edited by Hirsh Sawhney
Akashic Books ($15.95)

by Rav Grewal-Kök

Delhi should provide a rich setting for noir fiction. It’s one of the world’s largest cities, the capital of a nation marked by a spectacular gulf between its rich (or merely middle class) and its multitudes of poor citizens. It’s not hard to draw contrasts. In the reception rooms of Delhi’s luxury hotels, gilded men and women sip on bottles of water that cost more than their waiters will earn in a day. Modest householders employ two or three domestic servants and look to upgrade to a foreign car or plasma television. Meanwhile, the capital’s slums burgeon with migrants from the other India—the impoverished villages, the teeming plains, the areas that Aravind Adiga, amongst others, has called “the darkness.”

Delhi is growing fast, because the migrant influx is limitless. Immediately to its east is Uttar Pradesh, a state roughly the size of Minnesota, but home to 190 million people (standing alone, it would be the world’s fifth most populous country). Ninety million more live in Bihar, the next state over, in an area a little smaller than Kentucky. Some of those people are desperate, and many of the industrialists and politicians at the top will take advantage. Labor and lives are cheapened, and corruption abounds. Add a police force notorious for its brutality (despite its slogan, “With you, for You, Always”—the title of the first section of this anthology), a prolific and sensational press, unlimited Afghan heroin, and appalling levels of rape and murder, and there’s abundant material for noir literature.

So it comes as something of a surprise when Hirsh Sawhney, the editor of this entrant in Akashic’s series of noir anthologies, notes in his introduction that few writers have set crime fiction in Delhi, as opposed to Bombay or Calcutta (which are both less violent cities). Sawhney blames the gap on the timidity of “Delhi’s book-buying-and-publishing citizens”: they derive too great a benefit from their unjust social order, Sawhney claims, to risk examining it closely. This seems a dubious assertion, given that Delhiites have an insatiable appetite for lurid journalism (media “stings,” where undercover reporters expose official corruption, are especially popular). And of course, one need not live in Delhi to buy a book that’s set there, just as one need not live in Bombay to read Vikram Chandra. But whatever the reason for the dearth of Delhi crime stories, this anthology provides the beginnings of a remedy. A diverse collection of writers, few of whom readers in this country will have already encountered, portray the seedier sides of life in India’s capital. Their stories are noir, but they’re also news.

The best fiction in the book is both vicious and poignant. In Uday Prakash’s “The Walls of Delhi,” the only piece translated from Hindi (the rest were written in English), a janitor, Ramnivas, discovers an enormous cache of bills while cleaning an exclusive health club. Instantly, the life of this slumdweller—whose first child died from eating fish caught in the sewer—is transformed. He can buy ice cream for his remaining children, meat and eggs for his dinner, furniture and appliances for his home, a trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal with his mistress. It’s not a happy story, though. A Chekhovian fatalism underlies the narrative; from the outset we understand that it won’t end well. In this case, the culprit is whiskey, along with that crushing social order that consigned Ramnivas to the slums in the first place. Now that he can afford to drink, he drinks too much. A pair of opportunistic police officers, recognizing that Ramnivas shouldn’t be the type to have money, turn up at his Agra hotel room for a shakedown. They order butter chicken and a bottle of Royal Challenge on Ramnivas’s tab, while the janitor’s underage girlfriend whimpers in the corner. After downing a few shots, Ramnivas gives up his secret. The police steal what’s left of the money and take care of the unfortunate Ramnivas too. In a concluding irony, the narrator, another poor man from the neighborhood, sees Ramnivas’s story not as a cautionary tale, but an exemplary one: at least Ramnivas escaped—however briefly—the walls of his own existence. “It doesn’t matter how many weeks or months or years I’ve got left in this sorry life before I also disappear,” writes the narrator, “but I, too, would like to enter into a world of my dreams, just as Ramnivas did.”

Another highlight is Nalinaksha Bhattacharya’s “Hissing Cobras.” The story takes place in the same drab housing colony in which its author, according to his contributor’s note, has lived for twenty years. The authenticity of the setting is palpable. When Raghav Bakshi, another corrupt police inspector and the story’s antihero, “looked at the shit-yellow two-story government quarters surrounding a bald patch of land that was meant to be developed as a park,” a tract that “was now deserted except for a couple of stringy goats grazing in a corner where there were still a few clumps of grass leftover from the previous monsoon,” can we infer some underlying authorial affection beneath the tart description? The writer certainly has a light touch. His jolly police inspector, a man less interested in solving crimes than in liquor, kebabs, and robust Punjabi housewives, is so happy with his lot that one is at first inclined to forgive him his petty extortions and casual sadism. But when Inspector Bakshi’s inquiry into the death of an elderly woman centers on a compromised daughter-in-law and takes on a more predatory cast, we remember exactly what’s at stake when those who enjoy a little authority want something from those who have none. By the story’s close, Bhattacharya has revealed himself to be a moralist, albeit a sly one.

