This week: Larry Kramer's epic novel 30 years in the making, new Ann Packer, and the life of a "New Yorker" copyeditor.
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli (Balzer + Bray) - After a “goobery nerd” named Martin discovers Georgia teen Simon Spier’s secret email relationship with a boy who calls himself “Blue,” Martin blackmails Simon into helping him romance Abby, a new girl who has been welcomed into Simon’s lunchroom clique. The threat of being outed by Martin forces Simon to come to terms with his sexuality, and his wise insights—Why do only gay people have to come out? Why is that the default?—add heft to a plot that is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Debut novelist Albertalli writes believably in the voice of a confused, openhearted 16-year-old. The large cast of companionable and well-developed characters contains a heroic drama teacher and Simon’s embarrassing but well-meaning parents. Page-turning tension comes from the anonymous quality of Simon’s emails with Blue, which are interspersed with chapters written in Simon’s first-person voice that chronicle Simon’s increasing frustration with Blue’s reluctance to divulge his identity, as well as the deepening nature of the boys’ relationship. Blue may hesitate, but readers will fall madly in love with Simon.
Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri (Knopf) - Chaudhuri’s novel, set in the world of Bengali expats living in Thatcher-era London, is a gently humorous book that riffs on Homer’s Iliad and Joyce’s Ulysses. Eschewing a traditional narrative arc, Chaudhuri primarily explores the friendship between Ananda, a 22-year-old Bengali expat and student of English literature, and his uncle, Radhesh, who is obsessed with the workings of his gastrointestinal and urinary tracts. As the duo wander the streets of England’s capital city, they discuss love and sex, race and empire, and notions of exile and exclusion. Descriptive details are richly evocative of 1980s London, a quotidian world of teabags, cheese and pickle sandwiches, and bland television shows—all marred by the ubiquity of racism, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Both men are homesick, although Radhesh denies his longing to return to his native land. As Ananda ponders viraha, a poetic term referring to a separation from something beloved, Radhesh longs to be somewhere where he is not defined by the continent in which he was born. The frustrated yearning to belong—somewhere, anywhere—reverberates plaintively throughout.
Young Eliot: A Biography by Robert Crawford (FSG) - Drawing extensively on new interviews, original research, and previously undisclosed memoirs, biographer Crawford (Scotland’s Books) offers the first book devoted to T.S. Eliot’s youth, painting a vividly colorful portrait of the artist as a young man. In exhaustive, and often exhausting, detail, Crawford chronicles, year-by-year, the young Eliot: his childhood, divided between St. Louis and Massachusetts; his painful shyness and love of dancing; his years at Harvard, his post-Harvard experiences in Europe and first, though unrequited, love ; his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood; and his early publications of poetry, leading up to The Waste Land’s release in 1922. Eliot’s affinity for the sacred is traced to his upbringing in an “idealistic, bookish household,” to his keen ear for St. Louis’s rich confluence of music—both opera and jazz—and to his love of birdsong. Readers also learn about Eliot’s difficult marriage to Haigh-Wood, which brought neither of them happiness, though Eliot wrote to Ezra Pound that “it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.” Crawford’s masterly biography, with its great depth, attention to detail, and close reading of the youthful Eliot’s writings, is likely to become the definitive account of the great poet’s early years.
A Scourge of Vipers by Bruce DeSilva (Forge) - Edgar-winner DeSilva’s excellent fourth Liam Mulligan novel (after 2014’s Providence Rag) finds the Providence, R.I., investigative journalist on hard times professionally. His newspaper, The Dispatch, has been reduced to a shell of its former self, publishing fluff rather than substance and largely staffed by wet-behind-the-ears newcomers. His jerk of an editor, Charles Twisdale, is more concerned with the bottom line and advertising revenue than reporting the news, leaving Mulligan feeling like a dinosaur on the verge of extinction. But if that’s to be his fate, the reporter is determined to go down swinging, pursuing the truth behind a series of murders that appear linked to the governor, colorfully known as “Attila the Nun,” who hopes to solve the state’s public-pension crisis by legalizing sports gambling.
The Lady from Zagreb by Philip Kerr (Putnam) - Bestseller Kerr’s superlative 10th novel featuring former homicide cop Bernie Gunther (after 2013’s A Man Without Breath) finds Bernie, now an officer in the SD, at an international police conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in the summer of 1942. Heinrich Heckholz, an attorney, wants Bernie to use his access at Wannsee to gather evidence that a charitable foundation is involved in fraud. Soon after, Heckholz is beaten to death with a bust of Hitler in his office. Almost a year later, with the crime still unsolved, Joseph Goebbels asks Bernie to help movie star Dalia Dresner locate her estranged father. Bernie falls quickly—and hard—for Dalia and agrees to travel on her behalf to Yugoslavia, where he witnesses some horrific scenes. Kerr combines a murder mystery that Raymond Chandler could have devised with a searing look at the inhumanity of the Nazis and their allies, presented from a unique perspective.
