Author: Richard Alley

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Eric Barnes’ The City Where We Once Lived.

In The City Where We Once Lived, we never learn of which city Eric Barnes writes. In its post-apocalyptic state, it could be San Francisco after the big one. With its rampant flooding, it could be post-Katrina New Orleans. With its clear line of delineation between the haves and have-nots, it could be Memphis.

The North Side of the city, divided from the South Side by a highway with a single overpass as egress between the two, is long neglected and blighted. Something has eroded the North, leaving it seemingly uninhabitable, and we’re only given hints as to what that something might be. Those who remain do so by choice, living wherever they choose. Our protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout, lives alone in a high-rise hotel. We see the North Side through his eyes from his lofty perch and as he wanders around the barren and desolate streets. Over time, we come to know his tragic story, but the information is parceled out by Barnes who is in no hurry to tell his tale.

Where his previous novel, Something Pretty, Something Beautiful (he’s also the author of the novel Shimmer) is all movement and adrenaline, The City is subdued, quiet and unsuspecting. The quiet, though, is punctuated by head-spinning action. A character asks, “What is your capacity for violence?” Barnes has a voice for violence and a heart of compassion, and the human element of his story is in neighbor helping neighbor. There is a dizzying moment of chaos followed by a beautiful moment when the citizens of the North End come together to help those from the South.

It doesn’t matter the city because its inhabitants’ behavior is universal. The North End is a land of sameness, of routine, and this may be the truest element of any post-apocalyptic story. How many of us, faced with the end of civilization as we know it, would take to the road to search out like-minded societies or create such a society ourselves? Who would fight zombies to the death while foraging for a cure? Not many, I suspect. Instead, we might be more apt to surrender and lie down on a sofa under the cover of blankets. And that’s just what the hero wants to do here. His memories weigh him down, yet he goes to work every day to put out a newspaper for the North Side. Maybe it’s the momentum of routine that will keep us alive come the end of days. In his wanderings around the city, researching the history of long-empty buildings and grim neighborhoods, he comes across people in the same situation — a woman working at the water pumping station, a security guard at the abandoned airport. The people of the North End keep doing what they’ve always done because, dystopia or not, everyone needs a purpose.

Though the city and characters remain nameless — the woman and the boy, the preacher, the gardener, the pressman — there is a lot going on here: climate change, industrialized pollution, man-made flooding. There is also the possibility that this isn’t an isolated case, but that it’s happening in communities worldwide. But maybe Barnes is making a simpler statement. He writes, “The South End is the suburbs to the North End. The sprawling, senseless suburbs that will also someday be abandoned. You can’t build places of substance and duration only as an antidote to what you have for so long neglected.”

We learn that, as the problems with the North End became apparent, the citizens and politicians gave up on it and escaped to the south. As a result, the South End is overcrowded, congested with traffic, and a place where “surfaces of everything are like plastic, the neighborhoods finished along sharp lines and dull curves that are repeated, again and again, on every house, every block, every subdivision for many miles.”

Barnes doesn’t name his city because this is every major metropolitan city in America dealing with sprawl and neglect and blight and a citizenry far too accommodating of the easy way out. Our man in the North End doesn’t take the easy way out, and, in the end, it’s a life worth fighting for.

Eric Barnes signs The City Where We Once Lived at Crosstown Arts, Saturday, April 14th, 6 p.m. Benefiting Overton Park Conservancy.

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Lorenzo Marone’s The Temptation to Be Happy

“Everything Happens to Me” is a jazz standard first recorded by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Frank Sinatra in 1940. Around that same time is when Cesare Annunziata, the antihero of Lorenzo Marone’s striking novel (translated from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside), The Temptation to Be Happy, would have been born, and Cesare might have taken that song as his life’s anthem.

When we meet Cesare he is 77 years old, and to say he’s curmudgeonly would be an understatement. I’d say he’s a loveable curmudgeon but, honestly, there’s not much to love about Cesare as a person.