There are other memorable pieces in the anthology. In Mohan Sikka’s “The Railway Aunty,” an orphaned young man from the provinces discovers that some of his relatives live a little differently in the capital. He seems to be a quick enough study, until he’s blindsided by a stunning series of betrayals. The young man is not solely a victim though. By the end, he’s uncovered a hidden and dangerous capacity of his own. If there are no good cops in this book, there are a handful of clear-eyed (though inevitably wounded) journalists. Hirsh Sawhney and Tabish Khair provide a couple of convincing exemplars. And Palash Krishna Mehrotra gives us something else entirely. His protagonist is an underground man, a Delhi stranger; the story unfolds after he has perpetrated a senseless crime. He’s a man without illusions about his own decency, or that of the society in which he lives.

A few stories are less successful. Hartosh Singh Bal’s effort suffers from the woodenness of more formulaic detective fiction, while Omair Ahmad abandons plausibility when his characters deliver potted accounts of Delhi’s recent history—would a seasoned private investigator really need her client to tell her that Indira Ghandi was a prime minister of India, or that there were violent reprisals against Delhi’s Sikh community after her bodyguards assassinated her? But these are minor objections. Overall, Delhi Noir is an invigorating and often moving collection. And amidst all that violence and depravity, readers might detect some undertones of optimism, thanks to the muckraking journalists who inhabit many of these stories. Their city may suffer from institutional corruption and systemic inequality, but it’s also awash in newspapers. In Delhi, writers matter, and the contributors to this volume know it.

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Helen Oyeyemi
Nan A. Talese ($25)

by Spencer Dew

One of the slightly less haunted characters in Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching, attempting to defend the work of Edgar Allen Poe, claims that Poe’s genius lies in “The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say ‘Oh, you know, I’m just afraid of Death’ and then they keep on with the screaming.” Here, with a wink, Oyeyemi differentiates her own experiment in the genre. Her work is not the “casual horror” of bloodcurdling shrieks echoing the unspeakable terror of mortality. Rather, hers is a formal horror, shrouded in all the subtle interplay and ironic commentary of contemporary humans. For every ambulatory manikin or voice from within the walls, there’s ample compassion, first-year college angst, and hand-twisted pastries steaming fresh from the oven. Oyeyemi’s technique of frightening involves locating that which unsettles at the periphery—from furniture that has been rearranged in the night to the mound of white-sided winter apples seemingly materialized of their own accord on the kitchen counter, to the distant but persistence presence of anti-immigrant sentiment, race-based violence, and a growing far-right political power in the United Kingdom.

White is for Witching succeeds by being simultaneously a ghost story and a tale of young love, a saga of childhood lost and an allegory on fear-fueled politics. While one character worries that she may be fading into a sketched stick figure or that, in fact, she may have been dead for some time now, Oyeyemi never lets her characters become ciphers or stand-ins. In keeping with her formal dedication to detail at the margins, the minor characters here are as richly textured as the protagonists: the father who lovingly crafts miniature meals to subvert his daughter’s eating disorder, the housekeeper who cuts copies of her father’s tribal scars into her own face.

As the title implies, color takes on talismanic functions in this novel, and its symbolism is multi-faceted. Near the white cliffs of Albion’s shore, twins Miranda and Eliot are raised in their family’s old Dover home, now run as a bed and breakfast by their pastry chef father. Their mother was killed half a world away, but there is a sense that she lingers on not only in their memories. The house itself contributes sections to the tale, told by revolving narrators, but the main focus is, first, Miranda, newly returned home after a clinical institutionalization, and, later, a girl named Ore she meets at Cambridge.

Miranda has an inherited disorder, pica, manifest in the hunger for non-nutritive items. She eschews food, instead eating plastic spoons and sticks of chalk. “Plastic was usually very satisfying. A fifty-millimetre wad of it was tough to chew away from the main body of the strip, but with steady labour, sucking and biting, it curved between the teeth like an extension of the gum, and the thick, bittersweet oils in it streamed down her throat for hours, so long she sometimes forgot and thought her body was producing it, like saliva.” She also begins to hear voices, to see things, and to channel, via automatic writing, her dead female relatives.

