Sing, Unburied, Sing served as my introduction to Jesmyn Ward, and it quickly became apparent what all the fuss is about. The novel is crafted from distinctive prose that’s at once poetic and blunt, a voice that’s able to capture not just the struggles that exist within families but throughout contemporary America. It pulls off the tricky task of using an intimate study of single family to explore huge themes across several hundred years of history.

Ward is also an expert in creating a sense of place, conjuring the sights and sounds and smells of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. Some of these evocations are good and rich with a sense of nostalgia, like “the smell of onions and garlic, bell pepper, and celery cooked in butter [that] clouds the air” in the kitchen. But others are not good, a reminder of the harsh realities these characters have to live in. Perhaps the best example of this is the opening scene which depicts the slaughter of a goat, described by the young narrator:

“The smell overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit. It smells like foragers, dead and rotting out in the thick woods, when the only sign of them is the stink and the buzzards rising and settling and circling. It stinks like possums or armadillos smashed half flat on the road, rotting in asphalt and heat. But worse. This smell is worse; it’s the smell of death, the rot coming from something just alive, something hot with blood and life.”

The story centres on Jojo, a thirteen year old boy who’s trying to accelerate his journey into manhood to care for his young sister, and his mother Leonie, who’s locked in eternal struggle with herself, the people around her, and her drug habit. Add to that Pop, Leonie’s stoic father, who is (almost literally) haunted by the tragedy and violence of his youth, and Mam, her mother, who is bedridden with an excruciatingly painful terminal illness. A difficult situation is made worse when the children’s father is released from the prison, and Leonie drags them on a road trip across the state to retrieve him.

The sheer weight of the effects of racism on these characters is crushing, the entirely ordinary and believable people portrayed more like the doomed figures from some ancient epic. On the surface Leonie has few redeeming features, a young woman who shows little love to her children, and who takes every opportunity to take out her anger on them. But, by the end of the story, the reasons for this become clear, and it’s hard to blame her for any of her shortcomings. From personal pain of the sudden death of her brother and the abrupt and uneasy transition into motherhood, to the exhausting daily quest for even a scrap of basic dignity and the momentary relief of drugs, its clear that she is a person, one of many, who is battling against a system that has been designed to keep her in chains.

But, of course, Jojo’s anger at his mother is understandable. He is one of the bravest protagonists of recent times, a boy who is forced to steal food from gas stations and secretly feed it to his famished baby sister, who endures the savage treatment of a suspicious cop, and who is covered in vomit more times than anyone deserves. Through conversations with his grandfather he begins to grasp the the horror and brutality of their cultural history, a revelation that leads to a major plot point near the end of the book, a strand that plays out something like Lincoln in the Bardo meets Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad.

Sing, Unburied, Sing is a tale of hardship and pain that’s stitched with a silvery thread of magic, but perhaps little hope. As Ward says in a Q&A with The Guardian, “Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It’s tiring.”

It’s out now on Bloomsbury (UK) and Scribner / Simon and Schuster (US).

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Jennifer Egan – Manhattan Beach

Corsair / Scribner

“Beneath the exciting plot and readable prose, Egan is still examining the modes and consequences of power in the United States. As such, Manhattan Beach is the introduction to the Look At Me‘s conclusion, the two texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.”

REVIEW

Steve Erickson – Shadowbahn

Blue Rider Press

“In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers return, fully formed, in the middle of the Dakota Badlands. Thousands are drawn to this “American Stonehenge,” and rumours start of a figure on the upper floors. This person, we find out, is Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of Elvis—a man with no singing voice haunted by the spectre of his brother, and the memory of a parallel America where Elvis was never born. Growing increasingly strange, the dream-like novel charts the movement of several characters through this world, where a second reality impinges on our own, as though the line between two dimensions has grown porous, slowly melding into one.” (Taken from our review of Protomartyr’s Relatives In Descent).

Ottessa Moshfegh – Homesick for Another World

Jonathan Cape

“I don’t know what they teach you in Utah,” warns an elderly gossip column writer in one of the stories from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, “but even Jesus would get greedy here.” Similarly black and bleak, the entire collection is built on characters who, in one way or another, are reaching a point of unbearable tension within their current state. From the alcoholic, grade-fudging teacher of opener ‘Bettering Myself’ to the wannabee actor and  of ‘The Weirdos’, the people here are somehow jarred slightly out of reality, lost within the only world they know, or reaching a fatal point of self-destruction—exploding in some great flash of light or disintegrating into dust and shifted high on the wind. Consistently funny and sad and interesting, Homesick cements Moshfegh’s position as one of the best writers plying their trade right now.

