“We’re not the kind of people who take taxicabs.”

Book Review:

Review by Maggie Hill (AUG 3, 2011)

Like a fairy tale, way (way) back in the day when you could still be enchanted, and yet they were happy makes you feel giddy and haunted at the same time. I found myself blinking a lot while reading, as if I couldn’t quite believe what my mind was seeing. Slowly, I realized:  I believe.

This is a novel for lovers – of wonderful writing, of mothers, of stories, of husbands, of the nature of the beast. What’s being traversed, in this fabulous world, is the personal odyssey, the high drama, the biblical quality, of joining with another human being in matrimony. Sure, it happens every day….but the literate, unique mind of the author gives us a peek inside the kaleidoscope of one young couple’s journey like you’ve never heard it before. Ever.

Here is its geography: there are 19 chapters, each with roughly five two-page stories. The journey has floods, fights, failures. There are monsters, mistakes, hauntings. The line-up includes brides, mothers, wives. Far-flung families, regimes, and punishments have to be accounted. And, like the Bible, there will be droughts and apocalypses. So, where is the love?

Love sits in your hand as you hold this book. Every page, every word, all the punctuation pulses with it. If someone asks me what’s and yet they were happy about, I’d tell them it’s about love. Real, true, scary, effed-up love. Here’s fight#2:

“He slams her face into a maple tree until the bark is imprinted on her skin. She becomes a maple tree. He taps her for syrup. She poisons her sap. He falls beside a stream. She becomes the stream. He vomits in the stream. She slaps his face. He feels rejuvenated by the water and goes to punish the tree. She becomes a honeybee and stings him. He yanks her wings off.”

If this isn’t exactly, crazily, what happens when well-married people fight, then I don’t know what’s what. There are four more paragraphs to this fight, each successively straining and morphing and, finally, exhausting the couple toward the last line:

“…Their hearts become strong, and marigolds pile up in the yard.”

I’ve been married a long time; lots of marigolds in our yard. Nice to visualize this past detritus as having nurtured a garden, fertilized by years of living together.

An important point: each of the stories in the novel is two pages long. That means, when you open the book, the two facing pages are the whole story. Depending on the number of words per paragraph, the whole story averages about five or six paragraphs. It’s really incredible how much story, love, and Life can fit into that small of a space.

Helen Phillips is a magician. She invokes fable and reality, a tiptoe through the tulips is followed by woods snaked with monsters. You go into the woods anyway, because the author has cast a spell on you. You will follow her words anywhere. Every word in these stories is chosen, crafted, polished. Every story makes an impact – there is an utterly brilliant and fantastical human universe being miniaturized across two pages, right before your very eyes. Open wide. Allow yourself to be swallowed up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Leapfrog Press (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Maggie Hill
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Phillips
EXTRAS:	Huff Post interview with Helen Phillips
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	another uniquely written book: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Bibliography:

• and yet they were happy (May 2011)

“Bodecker lifted his flashlight. Animals in various states of decay hung all around them, some in the branches and others from tall wooden crosses. A dead dog with a leather collar around its neck was nailed up high to one of the crosses like some kind of hideous sacrifice. The head of a deer lay at the foot of another. Bodecker fumbled with his gun. ‘Goddamn it, boy, what the hell is this?’ he said, turning the light back on Arvin just as a white, squirming maggot dropped onto the boy’s shoulder. He brushed it off as casually as someone would a leaf or a seed. Bodecker waved his revolver around as he started to back away.

‘It’s a prayer log,’ Arvin said, his voice barely a whisper now.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 12, 2011)

I read Donald Ray Pollock’s collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, in 2009 when it first came out. It amazed me with its brilliance at the same time that it wrenched my guts. His new book, The Devil All the Time is just as brilliant but feels more like a kick in the guts. It’s heavy, horrific, beautifully written and filled with studies of people one hopes never to meet. There were times when I felt like a voyeur, watching something that was meant to be private and not shared but I read on anyway, fascinated and sometimes disgusted, but always riveted and totally impressed with the quality of the writing. The tenor, weight and tension of the novel never lets up.

In my opinion, this book is as much a collection of interconnected short stories as it is a novel. It is not that different from Olive Kitteridge or The Imperfectionists in that sense. Many of the chapters can stand on their own and the novel brings the reader full circle from beginning to end.

The characters are like no others I have ever come across in literature. The closest I can think of are the two killers in Capote’s In Cold Blood and some of the works of Cormac McCarthy or early Stephen King. Pollock, however, stands alone. His writing is unique and powerful. The violence of his novel is riveting in its power, and is an icon to this writer’s magnificent ability to create characters and situations that have not been seen in literature previously.

The people in this novel form the milieu of the country hollers of Ohio and West Virginia. There are the two married killers, Sandy and Carl. They go trolling the highways looking for “models” who they photograph and kill in different states of sexual play with Sandy. Carl considers himself a photographer but his only claim to fame are the dozens of rolls of film he’s taken of his models in their death throes. Sandy appears, at least on the surface, to be more of a follower and less into the whole killing spree than Carl but underneath it all she enjoys the attention she gets as she grooms the models for what is coming. Pollock leaves a lot to the imagination and this makes situations even more scary, not that unlike a Hitchcock movie.

