(Nearly 4.5) The musical equivalent of Lot might be a mixtape played on a boombox or blasted from an open-top Corvette while touring the streets of Ho(Nearly 4.5) The musical equivalent of Lot might be a mixtape played on a boombox or blasted from an open-top Corvette while touring the streets of Houston, Texas. Most of this Dylan Thomas Prize-winning linked collection follows Nic, a mixed-race Black/Latino boy who works in the family restaurant. As his family situation realigns – his father leaves, his older brother Javi enlists, his sister Jan has a baby – he’s trying to come to terms with his homosexuality and wondering if this gentrifying city suits him anymore. But he knows he’ll take himself wherever he goes, and as the book closes with “Elgin” (the most similar in mood and setup to Washington’s debut novel, Memorial) he’s thinking of taking a chance on love.
Drug dealers, careworn immigrants and prostitutes: Even the toughest guys have tender hearts in these stories. Eleven of 13 stories are in the first person. Where the narration isn’t Nic’s, it’s usually the collective voice of the neighbourhood boys. As far as I can tell, most of the story titles refer to Houston sites: particular addresses or neighbourhoods, or more vague locations. Like in Memorial, there are no speech marks. Washington’s prose is earthy and slang-filled. The matter-of-fact phrasing made me laugh: “He knocked her up in the usual way. For six minutes it looked like he’d stick around”; “He’d been staying there since the Great Thanksgiving Rupture, back when his brother’d found the dick pic in his pillowcase.” With the melting pot of cultures, the restaurant setting, and the sharp humour, this reminded me of Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart.
Three favourites: In “Shepherd,” the narrator emulates a glamorous cousin from Jamaica; “Bayou” is completely different from the rest, telling the urban legend of a “chupacubra” (a mythical creature like a coyote); “Waugh,” the longest story and one of just two told in the third person, is about a brothel’s worth of male sex workers and their pimp. Its final page is devastating.
I saw the author read from this in November as part of a virtual Faber Live Fiction Showcase. Persaud described it as being about a widow, Betty; her I saw the author read from this in November as part of a virtual Faber Live Fiction Showcase. Persaud described it as being about a widow, Betty; her son, Solo; and their lodger, Mr. Chetan, and how people come together to make an unconventional family despite secrets and “way too much rum.” She read two excerpts, one from Betty’s POV and one from Mr. Chetan’s. I loved the Trinidadian accents. My interest was then redoubled by the book winning the Costa First Novel Award. All three narrators are absolutely delightful, and I loved the Trini slang and the mix of cultures (for example, there is a Hindu temple where locals of Indian extraction go to practice devotion to the Goddess).
Early on, I was reminded most, in voice and content, of Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo. But the lightness of Part One, which ends with a comically ill-fated tryst, soon fades. When Solo moves to New York City to make his own way in the world, he discovers that life is cruel and not everyone is good at heart. Indeed, my only hesitation in recommending this book is that it gets so very, very dark; the blurb and everything I had heard did not prepare me. If easily triggered, you need to know that there are many upsetting elements here, including alcoholism, domestic violence, self-harm, attempted suicide, sadomasochism, and gruesome murder. Usually, I would not list such plot elements for fear of spoilers, but it seems important to note that what seems for its first 100 pages to be such a fun, rollicking story becomes more of a somber commentary on injustices experienced by both those who leave Trinidad and those who stay behind.
The timeline is overlong and I remained in the dark about the late mystery (did Persaud give clues that I just failed to pick up on?). A beautiful moment of reconciliation closes the story, but man, getting to that point is tough. The title speaks of love, but this novel is a real heartbreaker. What that means, though, is that it makes you feel something. Not every author can manage that. So Persaud is a powerful talent and I would certainly recommend her debut, just with the above caveats.
