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Thane Tierney

FictionHistorical Fiction

Small World

Review by Thane Tierney

In the July 1845 issue of the Democratic Review, an editorial urged “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” It’s believed to be the first time the expression “manifest destiny,” a staple of high school history papers for over a century, ever appeared in print.

The phrase doesn’t show up as such in Jonathan Evison’s epic seventh novel, Small World, but its presence—and its role within American immigrants’ and Native Americans’ destinies, spread across three centuries—is woven into every page.

There’s Amtrak executive Jenny, whose great-great-great-grandfather was a Chinese immigrant and forty-niner who parlayed his gold into intergenerational wealth; budding basketball player Malik, son of a single mother and descendant of an enslaved man; abuse survivor Laila, whose Miwok ancestor internalized white people’s cruelty; and retiring train conductor Walter, whose Irish forebear was on the crew that drove the golden spike that connected America’s coasts by rail in 1869.

In fact, it’s Walter’s 2019 train crash that kicks off the odyssey, as the engineer tries to imagine the lives of his passengers and “what circumstances, what decisions, had delivered them all to that moment.”

As Evison tells the tale of America through immigrants’, Native Americans’ and their descendants’ eyes, readers are treated to seemingly unrelated vignettes that jump back and forth across time and space. Piece by piece, Evison successfully corrals this sprawling history into a cohesive whole, coalescing it into a vivid mosaic.

Part of the reason this 480-page book seems like a novel half its girth is Evison’s ability to drop the reader into a scene. You can feel the bone-rattling lurch of a wagon carrying its hidden human cargo to freedom. You can smell the pinewoods as a young couple seeks a place to build their nest in the Sierra foothills. You can taste the congealed oats at a Dickensian orphanage. You can revel in the dreams of a young athlete on the verge of greatness.

Throughout it all, Evison underscores a sense of a shared America, not so much in the kumbaya mythology of the melting pot but a feeling—oft-neglected these days—that we are all in this nation-building adventure together. That’s a destiny worth manifesting.

Jonathan Evison underscores a sense of a shared America, that we are all in this nation-building adventure together. That’s a destiny worth manifesting.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Chouette

Review by Thane Tierney

If you’re a fan of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love or Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, you’ll likely feel right at home within the perpetually shifting landscape of Claire Oshetsky’s debut novel, Chouette. Which is to say, if you don’t mind a little unexpected violence set in a surreal landscape, it will be right up your alley.

Chouette’s mom, Tiny, is a cellist who has a dream of a sexual encounter with an owl and, two weeks later, learns she is pregnant. “You may wonder: How could such a thing come to pass between woman and owl? I, too, am astounded, because my owl-lover was a woman.” Tiny’s unnamed husband is at first more overjoyed by the pregnancy than she is, and as the owl-baby begins to take over Tiny’s thoughts and emotions, her musical talent begins to desert her.

After the birth, Tiny’s husband rejects the notion of an owl-baby, suggesting that the child he calls “Charlotte” is perhaps developmentally disabled while overlooking the fact that she eats mice and other snacks not typically found in the grocery store’s baby food department. As the days begin to drift away like so many molted feathers, some hazy shapes of proto-truths emerge. Tiny’s husband wants to “fix” Chouette, while Tiny would rather see nature take its course and adapt her love to her owl-child’s needs, rather than the other way around.

Tiny’s husband enrolls Chouette in an increasingly bizarre series of treatments carried out by medical practitioners with names like Doctor Zoloft, Doctor Benzodiazepine, Doctor Chelation, Doctor Rectal Flushing and Doctor Hyperbaric. Needless to say, these therapies to “normalize” Chouette are unsuccessful, but that doesn’t keep the husband from trying, nor Tiny from getting more frantic in her quest to allow Chouette simply to be herself. It seems inevitable that a day of reckoning is not long off, and when it comes, it arrives like an owl strike: abruptly, decisively and violently. Owls, after all, are predators.

