This week: a brain surgeon's memoir, Robert McCammon's latest, and a page-turning mystery set in the Arctic.
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (Knopf) - Hugo Award–winner Bacigalupi (The Windup Girl) delivers an ambitious, genre-dissolving thriller and a timely cautionary tale. In an indeterminate near future, extreme water shortages have made the Southwestern United States a dystopia, with the privileged few living in elite “arcologies” with self-generating water recycling systems. The depleted Colorado River has become one of the last lifelines and the object of armed conflict among the residents of Arizona, California, and Nevada. Angel Velasquez is a “water knife,” a sort of mercenary factotum, whose job is to secure as much water as possible for his Las Vegas boss, arcology developer Catherine Case. Sent to investigate a possible water source near drought-stricken Phoenix, Angel soon crosses paths with an idealistic journalist, Lucy Monroe, whose underground dispatches put her in constant danger. As vigilante bloodshed and desperation threaten to consume Phoenix, whispers of a 150-year-old document surface that may settle the water rights dispute and bring life back to the desert metropolis. With elements of Philip K. Dick and Charles Bowden, this epic, visionary novel should appeal to a wide audience.
Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff (Philomel) - Less than a year ago, 12-year-old Trent Zimmerman accidentally contributed to the death of his teammate Jared during a hockey game, after nailing him with a puck (Jared had a “bad heart”). Already prone to overthinking, Trent is overwhelmed by disturbing thoughts, which he draws in a closely guarded book, and very angry. He backs away from his best friend, acts out at school, and clashes with his family. With help from a persistent classmate, who is known as much for the large scar on her face as for her weird outfits, and a similarly dedicated teacher, Trent is gradually able to let go of his intense guilt and regain his confidence. Trent’s barely constrained rage is visceral, and the moments when he lashes out, verbally and physically, are as frightening as they are realistic. In an ambitious and gracefully executed story, Graff covers a lot of emotional ground, empathically tracing Trent’s efforts to deal with a horrible, inexplicable accident and to heal the relationships that have become collateral damage along the way.
Zodiac Station by Tom Harper (Harper) - Harper (The Orpheus Descent) brilliantly uses a framing device straight out of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in crafting an utterly compelling, sophisticated page-turner set in the Arctic. Capt. Carl Franklin and his crew aboard the U.S. Coast Guard ice-breaker Terra Nova face a baffling mystery when they rescue a man named Thomas Anderson from an ice floe in the middle of nowhere. Anderson, who’s in bad shape from hypothermia and frostbite, tells Franklin that he’s a researcher from Zodiac Station, a scientific base on the island of Utgard. Martin Hagger, a biologist who believes that life on Earth originated at the poles, recruited Anderson, but when Anderson arrived at Zodiac, Hagger was gone. This was but the first of many puzzles Anderson encountered. After the base was devastated by an explosion, Anderson traveled more than 100 miles in just four days in search of help. Franklin, who finds aspects of Anderson’s narrative questionable, probes relentlessly for the truth about what happened at the research outpost on Utgard. The plotting is complex but logical, with a fairly clued and stunning payoff.
Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf (Knopf) - Within the first three pages of this gripping and tender novel, Addie Moore, a 70-year-old widow, invites her neighbor, Louis Waters, to sleep over. “No, not sex,” she clarifies. “I’m talking about getting through the night. And lying warm in bed, companionably.” Although Louis is taken off guard, the urgency of Addie’s loneliness does not come across as desperate, and her logic will soon persuade him. She reasons that they’re both alone (Louis’s wife has also been dead for a number of years) and that, simply, “nights are the worst.” What follows is a sweet love story, a deep friendship, and a delightful revival of a life neither of them was expecting, all against the backdrop of a gossiping (and at times disapproving) small town. In this book, Haruf, who died in 2014, returns to the landscape and daily life of Holt County, Colo., where his previous novels (Plainsong, Eventide, The Tie That Binds) have also been set, this time with a stunning sense of all that’s passed and the precious importance of the days that remain.
Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch (Princeton Univ.) - Historian Jarausch examines 20th-century Europe through three distinct kinds of ideological and cultural modernities—democratic, communist, and fascist—that struggled for mastery until the democratic and democratic-socialist versions won out. There’s little Jarausch doesn’t cover in steady, stately prose. He never loses sight of the alternative, contingent courses Europe could have taken at each juncture. Art, music, and literature fill the pages alongside politics, diplomacy, and war. Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union get their full due. While the major figures of Europe don’t come as thoroughly alive as they might, Jarausch compensates by brilliantly linking the century’s historical developments together and showing how reactions against modernity always made themselves felt along the way, often with disastrous results. While fitting everything into the mold of modernity (and, toward the end, postmodernism) can become reductionist, this organizing motif and Jarausch’s authoritativeness carry the day. The work isn’t designed to be encyclopedic, yet it should be on the shelf of everyone seeking a panoramic, narrative guide to history’s most violent century.
Photography and the Art of Chance by Robin Kelsey (Harvard/Belknap) - This ambitious text, both scholarly and affecting, combines art history, psychology, and the history of philosophy and science into a shrewd exploration of “how meaning is produced in a medium prone to chance.” The book focuses on the work of five photographers who revolutionized the medium through their relationship with chance: William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Frederick Sommer, John Baldessari, and Alfred Stieglitz. Kelsey, a professor of photography at Harvard, discerningly connects their work to various moments in history from the Victorian era through the 21st century: the move away from determinism in the early 19th century, Darwin’s discoveries concerning random biological variation, and changes in the understanding of social morality, particularly regarding the violence and irrationality of the world wars. Kelsey’s primary focus is the development of photography, the end result is a wholly informative, refreshing, and rich perspective on photography and Modernism.
A Handful of Stars by Cynthia Lord (Scholastic) - It is a summer of change for 12-year-old Lily, who lives with her grandparents above their general store in rural Maine. Having grown apart from her boy-obsessed best friend and coping with her dog’s increasing blindness, Lily finds a kindred spirit in Salma, whose migrant family works in the local blueberry fields. One constant in Lily’s life is her longing for her absent mother, whose personality and fate Lord reveals measuredly. Salma, too, is grieving, having lost her own dog and many friends due to her family’s frequent moves. Lord links images beautifully: Lily shows Salma how the fluted top of a blueberry resembles a star, and Salma confides that she is comforted knowing that the stars overhead are the same ones shining on her loved ones far away. Salma’s artistic creativity and gumption awaken Lily to the power of imagination, the importance of embracing change and knowing when to let go of the past, and the rewards of venturing beyond one’s comfort zone.
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh (St. Martin's/Dunne) - In this memoir of a long career, English neurosurgeon Marsh reveals both a “weary and knowing skepticism” and a striking determination to help the desperately ill despite the uncertainties. “The operating is the easy part, you know,” he writes of one neurosurgeon’s advice to him; “the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.” Marsh’s remarkable, unblinking honesty shines through in each of the starkly different cases he describes, including a little boy with a progressive cancer whose family came to believe he could “go on being treated forever”; the death “without regret” of his own mother from metastasized breast cancer; and the devastating outcome of a difficult operation on an 11-year-old Ukrainian girl with a large but benign brain tumor that was slowly killing her. This thoughtful doctor provides a highly personal and fascinating look inside the elite world of neurosurgery, appraising both its amazing successes as well as its sobering failures.
The Border by Robert McCammon (Subterranean) - Genre-busting author McCammon pulls out all the stops for this exhilarating alien-invasion epic, which harkens back to his 1987 blockbuster, Swan Song. The spectacular opening introduces an amnesiac teenage boy who abruptly becomes aware of himself in a full-tilt sprint through a post-apocalyptic battlefield, with wounds that should have killed him, and knowledge and abilities he doesn’t understand. Ethan, as he calls himself, is clearly more than he appears—a fact that doesn’t escape the apocalypse’s survivors, expressively depicted in their despair and desperation, with whom he holes up outside Ft. Collins, Colo. Two years prior, alien species nicknamed the Gorgons and the Cyphers brought their own war to Earth’s atmosphere, killing many humans and turning others into mutant cannibals. As revelations about Ethan become increasingly poignant, McCammon expertly turns up the tension, and the group embarks on a riveting journey toward a destination they have little chance of reaching. This story blends the gripping horror and action of McCammon’s earliest novels with the empathy of his more recent work, making it one of his finest.
