Fiction

Short reviews of recent fiction books.

• A Thousand Splendid Suns
• New England White
• One for Sorrow Two For Joy
• The Interloper
• Dedication
• The Raw Shark Texts
• The Girl with the Golden Shoes
• On Chesil Beach

A Thousand Splendid Suns

By Khaled Hosseni
Riverhead, 384 pp., $25.95

Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel The Kite Runner was a story about brotherhood between two racially diverse men growing up in war-torn Afghanistan. With A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini divulges more about Afghanistan's turbulent and repressive history, but this time through the eyes of two women: a poor peasant girl (Mariam) who is raised by her emotionally broken mother in a "kolba" outside the city of Herat, and the privileged daughter of liberal intellectuals (Laila) who is given a multitude of educational opportunities in Kabul. Separate tragedies eventually bring them together under the same roof where they develop a bond of sisterhood and solidarity against their abusive and tyrannical husband Rasheed.

Hosseini's subtle and simple prose lulls readers into the narrative and before they know it, the audience is in the midst of something both obscene and beautiful. Plot twists as chapters end cause fingers to frantically flip pages. Through carefully orchestrated character development the reader experiences Afghanistan underneath the weight of a burka. Tides of injustice, violence, hunger, endurance and hope ebb and flow with the struggles of Mariam and Laila. Although A Thousand Splendid Suns examines the past 30 years of Afghanistan's history, from Soviet control to the rise and fall of the Taliban, the story remains elegantly pinpointed on the lives of the two women; quite splendid indeed.

�Deidre Wengen

New England White

By Stephen L. Carter
Alfred A. Knopf, 576 pp., $26.95

While by no means a perfect book, Stephen L. Carter's second work of fiction, New England White, may be a perfect beach book. Well-paced, if maddeningly elliptical, and liberally sprinkled with mini-cliffhangers, this octopus of a suspense novel has tentacles in government, academia, election politics and secretive societies for "the upper crust of African America."

Julia Carlyle belongs to that upper crust, though folks in her mostly white, casually racist New England town can scarcely fathom it. When she and her university president husband discover the corpse of her ex-boyfriend Kellen Zant, an economics professor, she is drawn into the search for Zant's missing and unknown "inventory." Zant tailored the clues (some obvious, some obscure) for Julia, whose wit and esoteric knowledge � of science, religion and antique mirrors � turn out to be lifesavers when others on the same trail start piling up more corpses in their wake.

Carter's observations about politics, race, gender and class are satisfyingly complicated, like Julia herself, who is the most real of all the characters. Her husband and relatives annoy her, and her kids don't really like her, but readers will. Tough, smart, and a little crazy, Julia's a good friend to take on vacation.

�Amy Baily

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy

By Elise Juska
Pocket Books, 270 pp., $14

Claire can think of five clues for fitting Bob's name in a crossword puzzle, but she can't articulate why she's miserable as his wife. After all, they're both in academia � he's an entomologist in rural New Hampshire, she's working on her dissertation on linguistics � and they seem a better match than her dignified father and her boozy-yet-devout mother. But after being a goody-two-shoes for almost 30 years, Claire decides to take off at the beginning of One for Sorrow, Two for Joy.

"But, ah, where would you go?" Bob asks. It's a fair question. She doesn't have any friends, even back home in Philly, and she can't see staying with her widowed dad at his condo down the shore. So she jets to Ireland, where her self-centered sister, Noelle, tends bar and lives with her fiancé and his gigantic family. Noelle may be a dropout and a drama queen, but she's happier than her big sister, so she must be doing something right.

Claire spends most of the novel in her head, mapping familial alliances and trying to make everything fit as neatly as words in a crossword grid. Not much happens on the outside, anyway: a little sibling rivalry, a few touristy day trips. Claire's not always lovable � she doesn't let her family get too close, let alone readers � but there's much to like in UArts writing teacher Elise Juska's empathetic portrait of a smart woman who's finally figuring that it's OK not to know everything.

�M.J. Fine

The Interloper

By Antoine Wilson
Handsel Books, 276 pp., $13.95

Pinning a book's success on one big plot twist gets risky. There's no guarantee that the twist will stay hidden; if it doesn't, the is left reader bored and marking time until the end of the story. Even if the twist works, the machinery necessary to pull off that sleight-of-hand may well overwhelm the revelation that's been concealed, turning shock into anticlimax.

Judging solely by its twist, Antoine Wilson's The Interloper should be a bust. It's not, and Wilson even turns the obviousness of his plotting to his advantage. He shows skill in hedging his bets, hinting that he's playing a much different game than one expects when starting his book.

Wilson starts out writing a straightforward con. Owen Patterson, newly wedded, simply wants a normal marriage, but his wife is consumed by mourning for her murdered brother. Patterson wants revenge for himself and his new family, and looks to punish his brother-in-law's killer by inventing an object of desire in a series of lonelyhearts prison letters that he can dangle and snatch away, destroying the murderer as his brother-in-law was destroyed.

The psychological-pulp trappings of Wilson's revenge plot telegraph the story's end, but that's no great handicap. Wilson's far more interested in the costs that revenge exacts on Patterson's personality, and the way that his alter ego highlights and magnifies weaknesses in Patterson's psyche. Carefully and economically rendered, The Interloper trades shock and revelation for a quiet but very effective creepiness � a very good bet on Wilson's part.

