4 minute read
THE MAGICIAN by Colm Tóibín
asked for her: He’s recognized her from a magazine photo as the older sister of Callie, the babysitter who killed his father, Buddy Waleski, when his latest pedophile assault on her turned violent 23 years ago. In fact, the truth is even darker than that. Leigh was an active participant in the killing. Now she’s determined to do everything she can to torpedo the defense she’s preparing for Andrew, who’s accused of stabbing Tammy Karlsen in exactly the way Callie stabbed his father, while persuading both her client and her watchful senior partner that she’s doing her utmost to represent him. As she learns more and more particulars about the case and her client, Leigh realizes that her plan doesn’t go nearly far enough. Andrew is guilty of this assault and others, but he doesn’t just want her to get him off: He plans to blackmail her into complying with a potentially endless series of demands. How can she strike back at a monster who holds all the cards? Only by tapping into the depthless power of sisterhood with Callie, who’s descended into addiction but still loves Leigh with a ferocity that makes the pair of them as dangerous as the man who’s targeted them.
Combines disarming sensitivity to the nuances of the tangled relations among the characters with sledgehammer plotting.
IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS
Slimani, Leila Penguin (240 pp.) $26.00 | Aug. 10, 2021 978-0-14-313597-5
Morocco’s decolonization provides the backdrop for this interracial family drama. Tall, fair-skinned Mathilde anticipates a life of adventure and exoticism when, in 1945, she marries Amine Belhaj, a stocky, dark-skinned Moroccan whose French army regiment is stationed in her Alsatian village. Instead, upon returning to Amine’s home city of Meknes, the newlyweds move in with Amine’s mother while struggling to evict a tenant from the land Amine inherited from his father. When, years later, the couple finally regains control of the remote property and relocates, an increasingly dour Amine works day and night to try to farm the stony acreage, leaving a lonely Mathilde to raise their daughter, Aïcha, and son, Selim. As clashes between the country’s pro-independence nationalists and French colonists grow violent, each of the characters suffers feelings of otherness. Amine sympathizes with his compatriots, though he’s not militant, and he secretly holds the French in esteem. Mathilde craves acceptance but chafes against her new home’s views regarding the subjugation of women. And while biracial Aïcha’s frizzy hair and secondhand clothes make her an outcast at her Frenchrun Catholic school, its religious teachings are the young girl’s greatest solace. First in a planned trilogy inspired by her family’s history, Franco-Moroccan author Slimani’s latest unfolds over the course of a decade via vignettes capturing the internal and external struggles of the Belhajs and their loved ones. The woolly narrative structure occasionally blurs the plot’s focus and saps it of drive, but Slimani’s visceral prose never fails to reel readers back in.
An affecting tale of evolution and revolution.
AFTERPARTIES
So, Anthony Veasna Ecco/HarperCollins (272 pp.) $27.99 | Aug. 3, 2021 978-0-06-304990-1
Posthumous debut from an author whose short fictions appeared in the New Yorker and n+1. In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” Ves and his cousin Maly escape to get high and watch porn while their family prepares for a party where monks will declare that another cousin’s baby is the reincarnation of Maly’s mother, Somaly. In “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly,” that baby, Serey, has grown into a nurse who is caring for the great-aunt who raised Maly after her mother died. Ma Eng is suffering from dementia, but her insistence that Serey is her dead niece Somaly fits a pattern in Serey’s life. Presented with the chance to pass her haunted legacy onto Maly’s daughter, Serey thinks twice about what she’s doing but can’t resist the possibility of being free of her family’s history. Generational trauma is an undercurrent throughout this book. The protagonists of these stories grew up in California, but they are constantly aware that their parents and grandparents and aunties and uncles witnessed genocide before escaping Cambodia. This awareness manifests in different ways across the collection. Set in the aftermath of a lavish wedding, “We Would’ve Been Princes!” follows brothers Marlon and Bond as they try to find out if a wealthy relative stiffed the bride and groom of a cash gift at the reception. The answer to this question is important because Marlon and Bond want to please their mother by delivering this bit of gossip, but it also reveals differing attitudes about what refugees owe each other—and it involves some trickery by a Cambodian singer flown in for the nuptials. In “Human Development,” Anthony, whose newish career is teaching private school kids about diversity, is at a party surrounded by insufferable tech bros when he connects with another Cambodian guy on Grindr. Anthony’s reaction to the relationship that develops is shaped, at least in part, by how much he wants his own past and the collective past he has inherited to define him.