Oshetsky shows an exceptional talent for keeping the reader off balance. Is Tiny hallucinating? Is she in hell? Is this a metaphor? Is any of the story actually happening in the manner it’s being told? The ambiguity is tantalizing, even mesmerizing, and if your internal gyroscope is sufficiently operative to keep you from slipping off the edge, Chouette will richly reward your attention.

It seems inevitable that a day of reckoning is not long off in Claire Oshetsky’s novel, and when it comes, it arrives like an owl strike: abruptly, decisively and violently.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Four Humors

Review by Thane Tierney

The country of Turkey and its capital city, Istanbul, stand at the intersection of many rival influences: Asia and Europe; democracy and authoritarianism; Turks, Kurds and Armenians. In her debut novel, The Four Humors, Mina Seçkin throws her arms around these diverse elements and hugs them close through the story of Sibel, a 20-year-old Turkish American premedical student.

Sibel departed Brooklyn for Istanbul to study for her medical school entrance exam and to take care of her grandmother, who has Parkinson’s disease. She’s also—whether she admits it or not—fleeing the site of her father’s untimely fatal heart attack. And since maladies love company, she finds herself with a chronic headache, which she ascribes to her “humors,” referring to an ancient philosophy of medicine that suggests that health is the consequence of the balance of four components: blood, bile, choler and phlegm.

Like many archaic metaphors, the humor theory may be somewhat deficient in the specific but valuable in the general. Sibel finds evidence of the humors not only in her own body but also in her surroundings, noting that “Istanbul is a humor. The lubricant, oily and thick, black humor that begins to leak from my spleen. Istanbul is black bile, melancholy, only disguised as a city.” Sibel also employs the concept as she peels back the layers of her family history, revealing three generations’ worth of political and cultural friction. Each of the novel’s four sections invokes one of the humors, distributed across space and time, all arcing back to Sibel’s present-day state of affairs.

If all that weren’t enough to occupy the head and heart of a woman caught between cultures, Sibel is also navigating her relationship with her American boyfriend, Cooper, who has joined her for the summer. Sibel’s family’s increasing acceptance of Cooper is mirrored in inverse proportion by her growing ambivalence toward him.

Like the Russian soap operas that Sibel and her grandmother watch devotedly, The Four Humors unfolds at a leisurely pace, with an extensive cast of characters and a multigenerational plot that demands your attention. Once you fall into its rhythm, you’ll find yourself hooked.

Like the Russian soap operas beloved by its protagonist, The Four Humors has a leisurely rhythm, but once you fall in, you’ll be hooked.
NonfictionFood & DrinkCookbooksArt

Gift books: For the friend with the best dinner reservations

Feature by Thane Tierney

These books jump out of the oven and onto your shelf.

The holidays are galloping upon us like so many overachieving reindeer, and that means many of us are in vapor lock, wondering what to get our gastronaut (please, NOT “foodie”) friends and family. The possibilities run into the thousands, if not millions, but we’ve trekked off the road more traveled to discover some volumes that will surprise and delight.

Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview edited by Melville House
In Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview, the late chef, author, journalist and raconteur, never shy about expressing his opinion, states his case about food: “Well, there’s nothing more political. There’s nothing more revealing of the situation on the ground, whether a system works or not.” His words serve as a good guide through all these books, and in a person’s wider eating life.

Women on Food edited by Charlotte Druckman
Historically speaking, the “system,” especially as it pertains to women in restaurants, hasn’t always worked all that well. While the Irma Rombauers and Julia Childs and M.F.K. Fishers of the world were given wide berth in waxing poetic while guiding homemakers, in the pro kitchens of the world they were often overlooked or demeaned (or worse). No more. In Women on Food, editor Charlotte Druckman enlists the aid of a talented brigade, including the likes of Nigella Lawson, Dorie Greenspan and Julee Rosso, to articulate the state of the food world from a female perspective. As the joke goes, “What do you call a woman chef?” “Chef.” I am in sympathy with the authors in hoping for a day, and soon, when we look back on a book like this and wonder why it was necessary. 

