Review: "The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill" by James Charlesworth

The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, the debut novel of author James Charlesworth that works both in spite of and because of it’s glaring flaws. It is overwritten but beautiful because of it, its timeline is confusing but creates a strange sense of mystery to the book’s proceedings, and its central, eponymous character is so ghoulish, so outside the realm of reliability or sympathy that it works to the book’s advantage, making this trek across the middle of the 20^thcentury and the four battered lives of a relentless, merciless American man feel less like an indictment of traditional masculinity (as the book’s blurbs consistently point out) and more something to akin to the recent spat of art house horror films where nothing is more perverse or terrifying than the idea of family. I’ve read a few reviews not so kind to this book, but its oddball qualities and its dreamlike progression to an inevitable final act had me beguiled and consistently searching for answers, to the dark crazy heart of this dark and crazy story. The first fifty pages, where the life of the title character is laid out are the best part of the book, where we learn about GBH’s sad beginnings, the pressure his father put on him to always be acting, to always looking for a way to get ahead, his first marriage to the failed beauty queen Mary, the birth of his first two sons George Jr. and Jamie, Mary’s shocking act of self harm that signaled the end of their marriage and the chance encounter in the backroom of one of the first ever fast food restaurants that he, and everyone he told, feels is the key to his future success. It is the one section where we get to know GBH deeply and his Charlesworth only attempt to understand the character’s pathologies. The majority of the book takes places in the ashes of 9/11 as GBH’s four children, George Jr., Jamie and the twins from his marriage to Annabelle, Max and Maddie, navigate their shattered world as they are all headed for a collision course with their monstrous father, whose own well publicized immoral business measures have been temporarily forgotten in the wake of the towers falling. George Jr. is reeling from a divorce and the death of his daughter, Jamie is caught between a world of make believe and very real horror in sections riddled with paranoia and events and people who may or may not be real, Max, a pilot in Alaska, lives a lonely life in the wake of not one, but two separate manslaughter charges and Maddie eeks out a living as a Vegas hustler, still waiting for her friend, who disappeared a decade earlier, to come back. There is a mysterious package, a gun in a baseball bat carrier and lots of regret and resentment boiling to the surface as both past and present intermingle and the reader is left with a vague sense of what is going on but can easily feel great undercurrents of longing and hope in every phrase, even the corny final line. This might be a personal favorite, but it comes highly recommended from me. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Inland" by Tea Obreht

Inland, Tea Obreht’s second novel came out this year nearly a decade after her debut The Tiger’s Wife came out in 2010 and you can really see the years of hard work that went into this period novel where two separate storylines converge in a brilliant finale at the tail end of the 19^thcentury. It is beautifully written and never once feels inauthentic or read like a cheap knockoff and its best quality which I will get to in a little bit, in other hands would crumble quickly in lesser hand but here becomes its best feature and what I am sure will be what most people take away from it. Having heaped praise on it, it is not a perfect book, with the two sections never feeling complimentary narrative wise (although they do thematically) and the plot gets overloaded with details that get lost inside each other. The two main characters of the story that takes place in the untamed Southwest of 1893 are Nora, a woman trying to hold her fractured family together on a constantly threatened parcel of land with a missing husband and soon to be missing sons and Lurie, an orphaned immigrant from Turkey whose wild life, from grave robbing to bank robbing and finally becoming a fugitive on the run from the law. It is clear they both share otherworldly qualities in their ability to talk to the dead, with Lurie followed by those he’s known who have died and one he killed on accident, and Nora by Evelyn, her daughter who died young but has grown into adulthood in her mind. These stories are interesting on their own, but until the payoff near the end of the 370-page novel they rest side by side in unharmonious fashion. But that aside, this is one of the most interesting novels of 2019 from an author I’m glad I reacquainted myself with. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "We Cast A Shadow" by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

