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Michael Magras

FictionLiterary Fiction

A long drive

Review by Michael Magras

When Queens resident Leah Kaplan gets a phone call from someone she worked with in San Francisco a decade earlier, she can’t possibly foresee the strange events that are about to happen. The unexpected journey that takes her back to California and away from Hans, her husband of five years, is the driving force behind The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky’s odd and entertaining new novel.

Leah had yet to earn her MFA when she worked at the University of California’s Facilities Management Department, writing job descriptions for custodians and engineers. Shortly before Leah left, her boss, Judy, took her to lunch in her “dream come true”: a “blindingly red” sports car she had wanted all her life.

Flash forward 10 years, when a former coworker calls to say that Judy died in an accident involving the red car and has left the car to Leah. The novel then takes a surreal turn. Leah hears Judy’s voice in her head. She travels West for the funeral, where everyone from former colleagues to total strangers wants to sleep with her. Judy’s car may be possessed: First, it fixes itself; then people who drive it have trouble keeping to a safe speed. Then Leah begins to suspect that Judy’s death may not have been an accident. 

Well before Dermansky mentions him, it’s clear we’re in the realm of Haruki Murakami: the staccato rhythm and short sentences; the presence of cats, if only in cartoon form on T-shirts; dialogue that’s not quite real speech. There’s even a Japanese motel clerk who, like many Murakami characters, is obsessed with American culture. If The Red Car doesn’t quite equal the bizarre beauty of the master’s finest work, it’s still a fun and addictive read. “Follow the signs,” deceased Judy advises Leah. Readers who do the same will enter a dreamlike world that is as familiar as it is skewed.

 

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

When Queens resident Leah Kaplan gets a phone call from someone she worked with in San Francisco a decade earlier, she can’t possibly foresee the strange events that are about to happen. The unexpected journey that takes her back to California and away from Hans, her husband of five years, is the driving force behind The Red Car, Marcy Dermansky’s odd and entertaining new novel.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The memories of war

Review by Michael Magras

It’s no secret that war tears families apart, including those comprised of militaristic parents and their pacifist offspring. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments.

Robert Quinlan, a 70-year-old Vietnam veteran and professor of American history, lives in Florida with his wife, Darla, an art theorist. They’re enjoying tofu curry at a local co-op when a disheveled man with few teeth enters. Robert, thinking the man is a fellow Vietnam vet, buys him a meal. This encounter takes Robert back to his Vietnam service, where he was “one of the eight out of ten who goes to war and never kills.” 

Robert’s younger brother, Jimmy, moved to Canada rather than serve in the war, a decision that angered their World War II-veteran father. Jimmy now makes high-end leather goods, has an open marriage with Linda, his wife of 24 years, and hasn’t seen his parents and brother for 46 years.

But with their 89-year-old father on the verge of death after a fall, Jimmy has to decide whether to return to the States and risk unleashing decades of “unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret.”

The disheveled man’s story, which Butler revisits throughout the book, feels extraneous, but Perfume River is a powerful work that asks profound questions about betrayal and loyalty. There are marvelous descriptions throughout: When Robert dashes out of a banyan tree, “a needle-thin compression of air zips past his head.” As this provocative novel makes clear, each of us does what he or she must, but acts of conviction are rarely free of consequences.

 

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

It’s no secret that war tears families apart, including those comprised of militaristic parents and their pacifist offspring. Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, has written eloquent works about Vietnam and its effect on families. He returns to these themes in Perfume River, a heartbreaking story of fathers and sons and their expectations and disappointments.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The economics of reviving a moribund marriage

Review by Michael Magras

When Nick Maguire moves his wife, Phoebe, and their 2-year-old son, Jackson, from Boston to Southern California, he hopes to put their rocky past behind them. But as quickly becomes apparent in Carousel Court, Joe McGinniss Jr.’s intense new novel, some bruises need more than time and distance to heal.

Nick, who makes his living producing corporate films, accepts a job as a production manager with a boutique firm in Encino. Phoebe, a former analyst at a financial-services firm in Boston, had an affair with the lead partner, known only as JW. Now, she sells (and takes) anxiety medicine for a pharmaceutical firm. Well aware of her attractiveness, she employs a unique method of enticing male doctors to buy her products.

