“The City & The City” by China Miéville

There are cities in Europe, like Berlin and Budapest, (and presumably elsewhere) that have suffered schisms, or have histories of division. In The City & The City China Miéville carries this theme to an extreme, and in the process gives the reader a highly diverting, atmospheric tour. Add in all the elements of an excellent whodunit-thriller, and you have the heady mix on offer.

The two Eastern European cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma have maintained a fragile coexistence for centuries. They occupy the same space in some sort higher plane in which motorists must avoid colliding with cars from the other city and hitting pedestrians inhabiting the other city, while completely denying their existence. It’s a quirky device beginning to end, to which the reader, even while buying the overall plot, never quite adjusts. And I think Mr. Miéville wants it exactly that way. It’s a tribute to his skill that you spend the whole read a little off balance.

So in the narrative veteran Besźel police detective Tyador Borlú tries to solve a murder and quickly gets tangled up in intercity and inter-dimensional vagaries: he’s forced to work with the police force of Ul Qoma, and relations are not always friendly and trust not always forthcoming, from either side. The two detectives bump and collide with

each other, and with the improbable truths, but finally begin to cooperate and address the wildly speculative possibility of yet another city sharing the same quantum space. We finish with a rewarding denouement, faithful in style and tone with what has gone before.

This extremely inventive novel portrays a present-day fantasy in cities steeped in wrenching geopolitics and lingering Soviet-era inefficiencies. The minutiae of detective work in this through-the-looking glass setup strike me as very believable; the pace is perfect; and the tension builds wonderfully. This book will satisfy anyone looking for an unusual detective story that’s presented in a wholly new and different way. It’s a commendable, interesting effort.

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"A Gate at the Stairs" by Lorrie Moore

Tassie Keltjin, the protagonist of Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, will never forget the lessons she learns during her first year at college, because she learns them all through heartbreak. The romantic heartbreak she suffers teaches her how little she can trust herself. Her breakup with the adorable toddler she babysits – her adoptive parents can’t keep her – breaks her heart, and rends the poor reader’s to shreds. And finally she and her family must deal with the loss of her dear, aimless brother, a casualty in Afghanistan.

Ms. Moore tells these hardships with a leavening of humor, most of it clever wordplay, but the puns and jokes harden and become brittle under the story’s pressures. She ends up telling them with a helpless wail, the better to crack wise than succumb to tears. I wonder.

 I don’t measure my reactions to books on the litmus of emotions, however. This book has plenty to commend it, principally the development of Tassie. She starts out as an innocent, her heart uncalloused by any real strife. She takes blows and batterings – really too many for any one person in a year – and comes through at the end definitely the sadder but wiser woman. I honor Ms. Moore for the clarity with which she tells the story,

while I wonder a little at what I think of as “piling on.”

Tassie is a fine construct, a wise-cracking, wide-reading, bass player, who learns quickly in a world which will teach things to you in spite of yourself. As full of well-realized characters as this book is, she’s the star here, and well worth your time.

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"The Name of the World" by Denis Johnson

At a pivotal moment toward the end of this novella, the protagonist, a college professor in the Midwest of the U.S., writes and underlines, “The name of the world” on the back of his business card and gives it to Flower Cannon, a young woman. This occurs in an abandoned, off-limits bunker where Flower lives, during a kind of fortune-telling session that she holds for him.

This scene transitions professor Michael Reed from his living coma (suffered because of the deaths of his wife and daughter five years prior) to an engagement with life. This scene feels like he’s asking the identity of the universe he’s about to re-enter, but author Denis Johnson might mean something a lot deeper, I haven’t figured it out. At story’s outset, Professor Reed watches his life in a detached way, seeing things as though from a distance and feeling nothing about them. However, he stumbles into an art classroom and seeing the model, who is not motionless or passive, snaps him out of his funk immediately.

