This week: Ethan Canin's wonderful, epic novel, plus the collected stories of Peter Straub.
Some of the Parts
Barnaby’s elegant, well-paced novel stands out from others examining the death of a loved one both for its understated writing and for its penetrating exploration of the outer limits of grief and guilt. Sixteen-year-old Tallie is drowning in both emotions after her older brother, Nate, dies in a car accident that took place four months before the book opens. Tallie is both mourning his loss and trying to come to terms with being both “the one who survived” and the car’s driver, as readers soon learn. When she discovers that Nate was an organ donor, she becomes obsessed with tracking down the recipients of his organs, and the novel takes on the feel of a detective story. Her unwilling accomplice is a new boy in town, Chase, who bears a heartbreaking resemblance to Nate and has his own fixation on other people’s deaths. Barnaby (Wonder Show) beautifully brings Nate to life and movingly portrays the relationship between the siblings through Tallie’s fragmented memories. A deeply affecting depiction of moving on after a great loss.
Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power
This essential publication, focusing exclusively on New York City’s art museums in the wake of the civil rights movement, shines a revealing light on the artists, museum staff, and activists who were involved in the effort to force large art institutions to “face artists’ demands for justice and equality.” Cahan, dean of the arts at Yale College, deftly weaves together interviews, excerpts from newspapers, and archival material. She dedicates a hefty chapter to each of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Cahan takes an unblinking look at the “elusive relationship between structural inequities and individual choices,” examining instances of African-Americans literally being turned away from museum doors, the politics surrounding the formation of the Studio Museum and its tense first show, and Met curator Allon Schoener’s problematic motivations behind the famously disastrous 1969 Harlem on My Mind exhibition. This thorough and unrelenting examination gives invaluable history as well as context for the present struggle to create and maintain diversity in art museums.
A Doubter’s Almanac
The mysteries of higher mathematics and the even deeper mysteries of the human heart are the unlikely themes of Canin’s (America America) novel. With stunning assurance and elegant, resonant prose, Canin follows the life of Milo Andret, who is both blessed and afflicted with mathematical genius. Milo’s aspirations take him from a lonely boyhood in northern Michigan to Berkeley, Princeton, the hinterlands of Ohio, and, finally, to a defeated return to the rural Midwest. Essentially asocial and so unworldly that he didn’t taste alcohol until graduate school, Milo is gradually embittered by his failures at love and his jealous relationships with his colleagues. Meanwhile, he pursues the exquisitely arduous process of constructing complex mathematical theorems in his mind. When, at age 32, Milo proves one of the greatest theorems in the history of mathematics, he becomes a scientific superstar. But by then he is an alcoholic, and he destroys his career in acts of reckless abandon. Fascinating in its character portrayal and psychological insights, the novel becomes even more mesmerizing in its second half, which is narrated by Milo’s son, Hans (the first half features close third-person narration on Milo). Hans also has a brilliant mathematical mind but is scarred by his father’s cantankerous, often vicious behavior and poisonous disillusionment with ambition and higher knowledge. Hans’s exorbitantly lucrative career as a high-frequency futures trader founders when he becomes addicted to drugs, but his redemption comes through marital and familial love.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Upending the traditional narrative of Western enlightenment and world domination as the inevitable descendants of Greek and Roman intellectual ferment, Oxford historian Frankopan (The First Crusade) places the silk roads—the long, remote Central Asian trading routes linking Europe and China—at the center of human history. The silk roads served as conduits for goods and ideas as well as plagues and marauding armies, and their location at the nexus of Europe and Asia continues to drive world events today. Frankopan casts his net widely in this work of dizzying breadth and ambition. Casual readers may struggle to follow all the threads; those opening to any page will find fascinating insights that illuminate elusive connections across time and place. Frankopan approaches his craft with an acerbic wit, and his epochal perspective throws the foibles of the modern age into sharp relief.
The Girl in the Red Coat
British single mother Beth knows her eight-year-old daughter, Carmel, has a tendency to wander—at a local corn maze, on school trips—but one foggy day, the girl vanishes at a local festival and cannot be found. A man who claims to be Carmel's grandfather convinces her that Beth has been in a terrible accident, so Carmel leaves the fairgrounds with him and winds up at a secluded home with the man and his female companion, Dorothy. As Beth frantically searches and slowly isolates herself from the outside world, Carmel is told after careful manipulation that her mother has died, and soon finds herself in America with her new "grandparents," who work as spiritualist healers. Carmel fights to remember her past, but as time passes and she crisscrosses the country, her old life begins to fade. It takes everything in her to remember her name, her address, and her parents. Hamer's spectacular debut skillfully chronicles the nightmare of child abduction. The trajectories of the novel's two leads—through despair, hope, and redemption—are believable and nuanced, resulting in a morally complex, haunting read.
