AS YOU WERE

 As You Were, David Tromblay, Dzanc Books, 2021, 236 pp

This memoir was the February 2021 selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club. It is a searing and tough read.

David Tromblay grew up outside Duluth, MN, son of a Native American father and a woman too young to be a mother. David's mother ran away from his father's abuse, ultimately dropping her two kids off at their paternal grandmother's because she could not afford to raise them by herself. 

But grandma was just another link in the chain. Ripped from her tribal home and sent to one of those boarding schools where they practiced a brutal form of conversion therapy designed to turn Native American children into White people, she has no other parenting skills than strict, abusive discipline.

As soon as David is old enough, he enlists in the military and serves successive re-enlistments. It is no more and no less dangerous than his childhood, even in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is all he knows about survival.

When he finally leaves the military, broken in body and mind, he finds his spirit and a way to live through writing. What a writer he is! The memoir is written in second person, a way to distance himself from himself. It works brilliantly.

If you are triggered by violence, especially towards children, I would not fault you at all for skipping As You Were.

I have a few thoughts I would like to mention. For many years I have been reading both history and historical fiction by authors from all over the world and set in places all around the globe. The through line to it all is violence, struggles for power, feuds, genocides, etc. 

Another through line is love, faith in a higher power, the benefits of literacy, education and the arts. All of this is part of being human. 

What I learned from David Tromblay, and not for the first time, is that while our bodies can be weak and vulnerable, our spirits are tough. I never tire of reading just about any kind of story. Trauma can be found anywhere from the home to the streets to the battlefield, even within the natural world. It takes a certain equation of toughness and compassion to get us through.

LAND OF BIG NUMBERS

 Land of Big Numbers, Te-Ping Chen, Mariner Books, 2021, 233 pp

It is widely known that I have not been a fan of short stories. By reading more of them lately I am discovering what makes a short story satisfying for me, though I am not ready to articulate that clearly yet.

Land of Big Numbers was a miracle. Every story in this collection is great. The author is, I believe, Chinese-American and a journalist who spent four years as a Beijing-based correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. She seems to have soaked up the essence of 21st century Chinese life.

Each story grabbed me from the first line. It was as if the characters were right in the room with me. Tension builds quietly yet relentlessly tale by tale. I found myself almost holding my breath until I learned what would happen, each time for 10 stories. The theme tying them together is the better life for Chinese people under the current government at the cost of some of their freedom. A heady concept created by this author without outright judgement. 

Thanks to The Nervous Breakdown Book Club for selecting Land of Big Numbers as the January 2021 book. Thanks to Brad Listi at the Otherppl podcast for a penetrating interview with Te-Ping Chen. I will be watching for more from this author.

WATER, WASTED

 

Water, Wasted, Alex Branson, Rare Bird Books, 2020, 283 pp

The final Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection of 2020 is possibly the weirdest novel I have ever read, but there was a lot I liked about it. As in Lord The One You Love Is Sick, it is set in a small town, this time in Missouri, right on the Missouri River.

The author grew up in Missouri, he likes to work for nonprofits that actually help people, and he runs an unusual podcast where every episode is the first episode without any sequels, or something like that. 

Central to the story are a middle-aged divorced couple, Barrett and Amelia, who lost their only child, a daughter named Edi. That loss destroyed their marriage leaving them each to become rather isolated eccentrics. The violent death of a teenage boy touches both of them in different ways but prompts them to reconnect and reflect on Edi's passing. 

Several other odd characters of the town turn out to have their own connections to Barrett, including an involved story concerning lots of dogs, a talking goat, a Bigfoot-like entity that ravages the countryside, and a G-man (supposedly a government agent who acts more like an alien.)

The story circles around, back into the past, and through many instances of the Missouri River flooding. During her short life, Edi wrote several fantasy books in which the goat, Bigfoot and the G-man figured. When these entities show up in town, Barrett and Amelia read Edi's books for the first time, trying to make sense of it all. What did she know and was it connected with her death?

I only recommend the novel to those who truly love the weird. It is like China Mieville decided to write a story set in small town America. I can't quite explain why I liked it, but I did. It made me think of some of the people and ideas that seem to have taken over our country in recent years and wonder if they didn't come out of a speculative genre or some parallel universe.