 He begins to live again, but he needs more lessons, a stamp of approval, and of course this must come from Flower. Reed knows that his life will now head in unpredictable directions, but although intimacy with Flower seems possible, that doesn’t turn out to be the point. Flower is a portal of another kind. She lives in a Spartan, featureless bunker, but is surrounded by her art and her quirky collection of mundane objects. It serves as the anteroom for the rest of his life, and contains some suggested materials for it. Flower has “… bits of glass and shards of mirrors, strips and patches of astronomical and topographical maps, nautical charts … She kept glass jars of buttons and boxes of marbles. Here was the lid of a large box like a tray holding multicolored strings and yarns, the silvery, papery bark of a birch tree, small chrome and plastic emblems …” These raw materials share the space with easels turned toward the wall, works ready to be considered as art, or as not art. It’s all potentiality at this point.

Their conversation brings out the amazing fact that Flower has two sisters (Professor Reed: “Sisters! There are more of you? What a world.”), one of whom her hippie parents named Kali, the Hindu god of destruction and rebirth. From the Hindu Tridevi, or Three Goddesses, Flower herself evokes Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music, art, and dance. She also encompasses the cosmic consciousness, and so some sense can be made of Prof. Reed’s “request” of her, for the name of the world.

This is the story of a quest, or rather the prelude to a quest, because it climaxes at the quest’s beginning. Mr. Johnson tells this sympathetic story in a short, powerful burst, and the novella form serves him so perfectly. Of contemporary American writers, no one serves up the same combination of straight-ahead muscular prose and challenging symbolic construct as National Book Award-winning Denis Johnson. This is superb, a gem.

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"Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson

While reading Train Dreams I felt like I was following the high-flown language and archetypal plot of an ancient epic poem. Robert Grainier, the novella’s hero, comes from a mysterious past and goes through life with minimal contact with his fellows, but what he does experience achieves a mythic dimension. The plain, unadorned prose that author Denis Johnson uses serves the story perfectly and never gets in the way of the stunning events. This slim volume packs a disproportionate weight – I’m left to consider, what might come next from this unpredictable and impossibly effective author.

Robert Grainer thinks he was born around 1886 – it might have been Canada, but he’s heard that it could also have been Utah. He works in his twenties and thirties as a local laborer in the Idaho panhandle and discovers he likes working on the bridges that allow the railroads to soar over ravines. These sketchy details and lack of clear roots sets the stage for the supernatural, but before we encounter that, we experience Robert’s tragedy: he loses his wife of a few years, and their infant daughter, to a forest fire while he is away on a job.

 He is known around his hamlet as a lonely, tragic figure, and he lives a solitary life, but isn’t quite a hermit. Even in infirm old age,

however, he continues to spend summer and fall at the remote cabin he built so many years before in the aftermath of his wife’s death; he does it for a secret reason, a reason he knows he can’t tell anyone.

In a way only Denis Johnson can manage, the stuff of legend is rendered here on the page. He baffles me with his strength in a few short phrases, and the epic life he can render in a short novella reads like the stuff of classic poetry. Every experience with Denis Johnson is an uncanny, memorable one. The man never disappoints, and can never be predicted.

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"Falling Sideways" by Thomas E. Kennedy

In an elegant portrayal of generational conflict in a few select families, Thomas E. Kennedy focuses on the tortured internal dialogs of a few stressed individuals to exceptional effect in Falling Sideways. Mr. Kennedy’s writing here is so forceful and affecting, I had despaired of any kind of heartening or life-affirming ending – but the ending surprised me quite a lot. It’s a fulfilling, lustrous conclusion to a book full of sad truths, all perfectly observed and rendered.

Fred Breathwaite, American expatriate, lives and works in Copenhagen, and frets about his 22 year-old son. He has a suddenly prickly relationship with the CEO of the think tank where he has worked for 27 years (the CEO being one of the most loathsome characters I have encountered in any recent fiction). Fred’s son Jes was blessed with a quick mind and has loads of potential, if only he would try to realize some of it. A second father-son narrative parallels that of the Breathwaites, this one containing the story of the loathsome CEO, Martin Kampman, and his son, Adam. Mr. Kennedy

treats us to a high-relief contrast with these two stories, and they begin to intersect in the younger generation, with some very telling results. Other characters receive due exposure: the charlatan, skirt-chasing middle manager, the dignified, unbowed au pair girl, the lonely and lovely finance executive who has a brief fling.

