Mariner Books

“Through its peculiar blend of horror, sci-fi and satire, Friday Black presents America as caught in a funhouse mirror—fear and fury and fully-righteous greed brought into relief and magnified into hideous detail. Still, no matter how exaggerated and distorted the reflection, its eyes are always staring back, as cold and star-spangled as ever. Adjei-Brenyah is undeterred, staring right back with an unflinching gaze, all the while grasping for anything that might represent a human heart that still exists within the monster ahead of him” [Read full review].

Jen Beagin – Pretend I’m Dead

OneWorld (UK) / Simon & Schuster (US)

“A fuller version of Mona soon emerges, one apathetic and emotionally-distant not through some hip disaffection but rather the chaos and distrust of her past. The metaphor of cleaning takes on a whole new slant, a constant movement toward purity that is doomed to perpetual action, just as Mona’s attempts to reconnect with herself and others allows long swept memories to surface.

Unlike [A.M.] Homes’s Novak [from This Book Will Save Your Life], Jen Beagin’s Mona cannot free herself from cynicism long enough to embrace any potential cure, though there is a similarity in how proximity to bizarre beliefs and lifestyles encourage the development of one’s own. Maybe a full embrace of one’s position and life, contrary to any outside expectation or criticism, is a noble and valuable pursuit. Which is to say, for Mona, perhaps cleaning could have a spiritual function? No book, no psychic seeing, no pyjama-clad, lotus-positioned observance of the setting sun can be sure of saving one’s life. But perhaps the idea can trigger something more practical. Something better than pretending to be dead” [Read full review].

Sam Byers – Perfidious Albion

Faber & Faber (UK)

“Far from nebulous abstractions, for Byers, ideas and opinions have effects and consequences. Thoughts, spread widely enough, can change the world. And now, thanks to the internet, they are spread with greater reach and immediacy than ever before. Context is stripped, as is intonation and intention. Irony is mistaken for sincerity and vice versa. The reader decides how to take any given information, and their interpretation can never be incorrect. Their interpretation is the information. Additionally, as communication is gamified into a competition of numbers, the feedback loop is closed. You simply give the readers what they want.

[…]

Byers suggests that if the dualism between on and offline has collapsed, so too has the dualism between true and false. Fake News and Alternative Facts may be presented as an invention of the Trump administration, but mass media is the true pioneer. And, in the same way, the solution is far deeper and more knotty than merely ignoring misinformation from nefarious governments in favour of the truth. Rather, fact and fiction blur, our world now a hyperreality where such distinctions have lost their meaning. In the closing scene, Jess and Deepa listen to an ASMR recording of rainfall, and the soundtrack merges with the sound of actual rain hitting the roof outside. The digital and physical have merged, the fictional and ‘real’ enmeshed as one. But then, such is life in the hysterical present” [Read full review (for 3AM Magazine)].

Elaine Castillo – America is Not the Heart

Atlantic Books (UK) / Viking (US)

“Elaine Castillo’s true triumph is that America Is Not the Heart cannot be faithfully categorized purely as an immigrant saga or LGBT romance. This, aside from being a testament to her writing, serves as a scathing critique of just what those labels entail, and what it says about the white gatekeepers who control them. Hero’s story does not conform to the ideal Western immigrant story of foreigner done well. She is not a plucky underdog making a home against homesickness and long odds, her history not present only to be beaten smooth of its sharp edges. Ultimately, she does not exist to follow the fanciful arc us straight white people like to imagine an immigrant or queer person traversing—the palatable, enriching passage from alienation to total acceptance, and thus, of course, a more realised state of being.

Because America Is Not the Heart is a novel about human experience, about loving and being loved, where every detail—the Filipinx-American setting, historical context, bisexual relationships, class hierarchies, family dramas—is used not to build the characters but the world around them, Great American conditions that must be navigated in order to live” [Read full review].

Evan Dara – Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins

Aurora

One of our favourite novelists returns with what he describes as “a play in progress,” which isn’t that great a leap seeing as Evan Dara’s work has always been entirely dialogue. Available only in electronic formats, Provisional Biography of Mose Eakins tells the story of the titular character’s struggle with a novel medical condition which renders every word that leaves his mouth meaningless. That is, unless he asks to buy something. Dara takes aim at Late capitalism, capturing the crushing confusion and alienation of existence in a world in which even human connection has been commodified.

