Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones

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Leaving Atlanta

Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Tayari Jones’s first novel, the carefully crafted, moving account of young children living through the Atlanta child murders, remains one of the best first novels I have ever read. This is a truly literary exploration of the inner lives of people who feel themselves to be endangered from all sides, for whom the idea of a bogeyman is very real. The metaphor that overshadows the reality of a child killer is the larger picture of America, which Jones deals with in the most subtle way: there is always someone waiting to kill a black child. What they are seeing in the story of the child killer is the reality of their world. Yet Jones treats this idea with delicacy and without sentiment or polemic, simply allowing these young selves to unveil. It was a pretty good bet Jones would make her mark, and book after book she has taken the journey.

Nowhere Else on Earth by Josephine Humphreys

Nowhere Else on Earth

Nowhere Else on Earth by Josephine Humphreys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have been reading Josephine Humphreys since her first novel came out, too many years ago to think about, and remember hearing her speak about her fascination with this tale. So I know that she worked for years on the research and other matter necessary to create this book, and the result is a fine, thoughtful novel that shows her to be at the top of her form. Since I grew up in eastern North Carolina I knew something of the Lumbee people and their struggle to find an identity; but her depiction of the love of Rhoda Strong for Henry Lowrie, her husband, gave such force to the novel. This is a tale that needed telling, a people coming together to resist a war they wanted nothing to do with. Too little is said about southerners who wanted nothing to do with secession, especially if it entailed the fighting of armies, but they got no choice in the matter. Too little is said about people like the Lumbee, who were collateral damage in the whole bitter mess. This story is at the intersection of slavery, war, native peoples, and poor people scraping by on the land, and the couple at the heart of the story embodies the kind of courage and tragedy that overtook so many in that time. It is a brave leap from her earlier work to this complex project, and solidified Humphreys as one of the great voices of our generation of writers.

Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips

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Quiet Dell

Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As far as I can tell, Jayne Anne Phillips can do no wrong. Knowing that she had set out to write a novel based on a true crime, I expected a novel that would disconcert me in some fashion, but what she wrote was a complicated story about the disintegration of a family, the hardships faced by a single mother, and a journey to West Virginia that opens up another world inside the first one. Murder, discovery, and a crime that found a national audience. It’s almost inconceivable that the book works as well as it does, being split in half by the murder, with the story migrating from the family that died to the reporter who becomes bound to the story and tells it with all her heart. This is a novel of such sweep that any attempt to describe it falls short: the message you should get here is that Phillips can write anything, so just settle into this book and let it happen. No, it’s not entirely unified, but I didn’t care; she follows the story where it goes and gets carried away by it herself. The passage where Emily hires a near-abandoned child and slowly grows attached to him is a moment of pure light in the harder story that stands in the foreground. This was a really grand book to read. I felt I was seeing a different side of a writer whom I admire so very much.

Things I Should Have Told my Daughter by Pearl Cleage

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Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons & Love AffairsThings I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons & Love Affairs by Pearl Cleage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Of all the work Pearl Cleage has written, plays and novels and poetry, I want to review this one first because it embodies the woman herself, her voice, her life, her events, her insights. It is as if we are at lunch and giggling and she is telling me all these stories exactly this way, very patiently, but in such a compelling way that I can’t stop listening. And while it’s her history, it’s mine, too, because I lived in the same city as she, watched her develop into the writer that I wanted to be, grew to love her writing as much as I loved anybody’s. But with Pearl everything runs a little deeper; it was her person that I admired, the firebrand who would walk off panels and out of meetings whenever she found she needed to make that statement. Like the day she walked off a panel with Alfred Uhry, who was holding forth on the subject of playwriting when his only real qualification was that piece of 50s servant-master nostalgia that everybody knows about. Or like the day she made a lot of prominent artists circle up and take an oath to fight racism in all its forms. This book is full of stories like that, and the beauty for me in reading it is that I was there for a few of them, watching her do so much work in so many places. As she says, back in the days before she got to be so respectable. She’s one of the true souls of the world. Still the same after Oprah and having superstars play roles in her plays and all. The book conveys her honesty and clarity through and through.

Things Not Seen and Other Stories by Lynna Williams

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Things Not Seen: And Other StoriesThings Not Seen: And Other Stories by Lynna Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was Lynna Williams’ first collection of stories; they are the evidence of her writing life that is left behind after she passed away a few years ago, dead of cancer just as she was reaching a point when she could retire. The stories are deeply affecting, all of them, so that one can relax with them, open up and allow the author’s sensibility to take one over; some, like “Personal Testimony,” are evidence of Lynna’s comic sense, which was a constant; others, like “Sole Custody” or “Things Not Seen,” cut to the bone where the feelings are richest. “Sole Custody” has always been the one that I remember best, the airplane journey of a women who, in the first sentence, reveals that she is on the way to steal her ex-husband’s child. The story takes one quiet step after another, to a moment of absolute heartache at the end. I knew Lynna as a friend and colleague for many years, and understood that there was a pain inside her that she could never shake, located somewhere between the sarcastic dismantling of camp meetings in “Personal Testimony” and the childlessness and loss of “Sole Custody.” It broke her heart that she could never manage a second book. But a lot of things broke her heart. She was one of the loveliest, most complicated, prickliest characters I have ever known, and I miss her very much. If you can find a copy of this book, you should read these stories and understand she was a master at this craft of writing. Not everybody wins the prize. Whatever it was that kept her from publishing more, we are poorer for the fact.

