“It was possible to hear a wide range of commotion coming off the meadow in waves: the din of the newly arrived campers—and what a peculiar din at that, the heavy grunts and human squealing, the many slurred and off-timbre voices, the disorder of it all—and beneath these sounds the thud of luggage on the meadow grass and the wet clicks of the cooling bus engines. Soon there were footsteps, a small regiment of them, crunching across the gravel pathway toward the infirmary.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (SEP 21, 2011)

The dictionary defines “inverted” as reversed, upturned, and this aptly describes the goings on, again and again in John Dalton’s latest novel, The Inverted Forest, an impressive follow-up to his award winning debut, Heaven Lake. That the two stories are quite diverse in setting and subject serves the reader well, as Heaven Lake, set in Taiwan and China, was one of those wondrous, luminous novels difficult to surpass. The Inverted Forest takes place in 1996 in a rural Missouri summer camp, a sun-dappled, bucolic environment that still manages to impart a sense of subliminal unease.

A grand transgression has just occurred: the counselors-in-training have indulged in an illicit, late-night skinny dipping pool party, to the outrage of conservative-minded camp owner Schuller Kindermann, who fires them all the next day, leaving his staff to scramble for new counselors before the first campers arrive. New counselors are hired, but no time is left to prepare them, inform them, and thus when the first campers arrive, a mere hour behind the counselors, they are stunned to see not kids spilling out of the bus, but adults, severely mentally disabled adults. The disorienting, funhouse sense of inversion has begun.

Among the camp staff are lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse, winsome and personable, Harriet Foster, camp nurse, the first African-American Schuller has ever hired, and twenty-three year old Wyatt Huddy. Born with Apert syndrome, which causes the skull bones fuse together too early, giving the face a distorted appearance, Wyatt has suffered the lifelong burden of looking much like the disabled state hospital campers, but without the intellectual disability. His presence produces confusion and discomfort in people he encounters and never more so while working as a counselor for the state hospital campers.

Dalton is one of those writers, like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, who has a fluid, assured style that’s compulsively readable, instantly absorbing. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dalton was the winner of the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He knows his craft, and every character who narrates arrives fully fleshed out with a rich backstory that has been distilled into a paragraph or two, usually with a dollop of wry philosophy tossed in. Countless examples exist throughout the story; I’d love nothing more than to quote a half-dozen, but I’ll restrain myself and limit it to a few, like seventy-eight year old Schuller Kindermann, lifelong bachelor, who craves order and prefers to be left alone to work on his hobby, crafting kirigami-style foldout paper creations.

“In his later years he’d come to understand a particular irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.”

And unwise longings, it becomes clear, constitute a great deal of the challenges within the camp during the state hospital patients’ two weeks there. Desires abound, not simply among the young, attractive counselors, but among the severely disabled as well. Dalton, who’s had personal experience as a camp counselor under such circumstances, neither trivializes nor sentimentalizes the behavior of the disabled campers, but instead gives us a candid, clear view.

“And yet there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth. But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.”

The story is narrated in turns, initially by Wyatt, Schuller and camp nurse Harriet, a canny, intelligent, single mother. It is she who observes the trouble brewing beneath the surface, problems that arise from the convergence of undertrained, overworked staff and the disabled campers that vastly outnumber them. Harriet’s suspicions over a staff member’s intentions come to a head one night and she enlists help from Wyatt to prevent a crisis, which results in an even greater crisis that carries long-term consequences for all involved.

Fifteen years later the story is inverted. The night’s drama, now history, gets turned on its side and explored from different perspectives. The past lives on in the heart of Marcy Bittman, former lifeguard, a character who allows herself to grow maudlin and sentimentalize. I found this was a brilliant way to add heart and sentiment to a section of the story without too much spilling over to the rest, which might have leached it of its taut hold on the reader. Former counselor Wayne Kesterton also returns, musing about a life that hadn’t turned out quite as he’d planned, the plight of many a dreamy twenty-year old. One afternoon on a city bus, Wayne encounters one of his former campers, the bad-tempered, vitriolic Mr. Stottlemeir, who loved nothing more than to spew obscenities at Wayne that summer (“Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say.”). This man, however, appears relatively normal. Through further investigation Wayne learns it was indeed his former charge, who’d finally been dosed with the right medication after years of trial and error, allowed to move from a locked-in facility to a retirement home. The unsettling nature of it hits both Wayne and the reader. What constitutes mental disability in the end? The wrong drugs? A low IQ? How low is too low? Should actions triggered by the baser, darker impulses that arise in all of us be judged by how intelligent we are?

Original and compulsively readable, The Inverted Forest challenges the reader to ponder the thorny issues of affliction, loyalty and desire. It’s one of those stories that will keep you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. A highly recommended read, a worthy follow-up to Dalton’s first novel, the equally recommended Heaven Lake.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Dalton
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Story of a Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Bibliography:

• Heaven Lake (2004)
• The Inverted Forest (July 2011)

“Dr. Amnesty’s cartridges, the South African Museum, Harold’s fossils, Chefe Carpenter’s collection, Alma’s memory wall – weren’t they all ways of trying to defy erasure? What is memory anyway? How can it be such a frail, perishable thing?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (AUG 20, 2010)

Aldous Huxley once famously said, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” In this luminous collection of short stories (including an 83 page novella), Anthony Doerr probes the fragility and endurance of memory, in locales that vary from South Africa to Hamburg…from Lithuania to Wyoming…and from the heinousness of the Holocaust to an immediate dystopian future.

