Winter Preview 2014-2015: Part Nine

Surveying all the authors' names on these upcoming winter books reminds me of attending a neighborhood holiday party. It's always fun hanging out with old friends, but it's also exciting getting to know acquaintances better and meeting some interesting-looking newcomers.

Today I'll talk about writers both familiar and new to me. I wonder which of them you already know.

Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Are you familiar with Mo Yan, the Chinese writer who won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature? His given name is Guan Moye; his pen name, Mo Yan, means "don’t speak." Many of his novels contain elements of folklore and magical realism and are set in rural Shandong, where his parents farmed. For example, in Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, narrator Ximen Nao covers 50 years of modern Chinese history, as he is executed during Mao's 1948 Land Reform Movement, goes to Hell and is tortured by the underworld's Lord Yama, before being reincarnated as five successive animals that return to his farm.

Shandong is also the setting for Mo Yan's most famous book, Red Sorghum, involving three generations of a sorghum wine-making family from the 1920s through the 1970s. Its cruelty and graphic violence make it tough to read, but it's a memorable book. The 1987 Zhang Yimou movie based on it is narrated by a man about his grandmother, Jiu'er (played by Gong Li), a young bride who travels to Shandong for a pre-arranged marriage with an old distillery owner during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was one of the first movies I saw with my now-husband, and I still remember its stunning cinematography and shocking sudden violence.

Novels by Nobel Laureates are always highly anticipated, and I've been looking forward to Howard Goldblatt's English translation of Mo Yan's Frog (Viking Adult, January 22), since its original Chinese publication in 2009. The novel examines China's one-child policy, instituted in the 1970s to curb population growth, in a village where modernity still struggles with tradition. It is narrated by an aspiring playwright nicknamed "Tadpole," whose Aunt Gugu is the village midwife and dedicated Communist. (Note: at the end of 2013, China formally eased this policy.)

Photo by Sarah Wood

While we're talking about acclaimed writers, let's not forget the Scotland-born Ali Smith, who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times. Her novels often have an unusual structure and contain clever wordplay; they're playful and offbeat. Take, for instance, her 2011 book, There But for The, featuring Englishman Miles Garth, who, after arriving as the friend of a friend at a dinner party, locks himself in the guest bedroom and refuses to come out. Now, I've told you I have a jones about novels involving sieges, and I enjoyed Miles's antithesis of a siege, even though my reading was distracted by visions of building a Trojan horse or simply picking up a heavy log from the fireplace and battering the guest bedroom door down. (I'm a less gentle soul than Miles's hostess, Gen, I guess.)

I can't count on any sort of siege situation in Smith's How to be both, which Pantheon just published here in the US on December 2nd. I'm anxious to read it, though, because it's been called Smith's best book yet, and it was shortlisted for the 2014 Booker. The publisher calls it a "fresco novel" (i.e., "a painting done rapidly in watercolor on wet plaster on a wall or ceiling, so that the colors penetrate the plaster and become fixed as it dries") with two halves. The book is published in two versions, which begin in one of two different ways: with 16-year-old George (for Georgia), whose mother has died suddenly after their trip to Italy; or with little-known Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa in the 1460s. Which version you get depends on chance. The publisher says, "The narratives are exactly the same in both versions, just in a different order. The books are intentionally printed in two different ways, so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text."

The novel––full of puns, wordplay, and prose from the 1460s, as well as the present––looks at art, language, youth, time, death, and gender. Needless to say, this complicated book is not for readers who like a stripped-down narrative that travels from beginning to end without any zigzagging detours. I'd love to hear from somebody who's read it. It sounds fun.

I doubt that "fun" is quite the right word to describe Michael Christie's first full-length novel, If I Fall, If I Die (Hogarth/Crown, January 20), although reviewers say it's mesmerizing and features beautiful prose. It's about a boy, Will, who begins going Outside after 11 years of life Inside with his loving mother, Diane, a filmmaker who has become so extremely agoraphobic she dreads even opening the front door.

It's estimated that four to five percent of people have one or more phobias, and some phobias, such as Diane's, are so serious if left untreated, they can cripple the sufferer and affect others around him or her. You can imagine how delightful it must be for a boy to discover the outdoors and to meet other kids. The first boy Will meets, Jonah, introduces him to skateboarding. (I smiled when I read Canadian writer Christie's background in psychology includes a stint as a pro skateboarder.) Jonah and Will eventually take off on a search for a boy who's missing. As Will's life expands Outside, Diane becomes increasingly distraught Inside, and we learn piece by piece how her life came to be this way.

