Tag Archives: book review

More from the Historical Novels Review Fall Issue

The following reviews first appeared in the November 2015 online and print editions of the Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society.

TWAIN AND STANLEY ENTER PARADISE, Oscar Hijuelos, Grand Central

Screen Shot 2015-11-29 at 11.55.47 AM In an interesting life-imitates-art twist, the widow of famed author Oscar Hijuelos was the force behind the posthumous publication of this, his final work, which in part describes the effort of the widow of famed author and explorer Henry Morton Stanley to posthumously publish his final work. The novel traces the long and unlikely friendship between Welshman Stanley and American Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, which started when they were young unknowns and continued as they became two of the most famous authors in the English language. We get a more detailed look at Stanley, from his unhappy and impoverished childhood through the fame that started with his successful rescue of missionary David Livingstone and later exploration—many charged it exploitation—of the Congo for Belgium’s King Leopold, and finally a hard-won, bittersweet happiness with his wife, socialite and famed portraitist Dorothy Tennant, and their adopted son, Denzil. Hijuelos presents a man scarred by rejection and desperate to prove himself, in sharp contrast to Samuel Clemens, who seems forever comfortable in his own skin, even as life and his own poor financial choices deal him some heavy blows.

Though the novel was more than ten years in the making, it’s tempting to wonder whether Hijuelos considered it finished. The author fails to make his characters flesh and blood, instead holding everyone at arm’s length. It reads so much like a biography for the first two-thirds that there is a temptation to cry foul when the author finally ascribes thoughts or feelings to his subjects. A biography must demure on details not in the historical record, but Hijuelos chose to make these historical figures characters in a novel without offering his readers the intimacy a novel should provide. It is that lack of intimacy that makes this interesting work ultimately unsatisfying.

A FREE STATE, Tom Piazza, Harper

Screen Shot 2015-11-29 at 11.59.01 AM Tom Piazza often writes about jazz and blues, and their various ethnic and cultural origins and influences. In his latest novel, A Free State, Piazza reaches even farther back in American music traditions to reflect on the odd phenomenon of the minstrel show, which was all the rage in the North ahead of the Civil War. The straightforward story brings together Joseph—who later takes the name Henry Sims—an escaped slave who is also a talented musician and performer; James, the performer/manager of a Philadelphia-based minstrel troupe that needs a big headliner to remain competitive; and Tull Burton, a brutal slave hunter sent to recapture Joseph/Henry dead or alive.

Henry is the son of a slave who was the current favorite of the master, which explains Henry’s light skin and green eyes. He and James have parallel stories: they are both self-made men from distinctly underprivileged circumstances who developed their natural talents to make a better life. The primary difference is that it was not against the law for James to run away from his home and change his name. When James sees Henry’s mesmerizing street performance, he knows that the Virginia Harmonists, “purveyors of Ethiopian airs, plantation jigs, and every variety of Negro jollity,” need him to join their show, though that’s against the law, too. Henry is a born showman in a time and place that demands he remain hidden. To be free, to escape being hunted, Henry must make it to Canada, but it’s not where he wants to be. If he has to go where he doesn’t want to go, how is that freedom? Piazza leaves the threads of the story open-ended, with that question left unanswered.

A PLACE WE KNEW WELL, Susan Carol McCarthy, Bantam

Screen Shot 2015-11-29 at 12.10.23 PM It turns out that Susan Carol McCarthy’s latest novel, A Place We Knew Well, is a far truer story than readers may at first imagine. McCarthy lived in Orlando, Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, that white-knuckle showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that unfolded over little more than a week in October 1962. Florida residents found themselves engulfed in the staggering military build-up that occurred with unprecedented speed to aim America’s collective might at the island just 90 miles off the tip of the Keys. McCarthy sent out questionnaires to collect recollections of others who were in high school at the time, as she was; one response apparently served as the basis for the family story she relates against this dark slice of American history.

Wes Avery is an upstanding member of his community, a WWII Air Force veteran who owns a local gas and service station and is a devoted husband to Sarah and father to Charlotte, a junior in high school. He continues to be amazed at his own good luck at how his life has turned out so far. Unfortunately, matching the speed with which America’s confrontation with Cuba and Moscow escalates, Wes’s good luck begins to disintegrate under the weight of long-held family secrets. What’s most compelling about the story is its vivid reminder of the suddenness of the crisis, the shared knowledge that both sides were for the first time armed with weapons that could wipe out all of mankind, and the real sense that tomorrow might not arrive. McCarthy’s use of detail—the concern over a lack of fallout shelters since Florida’s high water table means there are no basements, the abrupt stranglehold on Florida’s economy as a result of the military build-up—adds to the novel’s authenticity.