The Rocks by Peter Nichols (Riverhead) - Nichols (Voyage to the North Star) has conjured the perfect beach read: a romantic story set in a rich beach town on Mallorca called Cala Marsopa. Though you may not get sand between its easy-to-turn pages, you’ll feel as though you have. Lulu Davenport, a lithe and headstrong beauty, is the doyenne of Villa Los Roques, a resort dubbed The Rocks by the English expatriate layabouts who return annually each summer. The book opens in 2005, in Lulu’s “ninth decade,” when a surprise encounter with her estranged first husband, Gerald Rutledge, awakens “a flame of old anger.” Gerald gave up his sailing life and made a permanent home in Cala Marsopa following their brief marriage, though they have managed to avoid each other almost completely for nearly 60 years. Nichols crafts the story in reverse, moving back through time and revealing that even though these former lovers have had little contact, they have left deep imprints on each other.
I Am Princess X by Cherie Priest, illus. by Kali Ciesemier (Scholastic/Levine) - Back in fifth grade, best friends May and Libby created Princess X, a katana-wielding heroine who wears Converse sneakers with her ball gown. Ever since Libby and her mother died in a freak accident, May’s life has been as gray as her Seattle home—until the 16-year-old spots a Princess X sticker in a store window, leading her to a Princess X webcomic that suggests that Libby might still be alive. With the help of Trick, a hacker-for-hire, May follows the trail that Princess X’s near-mythic narrative leaves for her, which incorporates Seattle landmarks like the Fremont Troll and characters like the dangerous Needle Man and the mysterious, helpful Jackdaw. Illustrations from the Princess X comic—skillfully rendered by Ciesemier and printed in purple—add greatly to this techno-thriller’s tension.
Kissing in America by Margo Rabb (Harper) - In this indelible coming-of-age story, Rabb seamlessly weaves together multiple narratives: families coping with death, immigrants determined to make it in America, the power of education to transform lives, reality TV offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, first love, first heartbreak, and the conflicted, ardent passion of a mother/daughter relationship. After Eva’s father dies in a plane crash, she lives with an awareness that “the very worst thing you imagine, your biggest fear, does happen,” a fear she mitigates by avidly reading romance fiction. Eva’s mother, a women’s studies professor, disparages the books, but for 16-year-old Eva, “those feelings felt as real and true as any other feelings I’d ever felt. As real and true as grief.” A cross-country bus trip expands Eva’s world as she and her best friend Annie encounter people who “never met a Jewish person before” and discover that “real-life cowboys were better than fictional ones."
Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe (Seven Stories) - The staid, cultured milieu of Upper West Side psychoanalysts and their clients gets an insightful and penetrating treatment from Roiphe (a National Book Award finalist for Fruitful) in this lyrical, meditative novel. The analysts—including elderly Dr. Estelle Berman and her middle-aged colleagues Dr. H. and Dr. Z.—take on a range of patients: young movie star Justine, a kleptomaniac whose real name is Betty; Anna, a self-harming college dropout; Mike, a 72-year-old widower whose son Ivan "had done something ungodly" and then fled the country. The doctors' professional and personal lives are difficult to separate. Dr. H. discovers a disguised Ivan while vacationing with his family in Belize; a very young analyst becomes obsessed with a colleague; and Edith, a "frightfully huge" poet, finally develops the courage to show Dr. Berman her work. Little by little, the aging Dr. Berman, who "considered herself a kind of exterminator... after the lice of the mind," begins to mentally deteriorate, and the damage she ultimately wreaks on the lives of Edith and her own relatives can't be mediated through psychiatry.
Nothing Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis by Joseph Tabbi (Northwestern Univ.) - William Gaddis’s famed media shyness may not have rivaled J.D. Salinger’s or Thomas Pynchon’s, but the much-lauded “difficult” novelist managed to avoid the public eye almost entirely throughout his lengthy career. In this long-awaited biography, Tabbi (Cognitive Fictions) shows that a significant amount of Gaddis’s writing was autobiographical, and that Gaddis mined his own family history for characters, themes, and stories. Tabbi relies on Gaddis’s many letters to his mother—from boarding school through penning The Recognitions—and others to show that Gaddis’s aristocratic sensibility and style developed early. He carefully takes apart Gaddis’s massive novels to show where the artist’s life and work overlapped. Tabbi has accomplished important work in untying the nearly inseparable strands of Gaddis’s life and art. Between the publication of his first two novels, Gaddis worked for 20 years in corporate America, claiming it was just to “pay the bills.” Yet Tabbi shows that Gaddis used this time to listen to the way Americans spoke—a skill that corresponds directly to the dialogue-heavy core of his second novel, JR. Tabbi’s valuable and worthy scholarly contribution shines a bright light on a great, enigmatic American novelist.