Sergio De La Pava – Lost Empress

MacLehose Press (UK) / Pantheon Books (US)

Detailing indoor football teams, expert EMTs and Dali paintings on Rikers island, while the tone veers between Pynchonian slapstick and philosophical musings, Lost Empress has an almost improvisational quality that refuses to slow or settle into any one groove. In what is becoming the author’s signature, the book rebels against concision and efficiency in favour of proliferation, the interconnectedness never reaching a neat conclusion but feeling all the more salient as a result. Like A Naked Singluarity before it, the novel situates Sergio De La Pava as a lead figure in the contemporary fight for challenging, ambitious fiction—and proves that the battle is not as hopeless as many would have you believe.

Nick Drnaso – Sabrina

Granta (UK) / Drawn & Quarterly (USA)

Ignore the people that said Sabrina was overhyped, a token placement on prize lists. Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel is a wonderful piece of literature, and one of 2018’s best attempts to get at the fear, paranoia and pervading sadness of the contemporary western world. Although the narrative centres on unspeakable tragedy, the real triumph is how Drnaso’s simple muted illustrations capture quiet loneliness and isolation. Yes, there’s desperation and grief, but equally powerful is the sorrow ingrained in clipped conversations and the walls of empty rooms.

William Gay – The Lost Country

Faber & Faber (UK) / Dzanc Books (US)

A lost William Gay novel, what more do we have to say? One of the masters of Southern Gothic delivers another story full of colourfully downtrodden characters, McCarthy-esque prose and whip-poor-wills. Billy Edgewater hitchhikes home after being discharged from the Navy, and navigates a whole shapeless community of the damned and depraved, drunks, swindlers and evil killers gathering in a tragicomic hellscape of decay and destitution.

Lauren Groff – Florida

William Heinemann (UK) / Riverhead (US)

“The Florida of [Groff]’s world is a canary in the coal mine, a ground zero for the approaching catastrophe. Her anxiety is not concerned with the likelihood of disaster, but rather the scale. Degrees of ruin sorted into a hierarchy—individual, familial, local, regional, national, global—and the question becomes whether a personal calamity will get to the characters before the climate slides into a planetary one. Will they get picked off one by one by a monstrous feline before the sea engulfs the peninsula? Will their house collapse into a sinkhole, killing them before the real trouble begins? Because, while the titular state might be uniquely dangerous, with its cottonheads and gators and mythic black panthers, the real looming threat is more ubiquitous and inescapable. “She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future,” Groff writes, her protagonist finding Paris hotter than she had imagined. “But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere.”

In the opening story ‘Ghosts and Empties’ we find her wandering the streets after dark, afraid to be in the house because of a propensity to yell, leaving the parenting duties to her husband, who does not yell. However, far from appearing unhinged, the narrator comes across the sane one […] Who wouldn’t yell, knowing what we know, living how we do?” [Read full review].

Denis Johnson – The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Random House (US)

To view The Largesse of the Sea Maiden as the parting words of a genius is a fair perspective, though to assume the collection’s primary interest exists in Johnson’s death is to disrespect the stories as valuable additions to his oeuvre. With an epistolary story where the protagonist writes to people as part of his AA program (“Dear Old Dad and Dear Grandma…,” “Dear Pope John Paul…,” “Dear Satan…,” “Dear Rolling Stone and TV Guide…,”), the return of some old faces (or, more accurately, old Heads) and devastating, semi-autobiographical tales of subtle grief, the work might be the last from a master, but it is by no means an end.

Rachel Kushner – The Mars Room

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Scribner (US)

“In The Mars Room, characters are not separated into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prisoners. Stoicism and sacrifice mean nothing not because a yawning nihilistic meaninglessness consumes all within the cell walls, but rather because meaning persists in all. Even the disobedient have significance, the most troubled and violent. Which goes some way in explaining the cast of characters within Stanville. Spouse killers, baby killers, killers of any witnesses. White supremacists and death row fantasists and women now specialists in playing lonely men over the phone. All are treated with an even gaze, with no hierarchy of morality or self-worth.