A widower, he lives alone in a building of mostly elderly people in Naples, Italy. He actively avoids those who live around him, lingering at the lobby mailbox if someone else is waiting for the elevator and avoiding standing in lines at the market. “Christ, there’s nothing worse than a sociable person,” Cesare thinks. “What’s so great about meeting a new individual? We’re all the same anyway, more or less, a collection of shortcomings walking along the street and trying to avoid similar collections.”

He rightly refers to these avoidances as “my sociopathic urges.” Come to think of it, sociopath might be a better description of Cesare than curmudgeon.

He inhabits his dismal building as comfortably as he does his own mind, to which the reader is given free access. When a young couple moves in across the hall, it’s as if the modern world beyond his front stoop has crashed his very consciousness. Cesare thinks, “At their age they still haven’t worked out that yes, it’s important to reach your target, but there’s no record to beat. It’s better to reach the finishing line slowly, enjoy the landscape, maintain a measured pace and regular breathing for the whole journey, finishing the race as late as possible.”

On the surface, it seems as though Cesare’s concern is with the urgency with which they conduct their affairs and that roses might go un-smelled. But remember, everything happens to Cesare, and what truly worries him is the noise that is sure to invade his quiet hovel.

And noise does accompany the young couple, though it’s not that of cocktail parties, but of furniture breaking and a woman’s cries. His neighbor is being abused and even sociopathic Cesare can’t stand for that. Begrudgingly, he enlists the help of neighbors — the crazy cat lady next door and the shut-in a floor below. Together, this unlikely justice league takes on the task of rescue.

This is about all the concern Cesare can muster because, as he’s striving to help a stranger, his relationship with his two grown children continues to capsize. Righting it is seemingly beyond Cesare’s capacity because its sunken state is, conveniently, not his fault. He says of his late wife, Caterina, “Because of her pregnancy I was forced to abandon forever my rebellious impulse — it was my wife’s fault that I would lead a life I didn’t want. That was when I began to hate her.”

Ever the victim, he’s burdened his son and daughter with his regret, saying, “He became homosexual; she egocentric and neurotic.” That quote says a lot about Cesare, and his thoughts on homosexuality and women. He goes on to say aloud to his dead wife, “If you were here, we could swap roles now. Perhaps that way we could compensate a little bit for the damage done!” As if being gay and headstrong were damages to be repaired.

In the end, it is Cesare who is damaged. What’s more, he realizes it and names it before we ever can. He is not completely alone in that apartment — he lives with ghosts and regrets as he laments, “I’m not capable of giving love to those who have a right to it.”

When tragedy strikes, it strikes hard, and Marone’s writing shines brightest as he pulls the reader into the scene, into the very room where life is slipping away and Cesare alone fights to save it. But still, there’s the old Cesare and his thoughts on it all — “Life is giving me a second chance” — as he makes it about himself.

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Jennifer Egan’s novel tells a tale that never changes.

As women across the country publicly opened up about harassment and assaults by politicians, actors, and news personalities, I cracked open Manhattan Beach, the new novel from Jennifer Egan. And there it was in black-and-white: the systematic belittling of women harkening back to a time when the phrase “boys will be boys” might have been coined. Who says fiction is fake? Who says novels are mere fantasy? The fiction writer casts an eye on society with a perception — and with the advantage of time and space — like few others can.

Anna Kerrigan works in a Brooklyn Naval yard during World War II, inspecting the delicate instrumentation that will find its way into the battleships under construction around her. She relishes feeling useful and her newfound sense of freedom, but craves more. When she happens upon a training exercise for Navy divers, she sets her sights on the task.

It was a time that saw unprecedented independence for and dependence upon women as they went to work doing the jobs men had occupied before shipping off to war. Despite such reliance, the respect offered these women was fleeting.

Egan writes: ” . . . unmarried girls didn’t live alone — unless they were a different sort of girl, which Anna was not. What would the neighbors think? Who would meet her at the end of each day? Fix her breakfast and supper? Suppose an intruder climbed in from the fire escape? Suppose she fell sick or got hurt?”

The third-person omniscient narrator’s insistence on using “girl” instead of “woman” throughout underscores how resistant society was to granting respect. Even as Anna is begrudgingly allowed on the diving team, “most of her assignments had this air of the domestic.”

