is raising a son Tru’s age who takes violin lessons at a prestigious music academy. Over the next decade, Patsy fails to find the America—or the Cicely—of her dreams and has to settle for a job cleaning bathrooms in a faux-Jamaican restaurant before securing gigs as a nanny for a host of privileged women.

The story moves back and forth between Patsy’s increasingly disheartening experiences in America and Tru’s grim situation back home. Tru has to live with her father, Roy, a police officer she barely knows. As Tru enters her teens, she struggles with depression and her sexuality, all the while wondering why her mother has been gone for much longer than the promised six months and why she never calls.

The pace sometimes flags, but this moving work about the immigrant experience is distinguished by Dennis-Benn’s compassion for her characters and her acknowledgment that issues related to sexuality and immigration require subtlety and understanding.

Desperation can lead a person to extreme decisions they wouldn’t otherwise countenance. For a parent, what could be more heart-wrenching than the choice to leave one’s child behind and move to another country in search of a better life? That’s the decision made by the title character of Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn’s follow-up to her assured debut, Here Comes the Sun. But one of the satisfying nuances of her second novel is that this heartache is only partly due to the knowledge that, by emigrating from Jamaica to America, single mother Patsy will leave behind her 6-year-old daughter, Tru.

FictionPopular Fiction

The Farm

Review by Michael Magras

There are a number of compelling arguments for surrogacy. Some would-be mothers are unable to conceive. Gay couples may wish to become parents. But, as with any legal arrangement, complications can arise, especially when mercenaries try to exploit people’s emotions for monetary gain.

Joanne Ramos imagines such complications in The Farm, her ambitious dystopian debut. The novel’s effectiveness lies in the power of its premise. Financially straitened women, most of them Filipina immigrants—Ramos, an American, was born in the Philippines and moved to Wisconsin when she was 6—are recruited to carry the babies of an ultra-rich, typically white clientele in exchange for a huge payout.

Among the immigrants is protagonist Jane Reyes, the Filipina mother of a 4-year-old girl who left her husband after she discovered his affair. After Jane loses her nanny job, she takes a tip from her 67-year-old cousin with whom she lives, and applies for a job at Golden Oaks, a fancy resort in New York’s Hudson Valley. At Golden Oaks, surrogate mothers reside in luxury, and this opulence includes organic meals, private fitness trainers, daily massages—all for free. But the pregnant women are constantly monitored, and they are restricted from leaving the grounds or from having any contact with the outside world.

The person running Golden Oaks is Mae Yu, a high-achieving Chinese-American woman who, in a marvelous phrase, has “a lusty Ayn Randian love of New York.” Her job is to recruit Hosts who are willing to carry babies for the company’s wealthy Clients. Not all Hosts, however, are treated the same. A few are Premium Hosts, which means they’re white. They include Jane’s roommate Reagan, who represents the holy trifecta of Premium Hosts because she’s white, pretty and educated. She aspires to a career in photography and wants to break free of her domineering father. Another Premium Host is Lisa, who sees Golden Oaks for what it is and recruits Jane and Reagan in her plans to undermine its authority. And then there’s Jane’s cousin, whose motivations may not be what they seem.

Although The Farm has too many digressions and sometimes makes its points too obviously, Ramos still does an excellent job posing complex questions surrounding surrogacy, immigration, capitalism and more. At one point, Reagan tells Jane, “Everything’s conditional. Everything’s got strings attached.” The Farm shows how intricately laced those strings can be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Joanne Ramos for The Farm.

There are a number of compelling arguments for surrogacy. Some would-be mothers are unable to conceive. Gay couples may wish to become parents. But, as with any legal arrangement, complications can arise, especially when mercenaries try to exploit people’s emotions for monetary gain.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Lost and Wanted

Review by Michael Magras

If you’re a scientist, you tend to believe in facts, not ghosts. You can imagine, then, how MIT professor of theoretical physics Helen Clapp must feel when she starts receiving text messages from her friend, Charlotte “Charlie” Boyce, shortly after Charlie’s early death. 

That’s the premise with which Nell Freudenberger opens her third novel, Lost and Wanted. And what a novel it is, a work about cold, hard science that is also a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time.

Charlie and Helen, who met at Harvard during freshman orientation in 1989, came from disparate backgrounds. They were, respectively, “an upper-middle-class black girl from Brookline and a work-study white science nerd from Pasadena.” Helen became a physicist, wrote two popular books for laypersons about quantum cosmology and black holes, and co-published a celebrated model for “quark gluon plasma as a black hole in curved five-dimensional space-time” with a former boyfriend named Neel Jonnal. 

Charlie, meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and became an executive television producer. She had a daughter after marrying a “blindingly attractive” surfer whose brother was in jail for drug possession. But life wasn’t always easy for Charlie. At Harvard, a professor’s advances persuaded her to abandon her thesis on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, author of Dangerous Liaisons, and give up her dreams of studying at Oxford. Later, she contracted the lupus that led to her death.

