like envy in me.” Most affecting is “Runs Girl.” A college student, a religious girl, meets a Yahoo Boy, one of the “ones who rolled into town in sleek cars and with pockets full of cash.” Many of Okparanta’s stories unfold amongst the Niger Delta’s guava and plantain trees, where big oil employs and pollutes, amid flatscreens and BMWs and NEPA power failures leaving candles to hold back the night. In “America,” a Port Harcourt teacher discovers her sexuality and then decides to follow her love to America. Later stories plumb the Nigerian-American immigrant experience. A daughter narrates “Shelter,” following along as her Nigerian mother meets rejection at a Boston domestic abuse shelter because of visa issues. In “Tumours and Butterflies,” Uchenna, disowned by her abusive father as she leaves for university, reluctantly comes home to assist her mother. Nigeria, the vibrancy of its heart, the soul of its people, is captured in these stories.
EVERYBODY HAS EVERYTHING
Onstad, Katrina Grand Central Publishing (336 pp.) $14.00 paper | Jun. 25, 2013 978-1-4555-2292-7
Toronto-based journalist Onstad pens a novel that asks if everyone is cut out for parenthood. The book also addresses marital relationships in the modern world, in which both men and women are married to careers that define them. While Ana is rising in her career as a research lawyer in a major firm, her husband, James, a television journalist, has just been laid off and covers his unemployment status by telling people that he is writing a book. Ana and James have put a lot of time and considerable money into fertility treatments and testing without successfully bringing a child into their lives. Things change when they become guardians of 2-year-old Finn. Little Finn’s mother, Sarah, is in a coma after being seriously injured in the car accident that killed Finn’s father. The father’s will specified that his friend James would be his child’s guardian in the event of his death. James takes pleasure in being a loving, attentive father to Finn. Ana, on the other hand, is constantly worried about potential disasters and finds the responsibility overwhelming. Ultimately, she realizes she doesn’t really want to be a mother but also that such a sentiment is not one a woman can easily express. The ending does not resolve all issues raised but does offer hope for a bright future. A fine novel about contemporary parenting and relationships.
LAST CAR OVER THE SAGAMORE BRIDGE
Orner, Peter Little, Brown (208 pp.) $25.00 | Aug. 6, 2013 978-0-316-22464-2
Orner packs memorable characters— and occasionally some plot as well—into an exceptionally small space. The stories here range from the ultrashort (a single paragraph) to the merely moderately short (a few pages), and with more than 40 stories coming in at around 200 pages, many of them feel more like snippets or vignettes than fleshed-out narratives. The opening story, “Foley’s Pond,” introduces us to Nate Zamost, who missed a week of school when his sister, 2 1/2, drowned in the pond. On his return, Nate’s friends try to cheer him up, though Nate makes them realize that he’s the one who had taught his sister to crawl under the fence protecting the pond. In “Horace and Josephine,” we meet the quirky title characters, aunt and uncle of the narrator. Josephine’s welcome habit of dispensing $50 bills to her nephews is tempered by the fact that Horace earns his money through a Ponzi scheme, and although both are eventually disgraced, they’re not willing to abandon their personal flamboyance. “The Poet,” the shortest story in the collection, presents a poet who’s recently had a stroke and who’s sadly “trotted...out [as] a novelty act” to stumble through his poems on the podium. “Geraldo, 1986” takes us back to Geraldo Rivera’s infamous, and embarrassing, attempt to pump up the discovery of Al Capone’s “lost vault” at the Lexington Hotel into the new King Tut’s tomb. Throughout the stories, Orner shows himself to be a master of the pithy phrase. A couple moves to South Dakota, for example, leaving the narrator to wonder “what heinous crime they must have committed in some other life to deserve exile in this moonscape among the earnest corn-fed.” Pithy and evocative. (Author tour to New York, Chicago and San Francisco)
INSTRUCTIONS FOR A HEATWAVE
O’Farrell, Maggie Knopf (304 pp.) $25.95 | Jun. 18, 2013 978-0-385-34940-6
A sometimes-brooding but always sympathetic novel, by prize-winning British writer O’Farrell, of a family’s struggles to overlook the many reasons why they should avoid each other’s glances and phone calls. Hot town, summer in the city. As anyone who’s seen Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing will recall, all it takes is a little fire, and a city will turn into a frying pan. So it is in the London of 1976: |
kirkus.com
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fiction
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15 june 2013
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