One of the biggest motivators for the move occurred when Phoebe, exhausted and high on Klonopin, slammed her car into an idling truck and nearly killed Jackson. Nick’s plan had been to move West, buy an investment property to upgrade, and give Phoebe time to regain her stability.

But when Nick’s job offer falls through, he becomes a repo man who pretends to own some of the repossessed homes and rents them to unsuspecting tenants. He and Phoebe feel stuck in their own neighborhood, Carousel Court, with neighbors so fearful of one another that some of them sleep in tents and carry guns. And all of this is before JW contacts Phoebe with promises of future employment and the prospect of further infidelity.

Despite repetitive elements, Carousel Court is a searing indictment of excess ambition and a dark portrait of the bitterness that forms when life and careers don’t work out as planned. As McGinniss makes clear, no amount of fancy buttercream carpeting or expensive organic cherimoya will mask the pain of a strained marriage. But as one character says, “Maybe there is something approaching salvation to be found in all these dead houses.” The same is true of seemingly moribund marriages: They may be on the verge of collapse, but maybe some of them still have value.

When Nick Maguire moves his wife, Phoebe, and their 2-year-old son, Jackson, from Boston to Southern California, he hopes to put their rocky past behind them. But as quickly becomes apparent in Carousel Court, Joe McGinniss Jr.’s intense new novel, some bruises need more than time and distance to heal.

FictionDebut Fiction

A witty look at life in the service industry

Review by Michael Magras

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, is the literary equivalent of spiked chocolate mousse: the lightest of confections, but with a powerful kick. Danler, a former waitress, has fashioned a breezy piece of fiction that dramatizes the behind-the-scenes activities of a posh Manhattan restaurant in exact and unsparing detail. This episodic novel’s depiction of staff members who bandy profanities and snort the harshest drugs is so precise and vividly rendered that, the next time you patronize a fancy eatery, you may wonder what those smiling greeters are up to behind the swinging door.

In June 2006, a 22-year-old English major named Tess arrives in New York from her Midwestern hometown and gets a job as a back waiter at Union Square’s most popular restaurant. Tess is such a novice about food that, when she’s asked during her interview to name “the five noble grapes of Bordeaux,” she “pictured cartoon grapes wearing crowns on their heads, welcoming me to their châteaux.”

The owner hires Tess, however, because he sees her as a “fifty-one percenter,” a person who has the empathy and work ethic lacking in many restaurant employees. Soon, Tess is part of a crew that includes a chef who demands that no one speak to him while he cooks, a food runner who writes screenplays and the bartender with whom Tess is smitten.

Occasionally, Danler tries too hard to be literary, but for the most part, Sweetbitter is a feast of coarse dialogue and industry insight. “You will stumble on secrets,” Tess says early in the novel. So will readers of this entertaining debut.

 

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

Sweetbitter, Stephanie Danler’s debut novel, is the literary equivalent of spiked chocolate mousse: the lightest of confections, but with a powerful kick. Danler, a former waitress, has fashioned a breezy piece of fiction that dramatizes the behind-the-scenes activities of a posh Manhattan restaurant in exact and unsparing detail. This episodic novel’s depiction of staff members who bandy profanities and snort the harshest drugs is so precise and vividly rendered that, the next time you patronize a fancy eatery, you may wonder what those smiling greeters are up to behind the swinging door.
FictionHistorical Fantasy

Where there’s smoke . . .

Review by Michael Magras

Perhaps you think it’s easy to spot beneficiaries of wealth and privilege in today’s society, but it is a lot easier in the late-Victorian England conjured by Dan Vyleta in Smoke, an inventive quasi-dystopian fantasy. The aristocracy are distinguished from the lower classes by one significant and immediately noticeable trait: The lower classes emit thick black smoke—or, as it appears here, Smoke.

This is an England in which babies turn black with Smoke and the resulting Soot minutes after they’re born; it’s the “dark plume of shame.” Think a bad thought or tell a falsehood, and tendrils of Smoke will alert the world to your misdeed.

The novel begins at a boarding school in which 200 upper-class boys are receiving a “moral education” to cure them of the evil they are born with. Two of them become best friends: wealthy Charlie Cooper and Thomas Argyle, whom one of the school’s young prefects, Julius Spencer, suspects of harboring a reprehensible secret.

