THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATENESS
Van Booy, Simon Harper/HarperCollins (224 pp.) $24.99 | Jun. 25, 2013 978-0-06-211224-8 Wartime violence prompts a handful of lives to intersect deeply in Van Booy’s fourth work of fiction (The Secret Lives of People in Love, 2010, etc.). Unlike the author’s previous works, this novel doesn’t emphasize romance, but the author retains an abiding interest in interconnectedness, and his tone remains poetic and optimistic. The story opens in 2010 as Martin, an employee at a retirement home, awaits a Mr. Hugo, who dies upon his arrival. From there, the story branches out, with chapters dedicated to Hugo, who obscured his Nazi past to become a successful filmmaker in England; John, a U.S. World War II bomber pilot who crashes in France in 1944; his blind granddaughter, Amelia, who works at the Museum of Modern Art in the present day; and more. Van Booy’s intention is to show how fleeting moments of generosity can have an impact decades after the fact, and the pay-it-forward philosophy produces some sentimental lines. (“Sébastien is not looking through the window, but through the scrapbook of things that have pierced his heart.”) Even so, Van Booy is skilled at crafting characters in a few strokes, and both John and Hugo are so well-drawn that their intersection becomes appealing and affecting. And the shifts back and forth in time give the story a tension that, once the fullness of the men’s wartime ordeals is revealed, gives his redemption depth. If it seems too on the nose that Amelia helps create an exhibit of American photos lost in Europe during World War II called “The Illusion of Separateness,” the overall sense is that Van Booy is foregrounding a we’re-all-inthis-together theme that many novelists needlessly obscure. This gentle book feels like a retort: Why not just say how much we owe each other? And so Van Booy does.
THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING
Vásquez, Juan Gabriel Riverhead (272 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 1, 2013 978-1-59448-748-4
An odd coincidence leads Antonio Yammara, a law professor and narrator of this novel from Latin American author Vásquez (The Informers, 2009, etc.), deep into the mystery of personality, both his own and especially that of Ricardo Laverde, a casual acquaintance of Yammara before he was gunned down on the streets of Bogotá. The catalyst for memory here is perhaps unique in the history of the novel, for Yammara begins by recounting an 30
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anecdote involving a hippopotamus that had escaped from a zoo established in Colombia’s Magdalena Valley by the drug baron Pablo Escobar. After the hippo is shot, Yammara is taken back 13 years to his acquaintance with Laverde, a pilot involved in drug running. Yammara is a youngish professor of law in Bogotá, and, generally bored, he spends his nights bedding his students and playing billiards. Engaged in the latter activity, Yammara meets Laverde without knowing his background—for example, that Laverde had just been released from a 19-year prison stint for drug activity. A short time later, Yammara is with Laverde when the drug runner is murdered, and Yammara is also hit by a bullet. He is both angered and intrigued by Laverde’s murder and wants to find out the mystery behind his life. His curiosity leads him circuitously to Laverde’s relationship with Elena, his American wife, whose death in a plane accident Laverde was grieving over at the time of his murder. Yammara meets Maya Fritts, Laverde’s daughter by Elena, who fills in some of the gaps in Yammara’s knowledge, and the intimacy that arises from Yammara’s growing knowledge of Laverde’s family leads him and Maya to briefly become lovers. Toward the end of the novel, Yammara comments that Maya wrinkles her brow “like someone who’s on the verge of understanding something,” and this ambiguous borderland where things don’t quite come into coherent focus is where most of the characters remain.
THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES
Yanagihara, Hanya Doubleday (432 pp.) $26.95 | Aug. 13, 2013 978-0-385-53677-7 An instance of that rare subgenre of literature, the anthropological novel, in which Norton Perina, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, traces the early part of his life, when he helped both discover and destroy a lost tribe. Yanagihara does everything she can to establish verisimilitude in this novel, so much so that the reader will be Googling names of characters to see if they’re “really real.” The movement toward ultrarealism extends to footnotes and an appendix provided by Ronald Kubodera, whose friendship with Perina extends even into the sad period when the Nobel Prize winner was convicted of sexual abuse involving some of the tribal children he brought back with him. Kubodera provides a preface in which he vigorously defends Perina, and then the narrative is turned over to Perina’s memoirs, which take us back to his Midwestern upbringing, his rivalry with his brother Owen, his graduation from Harvard Medical School and almost immediate hire by the anthropologist Paul Tallent. Along with his assistant Esme Duff, Paul takes Perina to U’ivu, a constellation of remote islands in the South Pacific. Perina becomes immediately fascinated with Ivu’ivu, an island that harbors a small tribe, a number of whom are well over 100 years old. Perina traces this