THE IMAGINED LIFE, a very apt title about the illusions Life makes up for us

THE IMAGINED LIFE
ANDREW PORTER
Alfred A. Knopf (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed writer, a taut, elegiac novel about a man trying to uncover the truth about the father who left him behind

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.

As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.

Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.

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

My Review: When your life in the present collapses, you look to the past. It's natural to make the trip back over any life, no matter how deeply quotidian it was. To know who you are you need a vantage point to look at the whole of it from and kidhood's the natural one to choose.

There's a reason this plot's an evergreen; for a reason as basic as growing old, that much-resented thing no one guaranteed the privilege of doing. Among male writers, anyway...Falconer by John Cheever, Montana 1948 by Larry Watson are two favorites of mine. I hope you're all at least passingly familiar with them so the next bit will make sense.

Looking for your father is probably the most commonly human thing a man does in his life. Fathers are often gone, voluntarily or not...wars, jobs, or simple absence of love for the mother are all ordinary reasons for Dad to book it out the door. Does it pay to know why? I can only say it's so uniquely difficult to accomplish this feat of vanishing now that maybe it did then, but not now.

Which is at the heart of my issue with this book: It evokes a day I lived in, and does it well; but it took the narrator decades to decide to search for his father with today's incredible web of tech? Then when he decides to do it in the ashes of his own family, it's to find out who's to blame for his brokenness? Therapy first, my dude, then when you have a framework to cope with the damage done to you, find the perp. It isn't like he didn't have literal decades of living in the modern world to figure out he was wounded. It's a realistic thing, taking your time to find out the wounds inflicted on you. It's not like there's a timetable. The reason it didn't sit all the way right with me is down to my having lived through those years where awakening followed awakening. The narrator's way too smart and too savvy not to have seen them, too.

Still and all, I read the story with a lot of nodding along, a good bit of emotional investment, and a strong interest in seeing where the resolution to his growth spurt would lead. I was...okay with the resolution. I'm making my issues loom large only to show y'all why a full four stars is such a strong testament to Author Porter's writing talents.

YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST, first novel set in a major, convulsive inflection point

YOUR HEART IS A MUSCLE THE SIZE OF A FIST
SUNIL YAPA
Lee Boudreaux Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.

On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor—a boyish, scrappy world traveler who's run away from home—sets out to sell marijuana to the 50,000 anti-globalization protestors gathered in the streets. It quickly becomes clear that the throng determined to shut the city down—from environmentalists to teamsters to anarchists—are testing the patience of the police, and what started as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.

Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the lives of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protestors struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the president of the United States.

In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity, and in doing so casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion.

A LOVELY SURPRISE GIFT. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

Doing something, he had discovered, anything, however small, that contributed to your meaningfulness of self and surroundings—well, that was the trick. That was the trick to not feel like shit.
–and–
What is the function of the heart, if not to convince the blood to stay moving with the limits where it belongs, to stay at home.

Stay at home, stay at home, stay at home.

But restless thing that it is, your blood, it leaps into the world.
–and–
...{T}hey learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

What the 1999 WTO Protests taught the reactionaries around the world was that there was nothing they could do to win the hearts of the people. They set about controlling their bodies instead. As Author Yapa put it, "...how deep the darkness of the heart which longs for control," and there it is out in the open. The hearts of a few demand that the world obey them, obey their darkness, and submit to external control.

None of the seven PoV characters in this story are without that darkness. They're all on trajectories that will not allow then to remain unbruised and unbattered by life, and more particularly by the awfulness of demanding economic justice from those whose entire way of life, whose whole sense of self, is rooted in and branches from their hoarded wealth. There are those whose one need in this life is to deny others what they want and/or need (preferably both) so they can Win, they can be seen to be Right because they've won! Then there are those whose one need in this life is to take away what it is they've decided is unfairly denied to others:

They wanted to tear down the borders, to make a leap into a kind of love that would be like living inside a new human skin, wanted to dream themselves into a life they did not yet know. He heard them in the streets saying, “Another world is possible,” and beneath his ribs broken and healed and twice broken and healed and thrice broken and healed, he shuddered and thought, God help us. We are mad with hope. Here we come.
–and–
Tiresome people, but he knew it was only human nature to believe it best to ignore suffering, to focus on your own good fortune. The human survival mechanism: to say your prayers, thank your gods, and hold your breath when you passed the slums. The sweet poison of privelege, wasn't it? To think blindness a preferable condition.

