Author: Corey Mesler

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Stephen Giles’ The Boy at the Keyhole.

What’s the difference between a young adult novel and a novel for adults? The sophistication of the language? Subject matter? Age of the protagonist? All of these dissimilarities can be shot down with examples. The Wind in the Willows has language as rich as a Nabokov novel. Clockwork Orange has a young protagonist, and today’s YA fiction is often about formerly taboo subjects. I ask this question because Australian writer Stephen Giles is the author of a series of young adult novels and, according to his publisher, this is his first novel for adults. While reading it, I kept wondering how it was unlike young adult fiction.

I was perplexed, so I did what any inquisitive man would do faced with such a vexing poser. I asked on Facebook. And most people said this: A young protagonist is the main difference. Yes, the titular protagonist of The Boy at the Keyhole is obviously a young person, and the entire story is about him wrestling with the absence of his mother and whether or not his keeper, Ruth, is evil or good. One person also mentioned a simpler structure, fewer subplots. This succinctly addresses what I was asking. And still another answer that is germane: one person said “marketing.”

By any standard that I can bring to bear, this is still a young adult novel, regardless of what the publisher says. I don’t mean this in any way pejoratively. But it makes a difference in how one reads the book and, for my purposes, how one considers it for review. Comparisons on the cover to Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson seem inapt.

The story is pretty straightforward and is practically a two-person play. Young Samuel Clay is left in the care of prickly stickler, Ruth, housekeeper and babysitter, who has let the rest of the staff go. Samuel’s father is dead, and his mother is in America trying to find a way to make her fortune (what she’s doing is rather vague). She sends Samuel postcards with brief notes, which do nothing to convince Samuel that she will be home soon. After some irresponsible taunting from his best friend, Joseph, Samuel begins to suspect that Ruth has done something terrible, perhaps even killed his mother so she could take over the house and the care of the recalcitrant only son. Samuel tells Joseph, “She’s a dragon, that one.” Joseph asks him if he’s checked the cellar.

As Samuel piles up his “proof,” he begins an emotional tug-of-war with Ruth. This battle of wills makes up the meat of the plot. There are tense, late-night creepings by both characters. Samuel thinks the postcards are forged. He also thinks Ruth might be trying to do away with him. In a piece of chocolate cake Ruth makes for him, Samuel chokes on a piece of broken glass. Ruth convinces him he does not need a doctor. As the boy’s investigations lead to more damning proof, the reader is left with two options: Either Ruth really is a murderous, duplicitous fiend, or Samuel is deluded in a childish and naïve way. The narrative is predominantly concerned with Samuel — he’s in every scene — so one is tempted to side with the lonesome lad and to believe his half-baked case against the overly authoritarian Ruth.

“You tried to kill me,” he says. “You wanted me to choke on that glass.”

Ruth answers: “It’s been a trying night, and I think we’re both ready for bed.”

Giles writes: “Samuel thought of his mother, murdered at Ruth’s hand, and he wanted the hate to glisten in his eyes.”

One can imagine this as a film, and it would make an especially fine thriller in the right hands, say a modern Hitchcock. The ending is certainly Hitchcockian — I’m pretty sure you won’t see it coming — and is a marvelous reward for the subtle, measured unfolding of the tale. The Boy at the Keyhole is a fast read, and I predict it will be a popular book, the kind of thing book clubs gobble up. It should also please fans of young adult thriller writers like John Bellairs, Ransom Riggs, Lois Duncan, and Enid Blyton.

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Daryl Sanders’ That Thin Wild Mercury Sound

“The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.”

— Robert Fitzgerald

I’ve always loved making lists, ranking anything from movies to books to music to my friends. My ears perk up when I hear, “Name your Top 10 whatevers.” So, numerous times throughout my life, I’ve enthusiastically answered the question “What’s your favorite album?” Trouble is I’ve toggled back and forth numerous times between two albums: The Beatles’ Revolver and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. To me, they seem the pillars of ’60s rock, my favorite genre in the known universe. Obviously, the book That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde by Daryl Sanders was right up my alley.

Sanders slowly leads up to the recording of that double album in Nashville, providing some colorful background: Dylan going electric, Dylan making Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan meeting and going on the road with the Hawks (who became The Band). It’s a pivotal period in Dylan’s life. He is about to change music forever. “I know my thing now,” Dylan says. “I know what it is. It’s hard to describe. I don’t know what to call it because I’ve never heard it before.” Sanders adds, “It would be another thirteen years before he found a description that worked — ‘that thin, wild mercury sound.'”