(3.5) The final volume of the autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy, after Childhood and Youth. Ditlevsen recalls her upbringing in poverty and her earl(3.5) The final volume of the autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy, after Childhood and Youth. Ditlevsen recalls her upbringing in poverty and her early success as a poet. By the end of the second book, she’s engaged to a much older literary editor. A series of marriages and affairs follows: Viggo, Ebbe, Carl and Victor are the major names, with some others in between. She produces stories and poems as well as a daughter and a son, but also has two abortions. Carl performs one of these and gives her a Demerol shot; ever afterwards, she takes advantage of his obsession with her chronic ear infection to beg for painkiller shots. “Then time ceases to be relevant. An hour could be a year, and a year could be an hour. It all depends on how much is in the syringe.” Addiction interferes with her work and threatens her relationships, but it’s an impulse that never leaves her even when she swaps the harder stuff for alcohol.
I only skimmed this one because from the other volumes I knew how flat and detached the prose is, even when describing desperate circumstances. I can admire this kind of writing – the present-tense scenes, the lack of speech marks, the abrupt jumps between time periods and emotional states, all coldly expressed – but I’m not sure I’ll ever love it. Of the three books, I liked Childhood the best for its universal observations.
Laura Jean McKay has a PhD in literary animal studies from the University of Melbourne and serves as an animal expert and presenter on Australia’s ABCLaura Jean McKay has a PhD in literary animal studies from the University of Melbourne and serves as an animal expert and presenter on Australia’s ABC radio show Animal Sound Safari. Pair her academic background with the fact that this second book of hers shares a title with a Margaret Atwood poetry collection and you’ll have some idea of what to expect here: mysterious but mostly believable speculative fiction that hinges on human communication with animals.
Jean Bennett isn’t your average grandma: a wise-cracking alcoholic, she drives the tourist train through the Australian wildlife park her daughter-in-law manages but wishes she could be a fully fledged ranger. Her ex-husband, Graham, left her and went down south, and eventually their only son Lee did the same. Now all Jean has left is Kim, her six-year-old granddaughter. Jean entertains Kim by imagining voices for the park’s animals. This no longer seems like a game, though, when news filters through of the “zooflu,” which has hit epidemic levels and has as a main symptom the ability to understand what animals say.
When the park closes to the public, the staff members are stranded on site. A clandestine visitor brings zooflu – before long, everyone is infected – and kidnaps Kim. Jean steals a camper van and takes Sue the dingo along to help her find her granddaughter. As they head towards the ocean, the full scale of the epidemic becomes evident. Pets and livestock are running wild, having been released by frightened owners. Jean stops at service stations and pubs to hear the latest news and ask if anyone has seen Kim. People are suspicious of Sue. “There’s a new normal now,” a bus driver tells her. “And around here, not wearing a mask means you’ve gone animal. I’d put on my protective if I was you. Put that mutt in a cage.”
It was uncanny reading this in the midst of a pandemic, but the specifics of McKay’s novel are hard to grasp and much bleaker than most of us are experiencing during COVID-19. Jean learns that some are so tortured by animal voices – starting with mammals, proceeding to birds, and in severe cases including insects – that they undergo amateur trepanning via a drill to the skull.
Yet Jean’s experience of animal language seems quaint or amusing. The creatures’ voices aren’t audible, necessary, but a combination of smells, noises and body language. The animals’ statements are blunt and literal, mostly concerned with food and sex. For a long time, they seem like pure nonsense, but gradually they resemble a sort of rough poetry, split at random into short lines in bold type. Here’s one example from Sue:
My front end takes the food quality. Muzzle for the Queen (Yesterday).
(Sue usually calls Jean “Queen” or “Mother,” showing that she respects her authority, and “Yesterday” is frequently used to suggest a primitive sense of the past or of an older person.)
As entertaining a protagonist as Jean is, I lost interest in her road trip. The communication with animals was neither as clear-cut nor as profound as I’d hoped for. Dystopian novels may have increased resonance at this time, but they are often unsatisfying. If you focus on the journey into the wilderness and don’t mind a sudden ending, you may find this a worthwhile follow-up to Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
A shortened version was originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck. (I read a proof copy for a Nudge review, but it’s never shown up on their website.)...more
(3.5) Collins recently won the first novel category of the Costa Awards for this story of a black maid on trial in 1826 London for the murder of her e(3.5) Collins recently won the first novel category of the Costa Awards for this story of a black maid on trial in 1826 London for the murder of her employers, the Benhams. Margaret Atwood hit the nail on the head in a tweet describing the book as “Wide Sargasso Sea meets Beloved meets Alias Grace” (she’s such a legend she can get away with being self-referential). Back in Jamaica, Frances was a house slave and learned to read and write. This enabled her to assist Langton in recording his observations of Negro anatomy. His amateur medical experimentation and a couple cases of opium addiction were subplots that captivated me more than Frannie’s affair with Marguerite Benham and even the question of her guilt. However, time and place are conveyed convincingly, and the voice is strong.
