Author: Corey Mesler

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Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut.

Let’s talk about voice in fiction. Sometimes what’s meant by voice is the author’s style. Think of Hemingway, Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf. Their styles are so much their own voices that they changed the way we read fiction. And then there is the voice of a particular novel, which often means an idiosyncratic first-person narrative. Think of The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, Portnoy’s Complaint, Jane Eyre, or Lolita.

The Shepherd’s Hut, by the Australian author Tim Winton, belongs to that group of novels remarkable for their narrator’s voice. Consider the opening sentences: “When I hit the bitumen and get that smooth grey rumble going under me everything’s hell different. Like I’m in a fresh new world all slick and flat and easy. Even with the engine working up a howl and the wind flogging in the window sounds are real soft and pillowy.” The speaker is teenager Jaxie Clackton. His mother is dead and his father — Captain Wankbag, he calls him — is an abusive drunk. When his father is killed in a freak accident, Jaxie takes off on foot, thinking the constabulary will come after him believing that he killed his father to escape his beatings. His goal is to disappear for a while until he can rendezvous with his paramour, Lee. This romance may or may not be made of air castle.

“There’s a sad feeling,” Jaxie says, “in a place people have just walked out of and left behind. Could be only me thinks shit like this. And you could probably say there’s plenty houses feel just as sad with people still in them. God knows our place was one of them for sure.”

The landscape over which Jaxie travels is barren and uninviting. Winton’s prose — and storyline — is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s. His nimble sentences wield an irresistible power that seems like literary legerdemain. Jaxie’s peripatetic tale is harrowing, though humorous in places, and a coming of age saga like no other. He says, “I been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn’t barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don’t get in my way.”

Along the way, Jaxie stumbles upon another exile, a seemingly cracked, elderly Irishman named Fintan MacGillis. Fintan lives in a remote corner of the saltlands, all by himself except for the unseen companions he is constantly chatting with. The mysterious Fintan — only some of his checkered past is revealed, and I won’t give it away here — will become mentor, enemy, friend, adversary, protector, and protectee. Their relationship is what shapes the second half of the book. Jaxie says, “He was from Ireland where it’s green and rainy and people believe in fairies. He said the Irish don’t believe in the church anymore and they had a right not to, but they still believe in the little people and the Eeyou.”

The latter part of the novel is where the narrative really gets its footing and the slow burn of the opening chapters changes to a high-octane thriller. Here Jaxie’s crude, profane, mordant voice — and Winton’s masterful control of it — meld with the tale’s surprising but inevitably bleak path. “Our stories. We store them where moth and rust destroy,” he says.

Tim Winton is one of Australia’s most revered writers. He is the author of many novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction. He’s been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and his 2008 novel, Breath, was made into a feature film. This newest novel — expect another Booker Prize short-listing, at least — is as powerful as anything he’s written. There is a feral music to Winton’s style, not just here but in all his books, that is somewhat reminiscent not only of Cormac McCarthy but of the wild Glaswegian, James Kelman. Winton, here, has created a seductive articulation for his adolescent protagonist that is as intoxicating as Kelman’s stream-of-consciousness voice in his Booker Prize winner, How Late It Was, How Late. Young Jaxie Clackton — you’ll want to follow him anywhere, even into the burning hell of his self-imposed expatriation.

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Caryl Phillips’ A View of the Empire at Sunset.

Jean Rhys is one of my favorite writers. Her early autobiographical novels are singular depictions of marginalized lives, the lives of women in a man’s world. In some of her novels, men represent a structure and a security her heroines don’t quite believe is possible. Rhys was born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams on the Caribbean island of Dominica, but she moved to England to attend school. For a while she led a wayward life of alcohol and opportunistic, inappropriate suitors. She met Ford Madox Ford and, under his influence, wrote those early novels which paralleled her life in disturbing ways. Yet, for all their pain and sadness, they shine with a light that is honest, compelling, and eccentrically rendered. In the 1940s, she disappeared from public life and quit writing. Then, in 1966, in a miraculous end to her unconventional writing career, she published her greatest novel, a brilliantly realized prequel to Jane Eyre, The Wide Sargasso Sea.