While Miranda gets in touch with her ancestors via grinning reflections with jagged teeth and urgent warnings from the children of the departing housekeepers, Ore—who quickly becomes her friend and lover—has adoptive parents that supply her with books on African legends and folklore, wanting to acknowledge Ore’s Nigerian ethnic heritage. So Miranda, in one of the house’s several hidden bomb shelters, muses on her acorn-eating grandmother’s bloody crack-up, and Ore wanders graveyards at night, pondering the story of the Soucouyant, a ravenous monster killed with salt and pepper. Ore is most interested in what the stories don’t speak of—the monster’s origin. How, she wonders, does such a hunger come to be? Miranda asks a not unrelated question of her dead relatives: “How is consumption managed?” When the girls find themselves together in the Dover house, wandering the dark corridors clutching metal blades, their questions—and the fears behind them—clash.

Much horror writing achieves spookiness at the sacrifice of other elements. No one reading Lovecraft, for instance, is ever moved by the description of a meal or the sensual details of a lover’s body. Yet Oyeymi, widely recognized as one of Britain’s most skilled young writers, crafts a tale that haunts on multiple levels. The late teen spunk of Ore, in her first months of college, lingers alongside the cabinet drawers nailed shut to stop their banging. The story of a man who hung himself at the Immigration Removal Centre is as disturbing and unforgettable as the image of Miranda, during a visit to the coast, sitting on one of Dover’s famed white rocks, sucking chalk powder from beneath her fingernails. A spellbinding story, White is for Witching, like all good ghostly yarns, leaves little settled. The temptation, at the end, is to flip back to the beginning and work through the mystery once more.

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Brian Evenson
art by Zak Sally
Coffee House Press ($14.95)

by Katie Haegele

What is it that makes a story scary? Explanations tend to make it fall apart, but you sure know it when you see it. Similarly, it’s hard to articulate what makes a joke funny. In person it can be as tiny as a sideways flick of the eyes or a minute gesture, anything that speaks to the truth. Likewise in writing—it’s the small things, the perfect details and linguistic tics, that hint at the heart of the matter, the thing the writer doesn’t come out and say.

In this collection of nineteen short stories, Brian Evenson spends most of his energy flirting with either funny or scary, often both at the same time. Some of his tales are set in apocalyptic or post-plague times, some are otherworldly, and some—maybe the strongest ones—unfold in places we recognize all too well.

Take “Ninety Over Ninety,” in which a wannabe literary editor gets talked into buying silly books that are more “marketable.” In this setting, Evenson is able to take a swipe at the big-money publishing industry and the crass, dumb, and dishonest ways it sometimes goes about doing business. A few of the gags are a bit broad, like the way the oily boss calls our editor-hero by the wrong name throughout the entire story (does this ever happen in real life, or just in books and movies?), and the groaner name of a rival publisher, MacMaster & Bates. But other gibes are apt and clever, such as the book ideas pitched at an editorial meeting and the daftly enthusiastic response they garner:

Ted Billner just said, "Three different fetishes, three simple words, three simple titles: Rubber, Leather, Silk."
"Super!" said Cinchy. "Crackerjack!"

Things get much weirder from there, but the story’s central joke—the everyday horror of how the world, unfortunately, works—is deeply funny.

Children abandoned by one or both parents is another theme; “Girls in Tents” could easily have the title of another story, “Life Without Father.” “Mudder Tongue,” a wonderful 2007 O. Henry Prize winner, is about a man whose use of language is slipping away, causing the wrong word to pop out of his mouth even though his brain knows the right one. Soon he can no longer teach his classes, and the absurd things he says to his grown daughter—in language reminiscent of a sadly comic Lorrie Moore story—infuriate and insult her, to his mounting despair.

Spooky little pen-and-ink drawings by cartoonist Zak Sally open each story in Fugue State, but only “Dread,” a short piece done in the style of a graphic novel, is fully illustrated. Sally, fast becoming an indie comics mainstay through publications such as Sammy the Mouse (Fantagraphics) and Recidivist (La Mano), deploys his scritchy drawings to add to Evenson’s overall sense of queasy unease, which tends to arise from the author’s restrained and distant language. The older sister in “Girls in Tents,” for example, is never explicitly described as scared, but listen to how she feels as she strokes her sister’s back to comfort her: “It was like she was petting an animal—or rather, since she herself, concentrating on staying as calm as glass for the sake of her sister, felt distant not only from her sister’s back but from her own hand, as if she were watching someone else pet an animal.” Evenson circles his subjects like a buzzard, creating a feeling of dread from that dizzy height.

