Review_FICTION
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The stories from Kevin Clouther’s debut collection,
We Were Flying to Chicago (p. 78), will linger in the reader’s mind.
; Wonderland
Stacey D’Erasmo. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
$22 (256p) ISBN 978-0-544-07481-1
On her comeback tour, a decade separated from her heyday, musician Anna
Brundage zigzags across Europe with a
new album, Wonderland; a new manager;
and a new band, in the commanding latest from D’Erasmo (The Sky Below). Along
the way, she tackles her roller-coaster
past—her relationship with her artist father; her affair with Simon, a married father of two; an abortion—and seeks
atonement. Spoken in Anna’s voice and
structured with a fragmented chronology,
the novel intersperses moments from
multiple tours and recording sessions
with personal letters and meditations,
creating a spellbinding look into the protagonist’s being. Characters like the
glammed-out Billy Q and the drug-ad-dled Ezra weave in and out of Anna’s tour
like ghosts, as Anna and her bandmates—
Zach, Alicia, and Tom—live life on the
road, where romance is fleeting, where
friends come and go, and where a savior
can be found in the darkest of moments.
A story of second chances, D’Erasmo has
meticulously crafted a work that, with the
exception of a small lull midnovel, constantly builds, yet often feels incredibly
casual. Days and shows pass, but within
this routine, a transformation slowly creeps
into the narrative: that of commitment,
and, perhaps, hope for the future. Agent:
Bill Clegg, WME Entertainment. (May)
The Snow Queen
Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-374-26632-5
Two brothers grapple with aging, loss,
and spirituality in this haunting sixth
novel from the author of The Hours and By
Nightfall. Barrett Meeks, a middle-aged
retail worker with boyfriend troubles, is
walking through Central Park one eve-
ning when he notices a mysterious light
in the sky—a light he can’t help but feel
is “apprehending [him]... as he imagined
a whale might apprehend a swimmer,
with a grave and regal and utterly un-
frightened curiosity.” Uncertain what to
make of his vision, Barrett returns to the
Bushwick, Brooklyn, apartment he shares
with his drug-addicted brother, Tyler, and
Tyler’s wife, Beth, whose cancer has come
to dominate the brothers’ attention. As
ever, Cunningham has a way with run-on
sentences, and the novel’s lengthy mono-
logues run the gamut from mortality to
post-2000 New York City. But at its
heart, Cunningham’s story is about fami-
ly, and how we reconcile our closest hu-
man relationships with our innermost
thoughts, hopes, and fears. Tyler and Bar-
rett have “a certain feral knowledge of
each other” and enjoy “the quietude of
growing up together.” They connect over
Beth’s illness, and contemplate the
unique pressures of dying before one’s
time. “Did Persephone sometimes find
the summer sun too hot, the flowers more
gaudy than beautiful?” Beth wonders.
“Did she ever, even briefly, think fondly
of the dim silence of Hades?” Cunning-
ham has not attempted to answer any of
life’s great questions here, but his poi-
gnant and heartfelt novel raises them in
spades. (May)
; All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr. Scribner, $27 (544p) ISBN
978-1-4767-4658-6
In 1944, the U.S. Air Force bombed
the Nazi-occupied French coastal town of
St. Malo. Doerr (Memory Wall) starts his
story just before the bombing, then goes
back to 1934 to describe two childhoods:
those of Werner and Marie-Laure. We
meet Werner as a tow-headed German or-
phan whose math skills earn him a place
in an elite Nazi training school—saving
him from a life in the mines, but forcing
him to continually choose between oppor-
tunity and morality. Marie-Laure is blind
and grows up in Paris, where her father is
a locksmith for the Museum of Natural
History, until the fall of Paris forces them
to St. Malo, the home of Marie-Laure’s ec-
centric great-uncle, who, along with his
longtime housekeeper, joins the Resis-
tance. Doerr throws in a possibly cursed
sapphire and the Nazi gemologist search-
ing for it, and weaves in radio, German
propaganda, coded partisan messages, sci-
entific facts, and Jules Verne. Eventually,
the bombs fall, and the characters’ paths
converge, before diverging in the long af-
termath that is the rest of the 20th centu-
ry. If a book’s success can be measured by
its ability to move readers and the num-
ber of memorable characters it has, Story
Prize–winner Doerr’s novel triumphs on
both counts. Along the way, he convinces
readers that new stories can still be told
about this well-trod period, and that
war—despite its desperation, cruelty, and
harrowing moral choices—cannot negate
the pleasures of the world. (May)
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown, $26 (336p) ISBN
978-0-316-03397-8
Paul O’Rourke, the main character of
Ferris’s (Then We Came to the End ) new
book, is a dentist. And he’s a good one,
informed and informative—even if the
mouths that once seemed so erotic have
devolved into caves of bacteria, pain, and
lurking death. Ferris depicts Paul’s difficulties: in the workplace, he struggles to
say good morning, has problems with the
office manager (who’s also his ex-girl-friend), and likewise has problems with
the devout Catholic hygienist, who can’t
see why he doesn’t believe. A constant ru-minator and obsessive Red Sox fan, Paul
would like to believe and belong, but he
can’t. And then the Ulms, who claim to
be followers of Amalek (a figure from the
Old Testament), hijack his Internet presence and claims him as their own. As an
angry and incredulous Paul reads “his”
tweets, learns about the unlikely history
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