And neither side of this divide sees the grim and angry reality: They're one coin. Heads, tails, maybe they're aesthetically distinct but they're one zero-sum-game playing piece of a coin. It would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

The central spine of the book, for this reader, is the story of Bishop and Victor...father and son, estranged, and truly, absolutely the same man, the same wounded-by-loss, blinded-by-love man. Just as sad as father-and-son estrangements always are. Just as inevitable as the voice of experience being unable to be the ears of acceptance that a rudderless, shallow-drafted dinghy of a boy needs to find a channel in the rough storms he can't avoid:

“What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?”
–and–
“Son, how easily an open heart can be poisoned, how quickly love becomes the seeds of rage. Life wrecks the living.”

Singing the same song, different verses, and different keys...the minor key of youthful wounds, the major key of adult scars.

What you need to know is that Author Yapa wrote a polyphonic poem, a written kōan to the concept of connection and belonging. What you want to read needs to be story of discovering yourself in many places, seeing your wounds and worlds across gulfs of experience and of time as you seek out the hand, the heart, the warm and welcoming shoulder to shelter and comfort you:

It was 1999 in America, he had traveled the world for three years, looking for what he didn’t know, and now here he found himself: absolutely allergic to belief, nineteen years old, and totally alone.
–and–
And yet there he was, his son, looking and smiling through his half-opened eyes, not a look of concern, but as if he understood in some way, the sometime knowledge of what this is, the knowledge of the whole ugly beautiful thing, the knowledge of the courage it takes to move into fear and to fuck up and to go on living, knowing that sometimes it is two people alone and some small kindness between them that is not even called family, or forgiveness, but might be what some, on the good days, call love.

Good days or bad, that is its name: Love. There are strands to this too-short, too-scattered narrative that seek their love, that clutch their illusions of love; but in this father, whose son is not his flesh and blood but is his, and this son, whose world refuses to stop hurting and whose heart can't make itself heard yet, there is a beautiful, complete love of like-minded men.

If that's a story you need to read, as I did, then get this into your hands at once.

JOE, the late, great Larry Brown's first masterwork in novel form

JOE
LARRY BROWN
Algonquin Books
$15.95 paper, available now

Now only $1.99 on Kindle, so don't wait. (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won’t slow down—not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he’s desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption—or ruin.

Kirkus, back in 1991 when they hated everything, said this of the book: "...Brown...pares his prose close to the bone, stripping away the slightest hint of sociology or regional color. This is white trash, lumpen fiction with a vengeance, and a vision of angelic desolation."

My Review: Selected as the May 2020 Moderator's Choice in the On the Southern Literary Trail Goodreads group, this is the novel that solidified Larry Brown's place in Grit Lit/Hick Lit's pantheon. He was a major talent; his short stories will, I think, be anthologized and lionized for a long time to come. He started out as a writer known for them; and I think that, like Hemingway, they will be his lasting contribution to Southern Literature's grittier edge.

This is not to denigrate or diminish his accomplishment in this, his most successful novel:

The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.

You know where you are; you know who you're with; you're not going for a madeleine with Proust. This is poverty, this is heat, this is misery on an epic scale but never ever looked at...it's witnessed, it's so real and so present that there is just not one doubt about its honesty. Heat and poverty are characters in this scene so cinematically framed. The people are, in fact, incidental if not ornamental. They exist as morality-play embodiments of Poverty, and they continue to do so throughout the book.

Is that a flaw? Is honest appraisal and presentation of reality ever a flaw?

“That boy,” he said. “I’ve done him ever favor I could. Some folks you can’t do nothing with. Just sorry. God knows I’ve done plenty of drinking and stuff in my time, but I be damn if I ever tried to cheat anybody out of any money.”

Is that a speech delivered to make an author's point, or is it the vox populi, the distilled belief of the Average Man that he is in fact average, the proper measure of a man's worth? It's certainly a refutation of the three-hundred-year-old moralism vox populi, vox dei! There is no god in this book, there is no numinous or immanent quality to anything. The landscape is hot, dry, miserable; the people are dumb, violent, miserable; the vox regis or deorum is notable only for its absence.

Also notably absent here are women's voices. They exist to bear children and beatings. They are adversaries to what low, animal joys men can find in sex (more akin to rape, in my opinion) and beer. Children are the punishment women inflict on men (as these men see it) for the fleeting pleasure of the rut. The idea of pleasure is, in general, absent from this world. It is a place where no one at all ever makes even a feint at a genuine smile.