Sometimes, though, his devices feel contrived. A powerful piece in other ways, “Younger” nevertheless batters us over the head with its refusal to name the characters; one can only read phrases like “the older sister felt” and “the older sister said” so many times before the repetition becomes distracting. Still, even this suggests the uncanny that lives within the ordinary. While Evenson’s characters are often doing something disturbing or gross, they observe eerie sensations that are all the more upsetting because they’re so commonplace. In “Life Without Father,” a short piece about a girl whose father dies sort of accidentally, sort of suicidally, the child experiences for the first time the sad gap between what we say and what others hear. “You could say what you thought was right, what would make sense to you, and nobody else really understood it,” she realizes, in trying to figure out how to tell the police that her dad had taken to putting plastic shopping bags over his head because this made his thinking more “lucid.” It’s a coming-of-age, Evenson-style.

And really, moments like this are what this book is about. These, just as plainly as the more obviously creepy scenarios—the ones that read like old-time horror stories, with the unseen ghost of Rod Sterling seeming to bear witness—are the fugue states of the title, the ever-present reminders that there’s plenty to be afraid of in the everyday.

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Jack O’Connell
Algonquin Books ($13.95)

by Vincent Czyz

Jack O'Connell’s multi-layered novel The Resurrectionist is billed as everything from detective fiction to fantasy—primarily because it defies easy categorization. While “speculative noir” might be a little nearer the mark, a handy label is beside the point: O’Connell doesn’t just blur genres with this quasi-gothic tale set in America’s rust belt, he also obliterates the lines between the realities generated by spacetime, drugs, imagination, dream, and even narrative itself.

The frame story centers on a pharmacist named Sweeney who has become obsessed with finding a way of pulling his seven-year-old son, Danny, out of a coma. Danny is being treated at the Peck Clinic, "a sandstone monster on fifty acres of private land near Quinsigamond's western border.” Dr. Peck has documented two “arousals” and believes Danny is a good candidate for a third.

Running parallel to the main narrative, and occasionally intersecting, is a fantastical tale of circus freaks recounted in Limbo, the comic book series Danny was reading before his consciousness high-dived into the void. There are any number of points of correspondence between the fictional world of Limbo and the real one, such as this nice touch of mirror imaging: while a freak known as the Chicken Boy is searching for his father, a father (Sweeney) is desperate to make contact with his son.

The dialogue flows naturally, the characters are well drawn, and the writing generally avoids being overwrought—although it often aspires to the lyrical, as exemplified by this description of Quinsigamond: “They rolled at an even speed past the foundries and chemical plants, past acres of ghostly housing projects and antique tenements long gone dark. Eventually, they cut into the city proper and made for downtown, a Mardi Gras in perpetual decay, this crowded hive of clubs and bars, noodle dens and arcades, strip joints and chapels of the apocalypse, all of them announced in red and blue neon.”

Perhaps O’Connell’s most impressive achievement is his portrayal of the Abominations, a nomadic biker gang whose leader improbably claims to know how Sweeney can connect with his son; eerily enough,Limbo is one of the pieces that fits into the puzzle. Like Milton’s Satan, the troupe [exerts] a strange magnetism—it’s hard not to be drawn to them no matter what horrors they perpetrate. Their hangout is the Harmony, an abandoned prosthetics factory, which stands in odd opposition to the Peck Clinic, a “Romanesque mausoleum.”

Dr. Peck and the Abominations both have abiding interests in the comatose patients at the Clinic, and oddly enough they seem to share certain perspectives. Peck, for example, "understood that the universe, the fabric of reality, was composed of nothing more than particles of longing, a kind of quantum desire for absolute connection. . . . He knew that every arousal he achieved would bring him closer to answers that had more to do with the nature of consciousness than of coma." One of the bikers, on the other hand, tells Sweeney “we’re headed inside, right? When all’s said and done, that’s where the real cosmos is, you know?” Where they differ radically is in their approaches, which catch Sweeney and Danny in between like hammer and anvil—except that ultimately, Sweeney has to choose sides.

The only shortfall in this novel is that for all the talk of getting underneath the surface and throwing a flashlight beam on the submerged architecture of the mind, hardly more than a cornice here or a collapsed arch there surfaces. Be that as it may, The Resurrectionist is a dark funhouse of a book that in the end is also a call for redemption and forgiveness through love and story.

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Richard Powers
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($25)

by Allan Vorda

What most people want in life, more than love or money or power, is happiness. So imagine a somewhat depressive teacher encountering a young woman who exudes happiness—a happiness so contagious it infects everyone she meets. This is the premise of Richard Powers’s novel Generosity: An Enhancement. This book follows on the heels ofThe Echo Maker, which won the National Book Award, but Generosityis perhaps an even better novel.

The story centers around a college teacher named Russell Stone and his motley group of Creative Nonfiction students, which includes Thassadit Amzwar, a 23-year-old Berber Algerian whose life has been filled with tragic circumstances. Nevertheless, an effusive happiness radiates from every expression, motion, and utterance that she makes. Even coming to class, drenched from a storm, she laughingly comments, “It’s ridiculous out there! Fantastic!” Her classmates give her the nickname “Miss Generosity.” Everyone assumes she is a Muslim, but she declares, “I’m no believer. I’m some kind of half-Christian atheist.”

