THE KINGDOM OF SAND by Andrew Holleran

Conference, full of smart, unfulfilled people such as me.” Elsewhere described as “footnotes having a get-together,” this is the Café of Minor Authors, aka Oblivion, where poor________ has landed after a massive heart attack at 62. Minutes after receiving word from his agent that the auction for his new book was “in the stratosphere,” he got a second notification: “_______, I’M SO SO SORRY. That was meant for another client.” Oof. So much for that mortal coil. But who does ________ find is his guide in the beyond but a “jovial boor” named Jozef whom he knew in his 20s in Chicago when both worked at a literary magazine. Jozef shows him how to order a cappuccino, where the library is, and how the dead can haunt history, returning to scenes in the lives of their heroes. Off they go to Prague to visit ________’s beloved Kafka, who, it turns out, was briefly acquainted with his great-grandmother Hanna, an actress in the Yiddish theater. Hemley has lots of fun with the details of these ghostly visits: “I was too shy to sit in Kafka’s lap, as it were (a sentence I never imagined myself writing before this), so I sat on the chair beside him where Brod had placed his hat.” A mostly hilarious mashup of real incidents and characters from Hemley’s career, historical fact, and giddy fantasy, the novel also has moments of real sorrow and poignancy. For example, _________ can’t encounter figures of the early 20th century without recalling which were to perish at which concentration camp—all three of Kafka’s sisters, for example. And in the end, it’s about how to live—and die—with frustrated ambitions and still have a pretty good time.

The best kind of shaggy dog story, delightful in every particular.

THE KINGDOM OF SAND

Holleran, Andrew Farrar, Straus and Giroux (272 pp.) $27.00 | June 7, 2022 978-0-3746-0096-9

Gay men are the life of the party, we’re told, but what happens when it’s time to die? The unnamed narrator of this mordant, unflinching novel is mired in what he calls a “predicament” quite different from that experienced by the hip young gay men at the heart of Holleran’s most admired novel, Dancer From the Dance (1978), that crucial narrative set in 1970s Manhattan. This novel is about gay men dying alone in a small, conservative, Christian town in North Florida. “Halloween, alas, was the only time there was anything even slightly campy about our town,” the narrator complains. In his 60s, he’s friends, or at least experiences a “shared loneliness,” with Earl, another gay man, who’s 20 years older; Earl’s illnesses provide a grim education in being old and, worse, getting even older. Earl and the narrator talk about the “UPS deliveryman, or a sale on ice cream at the grocery store, or a new person who’d moved into the rental cottages down the street.” And yet Holleran makes these everyday topics, and the seemingly uneventful days of the narrator and his friends, into thrilling fiction. That is partly because this novel feels confessional, with the narrator divulging thoughts and behavior that most of us would be afraid to share. Holleran is fiercely a pointillist. His observations about the minute details of his narrator’s life feel revelatory—and not always specific to the lives of gay men. “Love and kindness have a lineage their recipients know nothing about,” the narrator declares, including the sometimes unrequited kindness of helping someone else die.

Ostensibly about gay men getting older and being alone, this novel is really about everyone getting older and being alone.

FORBIDDEN CITY

Hua, Vanessa Ballantine (368 pp.) $28.00 | April 19, 2022 978-0-399-17881-8

Hua’s ambitious second novel explores China’s Cultural Revolution through the eyes of an idealistic teenage girl. On the day of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Mei Xiang, a waitress in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant, recalls the incredible journey that took her from a remote, impoverished village to the heart of political power in Communist China. When Secretary Sun, a Party official, arrives in the summer of 1965 to recruit young girls for mysterious duties in the capital, the patriotic 15-year-old Mei is so eager to become a model revolutionary that she subtly blackmails the village headman into guaranteeing her selection. Arriving at Beijing’s walled Lake Palaces, once home to emperors and now the Chairman’s residence, Mei soon learns from Teacher Fan that her job will be to dance with the Party elites. That first evening she attracts the Chairman’s attention, earning the enmity of another ambitious girl, Midnight Chang. The quick-witted Mei soon becomes the Chairman’s lover and confidante; when he recruits her to trick and undermine his political rival, she seizes the opportunity for revolutionary action with fervor. But her doubts grow as Mei observes the harrowing violence and brutality sweeping the country. Inspired by documentary footage of Mao surrounded by adoring young women and drawing on the life of his personal secretary, Zhang Yufeng, Hua vividly captures the cult of personality that enabled the manipulation of girls like Mei. But her narrative pace is surprisingly slow; most of the action takes place within the isolated confines of the Lake Palaces, where Mei obsesses over her rivalries with Midnight Chang and Madame, the Chairman’s wife. Mei’s narrow viewpoint also limits the novel’s emotional impact, as she remains detached from the traumatic events of the Cultural Revolution until the contrived climax.