What redeems this read from being a complete, utter, suicidal-depression-inducing downer? Joe Ransom. Drunken convict that he is, awful father that he may in fact be, to Gary Jones he is Jesus freshly down from the cross. Gary's sperm donor is a memorable...a matchless, actually...portrait of the kind of person I, in my damned close to infinite privilege, have never interacted with. He pimps out his prepubescent daughter. He does nothing of value to anyone, not even himself:

“She don’t like to be around anybody drinkin, don’t even like to smell it. I drink and I like to drink. That’s it.”

That's the least-offensive thing the man utters in this book. Probably in the whole of life. His son, his who-knows-how decent and good-souled son, makes him feel more worthless than he already does; not, however, as worthless as he actually is.

Gary goes to work for Joe on a county work crew. Joe, ex-con bad dad Joe, shines like a savior to him, modeling the astounding heights of not-stealing, of not-beating while being a man. Gary's life changes because he sees a possibility he never saw before. As events unfold, that possibility is embodied in a redemptive act of startling generosity, of genuine salvation.

And Joe chooses to save, not his own flesh and blood, but someone whose life trajectory makes Joe's own fucked-up life look like my wealth and privilege by comparison. If not for Larry Brown, I doubt I'd've made a second's time for these men.

Isn't this what fiction's meant to do? To make us, all of us really but especially the most shockingly privileged among us, pause and allow The Other to take unsentimental shape in our emotions?

Larry Brown did this to me, for me, and I am deeply grateful to him for it.

THE WHISPER MAN, Alex North's debut thriller, has so much more to say than "BOO!"

THE WHISPER MAN
ALEX NORTH
Celadon Books
$26.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this dark, suspenseful thriller, Alex North weaves a multi-generational tale of a father and son caught in the crosshairs of an investigation to catch a serial killer preying on a small town.

After the sudden death of his wife, Tom Kennedy believes a fresh start will help him and his young son Jake heal. A new beginning, a new house, a new town. Featherbank.

But the town has a dark past. Twenty years ago, a serial killer abducted and murdered five residents. Until Frank Carter was finally caught, he was nicknamed "The Whisper Man," for he would lure his victims out by whispering at their windows at night.

Just as Tom and Jake settle into their new home, a young boy vanishes. His disappearance bears an unnerving resemblance to Frank Carter's crimes, reigniting old rumors that he preyed with an accomplice. Now, detectives Amanda Beck and Pete Willis must find the boy before it is too late, even if that means Pete has to revisit his great foe in prison: The Whisper Man.

And then Jake begins acting strangely. He hears a whispering at his window...

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME A REVIEW COPY OF THIS TITLE. THANK YOU.

My Review: The town of Featherbank has this as its primary claim to fame:

If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.
If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.
If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.

You're the young single dad of a weirdo son. You know this town's had five young boys kidnapped, interfered with, and murdered. So what do you do, give the place a three-hundred-mile berth as you decide where to run away from your grief and your complete inability to grok your sweet, sensitive son?

Not if you're Tom Kennedy! You *move*there*to*write*! TSTL, anyone? Exacerbated by the fact your spawn is prime meat for this lunatic?

But he's in jail, the perp's been caught, so there's no risk.

Horseshit, says I, my son and I will be moving to Mallorca or Auckland, NOT FEATHERBANK. However, I possess a strong streak of risk-averse-ness that Pa Kennedy doesn't.

Why'd you read it, I hear the review-readers asking. Knowing what was gonna happen, why put yourself through it, the crowd snorts inwardly.

That was the thing about going to sleep. It kind of scrubbed things. Arguments, worries, whatever. You could be scared or upset about something, and you might think sleep was impossible, but at some point it happened, and when you woke up in the morning the feeling was gone for awhile, like a storm passed during the night.
–and–
Guilt. Fear. Anger. Once loose, any one of them would charge off, dragging the others along like dogs chained in a pack. And that was no good at all.
–and–
It was a daunting prospect, because it was all such a jumble, and there was also so much I didn't know and perhaps never would. But then again, I wasn't sure that in itself was a problem. The truth of something can be in the feeling of it as much as the fact.
–and–
But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been. He had only ever needed to be himself, and it had just taken time—too much time—to understand that.

This is not ground-breaking prose, jaw-dropping insight, beauteous lapidary phrase-making of a high order; it is, instead, the commonplace recognition of Life's Little Thumps said in ways that any one of us can feel, really and viscerally, instead of the more rarefied and intellectual pleasures of Writing for the Critics.

