To My Handful of Loyal Readers

Good day, everyone! I have been busy setting up another blog, called Basso Continuo. (Basso continuo is defined as a foundational musical accompaniment system, used almost universally during the Baroque era, approximately 1600-1750. It's Italian for "continuous bass.") Link: https://literaturefiction.blog/ 

I'm loading in-depth essays of recent fiction there. I will still be reviewing books here, but the pace of my output may flag a little as I work on in-depth pieces for Basso Continuo.

 

Thank you all so much, and keep reading! 

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"Evelyn in Transit" by David Guterson

 

David Guterson’s 2026 novel Evelyn in Transit is grand example of storytelling in plain, unadorned language. It contains the story of a woman from Indiana who proves you never know a person’s worth until they reach their potential. Educated in a Catholic elementary school, Evelyn, whose character is at base blameless, exhibits mild behavior problems, and is an uninterested pupil. Later on, she shows fearlessness at expressing herself in group therapy sessions for teens, and is a tireless laborer at odd jobs she takes, at restaurants, fruit picking, and helping build a sacred Buddhist peace monument on a mountain in New Mexico.

Alternating chapters deal with Evelyn and with a child Buddhist monk in Tibet, named Tsering Lekpa. Tsering is admitted to a monastery as a young boy and learns his principals well, and matures into an abbot, but accepting all the subservience and notoriety grates on him. He feels unworthy of it and much of his life seems pointless. He accordingly travels to Seattle after meeting a Buddhist professor who teaches at the university there, and goes to work translating manuscripts.  

Evelyn’s and Tsering’s stories entwine when three Buddhist monks arrive at Evelyn’s Evansville home, with the surprising news that they think her son Cliff, roughly six or seven years old, is the sixth reincarnation of a holy monk, called Norbu Rinpoche. Tsering, who had grown old and died, was the fifth. Something about this news stirs Evelyn to travel with her little boy to Nepal.

Guterson’s genius dictates that he portray both characters, particularly Evelyn, in flat, starkly mundane prose, that keeps us nevertheless reading on because of the sympathy we feel for both. He spends most of his energy and resources on Evelyn, and with excellent reason. I’ll leave you the joy of learning the reason on your own. The journey is well worth it.

Guterson’s work is straightforward, but develops a surprising depth and subtlety in its development and resolution. Evelyn inspires a deep loyalty in the reader, and she gets a confirming affirmation by story’s end. Rather than run the risk of giving too much away, I will end by confidently recommending Evelyn in Transit, an accomplished, worthy read by a superb author too little appreciated. 

 

 

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"The Shapeless Unease" by Samantha Harvey

In The Shapeless Unease Samantha Harvey recounts an interval in her life in which she suffered severe insomnia, describing struggling with the condition of getting little or no sleep over several months’ time. She describes her nights—filled with repeated plagues of watching her digital clock, of almost getting to sleep only to have a noisy truck pass on the street, rattling her awake, of the ever-deepening dread and self-fulfilling prophecy of the impossibility of getting any sleep again tonight. 

I can attest to the accuracy of her telling, both of the deepening desperation through the nights and weeks and months, and the zombie-like trance of dealing with people during the day who have actually slept.

She distinguishes her narrative by presenting it with honesty, and the sense that there’s an end to the vicious cycle (there is). 

She also intersperses passages of stories she’s writing, or thinking about writing, and of random-seeming observations and reflections on consciousness and philosophy. For example she disagrees with William James about how life can be conquered with reason and intellect.  She dwells for a time on the Parahã tribe in the Amazon, unencroached upon by the modern world. This group has no concept of the past or the future, no words for before or after; the concepts “tomorrow” or “yesterday” are utterly foreign. They never put a dependent clause in a sentence.

Her memoir includes snippets of a story she’s tentatively writing of a man who robs cash machines, calling it “jackpotting” them. She describes her frustrating visits to the doctor—she alternates between thinking she must sound like a crabby child, and feeling rage at being so helpless and living in Britain, where health care can apparently feel like a constant struggle with a vast bureaucracy. 

She gets better for a few weeks on sleeping pills, only to quickly relapse. Finally she describes the process of swimming in a lake, where she concentrates on currents and waves, and how to counter them, and how to go with their flow. She finishes by writing about getting over it all through some subtle inevitable, natural process, and how the memory of the interval faded into an unreality. 

The Shapeless Unease is vivid, sympathy-inducing in those of us who’ve suffered sleeplessness, and so real that it I worried I might start a spell of insomnia of my own. (I didn’t.) To anyone who’s wondered about the disorder, Harvey’s book is exceedingly honest and accurate, and her odd musings intriguing. Her writing, of course, reinforces what we know about her matchless talent.

 

 

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