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I often turn the last page in a book and think, "Nice, but I don't need to hurry writing a review. I'll remember." And then, after a few days, I don't. What makes a book, a novel in particular, memorable?
For me, it's the emotion evoked, especially if it's couched in excellent writing and in the guise of a realistic character. I would like to share a few examples from current novels.
6 NEW NOVELS THAT STICK IN YOUR MIND
A Meal in Winter: A Novel of World War II, by Hubert Mingarelli, is translated beautifully from the French by Sam Taylor. The story is simple enough: three German soldiers are sent out into the Polish countryside in the midst of frozen winter. Their mission is to bring back a Jew to be killed. They find one, and while resting and eating a meal with him at an abandoned house, a passing anti-Semitic Pole joins them. Within hours, sympathies (theirs and perhaps even ours) start to evolve as each man has to make a stark choice with profound moral implications.
The narrative is masterfully understated and perfectly detailed. How cold and hungry these men are, and how little any of them want to be where they are. The larger world of politics and murderous madness are kept to the background while we enter the men's minds. It's an unforgettable novel, exquisitely crafted. A brief example:
We came to a crossroads and wondered if it wasn’t time to consult the map. But it was inside Emmerich’s coat, and opening his coat would be like taking an ice bath. In the end, we settled on a path that went south, joking that it would be less cold down there ....
The Jew walked in front, in the old tracks that had frozen. .... Then I realised he had his hands above his head again. I told him he could lower them. He understood that I was talking to him, but not what I was saying. He turned around and opened his eyes wide. Using my hands, I signalled to him that he could lower his, and this time he understood.
We were no longer allowed to kill them where we found them, unless an officer was present to vouch for the fact. These days, we had to bring them back.
All Is Not Forgotten by Wendy Walker is a psychological thriller in which crucial facts only become clear over time. We don't even know who the narrator is for many pages. And how reliable is that voice? An experimental drug is given to Jenny, a teenage girl, after she is brutally attacked, so that she cannot remember most of what happened that night. Turns out not to have been the best choice for her own emotional stability. Her parents' troubled marriage, a small town full of secrets (are there any other kind in fiction?), and the unruly mess that is memory—all these combine to form a tense plot to keep you turning pages.
Here is how Jenny describes her feelings after the attack and the taking of the forgetting drug:
If I had to explain it, I would say that I felt like doing things that I used to do felt like a lie, like I was trying to pretend I was someone I wasn’t anymore. Like wearing something blue because you used to like blue and you think you still should like it, but you just don’t now. Does that make sense? I didn’t like doing anything I used to do. I just did them, you know, went through the motions, because I felt like if I didn’t, then everything would just fall apart. Sitting on my bed with all these things I used to love but not loving them anymore, I just wanted to set them all on fire. That’s when I knew I was never going to be all right again.
My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal can be read in an evening or two. The mixed-race English author's mother took in foster children, and de Waal spent 15 years in criminal and family law. Those experiences led to this smoothly written first novel, its child-like (yet never sentimental or simplistic) point of view showing readers how Leon, a nine-year-old mixed-race boy, fares when his mother can't care for him. Leon's beloved white baby brother Jake is adopted quickly while he remains in foster care, unable to understand why the social workers lie to him, why he can't go back home to get his toys, why his mother doesn't visit, and why he is helpless to control his own fate.
Here is his foster mother explaining what's about to happen:
"Did you understand that, Leon? Jake is going to be adopted."
"What's adopted?"
"Jake is going to have a new mom and dad."
"Why?"
"Because, Love. Just because. Because he's a baby, a white baby. And you're not. Apparently. Because people are horrible and because life isn't fair, pigeon. Not fair at all. And if you ask me, it's plain wrong and —"
And a week later, another conversation:
"Well, those people are coming for Jake today, love." ...
"Am I going with him?"
