Fiction to Consider, July 2020

OUT OF THE EASY, BY RUTA SEPETYS

It's 1950, and as the French Quarter of New Orleans simmers with secrets, seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine is silently stirring a pot of her own. Known among locals as the daughter of a brothel prostitute, Josie wants more out of life than the Big Easy has to offer. She devises a plan get out, but a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie tangled in an investigation that will challenge her allegiance to her mother, her conscience, and Willie Woodley, the brusque madam on Conti Street. 

Josie is caught between the dream of an elite college and a clandestine underworld. New Orleans lures her in her quest for truth, dangling temptation at every turn, and escalating to the ultimate test. 

With characters as captivating as those in her internationally bestselling novel Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys skillfully creates a rich story of secrets, lies, and the haunting reminder that decisions can shape our destiny.

Reviews:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/out-of-the-easy-by-ruta-sepetys.html

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11178225-out-of-the-easy

THE OVERSTORY, BY RICHARD POWERS

The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

Reviews:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/richard-powers-the-overstory/559106/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-most-exciting-novel-about-trees-youll-ever-read/2018/04/03/bb388a4e-3686-11e8-8fd2-49fe3c675a89_story.html

VIRGIL WANDER, BY LEIF ENGER

The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander is an enchanting and timeless all-American story that follows the inhabitants of a small Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart.

Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking, kite-flying stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son; to Nadine, the reserved, enchanting wife of the vanished man; to Tom, a journalist and Virgil's oldest friend; and various members of the Pea family who must confront tragedies of their own. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town.

With intelligent humor and captivating whimsy, Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a swift, full journey into the heart and heartache of an often overlooked American Upper Midwest by a "formidably gifted" (Chicago Tribune) master storyteller.

Reviews:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/leif-engers-fans-have-waited-10-years-for-virgil-wander-was-it-worth-it/2018/10/01/93afd8ae-c512-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/books/review/leif-enger-virgil-wander.html

LOCKDOWN, BY LAURIE R. KING

Career Day at Guadalupe Middle School: a day given to innocent hopes and youthful dreams. A day no one in attendance will ever forget. 

New York Times bestselling author Laurie R. King is an award-winning master of combining rich atmospheric detail with riveting, keen-edged mystery. Now, in her newest standalone novel of psychological suspense, King turns her sharp eye to a moment torn from the headlines and a school under threat. 
A year ago, Principal Linda McDonald arrived at Guadalupe determined to overturn the school's reputation for truancy, gang violence, and neglect. One of her initiatives is Career Day--bringing together children, teachers, and community presenters in a celebration of the future. But there are some in attendance who reject McDonald's bright vision.

A principal with a secret. A husband with a murky past. A cop with too many questions. A kid under pressure to prove himself. A girl struggling to escape a mother's history. A young basketball player with an affection for guns. 

Even the school janitor has a story he dare not reveal. 

But no one at the gathering anticipates the shocking turn of events that will transform a day of possibilities into an expolsive confrontation. 

Tense, poignant, and brilliantly paced, Laurie R. King's novel charts compelling characters on a collision course--a chain of interactions that locks together hidden lives, troubling secrets, and the bravest impulses of the human heart.

Reviews:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/laurie-r-king/lockdown-king/

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-804177-93-1

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, BY GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUES

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again. Marques won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Love in the Time of Cholera was published in 1988

Reviews:

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/06/books/books-of-the-times-garcia-marquez-novel-covers-love-and-time.html

https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2009/1101/classic-review-love-in-the-time-of-cholera

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein

In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein began with a theme that resonated strongly with the liberal arts folks in our group.  Our schooling was based on the traditional notion that diverse strands of a broad education strengthen each other.  For some of us, that theme has been borne out by diverse and even checkered work histories.  We were pleased to have Epstein explain why our bias may be valid.

Epstein begins by contrasting Tiger Woods’s early specialization in golf with Roger Federer’s dabbling in many sports until he settled rather late on tennis.  Specialization and repetitive practice leads to positive results in what Epstein calls “kind” learning environments.  In these environments, patterns repeat and feedback is usually rapid and accurate.  Quick recognition and response is enhanced by practice.  Examples he cites are flight crews and surgical teams.  By contrast, “wicked” learning environments have a greater number of variables and are less predictable.  These environments value more intuition and judgment, which are developed better through a broader range of experience.  

