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.

Review: 'Bliss Montage'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Bliss Montage
By Ling Ma
Literary Fiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Who are we, really? Are we destined to bear the dreams and sins of our families, of our home countries, of our newly adopted homelands? Are we worthy of happiness? What is a facade and what is reality?

These themes are essential to the stories in Ling Ma's new story collection, Bliss Montage. They are sometimes fantastical, sometimes grounded so thoroughly in family that the narrators feel trapped or weighed down. In all of them, the female narrator seeks a way to do more than endure. 

The opening story, Los Angeles, gives the reader a sense of what to expect throughout the collection. A woman, married to a wealthy man, spends her days with 100 ex-boyfriends who live in a wing of their huge home. They go for drives, for shopping, for being out and about aimlessly. When her husband returns home from work, they fly up north for a fancy dinner, then return home, often after their young children have fallen asleep. The husband only speaks in dollar signs.

Two of the wife's ex-boyfriends are opposites, and the ones that mean the most to her. Adam abused her, Aaron loved her. "The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don't always know that you're wounded until you receive the salve." It's an idea that surfaces in different ways in the various stories. What do we deserve? When certain events happen, as they seem to inevitably do, how do we respond? Is there a way to outfox destiny?

The story ends with an attempt to catch up to the past, to capture it. In the following story, Oranges, that is what happens. Coming to grips with having been abused is treated in a realistic, searching fashion as far as the tone of the narrator's journey in catching up to her past. In the end, one character is trapped within themselves while the other goes forward.

The story G, the name of drug that makes its user disappear and able to wander freely, is about working to be oneself while anchored by a childhood friend, anchored to their Chinese-Amerian neighborhood where they were firmly anchored by their mothers. It is a tour de force in how the past can define a person, and how a person can feel unseen.

Do you now how easily the world yields to you when you move through it in an invisibility cocoon? No one looks at you, no one assess you.

That would be a dream come true for the narrator and her childhood friend. The idea is tied to the way the narrator, Bea (which can literally be Be in this story), became herself as her friend Bonnie spent hours of their childhood finding out what Bea thinks and feels. "It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someeone's gaze."

The transformations to come in the story are completed rooted in identity and being seen.

Another take on these ideas is presented in Returning, in which a young Chinese-Amerian wife goes back with her husband to his mid-European country for a traditional festival that is meant to be life-changing. Her husband talks in his college classes about fiction and identity:

Fiction can be a space for the alternate self ... It often serves as a fantasy space for our other selves.

While his book is a successful novel called Homecoming, the narrator's old college friend has published a graphic novel called Arrival Fallacy, a science fiction tale in which explorers return decades after they have been forgotten. The two stories merge in the trip back to the husband's homeland. The narrator's own novel, Two Weeks, is more about stasis after a missed connection and a plan falls apart. It's not surprising to wonder how that, too, is connected to this story in which it is presented.

There is a similar feeling in Office Hours, in which a college student becomes a professor and inherits her old professor's office. There is a passageway to a different world there, much like Narnia. As she begins to explore this other world, and delivers lectures about the journey in The Wizard of Oz, there is an undercurrent of what kind of life she really wanted to live. As her professor once said:

It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality.

That is a core concept to the fantasy elements and situations in the stories of Bliss Montage. What is real, what should be real, what do we really want? The yearning is explicitly present in the final story, Tomorrow. Another Chinese-American woman is in stasis again with a job, an ex-boyfriend and a baby coming. A baby with an arm already out of the womb. But whether it's because the baby is already itching to get out into the world or not at home in his first home is unsure, just as so many protagonists in these stories are unsure of where they want to belong.

The penultimate story, Peking Duck, is a meditation on the power of mothers to play a role in their children's lives well past the time they grow up. Although it is tied to the immigrant story of the narrator's family, it is not limited. Like all the stories here, this tale involves making stories one's own story, even if they first were heard from others. The connections are strong as chains, sometimes lighter than feathrers and even occasionally softer than silk.

