Little Reef by Michael Carroll

"Little Reef" is a book of short stories split into two parts. The first half ‘After Dallas’ contains stories that largely have to do with artistic ambition and mentorship. A couple researching a biography interview a prickly editor about his deceased ex-wife who was an esteemed author, a woman who feels like a failure in life finds an empty sense of accomplishment in her NYC social circle, an elderly mother waits for her sensitive son in a bar filled with colourful characters, the wife of a writer and teacher negotiates boundaries of intimacy with one of his students, an ambitious young writer wins a story contest and makes his first introductions into an established literary social milieu, and a man revisits memories of his best friend from childhood who is dying and harbours a dark inclination.

The second half ‘After Memphis’ is a sequence of stories with a pair of recurring characters who have achieved a level of artistic achievement. An older well-regarded writer Perry and a younger writer Scott are a couple living in New York City who deal over a sequence of stories with family, failing health, the social dynamics of a writing program, working to complete a novel while achieving better health in Maine and losing oneself in Key West. The stories in the first section deal with a wide variety of topics and situations, but many feature characters striving for a grander life of fame and accomplishment. The stories in the second half seem to work as a kind of counterpoint or expansion out of those initial characters. Here Perry and Scott have established themselves in the literary circles they've always dreamed of inhabiting. Over the course of their stories they come to terms with the real meaning of success and achieving one’s own ambitions.

The plot of many of these stories hangs upon the potential for forging relationships that could drastically alter the fate of the characters involved. As desperately as some characters are looking to make connections and align themselves with people they aspire to be, there are others who are wary of the danger that comes from courting admirers. In the poignant story 'Referred Pain' it’s observed that “young people always needed extra attention. They’d lavish it on you to get a tiny part of it back.” There is a neediness here which the admired are right to be wary of. In order to avoid following well-worn tracks which lead nowhere some potential relationships are abruptly cut off leading to inevitable disappointments and scuppered dreams. In another story “Barracuda” it’s observed that “Life got you in its ticking reaches and laughed.”

A tension exists in many of the characters who find it difficult to assimilate the hard nature of adult realities with the dusty dreams of young adulthood. In a strikingly resonant way, Carroll writes “Adolescence had been just an embarrassment and it locked you into making too many romantic, silly statements you lived with forever if you thought about it. You couldn’t overthink it. That way you’d go crazy.” Many of the characters in these stories are in the process of learning to adjust their worldview to a more sensible state of existence that doesn’t stubbornly insist on making wild aspirations a reality. Sensibly, the tone of many stories in this collection suggest snubbing self-flagellation over one's inevitable failings in favour of forging ahead with aspirations that adjust in tandem with how the world responds to you for a more calm and measured life.

There is an economy of language used in these stories which make them expand out in the reader’s imagination to encompass much more than what is on the page. For instance, personalities can be conjured and swiftly dispensed with in the space of a short memory: “Poor Corporal Maynard. Funny thing, he got killed in a silly accident. Some requisitions being craned off a transport dropped on him and crushed him, but the last memory of him was of the kid digging into Leo's armpit and bawling, soaking his undershirt. Had a screw loose, maybe was queer. Or the mother messed him up, smothering him. Unresolved conflicts. Shitty shame.” The power of this lies not only in the succinct descriptive terms chosen but in the skewed perspective of the character's voice recollecting the dead corporal. The assumptions and dismissive attitude suggest a conflicted relationship which didn’t fully appreciate the complexity of the corporal’s personality. However, it makes an attentive reader’s ears prick up and prompts him to envision what has been left out.

One of the great accomplishments of these stories is the vibrancy of dialogue that breathes life into a large cast of characters making them lift off the page and lodge themselves in your memory. Carroll has the ability to convey a rich amount of detail about a character’s position in life through their speech rather than needing to give lengthy background descriptions. He is also able to establish an intellectual and social hierarchy between his characters through pointed exchanges.

Take, for instance, this line: “‘One compromises in every situation in life,’ said Taylor, an Edith Wharton matron now.” Here the gravity of the character’s feeling is conveyed in her earnest statement while simultaneously slightly poking fun at the pretension of this precocious student. The young rattle off prepared deep thoughts which slide into ostentation and which the older characters wryly observe from a distance. Bold ambition-laden statements vie against world-weary experience.

Through representations of cross-generational characters many of the stories convey a sense of the way people’s changing ontological positions throughout different times in their lives maintain equal validity, but jostle against one another. The hopes and desires of youth are treated with equal sincerity when paired against the inevitable compromises and disappointments of advanced age. What emerges is a fraternity of sentiment that all our drive in life is wrapped up in the conflict of our present circumstances. There is something comforting in the notion left after reading these stories that moments of true contentment can be found when the hectares of life can be confidently straddled with a foot planted firmly at each end.

I was particularly struck with some details in this book which create a real emotional resonance for the simple way they pull you into the moment of the story. When Scott brings Perry into the hospital after he has a stroke it becomes a recurring question in the couple’s minds whether what Perry is lying on is called a cot or a gurney. It’s the sort of trivial detail which nags at the mind in a moment of real crisis when there are so many more important things at stake. Also, in this same story it’s observed that “They were both so bored, waiting. Healing was waiting.” The sheer tedium experienced by anyone who has been in a hospital dealing with a critical situation grates so excruciatingly up against the panic one feels at the many possible outcomes.

This collection is also a highly pleasurable read for bookworms and aspiring writers. There are a multitude of sharp-witted funny observations about the state of literature and those with bookish tendencies. Take these lines: “Literature is a sop to the lazies. It makes you feel good about doing nothing but reading, sitting around committing no compassionate acts, watching your surroundings get dirty and disorderly, getting more and more useless as a ‘mind.’” There’s a lot of loving cynicism and knowing nudges in these stories to all us book fiends. When life becomes all about books it becomes increasingly difficult to see what real-life correlation there is between the exterior world and an interior existence lived between the pages.

Personally, I love the way Carroll writes about my home state of Maine in the story 'Avenging Angel' with its early evenings, country trail walks with unexpected encounters and organic food markets. Most of the stories evoke the environments of New York City or Florida, but I can say from experience that he captures Maine particularly well here. 

Carroll's stories show a true depth of experience. Although the characters vary widely they are written with a generous compassion and an acute awareness of their particular foibles. The author clearly knows them well. It's being in the hands of such a skilled storyteller that makes these stories such compulsive reads. “Little Reef” is a brave debut book of stories that demonstrate considerable talent.

Here is an interview with Michael Carroll about the book: https://www.glreview.org/article/michael-carrolls-characters-tell-their-stories/

Above by Isla Morley

Our society finds it incredibly attention-catching and chilling when news stories about women who are abducted and held captive for many years come out. I think this is because these cases often involve normal middle-class girls who are then taken and held in a confined structure which is often amidst ordinary communities. The realization that next door someone might be held prisoner in a secret room for many years while you’ve gone about living your life is horrifying. Therefore getting into the psychology of such unusual cases makes very compelling fictional material. Isla Morley has taken on this subject matter in her new novel “Above” where teenager Blythe Hallowell is abducted by a man from her own community named Dobbs and imprisoned in a customized hiding space for many years. With gripping detail and vivid descriptions the author describes how Blythe must adjust to her captivity where she feels like “a convict – except I can’t figure out my crime.”

The terrifying truth about why Dobbs has chosen to kidnap her is gradually revealed. Her abductor believes he is justified and right in having taken Blythe away as she explains: “To define the terms by which I am here, he uses words like delivered and rescued and saved.” The author truly gets inside the twisted psychology of the abductor by laying out the language of his logic and how he tells himself and Blythe that what he has done is for a good cause. It’s part of his masculine pride that he believes he knows what’s better for a woman than she knows herself. Equally, the portrayal of Blythe’s struggle to maintain her sanity is portrayed in eerily believable detail.