At Christmas, the headmaster asks Charlie to accompany Thomas to the home of Baron Naylor, Thomas’ uncle. Keep an eye on Thomas, the headmaster tells Charlie, but he doesn’t say why. What follows is a shocking visit in which both boys become enamored of the baron’s daughter, Livia; discover experiments conducted with the Soot of prisoners; learn the mysterious properties of a tin of sweets; and uncover the real intentions of not only Julius but also the school’s masters.

From the houses of Parliament to London streets dense with costermongers and their handcarts, Smoke is an action-packed adventure that raises provocative questions about religion versus reason. As one character says in the second half of the book, Smoke  isn’t necessarily evil. One person’s wickedness is another person’s humanity. That’s the kind of subtle observation that makes a smart thriller easy to spot.

 

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

Perhaps you think it’s easy to spot beneficiaries of wealth and privilege in today’s society, but it is a lot easier in the late-Victorian England conjured by Dan Vyleta in Smoke, an inventive quasi-dystopian fantasy. The aristocracy are distinguished from the lower classes by one significant and immediately noticeable trait: The lower classes emit thick black smoke—or, as it appears here, Smoke.
FictionDebut Fiction

A delightfully ambitious debut

Review by Michael Magras

No one can accuse Martin Seay of lacking ambition. His first novel, The Mirror Thief, is a 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents. But this is hardly a punishment for readers. It’s a workout, but of the intellectual kind: part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno.

The action moves back and forth among three different parts of the world and three distinct eras. In 2003, on the eve of the second Gulf War, Curtis Stone, a 40-year-old African-American ex-Marine, arrives in Las Vegas from his Philadelphia home. A club owner named Damon has hired Curtis to search for gambler Stanley Glass, ostensibly to collect on a marker. Curtis has trouble locating the elusive Stanley, but he finds one of Stanley’s treasured possessions: a slender volume of poems, “The Mirror Thief,” written in 1958 by a proto-beatnik named Adrian Welles.

Cut to 1958, when Stanley, a 16-year-old card sharp fresh off the train from Staten Island, shows up in Malibu, California, in hope of meeting Welles. Stanley, who adores Welles’ poems, wants to talk about “The Mirror Thief” and its mysterious subject: a 16th-century alchemist named Crivano. The novel’s wildly ambitious third segment takes us to Venice in 1592, where a sultan has sent the murderous Crivano to “locate craftsmen adept at fashioning the flawless mirrors for which every civilized land celebrates the isle of Murano, and return with those craftsmen to the Ottoman court.”

The Mirror Thief is overstuffed with incident and period detail, but it’s still an impressive feat of imagination. Much of this book, Seay seems to be saying, is like one’s reflection in a mirror: What you see in front of you isn’t the whole story.

 

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

No one can accuse Martin Seay of lacking ambition. His first novel, The Mirror Thief, is a 600-page thrill ride across three centuries and two continents. But this is hardly a punishment for readers. It’s a workout, but of the intellectual kind: part crime thriller and part meditation on poetry, with unexpected plot twists and references to famous figures as diverse as the French dramatist Antonin Artaud and Jay Leno.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The ripples of extremism

Review by Michael Magras

Though terrorist acts may have different motivations, they share a common factor: the suffering wrought on the victims’ families. That point is dramatized with chilling effectiveness in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, a novel in which questions of politics and religion are rarely far from the thoughts of its main characters.

Mahajan, whose 2008 debut novel, Family Planning, was published in nine countries, begins his story with a 1996 marketplace bombing in India. The Khuranas, who are Hindu, have sent their two young sons to an open-air market to pick up their television from an electrician. The boys bring their Muslim friend Mansoor, the Ahmeds’ only child, along. An explosion “under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800” kills the Khurana boys, but spares Mansoor. His injury seems minor at first, but when he gets to America years later to study computer science, his wrist and neck pains become so severe that he’s unable to type.

The novel shifts perspective throughout to encompass multiple viewpoints and demonstrate the intersection of lives affected by that initial blast, including Mansoor, who abandons his secularity after he experiences prejudice; a bomb maker named Shaukat “Shockie” Guru; and a Muslim activist who becomes more radicalized as the novel progresses.

