Fiction Reviews

In her second novel, queer activist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore delves into the daily doldrums of a gay prostitute whose traumatic past has brought him to the brink of unraveling. Rendered in confessional, stream-of-consciousness prose, the book reads like a diary, replete with free associating word games and faceless characters who wander in and out of the narrative without explanation.

Sycamore throws plot to the wind in favor of meandering reflections on bikram yoga, the narrator's cockroach problem and his tricks' idiosyncrasies. While these refrains provide a degree of narrative continuity and even poetic resonance, they veer into monotony as it becomes clear that Sycamore is more interested in texture than story line. Her approach does achieve flashes of descriptive brilliance — we can feel the mold on the carpet, the cold interior of city buses, the surreal agony of insomnia. Ultimately, Sycamore's prose is too loose, unfocused and aesthetically driven to reach higher levels of social commentary or emotional engagement. It is the point, perhaps, that Sycamore's narrator would rather talk about Thai food than confront his demons, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating.

—Liz Tung

Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction from Young American Writers

There have been many books written by gay authors about the usual subjects of coming out, homophobia, AIDS and sexuality. But few speak for a younger generation of gay men born long after Stonewall. These 18 stories, published by Philly's own Running Press, showcase an array of fresh fiction devoid of painful coming-out stories and self-loathing. Instead, the stories are energized by sometimes humorous anecdotes about everything from finding sex on Craigslist to eco-terrorism to a Brad Pitt fantasy vacation.

In the story "The Sex Lives of Shadows," Eddie Beverage waxes erotically about the days of backroom buggery and a sex addict turned rapist, while in "Happiness," L.A. Fields tells the tale of young, unshocking love between two men. Gay fiction of the past relied on personal experience to tell tumultuous stories of civil rights and sexual freedom, but Cool Thing reads less like memoir and more like, well, fiction. Many of the young authors have been schooled more by John Waters' filthy world and less by The Laramie Project. That's refreshing, especially if you consider progress to be akin to nonchalance.

—Natalie Hope McDonald

To Siberia

Last year, Norwegian novelist Per Petterson burst onto the American scene with Out Stealing Horses, a humble but powerful World War II novel The New York Times named one of the best books of the year. On the heels of that success, Petterson's 1996 novel, To Siberia, also about Scandinavians in World War II, comes to American audiences for the first time.

Marked by transcendent northern landscapes and poignant stoicism, To Siberia was forged in the same literary fire as Out Stealing Horses. The unnamed narrator and her brother Jesper grow up in a Danish fishing village in the 1930s, each longing to travel, but in different directions. Jesper dreams of Morocco while the narrator sees herself in Siberia, despite the persistent cold. After their grandfather's suicide and the Nazi invasion, the siblings grow remarkably close, even as Jesper is drawn deeper into the furtive life of the Resistance.

The story unfolds, like Out Stealing Horses, in spots of time, as the narrator blinks through memories, revealing the pains of being a child in an unknowable adult world. An absolute master of simple language and emotions, Petterson reminds us that the latter are no less difficult to understand.

—Katherine Hill

Crime

A wayward cop on a coke binge guards a young girl's life. This good-versus-evil dichotomy is the central tension in Crime, the 10th novel from neo-noir Scotsman Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, The Acid House).

Panning away from the seedy underworld of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and across to the seedy underworld of Miami, Welsh follows the relapse of Ray Lennox, a detective inspector who habitually copes with the horrors of his job through liquor and drugs. Lennox is vacationing with his fiancée in the Sunshine State but can't get his mind off a grizzly kidnapping-turn-murder case he feels he should have stopped. Slipping off to do lines at the home of a nightclub floozie, Lennox finds himself protecting her 10-year-old daughter, Tianna, from dealers who double as child predators. The situation motivates him to stay sober and protect the girl in place of the one he couldn't.

Welsh excels at creating irredeemable anti-heroes (think Filth's Bruce Robertson or Trainspotting's Mark Renton), but Lennox becomes heroic as the novel progresses. This means occasional Hollywood contrivances — bad news for fans of the hard-boiled, misanthropic Welsh — but the upsetting subject matter is presented so unflinchingly, levity is practically necessary.

—John Vettese

The Butt

You can accuse Will Self of writing jumped-up science fiction. You can accuse him of writing sadistic pornography cloaked in convoluted, Joycean prose. You can accuse him of being an adolescent autodidact. But you'd be missing the point.

Self is a political and moral satirist, writing in the best tradition of Rabelais and Swift. His novels are grotesque, convoluted, imaginative and always designed to point out some deep and painful contradiction in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon world. In The Butt, Self sets his sights on imperialism, both straight-up and neo, with literary touchstones Heart of Darkness and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Set in a nameless former colony that reads like a mix of Australia, the Sunni Triangle and Micronesia, The Butt follows an American tourist as he falls afoul of the country's stringent anti-smoking laws, forcing him to travel thousands of miles into the desert to make reparations.