The account of Blythe’s imprisonment is told in such a compelling manner that I was curious where the story would go when halfway through the novel the narrative takes an abrupt suspenseful turn. I don’t want to give any spoilers but suddenly it becomes another kind of story completely and one which is equally gripping in its delineation of horrifying events. This progression shows how Morley is working with larger and more widely relatable issues.

Comparisons will naturally be made with Emma Donoghue’s immersive novel “Room”. However, in Morley’s novel the protagonist wasn’t born in captivity but was brought there. This gives her a rich amount of memories to call upon and it also makes her hope for escape all the more persistent. She develops coping mechanisms for maintaining her sanity such as creating stories inside her head: “Stories keep the fire burning inside us, stories keep us from dashing our heads against the wall.” The same could be said (on a much less dramatic level) about why we are so drawn to reading and telling ourselves stories to deal with the larger challenges and inhibiting nature of life. This novel also puts one in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and PD James’ novel “Children of Men” in their portrayal of hideous possible realities and pondering the meaning of survival. 

It feels that the challenge a reader can take away from “Above” is summed up in a line of dialogue from a character named Pops: “None of us are to be spared suffering. The better question is, are we being defined by our afflictions? Are we to live with them or live above them?” Throughout our lives we will all encounter suffering whether it be of large or small proportions. The difficulty is how to work through this adversity and not only survive but thrive. Morley’s novel gives a challenging point of view to this conundrum by creating a thought-provoking and compulsively-readable tale.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Sometimes I wonder what the point of it all is. Why am I writing this? Why are you reading it? Does writing books or blogs or reading any of it really contribute to either our own understanding of the world or humanity’s evolution? No, it doesn't always have to be that serious and it shouldn't be. However, sometimes I can fall into slothful habits achieving nothing but my own temporary amusement or stare at the wall for an entire morning feeling disillusioned about life. But I always come back to books and reading seeking a connection, understanding and engagement with life. The kind of immediate voice and cavalier spirit that’s expressed in the pages of “Wind, Sand and Stars” is exactly what draws me back into living.

It’s not often that books can make you stand still and look at your life to reassess your goals and values. But that’s what Antoine de Saint-Exupery seeks to do in this memoir and philosophical investigation into life’s meaning. The book ends with a veritable battle-cry against all our self-centred ennui and the mediocrities in life we settle for in favour of a soulful engagement with the betterment of humanity. He was someone with a feverish passion for life although, at a glance, you wouldn’t guess it at first from his seemingly daredevil lifestyle. During the early 20th century he flew commercial planes over airmail routes in Europe, Africa and South America. These were journeys fraught with danger as was demonstrated by the near death of him and his colleagues on a number of different occasions where their planes unknowingly went off course or they were forced to make crash landings.

Saint-Exupery describes one such experience from 1935 in lengthy detail. He and his mechanic survived a crash into the Sahara desert. Utterly lost and with barely any supplies, they rapidly began to dehydrate and suffer hallucinations until they were discovered by a Bedouin man. Through his musings on life and critique of society, Saint-Exupery explains why this risky profession isn’t for thrills. “It isn’t a matter of living dangerously. Such a pretentious phrase. Toreadors don’t thrill me. Danger is not what I love. I know what I love. It is life.” He sees his labour as a pilot as a way of adding (if only with nearly invisible blocks) to the escalation of humanity and an expression of engaging in the pulse of living.

“Flying is not the point. The aeroplane is a means, not an end. It is not for the plane that we risk our lives. Nor is it for the sake of his plough that the farmer ploughs. But through the plane we can leave the cities and their accountants, and find a truth that farmers know.” Throughout the book Saint-Exupery describes a reverence for a pastoral conception of life over what he contemptuously perceives as people caught in bourgeois lifestyles that are concerned only with the frivolous details of their own circumscribed existence and toeing the line.

While Saint-Exupery was lost in the Sahara desert after his plane crashed he followed the tracks of a fennec fox

Crucially, he sees our labour and active engagement in community as the means to living fully and liberating ourselves from a miserly existence. “We want to be set free. The man driving a pickaxe into the ground wants to know the meaning of his pickaxe blow. The pickaxe blow of the convict, a humiliation for the convict, is not the same as the pickaxe blow of the prospector, which gives stature to the prospector. Prison is not in the place where the pickaxe blows fall. The horror is not physical. Prison is where pickaxe blows fall without purpose, fall without bonding the man to the community of men. And we yearn to escape from that prison.” Saint-Exupery makes a philosophical distinction between action whose meaning has no thoughtful purpose and action which seeks to forge forward the path of humanity. He also expresses a stalwart resolve that life shouldn’t be lived because that’s the way you’ve been directed to live it. Rather, it must be lived mindfully if we are to live as fully actualized and happy human beings. As he writes: “To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible.”

Saint-Exupery is dismissive of cowardly approaches to life and nowhere does he see an action more cowardly and wasteful than in suicide. “I once knew a young suicide. Some disappointment in love had driven him to fire a bullet carefully into his heart. I have no notion of the literary temptation to which he had succumbed as he drew on a pair of white gloves, but I remember having felt in the face of this sorry spectacle an impression not of nobility but of wretchedness. Behind that pleasant face, then, under that human skull, there had been nothing, nothing at all. Except perhaps the image of some silly girl no different from the rest.” What a sweeping refusal to engage with the romanticism of ending one’s life for love! He would make Romeo and Juliet feel quite silly. Of course, many suicides are performed out of a deeper disillusionment with life and persistent feelings of failure. There are graveyards filled with artists like Virginia Woolf and Stefan Zweig who produced large bodies of admirable writing, but who still felt compelled to end their own lives for these reasons. That doesn’t grant their escape from life any more nobility, but does more closely align them to Saint-Exupery and his own demise when he disappeared flying on a reconnaissance mission in 1944. He continued flying at his own insistence although his colleagues didn’t think he was entirely fit for duty. Surely he knew the increased risks and that flying in such perilous circumstances was tantamount to suicide, but presumably he thought to settle into a life of inaction would be the equivalent of death anyway. He concludes that any one individual death means little in the scope of what that life has contributed to furthering humanity. “In the rural lineage death is only half a death. Each existence cracks in its turn like a pod, and gives up its seeds.”

Of course, it’s not necessary for us all to participate in the kind of high-risk endeavour which accompanies being a pilot in the author’s time (when the technology of flying was so much more primitive than it is today). Saint-Exupery sees great nobility in the gardener who digs not out of a necessity to grow crops to sell or eat, but to engage in creation. We come together as a civilization when we work towards the common goal of our own species continuation and betterment over being consumed only with ourselves or improving our social media stature. As the author writes: “Experience teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.” Creating and passing on books is an act of love. My admiration and respect goes to people like booksellers, teachers and writers who clearly do what they do out of a desire to carry the torch and lead us all a little bit further no matter how fruitless their efforts sometimes seem in the face of lazy indifference. It’s why I revere authors like Joyce Carol Oates and Nadeem Aslam who produce book after book in an act of faith, in an effort to connect. I think they are in many ways quite like pilots bravely flying into cloud-filled skies again and again. The danger might not be as palpable, but it is definitely there.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I could write a review of “Americanah” as I do for many books by giving my own synopsis and then highlighting what I think are its major themes and qualities. But I don’t feel like I can. What I’d like to do first is discuss how reading this book has influenced my reaction to the recent horrific news of the abduction of around 200 female teenage students from a school in Borno, Nigeria. At about midnight on April 14th/15th these girls were taken from their dormitories and their school was burnt out by what is suspected to be a group of Islamic extremists who are against Western education. Some escaped before the lorries full of girls (it's not clear exactly how many) and their captors who posed as soldiers disappeared. Now, after two weeks, the girls are still missing. What some people and commentators are asking is why isn’t this bigger news?