The title phrase refers to a music Dylan heard in his head, but which eluded him in the studio. He thought he found it with the Hawks. Instead, he was finally able to create the sound in his head on record when he went to Nashville and recorded this, his greatest album. Here’s the most common lineup with whom he found that once elusive sound: Producer: Bob Johnston. Nashville cats: Charlie McCoy (guitar and harmonica), Hargus Robbins (piano), Joe South (guitar), Henry Strzelecki (bass), and Kenneth Buttrey (drums). And Dylan brought with him Robbie Robertson (guitar) and Al Kooper (organ).

I’ve read a lot about Dylan, but he seems an inexhaustible subject. I learned a lot here. For instance, I didn’t know that Jerry Schatzberg, who later became a wonderful director (the Al Pacino film, Scarecrow), took the iconic cover shot. Dylan himself chose the blurry print, which delighted Schatzberg.

The meatiest part of the book concerns the actual recording of the album. Many of the sessions were done in the wee hours of the morning, which didn’t always please the professional Nashville cats, though they were, mostly, aware that they were part of something momentous. “According to studio records,” Sanders says, “it was 4 a.m. when the Nashville musicians finally got their introduction to the ‘Sad Eyed Lady’.” The reference is to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the epic song that took up the entire side four of the LP. “To me, this is the definitive version of what 4 a.m. sounds like,” Al Kooper said. Much of the wait was because Dylan was writing and polishing the lyrics as they went along. Often, he sat in a part of the studio cut off from the other musicians with just paper and a pen. Strzelecki said, “You know, this is going to be either the biggest album in the world, or it ain’t gonna do nothin.'”

Fortunately, the former part of his prediction is on the mark. After Blonde on Blonde was released and digested, it became one of the most influential records in rock music. Much about the recording, the songs, even the title, has become part of rock myth. Many believe the title is a reference to Edie Sedgwick, from Warhol’s factory, who dated Dylan briefly. Others suggested it referred to Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, or to Dylan’s high school girlfriend. Sanders adds, “Finally, there is also the fact that taken as an acronym, the title spells BOB.”

This fascinating, delicious book offers great insight into both the minutia of the recording process and Bob Dylan’s idiosyncratic, eccentric methods. For songwriters, this book may offer unlimited inspiration. For Dylan fans, it is a must.

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Edward Carey’s Little.

Edward Carey’s first novel, Observatory Mansions, announced the coming of a new American fabulist. It may have been the best first novel since Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mulhouse. And like Millhauser, Carey’s inventiveness was joyous and full of marvels, like a bookish visit to Aladdin’s cave. His second novel, Alva and Irva, only cemented his reputation as a new Calvino. Little is his first adult novel in years, after a well-received Gormenghast-like young adult trilogy.

This new novel, as they say in a film’s opening credits, is based upon a true story. But the literary magic, the supreme storytelling, the novelistic pacing and design belong to Carey, and he dazzles. The Dickensian tale begins in Switzerland, in the 1760s, when a young orphan girl, Marie, becomes apprenticed to a Doctor Curtius, who has washed out of medical practice, only to begin an eccentric career based on making figures in wax. Marie is under five feet in height and becomes known as Little, a moniker at times affectionate, at times demeaning. “Little ill-facedness, little minor monster in a child’s dress … little thing … little howl … little crumb of protruding flesh … little statement on mankind,” one nasty man calls her. Little’s story is fraught with horrors, then becomes a mix of horrors and enchantments.

Little is voiced in first person by Marie, and she is an engaging narrator. She says, “This is the story of a shop. The story of a business, of its highs and its lows, of its staff coming and going, of profit and loss, and sometimes of the outside world and the people that came knocking on our doors. So then. Let me explain.” She also illustrates her tale with chiaroscuro drawings, demonstrating the craft she has learned from the doctor, though the pupil soon outstrips the educator. Carey is an accomplished artist, and his illustrations add to the strange and eerie luster of the tale. The book’s pages are as lovely as a rill; the words wind around these intricate and arresting sketches. They remind me of the illustrations in some of John Gardner’s novels. I met Gardner once and asked him why he liked visuals in his novels, and he said, “Because every time you open one it’s like Christmas.”