Book Review: Undermajordomo Minor

Leave a reply

This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 22 September 2015.

Anyone already familiar with Patrick DeWitt’s earlier fiction, like The Sisters Brothers, will immediately recognize his signature tone, which is easy to spot but hard to describe.

It’s sort of arch, breezy commentary, whether it’s coming from the thoughtful, well-spoken-but-naïve hired gun who narrates Sisters or from the third-person narrator of his latest novel, Undermajordomo Minor, which is as hard to categorize as his writing style.

The book jacket suggests it’s a fable, but a fable has a moral. This is more like a fairytale, something wispy and ephemeral, with a half-dreamy, half-nightmarish quality, and perhaps a bit of happily-ever-after thrown in.

Perhaps.

Like a fairytale, this story takes place in no definitive time or location. It has the feeling of someplace misty and Eastern European in the mid-19th century. We meet Lucien Minor — known as Lucy — on the day he is leaving home, for the first time, at age 17.

His mother isn’t sorry to see him go, since she blames him for somehow transferring his recent life-threatening illness to his father, who promptly dies. She’s not far wrong, since we see the mysterious visitor who shows up at Lucy’s bedside in the middle of the night, has a quiet conversation with him, and then — in a scene pulled directly from The Green Mile’s John Coffey playbook — inhales the illness out of Lucy and wanders off to deposit it in his father.

Lucy has told the visitor that what he wants from his life is for something to happen. He feels that he has more to offer than do the large, oafish peasants who surround him, a populace who cannot possibly appreciate his more refined, cerebral qualities. Unfortunately, he has no prospects.

Father Raymond, the parish priest who “followed the word of God to the letter and at night felt the Holy Spirit coursing through his body like bird flocks,” helps to find him a position by writing to all the surrounding castles. He receives a single answer from the majordomo of the Castle Von Aux, extending a job offer, which is how Lucy ends up becoming Undermajordomo Minor.

(With this book following The Sisters Brothers, it seems possible to imagine that DeWitt works by dreaming up a clever title and then writing a book to go with it. There are probably worse ways to come up with a subject.)

And so Lucy commences on his journey: Five minutes from home, he meets the man to whom his mother has already rented his bedroom; a delay at the train station gives his unfaithful girlfriend and her hulking new lover time to humiliate him in front of all his fellow passengers; and he watches in the dark train car as a shadowy man and boy methodically rob all the sleeping passengers, and then falls in with them without immediately realizing who they are.

The older man, Memel, and the boy, Mewe, live in the village of the Castle Von Aux. In short order, we meet Adolphus, the exceptionally handsome and charismatic leader of the local rebel army; Klara, Memel’s beautiful daughter to whom Adolphus believes he is betrothed; and some of the denizens of the lightly populated Castle Von Aux, like Agnes the cook and Mr. Olderglough, the self-titled majordomo who uses Lucy as an errand boy.

There are mysteries, like what actually happened to Lucy’s predecessor, poor Mr. Broom; why is Lucy told to lock himself into his room each night; and where is the castle’s owner? We finally meet the feral and practically subhuman specter of Baron Von Aux, a man thoroughly wrecked by his love for a heartless woman who happens to be his wife. When Lucy intervenes to send a note to the absent baroness, a host of unintended consequences naturally unspools.

The story is surprisingly straightforward and unadorned, though the prose oozes with that odd DeWitt charm that makes it compelling. Told from Lucy’s point of view, the tale has a clueless innocence that is both comical and sweet. Dialogue is clipped and formal, but the effect is often laugh-out-loud funny. At those moments when it’s tempting for a reader to conclude that Lucy is a complete idiot, it’s worth remembering that he is 17, an age at which everyone is a complete idiot.

If there is, in fact, a moral to this story, it’s a simple and universal one. When Lucy finds himself as undone by love as the baron, poor Mr. Broom, Memel, and Memel’s best friend, Tomas, he plummets into the underworld (literally) and fights an Odyssean path back to the surface to return to Klara.

When he later admits to his old benefactor, Father Raymond, that he is in love, the priest asks what it’s like, and Lucy tells him, “It is a glory and a torment.”

“Really? Would you not recommend it, then?”

“I would recommend it highly. Just to say that it is not for the faint of heart.”

Lucy is not such an idiot after all.

Book Review: In the Language of Miracles

Leave a reply

This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books on 9 September 2015.

So much is conveyed in the first paragraph of Rajia Hassib’s eloquent debut novel, In the Language of Miracles: protagonist Khaled’s status as favorite of his devoutly Islamic grandmother, Ehsan; her disappointment in her daughter’s failure to follow the same devout traditions; and her firm belief that such lapses will lead to disaster for the beautiful boy, as evidenced by Khaled’s life-threatening illness, which has prompted Ehsan’s emergency visit from Egypt.

