reviews ism is glimpsed dimly at best. In her reading, Serena longs for “characters I could believe in,” hoping “to be made curious about what was to happen to them.” McEwan has supplied a worthy collection of such characters in Sweet Tooth, a spritely portrait of the malleability of fact and fiction. —Harvey Freedenberg
the middlesteins By Jami Attenberg
Grand Central $24.99, 288 pages ISBN 9781455507214 eBook available
popular fiction
Richard Middlestein showed his future wife incredible compassion on their first date, a setup. Rather than take her out to a showy dinner, Richard sat beside Edie at her sick father’s bedside, laughing and entertaining the pair over pizza in the hospital. But now Edie is the one who’s sick, facing debilitating diabetes and other problems that accompany her obesity. Richard can’t handle it. Edie has been nitpicking him for years, and quite frankly, he can’t bear the idea of living the rest of his life without sex. He leaves his wife and endures his children’s wrath as Edie’s downward health spiral continues. Robin is the baby of the family, and though her father dotes on her,
The Guardians by Richard Williams AuthorHouse • $16.99 ISBN 9781434376633
40
Two shelties lead their masters back to the path of God’s love. These special dogs have the ability to speak, but their unusual talent is a closely guarded secret. Available on Kindle and Nook.
FICTION she is withdrawn, dark and moody. It’s been years since she has shared things with her mother—in fact, not since the death of one of Robin’s close friends at age 15. That separation endures 16 years later, but as Edie’s health deteriorates, Robin is by her mother’s side. That’s due, in part, to encouragement from her sister-in-law, Rachelle. Rachelle married Benny Middlestein after he knocked her up in college. Despite their somewhat rushed entrance into marriage, the couple appears to have everything together. But Edie’s weight problems become a wedge between Rachelle and Benny as she obsesses over how to help her mother-in-law. The Middlesteins are a normal, dysfunctional American family. Through their story, author Jami Attenberg (The Melting Season, The Kept Man, Instant Love) examines how families relate, the ways in which they shoulder each other’s burdens and whether they share responsibility for each other’s struggles. The result is a vivid, compelling portrait of human interaction. —Carla Jean Whitley
hush Hush By Steven Barthelme
Melville House $16.95, 208 pages ISBN 9781612191591
short stories
highly resonant pieces of flash fiction and more substantial, intimate narratives. Bailey Long is down a thousand dollars to his ex-girlfriend, who has moved on to a younger man—“breeding stock,” as Bailey sees it—and must decide when to quit as he goes on a roll with the loan money at a Biloxi casino. And so it goes with a lot of Barthelme’s characters, many of them gamblers of one sort or another, all of whom are willing to take the big risks in matters of the heart. Risk is a familiar theme in Barthelme’s writing, most notably explored in the memoir Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, which he co-authored with his brother Frederick. Both brothers work at the University of Southern Mississippi, where Steven is a professor and director of the Center for Writers. But in Hush Hush his fiction cuts more sharply at the truth. The stories are a brilliant mixture of high-flying antics and tender reflection, his prose terse and his dialogue alive with recognition. Like in the unusually patterned “Good Parts” where the narrator tells us, “Bill bought a gun, .38 caliber. It smelled good. Maureen returned it and got his money back. $199.95.” What Bill planned to do with that gun, or what Maureen thought Bill planned to do with that gun, is left to the reader’s imagination, but also intimated by the rest of the story. Because like a good poker face, it’s what Barthelme doesn’t say that makes it all the more compelling. — W . S . Ly o n
The characters in Hush Hush, the latest story collection from Steven Barthelme, are drawn directly from life, with a precision that leaves sentences ringing in the reader’s ear. They seem to inhabit some infinitesimal space between the past and the present, and yet they are never trapped, always willing to move forward and try again in spite of the flaws that define them. “Claire” is the most sympathetic story and perhaps the most richly imagined; it won a Pushcart Prize in 2005 and acts as a centerpiece for the book, which alternates between
american ghost By Janis Owens
Scribner $25, 288 pages ISBN 9781451674637 eBook available
Southern fiction
Janis Owens’ Southern Gothic American Ghost is equal parts mystery and thriller, populated with slippery characters inhabiting
a backwoods swampland hamlet forever haunted by a Depression-era lynching. Indeed, Owens based her fourth novel on the infamous 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida. Still, while the novel is rooted in a real-life incident, it remains a pure work of fiction in the best sense: a rich portrayal of a small town where the lines between black and white become blurred—not only in regard to race, but in the Hendrix code of honor, too. Readers are taken through this mesmerizing tale by its teenage heroine, Jolie Hoyt, who, like Owens, is the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher. When the story begins, Jolie appears destined for a sad, small life punctuated by poverty and hopelessness in her hardscrabble hometown of Hendrix, Florida— until she falls hard for a visiting anthropology student, Sam Lense. Hailing from a Jewish family in Miami that holds its own bitter secrets, Sam claims to be researching the history of Hendrix’s indigenous Indian tribes, but his true agenda is far more personal, and hinges on the town’s racist past. When the couple’s hasty, albeit heartfelt, engagement is shattered by violence, the young lovers are torn asunder. Still, the heart of the story is the decades-old lynching, which remains incendiary for survivors on both sides. Owens writes powerfully of Jolie’s epiphany as to the magnitude of the horrors that continue to haunt her hometown: “In the darkness she could imagine it precisely: the tree and the dust, the press of the crowd and the shouting. If she closed her eyes, she could almost smell the stink of the slaughterhouse—the blood and skin and rot of decomposition that Kite must have foreseen himself, being raised on a farm.” Despite its dark subject matter, the novel is infused with light and hope—no small feat, given that the novel gracefully weaves everything from anti-Semitism and hate crimes to first love and family loyalties into the story. American Ghost is sure to resonate with readers long after its stunning final pages. —Karen Ann Cullotta