Curtius’ art takes them to Paris where they take lodging with the Widow Picot, in her home called the Great Monkey House. She is one of the novel’s antagonists, an unpleasant woman who takes an immediate dislike to Marie and sets about to make her young life a living hell. “I loathed her utterly, then and always,” Marie says. “Can I describe my hatred for her? It would poison these pages.”

Meanwhile, the waxworks they’ve begun in the widow’s house have become a popular attraction. She wants to exhibit only the best people — she is a terrible snob — while Curtius is drawn to the criminal and the insane. The exhibition is yin and yang, heroes and villains, dark and light. It is this seesawing back and forth that propels the story, as Marie attempts to come into her own. It’s a bildungsroman, with the added twist that the hero is a woman, who must not only battle her tormentors but also the prejudices of a male-centered universe. Carey adds just the right amount of gothic seasoning to his tale. One can feel a bit of Bronte behind his descriptions of the various households and plain and fancy folk whom our protagonist finds herself among.

The historical background for this tale is the French Revolution, the same as A Tale of Two Cities. Carey’s version, seen through the eyes of a young woman coming into her own, is a masque with a colorful cast of real people, from Marie Antoinette to Jean-Paul Marat and Jacques-Louis David, from Rousseau to Robespierre. Carey’s vividly painted setting and equally vivid rendering of characters makes Little the kind of book you feel you are living within. When I finished, I immediately missed it. I wanted to listen to Marie a little longer. It’s also a story too large and rich for a 700-word review.

Little is the best piece of new fiction I’ve read this year. It is a marvel. It is like a Christmas present. Give it to yourself.

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Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective.

Jonathan Lethem is one of our most versatile writers. From his early sci-fi novels to his National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Motherless Brooklyn and his The Fortress of Solitude, his restless imagination has never settled; he’s not written the same book twice.

This new novel, The Feral Detective, belongs to what you might call the smart-ass noir subgenre, novels that use the tropes of the detective story with heartfelt respect, leavened by a wink to the audience. Other writers who have done this include Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Berger, and William Kotzwinkle. Lethem can make with the hardboiled patter: “That coffee was a wiper blade, cutting a window for my brain to peer through.”

The first-person narrative comes via Phoebe Siegler, who seeks out the titular detective, Charles Heist, to help her find a friend’s daughter, Arabella, who has disappeared, either kidnapped or a runaway. It’s as if Brigid O’Shaughnessy is telling the tale of The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade is a secondary character. It’s an interesting set-up, made believable by Lethem’s ability to take on a female character’s voice. Plus, this story takes place just after Trump has won the election, and that colors everything that happens, casting an irreal, dark penumbra over events already bleak and daunting. Phoebe fantasizes about her adventure and then says, “That such thinking was fucking insane didn’t make it less consoling. We lived in a fucking insane world. Such thinking might be the right gear for my expedition through it.”

Charles Heist, Private Investigator, never really solidifies for the reader, partly because Phoebe can’t get a handle on him, and it’s her story. He seems like the Marlboro Man who’s read Nietzsche and Reich and Camus, an unlikely hero for an incongruous time. We’re not given much of him because he speaks little. Sometimes he seems like only a reflection of our narrator’s romantic leanings, or the hero she believes she needs when she really only needs herself.

Phoebe thinks that Arabella may have gone in pursuit of Leonard Cohen’s ghost, so the search for the missing girl begins with a trip up Mount Baldy, where Cohen studied Buddhism under his spiritual guide Roshi. Eventually, their exploration takes them into the Mojave Desert and into a survivalist cult that is in the midst of a civil war between Bears (mostly men) and Rabbits (mostly women). Partly, Phoebe takes up this idealistic expedition out of despair and depression engendered by the squatter in the White House. Out of the nation’s miasma she is trying to find something that makes sense, and rescuing a friend’s daughter from bad guys seems to have sincere meaning for her.

Phoebe falls hard for the laconic Heist, and she loses sight of the prize as she begins an affair with the detective. This complicates their dangerous, desert sojourn, and the original case becomes something else, something more personal and, hence, thornier. “I felt closer than ever to Heist,” she says. “We had different styles. I made myself candid in fickle bursts, he reciprocated with marathon ruminations or silence. He’d led me into his desert.” Here, Heist becomes even more of a wavering mirage, flickering into view because of Phoebe’s reheated passion.