Looking on the BBC news site today, this story appeared nowhere in the world news section. When I clicked on the African section I only saw this article at the very bottom of the feed which was last updated four days ago. Anne Perkins has notably written this article questioning and giving practical thoughts as to why the recent South Korean ferry tragedy has been given so much more news coverage than the abduction of schoolgirls in Borno. She reasonably surmises that the primary reason for one tragedy taking so much more attention than the other is one of economic disparity with South Korea being considered a “first world” country and Nigeria a “third world” country. One could argue that there is only so much space in the news and preferences must be given to some issues over others. Of course, this is true. But consider if this incident had occurred in France? The news would be at the top of the list every day in both Britain and America until the girls are found. However, since it’s in Nigeria I think the knee-jerk reaction to this story from most of the public would sound something like: How awful! What a politically unstable country. I guess you expect this sort of thing from there and there’s not much to be done. I hope they are found. Our empathy for the individuals involved is tempered by our understanding of the economic and political disparities between our countries. It's interesting to question why this would influence the amount to which the media and public allows these girls’ plight to infiltrate our awareness.

This desire to challenge my own and others’ assumptions regarding gender, class, nationality and race is what the experience of reading Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie does to you. She has prompted this response in all of her four published books (three novels and one book of short stories) which I’ve read and greatly admired. But it’s here in “Americanah” that the provocation to question is crystallized in the central character of Ifemelu, a bluntly honest and inquisitive Nigerian girl who moves to America to study. She continues living there for over a decade and creates an extremely popular blog “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black.” Included in the text are various posts about Americans of many different races who Ifemelu encounters and where she makes sly, humorous and challenging statements about racial politics in America today. However, running alongside Ifemelu’s narrative is the story of Obinze, a man Ifemelu was in love with before she immigrated to the US. Obinze’s story takes a different slant as he travels to England where he works illegally and seeks residency through a sham marriage. Both characters eventually return to Nigeria where they rediscover their country through eyes that have been informed by a Western sensibility. The duo stories form a complex social portrait of these three countries and the way national and racial politics form identity.

The first three quarters of the book take place in the present during a simple trip to a hair salon for Ifemelu. Her backstory is recounted during the some six hours it takes to get her hair braided. Personally, I find getting my hair cut a very awkward necessary chore so to think of having my hair done for so many hours every few months is terrifying. However, as Adichie explores there is nothing simple when it comes to the way black hair is worn in America. The majority of white Americans assume that Michelle Obama's hair is naturally straight and if a black person allows their hair to be naturally kinky it's consciously or unconsciously viewed by many as a political statement. Ifemelu is told when applying for jobs: “If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional.” This is just one example of the ways racism expresses itself subtly in American culture – not necessarily through vociferous cries of hatred but through dominant ideologies which pressure people of different races to correct their appearance, accent and attitudes to conform to a more tolerable idea of how that race is generally perceived. Despite liberal-minded views which wish to believe that we're now a colour-blind society she comes to the conclusion that “race is not biology; race is sociology.”

In some ways, moving to a foreign country is a necessary process for Ifemelu to better understand herself and find her own voice. As an opinionated person who can't hold her tongue she was always somewhat an outsider growing up in Nigeria. While she was popular and academically gifted “she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference.” However, it's only when she moves to America that her difference takes on a more evident form in a self-consciousness about her race. In America she discovers the projection of idealized states of existence: “it was the commercials that captivated her. She ached for the lives they showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they became the real America” She also is informed about the culture through reading classic America literature: “as she read, America’s mythologies begin to take on meaning, America’s tribalisms – race, ideology and region – became clear.” There is also a funny, damning perspective of the new books being written by young novelists: “they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory.” These influences formulate Ifemelu's background understanding of the culture that “the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not” and provoke her to challenge the way attitudes towards race and national differences are expressed by the people she encounters.

Chimamanda Adichie in conversation with readings from Americanah.

Alongside a host of these and many more sharp cultural observations, the primary drive of “Americanah” is that of a love story. Ifemelu and Obinze are split apart for a long period of time by circumstances. As they grow to change there are multiple ways communication between the two breaks down. This is a dynamic tough love which gradually transforms over time while each individuals develops and grows. After Obinze returns to Nigeria he establishes himself as an influential and prosperous figure in society who marries and has a child. His reunion with Ifemelu when she returns from America is not a simple affair. In a situation reminiscent of Wharton's “The Age of Innocence” the two find themselves in a romantically painful state where Obinze concludes that if they don't take a leap of faith “they would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy.” Hounded by obligations and repressed by their own pride the question of whether the two can come together hangs heavily over the story. I found their dynamic complex relationship very moving.

Adichie is a tremendous writer. Through clear-sighted views of different levels and kinds of society she makes clear the contradictions, humour and flaws which should be so obvious but which most of us are blind to. It's a mark of true intelligence when a writer assiduously pursues meaning and provokes so many questions to challenge you into rethinking your views of the world. Her ability to create a layered story which straddles so much physical and emotional territory is extraordinary. This novel is truly transformative.  

The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert

Rachel Seiffert made an impactful debut when she published her first novel “The Dark Room” in 2001. Not only did the three novellas in this book set in Germany exhibit precise writing and memorable characters, but the book as a whole artfully handled social and political issues across a large span of time. This is a writer who is ardently engaged in the history of the society around her, how the past impacts upon the present and ways in which individuals survive under the pressures of domineering persuasive ideologies. It’s writing which makes me want to learn more about the subjects she references and engage with the issues raised. In Seiffert’s latest novel “The Walk Home” she shifts her focus to the Irish community living in the city of Glasgow. Graham is a character who joins the Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal organisation that is strongly linked to English/Irish unionism, where he is a drummer participating in the Orange walks that march through the city. This is a subject I knew virtually nothing about before reading this novel. I’ve since read up on it to better understand the context of the story. These parades or demonstrations are highly contentious within Glasgow as there have been at times skirmishes between the Orange Order members and Irish Catholics as well as the native Scottish population. To this day, there have been attempts to have the walks banned by some of the residents. Graham finds a strong sense of fraternity in the Orange Order and continues to participate in the walks despite the divide it causes to form between him and his family. The novel raises questions about the ways personal beliefs can estrange people from their families and the way time gradually transforms the meaning of these distant relationships.

The novel tells the story of how Graham grows to join the Order and fall in love with Lindsey, an Irish girl newly immigrated to Glasgow who is estranged from her father. Lindsey forms strong bonds with Graham’s mother Brenda as well as Eric, the black sheep of the family who remained estranged from his own father up until his death because Eric married an Irish Catholic woman. Alongside this story is the present day tale of teenage Stevie who has newly returned to Glasgow after a mysterious period of absence. Stevie is hired as a builder by Polish Jozef who is struggling to earn enough money to establish a better life for him and his wife, an endeavour which has led their relationship to devolve into a tense distant union. Although Stevie clearly comes from the city and should feel a part of it, he hides himself within it. Gradually the reader discovers what led to Stevie’s intense and vividly-portrayed sense of isolation.

This is a short novel and Seiffert skilfully covers a lot of ground, but still made me feel like I closely knew the characters. Brenda is the hard-working glue of the family who struggles to keep everyone in line and together although her relations splinter apart. Eric is an artistic melancholic who casts his family’s personal struggles against the back drop of biblical parables in finely detailed drawings. Malky is a stalwart patriarch who wisely keeps in the background and dispenses sage cautious wisdom: “if you loved, you learned to make allowances.” However, the character that most captivated me is Stevie. Despite being a quiet, almost silent boy whose emotions are also largely clipped out of the narrative, I felt his loneliness and spurred sense of hurt which has led him to break from his family. By portraying his measured deliberate actions, hollowed-out motivation and small tender gestures, Seiffert evokes a personality which feels the heavy burden of a family that’s been shattered by blistering internal strife.

