Fiction Shorts

Short reviews of recent fiction books.

Judas Coyne, an old but not burnt-out rock star, has an occult fetish and a past. Both wind up biting him on the ass when his sycophantic assistant tells him about an online auction for a ghost. Coyne buys it for $1,000, then learns he's been set up by one of his ex's bitter family members. This horror novel from Joe Hill (Stephen King's son) has enough modern trappings to be genuinely fresh, with just the right musical and occult references (from Black Sabbath to Aleister Crowley) to keep the old-heads enthused. Heart-Shaped Box also reads a lot cooler than King — and I'm a big fan. Though critics have compared this first novel to the work of Clive Barker, Hill's everyday, homey backdrop — an isolated farmhouse with lots of dogs, a man with a past and a relentless internal monologue, haunted and yet trying not to lose his shit — seems more like King's turf. Those jonesing for a literate page-turner about sex, blood and rock 'n' roll will love this.

—Alex Richmond

The question "What if?" may be one of the most powerful in literature, and Lionel Shriver gives it a stunning spin in The Post-Birthday World, a book that dares to explore every nook, every crevice of two parallel universes resulting from a single choice. Children's book illustrator Irina McGovern lives a quiet, fulfilling life in London with her longtime partner, Lawrence, not really thinking anything is amiss until an impromptu birthday dinner with Ramsey Acton, a friend of Lawrence. Amid sushi and conversation, Irina is overwhelmed with the urge to kiss Ramsey, knowing full well this places her at a crossroads. And here Shriver splits her narrative, alternating chapters of Irina's life had she done so with those where she had not. The book's heft is a good clue that Shriver will devote considerable time and energy to all facets of Irina's parallel choices, showing how Lawrence's closed-emotion state and endless obsession with world politics contrasts with Ramsey's garrulous charm and single-minded emphasis on his beloved snooker, and how each man brings out differing aspects of the best — and worst — in Irina. But The Post-Birthday World is equal parts about the protagonist and the nature of decision-making — how the "right" choice is as fraught with minefields just as much as the "wrong" one. Credit Shriver, whose last novel (2003's We Need to Talk About Kevin) catapulted her to prize-winning heights, for her own choice: refusing to take the easy way out and judge Irina for whatever path she follows.

—Sarah Weinman

An extremely wealthy Yemeni aristocrat somehow gets it into his head that he wants to introduce large numbers of salmon (a cold-water fish) into his country (a desert). A (not very) thinly veiled version of the current British government picks up on the two things it cares most passionately about: money and a good photo-op. A talented but stunningly dull fisheries scientist is strong-armed into overseeing the project.

Thereafter, everything in the life of Dr. Alfred Jones gets wobbly. As he is shuttled back and forth between London and the Yemen, his job, his marriage and his sense of scientific rationality — all the comforts of his middle-class life, in other words — begin to fall apart. They are quickly replaced by other things. Pretty soon, Jones isn't sure he wants his old life back.

Torday builds his first novel as a chain of e-mails, diary entries, press clippings and, by Salmon Fishing's grim climax, excerpts from parliamentary inquiries. The feel, however, is oddly redemptive. Torday wants it both ways, it seems: He wants us to laugh at his characters while they suffer, but he also wants us to be excited about the vaguely defined spiritual improvement they experience throughout the story.

Torday taps into some compelling ideas about the fickleness of political power and how we, the little people, experience it. You get the sense, though, that he never totally decided whether he wanted to write a quick read for the airport lounge or a political satire that might still resonate in a decade or two. He splits the difference by sticking the characters in odd situations and having them ruminate about how they feel something they can't quite describe. Salmon Fishing is a very funny, very clever book. It could have been more.

—Joel Tannenbaum

The story of Richard Gwyn is proof positive that quirky, unclassifiable books can be published — albeit in a quirky, unclassifiable fashion. When a tiny Welsh publisher, Parthian, first published his debut novel in 2005, it was quickly championed by British booksellers and critics and the attention soon landed him all manner of foreign-rights deals. Now The Color of a Dog Running Away finally is available in America and readers here can delight in its peculiar but delightful cornucopia of thriller trappings, history lessons, existential ruminations and cheeky asides.

In present-day Barcelona, Lucas is a sometimes translator and musician who's mostly interested in leisure time (if not full-blown slacking). But thanks to a mysterious postcard, he is pulled into a strange sequence of events featuring a lovely lass named Nuria, a talkative bunch of fellow misfits known as the Roof People, and a secret sect of individuals bent on mimicking the medieval Cathars in habit and punishment of perceived crimes. Or is he?

Gwyn keeps the reader wonderfully off-balance with shifting mood changes, alternating story lines and Lucas' possibly unreliable narration (often mocked by his friends, especially after a several-month interval of possible abduction and readjustment). Part homage (especially to Haruki Murakami) and part collage, Gwyn's debut seems destined to be a cult classic, but one can't help but hope there are more readers out there for his particular storytelling style.

—Sarah Weinman

Fiona Sweeney, a librarian, decides to leave New York to run a bookmobile that brings books to people who live in remote villages of Kenya, where 80 percent of the villagers are illiterate. But not everyone in the village of Mididima is overjoyed by books. Some townspeople believe that the books aren't needed and threaten their way of life. Others think that it will anger their god and bring drought, which is a constant threat. And when one of the villagers, named "Scar Boy" because of deformities from a hyena attack, refuses to return his books, the villagers believe he will bring a curse to them all.

