WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY, stalking is a real, dangerous crime with consequences

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY
KAT HAUSLER
Meerkat Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Simon Kemper is on the up and up–he’s out of rehab, and his band is gaining moderate success around Berlin. But out of the corner of his eye and over his shoulder, he’s always aware of her. The stalker. She’s at every show, no matter what city. She sends hundreds of postcards to his label. Worst of all, she acts like she knows him. Like she owns him.

When the stalker disappears at one of his shows, Simon is the prime suspect. Initially an effort to clear his name, his search for July quickly becomes a deeper psychological quest: to prove that his fears were warranted? That she couldn’t have given up her obsession that easily? The threads of July’s disappearance turn out to be tangled into every corner of Simon’s life: a trusted band member, a tenuous new love interest, a resentful ex, and the self he’s supposedly left behind.

Narcissistic, insecure, and consummately relatable, Simon is the anti-hero of his own life—trying to want to be better; hoping that’s enough.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Enjoyable story of a guy, pretty average musician, pretty average addict, making an effort to clean himself and his life up. Then there's the small issue of a woman obsessed with him, called July. There's a weirdness in her obsession: how does she know so much about him?

I really wouldn't like this oft-told tale much at all...why do men without much going for them seem to attract women so easily and then get them obsessed?...because it feels like fantasy fulfillment. Ever since Fatal Attraction it's been peopling the landscape of thrillerdom.

What caught my attention was the vanishing of July. I've been stalked online, I know the worst of it is the sheer absurdity of a person's unsought, unencouraged, obsession causing the object real consequences. But this story adds a different layer in the stalker vanishing and leaving a void that must be filled by some sort of legal resolution. This is Germany, after all, and there must always be a resolution or whatever rent on the social fabric it is remains open and actively pursued. July was always going to get a period at the end of her sentence in Simon's story.

That it proved to be a weirdly condign chapter, not sentence, in his story, one that involved unexpected other players and motives, was the reason I didn't dismiss the read. The reason thrillers satisfy me is they offer more...open-ended...solutions to the the grosser insults to Ma'at's order. In this story the results of the crime committed were equitably meted out. That they were also unorthodox felt much more satisfying than milder law-n-order solutions available to the author.

I was not initially drawn into the read. What happened was I had put the story down, thinking it would be another male-fantasy tropefest; I couldn't quite shake it though, kept processing it behind the noise of Life, because the author's a woman. Why would she choose to write that?

She didn't. I came back and finished the story thinking I'd at least get an answer to why one character felt...wrong...and, well, yes indeed that was the point. It wasn't clear to me why the ending was heading in a direction that seemed very much at odds with what I thought it was going to be. That was a satisfying twist, Author Hausler. I enjoyed it.

So, lesson learned: attend to the still, small voice that suggests you're not quite seeing what you think you are. A solidly crafted thriller about a dangerous crime that never gets the belief the victim deserves unless they're very lucky.

I MAKE ENVY ON YOUR DISCO, solid debut of a strong storytelling voice

I MAKE ENVY ON YOUR DISCO
ERIC SCHNALL
Zero Street Fiction/University of Nebraska Press
$21.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.

A trip that begins in isolation evolves into one of deep connection and possibility. In an intensely concentrated series of days, Sam finds himself awash in the city, stretched in limbo between his own past and future—in nightclubs with Jeremy, a lonely wannabe DJ; navigating a flirtation with Kaspar, an East Berlin artist he meets at a café; and engaged in a budding relationship with Magda, the enigmatic and icy manager of Sam’s hotel, whom Sam finds himself drawn to, and determined to thaw. I Make Envy on Your Disco is at once a tribute to Berlin, a novel of longing and connection, and a coming-of-middle-age story about confronting the person you were and becoming the person you want to be.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Sam's got a problem. He doesn't like his life much, right now at least, in no small part because his husband's got an itchy zipper, his career's reached the same-ol' same-ol' stage, and he's nudging forty...gay man's death. What better idea could a man in these dire straits have than to run away from home?

"Home" in New York City; he runs to Berlin on the rather flimsy pretext of an art opening...has this yutz heard of climate change and carbon footprints?!...in search of a path to the future. This reminded me of a very common trope in fiction, middlescence I call it in tribute to my old friend Juanice. She took the old-fashioned view that her husband was going to stray because he was reliving his adolescent horniness stage one last time, this time knowing what he was doing. Sam's a classic example of that middlescent man.

So was Less in the eponymous novel. I really disliked that novel.

The idea that one should run away from problems that absolutely won't fix themselves is an evergreen for novelists because it makes the narrative structure obvious and the stakes unambiguous. Your fish is out of water, your side characters write themselves. And the metaphorical journey/quest will never run out of steam. Okay, then there's the debut novel bit: Wise novelists spring from the acorns of the successful tropes past topiaried to order for their garden of prose.

This iteration of all the above uses the material to do what we hope for when we buy a relationship novel. It convinces the reader to invest in the characters, it affords us room to look at the ways and means Sam uses to escape as markers of solution, resolution, completion. Interestingly to me, this novel eschews the easy answers and instead makes us live in a real-life space of ambiguity.

Things end. Sometimes cleanly, without edges that could be kintsugi'd together. Mostly not, though. Mostly the Sam Singers and Lesses of the world do not get clean, fresh starts because that is exceedingly rare in life. There's a lot of charm in the kind of ending that spawns new beginnings. This book's stuffed full of those...though in my experience the new beginnings learned from travel are, of themselves, ephemeral. Their main value in my life has been to prove to me that new beginnings are possible. The intensity of Sam's connections to Jeremy the straight poet and Magda the stuck concierge bid fair to be short-lived; Kaspar the love interest, though, might be different. Might be.

The irony of seeking one's way forward in Berlin, that city resolutely planted in its pasts, isn't commented on in some arch or knowing way. That facet of the story's quietly acknowledged by Sam's attendance at the art opening that has as its topic what Germans now call "Östalgie", or nostalgia for the dear, dead days of two Berlins, two Germanys. The switch to capitalism was not smooth, and is not smoother now it seems. Culturally anyway that all collides hardest in the place that was defined by The Wall. My one and only trip to Berlin was pre-Wall fall, so I actually kind of get it. Nostalgia for how things were definitely communicates itself to those who were NOT there. Humans are weird and define "coolness" in very exlusionary ways. Sam, whose career is in the arts, gets this in his bones, since it's part and parcel of that world to exclude all but the wealthiest and most sophisticated. Those are overlapping but not identical groups; they are each quite exclusive, in every sense of the word, though not of each other.

So that's why I don't give the book five stars. I enjoyed the read. I like the characters. I really like the ambiguous ending. I don't care for the run-away-from-home trope. I ended up, mostly, not resonating with the way Sam drifted through Berlin "Östalgie" with what felt to me like very little curiosity. When an adult travels, but doesn't question the place and its history, I don't see why the author set the travel destination where they did. Author Schnall gave me a decent day's reading. That's great.

I would've liked to have been given an awakening of curiosity about Berlin, akin to the effect of The Sheltering Sky or even Death in Venice. Not, I hasten to assure you, a fault of craft on Schnall's part. More a lacuna between my expectation of a novel about a traveler to a place and what I got about the place.

I hope you'll try this debut novel out.