Though disappointing in its execution, this wellresearched book addresses a momentous period rarely covered in fiction.

BLOOMSBURY GIRLS

Jenner, Natalie St. Martin’s Press (368 pp.) $27.99 | May 17, 2022 978-1-2502-7669-8

In post–World War II London, three women battle misogyny at a stodgy bookshop. In Jenner’s follow-up to The Jane Austen Society (2020), former housemaid Evie Stone, age 17, has completed her studies at Cambridge, but, despite her genius for scholarship, the upper-class Cambridge boys club will not grant her the academic career she craves. Through her Austen Society contacts, she wangles a job at Bloomsbury Books, where men hold sway and a set of arcane rules keeps the female clerks toiling in the lower echelons of bookselling. From here, as in the earlier book, the lives of several characters intertwine. Vivien, of the fiction department, is a talented writer whose ambitions have been thwarted. Alec, her boss and spurned lover, is a less talented writer, which the near-omniscient narration makes clear in one of many pointed character assessments. Grace, a secretary, yearns to escape her controlling husband but fears losing custody of her sons. Ash, of the science section, comes to realize that as an Indian immigrant he cannot overcome British bigotry, however powerful the pull of his and Evie’s mutual attraction and matching meticulous personalities. The shop’s hierarchy includes Herbert Dutton, the general manager, who clings to power despite failing health, and Lord Baskin, the benevolent landlord. Except where Evie is concerned, class conflict is not a factor here. In fact, the dramatic tension suffers as conflicts are too easily resolved by lucky breaks, not to mention wealthy mentors. The timing of key developments often owes more to plot convenience than to convincing causality. The 1950 setting does allow for entertaining literary intrigues, including store events featuring Daphne du Maurier and Samuel Beckett, which spark kerfuffles and exacerbate the gender wars that are the overriding preoccupation of this novel. Much of the plot revolves around overlooked women writers, notably Jane Webb, author of a prescient but forgotten 1827 novel called The Mummy! However, readers can be comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, in the expectation that the women will prevail.

A rose-tinted view of early 1950s literary feminism.

SONG FOR ALMEYDA & SONG FOR ANNINHO

Jones, Gayl Beacon Press (200 pp.) $23.95 | April 5, 2022 978-0-8070-2990-9

The mercurial and provocative Jones follows up Palmares (2021), her novel of 17th-century Brazilian slavery, in the unlikely and, yes, provocative form of an epic narrative poem.

The starkly rendered imagery and intensely orchestrated language in such Jones novels as Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976) suggest that she has always been as compelling a poet as a storyteller. Her new book is a poem in two parts, Song for Anninho having been first published 40 years ago as prelude to Palmares, her sprawling, epochal bildungsroman about Almeyda, a young enslaved Black Brazilian woman, and her tumultuous adventures under different masters before escaping bondage with her husband, Anninho, to the refuge of Palmares. As readers of the novel will recall, the community is ravaged by war, scattering the survivors and sending Almeyda on a yearslong search for the missing Anninho. The newer of the two “songs,” which opens this duo, finds Anninho safely bivouacked from his pursuers

and preparing for the battle to build a “New Palmares.” He is seeking answers from a curandero (or healer) as to the safety and location of his wife and speaks with other exiled Palmarenians: “Men and women who want to be / Who they are / Some must be taught to be / Themselves / But rebels are rebels.” Anninho also conducts imaginary conversations with Almeyda, whom he assures “the war has not / Ended. But / here in these caverns are the / African waters that / heal.” Meanwhile, in her song to Anninho, Almeyda conducts imaginary conversations with her husband, as she has been viciously enslaved again; at times, she grudgingly returns to a reality where she will sometimes “cross my hands over breasts / that are no longer there.” The pain and mortification of her abusive imprisonment are relieved by her reminiscences of her previous life and dreams of the distant prospects for freedom. There is fierce and evocative intimacy in these songs that contrast sharply with the sweeping momentum and formidable amplitude of the storytelling in Palmares. Readers familiar with both books will likely suspect that there’s far more to come in the saga of these besieged yet rhapsodic revolutionaries. For readers who are more encouraged than intimidated by Jones’ steely focus and breadth of vision, this is an important stop on a remarkable journey.

This book’s magic is different than that of its predecessor, yet the spells they cast are comparably powerful.