The Camel Bookmobile is told from many points of view to show how life is much more complicated in one village than Sweeney could ever think. The narrative stutters at the beginning and can be pulled down by flowery language ("dismayingly cheerful"? Does such a thing exist?), but picks up when Sweeney spends four days living at the village in hopes of getting Scar Boy's books back. (A late fine won't cover this one — if a village refuses to return any books, they will be taken off the service.) It's a fascinating look at how one action done for good can touch and disrupt so many people, and about how difficult it can be to hold on and let go of tradition at the same time.

—Jen A. Miller

The female spy has been elevated to an almost mythic status thanks to the astonishing adventures of Mata Hari, the World War I temptress whose real story outshines the stereotype developed after her death. But as Philadelphia-based novelist Pam Jenoff demonstrates in her addictive, suspenseful historical debut The Kommandant's Girl, the real heroines of war are ordinary women thrust into extraordinarily brutal circumstances in which not making a seemingly awful choice could lead to even more devastating consequences. Nineteen-year-old Emma Bau, an Orthodox Jewish girl in WW II-era Poland, has been married only a few short weeks when her husband, Jacob, disappears without warning to join up with fellow Jewish resistance fighters against the onslaught of Nazi invaders. Emma herself is then smuggled out of her city's ghetto to Krakow, where she adopts the gentile identity of Anna Lipowski and attracts the professional — and personal — attention of Kommandant Richwadler. Emma knows she's supposed to view the Kommandant as an enemy, but working with him on a day-to-day basis gives her a glimpse of his individual humanity and renders her mission to provide intelligence on behalf of resistance fighters and to save Jacob that much more gut-wrenching. Jenoff has a keen eye for historical detail, an excellent way with pacing and character, and a marked ability of depicting all sides of a situation with myriad gray areas. The Kommandant's Girl isn't a thriller, but uses that genre's trappings to tell a literary story with greater mass appeal.

—Sarah Weinman

At the start of local author Lisa Scottoline's Daddy's Girl, University of Pennsylvania law professor Natalie "Nat" Greco accepts a colleague's invitation to teach a class at a nearby prison, a decision she quickly regrets when a riot breaks out.

Before one of the prison guards dies in her arms, he gives Greco a final message to pass along to his wife. Although the professor doesn't know the importance of the message, someone else clearly does, as Greco finds herself on the run for her life, accused of murder and with half the cops in the state on her trail.

Although Greco's behavior is sometimes questionable — speeding down an icy highway while fleeing the police, no doubt jeopardizing the lives of many other drivers — she is an interesting character and her plight is carefully designed to earn the audience's sympathy.

While Daddy's Girl is a fast-paced thriller, the plot is so wildly unbelievable that it might be difficult for some readers to overlook the improbabilities and coincidences that power the story forward. If they can get past that, though, they're likely to be reasonably well entertained.

—David J. Montgomery

If Franz Kafka were funny, if, while down at his local pub in Prague, he had fired off one witty, sarcastic rejoinder after another about the absurdity of the world, then he would have written a novel like Scott Stein's Mean Martin Manning.

For the past 30 years, fed up with the idiocy of the world around him, Manning has locked himself into his apartment. He has neither left his rooms nor spoken to a single human being. Television and the Internet have satisfied his mental diet. Salami, cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches have been his chief bodily sustenance. Manning has created a little oasis of comfort in which he pads around all day in slippers and a bathrobe. He no longer owns any other articles of clothing.

Of course, the world comes crashing in (literally) when a social caseworker, Alice Pitney, learns of Manning's lifestyle and vows to "cure" him, to help him "realize his full potential." What follows is a romp through an absurdist America from trial — in which Manning, as a belligerent but witty Josef K zings his contempt onto the proceedings — to rehabilitation with a cast of other loonies whom Pitney is also "helping."

Manning narrates his story as a first-rate smart-ass, taking aim at a society that shoves health and happiness down its citizens' throats as if the true meaning of life could be found in uncooked vegetables and self-help programs, when we all know what we really need is salami and pro wrestling. Scott Stein has written a perfect book for Philadelphians who are having trouble coming to grips with government-decreed bans of trans fats and even the slightest whiff of tobacco smoke. In fact, smoking was the only pleasurable vice I missed in this gem of book.

Mean Martin Manning is a kind of manifesto for those fed up with the health-and-well-being nazis of all stripes, telling others what they should or shouldn't do. The enforcement of civility. No junk food. Eat right. Exercise. Realize your potential. These are the commands of a parent to a child, not the wise legislation of political leaders. So, what happens when bureaucrats become stern parents? Those not in power become petulant children, just waiting for Mom and Dad to turn their backs so they can snatch a treat from the cookie jar or smoke a cigarette out behind the shed. Here lies the deeper problem of a health-obsessed society, which Stein's novel addresses: the infantilization of adults.

As the novel progresses, Manning becomes less like Kafka's Josef K and more like Anthony Burgess' Alex, whom society wishes to turn into the perfect clockwork orange, seemingly ripe on the outside, but mechanically precise on the inside. And where's the fun in that? Manning revolts against this new system that's supposed to make him a better human being and draws up his list of those who need a comeuppance. The scary part of it all is that Stein's novel is no dystopian vision of a distant future. The time is now. Guard your salami and mayonnaise. Mean Martin Manning for President!

—Edward Pettit