In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips gives us a fictionalized account of Rhys’ life that works as both biography and fiction. He manages to limn Rhys’ style while not falling fully under its sway and abandoning his considerable novelistic abilities. You can taste Rhys, but it’s still Phillips’ exotic stew. Here she is called Gwennie. I was absorbed initially in waiting for young Gwennie to become one of the 20th century’s best novelists. But Phillips is after more than this. His narrative is about homeland, family, alienation, loneliness, and need. His Gwennie is a masterfully drawn character, as dissolute, yet as determined, as Rhys’ tragic characters. Is Rhys’ story her characters’ story? Yes and no. While there is much to suggest that Rhys drew from her own life, it is a disservice to her remarkable novels to see them only as thinly disguised autobiography.

Phillips traces Gwennie from her birth in Dominica to her schooling in London. When she abandons school to tread the boards, she encounters and learns from other wannabe actresses. She abandons this as well; she wanders; she fails continuously at attempts to find herself. Comparing herself to a friend she says, “Unlike herself, Ethel was busy; unlike herself, Ethel had not stooped to love and thereafter found herself sitting idly about waiting for a man to whisper kind words in her ears as he unfolded his wallet.”

She is married twice, loses a child, and has a daughter who survives her. She drinks. Her marriages are unhappy. “Is it possible, she wonders, that she might well be participating in a modern marriage: attachment and detachment at one and the same time?” Poor Gwennie!

Phillips is a colorful writer, even with such dour material. His sentences are as sharp as etchings in glass. And he’s a storyteller of the first water. His Gwennie is a sad wreck; often one wonders where the triumphant Jean Rhys is in this gloomy, inchoate life. Of his heroine Phillips says, “She understands that it doesn’t matter where you are, on land or sea, you always hear the noises before you see the light — and then soon after, the new day will arrive to torment you.” But, perhaps the most telling statement about Gwennie is this: “Mabel always insisted that the key to happiness was to simply stay quiet and make them fall for you. Eventually she learned how to do this, but it was afterward that always proved difficult, when she invariably decided that she no longer wished to remain quiet.” Of course, we know the conclusion. She does not remain quiet. She emerges as one of the most unforgettable female voices in all of literature.

In the end, A View of the Empire at Sunset is more novelistic than biographical. If Phillips doesn’t give us the Jean Rhys, he gives us a Jean Rhys, a fascinating portrait of a clever, sensitive woman, who never quite gets where she’s going. At novel’s end, Wide Sargasso Sea cannot even be discerned on the distant horizon, but Caryl Phillips’ Gwennie is still moving, still moving on.

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Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight.

Sri Lankan/Canadian author Michael Ondaatje’s early poetic, elliptical novels were adored by the cognoscenti and stuck him with the label “writer’s writer.” Then someone made a silly but outrageously popular movie from his third novel, The English Patient, and Ondaatje found himself unexpectedly a bestselling author. The novel The English Patient, I imagine, was more bought than read. When fans of the film got it home and found its sophisticated prose getting in the way of the romantic center of the story, they sold the paperback, with its Ralph Fiennes/Kristin Scott Thomas cover, to used bookstores by the thousands; it was the Lincoln in the Bardo of its day.

This new novel, Warlight, is a bit more conventional, though its narrative is circular and kaleidoscopic rather than chronological. The action takes place mostly during and right after the second world war. Its first line is “In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.” The voice is 14-year-old Nathaniel’s. His older sister, Rachel, is the other abandoned child. The “criminals,” The Moth and The Darter, are a couple of men who seem shady, but who are also entertaining and enlightening. “So we began a new life. I did not quite believe it then. And I am still uncertain whether the period of time that followed disfigured or energized my life.”

The lingering mystery of the novel’s first half is where their mother went. She was supposed to accompany their father to his new job in Asia, but, seemingly, she disappeared. It is up to Nathaniel, in this account, which he’s writing as an adult, to try and make some sense out of what happened. He says, “There are times these years later, as I write all this down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil.”

In Warlight, Ondaatje employs his masterful, melodious prose to ask questions about history and memory. It turns out that the children’s mother, Rose, was working for the government in some secret capacity that, even later, she is unable to elucidate. It also turns out that The Moth and The Darter were put in place for protection. The children, at the time, were unaware that they were in danger because of their mother’s wartime activity.

