STEVEN ROWLEY'S PAGE: a novel about testing your experience of love and a novella about being tested by love's lies

TAKE ME WITH YOU
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A poignant, hilarious, and wholly original love story, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor.

College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband Norman get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and . . . disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly . . . will he ever return? Jesse knew they were longing for something, both feeling stuck. But had Norman been so stuck that his only option was to leave Jesse behind?

As Jesse struggles to understand Norman’s disappearance, he tries to piece together his new reality. Is he expected to wait patiently for a partner who may never come back? Or is this an opportunity for reinvention? He is, after all, alone for the first time in his adult life. Should he return to the classroom? Put in a pool? Get a dog? Call his estranged mother? What does it mean to be alone when you’ve always been one half of a whole?

When Norman’s sister Lally lands on Jesse’s doorstep with an urgent request, Norman’s absence becomes even more profound. Add to Jesse’s grief and confusion a conspiracy-theorist neighbor, a strange man following him, and suspicions that he may have had a hand in Norman’s disappearance, and Jesse starts to crack under the pressure. With his husband missing and the world closing in, all eyes are on Jesse. Before he can understand how Norman could leave it all behind, Jesse must confront what it means to stay.

In Take Me With You, Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story—an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.

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

My Review: Being left as a subject for comedy makes more sense to me now that I've left and been left often enough to really *get* why people leave. Jesse and Norman, after a lifetime together, are...ordinary. They don't have the most exciting life but they're...contented. A perfect meet-cute sets them off on a long voyage of comfortable ordinariness. The voyage ends when Norman debarks their cruise ship in a spectacular way.

What follows is Jesse's journey through grief. Where'd he go...why'd he go...is he coming back....

Reckoning up a lifetime's happy domesticity in the ruins of abandonment shouldn't be funny. Often enough it's not. Often enough it is...this is Steven Rowley, after all...but it's muted, it's in the brightly lit pastels of these men's Joshua Tree homeplace. I got to the ending and thought, "if anyone says 'don't panic' I will riot" but no, no indeed, just a very endearing flashback and some rollerblades.

It's not the same as Author Rowley has given us in tje past, it's maybe not his tippy-top form, at least for my taste; but I am happier, I am more at one with my contentment than I was before I read it.

I call that an excellent return on time invested.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE DOGS OF VENICE
STEVEN ROWLEY
G.P. Putnam's Sons (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebok, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants and The Guncle, a heartwarming story about finding oneself in one of the most romantic cities on Earth.

After months of planning a romantic holiday getaway in Venice, Paul is blindsided when his five-year marriage suddenly unravels. Fueled by heartbreak, Paul endeavors to take the trip alone.

Soon after arriving in Italy, he notices a small, scruffy, self-assured dog trotting alongside a canal with the confidence he so desperately wants for himself. When their paths cross again, Paul feels compelled to learn how his new four-legged friend thrives on his own. Amid the food, sights, and welcoming people of Venice, Paul’s journey culminates in a magical encounter that leads him to feel real connection—to a dog, to a foreign city and, most importantly, to himself.

Capturing Steven Rowley's signature wit, insight, and indelible characters, The Dogs of Venice offers another timeless story of love lost, and independence found—a holiday tonic for the soul.

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

My Review: What an awful December Paul is having: the collapse of his love; the need to hide from his lovely supportive friends while the wounds that Christastime-dealt betrayal gave flensed him to the bone start to heal; because let's be so real here...he has to go on the not-romantic-anymore trip to Venice that he planned to take with Darren, the now-ex, at a some expense so he's not around as Darren moves out, which...acceptable. He's rented a cool apartment though it turns out his landlady's got zero English and this presents some amusing miscommunications.

Also, as ways to re-enter singlehood go, a trip to Venice is fire. Most romantic sinking ruin since Atlantis, plus hot Italian guys? Sign me up for the broken-heart tour. Paul even succumbs to the sensualty of Venice by having a fling. I was glad it was just that, a fling, and at the end of the story Paul takes home some lonely introspective walks with one of Venice's stray dogs, some fairly basic grief-processing that gave me very mild hope for his post-Darren future, and a real sadness that there's such a homeless-hound problem in Venice.

I don't think this is peak Rowley, but I do think it was 93 minutes very well spent. It took me away from my deeply grouchy mood that's hung over since yesterday. For that alone, I'd give it four stars; it deserves them more for the way a slightly co-dependent man starts facing up to the cost of couplehood über alles and starting out on the path of learning how much alone gives and how little loneliness is actually in it.

