This week: Anthony Marra's latest, plus Jeanette Winterson retells Shakespeare.
Wilkie Collins: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd (Doubleday/Talese) - This compact but detailed biography illuminates the literary career of Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), whose “sensation stories” made him one of the Victorian era’s most popular authors. Collins, the son of a respected painter (whose biography would be one of his first publishing successes), escaped from the drudgery of a civil service career—his father’s idea—while still in his early 20s by unleashing a torrent of novels, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces that ensured his literary fame. He befriended Charles Dickens, becoming his frequent collaborator on stories and amateur theatrical adaptations in which the two occasionally acted. Ackroyd (Charles Chaplin: A Brief Life) identifies “contemporary melodrama” as Collins’s métier. He was “a master of plot rather than of character” whose novels—notably The Woman in White and The Moonstone (regarded as the first detective novel)—are memorable for their suspense and narrative ingenuity. Collins also flouted Victorian mores and sometimes incensed critics with his realistic depictions of working-class life and the plight of women. The depiction of Collins as an artist afflicted with gout and neuralgia who worked himself to the brink of nervous prostration with each book he wrote makes him as interesting as one of his own fictional characters.
Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes (Knopf) - In these sharply observed essays, English novelist Barnes (Sense of an Ending), levels his fine critical eye at the visual arts, principally focusing on French painting and the transition from romanticism to modernism. The Booker Prize–winning novelist first wrote about art for his novel A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), which contains a study of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa; that study is this collection’s stirring opener. French art remains Barnes’s forte, and the book includes pieces on Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Braque. He submits thoughts on these and other artists with sentences that coolly snap and continually delight. In his wonderful study of Edgar Degas’s portrayals of women, Barnes knocks down the charge of misogyny and shows an argumentative spirit that is somewhat wanting in other places. “Do you constantly and obsessively fret at the representation of something you dislike or despise?” he provocatively asks. It’s both a pleasure and an education to look over Barnes’s shoulder as he interrogates, wonders at, and relishes works of art. He’s a critic who prioritizes the objects themselves, and his work is always satisfying.
An Inheritance of Ashes by Leah Bobet (Clarion) - This superb fantasy takes place in a grim world that readers will come to recognize as a future North America. Reasons for society’s collapse aren’t given, but civilization is at a roughly 19th-century level. Guns are considered relics, but no one thinks twice about having Hmong neighbors. Months ago 16-year-old Hallie’s brother-in-law, Thom, marched away from the farm she co-owns with her sister, Marthe, to fight the Wicked God Southward, an entity that traveled through a rent in the universe and, accompanied by its Twisted Things, was turning their world to ash. The ragtag human army defeated the Wicked God, but Thom, like many others, did not return; those who did have been badly damaged. When Hallie finds another Twisted Thing on the farm, the horror seems ready to return.
The Witch of Lime Street: Seance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher (Crown) - Jaher brings Harry Houdini’s crusade against spiritualism back into popular knowledge in his gripping first book. At one point, Houdini thought his legacy would be that crusade, not his death-defying magic tricks. Spiritualism, a 19th-century religious movement predicated on belief in communication with spirits, experienced a resurgence after WWI. Houdini had posed as a medium early in his career and knew all the tricks of fake mediums, so when Scientific American held a controversial contest awarding a cash prize to any medium who passed their scientific tests, Houdini sat on the five-person jury. Through that contest he met Mina “Margery” Crandon, one of the most famous and convincing mediums in the country. Despite the conviction of his fellow judges, Houdini declared Crandon a fake and reproduced—to much public consternation—the feats that brought her notoriety. Jaher paints a fascinating portrait of spiritualism.
Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA by Roberta Kaplan, with Lisa Dickey (Norton) - Civil rights lawyer Kaplan, who helped bring down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in the case United States v. Windsor, shares the remarkable story of the landmark victory for gay rights. Along with detailing her legal strategy in the lower courts, Kaplan weaves her own coming out story and her personal relationship into the story of her clients Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, but those details never compete. Instead, they provide a revealing juxtaposition of how two very different generations of lesbians wrestled with the social attitudes of their times. It’s a timely, well-told story, brimming with observations about the importance of family and Kaplan’s Jewish heritage. Her explanations of the intricacies of U.S. constitutional law are deft and accessible to the layperson, especially when she divulges the strategy of focusing their legal case on Justice Anthony Kennedy’s jurisprudence. Kaplan’s rallying cry “It’s all about Edie, stupid” keeps the stories of two remarkable women at the center of this historic legal and human drama.
