“What are you waiting for, Tommie? If there’s something that can save you, what could you possibly be waiting for?”

“I can’t say that either. The jury doesn’t want to hear things. Nobody wants to hear certain things, because nobody can believe certain things even if they hear them. There’s strange things that happen in the world sometimes. I’ve come to understand that, and they don’t fit in with the rest of our lives. These things, they’re like a burl in a tree, Willie – they don’t belong there. They get in somehow and the tree has to work around it. Or else die.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUN 21, 2011)

Tommie Cluverius is on trial for murder in the first degree. The charge is that he killed Lillie Madison and threw her into a reservoir where she drowned. The year is 1885 and Richmond, Virginia is the scene of the crime. Did Tommie kill Lillie or was it suicide? Did someone else kill Lillie and try to pin the crime on Tommie? The outcome of the trial will determine whether Tommie lives or goes to the gallows.

The Reservoir by John Milliken Thompson is a moving and fascinating story of two brothers and the woman they both love. Tommie has always had ambition and things came easily for him. He was his parents’ favorite child while his brother, Willie, was more easy-going and wanted to live off the land. His goal was to farm the land or be a sawyer. Tommie set out to college and became a lawyer, joining up with the prestigious firm of his mentor.

Both boys were raised by their Aunt Jane. Their younger brother died when he was six years old in a drowning accident and their mother started drinking very heavily. At the same time, their father lost his farm in the depression following the Civil War. Aunt Jane was childless and had money and love to raise the two boys so they were sent to live with her. When Willie was sixteen, their cousin Lillie was also sent to live with Aunt Jane. She was having troubles at home and Aunt Jane took her in.

The novel weaves back and forth in time and we learn that Willie and Lillie were in love for many years. Tommie was engaged to Nola, a neighbor whose family had wealth and land. Though Tommie wasn’t in love with Nola, he saw this as a good match for himself, an opportunity to expand his wealth and achieve his social ambitions. He did not intend to fall in love with Lillie, but it happened. Though in love with Lillie, he planned on marrying Nola.

The reader gradually learns that Lillie has family secrets, especially about her father who has been physically abusive and sexually inappropriate with her. Aunt Jane sends Lillie to boarding school for a while and Tommie goes off to college at the same time. Tommie likes to visit the brothels very regularly. In today’s parlance, one might consider him a sex addict because he spends money he doesn’t have on prostitutes, is obsessed with going to the brothel and makes it a major part of his life.

The novel opens with the following sentence: “On March 14, 1885, a body is floating in the old Marshall Reservoir…”. The body turns out to be Lillie and she is eight months pregnant. The first thought is that it was a suicide but there are two sets of footprints. One set appears to belong to Lillie and the other set is a larger size, most likely a man’s. The coroner determines that Lillie was killed. A search for the killer begins and all the evidence leads to Tommie. He is picked up and charged with the murder.

The setting of the story and the trial is Richmond, Virginia and the surrounding area. The author gets the feel and ambiance of the environs and time to a tee. The reader can almost smell the streets, feel the political charge in the air and know what it’s like to live in Richmond in the late nineteenth century.

Willie and Tommie are very close and as the trial progresses, Willie does everything he can for Tommie. However, does he really believe in his brother’s innocence? The early part of the book alludes to Tommie’s guilt but as the book progresses it gets much more difficult to figure out how much of a roll Tommie played in Lillie’s death or if he killed her at all. The court scenes are exciting and the characters of the defense attorneys and prosecution are very well done. My only gripe with the book is that the author told me too much, not letting me figure out the subtle emotional backdrop to the story and the people. I wanted to let things play out in my mind and not always see them in black and white, on paper.

Mr. Thompson has written several works of non-fiction and has published short stories but this is his debut fiction novel. This is a novel based on an actual criminal case that the author researched. “The details of the case, then, were the fence posts on which I hung the story. The tragic love triangle at its heart was my invention, but it was suggested by the facts.” It is an admirable achievement and one can tell that he knows the south very well. He has lived there all his life and his familiarity with the people and sense of place comes through marvelously in the telling of this tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Milliken Thompson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another Virginia mystery involving brothers, but in current setting: The Legal Limit by Martin Clark

Bibliography:

• The Reservoir (DATE)

Nonfiction:

• Florida and the Southeast (1997)
• America’s Historic Trails (2001)
• National Geographic Guide to America’s Outdoors: Southeast (Nature Adventures in Parks, Preserves, Forests, Wildlife Refuges, Wilderness Areas) (2001)
• Wildlands of the Upper South (2004)
• America’s Western Edge (2005)
• The National Geographic Almanac of American History (2005) (with James Miller)
• Our National Parks: Tours with Rangers (2006)
• National Geographic Traveler: Washington, DC, 4th edition (February 2011)

“ It is not always easy for people to move from one region of the world to another and make a fresh go of it. It is not always sufficient to live in an unpopulated field, or even an entire unpopulated freshwater basin, and call it your own.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (DEC 12, 2009)

Earlier this summer  I went to a book reading here in Maine where I live. The author, Jessica Anthony was local, and that always brings in a nice crowd. We have a lot of good writers in Maine. Of course there is Stephen King, up in Bangor, whom everyone knows; and there’s Phil Hoose, who just recently won the National Book Award. But there are a lot of writers around here who aren’t as well known, and many of them are very talented. I had not heard of Ms. Anthony, but I was obviously in the minority, for she seemed a favorite of the crowd the evening of her reading–and it was a crowd. Chris, the owner of the bookstore, introduced her, calling her brilliant and her book brilliant too. But Chris says this about a lot of the writers he introduces. They are either brilliant, or if not brilliant, their book can’t be put down. Sometimes it’s one or the other. Tonight, it was both–and the book was brilliant too, as I said. Ms. Anthony approached the podium and said hello to her many friends in the audience, talked briefly about the book, and began to read.