In If I Fall, If I Die, we see Will come of age in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and we take a look at fear from various points of view. I imagine readers who enjoyed books such as Emma Donoghue's Room, Carol Rifka Brunt's Tell the Wolves I'm Home, or Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai might want to check this one out.

A couple of years ago, I met a different Will in Michael Kardos's first novel, The Three-Day Affair (see review here). That Will was a drummer in a New York City band until a stray bullet killed the bassist and sent him and his wife retreating to a quiet life in New Jersey. When the book opens, Will is a recording studio sound engineer who's getting ready for the ninth annual get-together with his best Princeton buddies. Instead of their usual luxurious weekend destination, this time it will be at Will's house. It should be a pleasant weekend with friends. As Will says, "By then, violent crime was about the furthest thing from my mind, until the night when I helped one of my best friends kidnap a young woman."

The Three-Day Affair is a twisting-and-turning examination of friendships, group thinking, and how we make decisions when faced with a moral dilemma. It was so entertaining to read, I've kept my eye out for another Kardos book, and here it is, Before He Finds Her (Mysterious Press, February 3), a story about another character trying to reconcile the past with an impossible present and attempting to create a doable future.

After a Silver Bay, New Jersey block party in 1991, Ramsey Miller murdered his wife, Alison, and their 3-year-old daughter, Meg. Not only was Miller never apprehended, Meg didn't actually die. She was moved to West Virginia under a witness protection program and brought up under an alias, Melanie Denison. Melanie is now 18 years old and pregnant. She chafes at her restricted life and decides to search for her father. Judging from comments of early reviewers, this is another stand-out crime novel.

I haven't yet read anything by writer Michael Crummey, who's been called one of Canada's finest novelists, but I can see this must change. In describing his 2011 book, Galore, Kirkus says, "Ghosts, gangsters, mermen and a Christ-like healer who emerges from the belly of a beached whale are among the attractions in a boisterous, one-of-a-kind folk epic about feuding intermarried clans in Newfoundland." C'mon, who can resist reading that?

The synopsis and early reviewers' comments about weeping once they've finished Crummey's Sweetland (Liveright/Norton, January 19) make it sound about as irresistible. Sweetland is the name of a remote island in Newfoundland and the family name of 12 generations who've lived there. Now, the mainland government is paying the few remaining islanders to relocate off the island, but only if everybody will go. Moses Sweetland refuses.

I'm taken by a book about a man who loves his land and clings to what must be a hard life, but the only one he's ever known, as everyone vanishes around him. The comment that Sweetland's ending is both inevitable and surprising sealed the deal for me, and this one goes onto my list.

I know westerns aren't everybody's cup of tea, but there are westerns and then there are westerns, novels so poignant and revelatory about the American psyche that anyone should be able to enjoy them. Among these novels I count Thomas Berger’s satirical Little Big Man, featuring Jack Crabbe, a man raised by whites and Indians (Dustin Hoffman stars in the movie); Charles Portis’s True Grit, whose main protagonist, 14-year-old Mattie Ross, hires US Marshall Rooster Cogburn to extract some retribution (Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers' 2010 remake of the 1969 movie, which stars John Wayne); Cormac McCarthy’s violent Blood Meridian, in which a young runaway joins a group of scalp hunters on a rampage along the US/Mexican border; and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, an adventure/love story/western epic centering around a band of Texas Rangers whose horses carry them from Texas to Montana (there are a slew of sequels that formed a TV mini-series in 1989).

Some novels set in the more recent American West feature modern versions of these archetypal characters and also deal with themes of self-reliance, violence, justice, forgiveness, and retribution. Publishers Weekly calls Sarah M. Hulse's Black River (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 20) a "top-of-the-line modern American Western debut." Wes Carver grew up in Black River, Montana, where he became a corrections officer, like many of his fellow townsmen, in the Montana state prison there. He's 60 years old and living in Spokane, Washington, when his wife, Claire, dies. Wes fulfills her request to transport her ashes back to Black River, where they left Claire's 16-year-old son, Dennis, when they moved to Spokane 18 years earlier. That's not the only item on Wes's agenda. Twenty years ago, Black River convict Bobby Williams led a prison riot during which two guards were killed and Wes was tortured for 39 hours. Now, Williams, who has become a model prisoner after becoming born again in religious faith, is up for parole. Wes, a rigidly moralistic man who struggles with his own faith, aims to stop that.

