This book is only 84 pages, but it’s the biggest book I’ve read in years. It is the very rare kind of book that surprises and transforms, and leads us gently but completely to a revolution in thinking. It could very likely become required reading.

Reviewed by Emily Kischell

Published by Rvive Books - Hardcover - 84 pages - $14.95

Ishiguro never takes the easy way out in his fiction; he doesn’t write stories with a  clear demarcation of right and wrong, light and dark, and yet he does insist on a  line of human decency.  His characters yearn for what is best not only for themselves but also as a reaching outward for someone or something else. Even when they fail, miserably or, as demonstrated to great affect in two of the stories, humorously, they are trying to do the right thing; Ishiguro’s characters want to be the right person for the job, to answer the needs of the people (acquaintances, wives, agents, friends, memory of a mother) making demands all around them, and to bring some gratification, some pleasure, somewhere.  Rarely do they please themselves, but that is life, both in Ishiguro’s stories and in the real world. Learning to live with dreams that have not quite come true, with loves that do not answer all needs, with the injustice of how life’s rewards and punishments are meted out, is learning to live, period. And in Ishiguro’s stories, the lesson is learned through moments of pain, of grace, and of laugh-out-loud chaos.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Knopf - Hardcover - 240 pages - $16.50

Though the subject matter might seem obviously grim, McEwan handles it with a forthright and reflective approach, allowing the reader to explore and analyze, rather than wallow in, the disaster’s effects on Stephen and Julie.  That is not to say that the book reads cold or unemotional which, owing to McEwan’s careful craft, it does not.

Cleverly, Stephen’s publisher Charles is married to a practical but nurturing physicist who is exploring the notion of time, and it is Thelma who seems to stabilize Stephen’s life as he moves through the world in a kind of hazy but detached mourning.  The twist in the book comes not with the obvious mystery of the disappearance of Stephen’s child but instead within the subplot of Charles and Thelma.  Subsequently, what at first seems a somewhat dry recounting of Stephen’s stagnant existence turns dramatically and fascinatingly on end, altering the reader’s perspective of all events and personalities in the book.

“The child in time” is not merely a title or a play-on-words, but also describes the seemingly shifting forces of time and experience itself, while illustrating how one child lost in time might shift the timeframe of the lives of others.  Says Charles, “Stephen, talk to a ten-year old in midsummer about Christmas… For children, childhood is timeless.  It’s always in the present… Of course time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end.  But they don’t feel it.  Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up…’ there’s always an edge of disbelief.”

Beautifully concise, perfectly worded, heart-wrenching, subtle, avalanching and, at last, imbued with hope, The Child in Time is perhaps the work that first marks McEwan’s celebrated later novelistic style of Atonement and Saturday.

Reviewed by Erica-Lynn Huberty, www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Published by Anchor – Paperback – 272 Pages - $10.00

The book begins with Eveline’s high school days in East Hampton, Long Island.  Not the “Hamptons” of current gossip columns and Hollywood films, this is remote, Eastern Long Island in the 1970s:  the population a mix of working-class locals, rich weekenders, pot-smoking children of hippies, and oddball bohemians.  What Rick Moody described of suburban Connecticut in the ‘70s in The Ice Storm, Hamann expands on and makes her own.

Through descriptive vignettes that shift, non-linear, between Eveline’s last two years of high school, we learn of her powerful connection to her best friend’s mother, a French woman whom Eveline calls Maman, who dies of cancer (“Though my mother had hoped to soothe me, her voice did not soothe me.  Maman’s voice rolled like currents beneath the sea.  You were diving, you were rising.”).  Also brought to light is Eveline’s humiliating rape by a group of male friends from high school.

There are several men who enter into Eveline’s life: as lovers, as reflectors, as shoulders to lean on.  Yet even they, and the obvious importance of them to her, do not overpower her strong and centered voice, her unique view of the world.  In another author’s hands Anthropology of an American Girl could have been another chick-lit forum for wise-cracking or weary, post-feminist musing.  In the hands of Hamann it is a mesmeric and intelligent work of literature.