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie (Orbit) - The breathtaking conclusion to Leckie’s much-lauded Imperiald Radch trilogy (Ancillary Justice; Ancillary Sword) lives up to the promise and expectations of the earlier books. Breq, the last human body housing the consciousness of the destroyed troop carrier Justice of Toren, must prepare the Athoek space station to survive the civil war spreading through Radch space. The station is overcrowded and badly damaged, and the political situation deteriorates as it becomes clear that the station has already been corrupted by competing factions of Anaander Mianaai, the many-bodied supreme ruler of the Radchaai. Breq has no way to determine the loyalties of the other military ships in the system. Things become even more complicated when station security finds somebody who doesn’t belong there and should have died 600 years before. New readers could begin the series here, but they will miss out on the deeply satisfying culmination of early plot points and running jokes. This glorious series summit is suffused with the wit and the skillful eye for character that fans have come to expect from Leckie. Breq and her lieutenants are destined to be beloved giants in the space opera canon.
The Ville Rat by Martin Limon (Soho Crime) - Set in 1974, Limón’s pulse-pounding 10th mystery featuring sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom (after 2014’s The Iron Sickle) takes the two agents of the 8th U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division to a crime scene a bit north of Seoul, where someone has strangled a young Korean woman, who worked as a kisaeng, or “entertainer,” and left her in the Sonyu River. The proximity of the corpse to a U.S. Army base suggests that an American is responsible, a possibility the military brass doesn’t want to countenance. The partners, who have a reputation for not “overlooking crimes that were considered embarrassing,” welcome the challenge. George and Ernie’s persistence soon leads to their recall to headquarters, forcing them to be creative in continuing their search for the truth. This police procedural, with its unusual locale, admirable protagonists, and well-developed plot, stands as a superior entry in a consistently impressive series.
The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra (Hogarth) - Marra follows A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (one of PW’s 10 best books of 2013) with this collection of nine interconnected stories, divided into sides A, B, and intermission. They probe personal facets of Russian life, from 1937 to the present—from Chechnya to Siberia and from labor camp to hillside meadow. In the first story, Roman Markin, a Stalin-era specialist in removing purged individuals from photographs and politically correcting artwork, airbrushes out his own brother, then begins secretly inserting his brother’s face into other pieces, including a photograph with a ballerina he’s erasing and a landscape by 19th-century Chechen painter Zakharov into which he’s adding a party boss. “Granddaughters,” set in the Siberian mining town of Kirovsk, focuses on Galina, the ballerina’s granddaughter. Inheriting her grandmother’s beauty if not her talent, Galina captures the Miss Siberia crown, the attentions of the 14th richest man in Russia, and a movie role in Web of Deceit, while her sweetheart, Kolya, ends up fighting and dying in Chechnya. As in his acclaimed novel, Marra finds in Chechnya an inspiration his for his uniquely funny, tragic, bizarre, and memorable fiction.
The Nest by Kenneth Oppel, illus. by Jon Klassen (S&S) - Oppel (The Boundless) enters Gaimanesque territory with his portrayal of Steve, an older brother struggling with anxiety and his family’s distress after his newborn brother, Theodore, is diagnosed with a rare congenital disorder. After a curious gray and white wasp from the hive above their house stings Steve, he develops the ability to speak to the hive’s queen, who promises to replace the ailing baby with a new one. Agreeing to the queen’s offer, Steve confronts a dangerous traveling knife sharpener, his parents’ concerns over his mental health, and strange phone calls from Mr. Nobody, a family legend turned real, it seems. As Theodore’s health deteriorates, Steve must decide what is best for his brother and what he will do to save him. Oppel infuses the natural world of the hive with chilling scenes of the queen’s heartlessness (“Before you know it, you’ll forget all about that crappy little broken baby”) while Klassen’s graphite drawings hauntingly depict the family’s stress. In exploring the boundaries of science, self-determination, and belief, Oppel uses a dark and disturbing lens to produce an unnerving psychological thriller.
The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century by David Reiff (S&S) - Rieff (Swimming in the Sea of Death) delivers a stinging indictment of modern philanthropy and development theory’s capacity to resolve the pressing issues of poverty and hunger. Countering the view that these problems are resolvable within our lifetimes through technology and the powers of capitalism, Rieff chooses to ask difficult questions: Is it truly possible for corporations to do authentically good work when their profit margins depend on resource exploitation? Is capitalism the answer or is the economic model fundamentally broken? Can humankind meet development goals without exacerbating climate change? Is it morally acceptable for super-rich donors like Bill Gates and other “philanthrocapitalists” to set international agendas? Rieff doesn’t claim to have the answers, but he certainly has a refreshing willingness to ask questions, and a skeptical perspective that extends to major figures such as Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, and Bono. This is a stellar addition to the canon of development policy literature.
Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion) - Joseph Brook, 14, has been dealt a hand so bad that he deserves to win the foster family lottery, which he does, delivered into the care of the Hurds—loving, patient, thoughtful farmers. He arrives nearly mute, his social worker warning that, because of what he’s been through in detention, he doesn’t like the color orange, to be touched, or to be approached from behind. But Joseph thaws quickly, bonding with narrator, Jack, the last foster child the Hurds took in. Within weeks, Joseph shares his tragic history: he fell in love with a well-to-do girl, and she became pregnant at 13. The baby, Jupiter, is now in foster care, too, and Joseph desperately wants to find her. The plot can be heavy-handed, but Schmidt’s writing is so smooth and graceful that is easy to empathize with Joseph, who is victimized repeatedly—by his father, by adults who write him off before they meet him, by bullies who see an easy target. It’s a powerful story about second chances, all the more devastating because not everyone gets one.
The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane - As the editor of two SF anthologies and director of Rutgers University Press, Sloane would easily have made a name for himself in the speculative fiction world even if he had not written these two tremendous novels. Reprinted for the first time in years, “To Walk the Night” and “The Edge of Running Water” blend SF and horror in a manner wholly unheard of when they were originally published in the 1930s. In “To Walk the Night,” two inseparable friends discover an impossible murder and are slowly drawn into its mystery, which threatens to consume their lives as well. In “The Edge of Running Water,” a genius electrophysicist attempts to pierce the barrier between life and death, with disastrous consequences. Sloane’s eerie, exquisitely descriptive prose is influenced by Gothic literature as well as contemporary scientific theory. Sloane is the product of his time, of course, and he uses some outdated terms for people with learning disabilities (as does Stephen King, bafflingly and willingly enough, in his introduction), but his work is still impressively well executed. These all-but-forgotten texts make excellent reading for any fan of classic SF or eldritch horror.
Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly) - Plenty of graphic novelists mine the seam of modern anxieties and alienation. Only a tiny handful do so with as much perceptive humanity as Tomine. These half-dozen short stories are drawn with a cool, dry, Chris Ware–like style that heightens the emotions packed within their rigidly uniform blocks rather than muffling it. Many of the stories track relationships in which the women are lost and the men lash out. The men react in fury to their thwarted creativity (like the wannabe sculptor in "A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture' ") and to any acknowledgment of their shortcomings (like the rage-filled middle-aged pot dealer in "Go Owls"). Some of those same damaged and defensive men also appear in "Amber Sweet," a Paul Austeresque fable of disorientation, in which a woman must come to terms with her resemblance to a popular porn star. But the title story is a simpler and more riveting construction. In it, an awkward, stuttering 14-year-old girl pursues an unlikely career as a stand-up comic, while her mother overpraises her and her father undermines her from the sidelines, though none of the three addresses the tragedy looming ever larger in their lives. Tomine has created a deft, deadpan masterpiece filled with heartache interspersed with the shock of beauty.
The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson (Hogarth) - Even the most devout Shakespeareans have trouble with his late plays—the ones where lost children reappear, the dead live again, and, with enough coincidences and unlikely events, King Lear–level tragedy ends happily. Winterson (The Daylight Gate), however, loves The Winter’s Tale so much that she’s written a “cover version” of it in this, the first in Hogarth’s Shakespeare series in which contemporary writers “retell” the Bard’s plays. She replaces King Leontes with Leo, an arrogant English money manager; old friend King Polixenes becomes Xeno, a video-game designer. As in the play, Leo’s conviction that the child his wife is carrying is not his but Xeno’s results in broken hearts and ruined friendships, exile, and a daughter turned foundling, raised by a bar owner and his son in a New Orleans–like city. But Winterson doesn’t just update the story: she fills in its psychological nuances. Why would Leo suddenly decide his wife is sleeping with Xeno? Winterson’s backstory can’t justify his actions, but it does add fascinating context. And in her version, the violence, by turns comic book and terrifying, happens onstage, not off. It’s fun to see Winterson solve the play’s problems, but the book’s real strength is the way her language shifts between earthy and poetic and her willingness to use whatever she needs to tell the story (angels, video games, carjackings).