Unable to understand how Thassa can be so happy, Russell decides to consult a psychologist and finds one on campus, Candace Weld—a dead ringer for his ex and a kindred spirit. Shortly after Russell meets Candace, the class (sans teacher) decides to take Thassa to a bar and get her drunk. While she becomes inebriated, her happiness still manifests itself. Unfortunately, after the group disperses, “a massive, impassive monolith” named John Thornell tries to rape Thassa, but she manages to talk him out of it. Thornell turns himself into the police and suddenly Thassa is in the news. Before long, stories of her ebullient nature are on the Internet, and they catch the eye of one Thomas Kurton, a world famous geneticist. Kurton gets Thassa to agree to be a test subject and discovers that her genetic make-up is the “optimal allele assortment—the happiness jackpot.” Kurton even postulates he can take Thassa’s DNA and make virtually everyone happy.

Suddenly, due to her Internet fame and Kurton’s theory, almost everyone wants a piece of Thassa. Before long, her celebrity status leads to an appearance on the Oona Show, but the confrontational nature of the program makes Thassa defensive, and the frenzy finally begins to affect her emotional state. Even though Russell has fallen in love with Candace, he feels responsible for Thassa and agrees to help her escape to her uncle’s place in Montreal. Unfortunately, Thassa’s breakdown has gotten to the point that she’s like “some infected farm animal, brought low by something it can’t even imagine. Microbes without borders.” The end of the novel involves a near tragic scene with a powerful denouement for its characters.

Once again, Powers has produced a fascinating story partially constructed around his impressive acumen in the sciences. He also creates exquisite sentences, whether musing about love (“just a minor node in a vast network pushing toward new and unimaginable exploits . . .”) or language (“When white guys walking on strangers' roofs in Oak Brook start using any given street argot, it's time to seal the word up in the dictionary mausoleum”) —in fact, the reader might feel obliged to underline a passage on virtually every page of Generosity. With each novel Powers has added to his reputation, and this one is no exception.

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China Miéville
Del Rey ($26)

by Will Wlizlo

Imagine walking down a city street. Next, imagine that when you walk past someone who doesn’t look like you, or dress like you, or who speaks a shrill other language, you completely ignore them. In fact, you’re expected to ignore these foreign passersby. You ignore countless aromatic cafes, traffic disputes, and groping lovers just an arm’s length away. You ignore the entire culture so methodically that eventually you “unsee” it.

It sounds like institutionalized racism, but this is everyday reality for the passive-aggressive sister cities Ul Qoma and Besźel in China Miéville’s The City & the City. Districts of the two cities intertwine and occasionally are layered atop one another. “Crosshatched” neighborhoods are pragmatically postmodern locales: they lie in Besźel and Ul Qoma at the same time, belonging to both and neither. Despite their relative proximity, two neighbors would need to travel across the city, undergo a rigid border inspection, and drive back to meet each other. Reaching out of the kitchen window and simply waving would be irresponsible and dangerous. Both Besźel’s and Ul Qoma’s citizens deftly navigate this complex urban infrastructure, even while driving busy, crosshatched city streets, without breaching the unspeakably complex borders of the other metropolis.

When a woman’s body is found outside of a slummy skatepark in Besźel, Inspector Borlú begins an investigation complicated by the full measure of bureaucratic diplomacy, cultural miscommunication, and a vacuum of evidence. The victim is discovered in Besźel, which has the look and feel of a Soviet-era burg once-swollen with Communist grandiosity and corroded after the collapse (think Warsaw or Bucharest). Scarce clues eventually lead Borlú to Ul Qoma, which more closely resembles a Middle-Eastern boomtown. Typically, a mysterious paramilitary force called Breach cracks down on boundary-crossing violations—often arriving out of thin air and vanishing with offenders just as swiftly—but the woman’s murderer pulls off the crime by legally crossing the Besźel-Ul Qoma border.

Miéville’s novel resembles a digital media mashup, which pools the functionality of multiple Internet applications and retools them to serve a more specific purpose. For example, an online program called Ground Zero, based on Google Maps software, allows one to calculate the range and severity of an atomic bomb dropped anywhere on Earth. (If you were so inclined, Ground Zero could inform you at what distance you would be safe from radiation burns if you dropped a 340-kiloton B61 nuke on your ex-boyfriend’s house.) In true mashup fashion, Miéville has retooled the most crucial and engaging genre tropes from hardboiled noir, conspiracy theory thrillers, and urban dramas to explore extreme political, racial, archaeological and infrastructural concepts. Even Borlú, in his own manner, shares characteristics with the most successful new media enterprises. He is not a whip-smart, almost omniscient super-sleuth; instead he is simple, adaptive, and experimental in his investigation.