The second half of the book concerns Rose’s return home. Rachel flees; she will not forgive her mother for abandoning them. Nathaniel stays to witness, to be his mother’s forgiver and questioner. He’s never sure if he gets the story straight, which, Ondaatje implies, is true of all recorded history, filtered, as it is, through cerebration and retrospection. And all stories are subject to what remains hidden, no matter how much research or recollection is brought to bear. “Omissions and silences had surrounded our growing up. As if what was still unrevealed could only be guessed at, in the way we had needed to interpret the mute contents of a trunk full of clothes.” Nathaniel is the reluctant interpreter of his mother’s life. “She and I had lost each other,” he says, “long ago in those confusions and silences.”

Another name enters the story, a man named Felon. He was, in some clandestine way, involved with Rose during the war. He becomes another guardian, another piece of the puzzle, and another voice in Nathaniel’s ear. The lesson that Nathaniel learns, or is in the process of learning, is that the past does not stay in the past. He says, “Historical studies inevitably omit the place of the accidental in life … But Felon in fact is always open to casual accident … He is inclusive, just as he is broad-shouldered, boisterous in the company of strangers, all this an escape from his secretiveness.”

Michael Ondaatje is rightly recognized as a master stylist. His prose is crystalline, his sentences as refined and shapely as the petals of flowers. Like Kazuo Ishiguro and Steven Millhauser, his novels are as jazzy as they are beautiful evocations of time and place, as well as masterpieces of storytelling. Warlight will stay with you like a foggy but luminescent memory.

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Julian Barnes’ The Only Story.

Julian Barnes became a household name — in bookish houses, of course — with his third novel, Flaubert’s Parrot. It’s a witty, crazy-quilt, postmodern meditation on reading and writing a novel, that is both literary and entertaining. Since then, he has gone from strength to strength — he won the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending — and The Only Story, his newest novel, is one of his best. Barnes is witty and urbane, pithy and highly readable, somewhat like his fellow countryman Ian McEwan. The Only Story is thoughtful and thought-provoking, with a depth of observation and analysis that, at times, seems Updikean.

It begins, “Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”

The story that follows is bittersweet, a sort of reverse Lolita tale — Paul is 19, Susan is 48 when they meet over country club tennis — told from Paul’s point of view, looking backward at what became much more than an immature indiscretion. The novel charts their course over decades. What begins in innocence — when Paul says he doesn’t have a reputation, Susan replies, “Oh dear. We’ll have to get you one then. Every young man should have a reputation” — becomes a tangle of emotions and responsibilities. The book’s essential question is, “How much do we owe the people who love us?” Barnes is wise and surgical in his examination of passion and its obligations. The Only Story cuts deep. It’s a dazzling, shrewd, painful consideration of who and what we are when we love.

Paul wants to take care of Susan, which includes protecting her from an abusive husband. He’s naïve, but she is ready to cede decision-making to someone else. Paul decides to become a lawyer, partly so that they will not have to live off her money. “I decided to become a solicitor. I had no exaggerated ambitions for myself; my exaggerated ambitions were all for love,” he says. Once the affair is begun, they do little to hide their amour, not even from Susan’s husband. Eventually, they are kicked out of the tennis club and the scandal — modest British opprobrium, of course — helps cement them together. They wear their outlaw colors as if a badge.

As with most chronicles of romantic relationships, fate enters in. Though this is Paul’s “one story,” it is a ragged affair, involving undying love, troublesome family members, unreal expectations, and, over time, a flux of emotions, all revealed by an unreliable narrator. The fantasy author, John Crowley, said, “Stories last longer, but only by becoming stories.” Paul says, “This is how I would remember it all if I could. But I can’t. There’s some stuff I left out… .” He admits that the story is told through his filters and no one else’s, and that the picture is distorted by his janky memory and by what he wants to include and what he wants to leave out. Between the lines, one senses that the hero of his story, himself, is not entirely without blame for the affair’s outcome.

