Review: 'Night of the Living Rez'

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Night of the Living Rez
By Morgan Talty
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Tin House

A young boy, living on the Penobscot reservation with his older sister and mother, gets older but doesn't seem to grow up in a beautifully written set of connected stories. Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez centers on David, or Dee, at different ages in a non-linear arrangement. Talty takes advantage of that narrative construction choice to show how, regardless of what is going on in our young narrator's life, there are some constants that affect everything about his life and the lives of his family and friends.

These constants are mostly not positive, which makes the positive parts stand out all the brighter. The stories also show how strongly connected the positive and not-positive are. In "The Blessing Tobacco", a young David visits his grandmother at her house. She is starting to suffer from Alzheimer's and thinks David is her long-dead brother, Robbie. 

Grammy keeps passing him cigarettes at the kitchen table. He hasn't smoked and is pretty sure he'd get in trouble if he did, but his mother told him to just go along with Grammy if she wasn't herself. So he smokes them and she keeps passing more to him, getting more insistent that he smoke them. So of course he's soon sick. Turns out Grammy was punishing Robbie for taking something that happened years before David was even born.

His mostly quiet mother and his usually distressed sister nurse him and he is sent back to fill his grandmother's wood box. The slight guilting, the quiet back-and-forth conversation that sends him back and the ensuing chat with his grandmother are realistically and quietly portrayed. It is real life. As they sit back down at the kitchen table, Grammy is herself and tells David a joke he finds so funny that he has her repeat it.

When Grammy has a bad spell later, the arguing that David's mother and sister had been doing is dropped as they unite in taking care of of their elder. She again mistakes David for her dead brother. Later, David dreams that he knew Robbie and has memories of them hunting or fishing together. The way the end of the story is written is indicative of why this book can take hold of one's heart and head:

"... and after all that we walked away through mud or snow until I stopped walking but he kept on going and going and going out there in quiet strides through a dark-pined forest until he was gone."

Gone in more ways than one.

David spends a lot of time with his friends. Whether they're playing an elaborate game of sticks and stones, or smoking, drinking and even doing drugs, the boys are together or looking for each other. They are just as apt to steal from each other as they are to give each other things. It's fascinating that they don't hold grudges and fall right back into hanging out together. David even spends significant time living at their houses when he and his mother cannot abide each other.

His father is mostly out of the picture. David's parents divorced when he was quite young and his dad moved away. He isn't a good provider and doesn't come to visit his kids, but when something goes wrong someone usually reaches out to call him and make him part of what's happening. And one of the other family members shuts him out. Again, the pattern is repeated.

The other major character is Frick, his mother's boyfriend who first appears in his role as a medicine man when Paige has a crisis. His role within the family has a most definitive trajectory:

He was a medicine man who had been forgetting to pray in the mornings and at night, forgetting to feed the spirits once a month.

For the most part, the fights and quarrels and bickering and hurtful things separate the characters. But then something comes up and, for the most part, they are there for each other. Throughout everything that happens to each family member in Night of the Living Rez, that love underneath the trauma holds:

Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.

Review: 'Olga Dies Dreaming'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Olga Dies Dreaming
By Xochitl Gonzalez
Literary Fiction
Flatiron Books

Olga is a successful high-end wedding planner, daughter of Puerto Rican activists, and sister of a media star congressman. What's most important to her right now? Some dodgy paperwork to present her cousin with expensive, heirloom-worthy linen napkins at her upcoming wedding.

So, is Olga Dies Dreaming, the new novel by Xochitl Gonzalez, a frothy tale about a woman and her familia? Let's just say it has a lot to say about family dynamics.

Olga and her brother, Prieto, were left by their mother, now a fugitive activist fighting for Puerto Rican independence. Their father, a Vietnam vet, died of AIDS as a broken-hearted junkie who loved music and his children, but who loved the needle more.

Their grandmother raised them with unconditional love. Both are accomplished, successful adults who are close to each other. Of course they are both hiding pain. And as the story deepens, the reader learns about the what and why of their pain. And how it affects what happens in the rest of the novel.

Olga has shut her heart up. She has an ongoing relationship with the rich owner of a chain of hardware stores, but she isn't in love with him. Olga had one other serious boyfriend as a young girl. Reggie is now a wildly rich music mogul with diverse investments and a renewed interest in his own Puerto Rican heritage. And now there is a new man who has appeared. Matteo is his own true self, even when it comes to admitting his flaws and fears.

Prieto is divorced and has a young teenage daughter. He's been hiding his homosexuality from even himself, but that's no longer an option. He is afraid of how his family will react, even more than the voters or the media.

Both sister and brother have received letters from their mother over the years, although she's never visited or even called them. She exhorts them to remember who they are and to not sell out. Nothing they do is ever good enough, because they are not as committed to her cause as she is. 

By the time the personal, professional, racial and cultural aspects of their story propel each other to some potentially disastrous decisions, it is difficult to not be worried for both Olga and Prieto. It's easy to see how badly things can do. So easy to see that it would be understandable if one decided to put the book down and, say, listen to music for a spell.