The focus wanders a bit during detailed passages about Indian politics and Mansoor’s religious conversion, but this remains a compelling story about extremism and its effects. Much of the writing is beautiful and evocative, as when the bereaved Khuranas awake to find “two parallel lines of salt” on their sheets from “shoulders soggy with tears” after the death of their sons. Some terrorist acts have relatively few casualties, but as Mahajan eloquently points out, even small acts of violence have devastating repercussions. In the world of political terrorism, there are no small bombs.

 

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

Though terrorist acts may have different motivations, they share a common factor: the suffering wrought on the victims’ families. That point is dramatized with chilling effectiveness in Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, a novel in which questions of politics and religion are rarely far from the thoughts of its main characters.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Carving out a space for creativity

Review by Michael Magras

Add the female protagonist of Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin’s moving new novel, to the roster of characters who have grappled with the age-old question of art vs. domesticity. Should one lead a life dedicated to an artistic pursuit—in this case, the writing of poetry—or to one’s family? The dilemma her protagonist faces may be eternal, but the device Grushin uses to tell her story is unique: Each of the 40 chapters occurs in a room of either a library or the narrator’s current residence.

The shifts in Grushin’s narrative style are a subtle way to underscore the difficulty of this question. The opening chapters, during which the unnamed protagonist grows up in Russia, are told in first person present tense. In these enchanting early pages, we learn that the narrator is prone to visions, first of a mermaid who sifts through her mother’s jewels, and then of a bearded, barefoot man who encourages the narrator’s artistic inclinations.

Later, when she attends university in the United States, the novel shifts to first person past tense. While her ambitious childhood friend Olga, the first Soviet to attend an American university, gives interviews and enjoys the limelight, the narrator quietly pursues her degree and experiments with writing poetry cycles.

The novel is told in third person, once the protagonist marries Paul Caldwell, a business major from a wealthy family. Soon, the woman who once dressed in thrift-store clothing is living in a fancy home with a ballroom and gold-plated faucets. Now referred to as Mrs. Caldwell, she gives up her artistic dreams and becomes stay-at-home mom to six children. But she fantasizes about the life she could have had and wonders whether she made the right choices.

Grushin occasionally succumbs to cliché, such as having the narrator examine her reflection in a mirror before assessing her life, but, for the most part, Forty Rooms is a sensitive and exquisitely told meditation on the pleasures of art.

Add the female protagonist of Forty Rooms, Olga Grushin’s moving new novel, to the roster of characters who have grappled with the age-old question of art vs. domesticity. Should one lead a life dedicated to an artistic pursuit—in this case, the writing of poetry—or to one’s family?
FictionLiterary Fiction

Found in translation

Review by Michael Magras

Good on Paper, Rachel Cantor’s ingenious follow-up to 2014’s A Highly Unlikely Scenario, is set in the final months of 1999. Single mother Shira Greene is 44 and works as a temp at a company that makes prosthetic legs. She hates the job, and why wouldn’t she? Her dream is to be a writer and translator, a vocation life has forced her to put aside. Employment notwithstanding, Shira has a comfortable life. She and her 7-year-old daughter, Andi, share a Manhattan apartment with Shira’s friend Ahmad, an economics professor whom Andi thinks of as her real father.

Then Shira receives a telegram from Romei, a Nobel Prize-winning poet. Romei offers Shira the well-paying chance to translate his new work, a Dante-inspired piece dedicated to his wife. The job, however, isn’t as perfect as it seems. Romei’s work is all but untranslatable, with a storyline that bears a resemblance to one of Shira’s few published stories—a discovery that makes her question Romei’s true intent in hiring her.

Part of the fun of Good on Paper is the slow revelation of the mystery behind Romei’s request—which involves not only Shira and her mother, who abandoned her family when Shira was Andi’s age, but also Shira’s friend Benny, a bookstore owner and part-time rabbi known to rollerblade around New York in a cherry-red bodysuit. Don’t be fooled by the breeziness of the opening pages. Good on Paper is a challenging work, with translation serving as a metaphor for the search for another person’s intentions. Cantor’s witty novel is about the quest for the best path and the difficulty in finding it.