Della Streetwise will be back shortly with more winter previews. In the meantime, happy holiday planning. 

Book Review of Michael Kardos's The Three-Day Affair

The Three-Day Affair by
Michael Kardos

If you're lucky, you have no personal experience with the proverb "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" You can count on your friends to cheer your successes, help you mop up your messes, and forgive you for liking bad movies. If they catch you careening off the rails, they yank you back on. Before the weekend events of Michael Kardos's The Three-Day Affair, narrator Will Walker would probably have agreed.

Will and three other young men became very close friends at Princeton University. Every year since they graduated nine years ago, these best buddies reunite for a weekend of golf and conversation. This year, rather than meeting at a luxurious resort, Will asks them to come to his home in suburban New Jersey. He's a sound engineer at a third-rate recording studio, and he's trying to save money to start his own small record company. He feels a little bad requesting this, because his friends are past scrimping and saving. Jeffrey Hocks, married to Sara, the most beautiful woman of their Princeton class, earned $30 million in a dot-com company's stock before he was age 25; Nolan Albright is a wealthy Missouri farmer's son who's now running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives; Evan Wolff is overloaded with work, but he'll make partner at his high-powered Manhattan law firm. Despite his embarrassment, Will is confident Jeff, Nolan, and Evan will not only understand, but they'll also be happy to invest in his new company. They're that kind of friends.

Princeton

After college graduation, Will became the drummer in a New York City band. He and his wife Cynthia, who's in public relations, fled to New Jersey after the band's bassist was killed by a stray bullet while she stood near Will outside the Cobra Club, where they'd just finished a gig. Cynthia and Will have lived in a rental house on a quiet street for three years. They're now expecting their first baby and, surprisingly to Will, are content with their lives.

Cynthia heads off to stay with her sister for the weekend as Nolan arrives. Jeff is due in a few hours; Evan's job has detained him in the city, but he'll come as soon as he can. The forecast is for a pleasant, laid-back weekend with friends. As Will explains in the prologue, "By then, violent crime was about the furthest thing from my mind, until the night when I helped one of my best friends kidnap a young woman."

Ordinary man Richard Hannay in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps

With an impulsive act so dumb it transcends understanding, Will is drafted into the club of ordinary men placed in extraordinary situations, where he joins characters such as Fredric Brown's newspaperman Doc Stoeger (Night of the Jabberwock) and the civilians pressed into service against the Nazis by espionage writers Alan Furst (Dark Voyage) and Helen MacInnes (The Double Image). These ordinary folks surprise themselves, and so does Will. Of course, Will isn't exactly extraordinarily ordinary, since he did make it through Princeton. Part of the pleasure of reading this book is the mental trip Will takes back to his college days in an attempt to recognize the friends with whom he explored literature, life's meaning, and what it's like to fall in love. These are the friends with whom he now shares a nightmare, and he's no longer sure of what they, or he, will do. They're as unfamiliar as when they first met: the Princeton legacy from Los Angeles whose baby clothes had little tigers stitched onto them, the ambitious and jaw-droppingly hard-working Missourian, and the nice guy from New Jersey with a deep love of music.

The high IQ and sophistication of these men make their weekend behavior surprising, and the tale isn't absolutely airtight in its logic. But then again, who's to say what I'd do on such a weekend with college friends in Newfield, New Jersey? After all, isn't this a story about smart people doing stupid things; a crisis of conflicting needs that create a moral dilemma; a situation in which everyone defers to everyone else to solve a problem? Man, oh man, The Three-Day Affair is the sort of book you read with one eye closed because you can hardly stand to see what will happen, but there's no way you can put it down. Author Kardos created characters you can't help but care about. Will is wonderfully human. Great use of settings, clear writing, and a plot gratifying in its complexity and surprises. It would make a terrific book for a group to read and discuss. Pandora's box was opened, but by whom and when?

Michael Kardos

Like his protagonist, Will, the author grew up in New Jersey, received a degree in music from Princeton, and played the drums professionally. Kardos currently lives in Starkville, Mississippi, where he is an assistant professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His previous publications include short stories and a collection in One Last Good Time. I'm happy to say he's working on another novel now.

Note: For review purposes, I received a free advance reading copy of The Three-Day Affair, published earlier this month by Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic. It has received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, which also named it one of fall's best books.