“When people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, Paul Krovik did not say he was going to be a fireman or soldier or pilot, as some boys will before they know the kind of drudgery and danger such jobs entail. He did not want to be an actor or rock star or astronaut, nor did he harbor secret desires to dance, design clothes, or write poetry — the kinds of dreams most in his world would have regarded as evidence that his parents had failed to raise a true man, whatever that might mean.

He always wanted to build houses.

And now they are trying to take away the only house that belonged to him. He is not about to give up the one thing he ever wanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (JAN 23, 2014)

A perfect title for a stunning book. Its literal meaning is explained in the 1919 prologue, when a tree on which two men have been lynched falls deep into a sinkhole with the bodies still on it. The rest of the novel takes place in the present, or perhaps the not too distant future, when the land has been developed as an upscale subdivision for a rapidly growing city in the Midwest. But we are not quite there yet. In a second, slightly longer prologue, a woman goes to visit a convict on death row. It is a creepy, brilliant scene, although we know little of either of them, except that his name is Paul Krovik, and she regards him as a destroyer.

The next 380 pages tell of Paul’s crime, among much else. He starts out as a property developer, building neo-Victorian houses with more love than skill, and when the recession hits and he is sued by purchasers demanding repairs, he goes bankrupt and his own house is foreclosed. It is bought cheap at auction by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles (pronounced “no-eye”), a couple who move from Boston with their seven-year-old son Copley. Large sections are told through their eyes, but they have two watchful neighbors who ad the protagonists of their own sections. One is Mrs. Washington, an African-American woman whose century-old farmhouse gets condemned to make way for the new development. And the other is Paul Krovik himself, who cannot bear to lose touch with his former property. So the title gets another meaning: the erasure of farmland and the rural way of life to make way for subdivisions springing up like faceless Stepfords. And it is all focused on the house, like a horror movie in the making. Nathaniel and Julia gut it of all its detail, paint it white, and install security, but still feel they have moved into an alien environment. Copley, brilliant, unhappy, and borderline autistic, believes the house has been invaded by strangers, but his parents merely take him to the doctor for medication.

One of the remarkable things that Flanery does is to recalibrate our sympathies. Yes, we will discover why Kravik is arrested, but he is not the worst villain of the piece. The company that Nathaniel works for, a Haliburton-like global conglomerate called EKK, specializing in total security, has virtually rebuilt the city as a company town, requiring compliance to its right-wing rules. I mentioned Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives; there are also after-echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in the inhuman authoritarianism that only seems futuristic if you ignore the changes that have already taken place over the past dozen years. That is the third meaning of the title: the moral fall of this land, America, from a country of humanity and individualism towards a managed state of paranoid conformity.

And it starts young. The scenes in the company school where Copley goes made me livid, especially as the parent of a once-troubled child myself. Indeed, the more the boy was in the limelight, the more disturbing the story became. For there are other themes in play beyond corporate security. The legacy of abusive parents, for example. The tyranny of psychologists and psychiatrists. The intolerance of anything a little bit out of the ordinary: an old black woman who won’t sell her land, a sensitive boy who prefers reading to sports, a same-sex couple who set up house together. Although this is in no sense a personal confession — indeed it has the makings of a good Hollywood movie written all over it — it is hard not to look past its mounting terror and political commentary, and wonder about what experiences the writer must have had to write with such conviction about outsiders. And that makes a special book very special indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (August 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Absolution

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“There is something I never told you, Laura, a thing about me that makes us more alike than you might imagine. While I have many regrets — in particular about the kind of mother I was to you, and the kind of mother I never managed to be — I have no greater regret than this: that I failed to tell you the darkest truth about me when you were present to hear it, that I failed to show you, when you needed it, how alike we were. This my true confession. To confess is all that I can do for you.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (NOV 30, 2013)

Patrick Flanery’s debut novel is a very interesting example of an overarching story that incorporates another “novel” or “memoir,” a journal and more embedded inside it.  Set in post-apartheid South Africa Absolution is a thought provoking book, and engaging; not necessarily, or least of all, in the sense one would initially expect. Much of the novel could be set in any other country that lived through two opposing government systems. While there are hints of the political realities of South Africa, such as the brief visit to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the central theme of the novel addresses deep moral questions of the human condition that are not time or place specific.

In the most broad sense Absolution is a deep reflection on guilt and seeking foregiveness, on what is truth and why we may not even admit aspects of the truth and our behaviour to ourselves, let alone to others. How many shades of truth are there?

Two central characters – Clare, a grand old dame of literature and Sam, her much younger biographer – enter over the course of the novel into a kind of intellectual and emotional “pas de deux,” whereby each reacts to or dances around the other’s questions and answers. Both reveal slowly and tentatively snippets of themselves and their lives… leaving us as readers to sift through the many shades of truths. As we follow each piece within the emerging puzzle we may at times think we are ahead of the two protagonists, but are we really?

While the “pas de deux,” the discussions between author and biographer, are central to the novel, the backstories of the two protagonists, told in separate sections and in different tones, are as essential. There is Clare’s “letter” to her daughter Laura, which reflects on and responds to her daughter’s notebooks, written while she was on the run from authorities during the “old regime” some twenty years earlier. Clare is also writing a “novel,” Absolution, that reads more like a personal memoir and in another series of chapters we learn more about Sam’s life that was deeply shaken early on in his youth.

Flanery is very effective in pursuing these different narrative streams, interleafing them in a way that, taken together, make for an engaging and comprehensive whole. Your attention is required to keep the different versions of the truth apart. Personally, I couldn’t help comparing Clare with the real-life grand old dame of South African writing, Nadine Gordimer. Be assured, though, there are no parallels between the two, other than maybe the home invasion that both experienced and that weighs heavily on Clare’s mind. I was taken by surprise that, despite the important political undercurrent in the novel, so little was in fact expressed in terms of the complex South African realities then and now. Race or colour was hardly ever mentioned, if at all. On the other hand, I found some sections too detailed and a tightening of those would have increased my reading engagement. Yet, for a debut novel, this book is a great achievement and we can hopefully look forward to more by the author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 28 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Publisher page
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Fallen Land More on guilt & forgiveness: Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)