Review: 'City on Fire'

©2020 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

City on Fire
By Don Winslow
Crime Fiction
William Morrow

Families, gangs, armies are all complex organisms that exist as an entity in addition to being a group of individuals. The dynamics between the two types of existence -- as individuals and as a group -- drive the action in Don Winslow's City on Fire, a remarkable new novel that has echoes of Greek tragedy.

The novel opens with the annual clambake Pasco Ferri holds at his Rhode Island beach house. Danny Ryan, loyal soldier to the Murphys, is content to celebrate the end of another summer with the Irish and Italian families that are loyal to Ferri. Through his eyes, the reader is introduced to the people around him, the ways they spend their holiday days and nights, the love he has for his wife, Terri, who is a Murphy daughter. Danny once fished on the ocean to stay away from the traditional jobs on the docks and running certain errands for the Murphys, but that all changed when he got married. And although he's a hard worker and loyal soldier, as well as a son-in-law, he has no place at the table in back of John Murphy's Irish bar. But that's the kind of thing one shakes off when it comes to family and friends.

When Danny and Terri spot a beautiful young woman arrive on the beach, they see things will never be the same. She is a Helen of Troy figure, coming in on the arm of one of the Italian crew. Pam draws everyone's eyes, but none more intently than those of Liam. He's the youngest Murphy son, the one least capable of doing his duty, and the one everyone makes excuses for. Until he insults Pam, and, like Troy and Sparta, the peace is broken. And, like the Trojan War, the toll will be heavy.

The action is twisty and fast-paced in this remarkable story. Danny anchors it, acting as a major player whose fate is not what he chose, but what he is capable of rising to fulfill. He also is a sort of Greek chorus that notices who does what, and why, and what the ramifications may well be. Some events are foreshadowed well in advance while others may well surprise a reader. But they all make sense within the frame of the story.

City on Fire is violent and profane in its raw depiction of what happens when two mob families go into an all-out war. The juxtaposition between what individuals choose to do and the way the families function shows how easily wrong choices can be made, and the deadly consequences that follow. There are echoes of other mob stories, but this stands on its own. Winslow has written about cartels and crime families in his fiction before, and his experience in being able to tell these stories in a compelling manner brings a good fit to the framework of classic tragedy. As the first in Winslow's trilogy that marks his retirement from writing to work as an anti-fascist media advocate full-time, City on Fire is an engrossing send-off.

Review: 'Notes on Your Sudden DIsappearanace'

©2020 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
By Alison Espach
Fiction
Henry Holt & Co.

Sally is in awe of her older sister, Kathy, in Alison Espach’s Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance. When you're in grade school, three years can make a big difference in how much your older sister knows. When you're in middle school and your sister is in high school, those three years make an even bigger difference.

The girls share a bedroom, where their names are spelled out in glow-in-the-dark stars. They also share a fascination with the star basketball player of their small Connecticut town, Billy, who is a year older than Kathy. Every tiny, fleeting encounter with him is treasured and dissected by the sisters. Billy appears to be an all-American prototype. But one day, he gets into a dare contest and jumps off the roof of the elementary school. He breaks a leg and becomes a hero to all the kids. It's also a sign that perhaps Billy is more complicated than he appears to be.

For years, the girls talk about Billy every night. Their infatuation never wanes.

Billy, whose father owns the local gardening store, works at the town pool's concession stand. The setpiece has the girls spending a day lounging by the pool, going over to the stand, watching what Billy does and how the other girls go over to the stand to flirt, the moms in a group by themselves talking about who knows what, Kathy acting like a true blue teenage girl who wants a boy's attention but doesn't want him to know it, and Sally trying to do her summer reading while keeping track of everything that's going on, and wishing she was older. This section is filled with what it is like to be all of those characters at those stages in their lives.

It's also a strong portrait of family dynamics, something that is a constant throughout the story with the two sisters and their parents, and their parents' wishes of what could have been. Their father, for instance, fusses over the big maple trees in the back yard whenever a storm is forecast. Those trees will play a central role.

