Review: "Ohio" by Stephen Markley

I’m sure for many people of a certain age (of which I am only marginally younger than) reading Stephen Markley’s debut novel Ohio will be a painful experience but also an enriching one in the way great literature, whether upbeat or downbeat always is.  It is a compassionate yet uncompromising story about people caught between their idealized past and their disappointing present, where the promise of youth gives way to adult failure and while the events in the book are extreme and farfetched in some cases, the feeling they produce is not far from the truth and strike a very raw nerve. The book begins with a very great introductory prologue recounting the death of Rick Brinkman, one of the book’s three shadow characters, who are talked about but don’t play an active roll, and subsequent parade held in his honor in the town of New Canaan, Ohio. It happens about five years before the central night in questions, and in cataloging the minute of the town, the troubles that befell it and others like it when the towers fell in 2001, it casts a large dark shadow over the book’s preceding story, recalling work as varied as Sherwood Anderson and Stephen King (I would not think New Canaan would warrant non-ironic comparison to Castle Rock) and prepares the reader for the sadness they will encounter as the book digs deeper into the terrible night at the book’s heart. The first section introduces Bill Ashcraft, a self-described eco-activist, paranoid, hopeless and drug-addled, as he comes back to his hometown to deliver a mysterious package he has taped to his chest to an old Flame, Kaylyn Lynn, the second shadow character in the story and whose motivations are always unclear. Markley likes to intercut scenes from the night and scenes from the past, and thankfully, he is very good at doing that so no one story overpowers the other or overstays its welcome. It also is a great showcase for blending genres, as once Ashcraft takes a cut of meth he got from one of his former classmates, Markley treats us to a staggering, hellish scene of hallucination that reminded me of the work of Dan Chaon, another Midwestern writer. The following section follows Stacy Moore, a PhD candidate and finally comfortable to come out of the closet, who is back in town to confront the mother of her first same-sex lover, Lisa Han, the third shadow character, and whose relationship with Kaylyn and others, such as the wounded veteran Dan Eaton, whose in town also to reconnect with an old flame, leads to the book’s haunting final few pages, where Markley’s omniscient voice acts as a kind of chorus to what really happened to the shattered lives of New Canaan’s residents. The fourth story focuses on Tin Ross, a character we know before from a much talked about video tape that shows terrible things being done to her, who comes back looking for something more profane and disturbing. This is a haunting example of suburban gothic: a tale of small town rumors and urban legends, filled with people who, try as they might, are stuck in rose-colored past, mainly as an antidote for their uncertain futures. But there is a bit of hope in this bleak tale, one the characters refuse to acknowledge and one that might save them: they are not alone in their pain. 

Review: "Every Day is for the Thief" by Teju Cole

At times feeling more like a travel guide or a thinly disguised polemic than a fictional novel, Teju Cole’s debut work of fiction Every Day is for the Thief (although published in the States after his official first novel Open City) offers glimpses into what interests Cole and what themes would show up in his later novel. It showcases a young man coming back to his home country of Nigeria after having been gone for years, ambivalent about his relationship with at it after a long absence and fully aware as to the country’s contradictory nature, as well as his contradictory feelings about his experience. It flows effortlessly from idea to idea, from scene to scene, Cole demonstrating his affinity for snapshots of life (it’s rather appropriate that many chapters are preceded, interrupted or concluded with a picture that Cole took himself) rather than a streamlined narrative that is easy to follow along. There is little plot to be had as well as little conflict, but it remains fascinating through most of the books 162 pages. I will divulge a few of my favorite sections, much like I do with short stories and pick out what works and what doesn’t. The first 50 pages are the best, as he visits the Nigerian consulate in New York on his way back to Lagos and views the trouble others not as lucky as he is have as they try to travel between countries, a running theme throughout many of the chapters. Once home, sections like his description of an Internet café filled with people formulating those Nigerian scam emails, as well as the problems the city has with crime, retelling a harrowing story of the murder of a distant relative. If Cole has one weak spot, it is character, and the side characters, ones he knows like his aunts and uncles or his first girlfriend, to an eager local law clerk more than a little jealous that the narrator has been to America feel like thinly drawn symbols for Cole’s narrator uses to pontificate on whatever subject he is discussing. This is a small novel, a minor work from a great talent with shades of what he would soon bring to his readers. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter" by Kia Corthron

