Review: 'My Darkest Prayer'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

My Darkest Prayer
By S.A. Cosby
Thriller
Flatiron Books

While most readers became aware of S.A. Cosby with the publication of the great novel Blacktop Wasteland, and even more with the publication of the remarkable Razorblade Tears, they were preceded by another very good thriller. My Darkest Prayer, first published in 2018, has been reissued so a greater audience can discover it.

Nathan is a former Marine who now works for his cousin, a mortician, for the Black community in a small Southern town. He's also a former deputy who quit after the investigation into his parents' death was botched -- botched because they were run over by the drunk son of a local rich white man. 

When the minister of a superchurch is found dead in his home, some church ladies are not convinced this death of a prominent Black man will be treated with care. So they ask Nathan to look into things.

As any reader of thrillers knows, Nathan is soon up to his eyebrows in trouble. And it's not just being threatened by law enforcement and criminals. The Rev. Watkins's daughter returns from her adult film job in California to do her reluctant part in laying her despised father to rest. She is soon sharing more than secrets with Nathan.

My Darkest Prayer does not read like a debut novel. It is fast-paced, all the pieces fit together, and the resolution of the main investigation makes sense. In addition, Cosby weaves in pertinent commentary on the culture in a racially divided small Southern town, the importance of church ladies, and longstanding friendships. Nathan may know too many women in the area too well, but he does have one thing a noir protagonist in a violent story cannot do without -- first-rate banter.

Cosby's debut is definitely a novel for noir fans to savor.

Review: 'Dinosaurs'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Dinosaurs
By Lydia Millet
Literary Fiction
W.W. Norton

The idea is not a new one, whether we express it through the words of John Donne -- "no man is an island" -- or even the New Testament notion that "we who are many are one body" because of sharing communion (1 Corinthians 10:17). And when Simon and Garfunkle sing about being a rock, it's obvious how forlorn that idea is.

Gil, the protagonist of Lydia Millet's Dinosaurs, has always been alone. HIs parents were killed in an accident when he was very young. He was raised by a frugal, distant grandmother who died when he was a teenager. The tie he has had the longest with any other person is the attorney who helps manage the vast wealth he inherited as part of a gas and oil family.

And yet Gil has always been one of those searching souls who doesn't curl up into a ball. He volunteers for various charities and ends up friends with two other guys. He falls in love with a woman and they move in together. But things happen and people drift apart. And when Lane leaves him for another man, Gil decides to walk across the country to a new home.

The walk itself is not a pilgrimage and not much time is spent on it. The reader does learn toward the end of the novel why Gil felt compelled to do it, and it fits in with everything we know about his character.

What matters are his new Phoenix neighbors, who live in a literal glass house. Soon, the wife, Ardis, has him hanging out with the young son Tom. The teenage daughter, Clem, is busy trying to make friends. Their father, Ted, is busy at work but genial. Gil volunteers at a women's shelter where another fellow soon becomes part of his circle. A friend of Ardis takes to Gil and soon he and Sarah are involved. Millet tells the reader early on what's really up:

Do your best all your life. What was that? Nothing but self-pity. All it meant was, you expected some surprising change, some exciting reversal, while being exactly who you’d always been. He pictured crowds hunkered down. Committed. Being themselves with dogged perseverance. But all the while they hoped to be interrupted by an unexpected event—deliverance. They dreamed of being lifted up. Being swung out in giddy delight over glittering peaks. Aloft in the sparkling air.

That's Gil. That's who he is to the core. And this passage resonates all the deeper when seen through the lens of what happens to Gil in his new home.

But Gil doesn't see it that way. He sees himself trying to do right by people, trying to justify his existence. He thinks that as a guy who inherited great wealth, he hasn't earned anything. That Millet could create such a character and portray him as forthright and sincere without being maudlin is a marvel. Dinosaurs is a comforting read, especially in as the continuing saga of chaos rages on.

He didn’t want to win. He only wanted to be worthy.

Throughout the novel, there are tidbits about birds and insects. Both existed when dinosaurs did, and both have survived. It's not very forthright until the end, when Gil is loopy after an injury, that the reader sees the connection between the tropes. There are flocks and hive minds in the species that have thrived and survived. They are not islands unto themselves.

And it's not the reality of whether people are connected or not that Millet focuses on, but Gil's realization about the truth of this, that provides the shining moment of the novel.