In this way, Kushner is following something of a Dostoyevskian theme, her characters capable of committing terrible violence and maintaining some semblance of innocence too. As Jennifer Wilson wrote in a recent article for The New York Times, “Dostoyevsky implored [that] it is not only our task to support the innocent or wrongly convicted but also to recognize the humanity of the guilty and the shared sense of responsibility that we have for one another.” As Romy insists at the end of the novel, “the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.” For Rachel Kushner, being human no matter what means just that. No matter what” [Read full review].

Ottessa Moshfegh – My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Jonathan Cape (UK) / Penguin (US)

“In his 2013 book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary argues that, from the perspective of twenty-first century capitalism, sleep is a useless, even deleterious phenomena. After all, we cannot buy anything while unconscious, nor can we work. Our productivity is nil. ‘The stunning, inconceivable reality [of sleep],’ Crary writes, ‘is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.’

[…]

If capitalism denatures our existence into an unbearable state, then the obvious reaction is to rebel against capitalism. Only, Moshfegh’s narrator finds a dead end down that path, with art, protest and even complete withdrawal already co-opted and commodified to become just another version of neoliberal life. The second option, then, is to abstain from life altogether. If the parasite can’t be killed, then what about killing the host? Which means locking your doors, abandoning your friends, doing everything you can to minimise your existence. In this way, Moshfegh offers her own counter-intuitive cure—narcissistic solipsism as the antidote to a culture of narcissistic solipsism. Capitalism will still try to draw from you in this state, yes, but does it matter if one has no memory of its fangs? Perhaps the stunning, inconceivable reality of sleep is not that nothing can be extracted from it, but rather that nothing can get inside” [Read full review (for the Cardiff Review)].

 Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Portobello Books

“[Keiko’s sister is] far happier thinking [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.” So sums up the position of Sayaka Murata’s Keiko, a woman who finds solace and purpose working in a convenience store, though faces unceasing criticism for her disinterest in ‘proper’ jobs or marriage. Her family and friends, projecting loneliness and depression onto her situation, want her to be ‘cured’, to be normal. But for Keiko, the only source of loneliness and depression is this concern from others. The result is cutting, fearless exploration of what it means to be different in a society that, for all of its talk of diversity, seems hellbent on the total homogenisation of what it means to be human.

Tommy Orange – There There

Harvill Secker (UK) / Knopf (US)

“Orange complicates things by delving into the idea of performance and invented identity. Yes, Orvil finds healing magic within powwow music, but then his brother finds the same within Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, and the other in the arrangements of Beethoven. And, when Orvil films himself dancing in traditional clothing, the act is a half-satisfying tug-of-war between holy and phony, an attempt at realisation rather than realisation itself. Still, Orvil perseveres, determined to dance at the upcoming Powwow where the novel’s characters converge, and finds value within his quest. Because a Native search for meaning is much like any other, a process of belief and faith that depends not on some sacred arrangement of sounds and rituals but rather the commitment to the cause. Identity need not be a binary presence or absence, but something to be discovered, nurtured, or dropped.

Gertrude Stein’s passage containing the “there there” quote continues along such lines. “It is a funny thing about addresses where you live.” she writes. “When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity […] then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” Which is to say, Indianness is not something inherent and inviolable at the core of all things, nor is it something that can be eradicated forever. Rather, it is the product of what is remembered, and what is not. There can be a there there, Tommy Orange seems to say, and one defined not by white fantasy, but the Natives themselves. It is just a case of remembering” [Read full review].

Chris Power – Mothers

Faber & Faber (UK) / Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US)

“Strong stories will always instigate some sort of reaction or change, but to assume that this alteration will always be good, or to map them on any kind of good-bad binary at all, is to underestimate the power of fiction. Yes, the characters of Chris Power attempt to use stories as an antidote to loneliness, but that’s not to say every effort is redemptive or magically healing. Indeed, sometimes it is actively counterproductive, the stories growing into new, deeper sources of loneliness that grip a soul and refuse to let go. Fiction, it turns out, is not some therapeutic balm. Rather, it is something that can help and hinder, soothe and scorch, and in doing so, be as nuanced and complicated as life itself” [Read full review].

Richard Powers – Overstory

William Heinemann (UK) / W.W. Norton & Company (US)

“Speaking about the environment makes you either a naive idealist or unhinged polemic, and neither belong in the circles of the truly ‘intelligent’ […] Thus, to speak about the environment is to silence yourself.