Review: 'The Book of Goose'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Book of Goose
By Yiyun Li
Literary Fiction
Picador

A young woman who grew up in poverty in post-WWII France marries an American and quietly raises chickens and geese in the States. She recently receives word that her childhood best friend has died in childbirth, the same as her friend's older sister. Although the woman, Agnes, is not yet middle aged, her account is as someone whose life has already been lived.

This story of mine expired when I heard of Fabienne's death.

That's because Agnes and her friend, Fabienne, once pulled off what could be seen as a remarkable act of creativity or a stunt with malicious overtones that got away from them. Fabienne was the stronger personality. She was always poking and prodding people. She would do things to people and animals to see their reactions. When not tending to her father's livestock and her motherless brothers, she ran wild. She was not loved, except by Agnes.

After the postmaster's wife dies, the poetry-loving man is on his own. Fabienne decides to poke and prod, so she and Agnes visit him every evening. Eventually, they show him the stories that Fabienne has dictated to Agnes, who writes down the tales of dead children. Devaux, when he reads the stories each night, calls them macabre, puerile, morbid, unbalanced, and waits with greed for each new one. 

He knows they are Fabienne's stories, and the two of them frequently spar. When she declares the stories are done, he dictates some editing changes that Agnes copies out in her handwriting. Devaux finds a publisher for them, and Agnes is whisked to Paris as a child prodigy author. Fabienne insists she go, alone, and later to England, again alone.

The rest of the story involves deceptions, betrayals and the fervent wish of Agnes to return home, to the days when she and Fabienne wandered around the countryside. But, of course, we know that even if that happens, it will never be the same again.

Agnes knows that for a time, she was considered a minor myth. And she knows that no one would believe her now. But she says that isn't important:

But is it a myth's jonb to make you believe in it? A myth says, Take me or leave me. You can shrug, you can laugh at its face, but you cannot do anything about it.

That mindset is embedded in everything Agnes tells the reader. She insists that a notable life and a dull life are the same, because both are lives that are being lived. 

"Any experience is experience, any life a life."

And yet, and yet. If that is so, why was she so determined to go back to Fabienne and to try to reclaim the past? Agnes is determined that she can only be herself when she is with Fabienne and that the two of them make a whole person. To Agnes, they wanted each other's experiences and to feel as the other felt, to go beyond themselves. For someone who states that "any life a life" Agnes protests a bit too much when the story reaches its climax. As she acknowledges:

Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.

The Book of Goose is not a story about contentment. Or love. It is a complex philosophical treatise about myth and reality, friendship and solititude, truth and deception, in the guise of a narrative. Of course this is an unflinching work. Because this is an author who could write a novel about a woman contemplating the suicide of a daughter (Must I Go) that she put aside when her son committed suicide. She wrote an imagined dialogue between her son and herself in Where Reasons End. This is a book to ponder over with its implications of how people consider themselves and others, and the places in which we exist.

Review: 'The Many Daughters of Afong Moy'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
By Jamie Ford
Historical Fiction
Atria Books

That feeling you can't escape destiny? Or that the person you've just met is someone you immediately feel you already know? Or wondering why people in your family feel the same way about things?

Those ideas are explored in Jamie Ford's new novel, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy.

Ford was inspired by his child's taste in music so closely mirroring his own, and wondering what happened to a Chinese woman who was put on American music hall stages as a curiosity in the 1830s to 1850s, only to disappear from history. She was known mainly as the Chinese Lady, but also was identified as Julia Foo-chee ching-chang-king, Miss Ching-Chang-foo, Miss Keo-O-Kwang King, and Afong Moy.

The family connections he explores through the lens of epigenetic inheritance. At a most basic level, we're talking family traits here. Or the way that some identical twins share so many things in common, even some who have been raised apart from each other.

But Ford and some researchers take it deeper, that there may be a connection between family members in which patterns are repeated from generation to generation because of the way individuals react to situations and feel about certain things. This includes intergenerational trauma, in which later generations learn ways to cope from their elders, ways that may not be healthy. There also is the concept of later generations feeling the burden or pain that their elders went through.