None of these characters evokes our sympathy very much, and Mr. Kennedy shows us the fear and arrogance, and toadyism, and paranoia rampant in this modern corporate culture. The fraught internal dialogs power the narrative and Mr. Kennedy flashes his brilliance by so utterly changing the tone and process from one character to the next. This, and the surprising, almost deus ex machina-type ending make Falling Sideways a highly worthwhile read.

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"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" by Ransom Riggs

Just months short of his 16th birthday, Jacob Portman holds his grandfather’s mutilated body and witnesses his death. Moments later he sees in the dark forest the face of the inhuman creature which surely must have done this to well-loved grandfather. Thus begins the hair-raising and death-defying adventures of young Jacob; these adventures include nightmares and panic attacks, apparent hallucinations, time travel, the killing of monsters bent on destroying him, and even love.

By now, the particulars of Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children are well known, because it has achieved a very high degree of popularity. And this popularity is well deserved. Mr. Riggs portrays his teenage protagonists in a highly realistic way, and the internal dialog of main character Jacob rings very true from beginning to end. This book contains elements that set it somewhat apart from other “teen fiction”: supernatural creatures of several kinds, including the “peculiar” children and the monsters who want to murder them. It includes the touching teenage “everyman” musings of Jacob, who matures by leaps and bounds, and remains a well-meaning youth throughout.

Paced well, with excellent descriptions of very oddball goings-on, this is a fun, gratifying, and sometimes very suspenseful read.

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"Major Pettigrew's Last Stand" by Helen Simonson

Through most of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand I found myself glibly telling myself that I knew what that last stand would be. And I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Numerous lines in this novel will make you laugh out loud, if you enjoy a dry, understated wit. You will also share in the hero’s outrage at his own rather closed society’s prejudices. We the lucky reader are ultimately struck, however, with the very sympathetic, if highly unorthodox, leading couple, and their triumphs and tribulations. This novel features some very satisfying scenes with this couple, and an extremely unexpected and harrowing climax.

Author Helen Simonson sets her story in the parochial society of an English village, in Sussex, and deals extensively with the tension which flows when such a society’s expectations clash with the needs of its citizens. This energy propels the action, and propels the eponymous hero to some surprising conclusions. Ms. Simonson plays with our expectations – toys with them you could say – and the whole is a gratifying, memorable package.

Chief among these memorable features is the hero himself, Major Ernest Pettigrew, British Army,

retired. Even though his grown son already views him as half-enfeebled, the Major proves him wrong time and again, and frustrates his greedy intentions in the process. A staunch and conservative man himself, Major Pettigrew finds it more and more difficult to toe the village’s restrictive line. No, bless him, he proves resourceful enough to follow his heart when it is captured by the charming and long-suffering Pakistani widow, Mrs. Ali.

For the funny lines, for the heartwarming bits, for a knowing treatment of the tragic potential of religious fanaticism and prejudice, take up Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. It’s mature, sympathetic, topical and lovely.

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"Enon" by Paul Harding

After his stunning, Pulitzer Prize-winning debut Tinkers, Paul Harding follows up with Enon, and it is a companion-piece to his first novel, in more ways than one. It continues the narrative of the same hard-pressed Crosby family, it contains more of the baroque symbolism from the first book – clockwork imagery figures prominently – and the prose is again so artistic and rewarding, that I simply remain in awe of this author. This is rather more than I’d hoped for after Tinkers.

Enon plumbs the depths of Charlie Crosby’s drug-addled grief and despair in a manner reminiscent of Thomas De Quincey. Charlie has lost his adored thirteen year-old daughter Kate in a traffic accident. Anger and grief rule his life for the next year, and he greases the skids with a frightening slide into drug abuse. This bald exposition does nothing to describe the book, though; along with unfolding Charlie’s story, Mr. Harding engages us in a level of thought, of imaginative speculation, that I don’t see other writers attempting.