But Powers refuses to be silenced, which translates to a lot of (intentionally) heavy-handed dendrological metaphors, a lot of (non-ironic) talk of rediscovering the beauty of nature and much (sincere) discussion of how humans are terrible and short-sighted and doomed in the way of a Greek tragedy. Essentially, a lot of trees. However, the fact that such a premise feels tiring, and the metaphors ham-fisted, and the views unsophisticated only confirms Powers’ point. There’s nothing hip or trendy about this message. There is no cultural capital to be earned, no badges of honour to wear, no quick redemption to cash in at the next available opportunity. There’s a slow, grinding process of unpicking ourselves from the prevailing attitudes and expectations, a version of life less comfortable and entertaining and cool. A willingness to appear naive in the short term in the hope of defeating the wider foolishness, a committed attempt to confront what surely lies before us. The Overstory represents a bravery test not only for Richard Powers, but for us all” [Read full review].

Nico Walker – Cherry

Jonathan Cape (UK, forthcoming 2019) / Knopf (US)

Cherry a blistering and breathless novel that confronts post 9/11 America through the lens of just one young man. It’s raw and brutal and hilarious, sad and terrifying and oftentimes intensely uncomfortable. Nico Walker has written a contender for the best Iraq novel and the best opioid epidemic novel in one.

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In taking on such subject matter, Rachel Kushner’s writing operates according to a similar dynamic. The book serves as our window into the invisible world, a product of the author’s willing immersion in the Californian legal and justice system. As Dana Goodyear unpacks in her New Yorker profile, Kushner spent time getting to know various people in prison, including a former contract killer serving life with no possibility of parole. By actually entering such places, giving names and faces to such figures, the usual tropes of prison fiction are avoided. Just as the characters give up a visible life when entering the previously invisible, Kushner also drops the previously visible world, or whatever the general public construct as the so-called visible, shedding all pre- and misconceptions in order to more fully take in the unseen reality. And, as with those serving life, once one drops the old view and takes up a new one, there is little possibility of reversing the process.

As well as detailing life within a women’s prison, the novel also casts a light on the lower class experience of San Francisco, the side of the city not buoyed by Silicon Valley, or perhaps even submerged by it. Kushner details a dangerous upbringing where personal freedom (pre-teens can traverse the city at will, drinking and fighting) is counteracted by a systemic limitation. The quote-unquote ‘proper’ path of life is severed sometime during school, be it through discrimination or lack of opportunity, or else a private refusal to assimilate. To be, quote unquote ‘saved’. The justice system is almost pitched as a remedy to this, a system of rules built upon negatives. No running. No congregating. No bare feet or uncovered shoulders. No high-fiving and no horse-play. No gum chewing in the courtroom and No-Huff Glue in the workshops. No escape from anything, ever.

This recurring motif of brutal and often bizarre orders serves a vital purpose in The Mars Room. If the economic disparity of late capitalism might feel like a prison of its own, Rachel Kushner is careful to extinguish any suggestion of metaphor. The system outside decides the penitential demographic, and indeed the entire form and shape of the contemporary justice system is dictated by capitalistic forces, so the two are intrinsically linked. However, Kushner’s portrayal of prison offers another level entirely, a captivity so deep and all-consuming that poverty pales in comparison. The small freedoms of childhood and adolescence do not excuse inequality, but they allow her to form an identity within it. The justice system, from court to prison, strips almost all aspects of identity, and with it a great deal of dignity too.

The Mars Room opens on ‘Chain Night’. A busload of women are cuffed and counted and transported to Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, an all-night drive for sixty individuals who have varying degrees of familiarity with the process. Starting her double life sentence (plus six years), protagonist Romy Hall has never experienced Chain Night before, and never will again. Still, she holds herself together. Or rather, she holds herself better than when she first landed in county, where she cried and cried until her cellmate showed her a tattoo, scrawled on her back in the gap between her shirt and pants, which read ‘Shut the fuck up.” Romy comes to cannonize this woman, “not for the tattoo but the loyalty to the mandate,” as though the preservation of dignity is still a fight worth fighting.

However, while Romy forms a saintly image of her old cellmate, that is not to say that Rachel Kushner’s prison rewards displays of penance and asceticism. Indeed, it is made clear that remaining halfway human is the only goal inside, and dehumanisation through self-flagellation is no different than dehumanisation from the wider system. When the ultimate punishment is being reduced to simple inmate names and numbers, your life nothing more than a national statistic, then what use is there in flattening your own vision of yourself too?