The novel is filled with a lot of ambiguity and sides with no politics in particular. Rather, it opens up an understanding of the way families can be torn apart and the impact of the isolation this causes. When Eric commiserates with Lindsey about the difficulty she’s encountered with her father he observes: “Terrible tae be on your ain. Terrible tae feel that way.” Prolonged loneliness and tightly-held resentment leads to really deep-running grief – not only for the loss of a relationship which was once dear but the loss of time together if things had been different. Seiffert is a writer that gives tremendous nobility to characters caught by both difficult circumstances beyond their control and their own stubbornness. This novel shows how reconciliation and forgiveness are not guaranteed, but they are always a possibility. As she observes in this powerful line: “Hard to be hopeful, but not too much; keeping faith, over the long haul.”

High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates

The eight stories which form the new collection “High Crime Area” from Joyce Carol Oates are daring and provocative. She creates a wide range of vividly-written memorable characters including a pot-smoking widow, an arrogant famous author, a terrifyingly vicious nun, a neglected bi-racial baby, a mysterious dishevelled bookseller, a love-hungry subway passenger and a civic-minded dropout student. By creating tense and emotional tales about these individuals’ lives the author touches upon deep fears which run through American society. The depictions of heightened emotion and sensational violence are dramatic visions of our culture’s broader underlying feelings. Looming behind the particulars of these isolated struggles are institutions such as prisons, churches, orphanages and universities whose ideologies reverberate through the consciousness of the characters and create conflicts in each story. Racial tension, drug abuse, gambling addiction, sexual violence and floundering education are particular issues which run through multiple stories. It’s an admirable skill when short stories can present both micro and macro pictures of society in such a condensed amount of space. This allows a wider vision of the world to unfold out in the reader’s imagination.

In ‘The Home at CraigMillnar’ a formidable nun is found dead in her bed by an orderly who works for the elderly care facility. Her face is covered in a mysterious thin shroud. Many of the women at this home are former sisters who still attend mass and I was particularly struck by a creepy description of how “the old women’s tongues lapped eagerly at the little white wafer.” The orderly narrates the story giving an account of his experience of caring for the cantankerous woman before her death and the controversy surrounding her time administering a home for orphaned children.

A sense of deep mourning fills the story ‘High’ where late in life a woman named Agnes takes up drugs for the first time and lets her niece and her friends ransack her house. This seems to be a resigned reaction to what is perceived to be a futile existence that carries on regardless. “I am a widow, my heart has been broken. But I am still alive.” Agnes finds herself longing to re-establish a connection with a prison inmate she tutored and who she made an impact upon as if this slighted man could give meaning to her drifting life.

The very short story ‘Toad-Baby’ is a haunting family snap-shot narrated by a girl whose unbalanced single mother unleashes a torrent of abuse. The mixed race of the girl’s very young step brother is transformed into a mark of disgust by the mother and daughter. Witnessing the baby’s pain is something which permanently imprints itself upon the girl’s consciousness.

The short, darkly hallucinatory story 'Demon' appeared in another version in an earlier very short collection by Oates published in 1996. This new version has some slight changes: he's given the name Jethro, he's 19 instead of 26, there are more details about the boy's parents and, most striking of all, an extended scene is added in a bus station public lavatory which is referred to only briefly in the first version. In this location he still experiences a crisis of the self confronting his image in the mirror (the denial of the self which he attempted to suppress with prayer made unavoidably clear in the eyes staring back at him in the dirty mirror), but he also has a violent sexual encounter with a minister which is interrupted by someone who enters the lavatory. Part of his subsequent scorn by those around him is tinged with homophobia. In this new version its made more explicit that physical signs which demarcate him as other or “cursed” and “demon-like” (the prominent birth mark, red hair, stunted-growth) as well as social stigmas which have been attached to him are differences used as excuses by external social forces to ostracise and demonise him. Because, of course, there is nothing essentially evil about him or anyone; there are only the strictures people impose upon each other borne out of their own fear and dogmatic principles. Tellingly in this new version his physical reaction to a shocking attempt to rid himself of what he's come to believe is an inherent demon-curse has changed. What was described as resulting in “no pain” in the first version is now a “pain so colossal it could not be measured – like the sky.” This doesn't so accurately describe the physical sensation of his misguidedly destructive self-ameliorating act, but reflects the pain which results from continuous self-punishment for not living up to the idealized standards we create for ourselves and that are formed out of social pressures to conform. The story prompts us to question why we do this to ourselves. Tragically Jethro’s act represents a definitive decision to never look at his true self again. 

In the story ‘Lorelei’ a provocatively dressed young woman rides the subway in search of a specific unknown and unnamed “you” or someone to love her. The claustrophobic environment of the train carriages with their jostling passengers all making mental judgments upon each other and guarding their own personal space is vividly and accurately described. Like a darker “glossy black” haired mirror version of Marilyn Monroe’s character from ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, Lorelei flirts and yearns so fiercely to find that special one and aches with such yearning for someone to complete her. It’s a quest destined to destroy her.

One of the stories which particularly moved me is the complex sombre story ‘The Rescuer.’ Here a young university student named Lydia is called upon by her parents to visit her troubled brother Harvy. Once he was a promising pupil at a seminary school, but dropped out and moved to a dilapidated apartment in a depressed neighbourhood of Trenton, New Jersey. At first she is reluctant to take on the responsibility of visiting him, but once she’s there her life becomes irretrievably intertwined with his own. The siblings retreat from the institutions for higher learning that supported them and instead turn inward, Harvy working on intensely-laboured poetry and Lydia on unpicking the meaning and possible translations of ancient text about infanticide. Because of her brother’s drug and gambling habits their lives become entangled with an intimidating local man named Leander with a Maori facial tattoo and long dreadlocks and his mischievous sister who has a penchant for going to casinos. Lydia is seduced by the prospect of abandoning the torturous mental effort of her studies: “I thought how easy life is for those who merely live it without hoping to understand it; without hoping to ‘decode,’ classify and analyze it; without hoping to acquire a quasi-invulnerable meta-life which is the life of the mind and not the triumphant life of the body” The story presents a kind of crisis about the real value of an intellectual life and how the quest for knowledge can be rendered meaningless in the ruthless decimation of the weak over the strong in the human species’ quest for survival.  “Individuals die, life endures. A copy of a text is destroyed but another takes its place – just like us.” Writers and scholars scribble away in faith that their contribution will provide a further piece to assist in the evolution of humanity. The story asks what happens if that faith peters out. Even without it the narrator finds that “working diligently and even obsessively without faith did not seem to me a terrible fate, when the alternative was yet more terrible.” Although the brother and sister’s preoccupations are wholly their own they find the compulsion to articulate meaning (even if it doesn’t contribute to a greater whole) is better than a life of total resignation.

In ‘The Last Man of Letters’ an extremely famous male author only referred to as X goes on a European book tour. He takes perverse pleasure in humiliating the women who praise him and his work. His perpetually macho antagonistic stance goes unchallenged due to his awestruck admirers’ reverence for a man that has been bombastically proclaimed to be the “last man of letters.” Parades of anonymous unnamed women populate his imagination and marital bed, so many that “the effort of trying to make sense of it exhausted him, and disgusted him.” As an asthmatic he sometimes chokes for breath with the sense that he’s fighting for his life. The vile hatred he spews at the women around him is like the chilling sound of a man gasping for air. In what might be an oxygen-starved hallucination the women he’s shamed visit him in his hotel room. A breathlessly narrated scene of orgiastic excess ensues where X is plied with rich food and eager flesh by the rapacious ladies which results in a judiciously horrific conclusion.

A young white teacher who moves to Detroit asks herself “Why am I so preoccupied with racial identities, skin ‘colours’?” It’s the Spring before the Detroit riots of 1967 and this woman, Mz Mc’tyre, senses the mounting racial tension in the collection’s title story ‘High Crime Area.’ She’s witnessed the dwindling white population moving from the city into the suburbs and has a mounting fear of being attacked which escalates after reading a paper from a female student about her imprisoned cousin who has converted to “Black Islam” and expresses extremist ideas. While walking to her car she senses a man following her. She has a gun concealed in her bag. The story is incredibly suspenseful and the conclusion is utterly surprising.