Hamman’s examination of moral character, and the intimate relationships through which power is exercised well or badly, is the centerpiece around which the convincing, though at times terrifyingly commonplace, plot revolves.  Eveline’s voice is almost impossibly and authentically observant, resonant and driven; her nuanced phrasing and painstaking scrutiny propelling the reader through thickly-woven segments of memory and experience, consciousness and perception; through the loss of love, the degradation of violence, and, in the end, the essence of hope through the human universal need for connection.

Reviewed by Erica-Lynn Huberty, www.ericalynnhuberty.com

Published by Spiegel & Grau – Hardcover – 624 pages - $25.00

The multitude of characters in Three Days Before the Shooting, Hickman, Bliss/Sunraider, Severen, Janey, Lee Willie Minifees, Jessie Rockmore, Lavatrice, McIntyre, the cross-eyed woman, and the rest, have such blood and bone truth in their presentations that the book could be a documentary about life in 1950s. Much as the blues music of the 1950s reflected life of the Black populations, the characters in this novel reflect both the segregated and integrated realities of 1950s America.

What is most magnificent about Three Days Before the Shooting is Ellison’s command and use of words. This novel is rich and deep and thick with words. Open the book to any page and you will become immersed in the movement and play of monologues, observations, recollections, letters, speeches, and sermons. The novel reads like music, a baroque rendition of the blues with layers of sounds, rhythms, and meaning communicating hopes and heartbreak, the painful smack of reality and the endurance of just getting on with it all. People talk “white” or talk “black”, and tell the truth of what they’ve seen as they see the truth to be. These variations together build the story of Hickman, Bliss, and Severen, but most importantly, the words build towards a crescendo of truth about race and identity in America.

The way in which Ellison constructed his novel — how he uses words to both illuminate and obfuscate the truth behind his story of a white child raised by a black man — is a deliberate deployment of what Ellison sees as a legacy of slavery: “the way we talk… you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to supply the missing meaning.” Ellison uses the linking narratives of his many characters to circle around and around the novel’s underlying truth. At times the different layers are dizzying. The novel becomes a maze of differing points of view and of tangents gone off on and then returned from; we are returned back to the main story but from a different angle, and we see everything in a new way.

Hickman warns Bliss of the power of words: “Words are everything and don’t you forget it, ever.” Bliss takes the advice but he abandons the positive and life-affirming use of words that Hickman has tried to instill and instead resorts to life-negating rhetoric of hate and prejudice. A son rejects his father with words but the greater rejection is the wordless abandonment of a son by his true father. Ellison uses the words of one of the most powerful phrases, “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?” to represent both the disbelief and the despair caused by such abandonment. Sunraider calls those words out when the assassin’s bullets strike; Hickman instructs Bliss as a child to recite those words during a dramatization of rebirth through Christ; and Ellison returns us again and again to the lamentation. It is not only the cry of Bliss and of Severen, neither to ever know their fathers. But more, much more, it is the plea of an entire population. The words evoke the abandonment of the Black slaves, set free by Lincoln but then left uncared for and undone. There is a marvelous scene of Black pilgrims visiting the Lincoln Memorial and reflecting on the promise of the man and the failure of a nation.

The breadth and bravery of Ellison’s writing is demonstrated by how he tackles his themes of what it means to be black in America, what it means to be white, and the promise and failure of the American Dream. It is a great pity that Ellison never finished this magnificent novel. Perhaps the novel could not be finished because Three Days Before the Shooting raises the issue of what race has to do with our identity as Americans and resolution of that question — who are we? — is far from being realized. We are still a nation divided by racial identity, more than forty years after Ellison began his novel. One hundred and forty years after the Juneteenth declaration that all Americans, black and white, are equal in the pursuit of and entitlement to happiness, liberty, and respect, we are still struggling with what these words - Black, White, American — mean. Ralph Ellison in Three Days Before the Shooting offers a vision that transcends race, recording both the common ground and the individual experiences that define who we are: Americans.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch at www.readallday.org