A Heart Revealed by Josi S. Kilpack (Shadow Mountain) - n this haunting and mesmerizing novel, Kilpack (the Culinary Mystery series) weaves an emotional tale of fleeting fame in Regency-era London. At 19, Amber Sterlington nearly has it all. Her stunning beauty and lyric voice enchant all the men around her, including Thomas Richards, a kind and intelligent man without a fortune who is besotted with Amber despite his dislike for her snobbish personality. As far as she’s concerned, the ideal suitor has wealth and a high rank. But when a strange medical phenomenon slowly overwhelms Amber and threatens her family’s position in society, her hard-hearted parents banish her to the country, where she must take a close look at the selfish and cruel woman she’s become and decide who she wishes to be. Amber’s struggle with her new life, her despair, and her hope for a happy future are stirring and real. Kilpack paints an extremely vivid picture of Amber’s suffering and reawakening, as well as her initial frivolity and callousness. Exceptionally moving and full of rich period details, this delicate romance is a real winner.
The American People, Vol. I: Search for My Heart by Larry Kramer (FSG) - Thirty years in the making, Kramer's sprawling, brazen, problematic, frustrating, incendiary bid at the Great American Novel, is a re-visioning the U.S. from European colonialism through the 1950s, thrusting toward 800 pages yet only comprising volume one. It straddles the line between history and novel, propelled along by a fictional narrator, Fred Lemish. A clear Kramer stand-in, Lemish is inspired to write his history when President Ruester (this book's Reagan) references "the American People" in a speech and Lemish realizes that gay men aren't included, a fact even more inimical considering that the "Plague of the Underlying Condition" (this book's term for HIV/AIDS) is well underway. The remedy, then, is "to record a history of hate when one is among the hated," which Fleming does. One wonders what the hell will happen in volume two.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove) - This astonishing first novel has at its core a lively, wry first-person narrator called the Captain, and his two school friends Bon and Man, as they navigate the fall of Saigon and the establishment of the Communist regime in Vietnam in 1975. The Captain is a half-Vietnamese double agent; he reports to his Communist minder Man who, unbeknownst to Bon, is a Republican assassin. The Captain and Bon make it on to one of the harrowing last flights out of Saigon as the city is overtaken by the Viet Cong. They travel with the Captain’s superior, the General, and his family, although Bon’s own wife and son are shot making their escape. The Vietnamese exiles settle uncomfortably in an America they believe has abandoned their country, as they are reduced to new roles as janitors, short-order cooks, and deliverymen. The General opens a liquor store, then a restaurant (in which his proud wife cooks the best pho outside Vietnam) as a front to raise money for a counter rebellion. In order to protect his identity as a spy, the Captain is forced to incriminate others, and as lines of loyalty and commitment blur, his values are compromised.
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris (Norton) - Norris has spent more than 35 years in the New Yorker’s legendary copy department, earning the nickname Comma Queen along the way. So it makes sense that her first book is a delightful discourse on the most common grammar, punctuation, and usage challenges faced by writers of all stripes. Not surprisingly, Norris writes well—with wit, sass, and smarts—and the book is part memoir, part manual. She recounts the history of Webster’s Dictionary; explains when to use who vs. whom and that vs. which; distinguishes between the dash, colon, and the semicolon; delves into the comma and the hyphen; and weighs in on the use of profanity in writing. Norris also finds ways to reference the Lord’s Prayer, the Simpsons, Moby-Dick, and, in a touching anecdote, her own sister. It’s a sure bet that after reading this book, readers will think more about how and what they write.
The Children's Crusade by Ann Packer (Scribner) - Packer (The Dive from Clausen’s Pier) begins her well-crafted family saga from the ground up with pediatrician Bill Blair’s Portola Valley, Calif., land purchased in 1954. Bill marries Penny, a young woman eager to have children—but she didn’t count on four kids, which forges her identity as a mother instead of the artist she yearns to become. Her children are intuitively aware of her distance and poignantly try to find a way to bring her closer to them. Their stories unfold through distinctive narrative styles, including both first- and third-person sections, suited to the characters: stressed internist Robert, brilliant psychiatrist Rebecca, dreamy teacher Ryan, and reckless drifter James. The multiple perspectives help render the complicated family fully. Packer is an accomplished storyteller whose characters are as real as those you might find around your dinner table. Readers will be taken with this vibrant novel.