Based on the description of Anna in marketing materials — “She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war” — Manhattan Beach is not the story I was expecting. But that’s my fault and what I brought to the book, rather than any fault of Egan’s masterful storytelling.

What we’ve come to expect in fiction is a revolution, a Norma Rae moment that turns the tide of an unacceptable social norm. In this case, Anna would’ve changed the thinking and ways of her superiors at the Naval yard, the men she worked alongside, her neighborhood, and her family. But Egan tells a far more real story. While the geopolitics of the world evolved during WWII, the world of women and minorities in the United States did not. Responsibility and respect were fleeting.

Anna’s father is a low-level member of a crime syndicate and constantly on the hunt for a better way to care for his family. Her mother was on the road to fame as a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies before children came along. Anna’s sister, Lydia, was born with a birth defect and is dependent on others. The fate of the Kerrigan family is tugged, unknowingly, by the strings of syndicate boss Dexter Styles.

Her father goes missing and Anna becomes the first female diver, and this is when a habitual reader of fiction, a consumer of storytelling, might expect her world to change. But it doesn’t because real life doesn’t turn so quickly. Families still struggle to care for those with special needs, and women still struggle for equality. In this way, Egan tells a very real story and one we’re not used to reading in fiction — there is no pretty bow on a neatly wrapped package.

In 2010, female authors, including Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, lamented the attention lavished on their white, male counterparts (in particular Jonathan Franzen), while women went largely unheralded. The following year, Egan won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her second novel, the experimental A Visit From the Good Squad. Since then, only one woman, Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch) has won. (In fairness, no winner was named in 2012, though Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! was a runner-up.) Is a woman due? Will Manhattan Beach be the next as Egan’s second? We’ll find out next year. Until then, the story remains the same, and the struggle persists.

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A new collection from Jeffrey Eugenides.

My main complaint with Jeffrey Eugenides is that he doesn’t turn out novels fast enough. That’s not really his problem, though, as much as it’s mine. I’m a fan, and what a fan wants most is to consume. But books — especially really good books — need time to cook. So take your time in the kitchen, Mr. Eugenides; I’ll wait.

Until the next novel makes its way onto my plate, Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Eugenides’ short story collection, is new on the menu.

Eugenides imbues many of these 10 stories with a sense of urgency, one that drills into the chest of the reader to get at the valve that regulates heart rate. With each page, as the story nears its inevitable conclusion, we feel as though we’re there with the protagonist, that what is about to befall them will also befall us.

In the title story, a young immigrant woman is so panicked over her imminent arranged marriage that, in desperation, she brings ruin upon a visiting writer to her college.

Or does he bring ruin upon himself? As the married man invites her to his hotel room, runs out for condoms, and comes back to complete the act, he knows it’s wrong. We’re right there with him, heart pounding, conscience churning, as he thinks of his family back home and the damage this could cause.

Yet, it happens. And, while it appears that only one gains from the encounter, both suffer.

This sense of peril is felt, too, in “Great Experiment,” when a once-promising poet takes stock of his life and the ways in which it might improve. Though he once had the literary world at his fingertips, Kendall is, these days, the editor for a small publishing house. Working from his absentee boss’ penthouse on the Gold Coast of Chicago, it is as if Kendall becomes awakened to his opulent surroundings by the company’s accountant. Why not us? The bean counter suggests, and Kendall wonders the same when he goes home to his wife and kids and the house they’d bought to fix up, but which is still in a state of disrepair after so many years.

When the two make the leap into the world of embezzlement, the warm embrace of security takes over. But underneath is that dread, the danger that something, somewhere, is amiss and just waiting to be overturned.

But perhaps we aren’t all familiar with that sense of foreboding and dread, as though something just beneath the surface is pressing upward and threatening to tear the fabric of your comfortable life. Good for you if not. In “Air Mail,” the subject is something we can all relate to: poop. Okay, it’s dysentery, and perhaps we haven’t all experienced that. But remember that stomach bug you had just before the holidays? There you go.