Because to shrink your life into a stoic act of contrition would be to accept your crime as the core definition of self, a single moment obliterating all sense of personality and history. So, in The Mars Room, characters are not separated into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ prisoners. Stoicism and sacrifice mean nothing not because a yawning nihilistic meaninglessness consumes all within the cell walls, but rather because meaning persists in all. Even the disobedient have significance, the most troubled and violent. Which goes some way in explaining the cast of characters within Stanville. Spouse killers, baby killers, killers of any witnesses. White supremacists and death row fantasists and women now specialists in playing lonely men over the phone. All are treated with an even gaze, with no hierarchy of morality or self-worth.

In this way, Kushner is following something of a Dostoyevskian theme, her characters capable of committing terrible violence and maintaining some semblance of innocence too. As Jennifer Wilson wrote in a recent article for The New York Times, “Dostoyevsky implored [that] it is not only our task to support the innocent or wrongly convicted but also to recognize the humanity of the guilty and the shared sense of responsibility that we have for one another.” As Romy insists at the end of the novel, “the opposite of nothing is not something. It is everything.” For Rachel Kushner, being human no matter what means just that. No matter what.

The Mars Room is out now via Jonathan Cape (UK) and Scribner (US).

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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.

The post Favourite Books of 2017 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

It was a surprise, then, to hear that Egan’s latest novel, Manhattan Beach, was a historical work without much in the way of genre-bending style. Pitched somewhere between crime-noir and domestic novel, the book follows the life of Anna Kerrigan, a girl growing up out of Depression-era New York into a war-time city where women are employed in the naval yard. This novel situation, coupled with Anna’s relationship with her disabled sister, worn-out mother and, most importantly, mysteriously absent and potentially mob-involved father, drives a narrative capable of straddling interior life with more genre-based features, with detective elements of urban thrillers and the rich research of historical fictional. However, while Anna finds herself spread across a range of scenes—family homes, docklands, nightclubs, crime dens—all are tied together by various forms of deceit and deception.

The opening scene finds a pre-teen Anna in the early 1930s, travelling with her father Eddie on one of his ‘work’ business trips, which appear to cast him as a kind of bagman for organised crime. From there, the narrative jumps to the 40s, to a Kerrigan household abandoned by Eddie with no explanation, and Anna working toward the war effort. Slowly, we learn that almost every character has secrets, with Anna more than most. Indeed, it is almost as though she has been conditioned by her father to lie, to occupy a slippery space whenever questions are asked, as though to mislead others is a vital part of self-preservation, a habit done often enough to become instinctive.

To say anymore risks spoiling the book, be it one based on clues and red herrings and mistaken identity. However, it bears saying that fans of Goon Squad and Look At Me, that is, readers expecting something more than glorified pulp noir from a writer such as Egan, should not be so quick to judge. The so-called ‘standard’ narrative not only contains enough signals—implicit communications, miscommunications, passive aggressions—to warrant deep investigative reading, but Egan uses both the character and setting to explore wider themes of American identity. The many-headed monster of organised crime proves a useful vehicle for such examinations, with the characters who find themselves roped into criminal systems not only justifying their involvement, but partaking in various means to obscure the fact, to conceal the truth of their crimes (from others and themselves) to the degree that their actions become abstract and ethically vague. This is just another example of the key theme of deception. Characters lying to shape their identity and gain some degree of agency. Some semblance of freedom. Be it from poverty, or preconceptions and reputation—essentially the forces of the prevailing system.

Jennifer Egan has long detailed an America heading toward some sort of saturation point, where consumerist culture and image-obsessed ideology would soon reach a critical, apocalyptic mass. While the closing segments of Goon Squad suggest a runaway escalation of technology, the tone and timing of Look At Me make 9/11 a kind of extra-narrative denouement. The American Dream, Egan seems to say, is collapsing into clouds of dust—America attacked and wounded, New York City at war—as though some falsehood has been revealed at its no longer impenetrable core. While it would be naive to say that Manhattan Beach traces back to the origin of this Dream, the novel portrays an America ready to inflate it, to display it to the wider world as an opportunity or promise more seductive than any other.

“I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever […] Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”

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 texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.

Manhattan Beach is out now via Corsair (UK) and Scribner (US).

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