"Lungs Full of Noise" by Tessa Mellas

Tessa Mellas takes us, the uninitiated readers, by the hand and adroitly through the looking glass in her award-winning collection Lungs Full of Noise. And while each story has an underlying potential for a normal plot and characters, it turns out they deal in a madness that resides immediately below the thin veneer of our lives as though it can’t be helped.

Some of these exceptional and engrossing stories portray widespread, cultural neuroses, like Mariposa Girls, which deals with the tortures young girls willingly undergo to look and perform to standards they have no say in setting. And which high school grad cannot say she has encountered a new college roommate so foreign that she must come from one of Jupiter’s moons? Or been pushed into sexual activity by intense peer pressure, like the smart girl in Dye Job? These three stories, respectively shocking, amusing, and disturbing, at least show emotions we can recognize, and social trends all too prevalent.

Then there are the stories of highly personal madness, like The White Wings of Moths and So Many Wings. The women in these stories pursue astonishing courses – projects so bizarre that they barely make sense even to their own addled selves. These two pieces, told in plain and highly effective language, serve to establish the outer boundary of mental instability in these outré stories. And as such, serve to expand readers’ consciousness and establish new perceptive territory, and I can think of no higher calling in quality fiction.

 I want to end on a piece still further from our narrative norms. Landscapes in White consists of five prose poems with apocalyptic tone and content – they deal with birds dying in flutterings of feathers (with the horrific image of dead chickadees with their “claws branching up without leaves”); windblown pages of phone directories, and receipts, and newsprint – “Fall’s foliage stamped with Garamond font.”; acid rain: “Raindrops gorged on nitric acid streak the sable skin of night.”; in stanza 4 the apocalypse seems like it might be over: “When the rain stops, the world is missing its flesh. We walk on its bones …” We finish with an arresting note of festivity-amid-the-apocalypse, where a woman’s sparkler, which she waves around “like you’re conducting the disaster,” ignites without a match. This piece contains the clearest statement of Ms. Mellas’s dark worldview that runs like a bass theme through this collection. It’s a stark, plain-as-day recounting of the logical end of so much reckless will and power.

distant from our narrative norms.

 Lungs Full of Noise contains a few distinct species of short story, and you never know which you’re getting from one to the next. However, each displays Tessa Mellas’s amazing inventiveness, her dark view, and her exceptional flair for the English language. This is truly a brave – and extremely deserving - pick for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and I congratulate the board on its pick.

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"Mr. Lynch's Holiday" by Catherine O'Flynn

For much of Mr. Lynch’s Holiday we wait and watch as Dermot Lynch tries to draw his son out of the wretched place he winds up in after his wife leaves him. He makes his attempts with unsteady progress – after all, the younger Lynch has moved from Birmingham, in the U.K., to the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and the two haven’t seen each other since the death of Dermot’s wife. The surprising and endearing turnabout at the end of this narrative rewards the persevering reader and makes this story well worth taking up.   

Dermot Lynch, retired from driving a bus in Birmingham, decides to surprise his son, living on the Spanish Riviera, with a fortnight’s visit. He finds his son in a strained existence, reeling from his wife’s abrupt departure. The housing development, called Lomaverde, consists of brightly colored cubes on a bluff overlooking the sea. It’s been abandoned by the bankrupt builder, and has fallen into a state of disrepair shocking for such new buildings. This motif of shabbiness closely corresponds not only with young Eamonn’s emotional helplessness but also his youthful self-absorption. His Dad provides good company for a time, a respite from his quirky

neighbors, but soon starts to provide a sterner hand in his son’s life. This impulse leads toward its logical end, but the climax surprises us nonetheless. The more we consider it, the more we feel we should have seen it coming.

Surprising, gratifying, true to life, and populated with intriguing secondary characters, Mr. Lynch’s Holiday deals also with some themes taken from today’s headlines: the depressed European economy, the hazards and fugitive nature of illegal immigration, and class struggle. A bit of a slow liftoff, but beguiling as it goes, and a splendid denouement – this is well done, exceptional.

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"Cries of the Lost" by Chris Knopf

This is an amazingly fun spy caper without any spies. I was at a disadvantage not having read the prequel, but it was nothing crippling, because Cries of the Lost stands really well on its own. Dead Anyway (2012) was a finalist for the 2013 Nero Award, named for Rex Stout’s clever detective, Nero Wolf. Cries of the Lost follows the adventures of Arthur and Natsumi after the death of Arthur’s wife at the hands of a person or persons unknown, and combines enough elements of a mystery and those of a thriller, to be really excellent escapist fare. Throw in the wisecracking protagonist duo, and you have quite a delightful confection.

Arthur Cathcart cannot leave a mystery alone, and he constantly puts himself and his girlfriend Natsumi in harm’s way and back out in the nick of time. Behind it all is a somewhat confusing feud between onetime antagonists in the Basque separatist movement. The FBI and possibly the NSA think Arthur

is a member of a Basque terrorist group, when all he wants to do bring an end to the conflict and an end to the mortal danger to himself and Natsumi. It’s all done at a mile a minute, as the pair duck and weave their way from Grand Cayman to the Côte d’Azur, to Aix-en-Provence and New York City. Throw in a crooked high-ranking FBI agent, and you start to get the idea.

The deepest theme you’ll find here is the corrosive nature of ancient enmity, and a hatred the principals won’t let go. Our central couple is quite endearing, cute really, in their devotion, to each other, and electronic gizmos and hi-tech cloak-and-dagger methods are front and center.

This is a fine romp, which will divert you in ways that are well worth your time. I’m sorry I missed the first in the series. I’m not sure what follows, but the plot ends with all sorts of potential for further fun storytelling. Judging from this single entry, you can depend on this author to deliver the goods.

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“The Map of Time” by Félix J. Palma

Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor. I don’t know how often or how assiduously you have tried to make sense of time-travel conundrums. If, like me, you still struggle with the paradoxes inherent in traveling through time, don’t look to Félix J. Palma’s The Map of Time to help you out. It doesn’t offer solutions, but generally delicious and delightful new possibilities of time travel, starring none other than H.G. Wells, the author of The Time Machine (1895). Imagine Christopher Lloyd’s mad Dr. Emmett Brown frenetically covering all the implications of traveling back and forth in time – but at a more studious pace – but with nary a solution in sight. In fact we end with more questions than answers. And the book is so much more because of it.

 Félix J. Palma wrote The Map of Time in the style of a nineteenth-century adventure story, very apparently admiring the style. The translation serves this purpose well, and never gets in the way. Maybe the time-travel puzzles which constantly pop up, or the occasional authorial intrusions, weigh against the style, but no matter. This is an enjoyable ride,

with wonderful descriptions of Victorian London, a very full biographical treatment of Wells (from which flights of fancy follow), and yes, some actual science fiction. My only quibble is that some characters disappear early and are brought back late in the story, as if by force. I found myself waiting for follow-up treatment of a couple of them, and my wait was in vain.

This book deserves some of the praise it’s received – it’s inventive and fun, and its characters come with full nuancing, but its leisurely treatment (611 pages) and shifting viewpoint bring down its grade.

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“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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