The tale toggles back and forth between first person narration (by Paul) and second person (the “you” being Paul). “You have no theories of life yet, you only know some of its pleasures and pains. You still believe, however, in love, and in what love can do, how it can transform a life, indeed the lives of two people.” In this varying narration, is Paul distancing himself from the story, sloughing off the responsibility of being the protagonist? Is he asking, what would you have done? Eventually, like all stories perhaps, Paul’s narrative switches to third person. Eventually all memoirs become novels. “For instance,” the narrator takes over, “he thought he probably wouldn’t have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled.”

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Susan Henderson’s The Flicker of Old Dreams.

This second novel by Susan Henderson, after her acclaimed Up From the Blue, is a look at small town living, at the relationship between a father and daughter, and at what it feels like to be considered an oddity, an outsider. It’s also a profound study of loss: loss of life, loss of love, loss of self.

Petroleum is a town so small they don’t have a stoplight. They don’t have a hospital or cellphone towers or pizza delivery, a mall or a movie theater. What they do have is a funeral home, which serves Petroleum and a number of surrounding towns. It is here that “Pop” Crampton, and his daughter, Mary, ply their trade. That she embalms and dresses and makes up the dead is part of why she is an outcast. She also makes little effort to fit in. With only her father to raise her, she has walled off the world. She speaks of her late mother this way: “My mother is a collection of stories and inanimate objects. She is a wedding ring in my father’s bedside drawer, a rose-hips-flavored tea bag in the back of our kitchen cupboard … She is a book underlined only to page seven.”

Told first person, in Mary’s wistful, independent voice, the story begins with a prologue in which two brothers are working in a grain silo. The elder, Eddie Golden, a local hero and basketball standout, steps into an air pocket in the grain and is sucked in faster than his younger brother, who is referred to as a sissy, can even react or reach him. Only the younger brother, Robert, was wearing a safety harness. This is the book’s key loss, the death of the hero. The ripples from its untimely horror last for decades and color every corner of the narrative. The town cannot accept that the younger, less athletic brother survived, and they blame Robert for Eddie’s death and for the loss of jobs that the destruction of the silo initiates. He is basically hounded out of town. Robert’s return years later to be with his mother, who is dying, is what triggers the action of this thoughtful and compelling novel.

“A mortician is an illusionist. The goal is to cushion reality, slow down how fast the hurt seeps in,” Mary says. But the hurt always seeps in. Reality always reveals itself, even through makeup, even after two feet of snow have melted away. “All I know is I’ve lived a cautious life, and it hasn’t made me happy.”

It feels inevitable that the two loners, the two pariahs — Mary and Robert — would find each other. They do and they don’t. It is the author’s ability to see lives in full that allows her to write from a position of such authority that all decisions seem real — tenuous, natural, human. Henderson’s characters are fully realized, happy and sad, flawed and noble, kind and mean-spirited. “In every community, there are always the lost and unloved: transients, prisoners, and elderly who die alone on the prairie.”

Henderson has Anne Tyler’s gentle touch with character. She is genuinely fond of these imperfect humans, and readers will leave them reluctantly. She also has Gretel Erhlich’s sense of place and observational technique. Petroleum is a small town brought into shimmering reality by the alchemy of the author’s telling details and memorable denizens. “We all have to make an extra effort during these tough times,” Mary says, “adding a little water to the milk, a little vegetable oil to the gasoline. Everyone gets by as they can.” Henderson gives the grit and the gentleness in equal measure, and her story is stronger for it. And, she has Eudora Welty’s gift of crafting simple, informative, yet elegant sentences.

With this sophomore effort, The Flicker of Old Dreams — a truly great title — Susan Henderson has begun a career to watch. She may well be the next Welty, or Tyler, or Jane Smiley. But she will also be Susan Henderson, wise and courageous and skilled, a storyteller of the first water. I, for one, am looking forward to her next novel.

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True Tales

Robert Bly first came to fame as a poet and activist, slightly on the fringe of the beats, publishing an early book, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last, with City Lights Books. He won the National Book Award for his poetry collection, The Light Around the Body. If you’ve seen Robert Bly read (perform) his poetry, you know that it’s like witnessing a conjureman or shamanistic scop perform. He’s the Wise Man of the Forest, part Joseph Campbell, part Allen Ginsberg.