“His mother’s insistence on throwing him an elaborate birthday party a few weeks earlier must have been the last straw. ‘Why parade the boy around? Why invite people’s envy?’ Ehsan would repeatedly mumble as she tended to the sick child. They might as well have injected him with bacteria and saved the money spent on the inflatables.”

That peek at a sly sense of humor is deceptive, though, because the story that Hassib goes on to relate is heart-wrenching. Meet the Al-Menshawy family: physician father Samir, stay-at-home mother Nagla, eldest son Hosaam, middle child Khaled, and youngest Fatima, along with the frequently visiting Ehsan.

Samir and Nagla made the leap as newlyweds from Alexandria, Egypt, to the U.S., ending up finally in small, suburban Sommerset, N.J., where Samir starts his medical practice and the family grows to be best friends with their next-door neighbors, Jim, Cynthia, and Natalie Broadbent.

The crux of the story, though, is the horrific incident that took the lives of longtime sweethearts Hosaam and Natalie, the first anniversary of which is quickly approaching as chapter one opens. The tragedy hangs over everything and everyone, and has separated the Al-Menshawys from the community, from their former best friends, and from each other. Each of the surviving family members is wrapped in his or her own form of grief, and their lonely attempts to find a way through increasingly polarize and isolate them from each other.

There is so much going on in Language, so many quiet layers that build on each other, and Hassib guides us through the nuanced implications of culture, religion, community, gender, familial relationships, even birth order that together form the unique lens we all use to view one another and to experience the world around us.

Samir is fully committed to his adopted nation, believing in his and his family’s ability to assimilate and be accepted as true Americans, while also clinging to very traditional beliefs about his role as the head of the family and each member’s role in relation to his.

He is certain he understands the American character and way of thinking, yet he is utterly tone deaf in his dealings with the community he’s lived in for years. Even his unassimilated mother-in-law understands what a poor idea it is for the family to attend the inevitable memorial service for Natalie. That he wishes to speak at the service is a source of dread for all of us; a disaster is in the making.

While Khaled is at the book’s center as the ever-obedient middle child now living even more deeply in his dead brother’s shadow — the standard miseries of adolescence paling in the face of chronic physical and social-media harassment, the constant fear of being recognized in public, and the sense that his family has turned its back on him — it is Nagla who is the book’s heart.

Our view into her grief, guilt, and sense of helplessness as a mother makes her universally accessible, and demands we consider how we would act under similar untenable circumstances. Nagla suffers through the judgmental and conflicting advice that her friend Ameena and mother Ehsan, two highly observant Muslim women, heap upon her.

“Both her mother and Ameena had an uncanny ability to quote the Qur’an in support of their arguments, even if their views opposed each other, even, she now realized, using the same verse to support two different sides of an argument,” but both sides telling Nagla she is wrong. She and Samir can no longer speak to each other without shouting, but Ehsan sides with Samir, even though she doesn’t agree with him. Nagla is truly alone.

Hassib’s book invites the question of how this scenario would have played out if the families involved were both from the same white, suburban, middle-class, typical “American” background. The answer, perhaps, is not so much differently.

The cultural disparity here makes the situation more fraught — particularly in a post-9/11 America and a 24-hour “news” cycle that has elevated public defamation to a full-contact team sport — but with the exception of Cynthia’s bigoted sister Pat, the people of Sommerset aren’t ostracizing the Al-Menshawys for being Muslim, but for having taken something from them that they can never recover.

Hassib herself only moved to the U.S. when she was 23, and yet she has an impeccable ear for the twanging crosscurrents of American culture, xenophobic melting pot that it is. She heads many of her chapters with roughly equivalent English and Arabic sayings that highlight both similarities and differences in the cultures.

And Hassib weaves in snippets from the Qur’an that feature a number of figures prominent in the Old Testament, helping to remind non-Muslim readers of the tightly linked origins of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s an empathetic reminder that our similarities are always larger than our differences.

Historical Novels Review Summer Issue

Leave a reply

The following three reviews first appeared in the August 2015 online and print editions of the Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society.

