Is it necessary to like the protagonist to read a work of fiction?
When a Claire Messud novel was published more than 10 years ago, there was a kerfuffle about unlikeable main characters. It came into being thanks to Jennifer Weiner, who took on Messud's work because she couldn't fathom the idea of wanting to read a book with an unlikeable character.
Well, The Woman Upstairs was "brutal, passionate and uplifting" in my estimation.
That novel came to mind while reading this year's Tilt by Emma Pattee. A woman in her 30s is just about ready to have her first child. She's tired, whiny, mad at the husband she has adored for years and not sure she wants this baby.
Annie is at the Portland IKEA finally shopping for a crib. She can't find the model she's selected where it is supposed to be. A store employee says she will look but is soon found talking to another customer. Annie makes a scene, the clerk finds the crib and Annie insists on wielding the heavy box onto a cart by herself.
Then an earthquake hits. Not just a quake. It's the big one. Annie's two journeys begin. She goes from being boxed in by boxes, and feeling boxed in by her life, through a Portland that no longer functions as she tries to make her way home.
Talking to the unborn child she is carrying, Annie fills the reader in on how things stand with her -- the ongoing dispute with her husband that is about supporting his ongoing unlikely dream while she feels overwhelming with being the responsible family provider, the abrupt loss of her mother at the start of the pandemic, finding another mother on the journey toward home and forming a deep bond, tossing aside more and more of the trappings of civilization after the brutal, natural attack of a major quake.
Although it is possible to debate how successful the novel is, and especially to debate the ending, it is noteworthy that a happy-go-lucky Annie would not have conveyed the two journeys that this protagonist undertakes after the quake hits. The disgruntled, unhappy, complaining Annie seen at the beginning of the novel represents the way life has turned out for many people. Life didn't turn out to be horribly bad, but it also isn't half as good as she thought it would be. She goes through the motions and it's weighing her down.
The way she tackles what she's facing makes for a fascinating story about what really matters.
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From LitHub, in which reality mirrors dystopian fiction.
And a list of essential newish books for men to read. Or as I think of the whole idea: Real men read Donna Tartt (and eat quiche).
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Some of this week's new fiction, with links to The Literate Lizard and descriptions by the publishers. Taking time to read is one way to recharge to take on what we are facing.
So Far Gone by Jess Walter
Rhys Kinnick has gone off the grid. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy-theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window and fled for a cabin in the woods, with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.
Now Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?
With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind.
Audition by Pip Adam
A spaceship called Audition is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing.
Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves—experiences of imprisonment, violence, and disempowerment.
Pip Adam’s transcendent new novel sets its eye firmly on our current justice system and asks what happens when those in power decide someone takes up too much room?
Midnight at the Cinema Palace by Christopher Tradowsky
This tender, exuberant novel about a young man navigating coming of age in ’90s San Francisco is for readers of Garth Greenwell and André Aciman.
Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn’t realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the dawn of the tech revolution. Out of college, out of the closet, and transplanted from the Midwest, Walter is irresistibly drawn from his shell when he meets Cary Menuhin and Sasha Stravinsky, a dynamic couple who live blithely beyond the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Witty and ultra-stylish, Cary and Sasha seem to have stepped straight out of a sultry film noir, captivating Walter through a shared obsession with cinema and Hollywood’s golden age.
As the three embark on adventures across the city, filled with joie de vivre, their lively friendship evolves in unexpected ways. When Walter befriends Lawrence, a filmmaker and former child actor living with HIV, they pursue a film project of their own, with hilarious and tragic results.
The Great Mann by Kyra Davis Lurie
In this diverse retelling of The Great Gatsby, set among the Black elite of postwar L.A. and inspired by real-life historic events, a young veteran is drawn into a world of tantalizing possibilities—and explosive tensions.
In 1945, Charlie Trammell steps into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles, lured by his cousin Marguerite's invitation to the esteemed West Adams Heights, L.A.’s newly rechristened “Sugar Hill.” Among the opulence of Black success intertwined with old-money white privilege, Charlie finds himself captivated by the allure of his new surroundings.
Settling into actress Louise Beaver’s boarding house, Charlie discovers a world brimming with opportunity, from promising career prospects at a Black-owned insurance firm to the promise of romance. But none of the young, Black elites dazzle quite like James “Reaper” Mann. Reaper's extravagant parties, graced by luminaries like Lena Horne and Hattie McDaniel, draw him deeper into a milieu of wealth and excess.
As Charlie's bond with Reaper deepens, he uncovers disturbing truths about Marguerite's marriage and the couple's facade of prosperity. Meanwhile, tension in the neighborhood simmers as White neighbors, frustrated by their own dwindling fortunes, ignite a landmark court case that exposes racial covenants within West Adams, threatening the community's well-being. As Charlie navigates a landscape rife with ambition, betrayal, and societal turmoil, he soon finds himself beside Reaper, facing a pivotal decision that could end in tragedy.
Days of Light by Megan Hunter
Easter Sunday, 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready for her life to finally begin. Her sprawling, bohemian family and their friends gather in the idyllic English countryside for lunch, arranging themselves around well-worn roles. They trade political views and artistic arguments as they impatiently await the arrival and first sight of Frances, the new beau of Ivy’s beloved older brother, Joseph. In this auspicious atmosphere of springtime, Ivy’s world feels on the cusp of something grand–but neither she nor those closest to her predicts how a single, enchanted evening and an unexpected tragedy will alter the rest of their lives.
Radical Red by Nathan Dixon
This winner of the 15th annual BOA Short Fiction Prize features linked stories that indict the ultraconservative movement that emerged at the end of the Cold War and extends into present day.
One strand of narratives follows a cohort of tea party conservatives—a politician, a radioman, and a televangelist—as their hyperbolic language shapes the world around them and leads to episodes of time travel and body horror. The second strand follows individuals victimized by conservative policy: their voices, their futures, their very bodies stripped from their possession. The final strand investigates the ways in which young conservatives have adapted the nostalgic rhetoric of their forebears to carry on the twin projects of minority oppression and environmental degradation—both of which they couch in the language of “freedom.”
The Longest Way to Eat a Melon by Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross
Equal parts melody and malaise, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon charts the activities of a cast of speakers who all grapple in their own ways with what it takes to conjure a self in the midst of discordance. A brain argues with a non-brain about how to remain productive from a place of exhaustion; two supernaturally inclined twins named Han are separated at birth; and an emerging artist paralyzed by possibility considers how best to transform a melon into a breakthrough work of art. Incorporating elements of fable, surrealism, satire, and art and cultural criticism, these stories have a playful peculiarity to them, an interweaving of self-deprecation and curiosity, of woe and hope, of absurdity and humanity.
The Nimbus by Robert P. Baird
On an otherwise ordinary fall day on a university campus in Chicago, the toddler son of an ambitious divinity school professor named Adrian Bennett mysteriously starts to glow. The nimbus, as the strange, soft light comes to be known, offers no clues to its origin and frustrates every attempt at rational explanation.
Though the nimbus appears only intermittently, and not to everyone, the otherworldly glow quickly upends the lives of all those who encounter it, including Paul Harkin, Adrian’s broke and feckless graduate student, who likes being a graduate student a little too much for his own good; Renata Bennett, Adrian’s omnicompetent wife, who can’t see her son glowing even though the nimbus is turning her life upside down; and Warren Kayita, a down-on-his-luck librarian and aging div school alumnus on the run from a violent criminal. As news about the nimbus spreads around the university and beyond, Adrian, Paul, Renata, and Warren are set on a collision course that will threaten their lives and put their deepest convictions to the test.
The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb
Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?
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