THE FERVOR

Katsu, Alma Putnam (320 pp.) $27.00 | April 26, 2022 978-0-593-32833-0

In 1944, the lives of a newspaper reporter, a newly ordained minister, Japanese internees, and a Japanese scientist intertwine around a mysterious illness. “There’s a long history of violence against Asians in America. If you’re unaware of this, it’s not surprising: it doesn’t make the history

“A Ukrainian beekeeper strives in the face of hardship to make the most of his simple life.”

grey bees

books, it’s not taught in classrooms,” the author writes in an afterword. Her novel combines historical events, such as Roosevelt’s executive order forcing Japanese Americans into internment camps, with supernatural elements from Japanese folklore. Chapters alternate among the perspectives of minister Archie Mitchell, reporter Fran Gurstwold, Camp Minidoka internees Meiko Briggs and her daughter Aiko, and scientist Wasaburo Oishi’s journal entries. What unites these disparate characters becomes clear as more is revealed about the illness spreading through the internment camp and the dangerous balloons or parachutes that have begun appearing in several states. While at first the plot moves at a dizzying pace, especially in Archie’s first chapters, a balance of incisive detail and steady progression is struck toward the middle of the book. What appears to be a story of supernatural suspense mixed with historical fiction transforms into an important reminder of the United States’ short memory of its own atrocities and its long history of antiAsian sentiment, violence, and racism. Didactic writing is both a strength and a weakness here. At first, important parallels are created; for instance, “America was not Nazi Germany. Rounding up citizens in camps in order to kill them: it was impossible. It went against everything America stood for—everything Americans said they stood for. Yet here she was, dying in an internment camp.” Unfortunately, by the end, these notes become too frequent and heavy-handed. Even so, it’s enjoyable to experience the ambitious, weblike weaving of the book’s many elements.

Admirable in its aims but needed more finesse.

GREY BEES

Kurkov, Andrey Trans. by Boris Dralyuk Deep Vellum (360 pp.) $15.95 paper | Mar. 29, 2022 978-1-646051-66-3

A Ukrainian beekeeper strives in the face of hardship to make the most of his simple life. Until it was thrust into the headlines by Russia’s invasion in February 2022, Ukraine was far from the minds of most Western readers. Through the story of Sergey Sergeyich, a divorced, disabled Ukrainian mine safety inspector and passionate beekeeper, Kurkov transforms the abstractions of geopolitics into an intensely human account of compassion and persistence. Along with Pashka, his lifelong frenemy, Sergeyich is one of the two remaining inhabitants of Little Starhorodivka, a village in Ukraine’s “Grey Zone”—the front line between the nation’s troops and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region. The village, so small it has only two main streets whose names Sergeyich decides to reverse in a moment of whimsy, has been without electricity for three years. Through a harsh winter, as the sounds of distant shelling periodically shatter the silence, Sergeyich survives on a diet of buckwheat, millet, and the occasional egg, heating his home with a coal-fired potbelly stove and lighting it with candles scavenged from the ruins of the village’s bombed-out church. Pashka has secured for himself a marginally more comfortable lifestyle due to his friendship with the separatist forces. With the onset of warmer weather, Sergeyich impulsively decamps with his six beehives on an odyssey across a war-ravaged landscape that will eventually bring him to the Crimean home of Akhtem, a Tatar beekeeper he met at a convention years earlier. But when he arrives, he finds himself more connected to Akhtem’s family than he ever anticipated, in the process discovering a common humanity that transcends borders and faiths. Kurkov’s prose is as unassuming as his characters. In his portrayal, Sergeyich is an Everyman embroiled against his will in “a war in which he [has] taken no part.” The humble pleasure he derives from tending to his bees and his determination simply to endure another difficult day make for a subtly inspirational tale.

A gentle story of survival in a war-scarred land.

CIRCA

Laskar, Devi S. Mariner Books (192 pp.) $25.99 | May 3, 2022 978-0-35-865292-2

A first-generation Indian American teenager’s world shatters when her best friend is killed in a car accident, fracturing her plans and reshaping her family. Growing up in 1980s Raleigh, Heera longs to be a normal American teenager. But her Bengali parents are strict and unyielding on everything from clothes to food, unwilling to adapt any more than they must to the country they immigrated to before Heera’s birth. Heera rebels with her best friend, Marie, and Marie’s older brother, Marco, her crush. The siblings look out for Heera, helping her sneak out and claim small victories in her quest for freedom. But when a drunken driver kills Marie while the three are leaving a party, Heera struggles to find the comfort she needs from her parents until further tragedy strikes the family and their close-knit community. On the verge of college, Heera feels conflicting loyalties and expectations and struggles to carve out the life she wants. This tight, insightful novel is built on familiar themes of struggles in immigrant families between first-generation children and their parents. But the author eschews simple, binary answers to the challenges Heera and her family face. Sometimes the expectations placed on Heera are suffocating, and other times her ever watchful parents and their community form a safety net, a fact that becomes especially clear in the wake of Marie’s death, when Marco becomes unraveled under a lack of supervision and guidance. By following Heera from high school to adulthood, the author teases out nuanced tensions in the parent-child dynamic that add richness to this oft-explored topic.

A heartbreaking examination of family ties.