 

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

Good on Paper, Rachel Cantor’s ingenious follow-up to 2014’s A Highly Unlikely Scenario, is set in the final months of 1999. Single mother Shira Greene is 44 and works as a temp at a company that makes prosthetic legs. She hates the job, and why wouldn’t she? Her dream is to be a writer and translator, a vocation life has forced her to put aside. Employment notwithstanding, Shira has a comfortable life. She and her 7-year-old daughter, Andi, share a Manhattan apartment with Shira’s friend Ahmad, an economics professor whom Andi thinks of as her real father.
FictionPopular Fiction

The Portable Veblen

Review by Michael Magras

That one of the recurring characters in The Portable Veblen is a squirrel tells you much about the experience of reading Elizabeth McKenzie’s clever second novel. Veblen, the 30-year-old protagonist who chats with the squirrel, describes herself as an “independent behaviorist,” translates for the Norwegian Diaspora Project in her spare time and “still favored baggy oversized boy’s clothes.” This novel is like vegetables cut on a bias: slightly skewed, pleasing to look at, and, thanks to its skilled chef, a joy to consume.

Veblen is named after Thorstein Veblen, the early 20th-century economist who “espoused anti-materialistic beliefs,” and is, like her namesake, a nonconformist. She lives alone in a bungalow in Palo Alto, but has fallen in love with Paul Vreeland, an ambitious young neurologist. Although they’ve known each other for only three months, they plan to marry. And Paul has another plan: He’s developing a device that will help medics perform emergency craniotomies on the front lines.

Paul’s device isn’t ready for the field yet, but the Department of Defense is interested, as is Cloris Hutmacher, a Tesla-driving pharmaceutical heiress. As Paul decides whether to enter into business with a firm that is the antithesis of Thorstein Veblen’s writings, he’s also grappling with his hippie parents and an emotionally challenged brother. Veblen’s side of the family presents challenges, too, most notably her mother, a hypochondriac who keeps a typed list of her medical history behind a ceramic bowl filled with pinecones and presents the list to Paul when they’re introduced.

The Portable Veblen has extraneous plot points, but for the most part, this is a funny and well-written novel about family, love and the perils of misplaced ambition. Adding to the experience are the many photographs wittily distributed throughout: Next to the paragraph in which Veblen’s stepfather offers her a chicken burrito is a tiny photo of a stuffed tortilla wrapped in foil. When you know what you’re doing, as McKenzie does here, to go against the grain is no bad thing.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our Q&A with Elizabeth McKenzie about The Portable Veblen.

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

That one of the recurring characters in The Portable Veblen is a squirrel tells you much about the experience of reading Elizabeth McKenzie’s clever second novel. Veblen, the 30-year-old protagonist who chats with the squirrel, describes herself as an “independent behaviorist,” translates for the Norwegian Diaspora Project in her spare time and “still favored baggy […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Finding your loved ones

Review by Michael Magras

Brief encounters can have as big an impact as a lifelong relationship. Similarly, a short work of fiction can resonate more deeply than longer volumes. That’s the case with Like Family, the elegiac new novella by Paolo Giordano. In this deceptively simple tale of a widowed nanny who, we learn on the first page, has died, Giordano shows us how lives can intersect in profound and unexpected ways.

The unnamed 35-year-old narrator is a physicist who isn’t sure whether his university contract, soon to expire, will be renewed. His wife, Nora, is an interior designer. When Nora is bedridden due to a difficult pregnancy, the couple hires a childless, elderly woman known as Mrs. A. The couple nicknames her Babette because, like the Isak Dinesen character, she prepares large, fancy meals for her employers. After their son, Emanuele, is born, the couple hires Mrs. A to stay on as a nanny and housekeeper. A fastidious woman who, each morning, rewashes the dishes the narrator had washed the night before, she becomes so much a part of their family that she accompanies the family on Emanuele’s first day of school.

After only eight years in the family’s employment, however, Mrs. A calls one morning to say that she can no longer work for them. The reason she cites is that she’s tired. But a subsequent diagnosis reveals the real reason: She has stage four lung cancer. Among the many insults the disease inflicts is that she has to stop attending church because her incessant coughing, amplified by the church’s acoustics, disturbs the other parishioners.

The obvious meaning of the book’s title is that Mrs. A is like a member of the family, just as she thinks of Emanuele as the grandson she and her late husband never had. But the book also asks us to consider what constitutes a family. This poignant work points out that there is no one way to define a family, and that, in any definition, the primary ingredient is the ability to love.