The book starts off with a family that is poor but loving. Willard is married to Charlotte who, at thirty years old, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. They have a ten-year-old son, Arvin. Willard can’t accept the fact that Charlotte will die and he gradually begins to lose his grip on reality. He builds a prayer log near their home and this log, along with the sacrifices he makes, is supposed to keep Charlotte alive. Willard and Arvin pray through the night, screaming their prayers so loud as to wake the town. When this doesn’t work, Willard starts to kill animals and tie them to the crosses he’s built that surround the prayer log. One of the sacrifices is even human. A cur wanders to their door and Arvin bonds to it, only to discover it bled to death and tied to a cross that evening as one of his father’s sacrifices.

After Charlotte dies, Willard commits suicide and Arvin is sent to live with his aunt Emma. He is a good boy, by and large, but he does have a streak of violence in him. He remembers his father telling him not to put up with bullies and to fight back. He is told that there is always a right time to get someone. His sister is sexually abused by a minister in their church and Arvin looks for the right time to take things into his own hands.

We meet Roy and Theodore, two cousins who are lay preachers in the hollers near Knockemstiff. Roy preaches while Theodore plays the guitar. Theodore is in a wheel chair because he drank too much strychnine in order to show the lord his love for him. Roy takes his greatest fears and uses these on the pulpit. He collects jugs of spiders and pours them over his body even though he is terrified of spiders. He tries to show the congregation that fears must be met head on. When Theodore goads Willard into killing someone so that he can test his powers by bringing them back to life, things quickly go south. They leave town and end up working for a traveling circus.

The novel traverses the 1940’s to the 1960’s. The environment is usually the hollers of Ohio, often Knockemstiff, where Pollock’s previous book takes place. While there is a lot of violence, there is much talk of redemption. God, redemption and prayer have a large role in this novel. Unfortunately, those who need redemption the most are sometimes the least likely to seek it.

There is never a dull moment in the novel. The world, from Donald Ray Pollock’s eyes, is a dangerous and formidable place. It’s a place “where the sun popped out like a big, festering sore in the sky,” where bodies rot, and blood spurts out of ripe wounds. It’s a place of poverty and god forsakenness. Perhaps that’s why so many people are seeking god. However, as the title says, it’s “The Devil All the Time.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Donald Ray Pollock
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read another review of:  The Devil All the Time

Bibliography:

• Knockenstiff (2007)
• The Devil All the Time (July 2011)

“Best of all, it made him feel as if the unspoken in him were connecting with the unspoken in her, and it crosses his mind that this was all chemistry ever was; two people’s silent selves invisibly aligning while their noisy selves carried on, oblivious.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 8, 2011)

Every now and then, a debut short story collection appears that makes me sit up and take notice – Interpreter of Maladies, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and You Are Not A Stranger Here, to name three. Alethea Black has taken her place as a short story writer who shows amazing promise.

Some of the stories in I Knew You’d Be Lovely are very good and others are excellent. There are none that are bad. She writes like a dream, summing up the unpredictable human condition with insight and perceptive and more often than not, a subtle sense of humor.

It took me two-thirds of the way until I had that “eureka” moment: “Aha, this is a book about beginnings.” Take her story “That Of Which We Cannot Speak,” for example. Bradley, a man who is struggling to find his way back to center after his marriage implodes, meets an attractive doctor with laryngitis at a noisy party. They communicate with a clipboard and, in an unspoken way, find a connection.

Or take the story “The Only Way Out Is Through.” An accidental father takes his very emotionally disturbed son on a camping trip. An act of impending horror is the catalyst for him to reveal the magical time of the son’s birth, ending with, “Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you get it.”

Or, one of my favorites, “Good In A Crisis.” Ginny, an aloof teacher, is resolved to avoid marriage at all costs, supporting her aversion with specific examples: a good friend’s husband taped The X-Files over their wedding videos. Eventually, she finds her way to her first crush, her older and still attractive and single high school teacher. The story of their meeting is real and poignant and fresh as Ginny starts “climbing the stairs – very slowly, like a woman sleepwalking, incapable of imaging the dream that awaits her when she wakes up.”

The title story “I Knew You’d Be Lovely,” focuses on Hannah, a woman who is searching for the perfect gift for Tom, one that is “prescient, ingenious, unique, unforgettable.” I won’t spoil the fun in revealing what that “gift” turns out to be.

At the end of the book, Alethea Black writes, “I love it when authors share the backstories to stories and snippets about their creative process.” And she proceeds to do just that, letting the reader know what inspired her to write each story.

Except one.

That story closes the collection and it’s called “Someday is Today,” a highly personal and poignant story about the death of her young brother-in-law and a potentially life-altering decision that her sister requests of her. It is a beautifully-written and in its own way, it, too, is about new beginnings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway; Original edition (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alethea Black
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

Bibliography:

• I Knew You’d Be Lovely: Stories (July 2011)

“Cleaning other people’s houses—their cherished possessions in both good and bad taste, the chipped dishes they eat off of, the ratty sofas they make love on, the unlevel, puckering floors they shed curly hairs on—is the most intimate relationship you can have with them. Yet every boss I’ve worked for wants that relationship to be unobtrusive to the point of being invisible. I have done my best to live my life in between those two places, intimacy and invisibility. Over the years I’ve absolved the remains of a thousand indiscretions without judgment, and have learned not to ask questions. Men staying over, friends moving in, children moving out; none of this is my concern. If my job is done right, what you find when you get home is a comforting antiseptic, fresh Band-Aid smell, spotless floors, and no evidence another human being, a cleaning lady, was ever there. ”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose (JUN 23, 2011)

The silent, overlooked residents of Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood play the starring role in author Brando Skyhorse’s debut, The Madonnas of Echo Park. The novel, really more of a collection of short stories, each narrated by a different character, presents to the reader different facets of both the Mexican and Mexican-American experience in multicultural Los Angeles. Skyhorse, winner of the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award for this novel, was born and raised in Echo Park. An Author’s Note sets the story (it should be noted, though, that the author calls it a fictionalized account). The sixth-grade Skyhorse, unaware of his Mexican heritage—he’d been told he was American Indian—inadvertently insulted a classmate, a girl named Aurora Esperanza. This novel, then, is his apology to her, his attempt to share with the public the world of Echo Park.