Published by Modern Library (Random House) - Hardcover - 1136 pages - $50.00

Abraham’s narration is genuine and clear; he is a boy we watch turn into a man and the process is painful, frustrating, awkward, and beautiful.  Abraham’s voice is one of conflicting emotions, uncertain status, threatened identity, and in turns hopeful and hopeless.  Paragraphs of questions underscore the uncertainty of Abraham’s life — “Who was she?  Who was this woman who so loved me while I slept yet was so uninterested in me when I was awake?  And which Abraham was I, the one my mother saw or the one my grandma knew; the one who needed to be scolded and coddled or the one who was deemed a man, albeit prematurely and without warrant?”; the questions that just keep coming, more and more questioning as Abraham grows from childhood into adulthood, questions that demonstrate the level of insecurity in terms of present needs (like food and medical care) and of future prospects (employment, health, family): “what chance do I have?”  Abraham wants to be a man but a man unlike the men he sees around him causing so much pain:”I had witnessed the damage other men caused and I didn’t want any part of being like the others, not their presence or absence.”

The most harrowing question posed, again and again, by Abraham and by the people of his community, is “What are the living supposed to do?….Should I cry out?…Should I demand to know why?  Do I plea for justice and peace?…I don’t know.” How to go on, when there is no future that can promise peace, sufficiency, stability?  Survival is through family (bonds of love), church (bonds of faith), or sadly, through escape via drugs that while destroying life, provide a buffer from pain and hopelessness that have become intolerable, or via mental illness, as seen in the character of Lindbergh, veteran of the Vietnam war and creator of magical helicopters to fly up and out of Ever Park.

Goodman creates a moving and unique relationship between Abraham and Donnell, the cousin who, although just five years older than Abraham, becomes his care giver, his protector, his touchstone, and his most faithful, believing, and exacting friend.  It is Donnell who must grow too soon into a man, and who skirts the line between what is legal and what is required for his family to survive; in the end, Donnell will be the one who blows his anger and frustration out in a game of basketball that is really a proclamation of worth, a manifestation of will, and a desperate bid for respect: “You leave it here.  Everything.  All the blood, sweat, tears.  Ain’t nothing that can stop you.”  When Abraham has to take stock of what his life has been and what he wants it to become, he recognizes the debt he owes to Donnell and the strength of the love he bears for him: it is a love that sustains Abraham as much as it sustains Donnell.

That is the strength of the hold of family love: it gives back as much as is given out. Love is the only lasting definite in the lives of the Singleton family, their existence  rife with transience (anyone could be shot dead at any time or hauled off to jail or just disappear into drugs) and uncertainty (lives, wasted and wasting, surround them).  But alongside the harrowing realities of daily life, love is the constant, whether it is the love of Donnell, protective and demanding; the love of Nice, so powerful that he cuts off all contact with his family when his own pain is too much for them to bear; the love of the grandmother, who does whatever it takes to keep the apartment and its inhabitants safe; the love of Aunt Rhonda, with her affectionate and obstinate pride in her family; or the love of Abraham’s mother, demonstrated through the care she takes of Abraham though she is still a child herself.  Love is a circle enveloping the Singleton family, even through its darkest hours of sorrow, hate, pain, and hopelessness.