Gabe Habash – Stephen Florida

Coffee House Press

Stephen Florida follows the final year of a lonely young wrestler in a North Dakota college, the last chance to achieve his dream of winning the Division IV NCAA Championship. Evoking the likes of DeLillo‘s Logos College and Wallace’s Enfield Tennis Academy, the college is a paradoxical blend of logic and madness, the ascetic athletic routine straining around the neurotic inner lives of the athletes, the competition between the boys blossoming into obsession and violence. Florida himself is either the ultimate unreliable narrator, or the most reliable narrator literature has ever seen, sucking us into his strange life and having us root for him, no matter how futile we both realise the quest to be.

Chavisa Woods – Things To Do When You’re a Goth in the Country

Seven Stories Press

“The stories are a reminder that despite much of the bluster and bravado it presents internationally, America is a dense mosaic of misfits, many of whom are trapped in damaging cycles by powers beyond their control. Whether dealing with war, drugs, queer relationships or, well… being a goth in the country, Chavisa Woods achieves a tone that’s simultaneously streetwise and sympathetic, and is exactly the kind of fiction we’re going to need to get us through currents times.”

REVIEW

Daniel Magariel – One of the Boys

Granta

Short, sharp and striking, Magariel’s debut One of the Boys blends sensitivity and ferocity to explore the relationship between two young boys and their abusive father. Fleeing their mother (inventing stories of maltreatment to gain custody), the volatile dad drives his sons to Albuquerque, promising a tight-knit relationship and a better life. But instead he slowly descends into the nadir of addiction, leaving the brothers to navigate the complexities of adult life alone, learning the importance of the unsaid, the truth behind closed doors.

Joseph Scapellato – Big Lonesome

Mariner Books

“Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.”

REVIEW

Omar El Akkad – American War

Picador / Knopf

“For all of its futuristic flourishes, this war could be any number of places from the past fifty years. The refugee camps, the suicide bombers, the baseless incarceration and torture. The distant foreign concern, the malicious intervention. The self-perpetuating violence. Angry young people killing angry young people, creating more angry young people. So, beneath the YA-style coming-of-age plot and sci-fi dressing, the novel is a study of radicalisation, of finding identity and purpose within chaos through unflinching world views and gestures of loyalty.”

REVIEW

George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo

Bloomsbury

“The majority of the action takes place in a state of existence between life and whatever comes next. The space is laid over our own, the spirits that inhabit it able to see the real world and pass across it, but unable to successfully interact with anything tangible, or communicate with anyone living. The result is a frustrating and confusing isolation, where words can be voiced but not heard, gestured made but never quite received. They are, therefore, left as bewildered viewers of the living, incapable of altering their paths and decisions, and wondering when, if ever, something might change.” (Taken from our review of Friendship’s Shock out of Season).

Nathan Hill – The Nix

Picador

“Hill is dedicated to the Wallacean endeavor of sincerity while simultaneously warning of the dangers that arise from a complete suspension of skepticism and irony. The Nix enacts a constantly revolving committal to criticism and skepticism coupled with attempts at understanding and empathy, a perpetual readjustment of the scales so that neither irony nor sincerity can gain detrimental prevalence.” (From a piece for Critique).

 Chanelle Benz – The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

Ecco

The debut collection of stories by Chanelle Benz, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead stretches across eras, places and styles to become one of the most diverse and wide-ranging books of the year. From Western bank hold-ups and contemporary wanderers to Middle Eastern subterfuge and a metafictional pastiche/parody of Gothic romance classics, the structure, tone and content veers from piece to piece, leaving it unclear quite where Benz’s true voice will settle, but offering a handful of viable avenues for the future.

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Us Conductors is Michaels’s first novel. Set in both Russia and New York in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the tale of Lev Sergeyevich Termen, a Russian scientist and inventor, who lived a rather extraordinary life. Just how closely Michaels sticks to the facts is left unclear (at least until an authors note which appears after the postscript), but I would advise anyone looking for a 100% historically accurate account of Termen’s story to look elsewhere (Michaels even points you to the definitive text). Not that Michaels is at all disingenuous about this fact, indeed the book opens with the note, “This book is mostly inventions,” although I suppose that in itself holds more than one truth.

Termen is most famous for his invention of the theremin, one of the very first electronic musical instruments and probably the only instrument that requires no physical contact from its player. The sounds are created as the performer moves his or her hands near the instrument’s two antennae, creating a sound that is quite unlike that of anything else. As Michaels puts it:

“The sound of the theremin is simply pure electric current. It is the hymn of lightning as it hides in its cloud. The song never strains or falters; it persists, stays, keeps, lasts, lingers.”

