Review: "Visible Empire" by Hannah Pittard

Visible Empire, Hannah Pittard’s fourth novel is at the very least different than her other three, of which none is very much like its predecessor. Her debut, The Fates Will Find their Way recalls Jeffery Eugenides The Virgin Suicides in a less self-conscious fashion, Reunion, her second novel is a searing look at the long held secrets between an extended family that burst forth over a weekend in Atlanta and Listen to Me, her third is a claustrophobic yet clunky look at paranoia and reserved aggression. Her fourth novel is her first attempt at a period piece and while it is hindered by its jumbled vague narrative push and being a little too long at 270 pages, it shows that Pittard possesses a great range as a writer who inhabits her characters fully and surrounds them with rich set pieces that form a cohesive whole. The book takes place in Atlanta in 1962 after the crash of Flight 007 from France kills a majority of the cities’ upper crust and damages the morale of an already fraught region of America. The book divides its time between three narrative strands. We are first introduced to Robert, a newspaper editor who mistress Rita died in the crash and instead of letting the secret die with her, he tells his pregnant wife and then runs away. Then there is Piedmont Dobbs, a young black man who was passed over when his school was selecting black students for integration who finds himself at a crossroads between his race and his desires, which puts him in the path of Robert. And in a seemingly unrelated thread there is Anastasia, a young woman who lied about being a child of one of the crash’s victims and finds comfort in the boudoir of Genie, a damaged Atlanta socialite. On their own, the stories work really well, with Robert and Piedmont’s nocturnal odyssey with P. T. Coleman, another privileged member of Atlanta’s high society, being quite funny and Anastasia and Genie’s courtship recalling Fassbinder’s Petra Von Kant in it’s focus on paintings, but together it gets messy and they come together sloppily, barely held together by dialogue only sections featuring the mayor and his wife which could have been cut out. Still, this is smart, well-researched novel from a writer I’ve come to appreciate and always be entertained by. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Catalina" by Liska Jacobs

Liska Jacobs’ caustic debut novel Catalina follows a string of unapologetic, proto-feminist novels (most of which are debuts) that follow a woman on a path of self-destruction laced with drug and alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity and general moral degradation that would be typical of the hyper masculine transgressive fiction of the mid 20^thcentury. Of this strange genre some books have been good, such as Merritt Tierce’s brutal Love Me Back and Weike Wang’s charming Chemistry and some have been middling at best like Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter and Jade Sharma’s Problems. This book falls somewhere in the middle, with a large portion being a sometimes bumpy journey through our narrator’s shattered world with a few flashbacks which culminates in a rather unique final section that saved the book for me. We follow Elsa, who has just been fired from her job at MoMA after an affair with her married boss as she travels back to California to visit her old friend Charley and her immature husband Jared. But her intentions, demonstrated by an early fling with a stranger, are not of the wholesome variety, and on a trip to Catalina Island with Jared, Charley, her ex-husband Robby and his waif girlfriend Jane, the true power and consequences of her actions and carelessness come to fruition. As I said, the bulk of this book feels like a rehash of other books like it, with a few exceptions, such as Elsa’s relationship with the innocent hotel bellboy Rex and the older man Tom, a figure able to see through Elsa’s smokescreen, even though he himself is predatory. But it’s those final 30 pages that separate this book from others like it, featuring a shocking final scene with Charley, an odd encounter with Tom and the culmination of Rex’s arc, which may or may not be drug induced hallucination. Elsa is tough character to like or even have sympathy for, a product of privilege in a cynical world who ends up being no better than those she looks down upon, but her journey is a fascinating one filled with searing wit and pathos. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "A Shout in the Ruins" by Kevin Powers

I was pleasantly surprised late last year when I heard about Kevin Power’s forthcoming second novel A Shout in the Ruins. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I never expected him to publish a novel again (maybe some short stories, but he has garnered praise as a poet), but it surprised me to see his follow up novel come out so soon after his first novel, The Yellow Birds, the one and only fiction book you need to read about the Iraq War. With a book as compact and powerful as that, it seemed Powers had said all he needed to say with his first book and he would go the way of Joseph Heller, who waited 13 years between publishing Catch-22 and his follow-up Something Happened. I’m glad we did not have to wait more than a decade for this book, because it is truly fantastic, an epic in miniature form that covers nearly 150 years of American history through the forgotten lives of a few of its inhabitants. But while it’s reach is sweeping, it never becomes overbearing and what really shines forth in this book are its finely drawn characters, both good and evil, who are fighting toward impossible goals that they, as well as us the readers, suspect they will never be able to obtain. The book is split into two time lines, one beginning in the 1840s and the other in the mid-1950s. The first section concerns the Reid family, made up of Lucy and Bob as well as their daughter Emily and their slave Rawls. In the second section we meet the nonagenarian George Seldom, who is traveling by himself to Virginia to seek out the answers to his chaotic upbringing. The two are seamlessly woven together, with little subtleties peppered in each one that create a whole and rather beautiful narrative strain that addresses the themes of failure, non-progress and fatalism that I think Powers was trying to convey. The book is filled with many striking and sometimes disturbing characters and scenes, like the first time Antony Levallois, the cold man Emily will marry out of convenience, shows his heartless nature in a scene of quick and devastating violence. The whole book is drenched in a sort of fatalistic view of life: eventually, despite our best efforts we will lose, shown through the eventual fates of Rawls and Nurse, the fellow slave he falls madly in love with, which is mirrored by the sad life of Lottie Bride, the waitress who helps George in his search for the truth about his past. It might sound bleak and in some cases it is, but maybe within Power’s hearty prose is a kind of beautiful acceptance of this fact, and within it, is the power to love those we do even harder knowing that it will eventually fade away, much like the book’s beautiful ending that melds the two storylines in a magnificent way, which reminded me of the ending to Philipp Meyer’s The Son, another great sophomore novel. This book was a pure pleasure, weighty but not overbearing, rich yet not overstuffed, brutal yet full of hope. 

Rating: 5/5