Chicken Genius by Bernard Radfar
Moving from the political to the aesthetic, Japan, perhaps more than any nation, has given life to the adage that “we eat with our eyes first.” And so it is with Bernard Radfar’s Chicken Genius: The Art of Toshi Sakamaki’s Yakitori Cuisine. Aram Radfar’s informative, imaginative photography, alongside the book’s step-by-step recipes and techniques, is a delight to the eye as well as the appetite. It may take you a while to bring your knife skills up to pro level, but this book will aid you at every step, starting with the proper way to disassemble a whole chicken with some degree of craft, and just possibly art.

Delicious Metropolis by Wayne Thiebaud
Speaking of art, let’s turn to Wayne Thiebaud. He couldn’t have grown up anywhere other than Southern California for his canvasses to look the way they do. In Delicious Metropolis, he rolls out a dessert cart overflowing with pinwheel lollipops, pastel-frosted pastries and the promise of an endless summer, not a cloud in sight . . . unless it’s made from whipped cream.

Eat Joy edited by Natalie Eve Garrett
And if every picture tells a story, it’s also true of every recipe, as Natalie Eve Garrett and her contributors prove in Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food From 31 Celebrated Writers. From Anthony Doerr’s hilarious recipe for brownie mix (“Sit on floor. Cut open bag of brownie mix. Add water. Stir. Eat with fingers. Repeat when necessary.”) to Rosie Schaap’s moving tale of her first Passover Seder as a widow in New Mexico, Garrett has gathered not only the “what” of her talented essayists’ relationships with food, but more importantly the tragedies and triumphs behind the “why.”

Vignette by Jane Lopes
If I were able to offer only one book to someone who cares to know about wine, it would be Jane Lopes’ Vignette: Stories of Life & Wine in 100 Bottles. Light and frizzante as a moscato but thoroughly researched, the book walks you through the often confusing world of viniculture with recommendations that will give you the confidence to peruse any carte du vin with authority.

Ruffage by Abra Berens
At a time when many of us are moving toward a more plant-based diet, Abra Berens’ Ruffage: A Practical Guide to Vegetables provides a veg-by-veg road map studded with tips, techniques and recipes geared toward getting the most out of the stuff we grow. Sure, you’ve grilled corn, but have you puréed it? Have you ever braised celery? Have you marinated peas? Berens not only shows you how but also explains why you should. It’s not strictly vegetarian, but it does place the plant at the center of the plate, rather than as an afterthought or mere side dish.

As Bourdain says in The Last Interview, “There are no secret recipes. There are no secret techniques. Everything that you learn in a kitchen you are either told, open-source . . . or you have learned it over time, painfully.” With these books, you can sidestep some of those missteps—or just look at the pretty pictures. Either way, you’ll come away with a greater appreciation of the culinary arts, both visual and practical.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and writes extensively on food-related topics both in magazines and on his blog, templeofthetongue.com.

These books jump out of the oven and onto your shelf.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Light From Uncommon Stars

Review by Thane Tierney

What is it with the devil and violinists? Seems like his thirst for their souls is never slaked. In the 1700s, he made a deal with Paganini; in the 1970s, he went down to Georgia; and now the unlikely California city of El Monte offers up the latest additions to his infernal collection.

In Ryka Aoki’s Light From Uncommon Stars, violin teacher Shizuka Satomi finds herself on the horns of a dilemma: As the clock ticks down, she needs to deliver one more soul to the Bad Guy Down Below or else prepare to take the hot seat for all eternity. She’s already turned over six violin students, each of whom traded their immortal essence for earthly success beyond their wildest ambitions. 

Number seven, though, is a problem. Katrina Nguyen, a transgender teen runaway with a broken instrument and a broken psyche, isn’t motivated by the typical incentives (recording contract, concert tour, international renown) that made Shizuka’s previous students such easy marks.

Katrina isn’t the only refugee with a troubled past on Shizuka’s date card. Local donut shop owner—and starship captain—Lan Tran is on the intergalactic lam from a civilization-destroying phenomenon known as Endplague. After a meet cute, Shizuka and Lan embark on a friendship in which confidences are shared and mutual assistance is provided.