Then, in 1990, he published his book, Iron John: A Book About Men, an often misunderstood work because of its association with the mythopoetic men’s movement. This movement became notorious for its sweat lodges and men’s retreats, but more to the point, the book seems to me to be an enchanting employment of Jungian archetype psychology, and the analysis of fairy tales and other mythic reverberations that follow from that.

This new book, More Than True: The Wisdom of Fairy Tales (Henry Holt, $26), is in that vein. It is similar to the work of Robert A. Johnson and Marie-Louise von Franz, whose 1974 book, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, parallels many of Bly’s themes, though Bly is still more interested in the masculine leitmotifs of folklore. I was in Jungian therapy for a dozen years — I know I should be more mentally sound — and Iron John was a key text to me, a real gift from my therapist. Taking an oft-used image from fairy tales, in that book Bly said, “I think we can regard therapy, when it is good, as a waiting by the pond. Each time we dip our wound into the water, we get nourishment, and the strength to go on further in the process.”

There is a pond, a well, a key, and a magic tablecloth in the six fairy tales Bly has chosen to explicate in his new book; there are talking animals, mysterious dark men, enchanted creatures, witches, and serpents. “Sometimes fairy tales are stories of incidents, supernatural or otherwise,” he says, “told and retold, in which the psyche is trying to communicate what it knows, trying to slip something past the guards of the dictator ego …” Each of these tales is emblematic of something the author wants to delineate about the human psyche or soul. In ancient stories — myths, folklore — there are deeper truths that may explain us to us. In other words, these fairy tales are more than true.

Bly calls on Freud, Jung, Rilke, Yeats, Vallejo, Ibsen, D.H. Lawrence, and other earthly gods to illustrate the interpenetration of myth into our literature and into our lives. He quotes Antonio Machado: “When heaven and earth have passed away/my word will remain./What was your word, Jesus?/Love? Affection? Forgiveness?/All your words were/one word: Wakeup!” He speaks of the shadow: “We used to say that the proper study of mankind is man … But now we don’t bother with the chthonic, the under-worldly energy as it lives in us.” And he speaks of “inner work,” the process we are honing or ignoring, the part that can be reached through the plumbing of the unconscious. “Now, with social media and worldwide conversations on every imaginable topic, more people are likely to recognize other people’s shadows and failures. Whether we can recognize our own is still in question.”

Fairy tales are one connection to the shared unconscious. Dreams are another, and perhaps poetry, ritual, and religion. Toward the end, Bly says, “Possibly fairy tales themselves are ways to keep the early joys of our life concealed and yet not lost.” I love that: And yet not lost. And further: “We mustn’t assume from the jokey tone tellers of fairy tales use that there is little at stake here. Everything is at stake.”

While this book doesn’t have the clarity or unity of purpose of Iron John, it is still an enthralling and welcome addition to Bly’s remarkable oeuvre and to the ongoing study of fairy tales and myths and what they say about us today. It is a book full of marvels and timeless insight.

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David Mamet’s Chicago.

David Mamet is one of my favorite playwright/screenwriters. His rapid-fire, cadenced dialogue, especially in the right mouths — William H. Macy, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, Gene Hackman — is a distinctive music. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Glengarry Glen Ross, which was made into a dynamite movie. And he is the director of the films House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, Oleanna, and others. Add to these accomplishments a number of books of essays on theater and film, and a handful of novels.

The good news about this new book, Chicago, is that it’s his best novel. It’s dialogue-driven, making it such a pleasure to read that it’s hard to put down. His characters talk like Mamet’s movie characters — sly, fast, and with a street-smart poetic pulse. The staccato interchanges, not unlike machine-gun fire, suit this tale of reporters and gangsters during the Al Capone era in Chicago. It’s a great crime novel: It moves briskly, and the story is gripping. It’s also often very funny.

Best friends Mike Hodge and Clement Parlow both work in the City Room of the Chicago Tribune. They’re seasoned pros, cynical, tough, and skilled, even when they find themselves wandering into the gray area between crime and justice. Mike has fallen in love, and Parlow rags him about it, goading him by saying he should be writing the sob sister column rather than covering crime. “A romantic is just a cynic for whom, as yet, the nickel hasn’t dropped,” he tells him.