“Bienvenidos,” narrated by Aurora’s father Hector, starts the novel in a highly readable, compelling fashion. Hector, while born in Mexico, has been living in the U.S. his entire life and has no memory of Mexico. Without citizenship or papers, however, work options are limited, and when the restaurant he worked at for eighteen years closes, day labor is all he can find. While on a job, Hector witnesses a crime and faces a moral dilemma: help justice be served by reporting the crime, which will require him to reveal his own illegal immigrant status, or remain silent and thus avoid deportation. The conflict is sharp, affecting, and, like so many of the stories, packs an emotional punch.

One of Skyhorse’s greatest skills, besides writing stellar prose, is the ability to write convincingly from the perspective of a wide variety of characters. Ex-convicts, gang members, estranged mothers, rebellious, hopeful teens all ring true. In “Los Feliz,” we are in the head of Felicia, Hector’s ex-wife, who cleans houses while struggling to raise a teen daughter and assimilate into the wealthier culture that provides her income. Felicia shares her story without a trace of self-pity, while observing the clear dichotomy between her world and that of her clients.

“In Los Feliz, I needed to be invisible and inaudible. Mrs. Calhoun and I managed to communicate without ever saying a word to each other’s face. The massive double front doors made a loud, drawbridge sound when I unlocked them, letting her know I’d arrived. I’d shout “Good morning” in English until Mrs. Calhoun responded with an echoed “Good morning,” often from one of the bathrooms. That was my sign to start at the opposite side of the house. When I finished a room, Mrs. Calhoun stepped inside and read a magazine until I finished the next room. Like the arms on a clock, we moved together through six bathrooms, five bedrooms, the split kitchen, two “recreation” rooms (a name that confused me; I didn’t have a room to create things in, let alone “re”-create them), and a living room as big as Aurora’s school cafeteria. We could spend the day inches apart and never see each other.”

Skyhorse does not vilify the wealthy in any way, and the conflict remains clear, blameless, in the subtle tension behind Felicia’s interactions, or lack thereof, with her client. Less convincing, however, is the friendship that blossoms between Felicia and Mrs. Calhoun after a year of strained formality. Mrs. Calhoun suffers from an emotional malaise that never quite gets pinned down. Depression? Ennui? Fear of being left alone? Agoraphobia? Marital strife? As a reader closer to Mrs. Calhoun’s description than Felicia’s, I found it annoyingly murky. For all the marvelous work Skyhorse has done in bringing the Mexican-American characters and their friends to life, this segment of the population, the wealthy white woman, struck me as a shallow, half-finished depiction. Which, given the story’s intent, still manages to be appropriate. Felicia’s English is self-admittedly poor, so it would be difficult to imagine her fully understanding what made Mrs. Calhoun tick. A special friendship? Harder to buy.

Petty gripes aside, this is a very important chapter and story, as the reader learns the full backstory of who the “Madonnas” of Echo Park were. Felicia and her daughter Aurora were among a group of mothers and daughters who liked to dress up like the singer Madonna and dance to her music in the street. Tragically, at one such event, the group gets caught in gang crossfire, in which a three-year-old girl is killed. This pivotal scene has long term repercussions and is the link that ties together so many of the novel’s stories, in startling and sad ways.

One of the most outstanding stories in the collection is “Rules of the Road.” Bus driver Efren Mendoza has been marvelously rendered, so achingly real and human, I feel like I know the man, and I respect him, even as I don’t wholly like him. Having left home at fourteen in order to evade membership in the gang both his brother and father belong to, he has fought to earn a respectable place in society, even at the risk of becoming hardened, unsympathetic.

“My salary of $21.27 an hour relies on my punctuality (I carry a back-up watch; you are penalized if you are one minute late for your shift). It’s a fair wage, one we had to go on several strikes—five during my time—to protect. Those socialist Che-worshiping Reconquistadoras complained these strikes hurt poor Mexican workers who cannot afford a car the most. You’re a Mexican, they say, trying to bond with me by speaking Spanish. How can you turn against your own kind? they say. But they aren’t my kind. They’re not Americans. They’re illegals, and the benefits to law-abiding Americans like me outweigh whatever inconveniences these people face breaking our laws.”

When things go wrong on one of Efren’s shifts, the reader feels it all: the shock, the frustration that this is not how things in his world are supposed to go, his moral and professional dilemma, the troubling but very real conclusion. Great stuff. I will never forget this story.