I Refuse by Per Petterson, trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Graywolf) - As Petterson's story opens, Tommy, a successful financier, unexpectedly encounters his estranged childhood friend Jim, who is fishing off a bridge during Tommy’s early-morning drive. In chapters that switch among several narrators and periods (the 1960s, ’70s, and the present story in 2006), the history of Tommy and Jim’s relationship unfolds. Tommy grows up in a dysfunctional household in rural Norway, in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, and their business. Tommy’s father beats him and his three younger sisters daily; the mother disappeared two years earlier without a trace, although her fate is eventually revealed in a striking subplot. After Tommy stands up to his father, the four siblings are separated by the authorities. Having lost his family, Tommy and Jim become inseparable until a seemingly minor incident on a frozen lake one night during their teens forever changes their relationship. Set against a stark landscape, this is a brilliant, meditative story about how one small, impulsive act can have an irrevocable impact upon one’s life, as well as a rippling effect upon the lives of others.
Essay: A Critical Memoir by Donald Revell (Omnidawn) - Revell (Tantivy), in his 12th poetry collection (which is actually more of a hybrid essay/memoir/prose poem), reminds readers that “hesitation and delay must never be mistaken for rest.” At turns memoir and literary analysis, allegory and reenactment, this fragmented and deeply personal exploration of memory and literature’s place in the soul resembles a type of scrapbook book that asks, “Who’s crazy? Whose pomp is prophetic?” Revell’s prose is a contemplative, forceful incorporation of disparate elements: a dervish at half speed that absorbs and refigures Dante, Thoreau, Shakespeare, old photographs, the Vietnam War, and more into a love letter to reading, a pageant of deliberate contemplation and devotion. “Am I afraid to cross over the river without my Virgil—my allusions, my heralds and cross-references? I must read more. Am I afraid to die? I must love more.” Unable to contain itself, Revell’s work challenges and denies more than just its generic conventions; it takes to task the notion that reading and storytelling can be anything less than transformative—which therefore makes them essential.
The Lunatic by Charles Simic (Ecco) - The prolific Simic (New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012), former U.S. Poet Laureate and 1990 Pulitzer Prize–winner, graces readers with 70 grimly playful poems that confirm his position among the literary elite. The collection primarily revolves around nostalgia, aging, and unappreciated everyday wonders. Unvarnished yet profound, these poems show a boundless sensitivity underneath their impish presentation: “a ray of sunlight/ In the silence of the afternoon,/ ... found a long lost button/ Under some chair in the corner,// A teeny black one that belonged/ On the back of her black dress.” He addresses the past in his poems with judicious sentimentality and ambivalence, cautioning readers against becoming prisoners of memory: “Everything outside this moment is a lie.” While some poems dwell on the loneliness of old age (“That one remaining, barely moving leaf/ The wind couldn’t get to fall/ All winter long from a bare tree—/ That’s me!”), Simic battles this loneliness in the company of “Imagination, devil’s old helper,” who helps him breathe life into the inanimate—and greater significance into the animate—as he contemplates the ruminations of cows, admires the menace of fleas, and comments on the foreboding quality of black cats. Simic’s new collection is an outlandish and masterly mixture of morbidity and heartfelt yearning.
The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky (PublicAffairs) - Sky, a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute, delivers a memoir that may be the best book to date on the American war in Iraq. Her thesis is that a unified stable Iraqi government was once possible, thanks to the hard work and sacrifices of many Coalition soldiers and civilians and the Iraqi people and their leaders, but that opportunity was squandered in the final months of the U.S. presence. Sky brings unique and unmatched credentials to her analysis of the war. As a British civilian, she was as close to unbiased as a senior participant could be. She was initially employed as a provincial governance leader by the Coalition Provisional Authority, and later she worked as the political advisor to Generals Odierno and Petraeus, the commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq. Her keen intellect and dry, self-effacing wit make the book a thought-provoking, informative, and enjoyable read.
Map: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (HMH) - Szymborska (1923–2012), winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, has her vast and impressive poetic repertoire on full display in this posthumously published volume. Ordered chronologically, the book reveals her development over seven decades, including a gradual departure from end rhyme and the sharpening of her wit. As multitudinous as Whitman, she conveyed deep feeling through vivid, surreal imagery and could revive clichéd language by reconnecting it to the body in startling ways: “Listen,/ how your heart pounds inside me.” To say that Szymborska wore many hats as a poet is an understatement: odes, critiques, and persona poems are just a few of the forms her writing took. Yet, despite their diversity, the constants of her poems were nuance and observational humor: “Four billion people on this earth,/ but my imagination is still the same.” Also apparent is Szymborska’s rare ability to present an epiphany in a single line, and her bravery in writing toward death: “But time is short. I write.”