LANDFALLS, Naomi J. Williams, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 311 pp

To say that Landfalls, Naomi J. Williams’ debut novel, is thoroughly delightful may sound too dismissive of what is a deeply researched and ingeniously told story, but there it is: it’s a joy to read. The book is a reimagining of the Lapérouse expedition, which set sail from France in 1785 on an ambitious scientific voyage to explore beyond the boundaries of the known world, and was not heard from again after it departed Botany Bay in 1788. Virtually none of the story takes place while the two ships of the expedition—the Boussole and the Astrolabe—are underway, since it is in fact about the landfalls that the voyage makes. The story is told chronologically starting with the outfitting of the voyage’s stat-of-the-art navigational equipment in England, and moving forward on the journey to Chile, Alaska, Macao, Russia, and beyond. Differences in geography aside, what gives this story its unique appeal is that each chapter is told from a different person’s point of view. Various members of the expedition, their relatives, people they meet, even some whom they don’t, are all represented here, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even as letters or reports. Each one is believable and fully rendered, in equal measures to dramatic, comedic, or tragic effect. The language Williams uses for each of her characters is immediately accessible, even modern, and yet it feels genuine to the time, place, and person.

A significant historical record exists of this voyage that never returned, and it’s clear that Williams used much of it. This novel must have been a vast undertaking, but the reader sees none of that heavy lifting. Instead Williams simply weaves in the details that allow her to take her readers around the world on a wondrous journey of discovery.

*****

THE BURIED GIANT, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015, 317 pp

In considering the synopsis of his seventh novel, The Buried Giant, long-time fans of Kazuo Ishiguro’s restrained and always-compelling prose may find themselves puzzled at what seems like a departure for him: in sixth century Britain, in a primitive land of fog, rain, ogres, and dragons, an old married couple decides finally to visit a son they haven’t seen in years. They cannot remember what caused their separation, and they’re not even sure which village he lives in. In fact, none of their fellow villagers seem able to form or keep memories, nor do they notice the lack. Nonetheless, Axl and Beatrice are determined to overcome the fog of forgetfulness as they set out on a fraught journey. Along the way, they pick up traveling companions who are on quests of their own, and begin to recover fragments of their lost memory, little of it comforting. Together, they find answers to the mysteries that have plagued them and their country for an age, though the discovery seems destined to unleash even greater woe. This is an Arthurian fairy tale for grown-ups, and one that asks quietly pointed questions, such as how much of a person’s identity is held in the memories she carries, or whether, when it comes to seeking justice—or is it simply vengeance?—for a great wrong, it isn’t better for everyone to let sleeping dragons lie.

In Ishiguro’s hands, the tale seems less fantastic than simply of another time, when ogres and pixies were part of the natural landscape, much like wooly mammoths on the ancient Siberian plain. Characters interact with a formality that seems almost Kabuki-like, but it feels organic to the time and place. And by now, Ishiguro’s fans should no longer be surprised at how he can still surprise us.

*****

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, VOLUME 1: SEARCH FOR MY HEART: A NOVEL, Larry Kramer, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015, 880 pp

In his latest novel, Larry Kramer wonders at the masochistic tendencies of Americans, to have invited the likes of Cotton Mather and John Winthrop to judge us so harshly and to instill in us an abiding shame over everything that makes us human. He seems to count on that masochism, however, to imagine people will read this book, 800+ pages of painful and ugly history tracing the origin of both America and what he calls the UC: the Underlying Condition, HIV/AIDS.

The conceit here is that Kramer’s alter ego Fred Lemish is writing this history, and he collects around him a cast of oddball characters who contribute their knowledge and scholarship to the effort. Lemish starts this history in pre-human times to argue that the UC has been with us always, biding its time. We even hear directly from the UC, self-aware and plotting its own advancement. The volume simply quits sometime after WWII. Presumably Volume II brings us into present day.

This book wants to grab Americans by their lapels, shake them, and bellow, “Stop with the blind hero worship, the whitewashed legends of this country! Stop imagining that it was noble and high-minded! It was ugly! It’s still ugly! Stop ignoring all the evidence that’s right in front of you!” But Kramer can’t have it both ways. He argues that only heterosexuals or closeted gays have written history, chronically hiding unpleasant truths, but here he is hiding his version of history inside of a novel, thereby letting himself and his readers off the hook.

It’s odd that Kramer calls this Search for My Heart, since he hammers home an image of an America that is heartless, brutal, rapacious, and cruel. This is the book that only Kramer could write, but for whom has he written it?

WIROB Review of Up the Hill to Home

Leave a reply

In today’s edition of Washington Independent Review of Books, reviewer Katy Bowman offers a lovely and detailed critique of Up the Hill to Home. Ms. Bowman says, “Yacovissi shines in her descriptions of daily life, whether that life is taking place in Civil War-era Washington as Jubal Early and his Confederate troops are closing in, or in the crowded mid-1930s household that Lillie calls home as the book begins.” Particularly gratifying is her assessment of the book’s “complex characters,” in which she notes, “She brings the people and the places to life in such a way that they take up residence in your imagination, fully formed and breathing.”