In a sense, virtually all of the book’s protagonists are literary examples of the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which damaged pottery is repaired with gold, becoming stronger because of its imperfections. In addition to the novel’s all-the-feels poignancy, Light From Uncommon Stars is also very, very funny. When Lan’s son is harassed by a hot-rodding local, the interstellar traveler derides the Earthling as “another primitive . . . who thought going 0 to 0.00000089469 times the speed of light in 6.6 seconds was something to brag about.” In another scene, when Lan marvels at a seemingly unending parade of breadsticks at an Olive Garden, Shizuka rejoins, somewhat incredulously, “But you traveled across the galaxy. The galaxy.”

Without straining the metaphor too much, Aoki gets every element of mise-en-scène note-perfect, and her prose is as exacting and precise as the techniques Shizuka is trying to impart to her young charge. Readers can feel the steam emanating from the kitchens of Aoki’s San Gabriel Valley noodle joints, hear the scrape of a freshly rosined bow across recalcitrant strings and experience the acute anguish of having one foot anchored in one world while the other is desperately trying to move forward. 

It almost makes you wonder if Aoki made a deal with—naaaah. She knows better.

In addition to the novel’s all-the-feels poignancy, Light From Uncommon Stars is also very, very funny.
FictionShort Stories

Gordo

Review by Thane Tierney

Jaime Cortez is a celebrated Chicano graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, performer and LGBTQ rights activist. His collection of short stories, Gordo, reveals that he also possesses the eye of a photographer. Like Diane Arbus or Weegee, Cortez depicts warts-and-all moments of vulnerability precisely, sometimes even harshly, and without sentiment. Unlike Arbus and Weegee, his camera is the printed word, rather than a Nikon or Speed Graphic.

The protagonist of many of these short stories is a young lad nicknamed Gordo who feels confused by the world as he grows into his oversize frame during the 1970s. He lives in the ag-industrial maw of central California, where a person’s horizons are frequently circumscribed by the limited choices available (working in the fields or trundling off to one of the mega food processors that stipple the landscape), particularly if that person’s first (or only) language is Spanish. 

Like many of John Steinbeck’s characters in The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row, the people who inhabit the pages of Gordo are often poor in economic terms but lead richly complex lives. There’s Raymundo, who as a boy is bullied for growing his hair long, and as an adult unexpectedly finds himself in a position to assist a former classmate. Nelson Pardo is an Salvadoran ex-army colonel who hates his janitorial gig at the Jolly Giant vegetable plant. And an accident with a chainsaw reveals Alex’s gender to Gordo, who is shocked by the realization that everybody else already knew.

Cortez is native to this locale, and it shows. He succinctly portrays a largely overlooked California landscape that’s as far removed from the worlds of Silicon Valley and Hollywood as it is from the 14 moons of Neptune. What ultimately draws the reader in, though, is the book’s emotional honesty. Gordo is no smarty-pants, wise-beyond-his-years kid; even as he grows up, he’s often puzzled by life’s abundant mysteries. The characters in and around his life exhibit kindness and cruelty in fluid motion. Cortez artfully frames these characters’ daily struggles and captures them in the freeze-frame flash of a master at work.

 

Note: Edited for clarity on 9/20/2021.

As in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the characters in Gordo are often poor in economic terms but lead richly complex lives.
FictionLiterary Fiction

In the Country of Others

Review by Thane Tierney

Leïla Slimani’s latest novel, In the Country of Others: War, War, War, is the first volume of a multigenerational trilogy recounting—in the truthful way that only fiction can—the history of the author’s grandmother, who emigrated from France to Morocco in the wake of World War II.

It was supposed to be a big adventure. Mathilde, in the company of Amine, a man “so handsome that she was afraid someone would steal him away,” escapes the confines of her Alsatian village into what she imagines will be a life ripped from the pages of a Karen Blixen novel. Alas, Morocco in 1947 is far from this romantic fantasy, so Mathilde does what millions of expats have done before and since: She makes up her new life as she goes along, and she curates (read, “lies about”) her experiences for her family back home.

