Euphoria, Lily King, 2014, 273 pages
Just after a failed
suicide attempt, Andrew Bankson, English anthropologist studying the Kiona
tribe in the territory of New Guinea, meets a pair of fellow anthropologists
fleeing from a cannibalistic tribe down river. Nell Stone is controversial and
well respected. Her rough Australian husband, Fen, is envious of her fame and
determined to outshine her. Bankson helps them find a new tribe to study, the
artistic, female-dominated Tam. Nell’s quiet assurance and love of the work,
and Fen’s easy familiarity, pull Bankson back from the brink. But it is the
growing fire between him and Nell that they cannot do anything about. Layered
on top of that is Nell’s grasp of the nuances of the Tam, which makes it clear
that she will once again surpass Fen. Set between the First and Second World
Wars, the story is loosely based on events in the life of Margaret Mead. There
are fascinating looks into other cultures and how they are studied, and the
sacrifices and dangers that go along with it. This is a powerful story, at once
gritty, sensuous, and captivating.
Lucky Boy,
Shanthi Sekaran, 2017, 496 pages
In this astonishing novel, Shanthi
Sekaran gives voice to the devotion and anguish of motherhood through two women
bound together by their love for one boy. Soli, a young undocumented Mexican
woman in Berkeley, CA, finds that motherhood offers her an identity in a world
where she's otherwise invisible. When she is placed in immigrant detention, her
son comes under the care of Kavya, an Indian-American wife overwhelmed by her
own impossible desire to have a child. As Soli fights for her son, Kavya builds
her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else's child.
Exploring the ways in which dreams and determination can reshape a family,
Sekaran transforms real life into a thing of beauty. From rural Oaxaca to
Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto to the dreamscapes of Silicon Valley, Lucky
Boy offers a moving and revelatory look at the evolving landscape of
the American dream and the ever-changing borders of love.
Men We Reaped: A
Memoir, Jesmyn Ward , 2013,
272 pages
In four years, five young men
dear to Ward died of various causes, from drug overdose to accident to suicide,
but the underlying cause of their deaths was a self-destructive spiral born of
hopelessness. Surrounded by so much death and sorrow, Ward closely examined the
heartbreakingly relentless deathsof her young relatives and friends growing up
in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, with few job prospects and little to
engage their time and talents other than selling and using drugs and alcohol.
She herself had partially escaped, going on to college in Michigan and
California; but the pull of close family ties and a deep appreciation of
southern culture lured her back each summer. Ward, author of Salvage the Bones (2011), lovingly
profiles each of those she lost, including a brother, a cousin, and close
friends, and their tragic ends as she weaves her family history and details her
own difficulties of breaking away from home and the desperate need to do so.
This is beautifully written homage, with a pathos and understanding that come
from being a part of the culture described.
Swing Time,
Zadie Smith, 2016, 464 pages
Two brown girls dream of being dancers--but
only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about
black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person
truly free. It's a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends
abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite
forgotten, either.
Dazzlingly energetic
and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and
music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we
can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an
exuberant dance to the music of time.
Visit
from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan, 2010,
288 pages
Jennifer Egan’s
spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an
aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate,
troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each
other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives
of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many
years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
We first meet Sasha in
her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her
long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil
when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in
Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her
best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her
uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to
extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own
while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We
meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced,
struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band
in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height
of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he
discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We
learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we
encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the
lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests
and meteoric rise and fall.
A Visit from the Goon
Squad is
a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the
stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing
conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging
from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of
self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human
hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape
the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music.
Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. .
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