Tom and Jake, and ultimately the male reader whose relationship with his maleness is built on a partial vacuum, are males groping for a point of commonality that is uniquely theirs. The normal female intermediary is gone. Most men don't try very hard to reach around Ma to get to their sons. Tom has no choice. And, haltingly and awkwardly, he makes connections to and bridges with Jake.

That, theydies and gentlethem, is worth reading average-to-good prose and forgiving the *sheer*boggling*idiocy* of moving your son to a town of known serial-killing-boys past. This is a rare thing. This is a love story about a man who works his brain into a frenzy to find a way to let his son know what all sons most want to know:

Daddy loves you.

SHELTER, my General Fiction vote for the Goodreads Choice Awards

SHELTER
JUNG YUN
Picador
$26.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. For years, he and his wife, Gillian, have lived beyond their means. Now their debts and bad decisions are catching up with them, and Kyung is anxious for his family’s future.

A few miles away, his parents, Jin and Mae, live in the town’s most exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by the material comforts that Kyung desires for his wife and son. Growing up, they gave him every possible advantage—private tutors, expensive hobbies—but they never showed him kindness. Kyung can hardly bear to see them now, much less ask for their help. Yet when an act of violence leaves Jin and Mae unable to live on their own, the dynamic suddenly changes, and he’s compelled to take them in. For the first time in years, the Chos find themselves living under the same roof. Tensions quickly mount as Kyung’s proximity to his parents forces old feelings of guilt and anger to the surface, along with a terrible and persistent question: how can he ever be a good husband, father, and son when he never knew affection as a child?

My Review: I voted for this in the 2016 Goodreads choice awards because it was the most interesting novel I'd read among the choices. It wasn't an easy read. I disliked everyone except Ethan Cho, the four-year-old, and given time I'm sure I'd've disliked him too.

What price family? I didn't have a close or happy family. My own parents weren't like the Chos, they were chaotic rather than cruel and cold. But what made the book interesting for me is the way Kyung tries to stop the vicious cycle of chill and distance, and fails again and again. His wife is just as guilty of emotional dysfunction as he is.

When this screwed-up couple is, in simple human decency, required to house the traumatized parents after their luxurious and hollow world cracks wide open, the fun truly begins. Think the set-up's dark? Wait until the parents move in!

The ending is a raggedy-looking bow tied on the fanny of the story which I didn't for one second believe came from any strand in the story itself. I'd still suggest reading it.

MUSIC OF THE SWAMP, a beautiful yet abjectly sad story about a painful subject familiar to all too many

MUSIC OF THE SWAMP
LEWIS NORDAN
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world—always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father—a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book was such a joy to find, to get from the publisher, to read...it has been a perfect experience. It's the twentieth anniversary of the original edition, so I suppose the publisher of all Nordan's work saw a need to fulfill. They've brought out Wolf Whistle and Lightning Song, so why stop now?

Daddy said, "It's funny how you end up somewhere, and then that's your life."

The sheer gorgeousness of the book's prose is no surprise to anyone already familiar with Author Nordan's work. Sugar, our kid narrator, isn't the artificial kind of kid that infests family stories. He's got the fire of a smart, frustrated kid, one who understands just enough to know he's not getting all the story. In the 1950s Mississippi Delta, there's more subtext than anywhere outside Japan.

Above all else, though, is the subject matter...the drunken daddy whose life has kicked him in the balls one too many times...the wearied, nibbled-at soul of a man who didn't get far and couldn't see where else to go. There's a good reason he doesn't really connect with anyone in his family. It's not one you'll find out early in the tales (these are braided stories telling a novel-sized plot) and, when you do find it out, you won't entirely understand the why of some things. I'll say this for Author Nordan's choice here: If these are lightly fictionalized autobiographical sketches there's a darn good reason he drew that veil.

A thousand times, when the train slowed or stopped, I thought of jumping off. I wanted to die in a ditch. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a different history and geography. In rhythm with the wheels I said I want I want I want I want I stayed on the train.

The whole of a person's life is set in childhood, much though we resist that knowledge. The way Sugar loved his Daddy and was not loved in return is the way his own family will turn out. Anyone who's had that kind of family pattern blast its way through our own lives recognizes the unstoppable force of Family History. It takes intentionality, focus, powerful motivation, and a pile of luck to keep the past from repeating itself.

The sound of the rain was without thunder. It was as constant as the feeling of loss that suddenly I felt inside me, that now I knew had been with me all along, a familiar part of me since the beginning of memory.