The novel follows Termen’s rise from a promising young scientist at Petrograd University, to a Manhattan celebrity both in the worlds of science and entertainment. Its important to note that the image of the theremin was (understandably) very different in Termen’s day. While it is now best recognized as something from kitschly creepy Hollywood sci-fi (as well as the soundtrack to the UK’s most violent fictional county), at the time of its inception the instrument was seen as something bordering on the supernatural, these strange shrill sounds seemingly pulled directly from the ether. Listeners react in a multitude of ways. Some are amazed and delighted, while others are less than sure. Take for instance the passage in which Termen demonstrates the instrument to Charlie Chaplin:

But when the sounds started, DZEEEEOOOoo […] Charlie gasped so loudly that [RCA corporation salesman] Len turned off the machine […] Chaplin was as pale as chalk […] the actor was plainly terrified. The best-known phantom in the world, a man who had made his fortune as an illusion projected onto silver screens-he was scared of this box of ghosts

And Chaplin isn’t the only familiar face that Termen’s new-found fame brings him into contact with. He meets Glenn Miller and Gershwin, Ellington and Rachmaninoff, talks science with Rutherford and Einstein and even provides a demonstration for a certain revolutionary in his homeland. But to Termen all of these names pale in comparison to one person he meets in New York, the young violinist and eventual theremin virtuoso Clara Reisenberg, with whom he falls immediately in love. Much of the novel is written in the first person, as a letter from Lev in which Clara is often referred to as “you”, and the entire book (and indeed Termen’s entire life) is preoccupied with thoughts of this girl from Lithuania.

Termen is a budding young Russian exposed to the grand decadence and impossible promises of American life, a collision of innocent romantic ideals and solipsism born out of brilliance. Imagine a combination of Josef from Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay and the all-too-human geniuses from Powers’s Gold Bug Variations and Galatea 2.2, men with intellect, with weaknesses, with the gift of ambition or the curse of obsession. That said, the reader’s sympathies lie with Termen throughout the book, his belief in the impractical and delicate forces of art and love proving naive yet noble in the face of the twin behemoths capitalism and communism.

And it is within the impractical and the delicate that the heart of the book lies. Faced with various systems of order, Termen gives himself to the spontaneous. The random, accidental nature of human connection and the wonder of unseeable, unconquerable forces, something his instrument embodies. The theremin is the perfect subject for Michaels, a man who sees magic in things, but perhaps not the obvious magic. Just like Michaels in his music reviews, Termen finds himself acting upon mystical forces rather than practical details, taking delight in the unexplainable, his knowledge of the component parts creating something that exceeds them in both scope and beauty.

The novel’s style mirrors this idea. Michaels’s prose is clipped and elegant, sentences like little staticky spits and sparks which both descriptively and structurally capture the electricity that lies at the heart of everything Termen does. The scientist’s persona is captured with the utmost subtlety, his sharp, original observations clearly those of a man who think outside the box. The style is a real winner, proving not only immensely readable but prone to moments of true beauty – discrete declarations, although simple when read alone, assembled into intricate, poetic passages, not unlike the components of Termen’s incredible machines. Take, for example, this piece in which Termen describes his incarceration on board a Soviet ship:

Some nights on the Starry Bolshevik, I can hear sounds from outside. I press my ear to the steel and beyond the groans of the ship, the screws loosening and tightening in the walls, I hear gulls. They cry and whistle. Other times I hear whales; I think they are whales; it is a moaning in four colours. My ear is pressed to the steel and I hear this calling like many callings folded together. Ancient blues, greys, scarlets, golds, on top of one another, in a chord. One day I will make a piano that plays the echoes of whales

It should be noted that Us Conductors is not all love and beauty and invention. The volatile politics of Termen’s homeland, alongside his position of influence in America, lure him into very dangerous territory. Business deals and visa arrangements are revealed to have multitudes of connotations as our plucky inventor is drawn into the fog of the dawning Cold War. The second part of the book spirals into nightmare as Termen is forced to endure what proves to be the polar equivalent of hell, and Michaels displays a gift for far more than pretty prose. But even the story’s darkest moments hold a flicker, jolts of pure inspiration, flares of that irrepressible electrical energy that drove Termen forward.

Us Conductors is out now on Bloomsbury here in the UK. Readers from the USA can get it courtesy of Tin House Books, and Canadians from Random House. The novel also won the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most lucrative literary award. It deserved it.

P.S. If you are in Scotland at the end of August, Michaels is crossing the pond to read and you should definitely go. Find the dates and links below, along with some Canadian events too.

Aug 22-23, 2015 • Edinburgh, Scotland – Edinburgh International Book Festival
Aug 25, 2015 • St Andrews, Scotland – Reading with Christopher Jory at Topping Bookshop
Sept 13, 2015 • Eden Mills, ON – Eden Mills Writers Festival
Oct 6, 2015 • Ottawa, ON – Read For The Cure
Oct 15, 2015 • Durham, ON – Free reading at Trent University (Durham campus)
Oct 15, 2015 • Peterborough, ON – Free reading at Trent University (Peterborough campus)
Oct 20, 2015 • Hudson, QC – StoryFest
Oct 23, 2015 • Edmonton, AB – LitFest Non-Fiction Festival
Oct 24, 2015 • St Albert, AB – STARfest Literary Festival

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