This masterful collection is bookmarked by an opening and an ending story with two diverse elderly women as key protagonists. The title story, “Memory Wall,” presents the elderly Alma, who lives in South Africa where she undergoes periodic “harvesting” of memories, stored on a series of numbered cartridges. By “hooking herself up,” she is able to recreate experiences to stave off her worsening dementia. She falls victim to a criminal and his accomplice “memory hunter” who attempt to rummage through these cartridges to find the location of a rare and lucrative gorgon fossil – one that will be the ticket to the good life that has been denied them. The young accomplice muses, “It’s the rarest thing that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.”

“Afterworld,” the ending story, also focuses on an elderly woman – in this case, Esther, an orphan and an epileptic, who was spared the fate of her many close friends in Birkenau. Now in her early 80s and living in suburban Cleveland, her seizures are getting worse and she returns again and again in her mind to poignant, nightmarish memories of her times in ravaged Hamburg, as she relives her survivors guilt. As he watches her deterioration, her grandson Robert reflects, “Every hour…all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during the same hour, children are moving about, surveying territory that to them is totally new.”

As in most short story collections, each reader will likely have his or her favorites. One of mine is the fable-like “Village 113;” the Three Gorges Dam is about to be built, submerging a village and forcing its inhabitants to relocate. The tale is relayed by seed keeper, whose engineer son is spearheading the project. Doerr writes, “Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.” The seed keeper and the schoolteacher are quite literally drowning in memories.

Each of Anthony Doerr’s well-crafted stories focuses on the most important things in life: birth, death, survival, solace, but most of all the memories that – according to the epigraph from Luis Buñuel – are “our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; 1 edition (July 13, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Anthony Doerr
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Anthony Doerr
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another short story collection: Legend of a Suicide by David Vann The Origin of Stars by Katherine Haake

Bibliography:

• The Shell Collector : Stories (2002)
• About Grace (2004)
• Memory Wall (2010)
• All the Light We Cannot See (May 2014)

Nonfiction:

• For Season in Rome (2007)

“No one will kick a girl. No one will hit her or push her or throw a clump of mud at her head. But they will laugh at her. They will stare. They will stand to the side and watch her be alone.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (APR 20, 2010)

It is evident that the talented Aryn Kyle still remembers what it is like to be a girl. In her superb debut, The God of Animals, Kyle illuminated the life of twelve-year old Alice Winston as she grows up on a horse farm. Alice’s interactions with the people around her and the lessons she learned growing up were never forced, but came through everyday nuanced interactions—ones that emphasized the role of social class in a rapidly changing Colorado countryside.

Kyle’s latest work is a collection of short stories—BOYS AND GIRLS LIKE YOU AND ME—and here too she sheds light on the many tribulations (and joys) of girlhood. What’s more she shows how the girls we read about, grow up to be the women we see around us.

In one of my favorite stories in the book, “Nine,” nine-year-old Tess is trying to come to terms with her mother’s sudden abandonment of the family two years ago. Her father has systematically removed all traces of the mother but occasional reminders pop up. For instance, there’s the red coat in the hallway closet calling out to Tess and reminding her of the past. Tess’s father is now in a new relationship while Tess herself is being counseled at school by two professionals who use puppets and other props to get at the girl’s true feelings. Kyle does a superb job of describing Tess’s reactions both to her father’s new girlfriend (Meredith) and to the school professionals—it is the kind of reaction that really captures the mixed emotions of girlhood. On her birthday, Tess gets a Raggedy Ann lunch box from her babysitter, Mrs. Stuart. It’s the kind of lunch box no self-respecting girl would be caught dead carrying, Tess thinks, but of course none of the adults know this. Tess’s reaction to this lunch box and the subsequent events that follow might seem blown out of proportion to adults but make perfect sense when seen from her point of view.

In another of my favorites, “Allegiance,” a recent English transplant, Glynnis, is paired with a classmate, Leora Faust. Glynnis, whose mother is English and coping with depression from suddenly being transplanted abroad, soon learns that she would need to dump Leora to make nice with the more popular girls in class. The methods she uses to systematically ingratiate herself with the “Megans” might make one wince but it is to Kyle’s enormous credit that the reader can sympathize with Glynnis’s actions till the very end.

The girls and women in Kyle’s stories sometimes tell lies to get their way or get ahead—in a way, these stories are quite dark and are uncomfortable in the truths they lay bare about human behavior. “Tess understands she sometimes tells lies. She does. But they are little, unimportant lies. Sick. Dead. Gone. What do her lies matter to anyone else? Why does the world care?,” writes Kyle in “Nine.”

Boys and Girls Like You and Me makes a strong impact precisely because the stories ring so true and there is so much nuance in every telling. Kyle shows a lot of empathy in her writing. As easy as it might be to make comparisons to stories like Mean Girls, such analogies don’t really work. The girls and women in these stories are no caricatures. They are real and full of complex emotions—some petty, some not. Boys and Girls Like You and Me is a superb follow-up to The God of Animals. The stories hit their mark often with unnerving disquiet—it’s also the reason why they work so well. Aryn Kyle’s latest work confirms her place as a wholly original talent in contemporary American fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner; 1 edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aryn Kyle
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The God of Animals

Bibliography:

• The God of Animals (2007)
• Boys and Girls Like You and Me (2010)