Fiction

Finds for fiction freaks

The Rain Before It Falls

By Jonathan Coe

Knopf, 256 pp., $23.95

Jonathan Coe has always been a dependable novelist, from his American debut with The Winshaw Legacy a little more than a decade ago, through his more recent semi-memoirs. His latest, The Rain Before It Falls, might just ruin his reputation for reliability.

Until now, Coe's novels have been of a particular kind most often practiced by young British men — mild satires of class and manners, told with a slight experimental flair. Coe has always been good at this; he finds precise ratios of humor and gall, and packages his stories carefully. He'll pull out a narrative trick or two but leaven his situations with a touch of absurdity, even while maintaining chilly detachment from even his liveliest characters.

Rain, though, departs from the formula. Instead of angry-young-man satire, Coe takes on a multigenerational mothers-and-daughters tale. After a brief framing chapter or two, Coe sets up a rigidly artificial structure that involves his elderly main character, Rosamond, at the end of her life, narrating memories into a tape recorder. The tape, describing 20 pictures, is intended for a blind great-niece. Instead of seeming mechanical, though, this device provides momentum, and the interplay between writing, spoken monologue and image enriches Rosamond's tone-perfect soliloquies.

More surprisingly, Coe's characteristic coldness emerges only in his characters; the writer shows more emotional sensitivity than ever before. Coe even dips, in the last few pages of the frame story, into sentimental mawkishness. Rosamond's voice drowns out that misstep, though, and underscores how far a dependable writer can come when he leaves his comfort zone.

—Justin Bauer

Arkansas

By John Brandon

McSweeney's, 224 pp., $22

When The Wire came down in Baltimore last week, culture dorks across the country lost our only dealers in the game. For those of us in withdrawal, John Brandon's punchy debut novel, Arkansas, couldn't have come at a better time, offering up a different drug trade altogether: more Southern, more rural and even whiter than The Greek and White Mike.

Brandon's unlikely organization is headed by Ken Hovan, aka Frog, a brooding ex-bouncer with connections from Florida to Texas. Among his many middlemen are Swin Ruiz, a bodybuilding wannabe academic; and Kyle Ribb, an orphaned drifter with an uncanny knack for survival. Paired by the boss they've never seen, they front as junior park rangers in southern Arkansas, soon finding themselves embroiled in a deal gone bad.

Swin and Kyle are pawns in the legacy of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, complete with the banter and existential angst. The Southern underworld they inhabit is at once kooky and familiar, sustained by Big Gulps, pawn shops and the legacy of Bill Clinton. It's a deliciously all-American setting, and Brandon's writing is vivid and patently cool, seeming to speed the reader toward some breathless conclusion. But as the story unfolds, it fails to slow down, mounting detail upon detail, as though each one mattered the same. In the end, even the most attribute-leadened characters meld together. For all the style, and all the fun, there are no Stringer Bells or Omar Littles here, just a bunch of quirky criminal dudes going along for the ride.

—Katherine Hill

Lush Life

By Richard Price

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 464 pp., $26

Nastiness is the real beauty of a good urban crime novel. Richard Price has never been afraid to expose the grit and grime — making cities the gorgeously layered organisms they are. He did it with great success with Dempsy, the fictional New Jersey city of Clockers and Freedomland. Dempsy's Dickensian complexity matches the visceral throb of fellow crime novelist George Pelecanos' D.C., but the Lower East Side of Price's Lush Life suffers, somehow, under the constraints of its reality.

New York neighborhoods are seemingly always on the cusp of major change, and the Lower East Side of Lush Life is uncomfortably expanding and contracting one year after the Towers fell. "Pioneering" wannabe doctors, artists, actors, writers and kids from the nearby projects mingle on the narrow, ghost-filled streets below Houston. Six years later, these same streets boast boutique hotels with Japanese soaking tubs and molecular food joints alongside halfway houses and bodega clerks behind bulletproof Plexi. Price nails the historical and social dichotomy at the expense of those who inhabit the changing streets.

Price never seems to write heroes; instead he sticks with characters who are mightily but wonderfully flawed. The plot isn't the point with authors like Price and Pelecanos, but character and atmosphere are. Because of that, it's easy to forgive the overlong police interview of the innocent suspect Eric Cash and the detours taken into the lives of police detective Matty Clark's troubled sons. It's equally easy to appreciate the phenomenal two-page, three-sentence internal rant of the exhausted, self-loathing Cash.

What isn't easy to forgive or appreciate is the superficial gloss he paints on project boys Tristan and Little Dap. The story revolves around them, too, but you certainly wouldn't know it. Yes, they're invisible, and it's that very invisibility that sparks their actions; however, it would have been a sharper and nastier and more beautiful novel if only they were more visible to Price.