The book also reveals Miéville’s keen grasp of global politics. Various nationalistic fringe groups in Besźel and Ul Qoma advocate separatism and hate; contrarily, the Unificationists want to shatter the arcane, arbitrary borders and assemble a massive, integrated city-state. The discourse of these political factions might just as easily map on to struggling areas like the Balkans or Rwanda. Further, Borlú’s international murder case echoes the challenges of global terrorism. To what extent can a nation prevent crimes from unaffiliated foreigners? Who should enforce international law, and how?

To balance out the heady themes of globalization, The City & the City is peppered with decadent conspiracy theories. Borlú increasingly links the murder to Between the City and the City, a theoretical book banned in Besźel and Ul Qoma. The book holds about as much scholarly clout in the universe of the novel as Laurence Gardner’s Bloodline of the Holy Grail does in ours. Nevertheless, Borlú plummets into the controversy surrounding Orciny, a mythical third city that allegedly thrives under the nose of Ul Qomans, Besź residents, and even Breach. Orciny’s existence is contentious because the early history and separation of the two tangible cities is largely unknown. As Borlú elaborates: “that beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown—records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators.”

Rumors circulate hinting that Orciny clandestinely manipulates the political destiny of Besźel and Ul Qoma like tactful Illuminati. In such a context, Borlú must see through political subterfuge, the fog of history, and the invisible walls that divide two cities to solve the murder of a young woman. It is impossible to know the city without walking down its crooked alleys and congested boulevards. You’ve never visited a place quite like it. But with patience and practice, you’ll fit right in.

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Kristiina Ehin
translated by Ilmar Lehtpere
Oleander Press (£5.95)

by Rebecca Farivar

Reading Estonian author Kristiina Ehin’s new collection of short stories, A Priceless Nest, it’s not surprising to learn that she is foremost a poet. The stories are short, but intense, using the compression of poetry to delve into new worlds. In many ways the collection is reminiscent of Aimee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt, as Ehin creates strange characters and places that in their other-worldliness elicit genuine emotion, although Ehin’s work feels more primeval; the stories read like origin tales. Yet even while using the conceit of folklore, Ehin explores contemporary problems in relationships between men and women, making the collection a hybrid of sorts, both ancient and new in the same breath.

This hybrid element is central to the collection’s title story. The main character, simply called “the woman,” traps and cages in her chest anything that makes her feel and then sells it for silver in a faraway town. This practice has occurred since the “beginning of the mists of time,” putting the character and the town in a place that is mystical yet real, and that predats our modern era—the stuff folklore is made of. The woman is successful in ridding herself of feeling until an adder slithers into her bedroom, coils in her husband’s mouth, and crawls into her when her husband kisses her. The woman puts the man and the adder into her chest and tries to sell them, but no one is buying, so she must live with them inside her, causing her to feel. She eventually adapts to this change, making the feelings part of her, rather than struggling against them: “She hoped and feared, loved and suffered, until she seemed to turn into a log herself—a strong, knobbly sculpture of love, a priceless nest.”

Ehin delves into folklore further by using characters that are neither human nor animal, yet even in these stories she establishes a clear male-female dynamic to discuss common relationship problems. In “Fire and Water,” the title characters are actually fire and water, though Water is a woman and Fire a man—and they’re in love. Lying in each other’s arms, Fire tells Water he thinks it’s most important for a woman to be bashful, which upsets Water because she doesn’t know what bashful means. Ultimately, Fire believes that Water is bashful when he sees his own red reflected in her and mistakes it for blushing, but this further upsets Water, saying, “To be able to love you I have to know who I am . . . If I deceive myself with the thought that there’s red in me, that I can blush, then . . .” Fire responds to Water, telling her that her “natural strength is more interesting than bashfulness,” ending the story with his love for her natural state. The story becomes a parable about acceptance in relationships, a very modern concern rendered strange through a folkloric lens.

Ehin’s use of ancient narrative traditions is, paradoxically, what keeps these stories from falling prey to cliché, making their observations and morals seem new despite the fact that the very same topics are talked to death on any number of talk shows. Ehin adds gravitas to these concerns, making it seem like our contemporary problems are actually rooted in the past.