Historical Novels Review Spring Issue

Leave a reply

The following three reviews first appeared in the May 2015 online and print editions of the Historical Novels Review, published by the Historical Novel Society.

DARKNESS AT NOON, Arthur Koestler (translated by Daphne Hardy), Scribner, 2015, 272 pp

This chilling, fictionalized account of one man’s victimization in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s is Scriber’s re-release of Koestler’s classic 1941 novel depicting the horrors of living under a totalitarian regime. While it’s historical fiction now, it was thoroughly contemporary when he wrote it in Paris in 1940; Daphne Hardy translated it from German to English as he wrote, and was able to smuggle the manuscript out of France mere days before Paris fell to the Germans in WWII.

The novel introduces us to Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, a loyal, revered, and leading member of the Communist Party since the 1917 Revolution, just as he is jailed by his own compatriots as a traitor. The novel is historically accurate in its description of how the Party began to devour its own as Stalin (here referred to as “No. 1”), who was never as popular or competent as Lenin (“the old man”), sought to shore up and protect his power base. The primary tenets of the Party—that the Party is never wrong, the individual is meaningless, the end justifies any means, and that wrong ideas are crimes punishable by death—all support the systematic purges of the old guard. Rubashov is hardly innocent of following the logic of this warped philosophy to its bloody ends himself, but now finds himself its next victim. As he tells his tormentors: “I plead guilty to having placed the idea of man above the idea of mankind.”

It’s a strong story told with compelling, horrifying realism. This is a timely release from Scribner, and I recommend it as an apt reminder of what life was like for millions under rapacious, repressive Soviet Communist rule, where mercy was considered poison.

****

WEST POINT 1915: EISENHOWER, BRADLEY, AND THE CLASS THE STARS FELL ON, Michael E. Haskew, Zenith Press, 2014, 208 pp

This book marks the hundredth anniversary of the 1915 graduating class of West Point, the “class the stars fell on”, so named because 59 of its 164 graduates attained the rank of brigadier general or higher, the most of any class in history. It seems clear that what fell on these men was World War II, since by that time they were deep in their army careers with long years of training and experience, which ended up serving the country exceedingly well. Omar Bradley suggests that his not going to France during WWI, far from ending his (or Eisenhower’s) career as he had feared, helped him to approach the demands of a mobile tank- and air-based war with an open mind, unsaddled with concepts of trench warfare. The Americans also had time to watch and learn from the British and Germans. Excellent (George C. Marshall) and cautionary (Douglas MacArthur) role models may have helped; Eisenhower’s affability and coalition building were undeniably crucial. Haskew’s research is exceptional; his skipping from one man’s story to another with only a paragraph break is a bit hard to track, but he’s done a good job of giving each man his due.

****

FOUR FACES OF TRUTH, Harriette C. Rinaldi, Fireship Press, 2014, 191 pp

Four fictional narrators take turns recounting the horrors wrought by the Khmer Rouge in Four Faces of Truth, Harriette Rinaldi’s noble effort to put the meteoric rise of this bloody regime into historical context. The title refers both to the different perspectives provided by the narrators—a Buddhist monk, an original party member, a traditional Khmer healer, and a Canadian archeologist—and to the ancient stone towers of Angkor Thom, topped with faces gazing out to the four points of the compass. Rinaldi is a master of her subject, having spent three crucial years (1972-1975) of her 27 years with the CIA in Cambodia. Her stated purpose in writing this account as a novel is to make this largely forgotten or ignored history more accessible. Unfortunately, her first-person narrators are burdened with having to convey a huge amount of historically accurate information about real people and real events, and the result is less satisfying than if Rinaldi had chosen to use, for example, literary non-fiction to tell this story. In particular, the dialog is wooden and used primarily to make observations about culture, history, or events. None of her characters are fully realized people in their own right, which is ironic since the driving horror of the Khmer Rouge was how avidly it sought to dehumanize its subjects, stripping them of all vestiges of individuality. The result here is that the reader is held at arm’s length from what ought to be a much more emotionally moving story. It’s a story worth telling, though; as the last narrator observes, the current Cambodian government is as corrupt as every one before it, still filled with Khmer Rouge henchmen, and bent on a campaign of actively forgetting the past.

Book Review: Church of Marvels

Leave a reply

This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books on 19 May 2015.

In her richly rendered debut novel, Church of Marvels, Leslie Parry comes close to making her readers’ eyes water from the stench of the outhouses and open-air abattoirs, the crush of livestock and unwashed crowds, and the overall grit and grime of 1895 New York City. Her vivid description of daily life among the underclass and outcasts of the Lower East Side and Blackwell Island’s asylum may make you feel the need for a shower to scrub off the dirt. Oh, but then you’ll be back to soak up more of Parry’s delicious language.