The book “High Crime Area” is a seductive read with its entrancing array of voices and innovative forms of narrative. The stories draw us into danger to provide a thrilling read which challenges our assumptions.

Read a short interview with Oates at Mystery Center: http://www.mysterycenter.com/2014/04/01/Interview-with-Joyce-Carol-Oates

The Bear by Claire Cameron

Narrating a novel in the first person using a child’s voice is tricky business. Unless a poetic route is taken, the author must necessarily “dumb down” their language for it to be believable yet make it compelling and insightful enough for readers to still get something out of it. The book which always immediately springs to mind when this topic comes up is Emma Donoghue’s break-through novel “Room” about a five year old boy raised his whole life in a single room. Here the voice feels authentic and tender, drawing you to fully see the world through the boy’s eyes while getting hints of the darker machinations at work beyond the child’s limited understanding. Cameron takes on the daunting task of also giving a straight-forward narrative told from the perspective of a five year old named Anna. She and her two year old brother who she nicknames “Stick” are suddenly thrown into a perilous situation where Anna is responsible for their survival.

Claire Cameron opens her novel “The Bear” with a note summarizing a factual incident which occurred in October 1991 on an island in a national park in Central Ontario. A couple on a camping trip experienced a fatal bear attack which left the public baffled and nervous because it is very rare for bears to attack without provocation. Her fictional re-imagining of this event throws two children into the mix who don’t understand the full horror of the situation. The real drive of this novel is whether the extremely young children will survive having suddenly found themselves alone and isolated in nature. The gravity of the violence and peril happening around them is experienced as if fuzzily in a side view mirror as the protagonist is entrenched in the minutiae of her suffering and tumultuous emotions.

For me, the build up and resolution are the high points of this short quick novel as these contain the most thrilling aspects. The rest is somewhat treading water as Anna and her brother stumble around grasping for sustenance from a tin of cookies or dodgy berries found in the woods and dealing with a seemingly never-ending amount of excrement from Stick. Of course, this is realistic but doesn’t make for the most interesting read. Anna’s narration veers from the mostly mundane to somewhat improbable leaps of language and metaphors: “A mosquito stuck a straw into my skin to drink from me like a juice box.” In instances like this the narrative feels too laboured and like a grown woman is creatively presenting how a child might view the world rather than believably inhabiting it. However, the majority of the text bumps along at a steady pace with flashes of real horror as the children alternatively have encounters with the predator and stumble across severed limbs.

The most touching aspects of the novel is the way the relationship is portrayed between Anna and Stick. Since the two year old boy has such little grasp of language he has his own words and sounds for things which only Anna can understand. The bond between them believably veers from lovingly close to fierce antagonism. The possibility that Stick might meet his end through his sister’s exasperation with him rather than the natural elements creates a heightened tension. Abandoned on her own Anna discovers she must quickly adopt a much more adult sensibility if they are going to survive. The representation of this unnaturally rapid development and the resounding consequences of it are handled well making “The Bear” a moving (if still somewhat frustrating) read.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Eimear McBride has that rare writer’s talent for breaking language and grammar down to use them for her own purposes. The story of an Irish girl coming of age in a strict Catholic setting is a familiar one, but the way the author tells it gives a fresh visceral understanding of the experience. The narrative is compact and clustered together with a bare minimum given to setting the scene so thoughts and dialogue are balled up as tightly as a clenched fist. However, the words sound out sharp and clear so that if you read it carefully you always know exactly where you are located, who is speaking and what is happening. The writing in “A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” is unlike any that has come before. At times it feels like a Beckett play with disconsolate Irish voices ringing out in a tumultuous stream. It can also at points invoke the kind of subterranean speech used in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” where dialogue is neither what’s being said in reality nor is it what is consciously going through the characters’ minds, but it’s impressionistic and poetic thought welling up from the inside. However, the experience of reading this striking, accomplished first novel isn’t wholly like either of these examples. McBride establishes her own unique voice which adheres to a particular set of rules and logic set by the author.

It takes time to get into the rhythm of the story as sentences come across as so fractured and disjointed. “We are bad her. She and me. My friend I’d call.” Yet, once you get into the rhythm of the unnamed narrator’s voice it takes on a special complex meaning which would be impossible to get from a traditionally narrated novel. When I was reading this book home alone I found it helpful to read it out aloud. Maybe it’s a quality of Irish writing that when the words are spoken aloud the musicality and intent of it comes through in a way that is so much more meaningful and different from simply silently reading the text. Or perhaps there are such powerful character voices cutting through the text that they can be naturally transformed into a theatrical monologue. For instance try reading these few lines silently and then say them out loud: “And my head is good for secrets. I can bang it on the wall. It takes the nervous out and no one bothers for it at all.” Doesn’t the meaning subtly develop and change? If nothing else, it allows you to appreciate how unusually beautiful the writing is. Whether you choose to read part or all of this book aloud yourself is up to you, but I’d recommend trying it.

McBride’s narrator describes her intense close relationship with her sick brother, the traumatic experience of living through puberty and becoming sexually aware through her first adolescent experience with an uncle and later with boys at school. I was particularly struck by this unapologetically blunt passage where she asserts that her sexual promiscuity gives her control: “And in a car the best. Warm and parked away. They’ll do what they can to me in here. On my knees I learn plenty – there’s a lot I’ll do and they are all shame when they think their flesh desired. Offer up to me and disconcerted by my lack of saying no. Saying yes is the best of powers. It’s no big thing the things they do.” This at once asserts her right to express her sexual attraction to boys/men and cuts them down for not being particularly imaginative in their physical abilities. Later her opinion on this is modified as she matures and develops more complex sexual relationships.

Unsurprisingly, the narrator establishes herself as fiercely intelligent and unique from those around her in her provincial Irish town. The people here mark her out as different. For instance they mock her passion for reading: “God how can you read books at all? Look at that three hundred pages an awful lot to read.” She moves on to higher education and establishes her independence away from her family. “Look around. What if. I could. I could make. A whole other world a whole civilisation in this this city that is not home? The heresy of it. But I can. And I can choose this. Shafts of sun. Life that is this. And I can. Laugh at it because the world goes on. And no one cares. And no one’s falling into hell.” This beautifully sums up asserting ones own place in the world and breaking out of the rules (Catholic, social and otherwise) that one has been governed by in life thus far. She cuts herself off from her past and the people she’s known with a terrifying severity: “I will not think of your feelings anymore. For it’s a bit too much to know.” For a time it seems as if she will leave behind her town and family for good, but when there are developments in her family she must return. Here the mettle of her new identity is tested against the strictures of her upbringing. She must piece herself together anew and reconcile the multifaceted aspects of her life.

This novel is at times deadly serious as the narrator is defiant, but wracked with guilt and grief. “I am. Such a mess of blood and shame.” However, it is also fantastically funny and witty. Certain passages ring out as wickedly hilarious especially when she sticks two fingers up in the face of religion. “We heard of you and know you’ll want to hear the good good news. Oh whatsit? Jesus loves you. Right enough and so and is there some more better news than that?” Her blunt dismissal and anger about religion comes naturally out of being raised in such a restrictive environment that hasn’t allowed her to develop openly in the way she’d like. This raises a lot of humour and intensely personal emotion. As the novel progresses and the narrator reaches an emotionally intense point the text cripples under the weight of her life and becomes increasingly fragmented. The tension reached a point where I felt like I could barely breathe.

McBride has written a novel so fresh and individual it will be fascinating to see what she might produce next. I’m sure some people will find it tough to get into the highly stylized narrative, but once I got into the flow of it I was engulfed in and fell in love with the voice. It apparently took the author nine years to find a publisher for the book. I can only be thankful she persevered in getting it published and that Galley Beggar Press realized that this is a fantastically original voice which needs to be heard.