For a while, their target is the leader of the Bears, a mountain of a man, who goes by the moniker of Solitary Love. (“Crazy-ass Love’ll never be brought down alive, and to kill him outright might require a bazooka.”) But this is a quest with numerous hairpin turns. What is sought keeps changing as the story mutates and zigzags.

The denouement of this rollicking, sometimes absurd tale is a wild ride through perilous territory. It’s like The Rockford Files crossed with a Pynchonian search for something numinous. It’s also occasionally very funny. Lethem keeps the Mad Max action in the forefront and the philosophy as backwash. We care what happens because Phoebe is believable, appealing, and endearing. Ultimately, Lethem proves that the phrase “literary page-turner” is not an oxymoron.

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John Ajvide Lindqvist’s I Am Behind You

John Ajvide Lindqvist has been called Sweden’s Stephen King. The comparison is apt, except, let me whisper this, he writes better than King. This novel certainly has a King-like opening, reminiscent of The Mist. It also feels very Twilight Zoney: Four pairs of trailer park denizens, along with two children, a dog named Benny, and a cat named Maud, awake one morning to find the rest of the park, indeed, seemingly, the rest of the whole world, gone. The fields that surround them are described simply as nothing.

Lindqvist hit something of a horror home run with his earlier novel, Let the Right One In, which was made into two films. This new book, I Am Behind You, at its best, is reminiscent of Lem’s Solaris, or the Strugatskys’ Roadside Picnic. It also has something else in common with most of King’s books: It’s a tad too long.

That being said, once the narrative gets cooking, it’s a real page-turner. The author delineates each vivid character thoroughly and precisely. The story starts queerly … and then gets queerer. In every direction, the nothing is like long stretches of a grasslike lea, and up above, there is a uniform blankness. “It doesn’t even look like sky; it is more like something that has been put there to resemble sky.” As each character tries to wrap his or her mind around the alteration, logic fails them. “They had thought the sun would reappear, that it was lurking below the horizon, but the minutes and the hours pass, and there is no sun. It is an absence so great it is impossible to comprehend.” Yet, they struggle to explain. They struggle to figure it all out. One of the book’s themes might be described as “empiricism fails.”

And it’s not enough that their present resembles something from a grim folktale, they are also, each man and woman, flooded with their bleakest memories. Is this part of the transformation of reality into irreality? One of the men ponders, “To what extent can we make our memories into a reality? If an event has been imprinted on us with the violence of a branding iron … if it is encapsulated within us like a moment that will live forever, does that also mean that we can really go back there, to some degree?”

The key enigma (along with the mystery of what the title of the novel means): “Nothing exists and the field is endless.” The reader will wonder, along with our poor trailer park crew, what is going on? Another character responds, “I haven’t a clue. But there’s someone … something out there that wants to do something to us?” This line succinctly nails the dark eeriness of the novel. It was about here, a hundred pages in, that the hair on the back of my neck began to prickle. Then, the young girl, who had seemed a somewhat sinister child, like the bad seed, asks her father if he thinks you can remove a person’s skin with a vegetable peeler. There is more than unease going on. There is real evil here.

The most problematic aspect of a sci-fi or horror story, movie, or book is the ending. In other words, after all the dread, bizarreness, and creepiness, there must be a satisfying conclusion, if not an explanation of all that has gone before. To illustrate: You watch all 118 episodes of Lost because you believe they’re going to explain all those disparate and puzzling happenstances in the final wrap-up. Then they don’t. Worst case scenario for an ending: It’s all been a dream. Or, everyone is dead and this is hell/heaven. In contrast to this, there is the theory that the journey is more important than the destination. What might be called the Twin Peaks poser is germane: is it weird just to be weird, or does it matter because the weirdness is certainly entertaining? And, incident by incident, oddity by oddity, I Am Behind You is very entertaining. Does Lindqvist come up with the goods? Does he have a conclusion that satisfies after all the abnormal machinations of his perplexing story? I don’t want to offer any spoilers but will say that fans of Lost and Twin Peaks will relish every page.

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Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller.