But, when Mike’s paramour is killed right in front of him, in an apparent gangland slaying, Mike goes on a bender. “I killed her,” he says to Parlow. Mike’s guilt upends his career, and he is a lost sheep for much of the book. “He had loved his job, and its proximity to violence, which, he knew was like a drug, and he had loved the Irish girl; and now he was sick and grieving in that impossible grief of betrayal at having your heart broken by life.”

The gunman kills the woman and, just as Mike glimpses his face, knocks Mike out cold.

The twist is that the slaying may have nothing to do with Mike’s coverage of Capone.

Capone, known as Mr. Brown, exists only in the crisp, blackened edges of the story. But his shadow is large and deep, and corruption is so rife in the city, even on the paper, that attempting to find what’s true and what’s smokescreen is like working on a Gordian knot.

Eventually, Mike finds his footing again, and now he has revenge on his mind. The story moves through the murky alleys of 1930s Chicago. There are hoods galore, cops — some straight, some crooked — and a particularly charming whorehouse, where much is known and only some of it revealed. Mike is a known quantity in all these places, and he’s comfortable in the dirt. He learned to kill in the Great War, and he recognizes that it’s still in him.

The story is episodic but builds accumulatively toward the only kind of sense these types of stories make. As Mike collects clues, more people are murdered. He’s not sure whether he’s up against Capone or the Irish Mob or something more esoteric, a crime which has nothing to do with the Mafia. “The weakness in the Mafia,” Mamet says, “was the absence of legitimacy. Anyone with sufficient ambition could rise through obedience and violence; but there was, culturally, nothing to check his rise.” Fans of Boardwalk Empire will find much here to admire.

As with Mamet’s intricate crime films, there are stories within stories. Chicago glistens with fascinating details, scams, anecdotal red herrings, beautifully rendered asides, and gorgeously wrought digression. The plot, which does have a satisfying denouement, is almost secondary to Mamet’s way with language, especially his crackling dialogue. Sometimes, if you concentrate too closely on the plot — which is, after all, similar to Hitchcock’s idea of the McGuffin — you may miss the author’s playfulness, his skill with a sentence, and his love for arcane information.

It’s Mamet. It’s underworld characters. What else do you wanna know?

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Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13.

This rich, layered novel opens with the mysterious disappearance of a girl, Rebecca “Becky” Shaw, on the Irish moors. But, lest you think you’re in for another page-turner like Gone Girl or Girl on a Train, be aware that the author has something deeper in mind, which becomes clear four or five pages in. Reservoir 13 is what you might call a sociological thriller: McGregor is more interested in what happens to the lives of the people in this small village after the disappearance than in the particulars of the crime, if indeed a crime has been committed. The book resembles Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood more than it does Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are the Children?

It reminded me also of A. S. A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife, which has been described as a domestic noir. In that novel we are aware from page one that a murder has been committed, but the narrative is more concerned with the characters than the felony.

McGregor’s prose style and approach are unique. His sentences circle the subject, build on non-sequiturs and juxtapositions, accumulate like imagistic flashes. When he mentions the missing girl, the reader is shocked back to the center, having become rapt in the happenstances of the village where the action takes place. McGregor employs a large mise en scène and populates it with individuals, all acutely drawn, in a democratic process similar to what Robert Altman used to do in films like Nashville and Gosford Park. Are any of these good folks guilty of a crime, complicit somehow in Becky’s disappearance? The answer is secondary to the analysis of each character, to the psychology of what makes us human, what makes us stick together or fly apart.

The amassing of mundane elements and facets of character, the bone-deep life of the village, create a complex quilt of intensely rendered components: “The clocks went back and the nights overtook the short days. The teenagers walked home from the bus stop in the dark. A man fitting the missing girl’s father’s description was seen walking farther and farther away from the village.” And: “By April the first swallows were seen and the walkers were back on the hills. At the heronry high in the trees above the quarry there was a persistent unsettledness of wings.” And: “Jane Hughes held a service at the church to mark five years since the girl had gone missing, and this time the mother managed to attend. Care was taken not to call it a memorial service. …”

There’s a grace and shimmer to McGregor’s prose reminiscent of the great Irish writers like William Trevor and Brian Moore. There’s also, at times, a drunken poetic cadence that recalls the bravura of Scotland’s James Kelman. But McGregor is his own man, and, ultimately, his style is as idiosyncratic as it is utilitarian. His seemingly simple sentences carry great weight.