It was really hard for me to fully grasp the ideas and themes behind Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel We Cast a Shadow, but one thing I was absolutely positive of was that I enjoyed the hell out of it. In fact, it is this very ambiguity that makes it so interesting complex and at various times disturbing. It is not as clear-cut as some critics might approach it and is thankfully treats its subject matter in a non-didactic way, which allows the characters became real and not just ciphers for a specific point of view and helps the reader buy in to some of the book’s more outlandish elements. Through the eyes of an unnamed black male narrator, a lawyer living in the near future, we see a skewed, cracked mirror version of our own world, with progressive ideals and historical hierarchies stacked on top of each other, colliding and creating a horrific mish mash of a culture where the top and bottom are indecipherable from each other, and no one knows if they are going backwards or forwards, least of all our tortured confused narrator, whose insecurities and cynicism he lays on the shoulder of his mixed race son Nigel. You know this book is offering something different in its first scene, where our narrator attends a company wide costume party, where he and the other two black employees subject themselves to various types of humiliation in order to save their job and get promoted. It is here where Ruffin’s brilliant eye for satire comes into play, how this world not unlike our own thinks it is moving forward, but here is ample evidence that it is not. Our narrator ends up keeping his job after a staggeringly humiliating action which he thinks might cost him his job, but he keeps his job and becomes entangled with Octavia, the head of the firm, a black woman who would be the paragon of success in any other book, but Ruffin perverts this ideal in brilliant ways with minor details, like the getaways she takes at an old plantation or keeping candy corn in an ancient African mask. Hesitant, our narrator accepts his new position and task to convince a local medical hospital to become a client of the firm, because it would mean he is one step closer to “helping” his son by getting him “demelinazation” treatment for his growing birthmark. In any other writer’s hands, this aspect of the novel would feel contrived and sloppy, but Ruffin takes a different approach, never referring to it in racial terms, and offering up valid points, at least in the mind of the narrator as to its desired outcome. The plot is loose, but it offers looks into the narrator’s past and why he thinks this way, a shady terrorist organization that once again would seem like the heroes in a different story but in this book their virtue is nebulous at best. Ultimately, though, this a novel of family and the sacrifices we make for them as well as a sort of hidden ode to individuality in a society that is always trying to put you in one box or another. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Rag" by Maryse Maijer

One thing is crystal clear within the first few sentences of any story author Maryse Meijer writes and that is her skill at creating a certain unique mood that infects every word of the story and, in turn, the reader. Her worlds are ones where the pathway from boredom to horror is scarily narrow and nothing is more terrifying than something not said or a feeling not acted upon no matter how grotesque. Her most recent short story collection, Rag, feels a little bit like a step down from her debut collection Heartbreaker, and falls too easily into traps these kinds of stories usually fall into: a structure that feels like an outline for something much greater than the finished product and vague prose too often mistaken for a sense of mystery, but even the flattest of these stories have the tendency to crawl up the base of your spine like a noxious insect and give you nightmares. As always, I will pull out a few of my favorites t discuss here, the first of which, “Her Blood” is easily among the best, detailing the obsession that comes over a virginal young pizza boy and the woman who has a miscarriage in his store’s bathroom. It’s the first of many in this collection that mines the perversity of attraction in a graceful way, others include “Brother” where one siblings attraction to another’s girlfriend causes a horrific outcome and “Jury” where a widower is drawn to fellow juror who happens to be a cutter. But my two favorites are the brief “At the Sea” where a man might have kidnapped his maybe daughter and “The Rainbow Baby”, that takes a ridiculous premise familiar to those who have read Thomas Tryon’s The Other and makes it work with empathy and pathos. Uneven at times, but never boring, this slim collection of off-putting yet mesmerizing fiction will delight readers drawn to the strange and weird. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Old Drift" by Namwali Serpell

The author who I thought of most while reading Namwali Serpell’s brilliant epic of a debut a debut novel The Old Drift was David Mitchell. The way she weaves a wondrous world both ancient and futuristic, informed by our distant past and our near future but still wonderfully original reminded me of his best work and even some of his lesser quality work which, like this book in very few places, is still fascinating to look at, interpret and think about. It manages to exist wholly within its two worlds, running smoothly through the bulk of the 20^thcentury and into the great unknown of the 21^st, presenting a world informed by past mistakes, present failures and hopes for a brighter future, all within the microcosm of the Republic of Zambia, a country that only gained its freedom a little over 50 years ago. It offers a wide range of characters through the years, with both victims and victimizers thoroughly fleshed out with murky motivations and hidden desires, along with very cool running themes that recur throughout the book. It begins at the start of the 20^thcentury, where a seemingly innocuous event at a luxury hotel at Victoria Falls, a scuffle between a white businessman that leaves another man knocked imbecilic, draws in the lives of three families, black, white and brown, and follows their ancestors as to the near future where the world presented at the beginning feels unrecognizable but with its same prejudices and feelings of want and desire. Like Mitchell’s work, Serpell crafts a world that is fantastical but realistic and it is easy for the reader to by into the more ridiculous aspects of the novel, such as the character of Siballa, whose hair grows at a rapid enough rate that she resembles Thing from the Addams family (hair is one of the book’s recurring themes, such as its powers in both growing it and shaving it off) or the character of Grace, a background character in most of the lives of the three families as they converge who does not see to age over the course of several decades. One of the main themes I found that appears at the turning points of each section is the somewhat pessimistic look at progress in both history as well as politics, like what happens to the sisters Matha and Nkuka, both of whom fall under the spell of the cult like Nkoloso, whose failed Zambian space program would be funny if it did not indirectly cause the death of the girl’s mother at the hands of the government. The book takes a delightful if hard left turn when it focuses on the grandkids, Jacob, Joseph and Naila, and introduces hi-tech smart devices that are implanted in people’s fingertips and near microscopic drones that might be the swarm of mosquitos that narrate small pieces in between sections, but it swings for the fences in its daring final few pages, and it is easy for me to respect that for a debut novel so thick, complex and intricate. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