Great lines:
“A novel is like a long, warm drink but a poem is a spike through the head.”
“Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if our purpose here is to change their minds.”...more
“Emergency police fire, or ambulance?” The young female narrator of this debut novel lives in Sydney and works for Australia’s emergency call service.“Emergency police fire, or ambulance?” The young female narrator of this debut novel lives in Sydney and works for Australia’s emergency call service. Over her phone headset she gets appalling glimpses into people’s worst moments: a woman cowers from her abusive partner; a teen watches his body-boarding friend being attacked by a shark. Although she strives for detachment, her job can’t fail to add to her anxiety – already soaring due to the country’s flooding and bush fires.
Against that backdrop of natural disasters, a series of minor personal catastrophes play out. The narrator is obsessed with a rape/murder case that’s dominating the television news, and narrowly escapes sexual assault herself. She drinks to excess, keeps hooking up with her ex-boyfriend, Lachlan, even after he gets a new girlfriend, and seems to think abortion and the morning after pill are suitable methods of birth control. Irresponsible to the point of self-sabotage, she’s planning a move to London but in the meantime is drifting through life, resigned to the fact that there is no unassailable shelter and no surefire way to avoid risk.
The title comes from the quest of John Oxley (presented here as the narrator’s ancestor), who in 1817 searched for a water body in the Australian interior. Quotations from his journals and discussions of the work of Patrick White, the subject of Lachlan’s PhD thesis, speak to the search for an Australian identity. But the inland sea is also the individual psyche, contradictory and ultimately unknowable. Like a more melancholy version of Jenny Offill’s Weather or a more cosmic autofiction than Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s Stubborn Archivist, this is a timely, quietly forceful story of how women cope with concrete and existential threats.
(3.5) This is like the guy version of Where the Crawdads Sing, perhaps as rewritten and set in New England by John Irving. Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey m(3.5) This is like the guy version of Where the Crawdads Sing, perhaps as rewritten and set in New England by John Irving. Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey met at Connecticut’s Minerva College back in the late 1960s, working in the kitchen at a sorority and nervously awaiting their Vietnam War draft numbers. They were all more than half in love with Jacy, but she disappeared in 1971 and only one of them knows the truth of what happened to her. Together again on Martha’s Vineyard in 2015, the friends are now in their mid-sixties but their dynamic hasn’t changed even if the country’s has with Trump’s star on the rise.
Most of the sections are from Lincoln’s and Teddy’s POVs, and I grew fond of Teddy, who, inspired by his love of Thomas Merton, started a small academic press called Seven Storey Books to publish popular religious works. There’s a reason he’s never married, though it’s not what you might expect. Lincoln is a real estate agent out in Arizona whose business hasn’t been the same since the financial crisis, but he’s holding steady thanks to the love of his wife, children and grandchildren. And Mickey? He’s the same crazy rocker as ever. The novel takes its title from a Johnny Mathis song and refers to a fair bit of other music – though with an unfortunate error: “Janice” Joplin! – Lincoln’s irascible father even has the amusing name of Wolfgang Amadeus Moser.
I think Russo let himself get a bit carried away with filling in Jacy’s backstory, such that things become fairly melodramatic. There’s too much plot in general for a book that’s mostly about ageing and nostalgia (“Was this what we wanted from our oldest friends? Reassurance that the world we remember so fondly still exists?”). However, male friendship is a fairly rare theme, I truly came to care about these three main characters, and this easily held my interest for large chunks on a train ride. It was only my second novel from Russo (after Empire Falls; I’ve also read his memoir), but I’m sure to read more....more
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