The Not Yet by Moira Crone

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The Not YetThe Not Yet by Moira Crone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Living through what resembles a pre-Apocalypse, I remember Moira Crone’s sprawling island city of New Orleans, a century or so from today, where a person can become immortal by kissing the right ass and toeing the line and earning enough capital for the change. Crone is a writer who tries for everything, writes everything, and takes on speculative work, science fiction, just as readily as she writes literary stories and novels. This book was nominated for the Philip K. Dick award when it first appeared. The drive forward of this book is so pleasing, through so many visions of the city and so many ideas about what it means for a world to crumble – there is an overlay of allegory matched with a grit that’s like a walk down Bourbon Street on almost any night. Well, maybe not now, during our pandemic. It’s a portrait of one face of inequality unchecked. A good read for right now, 2020, when we can see what a collapse might look like. Especially mind-blowing is the fact of New Orleans, because it just feels right to be there for the end of the world, really. Where else?

City of Boys by Beth Nugent

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City of BoysCity of Boys by Beth Nugent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title story is one which I have often taught, and students respond to the specificity of it, the younger woman in thrall to the older woman, the idea that the speaker wants to inhabit her body for herself, her own way. The story is specific in its physicality at every moment. Nugent writes blunt and hard, always with a sense of movement in the language, the story turning in true directions, as if they are being uncovered rather than written. These are stories that will fix you in place. “At the End of My Life” is a complicated study of what might be a future predator as he takes over the life of his sister, the only person to whom he can respond. Parents are detached, distant, even hostile, not only in this story. “Minor Casualties” frames the world with the love of a new Toyota and the family visit that it brings about. She gives an energy to the writing of short fiction that feels necessary and original; she is one of those writers who has learned to see into the heart of this particular material. These are people I already know, feels like. A bookseller in Iowa City recommend this to me years ago and I’ve read some of these stories a dozen times.

To Write Like a Woman by Joanna Russ

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To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science FictionTo Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction by Joanna Russ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am picking this book because it shook me up when I read it, and tapped into angers I had myself, and just pounded at the part of my head that preferred not to see the real extent to which women’s writing has been shoved into the periphery. Read it at a time when I was hopeful that things were changing. Well, I will let that sentence stand even though it’s not strictly true that I have ever hoped that things were changing, not fully. But now and then I see the signs. I have recommended this book to my students, most of whom were women, hoping they would see their own fiction differently – especially the ones who write about male characters because they see males as the true actors in life. Reactions have been all over the place, which is what Russ usually evoked, I think. This is a book that is useful in so many ways; her thinking about science fiction is searing and on point. Her novels are stunning. I’ve had a couple of wonderful discussions about them with people who really matter to me. I want to say she wrote exactly as she pleased but I think she would spit at me for saying that; she was never allowed the room to do all that she wanted, and died much too soon. Such a force.

Paris, 7 a.m. by Liza Wieland

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Paris, 7 A.M.Paris, 7 A.M. by Liza Wieland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A wonderfully written life of Elizabeth Bishop lies in wait. I am often enamored of dreamy books; this one is such a delight to encounter. Within the scope of a few days in a part of Bishop’s life about which little is known, a gap in her journals, Wieland imagines a different moment of the poet’s life. An act of resistance against the Nazis. She is lost in words, this Bishop, and her thinking will either please the poet in you or maybe not – I found the writing to be strong, an echo of what one might expect her to be like, maybe at moments pushed a bit, but that was fine, really. One leaves the book with a strong sense of the woman, the poet, the possibility of this strange interlude. Many background figures drawn in a gauzy light, and then those figures connected with the rescue of the child, solid and real and fixed. A beautiful outpouring of words. The ending gave me some hesitation, it seemed to slide away from me forward in time. But it worked. If you are a fan of lovely prose, you will find a home in these pages.

The Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland

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The TranscriptionistThe Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved the beginning of this book, the idea of the transcriptionist sitting alone in what felt like an abandoned part of a huge newspaper building, doing her job, transcribing recorded stories from reporters who were in the field. Feeding a pigeon that was stuck to the windowsill. Wandering in the empty halls. The atmosphere of the book appealed to me. Reminded me of Gormenghast, weirdly, because of the emptiness of the building, as if it went on forever, and our puny modern day could only manage to fill part of it. I liked, not loved, the ending of the book where it becomes a kind of thriller. It’s well managed and plausible, and even satisfying. But doesn’t altogether live up to the atmosphere of the beginning. There is a good reason for the shift in tone; the book examines the ethics of modern journalism. Tiny quibble for a good book. There’s just something so seductive about the first half of it, though. I’d like to write an alternate second half. Well, I wouldn’t actually want to do that, but you know, stray thought. I worked as a transcriptionist for some years, on the night shift in a huge public hospital that was mostly empty on my shift. Gave me a feeling for what Rowland is talking about.