The novel’s subtitle, “War, War, War,” telegraphs the backdrop against which this drama plays out. Amine fights against the arid land he tries to farm, against the elements, against poverty. Mathilde fights against society’s expectations of her, both as a woman and as an immigrant. Morocco fights against its colonial history and uncertain future. Both Morocco and Mathilde struggle to gain some degree of autonomy over the course of the novel. Parallels with Paul Scott’s famed Raj Quartet are evident, as the personal and political journeys are inextricably intertwined.

In the Country of Others is an unabashedly feminist novel of outsiders. In an interview, Slimani asserted that “women all live in the land of others, for they live in the land of men,” and that her dual Franco-Moroccan heritage leaves her partially estranged from both cultures. But she has been warmly embraced by the French literati, having won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2016 for The Perfect Nanny, as well as the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne Madame Figaro, awarded by Le Figaro for the best novel featuring a female protagonist, for In the Country of Others.

The first in a planned trilogy, In the Country of Others doesn’t wrap up its myriad messy conflicts, but it does conclude in an emotionally satisfying way while leaving the door open for its next two chapters.

Leïla Slimani’s latest novel is the first volume of a trilogy recounting—in the truthful way that only fiction can—the history of the author’s grandmother.
Fiction

My Heart

Review by Thane Tierney

In the mid-1600s, two theories competed over the true nature of the heart. English physiologist William Harvey claimed it was a pump. French philosopher René Descartes believed it to be a furnace. While Harvey won the day in the world of anatomy, Bosnian author Semezdin Mehmedinović, in his semi-autobiographical novel, My Heart, finds room for both concepts.

As the book opens, Mehmedinović has suffered a near-fatal heart attack; in fact, his doctor warns him that if “I had to come to him again, I wouldn’t leave the hospital.” A prognosis like that tends to focus the mind, and so in the book’s second section, Mehmedinović composes a sprawling letter to his son, Harun.

Part diary, part travelogue, part philosophical observation and part confessional, this epistle to Harun spans decades and continents. It includes the mundane (father and son listen to Morcheeba and Moby during a desert road trip) and the astonishing, as when Mehmedinović describes a poet friend who turned a restaurant “into a concentration camp.”

Just as Mehmedinović’s physical heart has suffered damage, his emotional one has as well. He apologizes for not having spirited his son out of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war and acknowledges their mutual PTSD as refugees, which has rendered them solitary men. They’re family, of course, but still fundamentally alone.

In the final section, we see the heart-as-furnace stoked as Mehmedinović recounts life with his wife, Sanja, after she has a stroke. As was the case with his son, he wants to bear witness and pay homage to moments whose consequences may only come into view in retrospect. He helps to fill in her memory deficits, but he also acts as an agent of selective forgetting, to shield her from reliving emotional trauma when relearning that a friend or relative has died.

The poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once observed that “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” As we can see from My Heart, this is also how the warmth gets out.

The poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once observed that “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” As we can see from My Heart, this is also how the warmth gets out.

FictionFamily Drama

Super Host

Review by Thane Tierney

Bennett Driscoll has what you might call a “Take It Easy” problem. You remember that 1972 song from the Eagles: “I’ve got seven women on my mind / Four that want to own me / Two that want to stone me / One says she’s a friend of mine . . .”

In Super Host, the first novel from Kate Russo (daughter of Richard Russo), Bennett has been taking it a little bit too easy. Once a painter of note, he has slid mindlessly into an indeterminate middle age, where he has been abandoned, in rather quick fashion, by critical notoriety, wealth, his gallery, his wife and any real sense of purpose. While he ponders how to extricate himself from several of those situations, the wealth bit demands his immediate attention, so he converts his estate into a short-term rental while he occupies the detached building that serves as a studio and occasional living quarters.

At this point, the only notable achievement left to Bennett is his status as a Super Host, which he jealously guards, even as it brings him into contact—sometimes too-close contact—with his renters, all of whom turn out to be women. In the hands of an author with darker leanings, this could have morphed into a creep show or even Psycho-esque territory, but Russo plays on the lighter side as the women in Bennett’s life (some intentionally, some otherwise) peel back his psyche, spurring him closer to some degree of self-awareness. 