While I have come across a few reviews that chides Kia Corthron’s debut novel The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter as being too long, I do not feel its 789 pages hurts it in any way. I do not want to dismiss the criticism that it is too long, since it is a valid one, but books like this, which aim high and feel like little empires in the palm of your hand, make my literary heart melt. They can take a toll (as this one certainly did) but I come out the other side feeling rewarded, thankful I took such an arduous journey and feel more than a little sad that it is over with. From its rich quartet of two sets of black and white brothers and the just as rich cast of supporting characters to its challenging yet fun game of narrative hopscotch it liked to play through different sections, switching from first to third person, the perspective growing and maturing with the lives of the characters and the way it dances around the mystery at the center of the novel, a harrowing event that links all four lives through the greater half of 20^th century America and the first part of the 21^st. Of the two sets of brothers, we are introduced to the Evans first, a white family living in the rural town of Prayer Ridge, Alabama living in the shadow of the KKK and casual yet brutal racism. We get inside the head of the youngest son, Randall, a gifted adolescent who seems to be on the fast track to becoming the first person in his family to go to high school. He is the class’s valedictorian and almost won the school a debate tournament if it weren’t for his position on the ongoing war.  He acts as a sort of big brother in spirit to his actual big brother B. J. who himself is almost an adult when the story begins in 1940, but due to his deafness is treated like someone with severe mental deficiencies. He is able to teach him how to read and how to use sign language and in a real nice touch, how to use the local library. After this first section ends, we meet the Campbell’s, a black family that lives in the rather progressive and integrated small town of Humble, Maryland. The section switches perspectives between the six year old Eliot, eager and eternally enthralled by a visit from civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph who inspires him to become a civil rights attorney and the twelve year old Dwight, who’s artistically inclined yet uncomfortable in an unrecognizable world who feels more comfortable with his white male friends than his black relatives. We do not figure out the horrific encounter that scatters these four lives in places as various as New York City, San Francisco and Texas, and this gives Corthron the chance to allow subtle and sly connections to creep in that tether the four men together in strange ways (motifs like cats, cancer and miscarriages appear more than once) and  to compassionately detail the lives of these four men, each with their own terrible flaws and who come across as something more than victims and victimizers, especially the character of Randall, who fascinated me most and, in a different story would not garner as much sympathy as I think he does. This is a towering achievement of scope and empathy that adds complexity to our nation’s history and to four lives caught up in its transformative mechanisms. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Slumberland" by Paul Beatty

Across four brilliant novels, his third, Slumberland, I just finished this morning, American author Paul Beatty has given his readers one of the most brilliant satirical journeys of our current moment. They feel necessary and relevant while being interesting, thought provoking and pee your pants funny even during their most bleak moments. No topic is safe, whether that be race relations, pop culture, both prominent and forgotten or our relationships with one another, it all gets skewed by Beatty’s musical wit that can be as harsh as a snare drum but as soft as the notes on a grand piano. His narrators, black men wise beyond their years with deep rivulets of knowledge about esoteric topics that instead of being better off for being smart, are instead harangued by it and the absurdity of what they experience, crumbling under the weight of their awareness that the world can be a better place if only people listened to them. And all of this is conveyed with the most musical of prose filled with double entrendes, crass jokes and impressively deep references to our country’s rich cultural history, mindful of its darker parts and most of the time, its most embarrassing. The man at the center of this novel is Ferguson Sowell, aka DJ Darky, a skilled DJ who belongs to possibly the only group of musically talented people who treat the art of DJing with such love and respect. He describes himself as having a phonographic memory, where he remembers everything he has ever heard, from the crack of his broken arm as a little boy and the sound of Norma Desmond’s dress as it descends the stairs in Sunset Blvd. The thing he seeks most in life is the perfect beat, the perfect collections of sound that would symbolize a kind of rhythmic nirvana. He thinks he has found the path toward this in the music of Charles Stone, aka, The Schwa, whose music he first hears as the soundtrack to a porno film where a man is doing unspeakable things to a live chicken. His search for The Schwa takes him to Berlin on the eve of the fall of The Berlin Wall. There, he takes a job as a jukebox Sommelier (crafting the perfect collection of music for a jukebox) at the Slumberland nightclub, a place where blacks in Berlin go to be ogled and pursued by white women. He soon ingratiates himself in a small group that includes a woman Klaudia, his future love interest and her sister Fatima as well as Doris, who works at Slumberland and the Schwa himself, whose true purpose will be recognizable to anyone whose read a Beatty book before. All this leads to some very funny and very gut wrenching scenes, like the cruel fate of Fatima as well as the climax, where a large, anarchic concert brings with it the fruits of everyone’s labor, even if they do not want them anymore. There is not a weak link in any of Paul Beatty’s books, and this cruel, hilarious journey through the modern collective consciousness is no different. 

Rating: 5/5