What the author seems most interested in is the passage of time, how it flows around and through us no matter what occurs. How we reckon it, how we are aware of it, never varies. “The clocks went forward,” he says, “and the evenings opened up and the days stood a little straighter on their feet. The catkins came out on the willows by the river and swung wildly in the wind.” Seasons change, animals arrive and depart, the air is cooler, the rain more insistent, people move away, and some come back and some don’t. The river rises and then abates. Holidays come and go. Men and women get together, break apart. Lambings, parties, marriages, deaths. There is a rhythm to life that even death is woven into. Even the death of a child. As the years go by, the picture of Becky changes. She’s near 15 now, now 17. Computer generated imaging comes into play. This is how she would look if she’s still alive. She’s still alive, many say.

Years on, some of the villagers still feel they are under the Curse of the Missing Girl. Even in McGregor’s elegant, controlled, lapidary technique, the mystery still rises to the surface. What happened to Rebecca “Becky” Shaw?

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Totally

Matthew Weiner had a hand in creating, as producer and writer, two of modern television’s best series, The Sopranos (1999-2007)and Mad Men (2007-2015). Both were critical successes and overwhelmingly popular. Both have, since, been recognized as watershed moments in the history of the idiot box. The Sopranos (1999-2007)and Mad Men (2007-2015).

Now, after mastering what might be called the long game, Weiner has turned his hand to fiction, with this novella. Checking in at a sparse 138 pages, it portrays a family’s evolution over a period of about fifteen years. That he is successful on the page is testament to his rich imagination and to his ability to do much with few words. The tale is as elliptical — and as unpredictable — as Don Draper’s peripatetic manner. Heather, the Totality, is quiet in its sustained tension and drama, compared to the occasionally outrageous plotlines of both TV series. This move to fiction is similar to the smash success of Noah Hawley’s turn at novel-writing with the thriller, Before the Fall, after he penned the exceptional TV series, Fargo. But Weiner is after something a bit more literary and a bit more daring. He’s moved to Raymond Carver territory, after impersonating Mario Puzo for the small screen.

The story begins with the courtship and subsequent marriage of Mark and Karen Breakstone; privileged and attractive, they glisten. Weiner’s ability to sketch an individual with quick, visual strokes is impressive. Soon, a third party is added, the couple’s daughter, the titular Heather. She is born beautiful and magnetic. As a child she brightens the lives of strangers. There is something mystical in the way she draws people to her, as if she were not just lovely but numinous. As she grows up, her intelligence comes to the fore; she is recognized by her teachers for her precocity and ability to debate anyone, peer or adult. Heather is almost preternatural, a real teen angel.

Yet, she is still predisposed to teen behavior and attitude. As her hormones come into play, she and her mother are at loggerheads, while she and her father have ‘dates’ involving coffee and discussions of politics and film. Vis-à-vis her parents, Heather is painfully aware and observant. “She was never disloyal by sharing their behavior, knowing it would be a catastrophic betrayal if the world discovered the Breakstone family wasn’t perfect. … She also knew they were poisoned with some disease of wealth that had turned them into half-people with coffee machines and cash registers where their hearts should be.”

Then a second storyline enters. It concerns Bobby, who is everything the Breakstones are not. Born poor, with a junky mother, he is cruel though brilliant, deprived, unloved and incapable of love, and, soon, quite dangerous. His appearance in the narrative is initially baffling — what could he possibly have to do with the Breakstones? — but soon engenders dread, because the reader knows that the two story strands will eventually dovetail and the results will probably not be pretty. Weiner strings this tension out beautifully, giving the reader just enough and then pulling back, letting the story develop like the slow unfolding of a life cycle. Regarding the Nietzschean Bobby, Weiner says, “He was so damn smart that people bored him and he was a bright light among them with all the power in heaven, and he could rape them and kill them anytime he wanted because that’s why they were on earth.”