I’m always interested in the follow-up to a great success, whether that be of the cinematic variety or the literary variety, so when I heard Colson Whitehead was publishing his follow-up to his awards sweeping novel The Underground Railroad, I was immediately interested. The Underground Railroad lived up to its hype, telling an engaging story of alternate history in all its ugliness, beauty and complexity and is surely to be one of the high points of 21^stcentury literature as the years roll on. But what was he going to give us next: more of the same or something totally different? It could have been anything for a writer with varying interests like Whitehead and his new book The Nickel Boys offers something new from him, but with the same attitude, eloquence and grandiosity his fans have come to expect from him. It reminded me a lot of the trajectory of the Coen Brothers after No Country for Old Men swept the Oscars, giving us the screwball Burn After Reading and the proudly esoteric and brooding A Serious Man. Whitehead has already accomplished more than most writers can do in a handful of lifetimes, and while this books is sure to have some detractors, I am not one of them. It is up there with his best books, a notch below John Henry Days and his preceding awards collector, but it might be his angriest and most cynical book, a tale of wronged young boys, victims of a system whose carelessness bred the monsters who tried, and succeeded a depressing number of times, to destroy them. Based on a harrowing true story of a reform school that operated in Florida, gives lurid headlines a tragic human face with Elwood, a young man at the dawn of the 60’s who finds himself the victim of despicable injustice and sentenced to hell, as he likes to think. We first meet him as he haunts the hotel where his Grandma works, barred from certain sections because of the color of his skin. He has a relatively stable life: college bound and inspired by the burgeoning Civil rights movements. But an offered car ride in a stolen vehicle gets him sent to The Nickel Academy, a place meant to shape young boys into men, but, as Elwood finds out on his first trip the “White House” is a hellish prison where abuse, physical and sexual, are the norm and where boys disappear “out back” and never return. It is a familiar story, but Whitehead adds layers of intrigue and subtext in the books slim 210 pages, like how injustice seems to follow Elwood (his first trip to the White House was because he tried to stop a fight), and his ambivalence toward the hopeful future he hears Dr. King preach about, given more credence and poignancy in the book’s shocking and brilliant epilogue, which I suspect will divide audiences. At times this is a hard book to read (and it seems to know that, spending scant time with the villains and focusing wholly on their victims), but it feels like an important book for our troubled times. Plus, it is a damn good book from a damn great writer. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Triangulum" by Masande Ntshanga

I’m beginning to see a pattern with the types of books Two Dollar Radio publishes. Thankfully, that is not a knock against them because what they put out is unique, memorable and always unlike anything else being put out, as is the case with South African writer Masande Ntshanga’s second novel Triangulum, a brilliant if overstuffed book that provides little in the way of substance but is really, really cool to look at.  It might be because I read it earlier this year, but there is a striking similarity between this novel and R. J. Campbell’s debut Found Audio, also published by Two Dollar Radio, if not in themes but at least in how the novel is layered House of Leaves style where the main story is at the center of a cursory story given to the reader first hand, so we are in fact the third layer of the story being told. Here, the story is told from the perspective of an astronomer in the middle of the 21^st century who has been given a manuscript of recordings and a memoir that has accurately predicted a series of events leading up to the end of the world. The majority of the book is the manuscript itself, detailing in audio recordings and journal entries the life of an unnamed woman, from her life as an adolescent, filled with sexual discovery and dread as a series of disappearances, including that of her mother, her romance with a mysterious woman named D. and her involvement with a terrorist group, all of which is accented by her mysterious vision of a triangular machine, whose significance is revealed in the book’s best part. As I said, there is very little of substance in the story, which seems drained of emotional impact, but it is never, not once, a boring read and filled with interesting ideas, cool scenes and mysteries that are more powerful left unsolved.

Rating: 4/5