If ever there was a book that’s right in my wheelhouse it’s this bookseller’s memoir. I was sent by God to review it. The Diary of a Bookseller is just that, a sincerely rendered, day-to-day year in the life of an antiquarian bookseller in a small Scottish town. I was prepared to enjoy the particular and peculiar differences between what he does regularly in his used bookstore, across the pond, as compared to what I have done in mine over the past 30 years at Burke’s. But, what I found more interesting is that his days are so similar to mine. His customers could be our customers. His worries are assuredly our worries. His joys are our joys. Even his stock is somewhat similar to our stock, both weighted toward local histories and writers, both a mix of used books and select new books. The similarities pile up; I won’t bore you with others.

It’s hard for me to determine whether or not this book is for anyone who doesn’t work in a bookstore, especially an antiquarian bookstore. But, part of the charm, or at least guilty pleasure of the book, is Bythell’s dour humor and his barbed tongue. He dishes on his employees: “Nicky arrived at 9:13 a.m., wearing the black Canadian ski suit that she bought in the charity shop in Port William for £5. This is her standard uniform between the months of November and April. It is a padded onesie, designed for skiing, and it makes her look like the lost Teletubby.” Or later this, about another: “I have a feeling that ‘outraged’ may well be her factory setting.” He dishes on his customers: “A customer came to the counter and said, ‘I’ve looked under the W section of the fiction and I can’t find anything by Rider Haggard.’ I suggested that he have a look under the H section.”

His store is called The Bookshop and it is in Wigtown. His stock is eclectic, everything from cheap Agatha Christie mysteries to pricey and scarce histories from the 16th and 17th centuries. His insights into the buying and selling of used and rare books were as exciting, for this reader, as his sarcastic quips.

In general, in his daily diary, he talks about the books he’s acquired, what he’s reading, the friends he’s made in the business, his partner Anna, his fishing trips, the store’s faulty heating, the estate sales he travels to in search of new stock, and what irritates him. Many things irritate him; his sardonic wit overrides everything. He also notes how many online orders the shop received and how many they were able to fulfill (we do this daily also) and how many customers he had that day and how much money they pulled in. In a singularly British manner, it’s a quaint way to concoct a book.

Of course, working with the public is a constant source of good material for anyone writing a memoir. People are fascinating, ridiculous and sublime, predictably drab or constantly unpredictable, funny and sad, sharp and dull. A year spent noting the passing parade, especially if one is a lively observer, as Blythell is, makes for entertaining reading. Hemingway said, “This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.” Blythell sees, and he also has a keen waggishness which makes his reflections funny and memorable and this book a hoot.

Finally, it’s also the observation of small, human scenes like this which makes the author a delightful companion through a year of bookselling: “When the old man in the crumpled suit came to the counter to pay for the copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, I discreetly pointed out that his fly was open. He glanced down — as if for confirmation of this — then looked back at me and said, ‘A dead bird can’t fall out of its nest,’ and left the shop, fly still agape.”

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Daniel Torday’s Boomer1.

Can we talk about book covers and how they color our reading of the text? We recognize the old saw, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” but we are also aware that reading a book that’s physically lovely is an especially rewarding experience. And, you can, somewhat, judge a book by its cover if you trust that the publisher has given its product the appropriate look. I bring this up because Boomer1, the excellent new novel by Daniel Torday, has a dreadful dust jacket. Bad colors, bad design. It deserves better.

Now, to the text itself. The story mainly concerns two characters: Mark and Cassie. They are both musicians — this book practically has a soundtrack it is so entwined with making music and listening to music — who play in bands together and apart. Torday namechecks influences from Bill Monroe to Kim Gordon, David Byrne to our homeboy, Alex Chilton. Both eventually have to admit they’re not going to make it as musicians and set off on new paths, Cassie as a fact-checker at a magazine called RazorWire, and Mark as the practically accidental leader of an internet movement called Boomer Boomer. Mark’s purpose is made manifest in his opening foray; he says, “This is Boomer1 … and I’m fomenting an open conflict against the Baby Boomers. They’ve taken our jobs and they’ve plundered our futures.”