Listen to a brilliant interview with the author from You Wrote the Book:

My story 'Rise' read by actor Matt Alford at Liars' League NYC

Liars' League NYC is a live literary journal featuring professionally trained actors reading original short stories by both up-and-coming and well-established writers. On April 2nd at the monthly meeting held in KGB bar my short story 'Rise' was read by the actor Matt Alford. It's a slight comedy about a plane that witnesses the apocalypse/rapture from above. You can listen to it below.

BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION Short List Predictions

It's been a month since the long list for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction was announced. My mind is buzzing wondering what six books will be on the short list which is announced tomorrow.

I've managed to fully read seven titles on the list on top of the three I had already read. Currently I'm halfway through reading Eimear McBride's imaginative and original “A Girl if a Half-Formed Thing.” Strangely, out of the four books I picked out as the ones I was most looking forward to at the time, I've only read Elizabeth Strout's beautifully-constructed and socially-relevant “The Burgess Boys.” Here is the full list of books I've read with links to reviews:

Donna Tartt -The Goldfinch

Evie Wyld -All The Birds, Singing

Eleanor Catton -The Luminaries

Deborah Kay Davies -Reasons She Goes to the Woods

Audrey Magee -The Undertaking

Anna Quindlen -Still Life with Bread Crumbs

Lea Carpenter -Eleven Days

Hannah Kent -Burial Rites

Suzanne Berne – The Dogs of Littlefield

Elizabeth Strout -The Burgess Boys

Since I haven't read all of the books on the long list I don't feel like I can make predictions with absolute authority, but I'll base my opinions about the remaining books on reviews, bloggers' opinions and gut-instinct. It's really difficult to choose since so many of the books are brilliant in their own ways. So, here are my predictions for the short list:

I have to guess Adichie because I think she's a monumental writer. I've read her previous two novels and short stories which are so precisely written and intelligent. From all accounts, like those of the wonderfully engaging blogger The Writes of Woman, “Americanah” is an incredibly successful novel. I'm quite annoyed I haven't got to reading it yet.

“All the Birds, Singing” is a brilliantly structured and powerful novel with a deeply moving story. My mind keeps drifting back to it and thinking about different passages. The way that time and carefully-contained emotions are dealt with in this novel is masterful. Wyld is a forceful independent writer whose two novels are wholly original and unlike anything I've ever read.

“The Luminaries” has, of course, been heavily praised and won the Booker prize already. But if I were a judge I couldn't let a book's reception or pre-existing popularity influence my opinion. Yes, it would be great for lesser-known books which are great in their own right to get more attention, but when it comes down to it, it should be about the best book. Catton's second novel is a staggering achievement and even if it wins book prize in the world it might make people really embrace the challenge of reading it. Because to most readers it is no doubt a very challenging novel.

“Eleven Days” is a novel that really deserves more attention and I don't think most readers in the UK have taken note of how excellent it is. It's a book which meaningfully explores the impact of serving in the military and really calls into question what battles mean. This novel has given me such a knowing insight into that side of life so far removed from my own. It's also cleverly structured so that I was incredibly tense until the end of the novel wondering what happened to Sara's son.

“The Goldfinch” is another novel that has been so incredibly successful due to Tartt's ability to create such a riveting read that captures readers' imaginations. It's a book that I really had to tear myself away from to get sleep at night because I was so engaged with it. It's a highly literary book without being pretentious and speaks about universal issues of identity that reach far beyond the particularities of the compelling characters who are portrayed.

“A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing” is a book that I can already tell breaks the mould and forces you to readjust the meaning of language as you read it. Speech and thoughts are jumbled up and crushed together, but the narrative is expertly controlled so that if you read attentively you know exactly what is happening at all times. As a first novel, it's a staggering achievement.

I will still be reading some of the other books on the long list no matter who is short listed tomorrow. I'm amazed by the diversity and originality of so many books on the long list and thankful this prize has introduced me to writers I might have missed otherwise. It's been a pleasure reading other readers' reactions to the prize like The Writes of Women, Antonia Honeywell and Farm Lane Books. One of the most fun things about book prizes are the conversations they create. In the intervening time since the long list was announced I have been reading other books and it surprises me that novels like Hustvedt's “The Blazing World” wasn't on the list for this prize. But there are always more books to discover.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

I have to admit that my reactions to this book must include some personal bias since it is mostly set and largely about the State of Maine – the place where I grew up. As such this novel is painfully close and familiar to me: from the cans of Moxie stacked in the refrigerator to the yellowing leaves of maple trees in the Fall to the remote bus station in Maine’s largest city to the restaurants all closed by 9PM because most residents have dinner at 5:30PM. It’s a detailed portrait of life in this largely rural, economically-depressed, sparsely populated, beautiful rocky coast-lined place known as The Vacation State – a place that I love in many ways but which I couldn’t wait to move away from when I became an adult. As is noted in the novel, it has a dwindling population because many young people move out of state when they come of age. With many of the new generation leaving and non-white immigrants moving in there will inevitably be clashes (since the majority of the population in Maine is Caucasian.)

This is the issue at the centre of Elizabeth Strout’s novel focusing on a fictional town called Shirley Falls. A teenage boy named Zach rolls the head of a pig into the town’s mosque attended by the steadily growing Somali population. This sparks off a political debate about racial and religious intolerance in the state. Zach’s uncles Jim and Bob Burgess who both work in the law profession (although Jim is much more successful) and live in New York City return to Maine to help defend Zach’s case. In the process they reignite family ties with Zach and his mother, their estranged sister Susan who has lived all her life in Shirley Falls. The Burgess siblings lost their father when they were all quite young due to an accident that has caused strained relations between them ever since. As the truth about the past gradually emerges the insecurities of all three of the adults comes to the forefront, particularly the antagonistic relationship between bullying arrogant successful Jim and large-hearted Bob described as “big, slob-dog, incontinent self, the opposite of Jim.” They have to renegotiate the meaning of family as their need for each other becomes evident.

The novel begins with an interesting prologue about a mother and daughter gossiping about this family and the incident with Zach. It gives you information about the fates of some of the characters we follow throughout the novel. Thus I found it fascinating to go back to the beginning and read it again after finishing the novel since I was now very acquainted with the characters. The novel is the daughter’s account of the siblings (as well as Jim and Bob’s wives). However, as a counter-point to the purely white perspective, sections of the novel switch to focus on Abdikarim, one of the Somali population who has taken up residence in Maine. He’s also a character who comes to play a pivotal role in the plot near the novel’s end.

Strout creates subtly written scenes which hint at much deeper feelings than what are on show. Here is an example of the artful (almost Jamesian) composition of Strout’s scenes. In one chapter while on vacation Jim’s wife Helen plans to seduce him after reading a magazine article about maintaining intimacy in a marriage. She finds him enraged and ugly after speaking with his brother on the phone. Her focus turns to a bowl of lemons and “a queer calmness descended on her” while her husband rages. As she looks at the lemons the idea of them can’t seep into her consciousness. At a point of emotional crisis there is a separation between her essential being and the world around her. It’s as if in looking at a still life painting which clearly represents a “thing” you have no understanding of what that thing is. It’s the gap between experience and emotional involvement with that experience. It’s a profound way to represent the interstices between knowing and being.

One scene in particular is so powerful it made me physically cry. The sister Susan reflects on her early marriage and first pregnancy which resulted in a miscarriage. The grief accompanying this loss is a shock for her to bear and transforms her: “It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn’t. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, ‘You’ll have another one.’” This is a searing indictment of the way society deals with women who have lost children to miscarriage – something that sadly happens to so many women in the early stages of their first pregnancy. It reminds me of another powerful and original novel – “Black Bread White Beer” by Niven Govinden (which I reviewed a few months ago) about a couple dealing with a miscarriage.