The Madonnas of Echo Park is a vivid, intricately woven story of eight disparate voices that come together to portray a once-invisible neighborhood steeped in cultural identity, violence, incidental beauty, now caught in the grips of change brought by time and gentrification. Spanning thirty years and stories from three generations, filled with emotional heft and bittersweet truths, along with a dollop of magical realism, Skyhorse’s debut serves up satisfying fare indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Free Press (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Brando Skyhorse
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Previous Pen/Hemingway winners: A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living by Michael Dahlie Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Graceland by Chris Abani

Bibliography:

• The Madonnas of Echo Park (February 2010)

“Someone who has not been born or, even more so, someone who has not even been engendered of conceived is the one thing that belongs to death entirely. The person who has not been conceived dies most. […] He or she is the only one who will have neither homeland nor grave.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (JUN 13, 2011)

This collection of short stories is intriguing and memorable, firstly for its peculiar themes and obsessions, secondly (contrary to what one might expect) because the earlier pieces seem far “better” than the later.

Let’s qualify “better.” The title story “While the Women Are Sleeping” is by far the longest and most self-indulgent of all the pieces, as well as being a relatively “late” piece. Pages of almost-monologue punctuated only by random, unnecessary actions do not constitute a well-crafted short story, in my view. The observations and tension do keep one reading, but in a sitting-back-with-eyebrows-slightly-raised sort of way. Arguably, the feat of retaining reader attention through the obstacle of such a construct is more impressive than if the story were crafted in a manner more conducive to the short story format. However, the bottom line is that it rambles. It’s introspective and ultimately inconclusive.

The short story is an unforgiving mistress. It has certain criteria, one of which is to swallow the reader instantly into its own specific setting and situation. This is the aim of all stories, of whatever length, but the demands made of a short story within a collection like this are far greater than those made of a novel with 300 pages to wallow in. All the stories in this collection do meet this criterion. Each one is vivid and memorable – sometimes unpleasantly so, as in the title story (it leaves one with a kind of “icky” feeling, which is undoubtedly entirely intentional).

The short story demands something else, though. It has to have thrust. If the tale drifts along in a nightmarish river of introspection, possibilities and hypotheticals, before leaving one stranded on a muddy shore with nothing more than a queasy stomach and uncertainty as to what just happened, it can never aspire to being more than mediocre. It is in this respect that the earlier stories outclass the later. They may be gawkier, but their undisguised obsessions have an energy that loses its way in the more convoluted sentences and oblique references in the later works. Though, having said “later” the latest piece in the collection is from 1998, so they are all relatively early works. There’s a certain breathless audacity needed to be able to write of a main character: “Derek Lilburn was a man of little imagination, ordinary tastes, and an irrelevant past” and still expect your reader to stay with you.

The other intriguing aspect of the collection (from an English reader’s point of view) is the seemingly near-stereotypically Spanish preoccupation with death and mortality. Eight of the ten stories deal directly with death, from a bewildering multitude of viewpoints. Add to this that the majority of the pieces are in the first person and you will get the (correct) impression that overall the collection is a head-on confrontation with issues surrounding mortality.

These issues are of a curiously philosophical nature. Mortality as connected with identity is a recurring theme, and the book is crawling with doppelgangers, mirrors, transfigurations and shadows. The self is lost, stolen, misplaced, and unknown in myriad variations. Generation and ancestry is a theme closely linked here, as ancestors and progenitors occur as echoes of the younger generations, haunting and forever directing them, even if unwittingly.

Yet these echoes, though fateful and often baleful, somehow seem to be taken as part of a natural process. Many of the outcomes in the stories are pretty dismal, but there’s a certain satisfaction of a destined, if not a just, end met: as if the Weird sisters were writing a report on the day’s activities.

This brings me back to the title story. One of the central characters is an entirely self-absorbed 23-year-old female. She has abandoned her parents and is currently seemingly content to be the idolatrous object of worship of an older man. She lies on the beach, staring into a hand-mirror, examining her perfect skin for any tiny blemishes. She says not a single word throughout the story. Such progenitor-less self-absorption is seen as a full-stop in the continuum of the general struggle of existence, and as such, more to be pitied than idolised. Perhaps this is the core paradox between Marías’ writing and his philosophy: a short story must be complete of itself, like the Midgard Serpent. His personal philosophy (as it appears in this collection) indicates that this would be the worst of all possible fates, so how could he reconcile the demands of the form to the thrust of the content? With difficulty, it seems.

I enjoyed this book, and will be carrying its images around with me for a long while, I suspect. I would recommend it to anyone interested in short stories. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	New Directions (November 29, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Javier Marías Wikipedia page on Javier Marías
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Written Lives

Bibliography:

• Voyage Along the Horizon (1972; 2006 in US)
• The Man of Feeling (1986: 2003)
• All Souls (1889; 1992)
• A Heart So White (1992; 1995)
• Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me (1994; 1996)
• When I Was Mortal (1996; 1999)
• Dark Back of Time (1998; 2001)
• Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear (2002: 2004)
• Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream (2004; 2006)
• While the Women Are Sleeping (November 2010 in US)

NonFiction

• Written Lives (1992; 2007)

“The world, it seemed, though not united in their opinion of our kind, was united in their awareness of our kind, and by extension, their need to remark upon it – the fact of me, a white woman, married to him, a black man.

The only problem, of course, was that it wasn’t true. Any of it.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUN 2, 2011)

What does it mean to be biracial and free in postmillennial America? The writer James Baldwin is quoted as saying, “Freedom is something that people take and people are as free as they want to be.”

By that definition, do the young interracial women that inhabit Danzy Senna’s first collection of short stories want to be free? Or do they want to belong to a collective… something, larger than themselves? The answer, as one might suspect, is complicated.

