Fiction Reviews

Joyce Carol Oates has always kept an eye on the dark side — the places in larger society where people get lost or, worse, destroyed. In My Sister, My Love, her 37th novel, she re-imagines one of the dirtiest corners of recent times, the tragic murder of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey.

Oates transforms JonBenét into Bliss, an ice-skating star, but the family setup of successful father, socially ambitious mother and obscure older brother remain intact. The brother's voice dominates the novel, subtitled The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike. Skyler doesn't just tell his version of events leading to Bliss' death; he adds detailed footnotes directly addressing the "canny reader." Meanwhile Bliss' cries of "Help me," "I am so afraid" and "I hurt" appear in boldface at intervals in the text, increasing the reader's sense of horror.

The book is part confession, part murder mystery, part skewering of upper-middle-class pretensions with a heavy dose of pop-culture ridicule. Just when you're convinced you know what happened, the book takes an unexpected loop and ends in a complete surprise. This is a beautifully written, if somewhat depressing, novel playfully set up with headlines, dialogues and footnotes. Not content to tell her story in almost 500 pages, Oates adds a 55-page novella, as well. So this isn't just a good summer read, it's a read that may take a good part of the summer to complete.

—Janet Anderson

The Enchantress of Florence

At his best, Salman Rushdie is an athletic novelist, enthralled with wordplay and myth. His characters, ever bound to history, burst with body, talent and desire, rising up as impressive if flawed specimens of humanity. Yet despite this exuberance, the Rushdie narrator remains a cynic: There is the awesome potential of human civilization, and then there is the brutal course that history and politics take. Tragedy is our inability to reconcile the two.

Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, centers on the real-life Mughal emperor Akbar, who ruled India from 1556 to 1605. Father to three sons and husband to many wives, including one perfect — and imaginary — queen, Akbar is pompous but infinitely sympathetic, a city-builder, scholar and general who is destined for historical greatness. Yet when a yellow-haired foreigner arrives at his court with a secret, Akbar begins to understand his legacy's fragile state. A saga concerning the titular enchantress, the secret spans continents and generations, unfolding like any Rushdie narrative, in discursive tangents and backstories until the entire world is implicated. At the center are three boyhood friends in Florence: Antonino Argalia, Ago Vespucci and Niccoló Machiavelli himself.

Rushdie researched the novel for years, and it shows, both in his six-page bibliography and in the fantastic lives of Akbar, the foreigner and the beautiful enchantress who connects them. Fans of linear narrative may bristle, but most readers will enjoy the ride. A novel about storytelling and inheritance, The Enchantress of Florence is notably less political than Midnight's Children or the fatwa-generating The Satanic Verses, though politics and religion do play their part. In these pages, Rushdie's romance of human potential transports us to an old world of imperious men and witchy women, before failed democracy and modern terrorism, a world almost — but not quite — innocent of the tragedy to come.

—Katherine Hill

Prescription for a Superior Existence

"From the beginning I could hardly bear it," ends the opening paragraph of Prescription for a Superior Existence, and readers may have the same thought if they slog through all of Philadelphia transplant Emmons' maddening novel.

Jack Smith, a fired San Francisco executive, is forced into a religion/cult called Prescription for A Superior Existence or PASE (insert Scientology parallel here). Yet Emmons never makes the anti-sex PASE seductive. Even with the babble about "UR Gods," a "Last Day" and becoming "savant," there is little to be impassioned about. The chapters depicting Jack's life falling apart before PASE are far more energizing.

Furthermore, as Jack becomes a full-fledged PASE convert, he becomes more difficult to care about. After he is pulled out of the religion/cult for deprogramming by the Cult Opposition Network (CON) — and he resists — the novel culminates in a series of ludicrous events and coincidences. Even his romance with Mary Shoale, the anti-PASE daughter of the religion/cult's founder, is wholly unconvincing.

Most frustrating of all is that Emmons is obviously knowledgeable. But while he gets at some ineluctable truths about human nature and desire, his writing is often embarrassingly clunky. Ultimately, the big questions Emmons asks do not resonate.

One may think that hating this book is like Jack's initial dislike of PASE "stemming from prejudice rather than an honest assessment," but that is hardly the case.

—Gary M. Kramer

Atmospheric Disturbances

As summer weddings prove, true love doesn't guarantee sunshine on your big day. And many anniversaries later, doubt can always rush in to cloud your ability to love as deeply and as simply as you used to.

That's the hard lesson Leo Liebenstein, the New York City psychiatrist and narrator of Rivka Galchen's complex first novel, struggles with after he suspects his much younger wife, Rema, of a vague infidelity. Galchen puts Leo up against the fact that even at age 51, love and its effects change as often as the weather.

