12 minute read
LET’S NOT DO THAT AGAIN by Grant Ginder
GO TELL THE BEES THAT I AM GONE
Gabaldon, Diana Delacorte (928 pp.) $36.00 | Nov. 23, 2021 978-1-101-88568-0
The ninth book in Gabaldon’s Outlander series finds the Fraser family reunited in the midst of the American Revolution. It’s 1779, and Claire and Jamie Fraser have found each other across time and space and are living peacefully in the American Colony of North Carolina. This novel opens with the mysterious return to Fraser’s Ridge of their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children. In a previous book, Brianna’s family time-traveled to 20thcentury America and planned to stay there permanently. It’s clear that Jamie and the others expect the troubles the family faced in the future will follow them to the past; unfortunately, after their return, the book pauses for several hundred pages of exposition. Gabaldon reintroduces characters, summarizes past events and tragedies, and introduces new characters. The text features not one but two family trees (the one in the back is updated to include the events of the book), and readers will need both to keep track of all the characters and relationships. The Outlander series has always been concerned with themes of time and place, and this novel contains intricate details and descriptions of daily life in Colonial America, clearly the result of countless hours of research. But Claire and Jamie have always been the major draw for readers. Now that they are grandparents, their love story is less epic and more tender, exploring the process of aging, the joys of family, and the longing for community and home. The last third is more plot-driven and actionpacked, but the cliffhanger ending might leave readers feeling as if the book is just filler for the promised 10th installment.
Lots of buzz after a seven-year hiatus, but even die-hard Outlander fans might need more action.
LET’S NOT DO THAT AGAIN
Ginder, Grant Henry Holt (352 pp.) $27.99 | April 5, 2022 978-1-250-24377-5
In this timely comic novel set in New York and Paris, a political family deals with drama past and present. A new book from Ginder beckons the reader like a hot bath and glass of something, a reliable and relaxing pleasure. Here the point of departure is a riot in Paris during which a young American pitches a champagne bottle through the window of a famous restaurant, apparently at the behest of a French right-wing extremist. This is bad news for her mother, Nancy Harrison, who is running for the U.S. Senate from New York. Nancy has been representing her district in the House of Representatives for nearly 20 years, since her husband’s death opened the seat, and her hard work, vision, and political instincts have led to this Senate race. Her competition is a Republican television actor “whose most impressive accomplishment was hiding his Botox”—still, beating him won’t be easy, especially with these new headlines. Her son, Nick, who’s just retired from the stress of working for his mom and is looking forward to getting off benzos and finding a boyfriend, is tapped to fly over and pry sister Greta away from the evil Frenchman. Ginder aces the small stuff: sparkling dialogue, hilarious supporting characters (Greta’s roommates!), whimsically named establishments—a doggy day care is BowHaus; a retirement community, Boom Town; a favorite restaurant, Me, Myself, and Thai. Nick is writing a musical based on the work of...Joan Didion. And you know the old saying about a gun in the drawer in the first act? Well, here the gun is a state-ofthe-art trash compactor. Keep your eye on that thing. He also aces the big stuff, characteristically insightful on sibling and parent-child relationships and politically on message. As Nancy
WORDS WITH... Jonathan Evison
The author’s ambitious seventh novel offers readers a Rorschach test on the American dream
BY MARK ATHITAKIS
Keith Brofsky
In his seventh novel, the ambitious Small World (Dutton, Jan. 11), Jonathan Evison delivers a cross section of America, following a group of characters in the present day—connected by a train accident in the Pacific Northwest—as well as their ancestors a century and a half earlier. It’s an impressive juggling act, but speaking on the phone from his cabin in the foothills of Washington’s Olympic Mountains, Evison suggests he’s hard-wired for it. “I’m offthe-charts manic, I’ve got all this energy,” he says. “And it’s served best when I’m working.”
In this conversation, edited for space and clarity, Evison discusses the new novel, his thematic focus on the American dream, and the recent controversy surrounding his 2018 novel, Lawn Boy.
