With her personal take on the best of sex writing from 2009 (or, rather, 2008; the title is a bit of a misnomer), Rachel Kramer Bussel notes that “You don’t have to look far to find sex, but you do have to get a bit bolder when looking for writing and thinking about sex that doesn’t play to the lowest common denominator.”
What an encore. Chris Cleave’s second novel, Little Bee, offers a series of intricately timed revelations. A teenage refugee from Nigeria carries one side of the narrative, a young British professional, the other. Through this split-screen, Cleave tackles the multiple perspectives inherent in any story: someone always stands outside looking in. Perspective equals character, which makes his use of multiple names so interesting…
A.B. Yehoshua never writes the shortcut phrase “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in Friendly Fire, his most recent novel, newly translated into English from Hebrew. It’s as though the veteran Israeli author is mining a seam so deep that its boundaries do not need to be explored or examined, or picking up a thread of conversation that Israelis have already been engaged in for 60 years. That isn’t to say, however, that Yehoshua has no comment on the matter.
Daniel Chacón’s Hudson Prize-winning collection, Unending Rooms, is smart and charming, fascinating and frustrating by turns. Like that of Borges, Chacón’s fiction springs from a powerful intellect at play, but in the latter’s case that rich intelligence sometimes elevates concept over character.
The dozen stories in The First Person, Ali Smith’s latest collection, are deceptively simple: no verbal pyrotechnics, no otherworldly setting, no last-minute epiphanies, and most of the time, no traditional rising action or climax. They’re told in a simple, conversational tone, often by a narrator who could be Ali Smith herself. But they stay with you long after you’ve finished reading them. They sneak up on you, camouflaged as innocuous little anecdotes about innocuous little interactions and misunderstandings, and only later do you realize they’re asking the most fundamental questions that fiction, or life itself, can ask.
The stories in Chris Adrian’s third book (and first story collection) are idealistic, relentlessly imaginative and existentially harrowing—(Flannery O’Connor/Lorrie Moore) x Kafka=Chris Adrian. Using a unique mixture of shocking imagery and surprising tenderness, Adrian illuminates the pathologies of the trauma-battered, those stricken by grief or illness who choose to funnel their angst into healing or annihilating activities. The results are individual, startling, and luminous.
Near the beginning of Nathaniel Rich’s debut novel, The Mayor’s Tongue, a young man named Eugene reads a novella by his idol, the legendary author Constance Eakins. “[It] was typical Eakins,” Eugene reflects, “a strange reality that bordered on fantasy, an exotic locale, larger-than-life characters.” He might have been describing The Mayor’s Tongue itself, a book so dizzyingly rich with surprises that no review could—or should—describe them all.
Driftless is David Rhodes’ first novel in 33 years and the sequel to his last published work, Rock Island Line. Unlike the earlier novel, whose epic narrative focused solely on drifter-cum-farmer July Montgomery, Driftless offers a series of vignettes featuring the many residents of Words, Wisconsin, as they tackle issues of powerlessness, tragedy, and belonging – timeless human questions – in philosophical and heroic ways. What John Gardner praised as “moral style” was evident in Rock Island Line, but it really comes into its own in Driftless.
Indu Sundaresan’s fourth book and first story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, contains India’s multitudes, all in relationships of opposition – men vs. women, traditional vs. new, haves vs. have-nots. Throughout these nine stories, Sundaresan cultivates empathy for her characters and their individual anguish at straddling those great divides.
E. Lockhart’s latest YA-novel–wherein Frankie Landau-Banks infiltrates her boarding school’s all-male secret society–is a lot of fun. The book is also a love letter to teenage girls asking them to value their own worth. As an antidote to the swooning of the Twilight crowd, Frankie’s gutsy determination is a welcome dose of a different kind of romance.
The stories in David Vann’s second book, Legend of a Suicide, circle compulsively around a central fascination—a father’s suicide. Partway through “Sukkwan Island,” the central novella in the collection, I decided I had to put the book down—just for a day, until I felt ready to read on. I mean this as praise. Legend of a Suicide is a very difficult book for the very best reasons: it is written with great honesty and journeys unflinchingly into darkness. It is a reckoning.
Happiness is a warm puppy (and also a good book). Paced like an epic novel, David Michaelis’ Schulz and Peanuts is the perfect biography for fiction-lovers.