Shortly after Charlie dies, Helen’s 7-year-old son, Jack, whom she had through an anonymous donor, claims to have seen a ghost in their house. And that’s when the texts start arriving, messages containing information that only Charlie could have known. 

Also arriving in Massachusetts: Charlie’s surfer husband, who plans to live with his in-laws, and Helen’s former boyfriend Neel, who accepts an MIT post to continue groundbreaking work on gravitational waves. 

Refreshingly, the science in Lost and Wanted is never window dressing, as the technical concepts that Freudenberger describes at length are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion. It is a magnificent novel.

If you’re a scientist, you tend to believe in facts, not ghosts. You can imagine, then, how MIT professor of theoretical physics Helen Clapp must feel when she starts receiving text messages from her friend, Charlotte “Charlie” Boyce, shortly after Charlie’s early death. 

Fiction

Landfall

Review by Michael Magras

Long before first lady Laura Bush mentions The Prime Minister, the fifth of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, readers familiar with his sextet of political works will have detected the similarity between them and Landfall, Thomas Mallon’s new book. Instead of Prime Minister Plantaganet Palliser and discussions of the Irish Land Tenant Bill, Mallon gives us the first two years of George W. Bush’s second term and its challenges, self-inflicted and otherwise, from the Iraq War to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina.

The writing style is the same, however, with a huge cast of characters and long conversations about politics. Amid the real-life personages, Mallon has added two that are fictional: Ross Weatherall, a director of the merged National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, where he is updating a 1938 Works Progress Administration guidebook on New Orleans; and Allison O’Connor, a civilian lawyer whom Donald Rumsfeld brings to D.C. to work at the National Security Council as “an assistant to a special assistant to the president.”

Ross and Allie haven’t seen one another since a romantic evening after a 1978 campaign event in Texas, when Bush unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Decades later, when they reunite, Ross is a committed Bush supporter, while Allie questions the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. Their positions evolve, however, as Katrina and other events force them to recalibrate.

Throughout Landfall, Mallon shifts perspectives among many characters, most notably Condoleezza Rice, portrayed as a relentlessly ambitious person who feels that if Prince Charles “could inherit his one lifelong job, she could be appointed to all of hers.” And he writes many scathing portraits of the era’s figures, including Barbara Bush, who, when she and George H.W. Bush call on dying former Texas governor Ann Richards, wants nothing more than to hurry the visit along.

If Mallon tries too hard to cram in references to every major news story of the day, Landfall is still a well-researched view of the jealousies and back-room dealings of early 21st-century American politics.

Ross and Allie haven’t seen one another since a romantic evening after a 1978 campaign event in Texas, when Bush unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Decades later, when they reunite, Ross is a committed Bush supporter, while Allie questions the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. Their positions evolve, however, as Katrina and other events force them to recalibrate.

FictionDebut Fiction

The Falconer

Review by Michael Magras

You can try, but you’re unlikely to find descriptions of basketball as elegant as those in Dana Czapnik’s debut novel, The Falconer. “The ball is a face. Leathered and weathered and pockmarked and laugh lined.” So begins the story of Lucy Adler, 17 and confident in her ability to beat any man on the court.

The novel is set in the early 1990s during Lucy’s senior year at Pendleton Academy. Ambitious Lucy likens herself to the Falconer in Central Park, “a statue of a young boy in tights, leg muscles blazing, releasing a bird.” That’s how she wants to live: at the top of her powers and showing no fear. Although she wonders why women don’t get statues like that.

Lucy is in unrequited love with Percy, her frequent competitor on the court, a wealthy kid whose family made its fortune in part by investing in the company that made Agent Orange. She can’t help but notice that she doesn’t get as much as respect as boys like Percy do, even though she’s her school’s scoring leader. That’s just one of the many examples of sexism Lucy confronts, but at least she doesn’t lack people to commiserate with. Among them are older cousin Violet, an artist, and the woman Violet lives with, also an artist, whose latest project involves using Pepto-Bismol to paint Barbie logos.

There’s little plot here, and Czapnik’s characters tend to make speeches, but The Falconer offers astute observations on the difficulties women confront when trying to succeed in male-dominated fields. In Lucy, Czapnik has created a great character who refuses to conform to expectations. But even Lucy knows that, for a falcon to soar, those with the power to hold it back need to let go.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You can try, but you’re unlikely to find descriptions of basketball as elegant as those in Dana Czapnik’s debut novel, The Falconer. “The ball is a face. Leathered and weathered and pockmarked and laugh lined.” So begins the story of Lucy Adler, 17 and confident in her ability to beat any man on the court.

FictionSatire

Hark

Review by Michael Magras

What’s a guru to do when he loses control of his own inspirational movement?

This question drives Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it.