THE NEW LIFE, debut fiction that feels very real, polished, and poignant

THE NEW LIFE
TOM CREWE
Scribner
$28.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A brilliant and captivating debut, in the tradition of Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Tóibín, about two marriages, two forbidden love affairs, and the passionate search for social and sexual freedom in late 19th-century London.

In this powerful, visceral novel about love, sex, and the struggle for a better world, two men collaborate on a book in defense of homosexuality, then a crime—risking their old lives in the process.

In the summer of 1894, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin writing a book arguing that what they call “inversion,” or homosexuality, is a natural, harmless variation of human sexuality. Though they have never met, John and Henry both live in London with their wives, Catherine and Edith, and in each marriage there is a third party: John has a lover, a working class man named Frank, and Edith spends almost as much time with her friend Angelica as she does with Henry. John and Catherine have three grown daughters and a long, settled marriage, over the course of which Catherine has tried to accept her husband’s sexuality and her own role in life; Henry and Edith’s marriage is intended to be a revolution in itself, an intellectual partnership that dismantles the traditional understanding of what matrimony means.

Shortly before the book is to be published, Oscar Wilde is arrested. John and Henry must decide whether to go on, risking social ostracism and imprisonment, or to give up the project for their own safety and the safety of the people they love. Is this the right moment to advance their cause? Is publishing bravery or foolishness? And what price is too high to pay for a new way of living?

A richly detailed, insightful, and dramatic debut novel, The New Life is an unforgettable portrait of two men, a city, and a generation discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom as the 20th century comes into view.

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

My Review: First, read this:

How to define extremity? The greatest extremity? Lust, not as quickened heartbeat or dizzy possibility, but as lagging sickness, a lethargy. Lust as slow poisoning. Lust as a winter coat worn in summer, never to be taken off. Lust as a net, cast wide, flashing silver, impossible to pull in. Lust as a thousand twitching, tightening strings, sensitive to every breeze. Lust as a stinking, secret itch. Lust carried leadenly in the day, dragged to bed. Lust at four in the morning, spent chokingly into a nightshirt. Lust as a liquid mess, dragged into your beard, drying into tendrils, the smell trapped in your nostrils.

In that passage from the very beginning of the book you are clear what this book's greatest strengths...specificity and sensory evocation...are, and what its weakness is: prolixity. (One fewer. Just...one fewer.)

But as a novel, on every story-based measure of characterization, action, world-building (late Victorian London is, in fact, as alien from our world as any spaceship), this first effort from Author Crewe is a wild success. As a salvo notifying us of the arrival of a new vessel, it's head-and-shoulders above most of what I've read in the past few years.

A fictionalization of two real people, who in this book do not meet but do collaborate on an extremely provocative and daring text...Sexual Inversion was its title...that dealt frankly and openly with the shocking idea that homosexual desire is not a perversion but an inversion, an opposite force, to the common-or-garden heterosexual variety of desire. In our rather less interesting realm of blah reality, the two never even corresponded that anyone is aware of. It's to be assumed each had heard of the other, being rather well-known people, but there is not a scintilla of a fact in this story's imagining of the literary work that John and Henry get committed to paper.

Poignantly, Henry Ellis isn't what we'd call gay, but a urophilic heterosexual; it wouldn't send him to jail, like sex with men would John Addington, but it would get him talked about and ostracized. The points of connection between the characters are real, and in Henry's case stem from a sincerely held belief that no one should be shamed for consensual sexual desires. In the 1890s. In LONDON, stuffiest and second-most perverted (Paris, of course, was first) of international brothels. We haven't come to terms with that radical idea yet and it's the third decade of the twenty-first century!

Henry and John's book is cursed, in a sense; it's coming to light at exactly the moment the world's spotlight of attention is glaring on Oscar Wilde's trial for "gross indecency," that most cishet male of crimes. (I mean, the Boer War was grossly indecent, the Native Genocide in the US was grossly indecent, but fucking a man who wants you to do it?) They're all the way through writing it and there's even a publisher willing to publish it. But is this the responsible thing for a family man (John) to do at this juncture? His daughters will likely suffer for the daring act. His wife will most certainly suffer more, and she is one whose suffering has been extraordinarily difficult because, of necessity, it's done in private and John is a scion of privilege as all men are. He isn't unsympathetic to her suffering through their marriage; he feels quite guilty about it; but it does not feel real to him because he is in no way aware of what a woman—any woman at all—confronts and endures by virtue of her sex. Blind, oblivious to his world of mind-bending luxury, he is gobsmacked when his wife demands that he consider her suffering as suffering, even saying to him that she is a receptacle "fitted to receive your waste." That statement, like the concept it arises from, is utterly devastating from any angle you look at it.