But it is so worthwhile to return to the novel. To find out what happens. And so see what happens when even people who love each other acknowledge that they haven't been brave enough to be completely honest in the past, but they're trying now. 

At one point, Olga wonders about someone who collects so many certain objects that the word hoarding is apt. What pain caused that hole in the heart that the objects are an attempt to fill it back up? What Olga doesn't know at the time is that she, too, has a hole in her heart. Every main character in the novel does. And the ways in which they seek to fill those holes show both how loving and how wounded, how willing to heal and how wounding, people can be.

Olga Dies Dreaming is a fascinating look at how the personal is part of the larger story -- of a family, of a culture, or a heritage that all can serve as foundational and supportive for someone to become their best true self.

Review: 'Fire Season'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Fire Season
By Leyna Krow
Literary Fiction
Viking

Before Washington Territory was granted statehood, a fire swept through downtown Spokane Falls. The cause was never determined and the town was rebuilt larger and more grandiose than before. One way of looking at why the town burned underlies the story in Leyna Krow's Fire Season. 

The story of the fire is not the subject of the novel, however. But it does serve to illuminate the story of a woman of a certain kind, as Roslyn is dubbed by her father. The fire also sheds light on how damaged men would control such women, and what happens when they try.

On the eve of the Great Fire of 1889, Barton Heyward runs the only bank in town. He's certain no one likes him, no one respects him and he just got the worst haircut of his young life. Not even his favorite prostitute, Roslyn, likes him more than she likes the drink. So perhaps he'll just kill himself. He chickens out, the town burns the next day and he comes up with a way to enrich himself. If he can't be loved he can find another way to make himself feel better. Writing fake bank notes and charging hidden interest fees makes him feel clever.

That includes keeping Roslyn at his house under the pretense people think she set the fire. People don't actually think this, but Barton isn't just deluding Roslyn. He's deluding himself, convincing himself that she is his great love, that she loves him and that they will go away together to begin a beautiful life. As Roslyn begins to clear her head from its alcohol-fueled fugue, she begins to think for herself.

Soon, another young man arrives in Spokane Falls. He is even less impressed with the people he meets than Barton. Quake Auchenbaucher was sent for because of his reputation for solving fire investigations as a federal government inspector. That's not who he really is, but Quake is ready to once again size up a situation, tell people what they want and make a tidy profit.

Barton seems a ready-made patsy for Quake's scheme. And the sooner Quake can get out of Spokane Falls, the happier he will be. The local police are a drunken gang, the town is full of stupid people and the only thing people seem excited over is the fare of a local waffle shop.

What Quake doesn't know is that Roslyn will come into his life, too.

And what both men don't initially know is that Roslyn, well, she can do certain things. Because she is a woman of a certain kind. Hints about what she can do appear during interludes between the sagas of the two men. Hints about women who can fly, who can intuit, who can have visions and who can levitate beyond their bodies.

As more is revealed about Roslyn and how she ended up in a Spokane hotel, more is shown about the ways in which women have to make the most of whatever gifts they have. And ways in which they can be punished for having those gifts. But Fire Season also shows that for a certain kind of woman who perseveres, grace is possible.

Fire Season does a superb job of portraying the aftermath of the Great Fire. It gives a feel for what Spokane Falls and other Western towns were like, in addition to their people. These portraits serve the greater story very well. 

Although there are serious themes displayed, there also is whimsy in this novel.

Review: 'Face" by Jaspreet Singh

©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Face: A Novel of the Anthropocene
By Jaspreet Singh
Literary Fiction 
Touchwood Editions

Mysteries within mysteries, whether scientific, academic or personal, are puzzled over in Jaspreet Singh's novel Face. As the mysteries are revealed, the ways in which they connect demonstrate just how complicated even the simplest-seeming thing can be.

Lila studied geology at university, but left India and became a science journalist. She enrolls in a fiction writing workshop and is paired with a woman in a face-studying exercise. They don't yet know each other's names, but they will get to know each other. And one of them will be dead in 51 days. 

The exercise is not comfortable to Lila, but she continues. And she imagines feeling responsible for this other person, who is named Lucia. Before they have a chance to talk when the exercise ends, a man appears in the classroom door to pick Lucia up. Lila is certain she has seen him before. But how and where is one of the mysteries to be unraveled in the novel.

When Lucia introduces her husband to Lila, she recognizes him as a former classmate of hers. But that cannot be. He died.

Lila's university days are recounted -- the group she studied with, her best friend, the boy her best friend fell in love with, and what happened during a field expedition that went very wrong.

Early on, Lila writes that she enrolled in the workshop because she wanted to "enter a character's consciousness". As the story progresses, the reader learns that Lila is revealing more of her secrets while considering the other mysteries in the story. 

The novella Lila is writing for the workshop attempts to connect two stories that she says do not belong together on the same page, although they are connected in real life. Singh connects those two stories together and brings in far more other stories and ideas. 

Face also has the reader consider such ideas as how caste and colonialism pervade academia and scientific research, and how scientific research founded upon lies works its way into generations of further research. 