Cartography is Self's true calling; he writes a newspaper column called "Psychogeography" and two of his novels — How the Dead Live and The Book of Dave — contain intricately drawn maps that illustrate the stories' physical and philosophical landscapes. There's no map to accompany The Butt, but half the fun (and most of the despair) is derived from the complex geography of Self's latest imaginary world.

—Joel Tannenbaum

Indignation

It's a safe bet that among U.S. writers with new books out this year, Philip Roth will stand alone in having tapped the Chinese national anthem for a title.

In his brief and brilliant new novel, Indignation, that word and the spirit that guided Roth to its source is stamped across the tale of 19-year-old Marcus Messner, son of a Kosher butcher from Newark, N.J. Set in 1951 during the Korean War, the novel tracks Marcus as he leaves his hometown and loving parents for Winesburg College in Ohio. Why'd he go? Indignation toward his father, a good man who's become so fearful about Marcus' fate it's left him "defenseless" against paranoia. Roth places shy, studious Marcus in Ohio and sets in motion a simple plot that quickly leads to confrontations over religious and sexual freedom, and thoughts on death, suicide and the afterlife. An early narrative twist lends gravity and dark humor to Roth's run over these well-worn topics, leading to a disturbing final chapter that reveals Marcus' destiny.

Though imperfect, few short novels can make such lasting impressions. It's a human cry against the hard truth that to love is also to admit dread. We simply cannot always protect those we love from harm.

—Matt Jakubowski

Three Musketeers

The title characters in Marcelo Birmajer's playful novel refer to a trio of political activists during Argentina's Dirty War. One of these men, Elias Traúm, is a 50-year-old returning to Buenos Aires from Israel to say kaddish for his two late friends/musketeers. Enter risk-adverse Javier Mossen, a slacker journalist at a Buenos Aires newspaper. He is assigned to interview Traúm and enters a Kafka-esque nightmare in the process.

A friendship slowly develops between the men as they spend days and nights together, telling each other entertaining stories. Traúm describes the history of the Three Musketeers, and why he may still have a target on his back, while Mossen lusts after female buttocks and explains the rift that developed between him and his (ex-)girlfriend.

Birmajer has fun unfolding the characters' truths and half-truths, revealing secrets of the characters' pasts. However, these confessions ultimately lack impact. There is no gravity, no emotion, no depth or center to all of the male bonding. Despite a reference to D'Artagnan, Three Musketeers is more likely to remind readers of the candy bar than Dumas. It is sweet, but full of empty calories.

—Gary M. Kramer

Downtown Owl

While reading Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl, I asked a couple of my friends — good, reputable pop-culture junkies, some even with bylines in this reputable pop-culture-junkie paper — whether they'd read Klosterman and what they thought of him. We all quickly discovered that none of us had read much of his writing, but each of us felt confident and able to judge.

This is hardly surprising, given that Klosterman is one of a band of writers who has made the transition from exploring a topic — disposable mass-culture celebrity — to becoming an example of it. He's an exemplar of the ADD nation, and has pulled the best possible product placement out of it (through putting Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs into Seth Cohen's hands).

But while Downtown Owl bears the clear thumbprint of its creator, what with the Judas Priest records and the North Dakota setting, it also manages to be a very enjoyable first novel. Unsurprisingly, its author can get lost in a sparkling three-page gag about the history of a high school football team — but he can also manage to build three distinct, subtly drawn narrators who sound only a little like their author.

—Justin Bauer

Vacation

Deb Olin Unferth loves her characters, but it's a tough love. She lays bare their faults gently, describes their idiosyncrasies with compassion and good humor, swaddles them in comfortable, reassuring prose and then sets them loose into a world too cruel and unpredictable to be dealt with by reasonable people, which they are not.

The story is a mid-tempo wild goose chase: Claire's not sure why she's made it a daily ritual to follow a stranger around town. Her husband, Myers, secretly starts following her. He recognizes this apparent object of his wife's fascination as an old school chum, Gray, and hatches a vague plot to murder him. Ill-informed and kinda going off the deep end, Myers ends up hunting for Gray in Nicaragua. That's where Gray believes himself to be but is not, because he's even further off the deep end.

Unferth's sentences are dazzling and careful, and clever enough to weather the frequent geographical and chronological leaps. But Vacation's trickiest trick is cartwheeling along the border between the simplicity of allegory and complexity of true human frailty. Makes you love these characters, too.

—Patrick Rapa