So too the Ellises are in some peril if the book comes out. Edith Ellis is a lesbian, and a campaigner for women's rights. Henry is a species of fraud, an expert on sex without a dog in the fight, so to speak, by dint of his virgin's estate. Still, knowledge does not need to be practical or no one would study particle physics. Their, um, unconventional set-up is so by design and not, like the Addingtons' ménage, a jerry-rigged response to reality's exigencies.

The famous Wilde trial, despite its centrality to the events of the novel, appears nowhere on the pages. I was surprised to note this as I finished the read. I'd expected some of it to appear and none except its fact as an occurrence ever did. This, after a moment's contemplation, made me very happy. We're fictionalizing the past any time we read about it, but I think Author Crewe's choice to leave this huge and celebrated event as, more or less, background noise was spot on. This kind of focus, of disciplined intentional limiting of field, isn't common in beginners. It was a delight to find it here.

I did mention that prolixity issue. The novel's about sexuality, and in a time of even greater repression than we are in at present. The sexual events are within the bounds of modern acceptability standards for a novel. They aren't in any unusual configurations for twenty-first century readers of even the most superficial sophistication. They aren't prurient, as in looking on from a remove and deriving judgmental or pleasurable titillation from the acts. But they, like so many things in the novel, are just that three-word clause, that one-too-manyeth ellipsis, too long. As one routinely tutted at for being wordy, I totally empathize. I did find myself thinking, "okay, enough now," more often than I expected to in a book professionally edited.

But, and this is important!, none of that made me feel frustrated or took me away from my focus on the story unfolding. It is a very good story. It speaks, through voices long dead, of the world of today as it was in its borning moments. It is a fine and worthy addition to your To Be Reads if you are at all interested in Victorian sexuality, the price of honesty within relationships, and the incalculable costs in unhappiness and suffering of enforcing conformity.

ASK AGAIN, YES is a deeply felt, carefully observed, and difficult to read tale of family crises

ASK AGAIN, YES
MARY BETH KEANE
Scribner
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A profoundly moving novel about two neighboring families in a suburban town, the friendship between their children, a tragedy that reverberates over four decades, the daily intimacies of marriage, and the power of forgiveness. How much can a family forgive?

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope, rookie cops in the NYPD, live next door to each other outside the city. What happens behind closed doors in both houses—the loneliness of Francis's wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian's wife, Anne, sets the stage for the explosive events to come.

Ask Again, Yes is a deeply affecting exploration of the lifelong friendship and love that blossoms between Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, born six months apart. One shocking night their loyalties are divided, and their bond will be tested again and again over the next 40 years. Luminous, heartbreaking, and redemptive, Ask Again, Yes reveals the way childhood memories change when viewed from the distance of adulthood—villains lose their menace and those who appeared innocent seem less so. Kate and Peter’s love story, while haunted by echoes from the past, is marked by tenderness, generosity, and grace.

I DON'T REMEMBER WHO GAVE ME THIS LOVELY BOOK, BUT THANK YOU!

My Review: I'm not a spoilerphobe, as I've mentioned before, but there are certain events in this book that it would just rot on ice for you not to see for yourself for the first time. So there will be some tap-dancing around some events.

What matters to me in a read, the thing I seek and must find or I'm put out and feel I've been hard done by, is the sense that I'm seeing characters make efforts, take chances, do things, and as a result of whatever combination of those things the author chooses, they need to change. Not necessarily dramatically, or for the better or for the worse. But there needs to be some perceptible alteration in that character's life, sense of purpose, or station.

That is very much not a problem in this story.

Immigrant Francis is Irish to his core. He moves to New York because 1970s Ireland was not the Celtic Tiger it became decades on. His adjustment to American manners and mores wasn't easy on him, but he fell in love with the right woman and built a life with her. So that base is solid, right?

It is a truth universally recognized that people are their own worst enemies. Actions that seem, in the moment, inevitable or destined to occur are deeply stupid and cause problems it's hard to imagine. Yet here we are, with only the moment to live and as often as not without a clear understanding of the past to build on. As Author Keane says, "We repeat what we don't repair." That just rang me like a bell the first time I read it. Such a lovely, distilled way to say the truth as I've learned it the hard way.

The quiet of the house when she kept to her room was not the peaceful silence of a library, or anywhere near as tranquil. It was...more like the held-breath interlude between when a button gets pushed and the bomb either detonates or is defused. He could feel his own heartbeat at those times. He could track his blood as it looped through his veins.