I know many of my relatives and I share similar taste in music, food and entertainment. But sometimes I wonder if there's more when it comes to things like a younger relative not getting over a first love, just like my great-grandfather (who made sure his wife knew she wasn't the one; what a rotten thing to do). Or knowing how to get somewhere in a large city when I'd never been there before (or studied the kind of map that would show me where to go).

What if, well not exactly the same two souls, but two souls who recognized each other, kept meeting but also were kept apart, generation to generation?

The women in this novel are the descendants of Afong Moy. The reader learns her tragic story, as well as what happens to succeeding generations of female descendants. The first daughter encountered is Faye, a nurse during WWII who feels an instant connection to a wounded pilot who crashlands his fighter plane and collapses in her arms. Later, she finds a photograph of her when younger, with the words "Find Me" written on the back. It's a photograph she never had taken.

No way was I not going to find out the mystery of that photograph.

Ford goes back and forth in time, dropping a trail of breadcrumbs through the lives of Moy's daughters. They include a programming genius whose work makes a female-based dating app a spectacular success, a poet in near-future Seattle who suffers from depression and a partner with an overbearing mother, a girl with a crush on one of her female teachers at the famed Summerhill school, a young girl sent back to China after a plague outbreak in San Francisco, and Afong Moy herself. Any single one of them would have been the strong lead in a historical novel.

But Ford combines both the historical stories with the metaphysical and emotional searches of each character. It's not just the meeting, and losing, of each one's true companion. It's also the way each character, in her own fashion, strives to devise a life for herself within the restrictions of her time and place. And the way none of them give up, despite the yearning, despite the loss, despite the traumas, no matter how injured they are.

Without spoiling the ending, let's just say Ford knows what to do with the narratives he has created. The Many Daughters of Afong Moy is a most satisfying book to read.

Review: 'Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney'

 ©2022 All Rights Reserved Lynne Perednia

Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney
By Adam Braver
Literary Fiction
University of New Orleans Press

When the Beatles' Abbey Road album was released in 1969, a giant billboard with the iconic album cover of the Fab Four crossing the street was put up on Sunset Boulevard. Paul McCartney's head was cut off and never found. 

Wondering why that might have happened is a starting point, but not the only point, to Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney. The novel by Adam Braver has an ensemble cast, all touched in some form by the missing billboard head, to bring to vivid life what an intense time the late 1960s were. There is a young couple who drive by the billboard and wonder, like Leonard Cohen, about the cracks that let the light in a chaotic world. There is a college student confronted by the FBI because a neighbor overheard her and her university friends talking about the billboard head but he thought they meant Gov. Ronald Reagan. There is a photographer in East Germany whose sister is working to get him and his work out. There is a young man whose girlfriend talks him into the performance art of dancing down Sunset Boulevard with only his head showing. There is another young couple who hide in a friend's bedroom after they are assaulted in a drug deal. There is a young woman who insists she is in the background of one of the six photographs taken the day the album cover was shot. And there is a young boy who carries the dream of someday finding Paul McCartney's head.

Some of the characters interact with each other. Some of them bump into each other years later, even if they don't know that they share a moment in cultural history. Some of them find closure, some find a way to carry on, some remain mourned for decades. Mistakes also are carried by souls for years.

Whatever bad things happened to each one of us, as they did, we accepted them as penance for that time in our lives when we might have been so much more courageous.

Braver's construction of writing the novel in suites keeps each story on track and the characters individually memorable. Most seek connection with the greater beauty of life, whether they seek a purpose to their days or not.

Those were the years when all I craved was connection, when you have the sense that any person that you might meet could be the one to change your life.

The author also brings back into focus just how intense that time was.

This was a tough time in our country and the world. We had seen a president shot in the street in broad daylight. We watched soldiers and the Vietnamese die on the nightly news. Police officers in Chicago had beat a young man holding an American flag. Black man targeted by cops and then jailed for defending themselves. For us, grasping at rationales had become a way of life.

It's easy to see parallels to today, when put in those terms. 

And because of those parallels, Rejoice the Head of Paul McCartney brings to mind how individuals, whether they drift through life or are determined to follow a certain path, are affected by what is going on around them.