Mitchell is on a journey, both physically as he travels the world, and spiritually, as he takes stock of himself among humanity. During an unintended extended layover on an island off the coast of Thailand, Mitchell is overcome by amoebic dysentery and the inward thoughts of a man whose innards are emptying out. Convalescing in a bamboo hut, he writes a series of letters home to his parents, informing them of his mystic insights. He self-medicates by starving himself, as he describes to his parents: “Rather than being some weird penance, fasting is actually a very sane and scientific method of quieting the body, of turning the body off. And when the body turns off, the mind turns on. The Sanskrit for this is ‘moksa’, which means total liberation from the body.”

There is a little something for everyone in Eugenides’ collection, and, as I read it over the Thanksgiving holiday, it was more like leftovers — a series of turkey sandwiches — as opposed to the heavier meal of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex or his debut The Virgin Suicides. The stories hit me just right, if not making me a bit uncomfortable, just when my hunger was at its greatest.

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Nostalgia and sentimentality and 750 pages.

Sometimes I read books so you don’t have to. Such is the case with Runnin’ With the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen (Dey Street Books).

As I tumble down the far side of my 40s on the way to 50, I have to believe it was my 14-year-old self who dug deep into his pockets for the lawn-cutting money to buy this book. That awkward and anxious kid would not have been disappointed. Written by the band’s David Lee Roth-era manager, Noel Monk (with music journalist Joe Layden), the book is the age-old story of a young band on the rise while riding a wave of sex, booze, drugs, more sex, even more drugs, and tanker trucks full of booze. And then, in chapter two, we begin with sex and drugs and booze. Ad infinitum.

The last 30 pages would have been a shock to 14-year-old me (spoiler alert): The band breaks up! It’s the telling of this story that is the most interesting and enlightening, particularly how three-fourths of the band — a band that, admirably, always shared equally in songwriting credit and revenue — treated that fourth, bassist Michael Anthony (not to mention Monk). In the end, we come away with what we already knew: Eddie Van Halen is a guitar god, Roth is a hyperkinetic sex machine, Alex Van Halen plays drums, and Anthony plays bass. And they’re all, for the most part, assholes.

I read the novel Ready Player One (Crown) simultaneously. I admit I’m late to the game on this book that is closer now to becoming a film than it is to its first publication date in 2011. It was recommended to me by a number of my peers, and all with the same sales pitch: “You’ll love it. It’s full of ’80s trivia and culture. The music, the movies … blah, blah, blah.”

So I put on my parachute pants, slipped on a Members Only jacket, gelled up my hair Flock of Seagulls style, and dived in. And they were right, it is resplendent with video game, music, and film references from the era I entered at the age of 9 and exited at 19. But is that enough to make a book interesting?

Author Ernest Cline clearly thinks so. Ready Player One is set in the dystopian world of 2044, but protagonist Wade Watts, himself a teenager, lives in a nostalgic haze of 1980s culture. It comes in handy as he embarks on a quest for an “Easter egg,” a hidden digital treasure found in video games and films. The orchestrator of the quest and its riddles is the late James Halliday, inventor of a social media platform unlike any we know today. It’s an immersive world where players become whomever they wish to be and do whatever they wish to do. It’s a way to escape the miserable world left for them by those who were in charge during the ’80s. The Easter egg Watts and an army of “gunters,” as the egg hunters are known, is Halliday’s massive fortune, left in a cryptic will to be had by the “winner” of his game.

Like the game’s inventor, I came of age in the ’80s, and that decade produced a lot of crap. A lot. But the upshot of aging is the curation of memories and blurring hindsight so we focus only on the good: Purple Rain (the album), The Joshua Tree, Paul’s Boutique, Appetite for Destruction, Die Hard, Airplane!. I met my future wife in 1987.

Nostalgia and sentimentality, though, aren’t enough to hold my interest for 750 pages across two books. I can no more stomach the seemingly endless loop of Modern English’s “I Melt with You” today or spend hours on end in an arcade, than I could a viewing of any John Hughes film in its entirety.

But this is only one middle-aged reviewer’s opinion, and he’s curmudgeonly and unsentimental. The teenager within finds these books as bitchin’ as an episode of Square Pegs.