Danzy Senna – author of Caucasia, daughter of the African-Mexican poet Carl Senna and Fanny Howe, a white American of Irish descent – explores this question from her unique vantage point. Each of her characters is struggling for self-identity; each is hopeful and yet yearning for more. The short story collection is populated with ambivalent women, detached husbands, troubled girlfriends, and young babies and toddlers.

In the eponymous title story, Lara, a New Yorker who is anticipating her first byline from an obscure magazine tries hard to love her fate as a childless woman. Still, when she receives a mistaken call from a young girl who believes Lara is her mother, she goes into self-denial: “She had a family – a child – and the knowledge of this made her feel complete, though she knew she was not supposed to buy into such retrograde logic.” Yet still she does, with nebulous “what-ifs.”

Then there’s Livy, a Brooklyn-born artist and new mother who has found happiness with a Santa Fe gallery owner. When Livy hosts an old and spurned friend, she discovers that the connection between them has disintegrated: “She felt the daughter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.” And we meet the liberal and African-American couple Cassie Duncan; tensions flare when their pre-schooler is admitted to a very tony private school and a decision must be made.

Lara, Livy, Cassie and others struggle with identity in a world that sometimes considers them interchangeable. (In the story “What’s The Matter With Helga and Dave?,” two women who look nothing alike are mistaken for each other because each is part of a supposedly interracial couple). Their greatest sense of comfort seems to be found in community: a young woman Janice takes in an abandoned puppy after being dumped by her black boyfriend and withdraws into a new world of dog caregivers who meet in the park each morning. Livy feels “love of a religious magnitude” for the world of new mothers, a world to which she has just gained entry. Helga’s friend Rachel gains a feeling of comfort after moving into The Chandler, an apartment building with other interracial couples.

These revealing stories have a seemingly effortless flow to them, despite some flaws. Some of the conclusions do have a retrograde feel: single women are inevitably unhappy; motherhood mostly brings meaning and fulfillment. Danzy Senna sometimes doesn’t trust her readers enough; for instance, the reader can evidently conclude that the mixed-breed dog Beulah is a stand-in for her owner, but Ms. Senna drums the message home. And her story “Triptych” – the same story told three times – is simply too gimmicky. Still, this is an insightful look about appearances and attachment in our increasingly hard-to-define nation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Trade; 1 edition (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Danzy Senna
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

Bibliography:

• Caucasia (1999)
• Symptomatic (2004)
• You Are Free: Stories (May 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009)

“Robbie’s eyes flicked between the [graph] paper and the patio we were building. I could see that he was really studying this stuff. He’d ask me a question and I’d answer and we went back and forth like that. It was great. Before that, I never taught anybody anything.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 29, 2011)

The world that Alexander MacLeod’s protagonists inhabit is not an easygoing or a comfortable one, it is – a realistic one. Set in different urban milieus, most of his characters are young, struggling to get ahead in life. Some confront personal adversity, hoping for companionship or friendship, others attempt to find solace and even redemption. With his debut story collection MacLeod exhibits an exquisite writing talent that succeeds in capturing, with precision and depth, both the inner workings of the individual’s psyche and their social and physical circumstances. The back cover of the book describes the author – very aptly I find – as a writer of “ferocious physicality.”

Five of the seven stories are written in first person voices, drawing the reader intimately into each of the narrators’ point of view of specific experiences in their lives. In “Miracle Mile,” Michael, while preparing for an important international running meet, reflects back on his long friendship with his closest competitor. As children they always raced together, sometimes at night through a cross-border train tunnel beneath the Detroit river, risking their lives in the process. One dangerous run is so vividly depicted, that I felt myself holding my breath until I knew that the kids were both safely on the other side. In this and other stories the author describes at length the many material details that underpin any physical activity that his protagonists are engaged in: be it running, swimming, holing bricks, or maneuvering a bicycle on the icy roads in winter.

Most of the central characters are young men, very few women hold an important place in the stories. One exception is the story of Stace, the central character in “Adult Beginner I.” We meet her when she stands at a roof’s ledge, fearful and reluctant to follow the urging of her gang of friends who have been jumping – at night – from the roof of a hotel straight down into the Detroit river below. The night is dark and only a few lights can guide the direction of her fall into the water… a water that is anything but inviting. Her deep-seated fear has a complex history that is told in flashbacks, going back to her youth and her first exposure to the Atlantic Ocean. MacLeod’s compelling ability to describe vividly both the inner struggles and the outer condition that a character finds him- or herself in, comes to the fore as he evokes the ocean wave that Stace was suddenly forced to confront. “The wall of water came into her vision, looming over her mother’s shoulder like an old-style gangster thug sifting out of the crowd in a grey trench coat with a brim of his fedora pulled low down. He was so thick and so wide, he blocked out the sky. He shoved her mother forward headfirst into the sand before grabbing the girl and carrying her off in the opposite direction.”

For me, this one of the most affecting and richly developed stories in the collection. ‘The Loop” is another favourite of mine. Teenager Allan and his bicycle have been delivering every day for three years medications and other drugstore supplies for old-fashioned pharmacist, Mr. Musgrave. Allan’s description of the wide range of regular customers he meets – from the nice, half-blind old Mrs. McKay, to eighty-nine year old Mrs. Hume, to huge, spooky Barney is meticulous and his relationship to them all is touching and very perceptive. He is fully aware that his customers’ conditions are confronting him with aspects of human life that should be beyond a young teenager’s knowledge or understanding; he nevertheless experiences empathy, and in some cases affection, for his “clients.” And one day, he surprises himself when compassion overrules reserve and even disgust. “The Loop” is one of the gentler stories and with “Adult Beginner I” my favourite in this collection. They both stand out in contract to the somewhat raw and dark emotions and physical aggression that lie beneath many of the stories told. I find myself torn between my attraction to the author’s brilliant writing and my lesser curiosity of most of the topics he expands on and the characters who represent them. Other readers may well find all of the stories captivating and engaging.