�Justin Bauer

Dedication

By Emma McLaughlin and Nicole Kraus
Atria Books, 288 pp., $24

Emma McLaughlin and Nicole Kraus' latest book, Dedication, isn't just another silly chick novel from the team that brought you The Nanny Diaries. It isn't just another love story about a bona fide Sk8er Boi rock star (a.k.a. Jake Sharpe) who returns to his hometown just to see the look on his ex's face. If anything, Kate Hollis � the ex in question whom Jake stood up on prom night to chase after his California dreams � is ready and eager to make Jake "regret his entire existence." Some girls dream of having songs written about them. Not Kate, who is far from happy about being the muse of such chart-topping hits as "Kate Hollis' Mom is a Skanky Ho" and "How Kate Lost Her Virginity." Reading Dedication is like skipping around on the radio. In one chapter, you might be meditating on the moment at hand as Kate and Jake painfully but sincerely exchange accusations and explanations. The next, you're tuning into the middle of one of Kate's memories, from awkward middle school dances through the post-Jake frat parties. Like listening to a song from your high school days, the mise en scène of Kate's memories has enough emotional backstory to capture your attention, despite the confusion of too many secondary characters and too many pop references. Thankfully, McLaughlin and Kraus are more interested in singing the praises of Kate, who is the embodiment of smart and realistically independent thirtysomething women today who rock, in spite of the rock stars who got away from them, saving what could be a just another love story from being stuck on repeat.

�Mickey Jou

The Raw Shark Texts

By Steven Hall
Cannongate, 448 pp., $24

Slippery and quick, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts pulls itself along at a breakneck pace as if afraid to let you pause for a moment to figure out what's just transpired among its various layers and lives. Deeply-felt novels of grief and blinding denial rarely find themselves described as summer beach bait, but Hall's is precisely that.

Gasping into consciousness, our hero Eric Sanderson finds himself alone and empty. That is, completely unburdened by a single memory. The ever-diligent pre-amnesia first Eric Sanderson leaves his successor a stream of letters leading the newly awakened Eric to rediscover his identity and history, his love and his loss.

The fairly unsurprising arc of his journey isn't what makes the novel the compelling quasi-adventure-thriller it is. In keeping with the thickly woven work of Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr. Y or Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Hall's Sanderson finds himself in the company of his cat, Ian ("a bit of an arsehole... " "Well, that's what you want in a cat"), and his enigmatic guide Scout. Together they descend into a fantastical linguistic hell in an attempt to escape the ravenous shark (made entirely of words) bent on destroying his memories with mega meta bites.

Really.

Despite the seemingly senseless fantasia of memory-eating sharks and virtual realities made up of castoff office equipment, Hall gives his book a background of love and longing, loss and forgiveness, which turns his whimsy into a very real tale of acceptance.

�Char Vandermeer

The Girl with the Golden Shoes

By Colin Channer
Akashic, 181 pp., $13.95

The impulsive heroine of this elegant novella, 14-year-old Estrella Thompson, is a fabulous fictional creation. Thinking she was "born unlucky," Estrella seeks to find her place in the world after she is cast out from her home in a Caribbean fishing village. Known to her friends as Pepper, because, she says, "when I cuss, my words is very hot," Estrella seeks to find a pair of shoes so she can get a job in the city of Seville. Such is the simple plot of The Girl with the Golden Shoes, which will leave most readers wanting more. (This is perhaps the book's greatest flaw).

Channer makes the fiercely determined Estrella's journey � which includes encounters with various men who want to get to know her � compelling because he creates a strong sense of place and character. The story may be a fable, with gentle humor and the rhythms of Caribbean life, but it resonates.

This is mainly because Channer's writing is so wonderfully evocative. A character's skin is described as "as dark as a coke," or "like rum," and lines about the barefoot Estrella running on her blisters are absolutely tactile. Even her patois is beautifully rendered; Estrella's innocence is apparent when she speaks, but her desire to read and learn reflects her intelligence, and her charm. The strength of The Girl with the Golden Shoes is that Estrella is a compassionate character, and one that readers will be glad to know.

�Gary M. Kramer

On Chesil Beach

By Ian McEwan
Talese, 208 pp., $22

In his fantastic new book On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan (Saturday, Atonement, Amsterdam) takes two happy newlyweds and pushes them off a cliff with this opening: "They were young, educated and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy."

The groom, Edward has mistaken his bride Florence's fear of physical intimacy for "a form of coyness, a conventional veil for a richly sexual nature," and "proof of her quality," while Florence, for her part, "loved him, she wanted to please him, but she had to overcome considerable distaste."

From these rough beginnings, through their impossible conversation and beyond, On Chesil Beach is stark, raw and hauntingly beautiful. Shifting the narrative between the first dim hour of a honeymoon and the engagement that preceded it, McEwan is a master of mood, music, color and lighting: Florence and Edward court in brilliant Technicolor to sunny melodies; while their honeymoon suite, in noirish shadows, has only Foley for accompaniment. Unflinching in his honesty, McEwan is nonetheless humane or sympathetic, and the result is a book that is warm, alive and unforgettable.

�Amy Baily