Thanks once again to another Los Angeles based indie publisher, Rare Bird Books, and to The Nervous Breakdown for sending the book out. 

LORD THE ONE YOU LOVE IS SICK

 Lord The One You Love Is Sick, Kasey Thornton, Ig Publishing, 2020, 229 pp

In the November, 2020, selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club, from indie publisher Ig, a slice of life plays out in a small North Carolina town. It is an enlightening read in terms of the supposed conflict between Red states and Blue states. I say supposed because it is my belief that Red vs Blue is a political construct that smothers the actual complexity of American lives.

Kasey Thornton grew up in a town similar to the one she writes about. She still lives in that community. She put this debut novel together by collecting the stories she had written about life in her town. The book reads like a novel, at least it did for me.

After the fatal heroine overdose of his best friend, Dale's life becomes almost impossible. He feels guilty for abandoning his friend, he is training to be a cop, and his marriage is on shaky ground. As all of this plays out, other residents of the town come into the story.

The drugs, the poverty, the vanishing economy, and all the secrets held combine into an explosive mix. The adults are facing down cancer, diabetes, mental illness; the kids are living with instability or abuse; the women are trying, and often failing, to stand by their men.

Yet there are strong religious beliefs and codes of behavior that include not facing reality. I have found this conundrum in much of Southern fiction: Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Jesmyn Ward, Carson McCullers and more.

These issues and conflicts are probably present in any community. The title here comes from the Gospel of John in the story of Lazurus. When he falls ill, his sisters Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus: "Lord, the one you love is sick." If you were raised on the Gospels you know the rest.

Even Jesus had a secret plan.

UNSEEN CITY

 Unseen City, Amy Shearn, Red Hen Press, 2020, 266 pp

This will be my last review for 2020. I had two more I wanted to post but life got in the way. Next up will be my Top Favorite Reads, my Books Read in December, etc.

The September, 2020 pick of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club was published by an Indie press from my very own city!

I loved Unseen City from the first sentence to the last. Meg Rhys, the main character, is a 40 year old woman who self-identifies as a spinster librarian. She likes men and sex but does not want a husband or to be a wife. All her heroes had resisted wifehood from Jane Austen to Emily Dickinson.

Meg lost her younger sister to a hit and run on the streets of New York but that sister visits her as a ghost in the evenings after work. Besides her cat and books, her passion is contained in the shelves of the Brooklyn Collection, on the second floor of the Brooklyn Central Library where she works; where she has amassed a wealth of understanding about Brooklyn from its 18th century farmlands to it gentrification in the 21st.

However, a man does finally penetrate her spinsterhood. Ellis turns up at the Brooklyn Collection needing a history of the ancient Brooklyn house his family hopes to renovate and sell. This house has a ghost also! Her name is Iris, her story lurks beneath Meg's story and like magic the author ties them together.

Everything I love about novels is encapsulated in Unseen City. The rhythms of the prose, the believability of every character, the layers of history, the accuracy of its present time scenes.

I feel like I will from now on be aware that my house, my property, my town within my city, has all those layers of history beneath it. I think a smart combination of agent, publisher, editor and marketer could have made this novel a bestseller, but that did not happen. So now it is up to readers who tell other readers: READ THIS!!

Thanks to Red Hen Press for putting the book into the world and to TNB for putting it in my hands.

THIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE

 This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, Nick Flynn, W W Norton & Co, 2020, 275 pp

The other day when I reviewed The Good Family Fitzgerald, I mentioned that I intended to finish reading and reviewing the remaining 2020 selections of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club by the end of the year. I have finished reading the 5 books in this little challenge but with only two days left in December, I may find it even more challenging to fit in all the reviews. 

But first, a bit of a rant. I saw in the news recently that Bertlesmann, the international media conglomerate, who already owns Penguin Random House (itself already a conglomerate of all kinds of formerly independent publishing houses) is now going after Simon & Schuster. While we all realize that publishing is a business and thus must make money/profits, don't you think it feels like all these mergers into one mega corporation presents risks to the diversity of books that reach us? 