Alexander MacLeod was a 2010 Giller Prize finalist with this collection that also has been named “Book of the Year” by other institutions in Canada. He is the son of award winning Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod, who won the International Foreign Fiction Prize (IMPAC) in 1999 for his novel No Great Mischief.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Biblioasis; Reprint edition (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Publisher page on Alexander MacLeod
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Tinkers by Paul Harding

Bibliography:

• Light Lifting (April 2011)

“Her face had only one expression, and she used it to conceal the two major emotions of her life, resentment and love. They were so violently opposed, these passions, that she could not move from one to the other; she lacked flexibility; so she inhabited a grim inexpressive no-man’s-land between them, feeling in some way that she thus achieved a kind of justice.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 26, 2011)

Margaret Drabble is a well-known English novelist. I have read several of her books and have always enjoyed them. I had no idea that she was also a writer of short stories. A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is the first compilation of her stories that has ever been published. They are presented in chronological order beginning in 1964 and ending in 2000. Like her novels, these stories often deal with the plight of women in their times, the socio-cultural aspects of marriage, and the difficulties that women find themselves in while trying to both raise a family and be successful in the business world. The stories are distinctively English;  the countryside of England as well as the urban landscapes are vivid throughout. There is a span of thirty-six years between the first short story and the last, giving the themes a relatively large period of time in which to develop.

The first story is entititled “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Humphrey had met a man at a pub who invited him to a party and when he came to the door, the host acted like he didn’t even know him. “It was the kind of party at which nobody got introduced.” The party was comprised of clusters of people who all seemed to know one another and the conversations that Humphrey overheard were artistic and intellectual. Humphrey knew no one and no one tried to make his acquaintance. Humphrey sets his sights on a long-haired red-headed woman who is waxing pontifically to a group gathered around her. He never knew if it was accident or inspiration that caused him to set her hair on fire but this act gained him exalted entrance to the entourage.

In “A Voyage to Cythera” we watch Helen who loves to travel. Whether it’s 30 miles or to another country, traveling is Helen’s gift in life. She likes the feeling of moving, be it in a car, train, or plane. Traveling opens a new world for her – one of possible intimacy, adventure and the potential of becoming someone other than the lonely, bland person she is.

In “A Pyrrhic Victory,” a young woman is adventuring with three others, trying to be what they want her to be. She represses her own needs and expectations. She finds herself taking on the weight and pain of acting according to what others want rather than risk being herself and seeming uncool or gauche.

“Crossing the Alps” is about two lovers who work together and are having an illicit affair. They are planning to travel from England to Yugosolavia. He comes down with a bad cold and sees her strengths and abilities as she cares for him. It is impossible for them to be together outside this week’s vacation as he is married. He has a lot of difficulty understanding her strength and resourcefulness in the face of her difficult life.

“The Gifts of War” is about a woman who is in a joyless marriage with an abusive husband. Her son is her only solace, her pride and joy. As she sets off to get him an expensive and totally inappropriate birthday present, she reminisces about the time during the Vietnam War when she not only protested the war, but toys of violence.

A well-known female English playwright meets an even more well-known American literary figure in “A Success Story.” He is known for his womanizing and comes on to her at a party. This coming on means more to her than having an intellectual conversation. She is happily married and things don’t go anywhere but she feels good that she is desired. The male character is based on the American novelist Saul Bellow.

“A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman” is about a woman who gets a job with her husband’s help at a television station. With time, she becomes very successful and gets to have her own show. Her husband becomes jealous and begins to despise her, sometimes even hitting her in her sleep. She carries herself well and usually has a smile on her face along with a look of success. Inside, however, she feels physically and emotionally ill. Her only comfort is her children who she gets to see very little of because of her grueling work schedule.

“The Merry Widow” is about Elsa who has just been widowed. Her husband was a mean emotionally abusive spouse and Elsa is glad that he is dead. She goes on a vacation alone that they had planned together and has a wonderful time until an old man with a scythe starts working the land. She realizes over time that she has mistaken him for “death” when he’s really a representative of “Father Time.” She is then able to enjoy herself again and look forward to the future.

Many of these stories are about the inner lives of women. The action takes place in their thoughts, hopes and dreams. It is very clear that what is seen on the outside is frequently very different from what is going on inside. Some of the stories seem like sketches for Drabble’s novels, ways for her to work out the characterizations. As a fan of Ms. Drabble, I loved this collection and feel privileged to have read it. I hope that more of her short stories come to light.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (May 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Drabble
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Wikipedia page on Margaret Drabble
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Red Queen

Bibliography:

• A Summer Bird Cage (1963)
• The Garrick Year (1964)
• The Millstone (1965)
• Jerusalem the Golden (1967)
• The Waterfall (1969)
• The Needle’s Eye (1972)
• The Realms of Gold (1975)
• The Ice Age (1977)
• The Middle Ground (1980)
• The Radiant Way (1987) *
• A Natural Curiousity (1989) *
• The Gates of Ivory (1992) *
• The Witch of Exmoor (1997)
• The Peppered Moth (2001)
• The Seven Sisters (2002)
• The Red Queen (October 2004)
• A Summer Bird-Cage (May 2006)
• The Sea Lady (May 2007)
• A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman : Stories (May 2011)