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David Coventry’s The Invisible Mile

If you’re like me, around the time Memphis social media was blowing up over news that Zach Randolph would be wrapping his dishes in newspaper in preparation for a move west last July, you were caught up in the drama of super-sprinter Peter Sagan’s disqualification from this year’s Tour de France following his fracas in Stage 4 of the race.

I know, I’m still upset about it, too.

My schedule over those weeks was simple: watch the present-day Tour coverage live in the morning, followed by reading The Invisible Mile (Picador), David Coventry’s novel set during the 1928 race, at night.

Through the eyes of a domestique, the youngest rider on the team, we witness the unveiling, mile by mile, of the Ravat-Wonder cycling team of New Zealand/Australia, the first English-speaking team allowed in the storied race begun in 1903. (I’m sure you caught that there — it’s a 1928 Australian team, and Sagan has been accused of knocking Mark Cavendish, an Australian, from his ride during a final sprint in 2017. It’s uncanny.)

Along the way, the young rider carries in his panniers memories of home and a sister whose fate we learn along the journey. His memories of the first World War, too, become vivid with each revolution of his machine’s gears.

While a fan of the race, I was unfamiliar with some of the names from the past as the announcers of today’s Tour de France rarely take us back beyond the career of Eddy Merckx. So as I read, I made frequent pit stops on Google to learn how easily truth can draft in behind such elegant lies. There was indeed an Australian/New Zealand team first introduced to the 1928 Tour de France, and it was led by Hubert Opperman and Harry Watson, just as in the novel. Other characters such as Camille Van de Casteele were actual participants as well.

The Invisible Mile is a long look at the Tour de France in its infancy. Today’s participants ride from one day’s finish to the next day’s start aboard luxury motor coaches with masseuses, team doctors, and personal chefs. Their gear is the most high-tech, up-to-date available and, in most cases, is designed for each rider. It is science on pedals. But aren’t most sports these days? Science in pads, science swinging a bat, science running a faster and faster mile.

The constant for professional athletes (for most, anyway, as the dollar sign is still the ultimate measure of a personal best) is heart. And the men of the earliest Tour de France had it in torrents as they trudged up the same mountains they do today — the Pyrenees, the Alps — on machines made of heavy steel, not feather-weight carbon fiber, while carrying their own spare tubes across their backs and bags full of gears to be changed out manually depending on ascent or descent. Once at the finish, they searched for lodging and for restaurants that were still open, as they may have finished a stage in darkness or in early morning. Coventry puts us in that mindset, taking us to the flat plains and rocky outcrops of France with poetry mingled into his peloton of prose to fit us on the saddle so we can see and feel the road ahead.

“I shouted at myself as I climbed,” Coventry writes. “My bones felt the terror of my muscles as they stretched and shrank. Trying to take me up and up, they seemed to bend to the effort. I say this, but we were barely pedalling. And it’s a heavy agony. I thought only to cry when we hit the snowline. The pain was exquisite and I could not comprehend how my body kept working me onwards. It was deep, it was everywhere, surrounding every part of me. I felt myself become damaged; I felt every muscle disintegrating, lungs and heart turning to bloody pulp in my chest. But I went on, and it’s not a case of knowing how, rather it is the case that we did.”

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The Center for Southern Literary Arts’ grand vision.

CREDIT: Ron Lima | Dreamstime

Last December in this space, I wrote out my Christmas list with a one-item wish: that a single nonprofit would come to the forefront and champion the local literary community. In the same way that the visual arts, live music, indie films, and theater have their advocates, so should the writer and reader.

I recently found my stocking stuffed. It wasn’t any jolly old elf slipping down the chimney, but a simple tweet: “Last Dec, @richardalley wrote in @MemphisFlyer wishing for ‘a single organization to gather these folks up and give them a home.’ So we did.”

That message was tweeted out by Molly Rose Quinn, and the “we” she mentions includes writers Jamey Hatley and Zandria Robinson. The trio have established the Center for Southern Literary Arts (CSLA) and, while still in the planning stages, those plans are bold and visionary. The mission states the CSLA “aims to cultivate the rich and diverse stories of the Memphis region by encouraging innovation in the literary arts and their adjacent economies.”