Having already published five collections of poetry in Estonian, only recently has Ehin’s work become accessible to English speakers with A Priceless Nest and her most recent poetry collection, The Drums of Silence (Oleander, 2007), both translated by Ilmar Lehtpere. Some readers may come to this collection hoping to get insight into Estonian culture, but aside from a few passing references to Tallinn and Tartu (Estonia’s two largest cities) and the story “Festival of Joy,” which touches on the still-felt effects of Soviet occupation, the stories live in a cultureless realm. In this way, Ehin further emphasizes their primeval aspects, and suggests that the struggles addressed therein are universal.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Colm Tóibín
Scribner ($25)

by Suzann Clemens

Laced with Irish idioms and universal themes, Colm Tóibín’s sixth novel Brooklyn opens in the author’s hometown of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland. Eilis Lacey, a bookkeeping student living with her widowed mother and older sister, struggles in this postwar coastal town where class structure, economic hardship, and the imposing intimacy of a small community complicates life. With no future prospects to be found, Eilis becomes the next member of her family to leave Ireland (three older brothers have already migrated to England). Through the manipulation of her resourceful older sister and a well-meaning priest, Eilis eventually heads for America.

What freshness can be brought to such a well-examined story as the plight of the Irish emigrant? In this case, familiarity does not sour the reading experience because of the author's masterful rendering of the characters and thematic underpinnings discovered there. See, for example, how intimately Tóibín expresses the transition through loneliness once Eilis reaches Brooklyn:

It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought.

Obligation also figures heavily in this novel, where family expectations and responsibilities navigate Eilis's leaving and later her return. This presents an aspect of entrapment, a topic often explored by Tóibín; his characters push the boundaries of social expectation when provoked by their own history and that of the place where they find themselves.

Tóibín's strategic use of descriptive detail is worth noting. In his first novel, The South, the damp earth of Catalonia engulfed the reader as the book’s main character saw the mountains for the first time. InBrooklyn, a modulated use of description fully mirrors the perspective of Tóibín's protagonist: what attracts Eilis is provided in detail; what does not is barely noted. Thus manipulated, the reader rides upon the character's perspective and ultimately feels whatever joy or sorrow transpires. With a character so intimately connected, even suspense is achieved when she behaves unpredictably, making her believably human.

The ways that humans find love, relocate, and attempt to change the direction of their lives are but some of the life experiences explored in the fictional work of Colm Tóibín. While his characters grapple with whatever befalls them, the influences of obligation, responsibility, history, and tradition add complexity to their individual efforts to endure. In Brooklyn, all of this supports a narrative deeply felt, providing a reading experience that is both imaginative and engaging.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Damion Searls
Dalkey Archive Press ($12.95)

by Brooks Sterritt

What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, Damion Searls’s first book of fiction, is remarkable for its humor, its erudition, and for what it does with existing literary texts. The short stories in this collection feel utterly new, yet revisit and refresh classics of the form, including works by Hawthorne, Nabokov, and André Gide.

This isn’t too surprising for an author who has translated works by Proust, Rilke, Thomas Bernhard, and others, but Searls’s linguistic facility is also on display here in the form of neologisms and multilingual puns. Though Gary Lutz got to the word “extracubicular” first, the following passage from Searls’s “Goldenchain” is without precedent: “Thrown-on hand-me-downs come together into a look, a neodisjunctivist style all their own.” Punning occurs when a husband and wife at the end of their marriage consult “Dr. Anfang” (der Anfang is German for “beginning”) and when an artist named Otto introduces his “newest project, an alterego of John Cocteau named John Cockwater.”

Each story in Searls’s collection is told in the first person, and contains at least one writer, whether actual, former, or aspiring. The narrator of “The Cubicles” declares “all of this is fiction,” “my similes drift, I notice,” and dreams of writing “on the side, some day, as a hobby.” In “Goldenchain” a man “recover[ing] from [his] marriage” encounters an exhibit of Ethiopian healing scrolls, decides to write about them, but is unsure which form to pursue: “a review, an essay, maybe even the novel I still wanted (and want) to write, or at least a short story.” “Dialogue Between the Two Chief World Systems” features a character writing a dissertation on the same five works of fiction from which Damion Searls drew inspiration for this collection.

Such frequent intertextual games and self-referential asides would distract, if they weren’t accompanied by Searls’s exquisite prose. Consider, in “56 Water Street,” a passage concerning a great blue heron: “Slowly, deliberately, it takes off. A coat tossed onto a coat rack, limp and loose, became a gray sail, swelling with the wind.” Or this description of a cemetery for British soldiers near the Puget sound: “Now they overgrow their own gravestones in a strange grassy grove on the hillside, enclosed in a white picket fence and a humming scent the transmuted young men release into the air themselves.” Searls also engages both high and low culture, with paintings of angels “more like Klee’s than Hallmark’s” and references to Chaucer, Henry James, Dr. Seuss, The Far Side, corporate-speak, and more.