Depending on how you count, there are around a dozen central characters in Small World. Did one particular character emerge first who provided a way into the story? Not at all. I set off from the beginning wanting to tell all these stories. In fact, I ended up cutting about six characters out of it. I had to get everybody on that train. About midway through the novel, I almost added a third generation of characters, but I decided against that. I did a lot of writing that didn’t make the final book, but that work is never wasted. I ended up writing an entire novel with one of the characters I dropped, with its own narrative line, a kind of Western.
The book seems like a product of the Trump era, where debates about national identity are very much on people’s minds. The tribalism of the Trump era has always been there—it’s just more palpable than it has been before. I started writing it about 3 years ago, in the middle of that time. But I wasn’t reacting to that so much. It was more my own personal ambition to swing for the fences. The novel is pretty consistent with how I’ve always written about America. I try not to write polemics. I feel like my job is to report on the state of the American dream.
There’s a lot of optimism in the book because the characters grow across generations. But it’s also engaged with racism, greed, abuse, and family separation, which are part of American history, too. Was it difficult settling on a tone for the story? It’s mostly intuitive. I’ll make tonal shifts that I’m aware of, but mostly it’s just a reflection of my optimism and who I am. You have to be pretty optimistic to write eight books and keep going. Even when I was a starving artist, I was hopelessly optimistic. I wasn’t really any less happy then. All my dreams have come true now, but I don’t think I’m any happier on a base-line level. It’s just who I am.
There’s a lot of history here—about the construction of railroads, orphanages in 1850s Chicago, Chinese immigrants in early San Francisco. How much time did you dedicate to research? I wrote the book pretty quickly—14 months actually writing, maybe 17 months [total] with the research. When
I know the information I’m after, and when I know the questions I need to ask, it becomes a lot easier. Some of it is stuff I already knew about from past books. A light bulb goes off in my head and I’d have to go back and research it, but I had an idea of where I had to look.
Still, writing a book like this in less than a year and a half sounds speedy. I have a very weird work schedule because I have three school-age kids and I’m a very hands-on parent. So the only way for me to do it is to get away up here to this cabin two days a week from my house on Bainbridge Island, about an hour and a half away. I drive out here and work for two days a week. And when I say two days a week, I mean 16 hours a day. I’m metabolizing story the whole time. The other five days a week is just getting game-ready.
In the fall, your novel Lawn Boy was targeted by some schools when it was accused of containing pornographic material. Where does all that stand now? The death threats have stopped. For a month, every day I was sending out statements to students, teachers, and school board members, people asking me to make a statement. But really there was nothing to defend. All the attacks have been raised by somebody who didn’t read the book; somebody read one paragraph out of context, and everybody just took that ball and ran with it. The book does nothing Judy Blume wasn’t doing for years, you know? I’m just tuning it out at this point. It’s nice to see the book selling again, but whatever. I’ve written three and a half books since then.
Mark Athitakis is a journalist in Phoenix who writes about books for Kirkus, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Small World received a starred review in the Oct. 15, 2021, issue.
puts it, “The only option is to fix things, because you’re sure as hell not going to leave them for your children looking like this.”
Ooh la la. The Senate race may be tight, but this book is a shoo-in.
THE ALMOND IN THE APRICOT
Goudarzi, Sara Deep Vellum (252 pp.) $22.00 | Jan. 18, 2022 978-1-64-605109-0
A grieving young woman experiences intense episodic dreams that she believes may be an alternate reality. The story opens with two distinct points of view: Emma is a 29-year-old designer of sewer systems in New Jersey. Lily is an 11-year-old girl living with Mom and Dad in Touran, a fictional conflict zone with frequent and frightening nighttime air raids. As the story progresses, it’s revealed that Emma and Lily aren’t distinct personalities but are rather linked in some way by Emma’s vivid dreams. At first, the connections manifest in sleepwalkinglike incidents for Emma. Later, elements of Lily’s life— a geranium, a birthday cake, chess games, apricot trees, breath mints, and hopscotch—pop up as references in Emma’s waking world. Emma gradually begins to suspect that Lily may be not a dream but another dimension of time or space. She hooks up with physicist Kerr Jacobs, who reminds her of her best friend Spencer, to investigate whether that’s possible. Kerr assures her, repeatedly, that it’s not. Emma’s prolonged grief at Spencer’s death, her romantic triangle with Jacobs and Peter, her minimally acceptable boyfriend, and Lily’s sweet summer romance with Nima, the son of her parents’ friends, add emotional depth. A banal subplot involving Emma’ boss, Charlie, her professional competition with her lunch buddy, Tina, and a sewer system at a new housing development feels disconnected from Emma’s and Lily’s stories. The central question of whether Emma’s dreams are real sustains the intrigue to a satisfying, faster-paced conclusion.