So I had the thought that the little indie publishers around the country and the world are going to have to take up the mantle that takes chances on new writers, on experimental writers, even genre writers, that have been choked out of mainstream publishing. I urge you to pay attention to the publishers of the books you read, the books that become bestsellers, have huge marketing budgets, etc, etc. If by chance you feel a sort of stifling sameness about some of these books, I want to point out that my subscription to The Nervous Breakdown Book Club has brought me many novels that are sometimes unusual, sometimes experimental but are almost always excellent reads by little known authors.

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire is one of those books. It was the August pick, the fourth memoir by Nick Flynn and its publisher, W W Norton, is still privately owned. 

The style is what I would call experimental, short pieces arranged in such a way that brings together the traumatic events of the author's childhood, how he has coped with those events in both self-destructive and constructive ways, how he has figured out his adult relationships and how to live up to his responsibilities. 

The writing is full of contradictions: sadness and humor; insight and unawareness; real and imaginary memories. Because Flynn seems aware of these contradictions, I believed him.

The best parts for me were when he got into how he saw his environment as a kid. Those parts are excellent renditions of how kids try to make sense of what the adults around them are doing.

I also listened to his interview on the Otherppl podcast where I learned about his writing process and found useful ideas and approaches to writing memoir. Flynn teaches writing and it was almost like taking a class from him. If any of you are attempting that tricky descent into your past, I recommend both the book and the interview.

I truly admire people who attempt to raise their consciousness. To me, that is the most important task in life and is the road to developing our potentials as human beings. 

THE GOOD FAMILY FITZGERALD

 The Good Family Fitzgerald, Joseph Di Prisco, Rare Bird Books, 2020, 404 pp

I have set myself a challenge to read the remaining novels I received this year from my Nervous Breakdown Book Club subscription. The number of books for this challenge is five. The Good Family Fitzgerald, the May selection, was lingering on my shelves because it is long, so I tackled it just after Thanksgiving. All 404 pages of fairly tiny print.

I had not heard of the author, though he has published five previous novels since 2000, as well as 3 poetry collections. He is 70 years old and active in education and literacy projects. In his interview on the Otherppl podcast, he relates the ways in which this novel is based on his own life.

I'll get the negatives out of the way first: the length, the wordiness, the style. Reading the book was like listening to your 70 year old uncle telling tales of the family when you are about 20 yourself. He is a bit out of step with the times though trying to stay relevant. He adds in sentences, whole paragraphs, sometimes pages of anecdotes and details that slow the story down.

The positives: This is a great sprawling family saga about the Irish in late 20th and early 21st century America. The combination of gangsters, lawyers and priests, all in the same family, is provocative and I must say entertaining. Paddy Fitzgerald, the patriarch, has his influence spread across business, real estate and the Catholic Church, all mixed up in a heady if shady stew.

I finally got to the end and was so pleased to find the females saving the day! Mostly I was happy to get to the end though not unhappy to have read it.

PIZZA GIRL

 Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier, Doubleday, 2020, 192 pp

This was the Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection for July, 2020. Jean Kyoung Frazier is a Korean/American woman who lives in Los Angeles and Pizza Girl is her first novel.

Told in first person, the heroine of her own story is not having a good time and is telling us about it as she goes. She and her boyfriend live at her mom's. She is newly pregnant and works delivery for a pizza place. Life is happening to her. 

Her alcoholic father has recently died, her Korean mother is supportive of the boyfriend and the pregnancy but does not understand her daughter's grief and driftless behavior.

When the 18-year-old mother to be delivers a pizza to a stay-at-home mother, she feels a connection. Jenny seems adrift herself, confounded by her young son, who is somewhere on the spectrum. She seems lonely stuck at home. She names our heroine Pizza Girl.

So begins a period of even more delusion for the Pizza Girl. She has an instant crush on Jenny leading her to obsess about being with her emotionally and physically, while she takes even more risks, drinks and smokes.

I have seen some reader reviews expressing being put off by such a level of irresponsibility and I get that. Somehow I was not. I worried for Pizza Girl, probably even more than her mother or boyfriend did, but I understood her because I've gone through similar experiences.