Wearing David Crosby masks, members post manifestos on the internet, beginning on YouTube and evolving to “the dark web.” This movement, as movements do, goes from manifesto to vandalism to assaults darker and more destructive. That this is all tongue-in-cheek is handled with great authorial control and subtlety. “They were baby boomers,” Torday says. “They had and they had and they had, as if that was the very condition of their own existence — having, owning, getting, living out Bellow’s I want, I want, I want — while he [Mark] and his generation had not.” Some of their targets: Rolling Stone, The Daily Show, Philip Roth, Eddie Bauer, Garrison Keillor, and “The American Association of Tired People.”

It seems lost on the millennials that they are declaring war on their elders just as their elders had done. They seem blissfully unaware that, during the ’60s, their parents had recommended not trusting anyone over thirty. Torday portrays today’s young people as ambitious climbers and, at the same time, ambitious revolutionaries. And their speech is rendered as humorous Newspeak: “The trad stuff was fine back whenever, in the Clinton Era or whatev — but we’re obvi moving in a new direction, new revenue streams, the places where journo and content and editorial will all be heading.” Or this from one of Mark’s proselytizing videos: “Social Insecurity. /I am Boomer1. We are all boomers now. /Resist much, obey little. /Propaganda by the deed. /Boom boom.” These revolutionaries seem to live online more fully than they do in the walking-around world.

Torday has some of the witty, neoteric, alternative-now chops of Don DeLillo (whom he also namechecks — the way he namedrops his influences, musical and literary, is charming and droll), but the novel is oddly old-fashioned. It’s as if he aimed at DeLillo and hit John Irving (yes, he mentions him also), which is not necessarily a bad thing. Torday’s narrative moves like a Clapton solo, fast and sinuous and haunting. And his black-humor story unfolds as naturally as a rainstorm.

Cassie’s and Mark’s lives entwine, separate, entwine, dovetailing in interesting ways. She writes about the anti-Baby Boomer movement unaware it was begun by her ex-paramour. Cassie is more homosexual than heterosexual, Mark being one of her only affairs with men. Their points of contact are more than arbitrary but not quite the eternal dance of the heart. In the second half of Boomer1, Mark’s story tends to swamp Cassie’s, though she is never far from what connects them. The ending is a satisfying update on their affair, and on the affairs of the country. This alternative-now is both funny and harrowing, and Torday has one hand on the pulse of contemporary life and one hand throwing up a peace sign.

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Claire Fullerton’s Mourning Dove

One could put together a mighty fine shelf of novels set in Memphis. To name just a few: September, September by Shelby Foote. Good Benito by Alan Lightman. Another Good Lovin’ Blues by Arthur Flowers. The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern. Molly Flanagan & the Holy Ghost by Margaret Skinner. A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor. The Springs by Anne Goodwin Winslow.

And now we must add to that august shelf this powerful, polished gem, Mourning Dove, by ex-Memphian Claire Fullerton. Fullerton lived here through the ’60s and ’70s, when most of this novel takes place. Her memory is clear and her prose crystalline. This is Memphis rendered nimbly and passionately, a city that encompasses both the landed gentry and the restless younger generation, which sees through — and travels through — the thin veil of gentility that still sits on the sprawling city like a doily on a magnolia stump.

Claire Fullerton lives in California now. But this is a chronicle penned by a shrewd novelist haunted by her hometown, a city of ghosts and lush memories. At times this family novel reminded me of the grandest family novel, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. Fullerton’s delineation of her memorable characters is masterful.

The story is predominantly about a brother and sister, Finley and Millie Crossan, and is told first-person through the soft-filter eyes of Millie. She adulates Finley, who, we are told on the first page, has died early. So, this is not just an examination of the peccadillos and mores of the Southern upper crust. It is also a mystery. What happened to the golden boy, a genius in school, an athlete and musician, and a protean soul if ever there was one?

The Crossans relocate from Minnesota to Memphis, escaping from the children’s father, a well-meaning drunk. “The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices.”

Millie grows up during the course of the novel, searching for her true self, one which has to struggle out from under her veneration of Finley and from under her mother’s genteel velvet glove. “At sixteen,” she says, “I was beginning to wrestle with the gnawing impression of what I interpreted as my mother’s superficial world, and it left me conflicted, for I had yet to arrive at the stable ground of my own identity.”

This is the Memphis of the Memphis Country Club, but it’s also the Memphis of the Well and the burgeoning punk music crowd, which draws Finley into its sphere. The children learn to assimilate in both cultures, though Millie says, “People from the neat grid of Memphis society I’d been raised in didn’t test its perimeters.”