The title refers to a Coney Island sideshow theater run by Friendship Willingbird Church (or Bird), a young woman who has always led an unconventional life. She started early by passing herself off as a boy so she could fight for the Union Army and avenge her brother’s death. Unconventional is definitely the byword in this tale of folks who, at best, are at the very edge of society, if not firmly latched onto its underbelly.

The prologue is delivered by Bird’s daughter Belle, the headliner of the show, loved by the crowds for her beauty, showmanship, and utter fearlessness. We immediately learn from Belle that the theater has burned down, Bird is dead, and that Belle herself has run off to the big city, leaving her twin sister Odile behind. Just in case that isn’t enough mystery to unravel, Belle also mentions she no longer has a tongue: “I’ve stared at it in my own cupped hands, stiff and bloody and fuzzed with white, gruesomely curled as if around a scream.” Finally, she explains that the upcoming story is not about her, but rather about how her actions and decisions have affected other people. She is true to her word: we don’t hear Belle’s voice again until the epilogue.

Instead, the novel follows three primary characters who are not immediately connected to each other, but whose threads become increasingly intertwined as the story unfolds. One, of course, is Odile, whose slight handicap keeps her forever in a supporting role to her star sister. Nevertheless, the two have always been inseparable until Belle runs off (not long after Bird’s death), leaving a two-sentence note on the kitchen table. When an alarming letter finally arrives three months later, Odile decides to make off after Belle, even though she has no clear idea where to look.

The second major player is Sylvan Threadgill, a man whose origin is a mystery even to himself. As a young boy, he was taken in by the family who found him living in their cellar, and years later, when they are all carried off by a citywide wave of consumption, he picks up odd jobs in between underground prize fights. One of those odd jobs is as a night soiler who slops out the street privies. When we meet Sylvan, he has just found a baby abandoned in the muck that he is shoveling.

Alphie, the third character, is the biggest mystery. Who is she? Why has she apparently been hauled off by her mother-in-law and thrown into a women’s asylum? Where is her husband in all of this? And how does she connect to the rest of the story?

There are many questions big and small to be answered throughout the book, and virtually every character has a secret to protect. Parry has woven an inventive and ingenious plot that carries the story along and builds to a fine level of suspense. A few plot points strain credulity, but in the main it hangs together very well.

My only complaint is that at times it felt as though character was being sacrificed to plot. The characters were interesting enough that I, for one, wanted to know them better. Parry does, however, paint an empathetic picture of how difficult life was for those who by nature, choice, or circumstance did not conform to convention in a rigid society.

In the best sense, this book cries out to be made into a movie; the richness of visual and aural detail is practically screen-ready: “Knitting needles tsked from unseen hands,” “a dimpled chin like a pat of butter someone had stuck their thumb in,” “eyes bulging like two boiled eggs from their sockets.”

She describes Odile’s crooked neck and spine, saying, “As a girl, she’d been made to wear a brace, a horrible thing like a metal corset, with a tin collar that trumpeted up her neck and flared beneath her chin. She looked like some kind of Elizabethan monster, clanking down the boardwalk in the ocean fog.”

Parry has fully imagined the Church of Marvels nestled in the quirky seaside carnival that was Coney Island, a world away by ferry from the wretchedness of a city summer. Church of Marvels is just the book to accompany any reader who has plunked down in a beach chair, toes in the sand, ready to be transported to another world.

Book Review: The Other Joseph

Leave a reply

This review was originally published on 23 April 2015 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

It’s hard to imagine two more disparate plot lines than those found in Skip Horack’s two novels. In The Eden Hunter, a pygmy tribesman — and loving husband and father — is captured and sold as a slave in early 19th-century Alabama. In his latest novel, The Other Joseph, a white man in present-day Louisiana works on an offshore oil rig and leads a solitary existence.

Thus, it’s revelatory to understand how similar they are: two stories of genuinely decent men who’ve had their families taken from them through violence and whose journeys — literal journeys in both cases — take them toward some level of peace and possible redemption.

The conceit of The Other Joseph is that its foreword is written by one Joseph, Thomas Muir Joseph, a Navy SEAL who was lost at sea during the first Gulf War, picked up by unfriendly forces, and held anonymously captive for 20 years before being liberated during the Arab Spring uprisings.

Tommy’s foreword introduces a narrative left behind by his younger brother Roy — the other Joseph — when Roy dove from an oil rig off the coast of Nigeria three years before Tommy was freed. So we know before we ever meet Roy that we’re going to lose him. That knowledge does nothing to prevent our emotional involvement in his story.