Those young years after finishing high school are in some ways even harder than going through puberty. All of a sudden you are on the cusp of adulthood without a clue.

I enjoyed the story and I even liked the ending!

STARLING DAYS

Starling Days, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, The Overlook Press, 2020, 289 pp

 

This novel was the April selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club. I hesitated to post my review since it was the least favorite of the books I read in August. It features a main character who suffers from depression and was hard for me to read at times but I decided to share what I got out of it because it was important to me.

 

Mina and Oscar have been a couple for many years and finally marry. Mina is a highly educated young woman who teaches and is working on a PhD in literature, specializing in Greek myths. Oscar works as a salesman for his Japanese father's liquor business.

On their wedding night, Mina attempts to end her life with pills. This we learn in the first chapter when Oscar is called by police to pick up Mina, whom they found at midnight leaning over the edge of the George Washington Bridge, known as a location for suicides.

Oscar decides to move them to London while he does some work there on his father's property, thinking a change of scene will be good for Mina. It does not help much, her depression has it in its grip, her meds are not working, and though Oscar tries to protect her he is becoming overwhelmed.

As the story goes on, it reveals the many early traumas of both. I liked the ways the author described each one's coping mechanisms but the choices both were making made me wonder if they would make it. I grew a little weary of being inside their heads and could not guess whether the ending would be happy or tragic.

I am not sorry I read Starling Days because it helped me understand a few things. I have always had an aversion to the subject of mental illness. It frightens me. After I finished the book I realized that I was raised to repress my own moods and occasional bouts of depression, to pretend I was fine, to keep up with life and family and work duties no matter how I felt. 

I guess I am fortunate to also have a strong, even sometimes happy side and to have never succumbed. Currently I have a friend who suffers from depression and have had to figure out how to relate to her when she is overcome. Buchanan's novel gave me insight into and more empathy for my friend.

BARN 8

Barn 8, Deb Olin Unferth, Graywolf Press, 2020, 282 pp

 

 

My goodness, this crazy novel was so good. Janey, a teenager from Brooklyn, runs away to find the father she has just found out she has. She ends up in Ohio where she falls in with some eco terrorist folks.

They plot the heist of a million chickens, which are from just one agribusiness farm of egg laying chickens. What you learn about how these chickens are treated is almost enough to turn you vegan if your are not already. The author IS vegan. She must have gone through some trauma herself in doing the research. 

Of course the heist goes very wrong but you will have to read the book to find out how it all turns out. Deb Olin Unferth is a fearless writer with a seriously whacked sense of humor and a lot of heart. The characters jump off the page and Janey won my admiration as she came to terms with who she is and what life means. Even the chickens became characters.

I am an omnivore and will remain so, but I am looking more deeply into where my supposedly "cage free" eggs actually come from. 

I received the book as the March selection of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club, a subscription that continues to introduce me to great books and authors who deserve more attention. I listened to the talk with Deb Olin Unferth on the Otherppl podcast and got more insight into the vegetarian lifestyle and views.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, EASTMAN WAS HERE AND LULLABY FOR SINNERS

THREE MINI REVIEWS

I have been reading like crazy in a wide range and sometimes a deep range. Here are three books I read in April, each of which took me away from it all in various ways. I apologize for the mashed up formatting. Sometimes Blogger has its limits.

From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming, Jonathan Cape, 1957, 268 pp

I don't know why I keep being surprised that each of these James Bond books gets better than the last. Most authors get better the more they write. It must be because the movies are so stupid, so lacking in what made the books great.

007 collides with SMERSH again (that is the Russian Intelligence branch) when they send a beautiful agent to seduce him and lead him to their assassin. In fact, the first half of the book takes place in the Soviet Union, setting up the lure, Tatiana Romanova, and the assassin, Red Grant, and the caper. All of that reminded me of Red Sparrow.

Even when Bond comes on the scene, he does not do much except meet and bed Tatiana in Turkey, and accompany her on the Orient Express as they travel to London. They pass through many Balkan cities, the very ones I have been reading about in Black Lamb, Grey Falcon.