I would recommend this book to anyone who feels hemmed in, pecked at, torn, or simply needs a respite from daily life. The book is pretty much a perfect meditation on the cost of living an unexamined life!

I wish this story ended more happily than it actually does. All this happened a long time ago, and now I'm middle-aged and have been going to Don't Drink meetings for a good long while myself. There is a good deal of wreckage in my own past, a family I hurt in the same way my father hurt me, and the same way his father hurt him. I tore my children up as fine as cat's hair, you might say.

ROOSEVELT'S BEAST, damn near perfect father-and-son novel

ROOSEVELT'S BEAST
LOUIS BAYARD
St. Martin's Griffin
$22.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 1914. Brazil’s Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt. Plagued by hunger and suffering the lingering effects of malaria, Theodore Roosevelt, his son Kermit, and the other members of the now-ravaged Roosevelt-Rondon scientific expedition are traveling deeper and deeper into the jungle. When Kermit and Teddy are kidnapped by a never-before-seen Amazonian tribe, the great hunters are asked one thing in exchange for their freedom: find and kill a beast that leaves no tracks and that no member of the tribe has ever seen. But what are the origins of this beast, and how do they escape its brutal wrath?

Roosevelt's Beast is a story of the impossible things that become possible when civilization is miles away, when the mind plays tricks on itself, and when old family secrets refuse to stay buried. With his characteristically rich storytelling and a touch of old-fashioned horror, the bestselling and critically acclaimed Louis Bayard turns the story of the well-known Roosevelt-Rondon expedition on its head and dares to ask: Are the beasts among us more frightening than the beasts within?

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER AS PART OF LIBRARY THING'S EARLY REVIEWERS PROGRAM

My Review: Listen to this:

After all these years, his best friend is malaria.
Even on the brink of an Alaska summer, it comes calling: a bone-deep chill one night, a ministry of sweat the next. Calling him back to old battles.

And we're off, down the River of Doubt with Kermit Roosevelt and his famous father (of whom Kermit's eldest half-sister, Alice, said, "Father wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral") and somebody scientific who, frankly, interested me not at all.

Kermit tells us about this factual trip in moderate detail, enough to make the facts of the journey come across as lived, not reported. That's a frequent issue I have with historical fiction, the author's telling of the tale sounds like a highly embellished report and not a novel. Enough is here to make the atmosphere come humidly to life; not so much as to feel ponderous. Here, like this, listen:

Here was the thing about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you'd been traveling; you could never say how long it would be.

It's the precise sort of thing I'd expect the clever son of an overwhelmingly larger-than-life father to say, to focus on distances and travels and quotidian concerns because his giant of a father (Roosevelt was maybe 5'8" in body but 12'12" in spirit) has sucked up the glory-hounding until he's simply got nothing else to think about.

And then on an overnight stop, Kermit and TR are kidnapped by a previously uncontacted native group (I do so loathe the locution "undiscovered tribe"—and who, might one inquire, determined that being contacted was being discovered, like their lives before Europeans showed up weren't real?). Their freedom can only be bought by ridding these people of their monster, a killer of Grendel-ish horrific-ness. Two days the men seek and revoltingly find the Beast's results, and only when they are living out a nightmare of misery and a cleansing, purifying agony of memory and rage do they really encounter the Beast...within, as always.

Both are shattered and neither is ever the same after this trip. (Factual again, after the invented Beast interlude.) Kermit succumbs slowly to the depression and addiction that killed his paternal uncle, and TR himself gives up, defeated for the only time in his life...and by himself, as in the end are we all. TR can't face the even the notion that anyone will ever so much as hear a whisper of his ordeal (oh, and Kermit's, but you know whose rep is foremost on TR's mind):

“You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it...”

A novel of fathers and sons, of myths and monsters, and of identity and fate. It's written in Bayard's accustomed voluptuous prose, and it's got the usual peaks and valley in plotting. I myownself wish that the Beast had been nailed down, shown to be either real or a projection of mass psychosis or a deeply experienced malaria dream. Nonetheless, I'm sure many will find this blurring of borders exactly to their taste, and even those among us for whom that's not the draw to the story needn't let it cause us too much pain. Simply decide for yourself what interpretation you want to put on it, and do so. Bayard's story will support it.

And that's about the best compliment I can give a writer, that one there.