The book lumbers out of the station a bit leisurely at first, but like a locomotive, it gains steam until Bennett’s life seems like it might derail. Can he regain his painting mojo, and even if he does, will it matter to the critics? And what will he do when his ex-wife, his tenant and his girlfriend all converge in competition for his affection?

Ultimately, Bennett discovers that his great new artistic challenge is one he hadn’t remotely anticipated: a return to the unfinished canvas that is his own self. And the critics he must attempt to win over aren’t the ones who write for newspapers or magazines; they are the people he holds most dear.

In Super Host, the first novel from Kate Russo (daughter of Richard Russo), Bennett has been taking it a little bit too easy.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Rib King

Review by Thane Tierney

In the era of the belated (and semi-involuntary) retirement of the likes of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth, The Rib King could hardly be more prescient, as it centers on a Black man who is the face of a food brand.

The novel’s first half takes place near the beginning of World War I, a time when the Civil War was no further removed from memory than the Vietnam War is from our minds today. And while the formerly well-to-do white Barclay family is inclined to behave less spitefully toward people of different races, they are by no means paragons of enlightenment. Much as in the Depression-era classic My Man Godfrey, it turns out that the key to solving the family’s financial ills may be held by the overlooked butler, in this case August Sitwell. He agrees to deliver a recipe for—and to be the public image of—a meat sauce that establishes him nationwide as the Rib King.

Fast forward a decade, and one of his former co-workers, Jennie Williams, has a product of her own to sell, which sweeps her unwillingly back into the Rib King’s orbit. In this half of the book, Ladee Hubbard’s talent really shines as Jennie navigates a maze of intrigue involving revenge, betrayal, economic exploitation, racial conflict and the often brutal exercise of power.

Hubbard’s depiction of a shadow economy bracketed by race is compelling and insightful, reminiscent of playwright August Wilson’s finest work. Woven into this narrative is a captivating depiction of Black feminist agency at a time not long after white women had gained the right to vote. It’s little wonder that Hubbard won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction in 2018.

Ultimately the reason to read The Rib King is not its timeliness or its insight into politics or Black culture, but because it accomplishes what the best fiction sets out to do: It drops you into a world you could not otherwise visit and makes you care deeply about what happens there.

In the era of the belated (and semi-involuntary) retirement of the likes of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth, The Rib King could hardly be more prescient, as it centers on a Black man who is the face of a food brand.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Summerwater

Review by Thane Tierney

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “Everyone has three lives: a private life, a public life, and a secret life.” It’s the latter of these we see on full display in British author Sarah Moss’ slender yet weighty Summerwater.

One rainy, gloomy summer day in a Scottish holiday park, a dozen or so people are cooped up—or occasionally not—in their cabins, alone with each other, alone with their thoughts. Every other chapter extracts a stream-of-consciousness core sample from the rich vein of a character’s internal monologue.

Becky, a rather petulant teen, is not having a good time because the cabin’s size requires her to share a room with her slightly older brother, Alex, an arrangement neither of them finds satisfactory. David, a retired doctor, reminisces about days gone by, when the other cabin owners were more like a community and less absentee landlords. He also ruminates about whether he should have sold the place back when the park, not unlike himself, still had the prospect of better days ahead. Meanwhile, a young wife named Milly fantasizes about Don Draper, alternately castigating and absolving herself for not being more present with her husband. There are more such moments, of course, but these are illustrative of Moss’ main thesis: It’s not much of a happy holiday for any of the participants.

Perhaps the one thing upon which they can all agree is that the Ukrainian—or perhaps Romanian or Bulgarian—family in one of the neighboring cabins parties way too loudly, and there’s nothing like a gloomy, rain-drenched day to offer the opportunity to obsess. As we all learned from watching the movie Deliverance, nothing sets up a potential catastrophe better than the combination of outsiders and wilderness, and on this point Moss does not disappoint. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it happens “gradually, and then suddenly.”