“The Burgess Boys” provides more in-depth, but equally complex social critiques about the issue of strained race relations in the US in the past decade. The rise of fear and mistrust following 9/11 has led to sublimated and sometimes overt expressions of xenophobia. Strout states “that’s what we ignorant, weenie Americans, ever since the towers went down, really want to do. Have permission to hate them.” In some scenes characters find reasons to cite why the cultural differences between the native Maine population and the Somali immigrants is untenable. Although a huge amount of people show up for a rally to support tolerance (as opposed to the handful of white-supremacists who show up to demonstrate against them) there are hushed private conversations between the white population who make generalizations and speak negatively about the groups of Somali. Many of the events concerning the Somali depicted in this novel are inspired by real incidents. Strout beautifully illustrates various points of view to raise questions and make you think more about this complex, difficult issue.

More than anything, this novel was a nostalgia trip for me. Describing the powerful connection and the mixed emotions you have for the place where you grew up is difficult. However, Strout does this incredibly well when Bob arrives back in Maine to advise his sister and nephew: “How could he describe what he felt? The unfurling of an ache so poignant it was almost erotic, this longing, the inner silent gasp as though in the face of something unutterably beautiful, the desire to put his head down on the big loose lap of this town, Shirley Falls.” There is a strong sense of familiarity and reverting back to a childhood self, but that self is now imbued with an adult sensibility that is both hesitant and yearning. It’s a sensation I know very well, especially for this specific location, and it’s what I feel whenever I return to Maine for a visit. It makes me wonder how authentic my accent now sounds when I say “You can’t get they-ah from he-yah.”

Elizabeth Strout interviewed at Politics & Prose in Washington DC

Strout uses a lush poetic language at the beginning of many chapters to describe the physical environment of her scenes. Whether you are familiar with the Maine landscape or not this book will make you feel like you’ve been there. Although I felt a deep, personal connection to this book I believe that “The Burgess Boys” will resonate with many people because of the universal issues it raises about family and community.

Caught by Lisa Moore

In the dramatic opening of “Caught” a young man named Slaney has just escaped from prison. He seeks to meet up with his friend Hearn again so they can immediately embark on a new scheme of importing marijuana into Canada – the very thing which landed him in jail previously. At the same time Slaney is being followed by a detective named Patterson who hopes to gain a much-needed promotion from bringing this escapee to justice. The stories of these two diametrically opposed characters are told in parallel to each other. Both men are desperate in their own ways and need to find different methods of concealing their identities to achieve their goals. More than a gripping thriller, “Caught” is a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of identity, life choices and time.

Slaney is humbled by the beauty of the world having been incarcerated for four years. In sensuous detail the environment around him is described as rich in smells and colours. The first half of the book recounts a series of colourful episodes Slaney experiences trying to make his way to his friend while evading capture. He encounters idiosyncratic people who are in their own ways trapped by the circumstances of their lives. There is a lonely bride stuck in a sweltering hot hotel room, a gambler who desperately tries to hock his wife’s vacuum cleaner and two exotic dancers who want to share a joint with him. Their stories could easily unfold into larger narratives but we only see snippets of their lives as juxtaposed against Slaney’s newfound freedom. There is a tense understanding that the choices he makes now that he’s sprung himself free will determine his future so that he is simultaneously experiencing “two possible lives formed and unformed…” on a moment by moment basis.

Naturally for Slaney time has taken on a special meaning having spent the precious first few years of his adult life in prison. The repetition of a highly regulated life while being incarcerated flattened out the meaning of passing days for him. The author writes that “In prison he had thought time was an illusion. But now he believed time was a natural force, like the hurricane, except he believed that it could be harnessed.” His perception of time changes from passively letting it flow through him to energetically seizing it for his own use. Having sprung free of his shackled existence Slaney is galvanized to take advantage of opportunity and claim the share of luck that he believes he’s owed.

Moore captures the heart-racing fear of being on the run when in moments of high tension the environment turns vibrantly alive and threatening: “a thin bank of trees, mostly skinny birch, the white trunks like bones, and the leaves so green they seemed lit up and the branches were trembling hard with the breeze.” The landscape becomes imbued with Slaney’s psychology. His heightened sense of awareness when he comes close to being caught twines around the landscape and how he perceives it. This skilful method of writing draws you into the narrative and makes you feel what’s at stake.

I particularly liked a shocking habit that the author creates for a character named Ada who shows a voracious appetite for reading. While sailing on a boat Ada reads book after book. But instead of shelving each title as she finishes them she drops the book over the side of the boat. This powerful image of setting free and destroying the book that’s just been consumed is both a devastatingly horrific idea and a romantic notion of making reading a singular experience.

One of the most difficult issues the novel deals with is the notion of trust. This includes the degree to which we can trust other people and the trust that life will yield fresh opportunities for us. Jaded from his early experiences Slaney finds it difficult to embrace trust in either sense. For him “trust was just another form of laziness.” To put his trust in people feels like having a lack of initiative for him. Likewise Patterson has his own issues with trust as he feels that “Trust was an unwillingness to think things through.” He is a man that has learned that caution and preparedness are actions which can eradicate the need for trust. These strong-willed and cavalier beliefs jostle against the need both men find for showing faith in other people. They gradually learn that their fates cannot be strong-armed into being, but must be guided in sync with the wills of others.

Lisa Moore reveals her own narrative process when she describes how Slaney’s consciousness has been transformed by his experiences: “Time was not linear: it looped, concentric rings within rings.” Throughout the book the past is continuously intruding upon the character’s thoughts while he’s in the present. Memories of Slaney’s great love and his daughter fold into each moment of existence preventing him from making a great leap forward into the future. The endless process of looking back to the man he could have been if his choices had turned out differently is where Slaney is truly caught. Moore’s novel describes how a journey to break out of this cycle is extremely difficult, but necessary.

The Dogs of Littlefield by Suzanne Berne

Exposing the problems and paranoia lurking beneath the surface of a seemingly idyllic middle-class American neighborhood is something that has been done in many novels and films. Anything so ordered and perfect must be hiding something when it’s inhabited by that wild part of the animal kingdom known as homo sapiens. Yet Suzanne Berne brings something so fresh and moving in her expose of the privileged and ordered fictional town of Littlefield. When a number of dogs are poisoned at the local park, the resulting anger and fear shakes up the complacent lives of the citizens. Mistrust and paranoia grow. The central character Margaret begins seeing the threatening specters of departed dogs and her civilized existence begins to unravel with her husband Bill who claims to no longer feel anything and her socially awkward teenage daughter Julia.

Through vivid descriptions of the surroundings and minute details, Berne creates an atmosphere of unease in an environment intended to be ideal. Carefully planned landscaping, tight community spirit and progressive ideals conversely result in the sensation of an impending nightmare. It all feels a bit Lynchian like a slowed down sprinkler system drawn out to sound like a scream. In one scene Margaret even has a nightmare of intimidating figures that have the heads of dogs. For all the safeguards this community builds into the structure of their community and the security they impose it’s as if the gaping hungry jaw of death will snap at their vulnerable faces at any moment.

Is this novel satirical? The author does certainly poke fun at her characters and there are many funny observations – all viewed through the observant eye of a sociologist who has infiltrated the community as part of her research to write a paper about suburban discontent and fear. However, more often than not (as I believe the author intended) I felt real sympathy for and related to the characters’ plights although many of them are nothing like me. Maybe a key to understanding Berne’s method is with the tragic-comic tone she employs when writing about a novelist named George who is working on a novel about a zombie baseball player. He really wants to write about the deeper darker things about life, but feels like he has to transmogrify his subject through established modes of genre.