The Grand Tour, by Adam O'Fallon, is a darkly funny road trip novel you'll get a kick out of if you've ever been on a book tour, or wished your publisher would send you on one, or even attended a reading by a visiting author. The touring author is an alcoholic Vietnam vet who has one big fan: an awkward student who volunteers to do the driving. Neither of the two misfits has much use for mankind in general. How the older man comes finally to appreciate the younger one, and both rise above their despair, is told by means of one funny disaster after another along the tour.
This early scene occurs after a stewardess wakes up the tipsy, Ambien-groggy author:
He frankensteined it through the cabin and up the long jet bridge and emerged into the fluorescence of the shabbiest boarding gate he’d ever seen. He hadn’t seen many—the result of a lifelong fear of flying coupled with a general disinclination to go anywhere—but this was certainly the shabbiest. Several ceiling panels were half rotten with brown water stains, and one was missing entirely, providing a nice view of the filth-caked girders above. A darkened McDonald’s brooded to itself across the empty room.
A tall kid wearing glasses, a backpack, and the faintest ghost of a beard stood alone holding a sign. r m lazar, it said in big block letters, each of which seemed to have been laboriously filled in with a Sharpie. He rolled his suitcase up, and the kid held the sign to his chest, as though to protect himself from a blow. His fine brown hair was swept in a delicate fringe across a high, worried forehead. Richard assumed the hairstyle was an attempt on the kid’s part to hide what looked like a palimpsest of acne.
The Nix, by Nathan Hill, is a debut novel that revolves around Samuel—a college professor whose own writing isn't flowing—and his personal Nix. A Nix is something you love that disappears, and having one hurts. Samuel's is his mother Faye who left the family when Sam was young, and who has stayed away for the decades since.
What makes this 640-page novel worth every paragraph is how smart it is and how psychologically "right." Scenes are set both at he Democratic Convention of 1968 and the Republican Convention of 2004, making it timely as well. I won't try to list all the themes, clever strategies, and funny scenes. If you like to lose yourself in an engaging novel that takes you places—mental places—you'll want to read this one.
Here's a flashback featuring a very young Sam and his mother:
“Let’s go for a walk,” Faye said. “Fill your wagon. Bring nine of your favorite toys.”
“What?” he said, his huge frightened eyes already slick and liquided.
“Trust me. Do it.”
“Okay,” he said, and this proved an effective diversion for about fifteen minutes. It felt to Faye like this was her primary motherly duty: to create diversions. Samuel would begin to cry and she would head it off. Why nine toys? Because Samuel was a meticulous and organized and anal sort of kid who did things like, for example, keep a Top Ten Toys shoe box under his bed. Mostly in the way of Star Wars action figures and Hot Wheels. He revised it occasionally, substituting one thing for another. But it was always there. At any given moment, he knew exactly what his ten favorite toys were.
So she asked him to pick nine toys because she was mildly curious: What would he abandon?
The Gentleman: A Novel, by Forrest Leo, seems from the first page to be one of those dry comic novels featuring the English upper class in Victorian London written by an Englishman (or occasionally, Englishwoman). It's not. Yes, it's dry and hilariously absurd, yet it was authored by an American who took the idea of a poet inadvertently selling his wife to the devil and ran with it. Forrest Leo, only in his mid-twenties, was raised on a homestead in Alaska, has a BFA in drama, and is a name to remember.
Here's an excerpt:
I will not here recount my wooing. It was, looking back, strangely joyous and brings me pain to recollect. There was throughout it a bizarre sense of burning happiness—a prickly feeling on the back of my neck, a pleasant tightness of the chest ....
I thought it was the sensation of being in love. I have learned that it was not, it was the joy of the chase. I wonder now if I oughtn’t have been a hunter. Perhaps I still could be one. I am certain that Simmons keeps an ancient musket somewhere, and I could steal a horse from my coachman and sally forth to murder foxes—or stow aboard an Arctic vessel and try my hand at clubbing seals, which cannot be difficult. But that is neither here nor there. I am a poet, I am a married man, and I am resolved upon my own immediate suicide—for I married for money instead of love, and when I did I discovered that I could no longer write.
Copyright (c) 2016 by Susan K. Perry, author of Kylie's Heel
