Hogarth
I’ve spent many hours enthralled by Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, who so expertly plumbed human nature for its gullibility and hypocrisy – especially that of a Westerner dropped into an Eastern culture of which he has little understanding.
So from Page 1, I was thrilled with Lawrence Osborne’s unsettling, exotic novel Hunters in the Dark (Hogarth, 309 pp., $16), so similar in tone, pace and cool British irony.
Robert Grieve is the first to admit he’s dull: passive, predictable, studiously inconspicuous. A teacher in a small English town, he escapes every summer, usually to Europe. But this year, he opts for fecund, steamy, faintly menacing Cambodia, still shadowed by the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.
When he lands an unexpected windfall his first night in the country, he decides to shed both his dullness and his mundane existence. But a suave-talking American, a desperate taxi driver, a rich Cambodian doctor and his beautiful daughter insert themselves into his life, which suddenly isn’t his anymore.
Superstition, fate, karma, good and evil – all play their roles as the story twists deftly toward its surprising end.
Random House
My Name Is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout
Random House, 209 pp., $16
“We were oddities, our family,” explains the eponymous narrator of Elizabeth Strout’s spare, unsentimental, deeply affecting novel “My Name Is Lucy Barton.”
In the mid-1980s, Lucy is a young woman, married with two small girls. When she fails to recover from an appendectomy, she languishes for weeks in a New York City hospital. One afternoon, her mother appears without warning; it’s been years since they’d seen each other.
“Her being there . . . made me feel warm and liquid-filled,” recalls Lucy, and they pass the time telling stories about people from the past in their small hometown of Amgash, Illinois.
Yet something is off-kilter. They approach one another cautiously. Lucy’s happiness is edged with pain. Slowly, straightforwardly, she reveals a troubled childhood defined by poverty, neglect, isolation and abuse.
Her narration strays into the present – her desire to be a writer, her love for her own children, her difficult marriage – but all is tinged by the terrible pain from the past, until she finds that the way to escape its grip is to let go of it first.
Random House
A Doubter’s Almanac
Ethan Canin
Random House, 592 pp., $18
Ethan Canin’s brilliant novel “A Doubter’s Almanac” begins during Milo Andret’s solitary childhood in the northern Michigan woods. Vaguely aware he’s different from other kids, he has no understanding of the mathematical talent he possesses until he lands at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s.
When his professor and mentor there says he’s been “chosen by God… by humankind. By the cosmic order,” for such talent, Milo is grateful.
“If you’re grateful,” the professor replies, “then perhaps you misunderstand.”
This is the first glimmer of the slow, painful unraveling of Milo’s life to come. He goes on to achieve international fame for proving an obscure mathematical theorem, followed by a spectacular plunge into an abyss of personal dysfunction and professional mediocrity fueled by alcoholism.
Canin’s examination of genius, jealousy, love, ambition and obsession is mesmerizing as he follows three generations of a family in turns buoyed and scarred by one man’s gifts and flaws.
Though his unflinching dissection of the physical and mental ravages caused by substance abuse can be difficult to stomach, Canin gives readers hopeful closure with his near-mystical, redemptive ending.
Penguin
Blue Horses
Mary Oliver
Penguin, 79 pp., $16
Now in her 80s, having had a decades-long, illustrious writing career, Maple Heights native Mary Oliver projects the patient wisdom of time in her most recent poetry collection, “Blue Horses.”
Yet there’s also a sense of youthful energy, with its impetuous and headstrong certainty. She declares, “I don’t want to be demure or respectable.” Nor does she yearn for the predictable or mundane: “… if I wanted a boat I would want a boat I couldn’t steer.”
Her poems portray a near-constant state of wonder at the natural world, at “mother nature,” whose “arms never withhold.”
But sometimes dismay at humankind counters the joy nature affords. Oliver has named title poem for a haunting painting by German artist Franz Marc, who died in the Battle of Verdun during World War I at age 36:
“I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses what war is…
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”
Marchetti is a critic in Cleveland Heights.
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