 

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

Brief encounters can have as great an impact as a lifelong relationship. Similarly, a short work of fiction can resonate more deeply than longer volumes. That’s the case with Like Family, the elegiac new novella by Paolo Giordano. In this deceptively simple tale of a widowed nanny who, we learn on the first page, has died, Giordano shows us how lives can intersect in profound and unexpected ways.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A curious team of explorers, an unlikely friendship

Review by Michael Magras

Writers have been known to embellish facts for dramatic purposes. A possible embellishment provides part of the drama of Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, the final novel by Oscar Hijuelos. This posthumous work, set in the late 19th and early 20th century, is more restrained than previous Hijuelos books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. And the protagonists are as un-Hijuelos as you can get: Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer who achieved fame for his search for David Livingstone.

Three years after Stanley’s death in 1904, his wife, artist Dorothy Tennant, discovers a manuscript that contradicts his official biography. In the hidden version, he wrote that Henry Hope Stanley, “the merchant trader from New Orleans whom he considered his second father,” had not vanished during a visit to Cuba in 1861, and that the young Stanley had traveled there with Samuel Clemens (Twain) to search for him. Tennant asks Clemens: Is it true? What follows is a chronicle of the decades-long friendship between these two very different men.

Hijuelos was still working on this novel at the time of his death in 2013, and Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise is clearly an unfinished manuscript. Descriptions go on for too long, and dialogue often sounds written rather than spoken. Despite its flaws, however, the book entertains. Hijuelos beautifully dramatizes Stanley’s discomfort with women and his struggles with celebrity. Clemens is the swaggering Twain of legend—until the moving passages that depict the deaths of his eldest daughter and beloved wife. And the scenes from Stanley’s final months, when he has trouble recognizing Dorothy, are heartbreaking. 

Late in the novel, Clemens says that books will last as long as there are people to read them. One could add that, as long as people read books, they will read books by Oscar Hijuelos. In its better moments, this novel shows you why.

 

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

Writers have been known to embellish facts for dramatic purposes. A possible embellishment provides part of the drama of Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise, the final novel by Oscar Hijuelos. This posthumous work, set in the late 19th and early 20th century, is more restrained than previous Hijuelos books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. And the protagonists are as un-Hijuelos as you can get: Mark Twain and Henry Morton Stanley, the Welsh explorer who achieved fame for his search for David Livingstone.
FictionShort Stories

A Pulitzer Prize winner returns

Review by Michael Magras

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, September 2015

It takes a writer of immense confidence and talent to fashion beautiful stories that chronicle ordinary people coping with devastating challenges. Adam Johnson demonstrated this talent in his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He now does the same in Fortune Smiles, a collection of six powerful short stories in which characters are forced to contend with some of life’s biggest tragedies.

“Nirvana” is a futuristic tale in which a computer programmer who has written an algorithm that can search for videos of dead people and “summon” them cares for his joint-smoking wife, who suffers from Guillain-Barré syndrome. In the eerie “Dark Meadow,” the police ask a pedophile who owns a computer repair business to help them track down people who view child pornography on the Web. The protagonist of “Interesting Facts,” a frustrated novelist who has undergone a double mastectomy, worries about what life would be like for her husband and two children if she were to die. “Hurricanes Anonymous” tells the story of a UPS driver who returns to his van after making a FEMA delivery in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana and finds there his 2-year-old son, whom his girlfriend has abandoned. In “George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine,” a former Stasi prison warden in East Germany wonders who is leaving mysterious packages on his lawn. And in the riveting title story, two defectors from North Korea struggle to adapt to the more democratic life of the South. 

Sound depressing? It could be in the hands of a lesser writer. But even in the midst of emotionally trying events, Johnson finds moments of delight, such as when the UPS driver in “Hurricanes Anonymous” changes his son’s diaper and “does [the boy’s] favorite part” by holding the talcum dispenser up high and letting the powder snow down. Each page contains vivid details: A character standing on a bridge looks out at “that sandwich spread of ocean.” Johnson’s tortured characters may not always get what they want, but all of them have reason to hope.

 

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

It takes a writer of immense confidence and talent to fashion beautiful stories that chronicle ordinary people coping with devastating challenges. Adam Johnson demonstrated this talent in his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He now does the same in Fortune Smiles, a collection of six powerful short stories in which characters are forced to contend with some of life’s biggest tragedies.

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