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “Everyone has three lives: a private life, a public life, and a secret life.” It’s the latter of these we see on full display in British author Sarah Moss’ slender yet weighty Summerwater.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Jubilee

Review by Thane Tierney

Let’s face it: We’re all a little delusional. We may think that we are more (or less) attractive or talented than we are. We may imagine past exploits as more epic than they really were. For the most part, though, these self-deceptions are harmless and don’t interfere with our real-world functioning. Bianca, the protagonist of Jennifer Givhan’s second novel, Jubilee, on the other hand, has amped up her fantasy to Calvin and Hobbes proportions. She believes that her lifelike, yet quite inanimate, doll named Jubilee is her baby. Her living baby.

Many people with PTSD color outside the lines of typical social behavior, and Bianca packs quite a bit of trauma in her trunk, as we see in chapters that pingpong between the eras “Before Jubilee” and “With Jubilee.” Bianca’s first love, Gabe, is abusive, and over the course of the novel, we see their relationship swing back and forth, with transgressions being met with forgiveness in ever-amplifying cycles until the relationship becomes unsustainable.

Fortunately, Bianca escapes and meets Joshua, a made-to-order Really Nice Guy who is willing to indulge her illusion (as does most of her family) in the hopes that she will reintegrate her somewhat split personality. It doesn’t hurt that he is working on his master’s degree in family counseling. But the real world intrudes on their fragile truce between reality and fantasy, ushering in potentially devastating consequences not only for their relationship but also for the family they have so tentatively forged.

Givhan, who, like her protagonist, is a poet, paints a surrealist canvas with vivid colors, even invoking images from artists such as Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo. The richness of her language and her eye for nuance animate her depictions of both the bleak exterior landscape of California’s Imperial Valley and the bleak interior landscape of Bianca’s damaged soul. Through it all, Givhan has forged a compelling tension between psychological drama and romance that makes for a riveting read.

Bianca, the protagonist of Jennifer Givhan’s second novel, Jubilee, believes that her lifelike, yet quite inanimate, doll named Jubilee is her baby. Her living baby.
FictionGothic Fiction

What Happens at Night

Review by Thane Tierney

In Peter Cameron’s latest novel, an American couple referred to only as “the man” and “the woman” check into the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel in an unspecified northern European country. This is no ski junket; they are finalizing a long-awaited adoption of a child they hope will mend the widening rift in their marriage.

So far, pretty normal, right? But not long after check-in, the man finds himself in the hotel bar, where he is befriended by an ex-circus performer of indeterminate age and treated to the local alcoholic delicacy, a lichen-derived schnapps “tasting faintly of bleach and watercress and spearmint and rice.” The town’s two main attractions appear to be the orphanage and an enigmatic healer who goes by the name of Brother Emmanuel.

The man and woman’s first appointment with the orphanage lands them—possibly by accident—in the healer’s den, which might or might not have been fortuitous, given the woman’s apparently untreatable cancer. This turn of events then cascades into a series of Waiting for Godot-esque moments in which anticipation is frequently met with frustration and further delay.

As in Samuel Beckett’s famed play, we learn a great deal about the Americans as they await their next disappointment, chatting among themselves and with the Fellini-ish cast of supporting characters. Every time the reader begin to adjust to a new normal, Cameron slips in something to unsettle it all, such as the hotel’s doors (one of which the man kicked in after losing his room key) being UNESCO-certified artifacts salvaged from a Cairo opera house. That’s the kind of revelation that will make minibar charges seem trivial.

Perhaps What Happens at Night might have been more aptly titled When Serling Met Sartre. It’s a weirdly compelling mix of all the elements that make us human and all the situations that test our humanity.

Maybe these characters should have read a Yelp review before they booked this reservation. It’s likely that the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel doesn’t get many repeat customers.

Perhaps What Happens at Night might have been more aptly titled When Serling Met Sartre. It’s a weirdly compelling mix of all the elements that make us human and all the situations that test our humanity.

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