Then in the last 20 pages the trap is sprung. Of course Bond survives to die another day. 

Eastman Was Here, Alex Gilvarry, Viking, 2017, 356 pp

I grabbed this off my Nervous Breakdown Book Club backlog pile in a fit of COVID19 angst. The cover was intriguing and it had blurbs from Tea Obreht and Gary Shteyngart.

I found plenty to enjoy. Alan Eastman is a cleverly created unreliable narrator, the kind of self-involved male who later showed up in Shteyngart's Lake Success, except that Eastman's story takes place in 1973.

He is a washed up writer with a disintegrating marriage. I had no idea while reading it that the character is loosely based on Norman Mailer. In hindsight, I see it. Self-centered, creates his reputation out of provocative statements and unique takes on contemporary issues, all the while tolerated with amusement by his male contemporaries and even a few women.

I have read quite a bit of Mailer and, aside from his views on women, have usually found him quite intelligent about American absurdities. In contrast, I felt sorry for Alan Eastman despite his infidelity (he maintains a mistress while going ballistic over his wife being unfaithful to him.)

When he goes off to Vietnam with an assignment to cover Saigon as the Americans pull out, he gets his comeuppance from a younger female reporter. I enjoyed that part the most!

Actually I enjoyed Gilvarry's dissection of the late 20th century older male who totally missed the point of mostly everything. The ending where Eastman and his wife try to work out their differences in front of their two young sons just made me sad.

Lullaby For Sinners, Kate Braverman, Harper & Row, 1980, 88 pp

I finished another volume of poetry. Last year I read Palm Latitudes, one of Braverman's novels, after learning that she had been Janet Fitch's writing teacher. I was impressed, so I decided to try her poetry.

Lullaby For Sinners is her second collection. It is stark with dark emotions, both beautiful and horrific images, and though I am no expert on poetry, it seemed to lie on the experimental side of the poetry spectrum.

I felt she was writing about the deep secrets of female emotional and mental trauma. Her poems reminded me of Sylvia Plath and Francesca Lia Block. Probably not for everyone but I liked it.

How has your reading been going? Today is Day 52 for me of staying home and I feel blessed to have everything I need (except a haircut) and so much time to bury into books. For others who have to work in dangerous venues or be stuck inside with small children day after day, I can understand how they must wish this would be over soon. 

JULIET THE MANIAC

Juliet the Maniac, Juliet Escoria, Melville House, 2019, 316 pp

 

Juliet Escoria is the current wife of Scott McClanahan, whose novel The Sarah Book I reviewed last. I received both books through my subscription to The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. The Sarah Book had been languishing on my pile of unread TNB books so when I received Juliet the Maniac recently I decided to read the two books back to back. I admit to a bit of voyeurism in wanting to see how these two writers came to be married. Ha! I learned not a thing about that.

 

Juliet's book is a fictionalized account of her own teenage years. A genre called autofiction has been around since a French author, Serge Dubrovsky, coined the term in reference to his novel, Fils. (ref: Wikipedia.) In her interview on Otherppl, Juliet says that after years of trying to write her story in memoir form, she was finally able to do so in an autofiction format. She does it quite well.

When Juliet was 14 years old, during a period of stress as an honors student aiming for a prestigious college where she intended to study literature, she began to experience hallucinations, panic attacks and insomnia. Then came self-harm and ultimately a suicide attempt. She was diagnosed as bipolar and put on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs.

Possibly because she was only 14 and it was the 1990s, she also began drinking and consuming street drugs. The upshot of all that, after a second suicide attempt, was her parents enrolling her in a "therapeutic boarding school" in a remote area of Northern California.

Juliet came from a middle class Southern California family, not deprived in any way, with loving parents. These parents were so committed to saving her life that they committed her.

For some reason I am drawn to such stories: The Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, are a few I have read. Actually I know the reason. I had a bit of a breakdown during my sophomore year in college. I begged my parents to get me to a psychiatrist but my father, for no reason he ever explained, refused. All he would say was that it was dangerous to fool around with someone's mind. That was in the mid-60s.