If ever there lived an accidental messiah, it’s Hark Morner. His original goal—in one of Lipsyte’s many sly commentaries—was to be a stand-up comic. He wasn’t all that good, but a club owner booked him to perform his act on “the pitfalls of office life” at corporate gatherings. Hark quickly began to take his own words seriously. He had found his calling.

Hark calls his method “mental archery,” or “a few tricks, or tips, to help people focus,” which include everything from yoga and New Age speak to literal bows and arrows. It’s not long before he attracts adherents, who are feverishly devoted to Hark’s vision. Among them are Fraz Penzig, an unhappily married father of twins who is “rich in nutrients, solid from the gym,” yet perpetually feeling “on the verge of the verge of death”; Kate Rumpler, a young heiress who funds the nascent Harkist institute; and Teal Baker-Cassini, former Fulbright scholar and erstwhile embezzler, who now handles the group’s marketing.

Give the world a popular movement, and mercenaries are sure to follow. That’s what happens here, as social media tycoons and others try to monetize Hark’s movement, leaving the former comic to wonder what sort of joke he has unleashed on the world.

Oddly enough for a novel about the power of focus, Hark sometimes strays from its central story. But Lipsyte lands plenty of jabs at his targets, from internet trolls and conspiracy theorists to the desire for quick fixes to complicated problems.

If acidic satire helps you fend off life’s challenges, then put Hark in your quiver.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What’s a guru to do when he loses control of his own inspirational movement?

This question drives Hark, Sam Lipsyte’s trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it.

FictionWorld FictionLiterary Fiction

All the Lives We Never Lived

Review by Michael Magras

To learn facts about one’s parents from their younger days can be a sobering experience. But discoveries might be especially painful if the facts concern a mother who abandoned her child. Anuradha Roy explores this dynamic in her perceptive new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived.

In 1992, Myshkin Chand Rozario is in his mid-60s. He still lives in his childhood home in the Indian town of Muntazir, where he works as the superintendent of horticulture, “a glorified gardener,” as he puts it.

Myshkin has received a large envelope from someone in Vancouver. The contents of the package pertain to his mother, Gayatri, which prompts Myshkin to recall the events of his childhood in 1937, when India was still under British rule and his mother yearned for a more fulfilling life. Into this picture come two real-life figures: Walter Spies, a German painter who met Gayatri years earlier, and Beryl de Zoete, an English dancer who horrifies young Myshkin with pronouncements like, “I eat little boys baked in the oven. With extra salt.” Inspired by Spies’ philosophy that “there is music in everything, beauty everywhere,” Gayatri leaves her family for what she hopes will be a more exciting and artistic life.

If the novel goes off on too many tangents, Roy is nonetheless a thoughtful writer who creates beguiling scenes, such as the emergence of women holding candles at nighttime, “a wavering line of fireflies,” as they sing a Muslim mourning chant. All the Lives We Never Lived is an affecting tale of loss, remarriage and rediscovery.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

To learn facts about one’s parents from their younger days can be a sobering experience. But discoveries might be especially painful if the facts concern a mother who abandoned her child. Anuradha Roy explores this dynamic in her perceptive new novel, All the Lives We Never Lived.

FictionLiterary Fiction

A Ladder to the Sky

Review by Michael Magras

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

It would spoil the pleasure of reading John Boyne’s latest novel to describe most of its plot points, but let’s just say Yorkshire-born Swift is more determined than your average aspiring writer. He has two dreams: to become a celebrated author, and to have a child. And he’ll steal from anyone, starting with 65-year-old German writer Erich Ackermann, whom Swift meets in 1988 when he’s a young waiter in Berlin.

Soon, Ackermann, a gay man with long-suppressed desires, asks the fulsome Swift to accompany him to literary events around the world. Ackermann also shares details of his past, including his membership in the Hitler Youth and a fateful wartime decision regarding a childhood friend.

Swift betrays Ackermann by using his story as the basis for Two Germans, his debut novel. Boyne then presents scenes, most of them told from the perspectives of other characters, that chronicle the extremes Swift pursues to further his career. No one is safe, including Dash Hardy, an older gay writer Swift accompanies to Gore Vidal’s Italian villa; Swift’s wife, Edith, whose literary career is poised to take off just when Swift’s has stalled; and even Swift’s own teenage son.

Boyne sometimes paints in broad strokes, but he compensates with many wonderful touches. Exchanges between Vidal and Swift are deliciously venomous, and the digs at contemporary publishing are spot-on, as when Swift describes a debut novel he dislikes as, “Bridget Jones meets A Clockwork Orange.”

A Ladder to the Sky is an entertaining, if deeply cynical, portrait of the literary world.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Watch what you say around writers—so goes the oft-stated wisdom—because they just might immortalize you in a book. That may not apply to all authors, but it does for Maurice Swift, the protagonist of A Ladder to the Sky.

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