The collection as a whole succeeds because it absorbs accepted classics, riffs on them, and then progresses into uncharted territory. For example, Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin,” with five short sections and a discussion of the responsibility of literature, lends its form to “A Guide to San Francisco.” The latter depicts a man in an underground office, in “the other parallel city a dozen feet below, not above, the streets of San Francisco,” creating “a three-dimensional model of the underground.” The narrator states, “I feel that this is the only sense of art: to create an inner universe we prefer to the other one.” With What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, Damion Searls has accomplished such a feat.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Lorrie Moore
Knopf ($25)

by Kevin Lynch

In the climactic scene of A Gate at the Stairs, Tassie Keltjin tries to get back to her parent’s farm home by taking a treacherous night drive on her Suzuki motor scooter. Author Lorrie Moore’s mental Suzuki attempts the same thing by driving backwards to pre-Iraq-invasion America, the folly of which Tassie implicitly acknowledges by noting a stern law of metaphysics—“You can never go backwards. Though scientists tell you that you can. No information can escape from a black hole.”

A self-described “disabused romantic” and arguably our most humane satirist since Malamud, Moore skewers the bellicose and deluded, wielding fate’s fickleness and kindly noting its cruelty. Furthermore, she enters and escapes Tassie’s deepening black hole of a life without gratuitous bloodshed, which too few novelists seem able to do (though the book does include a memorable steak knife-to-Karl Rove fantasy). A Gate at the Stairs actually circumnavigates John Updike territory, with a distinct reversal—rather than the child of a New England suburbanite, Tassie is a 20-year-old Wisconsin potato farmer’s daughter working and studying in the city. Yet a suburbanite’s loneliness lingers in this fictional college town modeled on Madison (where the author lives and teaches), here renamed as the famously duped city of Troy.

After restaurateur Sarah Brink hires Tassie to nanny her adorable mixed-race adopted child named Mary Emma, Tassie falls for a suave Brazilian who’s not what he seems. There’s some kinship here to Updike’s surprising late-career novel Terrorist, but in A Gate at the Stairs the worst victims of this subplot are love and faith in the promise of multi-cultural relations. Sarah runs the tony Le Petit Moulin, while mainly running away from her relationships. After allowing Tassie to handle much of Emmie’s crucially formative period, Sarah gives the child up with stunning equanimity when the agency reclaims her due to “withheld information” regarding Sarah’s secret past.

Sarah concludes she’s an inadequate mother for the challenges a mixed-race child faces. With Mary Emma gone, she almost predictably divorces her husband to go back to her home in New York. She no longer loves this compulsively flirtatious, typically abstracted scientist, the kind many women pragmatically “settle for.” Sarah’s dissolving act is moving because Moore has made us care about her. The author has admitted that her own unanticipated struggles as a DWSM (divorced working soccer mom) kept her from finishing this novel sooner; her experience surely fueled painful insights into fragmented nuclear family life.

One also almost feels sorry for Edward, the seemingly clueless husband. After Sarah leaves him, Edward calls up Tassie and suggests that she taught him there is “no such thing as wisdom . . . But there is lack of wisdom,” a sort of reductive cop-out Zen-ism embedded in a romantic overture. Tassie, who has learned some things in college, won’t settle for that. Moore’s final witticism is an example of her rare emotional power—a corny-yet-apt pun on Edward’s name, conveying Tassie’s desperate sense that human connections are no more stable than the caprices of weather. This sort of laugh-it-off queasiness often surfaces in Moore’s writing as an inlet to reality. "Bury your unrealistic dreams or they will bury you," Tassie says, and it's a punchline that works.

Moore’s picaresque journey is packed with a flask of 80 proof satire that often fires up tears of bitter ambivalence. Her comic insight peaks in the dazzling glare of several extended tour de force passages quoting uptight parents of mixed-race children, and she deftly pours out a trail of bickering splutter reeking of American racism and political correctness, sometimes in the same person. By contrast, Tassie’s friendship with her roommate is the book’s most satisfying relationship. Our heroine plays a translucent bass guitar “like Jack Bruce of Cream” and “Murph” plays a xylophone that Sarah left behind. They jam merrily while the storytelling bubbles with hip musical references and sauciness: In trying to write a song lyric, Murph pauses to ask: “Is it clitoris or clitoris?” “It may depend on which you have,” Tassie responds.

r comparatively hardscrabble life easily overtakes Sarah’s sad yuppie story, and culminates in a Marx Brothers-like stunt that touches the desperate desire for familial redemption. Yet ultimately this is Tassie’s book, and one senses that, like Updike’s haggard Rabbit Angstrom, she may be a character we meet again. Readers will want to keep following Tassie, wherever her kooky Suzuki takes her.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Fall 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009