Somehow I recovered enough to work out my problems as a young college woman on my own, although not in any ways that made my parents happy. All in all though, I feel I've had something like a guardian angel watching over me and here I am.

Juliet's "therapeutic boarding school" used a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, psych meds and restraint on its patients along with regular schooling and some other weird and questionable techniques. But she managed to "graduate" and return home, then go on to college. She writes about the whole experience with an exquisite realism touched with humor and no self pity. Her intelligence and bravery come shining through her prose.

According to her Otherppl interview, she is able to function in life on a finely-tuned prescription of medications though the fine tuning has put her through its own kind of hell. She now teaches, she has published a collection of poetry, Witch Hunt, and a story collection, Black Cloud. It appears to be a happy occurrence that she and Scott McClanahan found each other.

Her book, Juliet the Maniac, is amazing in my opinion. I hope that the young women who need such books to know they are not alone, find hers.

THE SARAH BOOK

The Sarah Book, Scott McClanahan, Tyrant Books, 2017, 233 pp

 

I first read Scott McClanahan when I read his earlier novel, Hill William, as part of the 2014 Tournament of Books. It was a gut punch of a novel and I barely survived reading it.

 

The Sarah Book is a sequel and investigates how the protagonist from Hill William managed to screw up his marriage to Sarah, the woman he was dating in that earlier book.

It is just as gritty and sad and upsetting, except you might say there are more moments of humor and lightheartedness. I too was unable to keep my first marriage together so there was that connection for me. Still, I grew up privileged while Scott grew up in Appalachia and still lives there.

Here's the thing: After reading Hill William, I felt depressed about how unfair life is. The author has suffered from depression but he has also seemingly read everything, he is a successful teacher of writing, and he keeps publishing his own books. Plus is happily married to the author of the next book I will review: Juliet the Maniac.

I went and relistened to his interview on Otherppl. He has a unique approach to life. I bet he still gets depressed sometimes. We all do. Somehow he manages to convey that to be born is to have a chance, no matter our circumstances or mistakes. I think he is right.

LONG LIVE THE TRIBE OF FATHERLESS GIRLS

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, 304 pp

 

In her debut, a memoir, T Kira Madden relates a childhood full of loneliness and confusion but also so much love that it did not destroy her. Reading the book I was aware of it being carefully crafted with the most beautiful language she could create. Without self pity she revealed emotions that both fit her age as she grew while tinging them with the insights she gained from looking back as a grown woman.

 

I don't want to say more. I knew maybe too much from listening to her interview on the Otherppl podcast before reading her book. So much that I was in doubt about getting into it. As it turned out her style of compiling incidents into vignettes both short and long was a perfect blend of the wonder and the horror of childhood.

Not once did I feel emotionally manipulated nor was I overcome by what she exposes. Perhaps if I knew her personally or was a relative I would have. Instead my heart went out to her. She seems to have come to a place in life free of recrimination. She did mention therapy in her interview, but she clearly never stopped loving either of her parents.

If you decide to read the book, perhaps you will have some of the thoughts and speculations I had concerning this paradox: how some people have had fine, almost idyllic childhoods and grew up to have bad lives while some lived through bad troubles and grew up to find themselves and create good lives. I suppose we are all somewhere on that particular spectrum. It behooves us all to live with tolerance for others, especially our parents and our children.

THE YOUNG WIDOWERS HANDBOOK

The Young Widowers Handbook, Tom McAllister, Algonquin Books, 2017, 282 pp

 

The January 2017 selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club has a misleading title. It surely is a perceptive blend of whimsy and tragedy. Hunter Cady did indeed lose his young wife too soon. The novel however is distinctly not a handbook. It is a road trip novel, one of my favorite types of stories. 

 

Now that I think about it, except for Thelma and Louise, most road trippers are male, either in search of adventure or looking for themselves. Some run away from loss, some run for their lives after a crime. A road trip can be a way of accelerating change. 

Hunter Cady, carrying his wife's ashes, to which he often talks, escaping his wife's mother as well as his own, is sure no one will ever understand and accept him as Kaitlyn did. He does find wry adventure and comes to find a new version of himself.