*Trilogy describing the experiences of three friends living through the 80s

Nonfiction:

• For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (1978)
• A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature (1979)
• Safe as Houses (1990)
• The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws (September 2009)

“It was frightening, though, how little time you got. You only became yourself when you were twenty-three or twenty-four. A few years later, you had an old man’s chest hair. It wasn’t worth it.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAY 15, 2011)

The thirteen stories in the collection Bullfighting from Irish author Roddy Doyle examine various aspects of male middle age. Eight of these stories first appeared in New Yorker, and in this volume the post-boom stories collectively offer a wry, bittersweet look at the years past and the years yet to come. We see middle-aged men whose wives have left them, middle-aged men whose children have grown and gone, stale marriages, marriages which have converted lovers into friends, the acceptance of disease and aging, and the ever-looming aspect of mortality. Lest I give the wrong impression, these stories are not depressing–instead through these marvellous stories Doyle argues that middle age brings new experiences and new emotions–just when we thought we’d experienced all that life had to offer.

In “The Photograph,” Martin tallies up the pros and cons of aging:

“Getting older wasn’t bad. The balding suited Martin. Everyone said it. He’d had to change his trouser size from 34 to 36. It had been a bit of a shock, but it was kind of nice wearing loose trousers again, hitching them up when he stood up to go to the jacks, or whatever. He was fooling himself; he knew that. But that was the point—he was fooling himself. He’d put on weight, but he felt a bit thinner.”

As Martin faces his first serious health issue, he recalls the recent death of Noel, a friend from his youth. Martin tries valiantly to make light of his own health problem with mixed success.

In “Funerals,” middle-aged son, Bill starts ferrying his elderly parents around to funerals. What begins as a one-off favour turns into a weekly habit. Bill discovers that his parents actually look forward to funerals and that they view them as outings to be followed by a trip to the chip shop. Instead of feeling burdened by becoming their regular chauffeur, Bill finds himself fascinated by their behaviour and pleasantly comfortable in their company, yet at the same time some sort of seismic shift has occurred in the relationship:?

“He could enjoy their company and listen to them flirting. They weren’t his parents any more; he wasn’t their son. He was a middle-aged man in a car with two people who were a bit older. Once or twice, in a rush that made him hang onto the steering wheel, he was their son and the car was full of himself as a boy and a stupid, awkward young man, hundreds of boys and men, all balled into this one man driving his wife’s Toyota Corolla and trying not to cry.”

Bill isn’t sure why he wants to spend so much time with his parents, but he does know that he’s beginning to feel uncomfortable with his own crowd:

“He stayed clear of the local funerals, the old neighbours. He didn’t want the conversations. What are you up to these days? How many kids is it you have? He didn’t want to talk to men he’d once known who’d lost their jobs so recently they still didn’t understand it. Great, great. Yourself? There’d be too many middle-aged women who used to be girls, ponytailed men he used to play with, a mother he’d fancied–in the coffin. Fat grannies he’d kissed and–the last time he’d gone to one of the local ones–a woman with MS, shaking her way to a seat in the church, the first girl he’d ever had sex with.”

Bill finds his parents child-like, and there’s a comforting sensation to the day trips he takes with them as they attend funeral after funeral. It’s as though Bill is a parent once again–after all his own children are grown and no longer need his care.

If I had to pick one favourite story in this stellar collection, it would be “Animals.” In this particularly poignant story, George, the middle-aged narrator, whose children are now grown and gone, recalls his life as a family man through memories of the animals the family owned. At one point, George tells how he once colluded with the local pet shop, Wacker’s over a lost canary. The canary, Pete, escaped from the cage, and George returns home to find “four hysterical children in the kitchen, long past tears and snot, and a woman outside in the back garden, talking to the hedge.” The woman is George’s wife, Sandra and she’s pretending that the canary is in the hedge:

“–Listen, he said.—I’m going to bring the kids to Wacker’s, to see if Pete flew there. Are you with me?
Sandra looked at him. And he knew: she was falling in love with him, all over again. Or maybe for the first time—he didn’t care. There was a woman in her dressing gown, looking attractively distraught, and she was staring at George like he was your man from ER.

–While I’m doing that, said George,–you phone Wacker’s and tell him the story. You with me?
–Brilliant.
–It might work.”

Some people measure their lives by the holidays they’ve taken, the jobs they’ve held, or the homes they’ve lived in, but George measures his life as a husband and father through the family pets. Perhaps, under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that middle-aged George finds that his loyal companion is a dog.