Sexist Nonsense in Beautiful Sentences 13 December 2013

AFTER THE FIRE, A STILL SMALL VOICE
EVIE WYLD
Vintage Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in the haunting landscape of eastern Australia, this is a stunningly accomplished debut novel about the inescapable past: the ineffable ties of family, the wars fought by fathers and sons, and what goes unsaid.

After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank drives out to a shack by the ocean that he had last visited as a teenager. There, among the sugarcane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life.

Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents’ bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he’s drafted to serve in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father.

As these two stories weave around each other–each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce–we learn what binds Frank and Leon together, and what may end up keeping them apart.

My Review: How awful it must be to be heterosexual...to know, with the full force of society's blasting, trumpeting inculcation of knowledge that your Object of Desire will not, can not, indeed may not, ever make sense to you.

Evie Wyld presents the stories of three generations of miserable men and the women they screw up in this, her debut novel. Lady's got guts, let's hand her her just props...she writes of the horrors of war as experienced by these men with the assurance of a far more mature (in experiential terms) writer. She fails signally to give these three generations of men any distinguishing characteristics. She tells the tale through the eyes of two of the three men, in (for no apparent aesthetic or organizational reason) alternating chapters.

She writes well when we're considering lines (plenty of examples, just open the book anywhere and you'll hit a good 'un); but why did Evie Wyld tell this particular story? I don't know. And that, ladies and gents, is a problem.

So am I supposed to think she's brave, for writing about men, or am I supposed to think she's sensitive, for understanding them? I don't think she's brave because she's created one man, a miserable loser with no delusions as to his own adequacy still less superiority; a character who, no matter which name-label she slaps on him, doesn't grow, change, or even demonstrate more than lizard-brain function. I don't think she's sensitive because each and every man she limns is a shit of the first water, abusive of or vampiring off the women in the book.

I'm really, really sick of women portraying men in this light, and then having other women yodel their praises for doing this eternal, socially acceptable hatchet job on men. This book, for reasons I can't understand, is a longlister for the Orange Prize. She's got promise, I grant you, and she's got some native *thing* that makes her place evocations arm-hair-pricklingly good. But this isn't a book I will ever read again, and I don't recommend it.

DEFENDING JACOB, routine courtroom drama redeemed by a wallopin' good ending; Posted 6 April 2013

DEFENDING JACOB
WILLIAM LANDAY
Bantam Books
$17.00 trade paper, $12.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.

My Review: Courtroom legal thriller. Nothing new there.

Redeemed from two-star basement by two things: The ending, which I am surprised to say I didn't see coming. It was a gut-punch.

And also two quotes, things I closed the book and nodded sagely after reading, things that were So Well Said I had to take a pause for absorption:

It was as if there was a place called After, and if I could just push my family across to that shore, then everything would be all right. There would be time for all these "soft" problems in the land of After.

Yes, yes, anyone who has ever lived through A Tragedy knows this feeling intimately, knows how this sentence encapsulates the aching need to be normal and better and fixed...that never comes....

And this:

At some point as adults we we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.

Anyone who has read some of my more dyspeptic posts on Facebook will realize how little I think of the adolescent exceptionalism that pervades our adult culture. You don't have a *right* to own a gun, unless you're in a "well-regulated militia," you have a stupid-ass paranoid fear that results from imaging They are out to get you. It's a symptom of a brand of stupid arrogant vanity, a sense of self as Uniquely Valuable, that is ridiculous and borderline mentally ill.

No one is so damned important that They are Out To Get You. And that sentence, that piece of Landay's wisdom, explains why it should be okay to say "Oh just STFU and grow up!" to more people more often.

Anyway. Up from a rocklike two all the way to three and a quarter stars. An enjoyable read redeemed by surprise and wisdom...helluva job, Landay!

2020 UPDATE FOUR TV-SERIES STARS Chris Evans plays Andy Barber with a complexity and focus that made me invest even more heavily in the AppleTV+ adaptation than I had in the book (as the ending approached). I like Mr. Evans's style of acting in general, but he sets the knobs to 11 and then wraps every-damn-thing in lead shielding as Andy's universe shreds...and then there's the slightly altered ending, which was pretty big stuff for Evans to play.

Still, eight episodes was two too many in my estimation, leading Michelle Dockery's performance as Laurie Barber to wear thin. It's hard to watch her reach deeper and deeper into herself and come back with much the same intensity...nonetheless, anything mildly critical I say shouldn't keep you from signing up for the free trial, binging the series, then canceling. Whatever you do, don't give those sleazebags any more of your money than is impossible to avoid.