Hold Love Strong is a powerful novel about one boy’s epic journey of survival against all odds.  That communities of insidious hopelessness, nonexistent opportunities, and failed political and civic promises exist is well-known and Hold Love Strong makes its truth a condemnation: communities of plenty are failing communities of need.  But Hold Love Strong is much more than a social commentary on failures of our society: it is a testament to the will to survive and to surpass. The book is fiction but every word of it rings true: in following its cycles of misery and possibility, of abandonment and connection, of loneliness and of brotherhood, we are all made witness to the enduring possibility — and our shared responsibility to foster that possibility — that any child can find wings and fly.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch, www.readallday.org

Published by Simon and Schuster - hardcover - 368 pages - $24.95

I-5 follows the path of Anya, a young Russian woman kidnapped into the world of involuntary sex traffic, shuttled from brothel to brothel in the United States. The premise of the book is that she’s being moved from Southern California to Oakland where Mr. Kupkin, her “owner” very much in the tradition of slavery everywhere, plans to expand his empire of young women, duped or stolen mostly from Eastern Europe. To get there entails a ride up I-5, the great (albeit boring) north-south highway of the West Coast. As they proceed north, Anya, her immediate boss & pimp Marty, a comic thug alternately called Pedro & the Tarantula & a nameless young woman who will be delivered to a new owner along the way, they get caught in the Central Valley’s infamous tule fog as well as the valley’s one growing-like-gangbusters industry, prisons. Things happen, people get separated & we get to see Anya’s complex (and ambivalent) relationship to her own slavery. More things happen & Anya & Marty reach Oakland, though not as they’d intended. More things happen still.

This is one of those books where you know from page 2, if not page 1, what Anya’s fate holds in store, though certainly not the what & how of it. Publishing the novel in a deeply noir format – Roderick Constance’s cover image is ironic without being comical – underscores what is predictable here, which is actually part of the fun of the book (how will Anya do it?). And Anya is the character here to whom Brenner is committed. To some degree, every other character in I-5 is defined by her, or at least by their function in her story.

If there are any weaknesses here, they’re relatively minor. Brenner gives us what amounts to a lesson in the history & meteorology of the Central Valley, setting up both the fog & the scene at the prison. This isn’t something Anya knows or understands, any more than she understands the back story of the young guard or of what Kupkin’s life is like in Atlantaguard stick—three days of carving for nothing.” Jaya thought of the designs she might have made on that ivory: kiwi vine and curved daggers. “They should make room for us. It’s time for new masters, new ideas. “If the court doesn’t come down soon, they will go,” said Hool. “It’s hot as a baker’s kitchen by the bridge. Brenner tells us all this & more because she wants us to know and in these postmodern times, nobody is worrying all that much about ontological or narrative consistency. If anything, Brenner makes great use of indeterminacy in the later chapters to reveal not just what happens but what can happen. But reading of the nature of tule fog or of the expansion of California’s prison system¹ feels disruptive – it was the one moment in the book where I could imagine becoming dislodged from the story itself.

Years ago, when she was writing the book that turned into The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, Kathy Acker & I had a long conversation about the nature of character. The great trick of narrative or figurative literature, of course, is that the language on the page integrates syntactically not into a greater argument or expository structure, but instead to a displacement, an invocation of a referred world. A character represents a particular configuration of this referred world, and the difficulty of this displacement is such that we commonly acknowledge that the highest compliment one can pay to a character is that he or she is “believable.” Anya certainly is believable, but she also is a cipher, a symbol of the thousands – millions, if we think of sex traffic on its worldwide scale – of young women who submit to rape everyday. Brenner wants us to see this world through the eyes of one woman, someone young enough still to remember what hope is, even if old enough now in experience to understand just how difficult this is. I-5 is in this sense a political novel, though Brenner never lets this obstruct our view of her character. Anya is someone you will never forget.

¹ In my work in the prison movement, 1972-77, I was the lobbyist responsible for stopping funding for new prisons and was successful in each of those years. But it was already evident that the Department of Corrections, the guard’s union and far right rural legislators were bringing together the unholy alliance that would see the system explode from the nine joints I had to deal with in the 1970s to the 33 of today. The Department of Corrections is now the second largest police agency in the United States, second only to NYPD.

Reviewed by Ron Silliman - Silliman’s Blog

Published by PM Press - 256 pages - paperback - $15.95