Cosmosapiens: How We Are Evolving from the Origin of the Universe
In this audacious, ambitious, and philosophically completist study, Hands (Housing Co-operatives) leads an interdisciplinary search through all the current human knowledge that may help answer two burning questions: What are we, and where do we come from? Hands proceeds from the basics of cosmology, chemistry, biology, ethology, philosophy, physics, and more as he addresses historical concepts and current orthodoxies, testing for explanatory and predictive power before he advances to newer and more exotic ideas. The result is a pearl of dialectical reasoning between Hands and the most celebrated experts he can find. In today’s age of specialization, readers will welcome this throwback to the days of the well-informed layperson, conversant and opinionated in a variety of topics. Hands feels that science is the right tool for allowing humans to understand ourselves, but he highlights controversies at the leading edge and explicitly closes his research with a summary of science’s limitations. He ends with a bold, definitive list of everything he thinks we know about ourselves and delivers a short answer to his guiding question: “We are the unfinished product of an accelerating cosmic evolutionary process characterized by collaboration, complexification, and convergence, and the self-reflective agents of our future evolution.”
The Quality of Silence
Astrophysicist Yasmin Alfredson, the heroine of this heart-stopping page-turner from bestseller Lupton (Afterwards), makes a desperate gamble to save her marriage and flies with her deaf 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, from their home in London to Alaska, where her husband, Matt, a wildlife filmmaker, has been shooting in a remote area north of the Arctic Circle. At the airport in Fairbanks, police tell a stunned Yasmin that Matt is dead, one of two dozen victims of a freakish fire that wiped out the Inuit hamlet where he was based. But in the absence of identifiable remains, she isn’t buying it, and even in the face of a looming winter storm, she resolves to get herself and Ruby, whom she has managed to keep somewhat shielded from the news (despite what the girl can glean from lip reading), the almost 500 miles on a two-lane ice road to hunt for her husband. Lupton limns a starkly beautiful story at once as expansive as the aurora borealis and as intimate as a mother and daughter finally learning to truly hear each another.
Midnight Sun
Jon, the narrator of this excellent standalone from Edgar-finalist Nesbø, is a “fixer,” or hit man, akin to the hero of 2015’s Blood on Snow. Jon, who has done jobs for an Oslo crime boss known as the Fisherman, has fled the city for Kåsund, a tiny village in the far north populated by Sami (Lapps) and dominated by a very strict religious ethos. Taking refuge in a church, he tells the townspeople he meets that his name is Ulf. A stranger in a strange land, Ulf slowly reveals what led him to leave Oslo: a failed hit and a theft that has Johnny Moe, the Fisherman’s henchman, after him. Ulf is a bad boy with a heart of gold; he got into trouble because he was trying to help someone close to him. His self-mocking deprecations are endearing: “Not that I’m an irresponsible or careless person; I’ve just got really bad judgment.” Immaculately plotted and perfectly paced, the book is also darkly funny and deadly serious. Scandinavian gloom notwithstanding, it has a neatly satisfying and surprisingly moving ending.
Interior Darkness: Selected Stories
This outstanding collection of 16 reprints highlights what makes Straub such a master of genre-bending horror and suspense, and it’s an effective introduction for readers new to his considerable body of work. Each story has merit, though a few of the quickies don’t punch as hard as the longer works. In the deeply unsettling and uncomfortable “Blue Rose,” a young Harry Beevers (who appears as an adult in 1998’s Koko) reacts to his troubled home life by doing very bad things to his younger brother, Little Eddie. In “The Juniper Tree,” Straub paints a heartrending portrait of sexual abuse and its lasting repercussions as a young boy finds escape in movies, only to discover a monster lurking in the theater’s shadows. “The Buffalo Hunter” is an unnerving story about a man with a very active internal life who discovers he has an unusual ability (and amasses an impressive baby bottle collection). “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine” features a couple with unusual and painful proclivities who take a creepy yacht trip down the Amazon River. Straub has a proven knack for black humor, and he coaxes the nightmarish out of the mundane with startling ease. This is a powerful collection from an enduring favorite in literary chills.