Galchen's plot runs wild and cerebral as Leo convinces himself that Rema has been replaced by a doppelganger, and only he can find his real wife. But even as Leo is crazily jetting off to Argentina, e-mailing a dead meteorologist and treating a weather-obsessed patient named Harvey — the love-weather metaphor works because, head games aside, Leo's vulnerability keeps bringing him back to Earth.

Galchen's dense language hobbles the novel's rhythm; it's often maddening, and that may be the point. But even in chapters two or three pages long, Leo's nerdy eloquence can be a struggle. Determined readers will eventually see Leo's quixotic adventure take on a sweet sadness, as Galchen uses his character's madness to show that our perceptions of how we love are easily altered, and small changes can lead to odd disappointments that must be overcome, if only to justify happier memories. Though much of the book requires heavy lifting, the finale is beautiful, and true in its complexity.

—Matt Jakubowski

The Turnaround

The Turnaround kicks off in the summer of 1972 with heat waves rising off the pavement and sound waves emanating from cruising cars. George Pelecanos, urban everyman and D.C.'s street poet laureate, is back.

"The car was a white-over-blue Cutlass Supreme. Because of the color scheme, and because it was not the 442, Billy often needled Pete about the vehicle, saying it was a car for 'housewives and homos.'" With this turn of phrase, Pelecanos aptly sets the stage.

The slow, lethargic build to the cataclysmic and senseless moment is what Pelecanos does so very well each and every time; it's this same deliberateness that he applies to the men, women and teenagers who inhabit his pages.

The Turnaround is a survivors' tale mixed with race, anger, resignation, loss, hope and redemption. It's no surprise that a guy named Pelecanos can write a character named Pappas with authority and precision. What is constantly surprising is that he can pull off 50-year-old Irishmen, black teenagers and life-worn mothers with equal grace.

With his last couple of books, Pelecanos has been honing his skill to portray lost boys redeemed into good men by honest hard work. Alex Pappas and Raymond Monroe's attempts to make sense out of the summer of 1972 some 35 years later show that a hardworking crime writer can quietly become a master of dialogue and characterization.

—Char Vandermeer

Dear American Airlines

There's a certain school of economy that would have you believe that one person's recession is just another's opportunity; that every closing door opens a different window; that no situation is so dire that someone can't profit from it. These are the gentlemen who advise buying when there's blood in the street.

So far, there aren't all that many dismal scientists saying "recession" aloud, and the blood in the streets remains a metaphor for the rising price of oil. Still, you have to suspect just a little economic voodoo coming out of the publishing industry this travel season. The people at Houghton Mifflin know what they're doing, releasing Jonathan Miles' Dear American Airlines at the start of June, just when travel season begins in earnest.

Set against the bulk of normal summer reading — procedurals and romances, or serious doorstoppers for those who want a single book in the carry-on — a novella-length epistolary novel detailing an aged alcoholic's self-flagellating regrets at missing his daughter's commitment ceremony wouldn't seem like a home run.

Dear American Airlines takes off as a cutting rant delivered during an unscheduled layover at O'Hare. Miles frames the book as a call for a refund and simple justice from an airline that's hit headlines for gouging its passengers just a little more than its competition. The setup, of course, is a gimmick, but anyone who has slept on an airport terminal bench can be taken in by Miles' gallows charm.

Still, it might be best to keep Miles' book at home on your next trip. What's good for Houghton Mifflin might not be so pleasing to the TSA.

—Justin Bauer

Real World

The most disorienting thing about Natsuo Kirino's new, noirish Real World is the insignificance of the crime at the heart of the plot.

It's not insignificant by way of being trifling — an unpopular suburban Tokyo boy bludgeons his mother to death with a baseball bat. Instead, the crime becomes at best a MacGuffin, and the boy who commits it remains largely a cipher.

This isn't a matter of cultural difference, either (though Kirino is better-known and more widely published in her native Japan): Kirino simply doesn't have much interest in men.

Her disinterest, not really a flaw, actually becomes her point. As with her English-language debut Out, here Kirino does an excellent job of creating events that throw small, tight groups of women into extreme situations. Out showed Kirino presiding over the dissolution of four wage-slave factory women; Real World replays that same dynamic with a clique of four high school girls.

This common pattern gets Kirino's books labeled as feminist noir, and the mechanical nature of her plots don't disabuse. She delivers blood, and then suspense, then more blood. But the reason Out and Real World surpass mere distaff Spillane comes from the missing men. Out imagines a band of working-class women able to avenge misogyny; Real World shows their almost-daughters able to trade vengeance for indifference.

—Justin Bauer