Roy opens his narrative by describing the day on the Gulf drilling rig that he lost his pinkie finger in an unguarded moment. The distraction partly arises from the fact that he received an email a few days before from someone claiming to be Tommy’s daughter. The rest stems from the sight of two lovely coeds who are pointedly sunning themselves on the bow of a sport fisherman below him; he considers that he used to be someone those girls might have hung out with.

How he goes from dean’s list LSU college student to roughneck oil worker living with his dog Sam in an Airstream trailer is what we learn in the first part of the story. The short answer is that an icy patch on a river bridge claims both his parents when Roy is still a freshman, and — lost and utterly alone in the world, attempting to pick up the pieces — the still-innocent 19-year-old engages in a series of reckless trysts with a 16-year-old neighbor.

The fact of her aborted pregnancy becomes known in the small community, and her shamed parents demand that Roy be prosecuted. The indelible stamp on his driver’s license, the requirement to register his whereabouts with the authorities and inform on himself to his neighbors all ensure Roy’s isolation, even though we understand that this is not the man for whom those laws were written. The scarlet letter is to be expunged after ten clean-living years, a scant three months away when Roy’s dismembered finger drops through the platform grate into the Gulf of Mexico.

The injury buys him time to do some sleuthing into the startling contact from a would-be lone blood relation, a sixteen-year-old girl named Joni, who contacts him without her mother Nancy’s permission. After a phone call from Nancy confirming that this isn’t a scam, but also that no one is inviting him to become Uncle Roy, he decides to pack himself and Sam into the old LeBaron and head cross country to San Francisco to track down his niece.

In Roy, Horack has given us a compelling and observant storyteller. The author effectively juxtaposes Roy’s current life as a roughneck at the margins of society with his middle-class, well-educated upbringing by two teachers, allowing us to believe this gritty man can express himself with such clarity and feeling. Somewhere on his trip, he pulls into a rest stop, “brick restrooms and some picnic tables, and I couldn’t shake the feeling terrible crimes had happened there…It was as if, with no obvious place to visit evil on each other, man had to go blueprint one.”

He decides to stop in and visit the Marine who had spoken to him earnestly but cryptically at Tommy’s memorial service years before. Roy has tracked him down to a place called Battle Mountain, Nevada. (Fans of the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten will already be familiar with the town that he described in 2001 as the “Armpit of America.”)

Roy observes, “On the slope of a faraway hill some irony-deficient crew of civic-proud dolts had spelled BM in enormous block letters fashioned from whitewashed rock. The work that must have gone into that. These are my people, I was thinking. I didn’t know what battle was ever fought atop that brown hill, but if this town held the victors I never wanted to see the place the defeated were sent to live.”

Though the story remains quiet, the possibilities for disaster lurk everywhere: in his side-trip with Marine-turned-hunting-guide Lionel, in his dealings with a Russian marriage broker, and — most dread-inducing of all — in his eventual tailing of Joni through the mean streets of San Francisco.

Every so often, we remind ourselves that we’re pre-ordained to lose Roy, even as we know we get his beloved Tommy back in the bargain, and that it will be Tommy’s voice we’re left with. Finally, the heartbreak is that we understand what Roy’s life might have been like if only he’d known that Tommy was still out there, somewhere in the world. It would have made all the difference.

Kirkus Reviews UP THE HILL TO HOME

Leave a reply

It’s no foolin’ that April 1st was a banner day in the life of Up the Hill to Home, because Kirkus Reviews–that granddaddy of all review sites–published a wonderful online review of the book (just beware the spoiler!). Some of the highlights include:

“The author creates believable characters whose lives contain plenty of passion and tragedy . . .”

“. . . history itself is the novel’s best feature. The author has done her homework, infusing her work with convincing details of 19th- and early-20th-century city life . . . ”

“. . . this student-run publishing house has turned out a good book.”

Book Review: Love’s Alchemy, a John Donne Mystery

Leave a reply

With his debut literary historical novel Love’s Alchemy (Five Star Cengage, 392 pp), author Bryan Crockett has managed his own dazzling bit of alchemical wizardry: he has unearthed a tiny undocumented slice of the otherwise outsized, thoroughly recorded lifetime of one of literary history’s earliest rock stars, John Donne, and turned it into an engaging, intriguing, and fully realized bit of who-can-say-it’s-not-so alternative history.

Calling this “a John Donne mystery” implies both that there is something of a whodunit surrounding a body, and that this is one of a series of books featuring everyone’s favorite Jacobean poet as a 17th century sleuth. Labels aside, the choice of Donne as a protagonist is a brilliant bit of casting. The perfect embodiment of the tug-of-war between the sacred and the profane in both his poetry and his life, Donne’s presence opens the window on so many elements of his time—political and religious perhaps even more so than literary—and Crockett takes advantage of them all to weave an erudite and compelling tale.

