Review: 'Lady in the Lake'

Lady in the Lake
By Laura Lippman
Fiction
July 2019
William Morrow
ISBN: 978-0062390011

A white woman on the brink of middle age realizes she is settled into her staid, perfect-on-the-outside life, her son nearly grown and nothing else to show for all those years. So she moves out, wants a divorce and decides her life needs to count for something. What she decides on, after helping find the body of a murdered child, is that she needs to be a newspaper writer.

Maddie Schwartz is not the only voice from Baltimore in 1966 in Laura Lippman's latest, remarkable novel. The first voice we see is that of the woman who becomes known as the Lady in the Lake, a younger black woman whose body is found in a city lake. Apparently the ghost of the young woman, Cleo Sherwood, doesn't want justice or revenge. She tells Maddie her snooping will only bring trouble.

Even as Maddie searches for a scoop as her way into a regular newspaper job, she misses stories all around her. Lippman shows the reader this over and over again, as each person whose path Maddie crosses gets at least one chapter to tell his or her story. Sometimes it's their view of what just happened, sometimes that's just the starting point of a snapshot version of their lives or to fill in something the reader will want to know.

Every single voice adds to the reader's knowledge of the Baltimore Maddie inhabits and the other Baltimores she doesn't know. Each one tells the reader about lives well lived and lives wasted.

Lippman's experience as a newspaper reporter, the daughter of a Baltimore Sun writer who worked at the paper during the era of her novel, and as a writer of mysteries and thrillers, brings expertise in the storytelling. This is true whether it's the telling detail or the connection of one character to another.

What Lippman knows and shows, however, Maddie does not. She misses every other story that is basically not about her. Even in trying to find out about the woman whose body was in the lake, even when she discovers the victim's name was Cleo to some and Eunetta to her family, Maddie is writing about herself.

And that trouble the ghost tried to warn Maddie about? It's coming. And when it does, others around Maddie could be the ones most affected.

As both a thriller and a look at writers and at the past of a city she loves, Lady in the Lake is an ode by Lippman to Baltimore and to journalism. It's an engrossing novel of many stories.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted with permission

Review: 'The Nickel Boys'

The Nickel Boys

By Colson Whitehead

Literary fiction

July 2019

Doubleday

ISBN: 978-0385537070

A child ready to become a man, inspired by the words of justice and equality by Dr. King; children cut off from their families, kind boys, lost boys, cruel boys and men thrown together; and a reform school where food and materials meant for black inmates are sold and some boys disappear. They are the Nickel Boys. Some of them survived.

In Colson Whitehead's new novel, The Nickel Boys, revives the hopes, the loss of dreams, the cruelty and evil of Jim Crow segregated "reform schools". The Nickel School in this novel is based on such a Floridian institution. 

Elwood is on the cusp of manhood, being raised by his grandmother in Tallahassee during the early days of the Civil Rights movement. He wants to learn about everything and is careful in matters great and small. A record album his grandmother purchased of Dr. King's speeches is his lodestone. The hard-working teen, trusted by his white employer and ready to start early college classes, makes one error in judgment.  

Elwood's views of individual and systemic justice don't stand a chance at a place like Nickel, the reform school where he is sent. Elwood is not corrupted by the system he encounters at Nickel. He suffers through learning how to navigate that system, and refuses to give up on Dr. King's ideals. He wants to emulate his hero.

His friend, Turner, does not look at the world in the same way. He already knows there is no such thing as justice and that what you do will never be as important to those in power as what you are. If Turner can game the situation, he will. It's what he has learned to do to survive. It's how he gets by.

Both boys do what they can to cope as best they know how, whether it's the random but expected little acts of cruelty or beatings so severe a boy ends up in a hospital bed on campus. Whether it's working on campus or even off the grounds, it doesn't matter. Working hard doesn't pay off if someone in power has it in for you. And if someone in power can use you, don't mistake what they do as acts of kindness or understanding. After all, there is an unmarked graveyard.