The CSLA seeks to draw writers out and into the community, bringing them together with readers to share their stories, regardless of publication credentials. “People tell stories in churches, in community organizations, at the gas station, and those stories are just as important,” says Hatley, the 2016 Prose Fellow for the National Endowment for the Arts and winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award that same year.

“It’s our collective response as friends and writers to the peril that we think the literary community is in here,” says Robinson, an urban sociologist and award-winning author. Rhodes College, where she’s an assistant professor of Sociology, was recently awarded a grant through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a portion will be put toward the CSLA’s startup.

The group was struck by the loss of the Booksellers at Laurelwood (that store will reopen soon as Novel) and with the changes at Literacy Mid-South, which, most notably, will see an indefinite hiatus of its three-year-old book festival. “At its core, it’s about returning Memphis to the literary map, reclaiming Memphis as a literary space, and making Memphis a place where professional writers can be trained up and developed and retained and thrive,” says Robinson.

The women are in the process of fund-raising with long-range goals of a permanent space for workshops, readings, and signings. Local programs — story booth and book festival, along with Christian Brothers University’s Memphis Reads initiative — tended to work as lone wolves, sometimes pulling in bookstores and the University of Memphis’ MFA writing program, but more often going it alone. The CSLA aims to stitch the community together.

“These programs that have run into obstacles or have folded, when they did exist, were so siloed, which is something we heard from so many people,” says Quinn, a native Memphian who has been in New York City the past 10 years working as a community organizer and arts administrator leading programs with literary and cultural institutions.

Though there is no physical space for the Center at the moment, there will be programming beginning with the next academic year: dinner with the arts, a multidisciplinary event featuring a chef, visual artist, and writer who discuss issues of the South; partnering with writers to facilitate workshops within a local high school; and a truncated version of their own take on the Mid-South Book Festival.

If this reader/writer could be granted one more wish, it would be for the CSLA to find a home within Crosstown Arts, at least temporarily as an incubator, while working its way through its prologue. The nonprofit that has seen the revitalization of the old Sears building is sorely lacking in literary event programming, and a partnership would be a means to an end for both organizations.

“We are geographically and strategically positioned to be a regional leader in the area,” Robinson says. “We’re looking to serve as an umbrella, collaborator, clearing house, friend, partner, supporter of other organizations with similar missions.”

Learn more about the Center for Southern Literary Arts at southernliteraryarts.org.

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Frank Murtaugh’s Trey’s Company

I remember the exhilaration that came with the snap of the match head on the striking surface and the first whiff of sulfur. I remember the thrill as the flame attached itself to a small pile of leaves and twigs and then spread to the larger pieces of kindling my friends and I had pulled from the very clubhouse we sat in. The smoke was mesmerizing, and then it seemed too much. And then there was the shouting of my mother from the back door and her voice coming closer. The look on her face is probably what I remember most and the clenching of my stomach later that night when she made me recount what I’d done to my father.

We’ve all done it — played with fire — or something equally thrilling and frightening. First kiss. First drink. First puff. Rites of passage. It’s the dawning of the unknown, a corner turned abruptly from childhood to adulthood.

It’s a moment in time, this transition, and it’s one captured in Frank Murtaugh’s debut novel Trey’s Company from Jackson, Mississippi-based publisher Sartoris Literary Group.

Trey Milligan is 13 years old in the summer of 1982, three months that will change him and his world irrevocably. He and his little sister Libby have a tradition of the season spent with their widowed grandmother outside Cleveland, Tennessee, far from their parents in California. The Milligans have traveled around; the parents, who remain distant and unseen throughout the story, are professional academics. But Trey feels most at home among the gently rolling hills of his grandmother’s neighborhood with its meandering creek, adjacent trailer park, and driveway basketball hoops.

It’s the home of some of his dearest friends as well — Devon, Larry, Arline, and Wendy. Wendy. We all have that someone in our lives who lit a fire in our hearts for the first time and changed who we are for good, and for young Trey Milligan, that someone is Wendy.