It is 1604, and James I has been on England’s throne for less than a year. Though he was Elizabeth’s most obvious successor, his ascendency was far from certain; thus, one way James sought to strengthen his base was to promise Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland and defender of Catholics, that he would be lenient toward Catholics as long as they didn’t openly flout the laws against religious practice. Once crowned, though, James and his Secretary of State Robert Cecil—chief strategist in bringing James to the throne—have clamped down on practitioners of the faith, mirroring Elizabeth’s brutal intolerance. Catholicism is treasonous, of course, since Catholics hold their highest earthly allegiance to the pope, and Jesuits in particular have a history of and reputation for inciting violence and promulgating martyrdom as an effective agent of social change.

In this, Donne’s backstory is particularly on point. He comes from a prominent—the Crown says notorious—Catholic family, in which two of his uncles were leading Jesuits, one having spent time in the Tower of London before being banished; his mother, great-niece of the martyred Thomas More himself, lives in exile in the Netherlands after helping another Jesuit escape prison; and Jack’s own beloved younger brother Henry died in prison from the plague after being tortured for harboring priest William Harrington, who in turn died an ugly martyr’s death. This last episode more than any is the one Donne points to in explaining why he lost faith in Catholicism and became a Protestant, but it is a question he wrestles with throughout the novel, believing that both sides are misguided.

Against this backdrop, we’re introduced to the young Donne family, which is going through its own trying times. At 32, Jack, as we come to know him, is already well-schooled, well-traveled, and well-known, especially as a ladies’ man and writer of titillating poetry. He has had the beginnings of a good career in the law, with a seat in Parliament and a position as the chief secretary to Lord Keeper Thomas Egerton, which makes his prospects at court favorable. All that has crumbled, unfortunately, in the face of what Jack himself might decry as cliché: he fell in love with the Lord Keeper’s young niece Anne, entrusted to him by Egerton himself to tutor appropriately. The two married in secret, without her titled father’s permission. The upshot of the ensuing unpleasantness is that Jack now has no position, no income, no home of his own in which to shelter his growing family—Anne is already expecting their third child in three years of marriage—and virtually no prospects. He is currently hoping to cultivate a wealthy patron for his poetry, the oh-so-enticing Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford. Crockett uses the opportunity to imagine Donne’s creative process; almost as the story opens, we hear the poet playing with the building blocks of the novel’s title poem.

Jack’s late-night summons by none other than Robert Cecil, the king-maker himself, propels the action of the story. Employing a deft mix of enticements, tokens of sincerity, and veiled threats to convince Jack to cooperate, Cecil recruits him to a particularly distasteful bit of spying: Jack is to pretend to convert back to Catholicism to ferret out a mysterious but apparently very dangerous man known only as Guido. As proof of his good intent, Cecil offers Jack some delicately personal information about himself that involves Jack and Anne, but it’s clear to Jack that he needs to figure out Cecil’s endgame before he becomes its victim.

So the mystery is not a whodunit but a whoisit (and where, and what is he up to, and why does Cecil care), and the tension builds as the outlines of a plot come into focus and Jack has to decide whom to trust. Left at home, Anne proves herself no passive Penelope, instead using her own smarts to make crucial connections and further Jack’s cause. If Anne in particular appears to have more modern sensibilities than we might expect from a woman in the early 1600s, her character still feels right; she would need to be an exceptional woman to capture and keep the heart and head of Jack Donne.

Crockett builds a marvelous fiction out of what is almost entirely known fact. Virtually all of his characters are historical figures, and he has captured them doing much of what they are known to have done; he simply adds in a few what-if plot points along with behind-the-scenes action that, it’s plausible to imagine, simply never made it to the history books. Even the cover art harkens to the historical record: it shows a dark and smoldering Jack Donne, only his face and full red lips illuminated, with an impossibly broad-brimmed hat pulled down to cover part of his face; that artwork is clearly a reflection of the famous 1595 portrait, in which his younger self gazes out—same red lips, same illuminated flesh—but with that broad-brimmed hat pushed back to frame his entire face. At times, the richness of the history dazzles in a mere hint, as when Crockett reminds us that Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne were all immediate contemporaries, living and working in the same city at the same time. Imagine the possibilities, then, as Anne describes what happens after she and Jack go to see King Lear at the Globe Theatre: “ . . . he saw me home and then went to the Mermaid to drink with the author. It was almost dawn when he came home, drunk and full of the raucous life of the alehouse. He wanted to bandy words with me, as he had done with Shakespeare, Jonson, and the others.” Talk about a pub-crawl for the ages.