One of Fullerton’s strengths — and there are many — is her Fitzgeraldian gift of observation. She gets all the details right. Here is Millie’s description of an adult party and her exclusion from it. “The Austrian crystal chandelier in the card room twinkled like a spotlight on their haute couture, and their voices carried all the way upstairs, to where Finley and I kept out of the way.” This concision, and its nuanced rendering of emotion, is found throughout this remarkable novel.

Mourning Dove is mainly concerned with Finley and how Millie’s view of him fluctuates, though her love never flags. As she gets older, her exalted brother’s diamond-bright personality begins to reflect sides she was unprepared for. As a friend tells her, “Careful of this guy, he leads a double life.” Though the heart sees what it wants to see, Millie begins to cast a gimlet eye on Finley, as he drifts away from her.

I don’t want to diminish how really fine this novel is by characterizing it only as a Memphis novel, though Memphians would be right to want to claim it and hold it dear. As I read it, page after page, I kept thinking, “Jesus, this is truly extraordinary.” Claire Fullerton is the real deal, and my admiration for this book is comparable to my admiration for Eudora Welty — I think Mourning Dove is that good.

Claire Fullerton signs Mourning Dove at Novel on September 11th.

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Inman Major’s Penelope Lemon: Game On!

My esteemed colleague and friend, the late Leonard Gill, in these pages, said this about an earlier novel by Inman Majors: “Until Wonderdog‘s climactic scene, expect the unexpected: unstoppered sarcasm laced with real feeling from the mind and mouth of Devaney Degraw, a wise guy whose catalog of complaints runs just this side of stream-of-consciousness (punctuation optional) in a funny, full-tilt second novel from the author of the underrecognized Swimming in Sky.”

It’s not a bad introduction to Penelope Lemon: Game On! (a clunky title), Majors’ newest. The sarcasm is still ripe and the surprises still fresh. In this, his fifth novel, the author attempts something mildly audacious: He sees through his protagonist’s feminine eyes. It’s as if Majors is channeling his inner Jodi Picoult. It works because he keeps it blithesome and because he convincingly gets inside the sensibility of a middle-aged woman. It’s a noteworthy job of literary ventriloquism.

Penelope Lemon is a recently divorced 40-year-old woman who lives with her parents and works at a faux-western restaurant called Coonskins. She has a young son, who is the worst player on his little league baseball team, and who is bullied. He craves attention at school and seeks it in any way possible, including sequential farting. Penelope’s friends are married and have little sympathy for her. Enter Missy, the mother of another little leaguer. She is brassy and blunt and, basically, a lot of fun. She’s a breath of fresh air for Penelope. This friendship, written with a surprisingly empathetic comprehension of how women interact, forms the turning point in the book, the fulcrum between rising action and falling action. And stodgy Penelope, when teamed with reckless Missy, begins her quest, the one given all heroes and heroines, to find her true self.

Penelope Lemon: Game On! is a sort of redneck Anne Tyler story. Many of the denizens of Lemon’s North Carolina town of Hillsboro are blue collar workers, good time Charlies, chipper housewives, trailer park dwellers, men and women who watch Matlock and have never suffered an existential crisis. Literature is never mentioned. Walmart is. Video games are. Applebee’s and Outback are and are characterized here as good grazing spots for newly single middle-age women.

Majors writes: “On the way to Coonskins, Penelope took in the ambience of her hometown, the Walmart and Applebee’s and Target that had replaced the local employers of her youth.” He knows this milieu like he knows his audience. The book often seems to be winking at the reader, nudging him or her with a grin and the promise of a good joke. And Majors also knows the parameters of a good yarn. His broad sense of humor, some observational and some jokey, and willingness to put his characters through rough patches, that are both absurd and hilarious, makes the book a diverting page-turner. A chapter set in Coonskins, on a night when everything goes pear-shaped, is a comical set-piece that could have come from a superior episode of Designing Women.

Missy is a catalyst for the change in Penelope as well as a way of supercharging the narrative. She puts the novel’s foot on the gas. One can sense that Majors is relishing his character’s wit, outlandishness, and lack of fear. It’s the kind of character authors live for, part scoundrel, part savior. Most of Missy’s ideas are bad ones, but they keep on coming. She’s like an NC-17 Peppermint Patty.