Sally, frustrated at being 13, climbs the high dive ladder but instead of diving, falls off. Billy rescues her. Her mother is so grateful that she invites him to dinner. Kathy is mortified but it leads to their going out.

Kathy becomes Billy's girlfriend. She shares everything that happens with Sally. But Sally is not as forthcoming to her sister, especially when a chance remark she made once in elementary school is picked up again by some boys. She is attacked on the bus one day going home from middle school. Sally's encounters with Billy are limited to them silently waiting in the kitchen mornings while Kathy dithers about what to wear to school. The day he wants to know what she's writing in notes for schoolwork floors her.

One morning, the unthinkable happens. In all the years that follow, two of the three try to carry on with their damaged lives and heartbroken souls. They deal with friends who are not really friends. They deal with stricken parents who lash out. They blame themselves but never each other. And they talk to each other. And talk to each other. And talk to each other. They go to college. They go out with people. They break up with them. They go years without speaking but never forget the other.

What is remarkable about Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance is that there is a tragedy anchoring the story. Everything that happens afterward is because of that tragedy. But this is not a morose book. It is heartfelt and looks for ways in which people carry on, for how they manage to get through their days and nights without the relentless crush of grief. There are piercing moments of joy that feel all the more earned because of what happened.

And, oh how to talk about the end without spoilers of any kind. Let's just say it is an ending I adored, and that the last sentence is one of the best I've ever read. With all the madness going on, it was a respite to live in Kathy and Sally's world for a day.

Review: 'Violets'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Violets
By Kyung-Sook Shin
Literary Fiction
The Feminist Press at CUNY

In a world of lost and missed connections, a story such as Violets seems particularly fitting. 

The novel, by Kyung-Sook Shin, chronicles the life of a young Korean woman born into loneliness. When Oh San was born, her mother suffered postpartum depression and her father left. She is raised by her mother and paternal grandmother, who constantly fight. She has only one friend, another schoolgirl with only one parent. But one day they become too close and the girl refuses to have anything to do with San again.

In the 1990s, San is a young woman on her own in Seoul looking for work. She tried hairdressing, such as her mother did, but hated it. She's been taking word-processing classes and would love to do that work at a publishing house, but loses out on a job because she has no experience. A flower shop has a hand-written note for a woman took look after the flowers in its window. She sees it, but backs away, then returns a few days later.

Oh San fills her days and sometimes her nights at the flower shop. The owner does not speak and would rather be on his flower farm. His niece is the one who runs the shop. Lee Sue-ae and Oh San are the same age and have both been through trauma in their childhood. Sue-ae rebelled but has returned to the flower farm and shop, and has come into her own. She is more confident and assertive, and becomes San's roommate. She brings light and stability into San's life.

Two men who come into the shop also come into San's life. One is a businessman who often buys flowers from the shop for company business. Choi is big, bold, polite but interested in San, and he terrifies her with these traits. 

The other is a flower photographer who comes in on assignment to take picture of violets. The unnamed man hates the assignment, hates the flower and is not quiet about it. But he is taken by the appearance of San among the flowers with her head down and takes several photos of her amidst the blossoms. It's not an important event to San but suddenly, without warning, the idea of the photographer as a man overtakes her. She is beyond drawn to him. The idea of him becomes her entire existence.

Everything that happens in this short novel, every character that comes into San's life, every idea, shows different ways in which people may have good intentions but cannot always be counted on to be that way. Violets is a searing look at ways in which women with open hearts can have them broken. Violets also is an open-hearted look at how women seek ways to pick themselves back up. As one character asks about herself:

Was I always this fragile a woman?

And as is said of one character:

She pretends to be strong and cold but she is actually sensitive and vulnerable.

Kyung-Sook Shin, winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, has crafted a story that gives women a chance to reflect on ways in which they have let their best selves shine, even when the characters here do not, and those who would care about them the chance to see them for who they are.