The stories include some gentle humour as we hear of one man who brags about picking up 57-old-twins. Another story tells of a couple whose relationship devolves into insult slinging (“Four decades of arse parked inside a piece of string”) in some sort of aging contest. Doyle’s characters, while sketched lightly, are fully realized individuals who cope with the various problems and disappointments of middle age: loneliness, illness, failure, and boredom. These stories examine middle-aged life from all angles, so we also see that middle-age is a mixed bag with consolations in unexpected places. Bullfighting, a rich mature collection from Doyle, shows us a writer at the top of his game, and Doyle’s stories are infused with generosity and wisdom–even as they examine, so excellently, the foibles of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Roddy Doyle Wikipedia page on Roddy Doyle
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Dead Republic Paula Spencer

Bibliography:

• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993)
• Wilderness (September 2007)
• The Deportees: and Other Stories (January 2008)
• Not Just for Christmas (September 2008)
• Bullfighting: Stories (April 2011)

Barrytown Trilogy:

• The Commitments (1987)
• The Snapper (1990)
• The Van (1991)

The Last Roundup Trilogy:

• A Star Called Henry (1999)
• Oh. Play That Thing! (2004)
• The Dead Republic (April 2010)

Paula Spencer Novels:

• The Women Who Walked Into Doors (1996)
• Paula Spencer (December 2006)

Children’s Books:

• The Giggler Treatment (2000)
• Rover Saves Christmas (2001)
• Meanwhile Adventures (October 2006)
• Her Mother’s Face (November 2008)

Nonfiction:

• Rory and Ita (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Commitments (1991)
• The Snapper (1993)
• The Van (1997)

“If it did happen again, if his and Lise’s baby died, too, would they survive? Would their marriage? The thing is, there’s no telling. From where he sits, less than a month away from fatherhood, he sees that what they’ve done together acknowledges the possibility of its own undoing: that what there is to gain is exactly equal to what there is to lose.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAY 9, 2011)

Ann Packer’s newest book, Swim Back to Me, is comprised of a novella and five short stories. They are all “emotionally searing stories” dealing with issues of intimacy, misunderstandings that cause distancing, betrayals, and the problems that people have with understanding and knowing one another. Each story is strong and brilliant.

“Walk for Mankind,” the novella in this collection, just sings. It is a coming of age story but to just describe it as that would be like saying it’s a beautiful day and to leave out what makes it beautiful: the smell of the greenery, the feel of a breeze, the sensation of the the sun on your skin and the overall feeling of beauty and abundance inspired by being part of this world.

The novella takes place in 1972 Palo Alto, California close to the Stanford campus. It is told from fifty-year old Richard’s memories of his fourteenth summer. Sasha and Richard are both fourteen years old and are friends, the kind of friends who play scrabble, go to the beach, ride bikes together and play truth and dare. They have fun. Sasha is the more dominant one in the relationship and she has a real independent and wild streak to her that Richard lacks. Sasha decides that she and Richard should do a 20-mile Walk for Mankind and raise so much money that they are “heroes” of a sort. Just before the walk, Sasha meets Cal and begins a sexual relationship with him. Since Cal is a drug dealer, pot also enters the picture. Sasha starts smoking a lot of weed and Richard soon embraces it as well. Pot becomes a big deal for Richard as he “laughs the ocean-wave laughter of the stoned, up and down and down and up, and it was incredibly intense and at the same time locked away from the real world, safe behind a wall of glass.”

Richard loves to go to Sasha’s house where her free-wheeling parents are fun and exuberant. Richard lives with his stodgy father, a history professor, and a housekeeper. His mother left them ten months ago to “find herself” and Richard sees her once a month for a weekend. Richard’s relationship with his father is distant and he loves Sasha’s family as much as being with Sasha. There comes a time in their relationship, however, when sexuality enters and they begin to distance, not understanding one another and their new roles.

The underlying theme of this beautiful novella is the distance and pursuit of two adolescents who do not know themselves or each other and are trying to navigate the world of intimacy. This quickly turns into perceived betrayals which distance the two friends, leaving them in a place of anomie. They learn to perceive the treacheries, dreams and misfortunes that comprise life, songs in a dissonant key.

In “Things Said and Done” Sasha’s family is revisited during the festivities of her brother’s marriage to a woman much younger than him. Her parents are long divorced and Sasha has come to realize that her father is a narcissist. She is his emotional caretaker. She has left her wildness behind her and lives a staid life as an academic.

In “Molten” a mother grieves the death of her teen-aged son. “Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.” She has lost her grasp on life and tries to relive her son’s days by listening to his rock music non-stop and finding meaning in the music and instrumentation he once listened to. She has moved away from her family and at a bereavement group “she felt molten. She didn’t want friends, compassionate or otherwise. She wanted to scream in a padded room, scratch her arms till they bled.”

“Jump” is a story about a shift supervisor at a copy store who has a urinary tract infection. Her car won’t start and a co-worker drives her home. On the drive she finds out he is not who she thought he was and that they are both trying to escape from certain parts of their lives without success.

In “Dwell Time,” a newly married woman has to deal with her husband’s habit of just disappearing for days at a time, something he did in his first marriage but she did not know about. Should she leave him or can she find a way to make this marriage work? Interestingly, the term dwell time “is how long soldiers have between deployments.” Could her husband think of their marriage as a war zone, and these disappearances be his way to find peace?

“The Firstborn” is a poignant story of a woman whose firstborn son died at five months from crib death. This destroyed her marriage. She is remarried now, pregnant and about to give birth to a child. The couple’s fears and hopes are examined, along with her memories of her firstborn.

I am a lover of short stories to begin with, but I gather light when I read something as engaging and brilliant as this collection. Ann Packer has matured so much in her writing since The Dive From Clausen’s Pier. She is well on her way to becoming a master.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ann Packer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Songs Without Words The Dive From Clausen’s Pier

Bibliography:

• Mendocino and Other Stories (1994)
• The Dive from Clausen’s Pier (April 2002)
• Songs Without Words (August 2007)
• Swim Back to Me: Stories (April 2011)