But being alone was also a closed loop. A loop with a slipknot, say. The loop could be small or large, but it always returned to itself. You had to untie the knot, finally. Open the loop and then everything sank in. And everyone. Then you could see what was true—that separateness had always been the illusion. A simple trick of flesh.

When everything sinks in for Gil, the reader can feel the goodness that is still possible in this crazy world, goodness that comes from being open and being there for others, and letting others be there for you.

Review: 'Trust'

 ©2023 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Trust
By Hernan Diaz
Literary Fiction
Riverhead Books

On its face, the story of a Roaring '20s stock market titan and his fragile wife is not compelling to those of us who prize honor and integrity over money. But Hernan Diaz's Trust is far more than that.

The novel, which was included in President Obama's list of favorite novels of 2022, begins with the tale of Benjamin Rask. He's the only child of a rich family, more content with numbers than people. When he inherits the family fortunes and businesses, he's content to let things ride because he doesn't care about them. Then he discovers joy in playing the stock market, and increases his wealth many times over. Gradually, he's drug into making a few society appearances and ends up marrying a quiet girl. Helen was drug all over Europe by her society-loving mother and arcane knowledge-loving father, performing memory parlor tricks.

The two loners find a way to not only co-exist, but to co-exist happily.

Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it.

That this also allows them both to continue to be loners is a contradiction, yet feels plausible.

Turns out this first section of Trust is “Bonds”, a novel written by Harold Vanner. It is dispassionate, no matter what events occur, and removed from the Rasks' inner selves. It is a curious work that recalls Edith Wharton and Thomas Mann without their ability to get to the heart of a matter.

It also, within the universe of this novel, apparently was a work comissioned by an actual 1920s stock market titan who did not approve of the result. The second section of Trust can sneak up on a reader with its first-person account of man with a history somewhat similar to Rask, one Andrew Bevel. There are similarities but also great differences, mainly in the controlled, yet ever-present, conviction of Bevels that he and his wife are the most wonderful and giving of people. It's not his fault the stock market crashed, even though he sold vast amounts of stock short just before it imploded. And that his wife was never known or understood as a paragon of virtue who loved music, books and flowers.

A third, and fourth, section add to the kaleidoscope effect of the whole novel. Who is in charge of his own story? Or her own story? Who gets to do the telling? And who is telling the truth, not just as they may have seen it, but as close to the truth as it's possible for a person to reach?

Diaz uses this structure to ask these questions regarding several ideas, from Wall Street and finance, to partnerships between men and women, from a writer and an interview subject, to family legacies of many kinds, including physical, spiritual and emotional.

The scope is spectacular. The ways the four parts of the novel intersect and inform each other are elegant. It is especially fitting that at one point, a character's love of math and music combine not only to perform well in the stock market, but as a way to advise someone else how to do the same.

They had to become his thoughts first. Call and response: I gave him D F♯ E A so he could think he’d come up with A E F♯ D on his own.

While making another character believe her ideas were his worked for this character, the gambit is shown in a different light by another character:

Later, over the years, both at work and in my personal life, I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs—as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place. (It is possible that in some cases their vanity had eclipsed their memory so that, thanks to this selective amnesia, they could lay claim to their epiphany with a clean conscience.)

Another character expresses why mystery novels, especially those written by women in the genre's Golden Age, spoke to so many:

I was comforted by the idea of order in their novels. It all started with crime and chaos. Even sense and meaning themselves were challenged—the characters, their actions and their motives seemed incomprehensible. But after a brief reign of lawlessness and confusion, order and harmony were always restored. Everything became clear, everything was explained and everything was well with the world. This gave me enormous peace. And, perhaps more importantly, these women showed me I did not have to conform to the stereotypical notions of the feminine world. Their stories were not just about romance and domestic bliss. There was violence in their books—a violence they controlled. These writers showed me, through their example, that I could write something dangerous. They showed me that there was no reward in being reliable or obedient: the reader’s expectations and demands were there to be intentionally confounded and subverted. They were the writers who first made me want to become a writer.

The need for order is one that is imposed by different characters in different ways, from the Wall Street financier to his wife to a poor typist who is the daughter of an anarchist. Two of the four sections of the novel have the titles of "Bonds" and "Futures". In both instances, they speak to the financial aspect of the story, and to the personal. That's the kind of novel Trust is. And like a well-crafted symphony, the various movements work together to form a whole greater than the sum of their individual parts.