This debut novel may not be a masterpiece but it is nicely done and gave me hours of emotional ups and downs while ultimately leading me to a feeling of well being.

THIRTY SEVEN

Thirty Seven, Peter Stenson, Dzanc Books, 2018, 269 pp

 

Another debut novel from an indie press, sent to me as the February, 2019 Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection. It is a horror novel with an unique twist. Actually I don't know for sure if it is a unique twist because I have read very little in the horror genre. I listened to the interview with Peter Stenson on the Otherppl podcast and decided to try the book, with trepidation.

 

Mason Hues, adopted and abused by his adoptive father, ran away from that home and ended up in a cult called The Survivors. In the telling of his story he is an unreliable narrator due to being in denial about a terrible thing he did when he was 15.

While there is plenty of blood with horrible scenes, the book is also about how cults operate and how their leaders are messed up individuals trying to work out their own issues through the cult they created and through the power that gives them over others.

Though it is extremely well written, plot-wise and character-wise with near perfect language and tone, I don't recommend it for anyone but those who like horror or have a strong drive to understand the phenomenon of cults.

This may turn out to be my gateway to the genre. Perhaps I have grown up enough to be a bit more free of the fairy tales I was raised on about life and love and progress and achievement. Evil is alive and well in the world and it takes a lot of courage to confront that, to live a decent life in the face of it, to be able to find the balance between good and evil. Or to deal with the truth that the concept of good vs evil is just another crappy duality humans have devised to make sense of how random life can be.

THE REACTIVE

The Reactive, Masande Ntshanga, Two Dollar Radio, 2016, 161 pp

 

Once again I have the Nervous Breakdown Book Club (a subscription) to thank for sending a book I would otherwise not have read, let alone heard about. Brad Listi, who chooses the books and then interviews the authors on his podcast, makes sure to spotlight new authors as well as indie presses.

 

The Reactive, written in English by a native, black South African male, is set in Cape Town. It is the year 2000, Apartheid has just ended and the HIV virus is rampant. ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs) are being produced but they are not yet widely available and are prohibitively expensive.

Lindanathi is a young man whose half brother has recently been brutally killed. That loss along with him testing as HIV+ has alienated him from his family and the small village where he grew up. His uncle is calling him home. Lindanathi has lost his way in life, dropping out of school and living an aimless existence with two friends.

These friends work low paying jobs and supplement their income selling ARVs on the black market. Mostly they stay high and contemplate the inequalities in their country. The dreariness of life, the lack of purpose, the wounds they carry are not spelled out. The author shows us rather than telling us. He takes us through the minutiae of their days, through the conversations between them, through the pictures he creates of their surroundings.

The prose is hypnotic, filled with atmosphere and wandering. I was not aware of a plot until I got to the end. I had been taken on Lindanathi's psychic journey from grief and guilt over his brother along with anxiety about his own mortality to a state of redemption through penance and reconnection with  the traditions and values of his home village.

Not since Chinua Achebe's African Trilogy (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, No Longer At Ease) have I been so moved by writing from the countries of Africa. I will be on the lookout for more novels from Masande Ntshanga.

NEW JERSEY ME

New Jersey Me, Rich Ferguson, Rare Bird Books, 2016, 327 pp

 

This was another Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection, from November, 2016. (I have only got one more book from 2016 for the TNB. For those of you working on the unread books on your shelves, congratulate me for another one down!)

 

I have truly come to appreciate the books from this subscription for introducing me to authors and indie presses I might not have found on my own. Rare Bird Books is right here in my own city. Rich Ferguson lives here now but he grew up in New Jersey. He is also a poet and a musician.

New Jersey Me is his debut novel. I grew up there too but in the rarefied, privileged town of Princeton. Ferguson's NJ is one of those depressed, blue collar Jersey shore towns, Springsteen territory, teenage sex and drugs and rock and roll. 

His protagonists Mark and Jimmy are bored, horny, 15 year olds prone to skipping school, staying stoned on their moms' prescription meds, pot and beer. They also read books and listen to music constantly. Mark's dad is a cop, his mom a Mary Kay superstar. The two have been separated since Mark was about six, after his mom walked out and basically left him with his authoritative but distant father. Jimmy has two parents at home who let Mark stay there whenever he needs to but are blissfully unaware of most of these boys' escapades.

