In this assured and evocative debut novel set in rural Kentucky, author C. E. Morgan comes closer to conveying the essence of life, as she sees it, than do most other novelists with generations more experience. Writing about an area in which she lived, Morgan recreates the bare bones lives of subsistence farmers who are irrevocably tied to the land, a land which is sometimes fickle in its ability to sustain those who so lovingly tend it. Interminably long days and aching physical labor are not always rewarded here, and despair is often the prevailing mood of whole communities when droughts or floods play havoc with man’s efforts. Yet each spring offers new opportunities and hope as the resilient farmers renew their back-breaking connection to the land once again. Orren Fenton is just out of college when his mother and brother are killed in an accident, leaving him the sole survivor of the family and the inheritor of the family’s Kentucky tobacco farm. He invites his girlfriend Aloma to join him in restoring the farm that had belonged to his grandparents. The work is brutal, their love is tested severely, and both learn, as does the local pastor. Insightful, philosophical, and mature, this portrait of three characters trying to understand themselves and their roles in the world as they face the hardships of everyday life in rural Kentucky is accomplished, moving, and insightful.
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The dramatic hit-and-run death of a respected cafe owner brings all the members of the man’s family to his home in the Mohave, to which he and his wife immigrated from Morocco when violence broke out in Casablanca in 1981. Each of these family members and many others in the community become first-person narrators as the action begins, the novel becoming a character-based study of people and how they respond to danger and threats. Nora Guerraoui, who becomes the main character, is a musician, composer, and grad student in California now, but on her return to the Mohave, where her parents live, she quickly re-adapts to the community where she grew up and reconnects with some friends from the past, some of them with long-standing prejudices. One of the best novels I’ve read all year, THE OTHER AMERICANS draws in the reader, provides constant interest and insights, and shows the sensitivity with which author Laila Lalami treats her subject without talking down and without lecturing. High on my Favorites list for 2019.
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Written in 1936 and out of print for thirty years, A Puzzle for Fools has now been resurrected as part of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series – and what a classic it is, with one of best and most surprising conclusions ever. The novel – hugely successful when it was initially published – established “Patrick Quentin” as a popular writer, quite different from some of his contemporaries in that he was more interested in the psychology of his characters than many of his contemporaries, who were still following a predictable formula for their plots. For Quentin, a pseudonym for Hugh Callingham Wheeler, in collaboration with Richard Wilson Webb, this is the first of nine novels featuring main character Peter Duluth, a Broadway director whose wife died in a fire at the theatre, and who became an alcoholic as a result. Admitting himself to a sanitarium to dry out, he becomes involved in the search for a patient who has been tormenting other patients in their sleep. Eventually, he is involved in searching for a murderer. One of the best and most surprising conclusions ever.
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Erle Stanley Gardner, a man who found his metier early in life, bridged the gap between pulp and literary fiction during the 1940s and 1950s, and THE CASE OF THE CARELESS KITTEN is one of his best. A lawyer for fifteen years, he has said that while he enjoyed litigation and the development of trial strategy, that he was bored by the day-to-day work in the office. He soon began writing stories for pulp magazines, setting as his writing goal over a million words per year, and using some of his cases as inspiration. Beginning in 1933 with his first novel, he eventually developed the Perry Mason series, which, alone, consists of eighty novels. Gardner quickly developed a style which fit his legal experience and interests, and modern readers discovering him for the first time, and older readers who have not read him in years, will be intrigued by the obvious formula which governs his work. In every case, the characters are introduced briefly, and their upcoming roles in the book are quickly established. Gardner is interested in the facts and has no interest in developing personal psychologies or complex motives. He keeps the character list simple and the action moving quickly. Ultimately he creates a puzzle, rather than a plot: Something terrible happens, and the reader is supplied with every piece of information s/he needs, along with a few red herrings, leading to a grand climax in which the evil-doer is revealed as a surprise. The reader’s objective is to figure out the guilty party ahead of the author’s revelation.
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In this collection of eleven short stories, author Joseph O’Neill focuses on imperfect and often uncommitted men as they live their usually unexciting and unrewarded lives. Their stories are, from a “story” point of view, as unexciting as their lives, yet they are also fun and often even funny. O’Neill, the son of an Irish father and Turkish mother who traveled and lived with their family all over the world, writes without the clever and quirky characteristics one usually associates with stereotyped “Irish writers,” presenting his stories instead with a “straight face” as he recreates his characters’ lives and leaves it up to the reader to form judgments and draw conclusions. Throughout the collection, O’Neill varies his literary style to fit the subject, and in “The Mustache in 2010,” his overtly academic tone for a subject like mustaches, as he traces the history of facial hair, serves as an amusing introduction to “the drama of Alexandre Dubuisson’s mustache.” Ultimately, the collection feels somewhat anti-climactic, lacking real, direct conflicts resulting in final resolutions. The male characters are weak and are often afraid or too easily distracted from the real issues to make independent moves.
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