To understand Frank Murtaugh, the man, is to know that he moves through his days with his very own Holy Trinity: family, baseball, KISS. And Murtaugh the novelist clearly had this trinity at his elbow as he wrote Trey’s Company. The warm nostalgia of family and a ballgame on the television are folded into every chapter; the ideals of Americana, just a neighboring porch away in Gran’s neighborhood.

Baseball is a constant with Trey — his team, as is his creator’s, is the St. Louis Cardinals — and he collects rookie cards and spends hours pitching a rubber ball to himself off the backyard deck (a baseball stadium of his own imagining). He and Libby visit Gran’s sister in her retirement home, the very idea a nightmare for some kids, but the Milligan siblings adore all contact with family, even when that family is a racist uncle who has a way with horses.

So there is Murtaugh’s trinity save for KISS. While the theatrical hard-rock quartet doesn’t make an appearance in the novel, the shadowy evil their shows portend does as the author rains hellfire (and actual fire) down upon his characters. The summer of 1982 is the axis upon which life turns, and it is through loss and fear and death that Murtaugh evokes the change of season for Trey, his Everyboy. Heaped upon a first kiss, a first date, and the milestone of glimpsing an older woman in bra and panties, there is the unknowable loss of someone close and a brush with tragedy and the law that shakes this 13-year-old to the core.

In the end, we wish Trey’s childhood could go on indefinitely, just as we wish all childhood might. If not an actual stunting of age, then the innocence that accompanies those magical years. A time when we might not know of death so close, of racist uncles, of fear and pedophiles and the heat from the fire of adulthood.

If that Peter Pan wish can’t come true, then we’ll wish to travel those rolling neighborhood streets with friends who will help see us through. “Choose the people you let in, Trey,” Geraldine, the ice cream lady and neighborhood sage, says. “Choose them very carefully. They’ll help you pave your path.”

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Hannah Tinti’s The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley (The Dial Press) is a violent book. It’s a book about guns and gun culture, revenge, paranoia, and murder.

It’s a book about family. The story of a father and daughter, a wife lost too soon, and a grandmother who wants to be nearer to her granddaughter to keep a sense of that lost daughter.

It’s these two worlds that make Hannah Tinti’s first novel in 10 years so compelling. It is the world we live in today, one consumed by compassion and devotion, anger and violence. Her storyline can be so authentic at times that I had to put the book down and walk away. As the news and social media fed me a steady diet of all that is wrong with our society, I didn’t want it from a novel I’d chosen for escape. But I’d go back to it because the pull of the story of Hawley and his daughter, Loo, as they struggle to survive as a team in the world he’s made for them is too strong.

Sam works as a collector, traveling the country taking back merchandise or cash from those who have stolen from powerful and corrupt people. That merchandise is collected by any means necessary, most often violently. It’s the sort of life that leaves in its wake grudges and vendettas like a map of stars across the night sky.

The structure of the book breaks every other chapter into the story of a bullet in Hawley’s life — 12 in all. As a writer, when I first began reading this book, I thought, “Why 12? Why not make it easier on yourself with, say, six bullets?” But Hawley’s life is measured by these bullets as they pass through his body. And Hawley passes through his life the same way — messily, violently, bloody. He tears at flesh and the fabric of a decent society as he moves from one job to the next.

He and Loo move from place to place, often at a moment’s notice, taking along whatever they can fit in a piece of luggage. There are other ways to measure time — a shampoo bottle, lipstick, a handwritten shopping list, a bathrobe, snapshots. Hawley carries these items of his wife’s, long dead now, from place to place, scraps of memory he arranges into a shrine at every stop along the way. This is how Hawley finds his way back to Lily.

Hawley’s longtime friend and partner in crime tells Loo, “Watches used to be important. When you got your first, it was special. A reminder of the days you had left, ticking away right there on your arm.”

Hawley knows from the beginning that his days are numbered, ticking away, and he wants to quit for his daughter’s sake. Violence begets violence. But simply retiring isn’t an option, and he works backward through time, tracing his wounds to the men who caused them like following the constellations to eradicate any future threat. Tinti writes: “What a mess he’d made, Hawley thought. He wished he could erase his entire life, starting with his father’s death and then every step that had led him here to this crap motel room, every bullet, every twisted turn of the road he’d followed — even meeting Lily, even having Loo. Hawley wanted it all gone.”