Told in short, visual vignettes, there’s no way to get around calling this book cinematic. Essentially, Heather, the Totality becomes a four-person play. But Weiner’s razor-sharp observations and his instinct for how to build suspense make this an enjoyable, fast-paced and edgy novella. It works because the author understands that patience and brevity can succeed like pointillism. He builds his story, dot by dot, shard by shard. In the spaces between vignettes, there is a shadow, something subterranean and malevolent. It keeps the pages turning. And the denouement to this compact, tightly controlled, dark excursion is both surprising and satisfying, maybe even transcendent.

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Kobo Abe’s Beasts Head for Home.

Kōbō Abe (1924-1993) was a Japanese writer known for such postmodern novels as The Face of Another, The Ark Sakura, The Box Man, and his masterpiece, The Woman in the Dunes. The latter was made into a film by the great Hiroshi Teshigahara, with a screenplay by Abe, the second of four collaborations between the two. Kōbō Abe, or Abe Kōbō as he is called on the cover of this novel, was Japan’s post-World War II international literary star, their Kafka, Beckett, or Camus. He also wrote poetry and experimental plays and was a photographer and inventor. For many years, it was rumored that he would win the Nobel Prize, but he died before that could happen.

His sensibility was neoteric, often absurd, and his sense of displacement and disorientation was Kafkaesque. Yet, his mid- to late-career novels are also playful, and easy to read, even when challenging. Beasts Head for Home is an earlier novel, his third, and is more realistic and more rooted in place (where the later novels seem to take place in dreamland, with unnamed locations and more surreal elements). It is also, apparently, autobiographical and perhaps explains the author’s sense of being displaced. This translation, by Richard F. Calichman, is available for the first time.

The story concerns a Japanese soldier named Kyuzo, who witnesses the end of World War II and the beginning eruptions of the Chinese Civil War, as he makes a trip home to Japan, a place where his people live but from which he has mostly been estranged. It is this trek from Manchuria, where he’s been stationed for years, that takes up most of the novel’s narrative. He travels by train, until it is derailed amid a skirmish, and then he travels by foot with an inscrutable companion, a man initially nameless but who creates his own identity, Ko. Identity is fluid when the world goes pear-shaped. This long march seems more Dostoevsky (one of Abe’s heroes) than Beckett. He trudges on, heading for a home that may not still be his home. The world has changed utterly, more so in Japan, perhaps, than anywhere else on Earth.

In an essay on Abe, Colin Marshall wrote, “The Typical Abe Protagonist (TAP), perhaps a shoe salesman or a schoolteacher, gets swept up, by little fault of his own, into potentially alarming circumstances. Maybe he’s importuned to find an unusual missing person; maybe he misses the last bus home; maybe leaves begin growing from his flesh.” There are no fantastic elements like leaves growing from flesh in Beasts Head for Home, but our TAP is an average man overwhelmed by unusual circumstances, in this case the destruction of his country.

Even if more true-to-life, the world of the novel is still nightmarish. Kyuzo is a prisoner of horrors, man-made, irrational, and murderous. War is hell. Other people are hell. Kyuzo himself, during the privations of his trudge through a desolate landscape, is transformed into one of the beasts heading home. And the ancestral home he seeks, Japan, is a place unknown to him, eventually, perhaps, unknowable. Abe is asking if home is one way we identify ourselves, one way we become ourselves.

Ko, the enigmatic fellow traveler, tells Kyuzo, “For me, the towns where the two-legged beasts lurk are far more dangerous than the fields where the wolves roam.” But to survive their treacherous journey, each man must become more feral. And later, with their goal seemingly within sight, Kyuzo says to an Army officer, “Please help me. I’ve walked such a long way without food.” And the officer answers: “But, really, nothing can be done. It’s not the same as before, you see.” Nothing will ever be the same again, of course.

As Kyuzo continues his slog down the road that goes nowhere, the book itself becomes a bit of a slog. Beasts Head for Home is a good novel, but it feels like a preparation for the greater novels to come. Abe seems to be licking around the edges of the surrealism that would characterize his later work, the way some of Nabokov’s early novels feel like a preparation for Lolita. Still, this is a necessary part of Abe’s important body of work, a book of vivid scenes and strange characters, a book that feels like the hollow terror after a nightmare passes.