Families are the prime breeding ground for things that need repair. Most often we don't see that...in ourselves, of course, since it's incredibly easy to see in others and there's even this thing called "fiction" to feed our schadenfreude watching others screw up chances to repair the damage done to us. But some damage is done in some families that is, in the truest sense of these words, irreparable and unforgivable. That's when the stories get really good.

Telling her, bringing that story to England, spoiled England for her. When she left for America two years later, she knew she would be smarter. She'd bring none of Ireland with her.

But no matter where you go, there you are, right? Our selves and our bodies are coterminous if not identical, where one goes there the other is as well. It's not always that great a feeling. But unless we repair the breaks, well...you're adults, you know already. And how sad, how burdensome is that knowledge.

The burden travels down generational rivers, too. In this story, Peter the son of truly miserable man and truly evil woman, falls for Kate the daughter of stoic parents whose inability to communicate doesn't keep them from mangling each other. There's a bad patch (!!) and the young people are separated against their wills; there's a reunion, and what flowers is a very beautiful blossom of hope and love.

He dreamed of sharing an apartment with Kate someday, coming home to her each evening and telling her about his day, hearing about hers, going to bed naked with the covers pulled up to their chins, feeling her warm skin next to his when he woke up every morning.
–and–
If they could do all those things and pay their bills and not dread going to work each morning, coming home each night, then that was a life. That was a great life, in Kate’s view. What else could there be? If they reminded themselves that these small things were enough, she believed, then they’d always be okay.

They're having different relationships. That's so often the way with couples, and sadly most often between couples freshly in love. The true emotional core of the party of the second part isn't always easy to reach, but the fact is most people don't really even ever try. It's hard. It's vulnerable. It's often met with anger or rejection or outrage. Who tries, they are abusive! Intrusive! I need my space! Who resists, they are elusive! They are secretive! Why won't you trust me and let me in?

Surviving those shoals, accommodating each other and bending to and fro, allowance-making and temperature-taking, survival...until new shoals hove into view as soon as the seas looked smooth.

And then she saw it so clearly, the whole trajectory of their lives, a twin flare of lights against the gunmetal winter sky: we're born, we get sick, we die. Beginning, middle, end. She saw her life as if held aloft by her own hand, and in an instant it spun away from her. Where did she want it to land? She was in the middle. The exact middle. Peter too. How could she have failed to notice that the beginning had come to an end?
–and–
It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, he knew. It was that she loved him so much that it frightened her, loved him so much that she worried she might have to protect herself from it. He tried to let her know that he’d figured that out, finally, that there was no need to explain, but then he realized that she might not know it herself.

It is a damn difficult thing to keep being in a present-tense relationship with someone over a long period of time.

They'd both learned that a memory is a fact that has been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room or anyone who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.

Allow this novel's steady pace to lead you where the story goes. Possess your soul in patience, don't get agitated and skip and flip; stand on the grass with Author Keane. Make a memory. Make it well.

THE LONG DRY, a speculative take on the life of a farmer after March 11's solar storm

THE LONG DRY 

CYNAN JONES 

Coffee House Press 

$15.95 trade paper, available now 

Rating: 5* of five 

The Publisher Says: THE ANIMAL FACTS OF HUMAN LIFE—NEED, LOVE, CHILDREN, EXHAUSTION, INCAPACITY, DEATH—COME ALIVE IN ONE FARMER’S LONG, HOT DAY. On a long, hot day, Gareth searches for a missing pregnant cow. A dog must be put down, there are ducks to go in the pond, there are children, and there is Kate, his wife, who may be an uncrossable distance from him. Jones’s rural Wales is alive with the necessities of our own animal instincts and most human longing. 

THE PUBLISHER SENT ME AN ARC. THANK YOU. 

 My Review: Every part of this book is as concentrated and as perfect as Mrs Dalloway or Montana 1948 is. I am so delighted to re-read it and find more than I saw the first time through.

Over the hills behind the farm the light started. Just a thinning of the very black night that made the stars twinkle more, vibrate like a bird's throat, and put out a light loud compared to their tininess.

Like those brief, compact stories, The Long Dry is without waste and bedizenment. The language is perfectly clear, the sentences flow elegantly, the imagery and the observation so sharp you can cut yourself on them but not feel it until later. A simple story, like all the best ones are; a man owns a farm, loses a calf, then a cow, then a dog, then a life. What it means to lose a life...it sounds almost casual, "go back and pick it up, silly"...is what Author Jones explores in his trademark beautiful sentences. I can't induce you harder than that. Beautiful books happen seldom enough that I am always hopeful they'll simply levitate in front of people as they're browsing for their next read, that some fanfare will blare through their speakers when cruising online, sourceless recommendations that simply demand the fractured attention of 2020 people. A thirteen-year-old book. Yeah, right. But it should. It deserves your eyeblinks. Now, for the many people think short = good, or short = bad, in point of fact short is just a thing a story is or isn't. This one, of necessity, is.