An is-it-real-or-is-it-a-dream story with a lot to like but little to love.
THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE
Gu Byeong-mo Trans. by Chi-Young Kim Hanover Square Press (288 pp.) $19.99 | March 8, 2022 978-1-335-42576-8
What happens when a chance encounter causes a 65-year-old Korean assassin to question what she’s always had to do to survive?
Hornclaw is an aging “disease control specialist” who’s built a 45-year-long career on eliminating targets her agency’s
clientele deem “vermin” without asking any questions—usually with a poisoned knife. Now her increasingly fragile health and the emotional ripples from an unexpected connection she makes with a doctor and his family threaten her plans for a leisurely retirement. Despite the peculiar objective of her work, Hornclaw must also navigate the mundane annoyances of corporate life, including bureaucracy, dismissive younger colleagues, and petty disagreements with management. The realistic detail with which Gu describes the agency’s day-to-day operations prevents the novel from veering into a melodramatic blood bath, as do the novel’s incisive observations about the harsh economic and social realities of modern Korean society, including economic recession, poverty among senior citizens, and the effects of the lingering American military presence. Behind the skillfully rendered (if occasionally drawn-out) fight scenes, Gu poignantly animates the desperate circumstances that motivate these characters to turn to contract killing in the first place. Despite Gu’s skill in dramatizing details, though, the novel’s larger narrative arc and epiphanies can feel rushed and mechanical. At times it seems that the characters could use a few more chapters for their complex lives to unfold in a way that does their transformations justice.
A thriller with heart that would benefit from more time to beat just a bit longer.
THE FRUIT THIEF Or, One-Way Journey Into the Interior
Handke, Peter Trans. by Krishna Winston Farrar, Straus and Giroux (336 pp.) $28.00 | March 15, 2022 978-0-3749-0650-4
A wandering, seemingly plotless novel by Austrian writer Handke. It begins with a bee sting: A pensioner in the exurbs of Paris walks barefoot in the grass and earns a hymenopteran bite for his troubles. Spurred, he takes the occasion to pack his bags and go for an adventure that it pleases him to think is somehow illegal. “Yes, at last I would lay eyes on my fruit thief, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, very soon, as a person, the whole person, not just the phantom fragments my aging eyes had glimpsed in all the years before, usually in the middle of a crowd, and always at a distance, and those glimpses had never failed to get me moving again,” writes Handke in a typically winding sentence. That fruit thief is a young woman who soon becomes the center of the story even though the oldster remains the omniscient narrator. He dislikes the new Europe: “I usually found women in veils properly—or improperly—offputting,” he grumbles, having encountered Muslim women on a train. He finds his fellow humans thick as bricks: “Nothing makes them prick up their ears.” The young woman, Alexia, is no more tolerant, a Nietzschean rebel who emerges as a younger, female doppelgänger to the older man’s world-weary curmudgeon. She wanders across France, her vast handbag full of, yes, pilfered fruit that she considers it her right to possess, staking out places where she can readily nab the stuff: “She evaluated each place according to the spots, nooks, and crannies where a piece of fruit grew that she could grab.” Why not televisions or late-model Renaults? Alexia falls in with an occasional companion who, Handke takes pains to point out, is of darker complexion than she, “fighting his way at her side through this European jungle.” Their travels don’t amount to much, but they afford Handke plenty of opportunities to sneer at modern mores and modern life and the boring homogeneity of humankind, especially the non-European sort.