All Mark wants, besides the usual teenage boy's needs, is to get away, preferably to California. This is the story of how he survived that town until he achieved his goal. It is its own fever dream, gritty and wild and full of a certain heart. Like early Springsteen mixed with Fleetwood Mac desires and daredevil Joan Jett type girls.

If you have ever read and liked Tom Robbins, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Kerouac, Chabon, you will like New Jersey Me. If you grew up there, you will love it.

You can also catch an interview with the author on the Otherppl podcast.

LAKE CITY

 

Lake City, Thomas Kohnstamm, Counterpoint, 2019, 304 pp

 

So, we've had Occupy Wall Street, the election of Trump, Hillbilly Elegy, etc. Now we are starting to get the novels about economic inequality, its causes and outcomes. Last year was Jonathan Evison's excellent Lawn Boy (just out in paperback) as an example.

 

Thomas Kohnstamm is a buddy of Jonathan Evison's. His debut novel, Lake City, is set in Evison's stomping grounds of the Northwest and its anti-hero Lane is another loser white guy who is doing his best to rise out of his impoverished Lake City neighborhood in northeast Seattle.

Lane has plenty of ambition. He has learned how to game the system. By the edge of his fingernails he has scrabbled his way into a college education, even a PhD program at Columbia in New York City

He also has goals: to get into a secure position in a well funded NGO and help the world, giving more opportunities to people like himself. However, his rich wife, currently funding his graduate studies, seems to have left him. Now he is back home, sleeping in his mother's garage and trying to hold things together.

The novel is one of those sad but funny, heartbreaking but savvy stories about social divides. I would say the author nails it pretty well. At times, it felt like he couldn't decide whether he was writing a literary novel or a gritty send up, a redemption story or a slap stick satire.

By the end I concluded he had done all of the above, resulting in some uncomfortable moments for the reader. Still I was impressed by the urgency of his plotting and found Lake City hard to put down.

The novel was the January 2019 selection of The Nervous Breakdown subscription book club. Thomas Kohnstamm's interview on the Otherppl podcast includes hair raising stories of his days as a travel writer and his years spent writing his first novel.

THE LOVED ONES

The Loved Ones, Sonya Chung, Relegation Books, 2016, 279 pp

 

 

Summary from Goodreads: In this masterful novel of inheritance and loss, Sonya Chung (Long for This World) proves herself a worthy heir to Marguerite Duras, Hwang Sun-won, and James Salter. Spanning generations and divergent cultures, The Loved Ones maps the intimate politics of unlikely attractions, illicit love, and costly reconciliations.

Charles Lee, the young African American patriarch of a biracial family, seeks to remedy his fatherless childhood in Washington, DC, by making an honorable choice when his chance arrives. Years later in the mid-1980s, uneasy and stymied in his marriage to Alice, he finds a connection with Hannah Lee, the teenage Korean American caregiver whose parents' transgressive flight from tradition and war has left them shrouded in a cloud of secrets and muted passion.

A shocking and senseless death will test every familial bond and force all who are touched by the tragedy to reexamine who their loved ones truly are--the very meaning of the words. Haunting, elliptical, and powerful, The Loved Ones deconstructs the world we think we know and shows us the one we inhabit.

 

 

My Review:

This amazing novel surprised me. It was the next book on my stack of unread Nervous Breakdown Book Club selections, from October, 2016. The title made me expect some kind of "women's fiction." Well, it is family fiction but not the bestseller kind I tend to avoid. 

 

Generations, divergent cultures (Korean, Black American), loss, finding the ones you love outside the box of "loved ones," and so much heart.

 

It is not perfectly written per popular fiction or even literary fiction directives. It goes back and forth through time though in the best possible way. The characters are not likeable. They are real like the rest of us.

 

Actually the writing is fearless, taking the reader to places and emotions that continue to astonish. The way Sonya Chung demonstrates the interactions between politics, society, belief systems, all these weighty topics, through stories that happen to everyday people is what I expect from great fiction. 

 

 

(The Loved Ones is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)