How Fiction Works: Discussion Review
by Anne Stameshkin
Anne Stameshkin, Greg Schutz, Celeste Ng, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Jeremiah Chamberlin lead a series of discussions on critic James Wood’s latest collection of essays, How Fiction Works.
Anne Stameshkin, Greg Schutz, Celeste Ng, Natalie Bakopoulos, and Jeremiah Chamberlin lead a series of discussions on critic James Wood’s latest collection of essays, How Fiction Works.
William Trevor is a God anyone can believe in–ever-loving and omniscient, but not omnipotent. Even as he reveals lives destroyed or halted, one is calmed by his authority, safe in his hands. It’s true; there is nothing he can do to save his characters from themselves. But in his latest collection, Trevor does not just bear silent witness: unlike most contemporary short-story writers, he spells out his stories’ moral lessons, traces them to their furthest conclusions, and even ties up loose ends.
Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead, Iowa after a twenty-year, largely silent absence, offering his family no details about those lost years or the cause of his return. Home is a quiet book, one without dramatic plot devices; Robinson’s characters carry out the pure weight of life–playing the piano, going to the store, washing dishes– all while facing the ever-present sense of life’s brevity.
In When We Were Romans, Kneale commits wholly to a child’s perspective–bad spelling, misused words and all–with fresh and moving results. Nine-year-old Lawrence joins his mother and younger sister on a spontaneous road-trip to Rome, holding fast to the hope that they can escape his mother’s demons.
Cannie Shapiro, the beloved protagonist of Good in Bed, is back in Weiner’s newest novel, Certain Girls. The book is (gasp) chick lit…but guess what? It tackles some interesting writerly topics.
I don’t actually want to tell you anything about this novel. I want you to go read it and then meet me at Sweetwaters in Ann Arbor, so we can talk about our favorite parts while sipping mocha lattes and nibbling cranberry scones. This type of behavior—informally discussing books in settings seemingly created for the informal discussion of books—is something that Clarke makes fun of in the novel, but then again, he makes fun of pretty much anyone who likes books, or talks about books, or thinks they are at all important. A significant feat, considering the fact that Clarke obviously reads tons of books, and loves them, and thinks they’re at least important enough to spend a few years writing a pretty good one.
After an experimental operation goes mysteriously right, Jonathan finds himself at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, chained to a statue of Venus. He needs no food and breathes water like air. Bonus: He’s immortal. Jonathan’s meditations on love (namely his unfaithful wife, Kitty, who thinks the experiment failed) take him on an adventure to the mid-Atlantic ridge, into a volcanic shaft, and back to land–where he becomes a demon statue, a nimble thief, and even a super-hero.
Brendan Short’s debut novel tells the story of Michael Halligan, a nervous child who, in 1930s Chicago, finds solace in the Sunday adventure comics, where pulp heroes like Dick Tracy and the Shadow bring down the bad guys. As Michael grows up, his obsession with the Big Little Books makes human connection difficult, eventually trapping him inside his collectibles shop.
Bestselling memoirist Deborah Copaken Kogan (Shutterbabe) pens a haunting literary murder mystery; Between Here and April is the story of Elizabeth Burns, a former journalist turned urban mom, who goes looking for answers about the disappearance of a childhood friend and winds up tangled in questions she hoped never to answer.
In her ambitious first novel, Saher Alam uses the conflicted feelings of the groom, Nasr, for Jameela (his long-time friend) and Farath (his beautiful intended) —a triangle conscious of its debt to The Age of Innocence—to paint a nuanced picture of Muslim communities in North America.
In this masterful debut novel, Hannah Tinti beguiles without the slightest trace of the maudlin. Readers will fall in love with Ren, a one-handed orphan boy who works for grave-robbers and longs for a family, and with North Umbrage–a 19th-century New England town where widows press their ears to the earth to listen for their husbands, trapped long ago in a mine collapse.
The title of Krasikov’s stunning debut collection, One More Year, suggests both despondency and hope, both reluctance and anticipation—wonderfully fitting for a book about immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