Epstein dissects the learning process, showing that our learning skills have evolved to keep up with the shifting nature of the problems we deal with.  Over generations, we have become better accustomed to abstract and conceptual problems, “wicked” learning environments, as shown by improved IQ test scores.  He shows that slower learning may be deeper learning – with implications for both kind and wicked environments.  He expands this thought through varied examples of musical and artistic development and unconventional career paths in other fields such as video game design, economic forecasting, and work team configurations.  

He also shows how the accumulation of wider-ranging experiences can lead to changes in work directions and ultimately to better vocational “fit.”  Military service academies provide a well-documented basis for this discussion.  The early specialization of the academies does not lead to officers with longer service tenure, but rather produces mid-level officers ready to try other professional directions.  Other recruiting sources bring people into the officer corps with more diversity of experience and whose later choice of this career path often leads to longer tenure.  Epstein gives a related discussion of how “grit” adds or subtracts from performance.  Persistence can be a virtue, but so can jumping to a new career track which other experiences now support.  These “sampling” experiences also change problem-solving skills, with consequences in invention, incident management, and other areas.

Epstein’s writing is based on extensive review of scholarly work on learning and development, but presented in highly readable prose and laid out in engaging flow.  His conclusions are more like realizations that emerge from a review of the academic research and historical examples he marshals to demonstrate the points.  I never felt he was pushing me to agree, but simply showing me his way of view and inviting me along.  — Bill Smith

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, begins with famous actor Arthur Leander’s real-life death as he plays the role of King Lear on stage. At the same time, outside the theater, people are beginning to sicken and die of the Georgian flu as it sweeps the planet. 

In the opening pages, the reader is tossed into a compelling post-apocalyptic world. Who will have the luck, grit, and skill to survive? How will they survive? How will they travel? Eat? Find shelter? Keep their sanity? Form communities? Move on? 

The novel has an ensemble cast (a nod to The Traveling Symphony and the troupe of Shakespearian actors): Arthur, Clark, Miranda, Elizabeth, Tyler, Kirsten, and Jeevan—with Arthur as the connection among all the other characters. Clark is his best friend. Miranda is his first wife. Elizabeth is his second wife, mother of their young son, Tyler (who becomes the cruel, Calvinistically-bent Prophet). Kirsten is a child actress, cast as one of Lear’s young daughters. Jeevan is the person who rushes the stage in an effort to save Arthur. 

Mandel pairs Kirsten and Tyler in a very Shakespearian way. They are both eight years-old when the flu wipes out almost everybody. Both are children of Arthur (he is Kirsten’s stage father). Both have copies of Miranda’s comic book, Dr. Eleven—which is a graphic expression of the pull between good and evil, awake and asleep, life and death, love and hate, beauty and ugliness that runs throughout the story. 

As a grownup, as the Prophet, Tyler has become a cruel and terrifying cult leader in the name of God. Kirsten, on the other hand, before the company’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, describes the world thus: “What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away.”

Near the end of the novel, inevitably, Kirsten and the Prophet must face off.

To weave her tale, Mandel uses a rich and flexible narrative structure sort of like crochet, where there is a string of linear yarn, but the story is told in a series of interlocking loops that often go back to the beginning and start again—growing richer with each pass. She does playful, clever things to make connections. Lots of Shakespearian allusions; four different dogs named Loki; a paperweight which is a hostess gift to Miranda at a dinner party years before Arthur’s death, which Miranda gives back to Arthur, which he gives to his lover du jour, which she gives to Kirsten, which she gives to Clark for the Museum of Civilization. And everything, big and small, supports in some way awakening into a brave new world.

Jeevan, in the old world, was a paparazzi in a relationship with a shallow, indifferent woman. In the new world, twenty years out, he lives in a settlement in Virginia practicing primitive medicine. The end of the day finds him drinking wine amidst “the gentle music of the river, cicadas in the trees, the stars above the weeping willows on the far bank. . . . He was overcome at his good fortune at having found this place, this tranquility, this woman, at having lived to see a time worth living in.”

Mandel shows us a new world which is a slow and painful work in progress. We get our parting look through the eyes of Clark who “has no expectation of seeing an airplane rise again in his lifetime, but is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain?”

And the Traveling Symphony is going on the road again, taking a new route, perhaps to find the far southern town with the electrical grid. The first horse-drawn truck in the procession, as always, bears the creed: Because survival is insufficient.— Sharelle Moranville