I want to finish by saying that, while Samuel Hawley is violent — and let’s make no bones about it, he is a bad dude — his devotion to his daughter is without question. And because he loves his daughter so much, he’s raising her to be a strong and independent woman. He may be going about it in the extreme — the book opens with Hawley teaching a 12-year-old Loo how to shoot a rifle — but it’s a lesson for all of us: If we love and respect our daughters, we must raise them to resist when society seeks to undermine their strength. Sam gets that, flawed though he may be.

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Today and tomorrow in Elan Mastai’s debut novel.

Our society’s obsession with youth and technology is widely apparent. When it comes to the simplest and easiest ways to roll back the hands of time, technology has given us space-age unguents to smear on the skin and eradicate wrinkles, dyes for our hair, pills to slough the pounds, pills for our cholesterol, pills for our poop, and pills for our peckers.

Technology might be the true fountain of youth.

And if science will be the means to one day turn back time, then science fiction is the way we can do it today. Ever since H.G. Wells urged us to consider time travel in 1895, we’ve hoped each technological advance might get us there with the flip of a switch. But without that portal available to us, we take Wells’ lead and look to the arts to transport us. The muse, it seems, travels back and forth through time, showing up in the writing desks of authors and on the soundstages of filmmakers. Those artists have given us Hank Morgan, Billy Pilgrim, Dr. Who, Kyle Reese, Marty McFly, and Henry DeTamble.

And we can now add to that roster Tom Barren, the protagonist of All Our Wrong Todays (Dutton), the debut novel by Elan Mastai.

Barren lives in a utopian world, a world of the future, though it exists in a dimension parallel to ours, rubbing up against our own reality. In his world, there is no competition, no war, no stress. The easy decisions are already made as people of this alternate Earth merely think of what they want to wear and a new outfit forms on their body. Likewise, outdoor advertisements are pinpointed to each individual consumer as he traverses along moving sidewalks. There are flying cars (finally!), and landscapes change with the push of a button for viewing from one’s apartment, which is outfitted, of course, with the latest gadgets.

The source of all of these conveniences is the Goettreider Engine. It’s John Galt’s kinetic motor, Dr. Emmett Brown’s plutonium, and Hot Tub Time Machine‘s energy drink, Chernobly, rolled into one. The Goettreider Engine was turned on by Lionel Goettreider on July 11, 1965, at 2:03:48 p.m. and never turned off again. That’s the exact moment the world changed forever, suddenly infused with a clean, self-perpetuating energy. No more coal, no more diesel fumes, no more war over oil, just whatever technology the mind could dream up.

Barren’s father is Victor Barren, Ph.D., whose offering on the altar of advancement is — you guessed it — a time machine. It’s been in the planning and building and testing stages when we enter the story in 2016. A team of chrononauts trains to be the first to go back in time, to the moment Goettreider flipped the ON switch in 1965, because the only way Victor’s wayback machine can find its way is to follow the engine’s tau radiation signal.

Anyway, it all sounds very technical — and it is — but it’s also very human, and the humanity is what makes this book so engaging and entertaining. It’s that rubbing together of technology and heart, emotion and theory jumping back and forth in the same way Barren’s world and ours coexist.

What’s the first thing we learn as sci-fi consumers when it comes to traveling back in time? That’s right: Don’t change anything! Well, Barren ends up in 1965 and — spoiler — he changes some stuff. It’s not his fault, time travel is glitchy, but this glitch keeps the world on a trajectory that sees the only technology being smart phones, remote car door locks, internet porn, and drip coffee. Boring.

Barren has to figure out how to make it all right again. The thing is, he likes portions of our world. His mother’s still alive and he likes his father better, he has a sister who didn’t exist back in utopia, and there’s a girl, Penny, whom he lost in his world. So what does our hero do? Well, you’ll have to jump into tomorrow when you can go to the bookstore and get your own copy of All Our Wrong Todays to find that out. I suggest you don’t waste any time in doing so; there’s no telling what might happen.