—Char Vandermeer

We Disappear

By Scott Heim

Harper Perennial, 320 pp., $13.95

The tiny, specific details — from the sight of a smudged drinking glass to the "rotten olive taste" of jealousy — are what make Scott Heim's third novel so spellbinding. These observations render the loneliness, despair and need for love of We Disappear's meth-fueled protagonist, also named Scott, with remarkable clarity. The author adroitly depicts the ugly truths of his characters — their addictions to drugs and drink, their demons and secrets — and makes them real and sympathetic.

This tale of an addict returning home to Haven, Kan., to care for his dying mother, Donna, includes meticulous descriptions of the effects of meth on Scott and the ravages of Donna's cancer on her body, her mind and the friends and family who care for her. With its precision and pathos, Heim's writing consistently breaks your heart.

In We Disappear, Scott indulges his mother's morbid obsession with kidnapped children. He listens, dubiously, to her recount an experience of her own temporary abduction. As Scott unravels the mystery, he discovers things about Donna he might prefer not to know. In doing so, he tries to atone for his mistakes as a son.

Heim's poetic repetition of words and themes ultimately builds a poignant, moving crescendo of emotion. But it is the marvelous details — the passage on Cherry Mash candies, or the untangling of Donna's knotty stories — that truly impress. We Disappear is all about extraordinary storytelling, and it is extraordinarily well-told.

—Gary M. Kramer

In Hoboken

By Christian Bauman

Melville House, 250 pp., $15.95

New Hope-based author Christian Bauman positions his third novel to be: A) a rough-hewn, gritty tale; B) done in the styles of Nick Hornby and Neal Pollack; C) centered around would-be bands; and D) based in Hoboken, N.J. It seems somewhat reasonable, given these elements, to expect that the music dealt with in In Hoboken might be, oh, I don't know, rock of some sort. But the references Bauman drops, from real-life festivals attended by his fictional singers to the legacy artists they model themselves after, evoke AAA radio and coffeehouse folk much more readily than, say, Yo La Tengo. This, in itself, is not a setback. Perhaps Hoboken did have a booming busker scene in the mid-'90s that received scant publicity. Even if it didn't, cognitive dissonance needn't necessarily stand in the way of a good work of fiction; I might be willing to suspend my disbelief about Bauman's setting if he had a good enough story to tell. The problem is, he doesn't. The narrative is so base and his characters such husks of clichés that his shortcomings become all the more pronounced. Thatcher, a guitar player recently out of the Army, drifts into town to crash with his old high school friend James and kick-start his career as a Woody Guthrie-style singer-songwriter. This naturally proves difficult and we follow Thatcher over the course of a year as he seeks crutch-like support from a network of friends, caricatures every bit as much as he. Perhaps the banality of their dreamer-style lives is Bauman's point, but he doesn't make that point well, bogging In Hoboken down with anachronistic catchphrases ("WTF" and "bling" in a novel set in 1995?), tedious sequences of colloquial trivia, impossibly flip dialogue that passes for wit and an ensemble cast of characters who are simply difficult to care about.

—John Vettese

Skim

Written by Mariko Tamaki Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki

Groundwood Books, 142 pp., $18.95

Joint teenage suicide might be the best way to preserve true love. It worked for Romeo and Juliet. It could've worked for you and that formerly-special-someone if you had only had the foresight and weren't so scared of commitment. But contrary to what everyone at her Catholic school might think, 16-year-old Wiccan-in-training and ultra-Goth Skim thinks it's a lame escape for losers lacking imagination. Losers like the closet homosexual jock who swallowed his mom's heart pills after his girlfriend dumped him, and whose suicide has the whole school going to depression assemblies holding bake sales to celebrate life. Or losers like Shakespeare, who Skim doesn't think deserves to have tests made about him. Or losers like her eccentric English teacher, Ms. Archer, who left school for an artist colony right after a forbidden hookup with her student in the woods behind school during lunch break.

Skim's diary entries and the novel's accompanying illustrations fuel duel narratives that seem to flirt with each other and at times even merge, like when her diary entries include doodles. Though the wispy sketches swoop the reader/viewer's eyes along, there is at least one occasion where everything stops and color seems to explode from the bleak charcoal scene.

Though there's not enough here to fall in love with, it makes a sweet spring fling: something to enjoy and finish quickly, to remember fondly once you've settled down and are trudging through something more hefty.

—Sam Tremble

Deviant Behavior

By Mike Sager

Grove Press/Black Cat, 304 pp., $14

Set in the early '90s at the end of the elder Bush's presidential stint, Mike Sager's outlandish but well-researched first novel, Deviant Behavior: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, Fatherhood and Crystal Skulls, focuses on Jonathan Seede, a functional junkie and dedicated reporter investigating Washington, D.C.'s seedy underbelly for his secret book project. It's a nonfictional walk through the drug war, social politics and sexual indiscretions of D.C.'s 14th Street strip, where Seede meets an interesting crowd of people — some friends, some foes, some just a story — who provide problematic, but entertaining, individual tales. Among them is Jim Freeman, the gay activist who opens an Elizabeth Taylor Medical Center (and later dies of AIDS); Salem, the "white-girl-talking-black" accidental prostitute who witnessed the murder of her rich Cuban lover in Miami; and Sojii, the exotic teenage runaway with mommy issues but also insight and beauty.