For instance, an old, spinsterish woman’s house, and more particularly a unique tall clock within the house, become in Charlie’s fevered imagination, the very heart of Enon, Charlie’s home town, and where he still lives. In a particularly lurid

bout of delusion, Charlie saws a hole in his living room wall so that the addle-pated math functions he has scrawled on the wall can flow into it, as though it is a black hole, and maybe is late daughter can somehow be materialized in the process. The episode of the hole occurs while a hurricane bears down on Enon, and while the macro-winds of destruction blow through the town, Charlie loses consciousness while holding a wand attached to his vacuum cleaner, which runs all night in his hand.

This is the sort of construct to which we’re treated in Enon. The author paces the wildness and terror of Charlie’s deterioration beautifully. We are everywhere challenged to comprehend yet another new image, and try to decide whether it reflects everyday fact, or some chimera of Charlie’s mind. By no means do I intend to warn readers off of this high accomplishment – on the contrary, it’s stunning, well worth your time and effort. It’s as breathtaking in its way as Tinkers, and for me, there’s no higher compliment to be paid.

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"Night Soldiers" by Alan Furst

Author Alan Furst calls it “near history.” Night Soldiers provides us a view with near-miraculous clarity of war-torn Europe in the 1940s, and this glimpse comes to us courtesy of Khristo – a nineteen-year-old Bulgarian youth who grows up by a river, watches Fascist thugs murder his younger brother, and falls into the war himself in the clutches of the Soviet secret service, the NKVD. This satisfying excursion into World War II espionage has every feature you’d want: intriguing insights into the tradecraft, a closely imagined story of a Soviet purge of its security service (Khristo is sentenced to life in prison as a result), close-ups of the cruel and genocidal regimes lording it over Europe at the time, and even a dabbling into the hero’s love life.

World War II nearly kills Khristo; he is one of the few survivors from the close-knit group that trained together in Moscow. Mr. Furst spares no effort in portraying the wasted Europe of the time, either. Protagonist Khristo suffers time and again in various circumstances and for various reasons, just like the devastated continent. In fact,

we witness the damage done over time to the man and the place, as in parallel. That’s what remains with me after finishing this book: I remember and feel the near-death escapes, heroic perseverance, and lost opportunities for happiness. Night Soldiers is packed with diverting secondary characters, too, from Khristo’s lover in Paris, to the American adventuress fighting in the Spanish Civil War, to the stout woman who pilots the tug boat that carries Khristo to freedom.

This is an extreme page-turner. Outcomes for characters are always in doubt – some make us sorry we liked a character, but overall, Mr. Furst has cobbled together a highly satisfying yarn of suspense, featuring fully nuanced heavies, and intrepid heroes.

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"Paint the Bird" by Georgeann Packard

Author Georgeann Packard places a quote at the beginning of Paint the Bird that plainly consigns faith to the realm of illusion. And she goes on to describe the crisis of faith suffered by her main character Sarah, who as a practicing minister, has a struggle indeed. The resulting conflict brings a sharp focus on family, loss, weakness, and redemption.

 People and events in Paint the Bird spring before us, like birds spooked into flight. Sarah Obadias, a veteran preacher in an “inclusive, nurturing” church, finds herself in the company of a compelling stranger and gives in to his sensual attractions. She also falls into his life, trapped almost, and his life is rather wretched at the moment. Tall, well aged, with a generous mane of white hair, this man is named Abraham, which is appropriate for this Sarah, and for this book, which purposely echoes Bible narratives. Abraham’s son (named Yago, not Isaac) has died and the events of the novel revolve around the effects of this untimely demise.

The language in this book is vivid and urgent, as are

the issues the characters must face. Ms. Packard engages us fully in this compact but eventful story. She handles the harrowing journeys of her main characters very surely, and strikes a particularly elegant chord with Abraham, the bereft father and artist who strives to understand and perhaps preserve his lost son. This plaintive, elegiac novel tugs at our hearts as it pushes us to come to grips with its human lesson of hope and charity, even if faith comes up a little worse for wear. A very gratifying follow-up to Fall Asleep Forgetting, as Ms. Packard continues to make good on her considerable promise.

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