Even in these dire conditions, with characters mired in can't-win situations, Whitehead writes about dignity and caring. The stories of the boys remain stories of boys and how they try to figure out how to become men. They observe, they work, they have a code of honor that serves them as can be best expected. Some endure. Some never quit being free in their souls. Others will remain imprisoned regardless of whether they left the place or not.

This is an important work. It is not fanciful. It is moored to reality, but with its spirit of humanity, it is not weighed down.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted by permission

Review: 'The Other Americans'

The Other Americans
By Laila Lamani
Literary fiction
March 2019
Pantheon
ISBN: 978-1524747145

A daughter seeking to live her own life on her own terms, a dutiful daughter her mother compares her to, a beloved father who is killed in a hit-and-run accident one night, a man who may or may have not seen that hit-and-run but who is afraid of the police, a deputy who remembers that first daughter as his beautiful and kind high school classmate, and his war buddy who is struggling with his return to civilian life -- all of these characters are Americans, those who are us and not us, brought to vivid life in Laila Lamani's latest novel, The Other Americans.

Lamani, a Pulitzer Prize finalist with her prior novel, The Moor's Account, slowly introduces each character in short chapters that are told from their points of view. Regardless of background or any other identifier, each character is fully realized and speaks for himself or herself. Their voices are grounded in how they see themselves and how the world sees them.

Nora is the daughter seeking to live her own life. She is a musician, a composer studying at university with a life not connected to that of her family. Her parents and older sister fled Morocco before she was born in America. Her father, Driss, has owned and run a diner in their small California town for years. One night, he is hit while riding a bicycle, coming home. The vehicle never stopped. Nora feels a great deal of guilt for not being there, and hurries back.

As the family's story, and the stories of each member, unfolds, others connected to the family, the diner and the accident also are revealed. Efrain isn't sure how much of the accident he saw and doesn't want to talk to the police. He is undocumented and has a family. His wife believes it is his duty to report what he knows, because it is the right thing to do.

The cranky bowling alley owner, Anderson Baker, whose business is next to the diner, didn't see anything. The long years he has put in at his alley are showing. Newly arrived Detective Erica Coleman is frustrated by the lack of information as much as she is by the barriers she sees to her son making friends and fitting in. Jeremy, the deputy, remembers Nora's kindnesses to him when they were classmates and stops by the family home to offer his condolences.

The structure has a Rashomon feel. As the various portions of each character's stories show events in different lights, revealing a greater understanding of them and of what happened the night Driss died and what led to that point. Not everything that happens to these characters is by chance, but everything that follows is determined by how they feel.

It is in the nuances of these feelings and reactions that the beauty of the novel lives. When Nora learns of her father's death, she thinks:

I could have talked to him one more time, heard the care in his voice, and yet I had squandered the chance. And all for some bitter coffee in a paper cup, hastily consumed before confronting a class of bored prep-school kids making their way through The Odyssey.

Or Efrain, as he tries to remember exactly what he heard and saw on the night of the hit-and-run:

Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.

Or Nora's mother, Maryam, the woman who relies on her faith in matters great and small, praying for her daughter:

... I murmured a prayer for her, as I had so many times in the past, only this time I prayed for more than her health, more than her safety, more than her happiness. I prayed for her greedily, for the thing I had given up years ago and never found again. Home.

And, Nora again, on this novel's foundation, love, especially within a family:

Only now, after my father's death, did I come to understand that love was not a tame or passive creature, but a rebellious beast, messy and unpredictable, capacious and forgiving ...

Just as in Lamani's earlier works, the personal becomes the universal. We are the the others to those who are the others to us. When looking at other Americans, what is being reflected back matters as much as the original. Everyone is part of a family, and these ties that bind can be restricting, empowering and supportive, or some of each.

©2019 All Rights Reserved TheLitForum.com Reviews and reprinted by permission