Not everything is revealed in the novel. But that's part of the plan. When Lila's writing instructor tells the class that "we are the stories we tell", she notes:

We are also the stories we choose not to tell. In fact, we are more the stories we don't tell, cannot tell, or will never be able to tell.

Throughout the telling of the various stories in Face, the choices about what is revealed, what is not revealed, and when things become known propel the narrative. It's a remarkable exercise in how personal stories can affect the greater natural world, and how that natural world is a part of every person.

The subtitle to Face is A Novel of the Anthropocene, signaling that this is a story of the current geological age. It certainly is a novel about the effect of people on the natural world and on each other.

Review: 'The Angel of Rome'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Angel of Rome
By Jess Walter
Literary Fiction Short Stories
Harper

Any new work from Jess Walter is a cause for celebration. When it's a new collection of short stories, such as The Angel of Rome, every story is reason to celebrate. (I don't know about you, but right now, any cause to celebrate is necessary.)

Mr. Voice may seem to have an odd title at first. The name refers to the stepfather of the narrator, the daughter of a single mother who draws men like flies. Tanya's mother marries an older, not-handsome man who is known as the Voice of Spokane. Things about the marriage embarrass Tanya, but her stepfather, Claude, is kind. And so is his son, an older teen who Tanya develops a crush on. Over the years, the things that happen to the family reflect the times from the 1970s to the present. Although it seems Tanya is telling the story of her life, there are major events that take place which she refers to only in passing. Because the story title is important. This is a portrait of her stepfather, Mr. Voice. And it's a spot-on portrait of the town for which Claude is Mr. Voice. This is a portrait of Spokane that resonates deeply for someone who was born and raised there.

Fran's Friend Has Cancer has a lot going on, and it's conveyed in a sly manner. An older couple are sitting at a New York City restaurant, perusing a large menu for a pre-Broadway matinee show meal. He's peevish, she's peckish. She's headed to Oregon to see her son, although it's ostensibly because her husband's cousin is caring for a friend with cancer. He doesn't want her to be gone long because although his cancer has been in remission, he has a fear of dying alone. And, besides, he's certain his stepson doesn't like him. While they quibble over this, and whether his cousin is a lesbian and whether she's plain and whether the waiter will ever come back, the husband notices a young man nearby writing in a journal. The way he stops and starts writing catches the husband's eye. And for good reason. But what is actually going on may be meta, it may be sheer Twilight Zone, it may also be a clever way to reinforce the idea that the way time passes changes with one's age.

Magnificent Desolation features a 50-year-old seventh grade science teacher who has been coasting on inertia for years. He was born on the day of the moon landing and idolizes Buzz Aldrin, who famously popped a moon landing denier. Aldrin also said of the view from the moon that what he saw was "magnificent desolation". Our teacher is meeting the mother of a student who insists he cannot be taught most of what is in the class because "we don't believe in that". When he sees the recently divorced mother of Jacob, his inertia is gone. How much of his common sense is left the reader will discover, especially when it turns out Jacob's mother has not taught him those things but his father does think the moon landing was faked. That our hero's breaking point regards the Van Allen radiation belt is rather endearing. And while his life has been one that has surveyed desolation, there is magnificence in the ending.

Cancer also figures in Drafting, a story about a young woman recently diagnosed. After chemo leaves her feeling even more ill, she takes up again with a scruffy skateboarder. Even though she realizes his personality isn't half as attractive as he nears middle age, she does go on a joy ride with him, heading for Seattle from Spokane in an old El Camino. Science also features in this story, as Myra recalls what a science teacher told her class once about mountain ranges and river gorges:

The whole world was a clock face with a gliding osprey rising on a secondhand updraft, as if being called to heaven.

It's passages like that which make me wish everyone knew the locations Walter uses as well as I do. Overlooking the Columbia River as it cuts through the buttes and creates coulees on its way to the Cascades and the Pacific, there is both a magnificent desolation and the opportunity to see that clock face. It resonates. Oh, how it resonates.

The Angel of Rome takes place in Rome. A pure Jess Walter hero, an inept young man who wants to leave Nebraska, ends up there on a scholarship to study Latin. His mother thinks he's going to become a priest. He thinks he's going to become someone who is not stuck in Nebraska. He doesn't do well, he is miserable and just as he is about to figure out a way to go back home, defeated, a series of misunderstandings land him on a movie set with an American TV actor and an Italian actress who makes the world shine for him. Yes, he knows it's actually the movie set lighting but it's all because of her. She was nicknamed the Angel of Rome during an ad campaign when she started out as a model, but it's not a name that has worn well over time.

After all, what is an angel but a kind of ghost, untouchable, out of place and time?

That doesn't bode well for any of the characters. Except when it does. The story builds into two perspectives: being one's own true self, or inventing oneself. Seeing how it worked for the various characters makes The Angel of Rome a story that will live with a reader for a lifetime.

Whether in Rome or New York, Spokane or West Seattle, every story in The Angel of Rome conveys what it means to live and to love, regardless of one's past and with an open mind toward the future. These are stories to treasure.

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.