Death looms large in this haven of progressive civilization that also holds fast to traditional values. The realization of its inevitability amounts in many cases to moments of existential crisis. “From across the room, Margaret saw herself sitting on the sofa, a slim blonde-haired woman in a blue silk blouse, holding a wine glass and smiling, a small piece of barbed wire in her mouth.” Especially in social gatherings characters are pulled out of themselves, witnessing the way pain and fear is being suppressed in going through the motions but they are unable to break out of what is habitual and seems “right.” Personal pains are subsumed for the sake of social appearance and are usually only revealed in overheard conversations or sly observations or personal meltdowns.

It’s only through an acknowledgement of common fears and embracing idiosyncratic behavior that the social network of this community is able to find real comfort rather than experience individual isolation for fear of being socially stigmatized. When Margaret tells George about hallucinations her husband is experiencing where he sees his dead father George comments that this “‘Sounds like regular nuts to me.’” In other words, this sort of recurrent fear is normal and part of everyone’s life because misfortune and death find us no matter how carefully we try to safeguard against it. Berne examines this not only in the lives of the adults in the novel, but how this manifests itself amongst the next generation down with the teenage children of several of the characters.

“The Dogs of Littlefield” is an extremely clever novel that presents what is familiar in poetic language that makes it wholly new. It made me think about and see the world differently when I walked down the street after finishing a chapter. It’s as if my senses were newly attuned to the micro world around me and the veiled emotions of the people walking past. There haven’t been many books I’ve read where I felt such a strong shift in my own vision of what’s around me.

Read a good interview with Suzanne Berne at Bookanista here: http://bookanista.com/suzanne-berne/

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

Fictionally recreating a story taken from an Icelandic legend, Hannah Kent crafts a thrilling first novel about the last execution in the country which took place in 1830. In a richly descriptive narrative she evokes the bleak barren northern region of Iceland with its sparsely-populated lands battered by snowstorms. Only a scattering of claustrophobic rural houses are scattered across the land heated by compact dung and teeming with mold which creeps into the lungs of the inhabitants. A woman named Agnes has been convicted for the murder of two men at a remote farm where she was working as a servant. Due to financial constraints the district commissioner has placed Agnes in the custody of a family to look after. Agnes requests that a young assistant reverend nicknamed Toti council her in the time leading up to her execution. The novel recounts her time at this farm where she slowly builds a strained relationship with the family that keeps her and recounts the story leading up to her conviction to the reverend who becomes enamoured with the tragic fated woman.

Touted primarily as a Scandinavian thriller (since those are all the rage at the moment) the book’s real driving motivation is to give voice to a woman who was scandalized in her time and persecuted. The author has spoken about how Agnes is a well known presence in Icelandic popular tradition and someone who probably didn’t receive a balanced judgement in her time because she was an illegitimate woman from the lower classes. As Agnes states to the reverend: “'To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.'” Informed by only a few scant details driven more by gossip than a serious investigation, the community persecutes Agnes and mistrusts her. However, through revealing her personal story to those around her and gaining their trust by hard menial labor and lending her dynamic knowledge about farming and medicine, Agnes gains a guarded amount of respect.

It was a challenge trying to mentally sound-out the long complex Icelandic names in my head while reading – as bad as reading Russian novels – but after a hundred pages it all started to flow and sound familiar. Kent has a good ear for creating tense dialogue between characters. At her most poignant, the author merges the characters emotion with the stark landscape around them: “Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another... It's the glaze of ice over the water, too fragile to trust.” The haunting landscape mirrors the fragility of her position. It’s as if the cold bitter country all around her is adding to Agnes’ indictment and embodies the cruel dismissal of her human integrity.

One of the most impactful scenes is when Agnes begins an affair with Natan, the man she’ll later be accused of killing, who speaks to her about absences they share in life:

‘Do you know what it means, to have a hollow palm? It means there is something secretive about us. This empty space can be filled with bad luck if we’re not careful. If we expose the hollow to the world and all its darkness, all its misfortune.’

‘But how can one help the shape of one’s hand?’ I was laughing.

‘By covering it with another’s, Agnes.’

This gesture of intimacy which would seem like a tender exchange of someone revealing the most hidden aspect of themselves to another and discovering a commonality here has a darker edge. It’s as if it signals the prelude to nightmare rather than high romance. I admire how Kent twists expectations to create this effect.

“Burial Rites” is a fast-paced and emotional read. The hints of an impending civilized approach to living for the hard-working poor communities in rural Iceland are presented in stark contrast to the barbaric forms of punishment doled out to those who don’t even receive a fair trial. The novel isn’t so much a thriller as it is a tribute to women who have been used and oppressed.

Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter

“Eleven Days” has been sitting on my ‘to be read’ pile for about six months. The subject matter of a contemporary American military man made me slightly wary of approaching it; I wasn’t sure I would really enjoy it. However, I found the book difficult to put down once I started getting into the story of a single mother named Sara whose son Jason is a member of a special operations team and has gone missing during a mission. The location of where he went missing is classified and she has no idea what might have happened to him. She’s suspended in time. The novel follows a period of eleven days until the point she finally discovers what’s become of him. In between we’re given the back story of Sara’s relationship with an elusive man who works for the CIA and who fathered her son. The author describes Jason’s development and his choice to join the military after 9/11. With exquisite detail and thoughtful insight she details his training in preparation for important missions which demand highly refined skills. The stark realism of Carpenter’s subject coupled with her characters’ deeply profound meditations on the nature of war lead to poetic insight and a deeply engaging story.

It’s impressive how intricately the author details the strenuous training Jason goes through. Alongside the arduous physical demands, the soldier’s most profound development is psychological. Here Carpenter meditates on different levels required in training to deal with battle over time: “Pain management allows you to move through the moment; expectations management allows you to move through the day; and anger management allows you to move through being denied not only any privacy but any acknowledgement of being you.” The way civilians manage their state of being day to day totally shifts when those people are indoctrinated into military service. Personal ego is necessarily set aside because the operation is what takes precedence.

Does this mean that to be in the military necessitates turning oneself into a thoughtless tool to be wielded by some strategic general? What this novel showed me is that there is a strange alchemy which occurs when a highly intelligent individual willingly engages in a cause which is much larger than him. “Somewhere he had developed a deep belief that a man was someone who acted, not someone who spoke, and that honor was about discretion and progress.” Jason’s faith in the values of serving his country doesn’t mean blindly following. He’s shown to be a highly intelligent and incredibly well-read person. Turning into a soldier doesn’t annihilate his personality, but adds to his character since it makes him an active part of civilization’s movement forward. To engage in service without questioning whether your personal sacrifice might be for a flawed cause is anathema to most people. It’s acknowledged: “They are aware that what they do and the choice to do it will never make sense to most people.”

U.S. Navy Special Warfare Trident insignia worn by Navy SEALS.

This novel captures how the meaning of battle has changed in the past several years from what it meant before the rising fear of terrorism. There are no longer any clear time lines for war or a sense of it being declared or ending. “The definition of success in wartime as Jason’s generation knew it was the prevention of future bloodshed, the corralling of ‘terror.’” Our society has increasingly become preoccupied with potential threats and reliable intelligence about the possibility of terror because of the understandable sense that attacks can spring up at anytime and anywhere. It’s interesting how this novel explores the creeping predominance of unspecified borders of military engagement because there are no longer any specifically demarcated battlefields.  

The emotional heart of the story is, of course, the relationship between Sara and her son Jason. What this novel beautifully shows is the way love is honed and safeguarded in a relationship that is stretched by the kind of unknowningness and time-sensitive nature of military service. The connection between them is beautifully evoked in small personal interactions that signal carefully marshalled emotion. When separated from her child, Sara’s ability to quietly endure is a testament to her faith and love for her son. At one point it is described that for a sniper “Stillness, it turns out, is an athletic experience.” The same could be said for the training and emotional control needed by a mother whose child is actively serving. “Eleven Days” is an excellently crafted intelligent novel which incorporates an impressive understanding of the mechanics and psychological processes of the military.