The selfish Seede, with his just-say-yes attitude, is eventually done in by his penchant for an irresistible high and sex. His indiscretions land him almost dead in the gutter, hallucinating about — and subsequently battling with — his wife, child in tow, who left him some months ago. It's a nod to the philosophical queries of the book: Do we give in to our urges, despite societal restrictions and possibly losing everything, or do we follow the rules and possibly lose ourselves?

Sager answers those questions without saying a word about them, leaving it up to the reader to decipher what he means. And because of that, despite the skull and the stereotypes, Deviant Behavior is a worthwhile read.

—Annamarya Scaccia

Wild Nights! About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway

Perhaps we overlook the quality of Joyce Carol Oates' incredible output, given its sheer quantity — Wild Nights! is her 21st collection of short stories, in addition to more than 40 novels, eight poetry volumes and about 20 plays.

Wild Nights! not only imagines five American writers' final days, it also reveals Oates slyly borrowing each author's voice. Most straightforward is "Papa at Ketchum 1961": Though written in the third person, it feels like Hemingway himself relating the fury and futility spurring his suicide. Her Henry James pastiche, "The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1914-1916," shows the aging novelist finding new life in a World War I trauma ward. "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906" was most surprising: Who knew that Mark Twain had a special taste for adolescent girls? All these stories have their basis either in the authors' work or lives. "Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House" places Edgar Allan Poe in one of his unfinished stories. This science-fiction piece supposes that Poe faked his death to join a psychological experiment about solitude; he keeps a remote Chilean lighthouse, accompanied by only dog and journal, with dire results. Oates captures Poe's chilling style in the volume's only first-person tale.

Wild Nights! proves a special treat for all who love Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway — as Oates obviously does.

—Mark Cofta

The White Tiger

By Aravind Adiga

Free Press, 288 pp., $24

Delivered to the desk of China's premier, Wen Jiabao, is a letter written over the course of seven nights by a self-proclaimed entrepreneur. The sender, Balram Halwai, or "The White Tiger," tells the story of his life in the so-called Darkness (the name for India's poorest villages along the river Ganga) and his unheard-of success in getting out to become a businessman. As you learn early on in the letter, Balram is a murderer. You'll come to understand the necessity of that murder as the book progresses; Balram's charm has you cheering for him despite his flaws. Alongside Balram's tales of being a servant and murderer are countless stories of India's stark separation among the castes. On the bottom rung, children are born without names, hospitals are filled with the sick and dying but lack a single doctor, and men spend their entire lives in jail for crimes committed by the rich.

The White Tiger's story is relevant Stateside, too, where globalization and outsourcing keep our nation running for the time being with little thought to future consequences that may be in store. As for Adiga's home country (he worked for several years as a political correspondent for Time magazine throughout India), this first-time novelist exhibits a keen understanding of a nation ruled by so few in the "light" while so many remain tormented in the Darkness.

—Danielle Zimmerman

Boy A

By Jonathan Trigell

Serpent's Tail, 256 pp., $14.95

The debut novel (now also a movie) by Jonathan Trigell, a 34-year-old British author now living in France, is about a vulnerable teenager named Jack. We learn from the start that Jack is not the boy's given name; he handpicked it from The Big Book of Boys Names as a way to shed his past as a child who was once accused of murdering another child known simply as "Boy A." Much of the gritty novel asks looming questions about whether a person can ever truly reconcile a traumatic past and start anew. The bigger question is, what happens to a childhood interrupted? And that's exactly where the novel picks up.

Readers immediately get to know Jack as a seemingly good guy who suffers from extreme flashes of violence. He is, at times, unreachable to himself and those around him. It's only as each alphabetized chapter unfolds that we realize the impact media sensationalism and the juvenile institutional system have on Jack's already feverish teen angst. Throughout the book, he does his best and worst to escape what he was accused of being: a murderer.

In every way, this novel is rough — from its doomed characterization to the bleak post-industrial setting to the sparse, sometimes bumpy writing style. In it, right and wrong are blurred and embodied in a character who, while in many ways innocent to the world, is perpetually on trial for an unforgettable childhood crime. But rather than the book being about vindication, it's more about reclaiming one's own humanity in the wake of tragedy. It's also a novel about identity and that no matter how we may try to reshape it, we are a reflection of our past. And in the case of Jack, it haunts him until the very end.

—Natalie Hope McDonald