He worries about his ability to fight for things when he is tired like this, from not sleeping, and from being worried always about tiny things—his ability to navigate a tragedy, or news of an illness. The world, he thinks, is filled with such unbelievable small heroisms, which to him have always seemed far more remarkable than the huge heroisms, of history. Somehow, we find the strength, he thinks.

Unpack that at any length, and there's a new volume of War and Peace in the world and, frankly, one is enough. But stated with the simplicity of words carved in granite, where the effort of creation is so immense that it can't be cavalierly sloshed in oceans of ink and gales of breath, it repays brevity. Curtness. What it lacks in volume it repays in depth. 

 Gareth was born on this farm to a father who served in World War II. His father's tragedies are now passing before Gareth's sleepless eyes in the form of his memoirs...memories, as Gareth needs to think of them to make them more his father's and not imposed on him from outside...and the present mingles with the past, the secrets he's kept from Kate, his wife, and she from him. Their son, their daughter, are part of their world so evanescently...though there is a hint that Dylan, the son, will not be able to break from his ties...where the cows and the sheep and the forms of the land are intensely molded into the flowing curves of Gareth's being. 

As one expects from Author Cynan Jones, the weight of the world isn't absent from any of these characters. In so many ways, as Gareth navigates the ever-worsening crisis of his life, he relives his father's trauma and atones for his load of self-applied sin.

We're expected to love too much and too long. He mustn't be like this, he thinks, he mustn't let this dark thing take him: this ever-hungry, very close big cloud of not caring anymore, and of not wanting. This is the enemy that must be fought until the end.

The depression of a man at the rag-end of his tether.

"It's raining," he says, and she can hardly hear him.

Those are the last words of the book. But they are not the end of the story. There is, in fact, an end; in a decision I didn't understand the first time I read this book, it comes elsewhere. It is, in fact, necessary for you to know the ending before the last words of the book because otherwise we will lose something precious: The wonder, the valor of going on.

{His child} says she doesn't have the right pencils for the colors she sees.

They can't make those colors, you see, because pencil colors are only the ones you see.

THE LEISURE SEEKER, soon to be a major (indie) motion picture! Helen Mirren! Donald Sutherland!

THE LEISURE SEEKER
MICHAEL ZADOORIAN
William Morrow
$15.99 trade paper, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE! (non-affiliate Amazon link)

Rating: 4.25* of five

***UPDATE! AVAILABLE ON STARZ & AMAZON PRIME!


***UPDATE 10/3/2017 Here's a clip that makes me really hopeful for the film's fidelity to the source material. And here's an Hollywood Reporter interview with Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland! Dream casting!***


**UPDATE 11/10/2016 A feature film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland will debut in the US during 2017. Talk about dream casting for your novel's movie! I hope Michael Zadoorian is as well served by the screenwriters and producers as he stands to be by his characters' faces.**

The Publisher Says: A sort of Easy Rider meets The Notebook, Michael Zadoorian’s poignant, funny, vibrant, and unforgettable novel, The Leisure Seeker, is a story of two seniors who escape from their retirement home and embark upon a hilarious and touching end-of-life road trip. Here is a story that will appeal to a wide range of readers: from retiring Baby Boomers to fans of Mitch Albom, Tom Perotta, David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, and Nicholas Sparks. In fact, the Detroit Free Press says, “I would recommend Michael Zadoorian’s The Leisure Seeker to almost anyone.”

My Review: The Robinas got old one day. They couldn't tell you which day, exactly...he has Alzheimer's, she's just old and frankly after a certain point who can tell the days apart anyway?...but it happened, and now, well, The End isn't on the horizon anymore, it's on the to-do list.

Three quotes will tell you all that you need to know about this book. If they fail to appeal, so will this wry, loving, unsparing look at the parade's end:

“We pass a church with a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I’m not, for crying out loud. Don’t be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life.”(p37)

“I think about the people in the slides, most of them gone now, heart attacks and cancers, betrayed by the foods we ate, by our La-Z-Boys, by our postwar contentment, everyone getting larger and larger in every year’s photographs, our prosperity gone wide.” (p57)


“We pass on the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore. I never much cared for the man. A big phony, I believe. Anyone who never met a man he didn’t like just isn’t trying hard enough.” (p79)

Seriously...tell me that's not pitch-perfect coming from a thirtysomething writer's imagination. The Robinas are delightful company on their last trip.