Inman Majors is an entertainer. Penelope Lemon: Game On! is mostly jokey and light-hearted, but Majors is also capable of some tender writing, especially having to do with the bond between Penelope and her nine-year-old son, Theo. And the relationships with both her exes, including Theo’s father, are engagingly and authentically rendered. Penelope is a well-drawn character, an interesting protagonist, who carries the story with her charm and aplomb. Her counsel to her son about baseball is at the book’s heart, and advice she is, simultaneously, giving herself: “Swing every time. Baseball is more fun if you’re just letting it rip. Everything’s more fun if you let it rip.”

Inman Majors signs Penelope Lemon: Game On! at Novel Thursday, August 16th.

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T. Sean Steele’s Tacky Goblin.

Just when you thought absurdist, humorous fiction was dead, along comes this American Raymond Queneau, T. Sean Steele, with this, his first novel (actually a novella), Tacky Goblin. Of current writers, Jesse Ball and George Saunders, to name a few obvious examples, are working this same vein, but Steele is … weirder. His left-of-center wit is so far left the center does not hold. He walks out onto the tight rope and then lets the tight rope fall. This is absurdist humor that mixes Looney Tunes, Luis Bunuel, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthleme, with something darker, something more disturbed. You laugh because he’s funny — and every joke is set up beautifully like a tiny time bomb — but also because he scares you a bit.

Gleefully anarchist, structured like a Mousetrap Game directed by James Wan, this is a novella you will probably read a few times and, perhaps, keep hidden under your mattress for its barbed marvels. The thin story concerns the unnamed, first-person narrator and his sister, Kim, who leave their parents’ home in Chicago to live in Los Angeles. They cohabitate there for a while, in an apartment building designed by Charles Addams and M. C. Escher. The neighbors are as odd as the siblings. Then they move back to Chicago. That’s the plot. But what Steele does with this light framework is just this side of miraculous.

He mines the surreal, the unexpected. Every page has its own oblivion ha-ha. There’s a baby that’s also a dog. There’s a talking mold stain in the ceiling. There are voodoo figurines that Kim employs as if playing a board game called Revenge of the Strange. There are dodgy foreign cinema DVDs. The narrator’s girlfriend, Laurie says, “Your sister loaned me some French movie. I think it might actually have been some kind of CCTV footage of an alley. It never ended. I got way too invested so I shut it off.” Later, Narrator says, apropos of nothing in particular, “My legs worked or they didn’t. Who cared? The facts existed, or they didn’t, whether or not I paid attention to them.” This could be Steele’s statement of purpose: Facts — who needs them? Who trusts them?

It’s tempting to quote endlessly from the book. The conversations are particularly peculiar and hilarious.

“‘There’s a guy out there,’ I said. ‘Do you know him?’

“‘Oh, that’s Larry. He’s not real. That’s another thing the pill does. It makes you see Larry.'”

Even time goes catawampus: “‘Where the heck have you been?’ my sister asked.

“‘I was applying for jobs,’ I said.

“‘For a month and a half?’

“‘What? No, like a couple of hours.’

“‘I thought you were dead,’ she said. ‘I even called the cops. There was an investigation and everything.'”

Or this delightful exchange between siblings: “‘What’s wrong with the roof of your car? It’s all scraped up.’

“‘High schoolers,’ was all I said … She nodded knowingly. High schoolers were Kim’s least favorite thing and I tossed the blame at them whenever possible.

“‘Did they try to talk to you?’ she asked … Never let them talk to you. They’re skinny and they tell a lot of inside jokes and make you feel bad for not understanding even though you don’t really care anyway.'”

Admittedly, this kind of writing is not for everyone. But fans of the kind of antirealism, crackpot fiction of the writers mentioned above will find themselves in recognizable territory. For everyone else it may seem like Wonderland after too many mushrooms.

“A driver’s license is one of those things people say you need but really you don’t,” Kim says. “Like bedsheets, or protein.”

Without spoiling anything: Though they are unchanged by the time the denouement rolls around, the ending is, well, a sort of epiphany. By the end of this wild ride, which you might consume in one afternoon, despite all the U-turns and non-sequiturs, you get to know Kim and her brother. You may even feel affectionate toward them.

That is, if you can love a protagonist who describes himself this way: “I have the transplanted legs of a dead man and the last girl I saw put a demon inside me.”