As she read, I was first struck by the quality of the writing. It was assured and confident. It had heft to it, like you want from good writing, like the difference between a sauce reduced from ingredients on the stove and a one poured from the jar. This writing seemed measured and lovingly created. Good writing catches my eye, or I should say ear, like nothing else. Like pornography, it is difficult to describe, but I know it when I see–hear–it. This was good writing like that. But it was the story that truly hooked me. The Convalescent is the story of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman. Here is Rovar giving a brief description of himself: “I’m barely human. I’m a hairy little Hungarian pulp. An incongruous mass of skin and blood and hair. I am a sorry gathering of organs. That is all.” See what I mean?

Rovar lives in an abandoned broken-down bus in a field on the banks of the Queenconococheecook River in Northern Virginia, from which is sells meat. He is a butcher who hails from a long tradition of butchers–and he is the last of the line. He is a species unto himself. He is diminutive, midget-like, and has a leg which drags behind him. His skin peels off in flakes. He is mute and writes, when he infrequently feels like communicating, on a tablet. He only has one set of clothes, including the stained and foul pink Disneyland sweatshirt he always wears. He is bearded and unkept. He is, by any measure, repugnant. Indeed, even his name–”It is a Hungarian name. It’s pronounced RO-vahr. It means ‘insect’”–brands him. He lives his life with general equanimity despite it all, seeking only one solace, Dr. Monica, the local pediatrician. She sees Rovar every Tuesday, against the wishes of her staff, amidst the stares and gawking of the patients, “the Sick or Diseased children,” who fill the Doctor’s reception area. She treats his skin, massages his trachea, alters his diet, counsels him. She tries to do what doctors do: heal. But Rovar is beyond healing, something we have sensed from the outset. Rovar is hardly human, enough human to lend plausibility, but lacking thereof in a magical way. As the novel progresses his condition deteriorates. He hallucinates, grows paranoid and generally decays. Or so we think. But this story is not just any story. It is a story laced with super heros, and giants, great rivers born streaming from birthing women and humans who perhaps aren’t.

Ms. Anthony said in an interview, that she usually does “not write strict realism; but nor do I consider myself a magic realist–I think I sort of float between the two, in some murky, absurd realm. Let’s call it Absurdorealism.” There is the experience, while reading The Convalescent, of being like an insect, airborne and tasting one flower then the next, one sensation following on the heels of another. Everything makes sense, then not, then you wonder: Is this absurd, or literal? It is great fun. It is not a coincidence I use the flying insect metaphor. Insects are in evidence here. Rovar keeps one as a pet in a can and feeds it bits of rotten food. As a young boy, or more properly, as a young Pfliegman, Rovar as he “lies in bed watching a fly hurtling around the edges of the window screen…wishes he were an insect. If he were an insect, he thinks, he would be invisible. O, to be a fly, a flea, he thinks, observing the small things about his room. The things that insects observe. The curl of paint on the window ledge. The jagged fray of the blanket. The sound of bees throwing themselves at the window screen. He pinches his arms and watches the hairs rise up. He presses his fingers on the his eyeballs until globes of light appear behind the eyelids, each taking the triangular shape of the wings of a butterfly–” If only Gregor Samsa had had so much desire, rather than dread.

Perhaps this reader’s delight was most in evidence in the chapters tracing Rovar’s ancestry, or rather the “Evolution of the Pfliegmans.” Interlaced with the straight-absurd narration of Rovar, we are treated to an absurdorealism walk through the history of Eastern Europe, cave-man to present. It is simply wondrous. Here is an example, from early on. Rovar is asked by Dr. Monica to open up, to communicate, as best he is able, using his writing table, to “write what I feel.” And so the Pfliegman mythology unfurls:

“Although it is difficult for me to write how I feel, I can tell you how Aranka felt as she lay on her side in front of a fire amidst the pungent, simmering remains of Enni Hús. She felt thirst, but there was no water. She felt the weight of isolation, of inevitability: this child would take her, or she would take the child. She gazed up at the uneven flaps of the tent, listening to the purring sounds of a hundred dozing Pfliegmans–she was savagely alone. Most Plfliegman fetuses, she knew, did not survive birth. As though they could sense it, as though they could see their whole lousy future before they even had a chance to live it, they hoped for better luck in the next conception and gave up in the womb. If they managed to be born, the babies were often so small they looked like little blue fish. Babies born off-color, with elongated heads, mealy skin. Feet that hung inward in hackneyed flippers. An aura of general malaise.”

This book, like a great myth, can be read on many levels. It can read as a tracing of existential nausea, a modern farce, a tract on the consequences of modern living, a quasi-adolescent coming-of-age fantasy memoir. It could be all this, none of it, or something else entirely. Mostly it is fun and witty and sharp. I would say how excited I am by this new voice of Jessica Anthony, but like Rovar, I sense the voice is an old-soul, not new at all, but one that has sprung afresh from an ancient mist.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	McSweeney’s (June 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AMAZON PAGE:	The Convalescent
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Another  interview with Jessica Anthony
EXTRAS:	Excerpt A short story
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other brilliant debuts: Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris The Book of Salt by Monica Truong Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Bibliography:

• The Convalescent (June 2009)