2017 Reads

Where did I escape reality and explore impossible worlds in 2017? Let me show you every darkened corner. Length of review does not indicate thoughts on quality or lack thereof, just some notes about the works at the time I read them.

Night of the Animals, William Broun
Magical realism steeps in the dystopian England of 2052, when King Henry9 rules and the last keeper of the Wonderments – the ability to speak to animals – is Cuthbert Handley, a 90-year-old, mentally ill addict set on releasing all animals in the London Zoo before a doomsday cult can massacre them. The zoo is an ark, the last place animals like gorillas, elephants, lions and otters still exist in the world. Cuthbert’s history with the animals and the childhood loss of his brother Drystan send him on the journey that involves dodging King Henry’s Red Watch who ensure Indigents like him stay away from the renewed aristocracy. Gradually the story expands beyond Cuthbert to Astrid, a recovering addict in law enforcement, and an American embassy official from West Virginia. Plus, the talking animals include sand cats. Who doesn’t like sand cats?
That it took Broun 14 years to write the book, which should hearten struggling writers everywhere. This masterwork is worth the wait and dropped at a time when concerns about renewed totalitarianism have crept across the globe. Broun completed an epic that spans a century while returning to a few pivotal days in an old man's life.

The Record Player and Other Stories, Winifred Moranville
A series of stories about towns across the Plains, from a vegetarian juice bar to a lost record player to final family gathering at a grandmother’s farmhouse, Moranville builds a world of little towns across Iowa and Nebraska, places fighting to survive in the 21st century.

Zama, Antonio de Benedetto
The book follows a government official stuck in Paraguay, held back by both ineptitude and being born in Spanish Latin America. Through three passages set in different times - 1790, 1794, and 1799 – through his attempts to get promoted to a better post, his child with a native girl and his relationship with his assistant, and his role in a government militia tracking down a rebel soldier. The ending is brutal, and exactly what Zama deserves. Recently reissued, it’s considered a lost masterpiece of 20th century South American literature. I won’t argue that point.

Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock
Pollock populates this one-stop town with ugly but sometimes redeeming characters, people who want desperately to get out for something better but somehow never do. Addictions help everyone cope with the lack of opportunity. Pollock’s interconnected short stories bring the place to life, although when you’re done, you might be glad you just bought a Coke at the convenience store and moved along.

Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
Interesting collection of short stories, though it does not always deliver on the promise of its clever title. Mostly first-person narratives, Moshfegh has a deft skill with characters, the teacher spending her summers in a dying town, the doctor widowed but suddenly enamored with succulents and the children seeking passage to another, better world by killing someone.

Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, Brian Alexander
This is no slam job or political screed – Alexander grew up in Lancaster and was intimately familiar with Anchor Hocking Glass Company’s central role in turning the southeast Ohio town into a vibrant community. Alexander has amazing access to Lancastrians, the glass workers, executives trying to prove the brand’s staying power and local law enforcement. But the town falls prey to predator owners of its manufacturing base and the opioid epidemic plaguing the nation.
Alexander comes down hard on the army of corporations and investors through which glass company ownership passes, all eager for quick profits more than building the business or keeping up its standards. Anyone looking at why small-town America is on life support should read Glass House. I had passing knowledge of Lancaster from my Columbus days, but its history in the glass industry and its 21st struggles illuminated the town in fresh light.

Forever Words: The Unknown Poems, Johnny Cash The curators (son John Carter Cash and poet Paul Muldoon) bring the best of the Man in Black’s poetry. His songwriting prowess shows in his poems, and shows that Cash was a wordsmith in his own right, not just an interpreter.

Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations, John Avlon
I forgot Avlon’s role leading The Daily Beast, a site that stooped to unscrupulous lows in 2016 (look it up). But Washington’s Farewell always fascinated me as one of the few essential American documents outside the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, a few thousand words that defined American foreign policy for most of the nation’s history. Avlon adeptly places the document in Washington’s America and explains its resonance through two proceeding centuries, even its worst-ever invocation at the infamous 1939 American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. He breaks down the myths that developed around the Farewell Address and focuses on its continued importance for 21st century American.

The Underworld, Kevin Canty
A fictionalization of the 1972 Sunshine Mine accident in the Idaho Panhandle, Canty excels at characterization, dropping us into Silverton as the town sits on the precipice of disaster. Everyone is connected and the disaster’s pull becomes inescapable for one family. Woven into the above-ground happenings are the efforts of two miners trapped behind the cave-in to survive. The only shame is the books’ 250 pages breeze by, leaving this reader desirous of more time in the 1970s Mountain West. The length keeps the store small, even when it feels the subject could have deserved an epic. In sum, I liked it, but wanted more. Revisiting this characters in a future novel would not be a terrible idea. Canty’s ending makes sense, but also felt like a raw, necessary beginning for the survivors of the tragedy.

The Melting Season, Ira Sukrunguang Sukrunguang’s stories often drop us into the lives of Asian immigrants and frequently center on food. The final story swings through a restaurant on a busy night, taking in the events from the eyes of everyone employed there.

Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
A young couple, Saeed and Nadia, meet as civil war comes to their once-prosperous metropolis. They move from Mykonos to London to northern California. Circumstance pushes them together, and flight and struggle are the glue in their relationship, tying free-spirited Nadia to conservative, traditional Saeed. At times, I wanted more details and Hamid to push the traces of sci-fi and magical realism further. I gradually understood that refugees and migration were not the central story but the journey of Nadia and Saeed’s relationship. Saeed is closed off, while Nadia is reveal and frank. The coda hit me especially hard. Ultimately, it’s a story of relationships and that everyone migrates, even if they spend their whole life lives in the same city or home. It might do us well to remember that “We are all migrants through time.”

Celine, Peter Heller
Far from the biography of a certain pop singer, Heller presents us with an aging detective who hunts down missing persons. The narrative intertwines Celine’s complicated life while she hunts down a photographer who allegedly died from a grizzly bear attack in Yellowstone National Park. To say more would spoil the story. Tired as I have grown at stories about elites and their troubles, Celine is a fascinating study of motivations and the seeming impenetrability of other people. Knowing the geography of the Mountain West – Montana around Yellowstone – aided me in understanding the story and importance of location.

Work Like Any Another, Virginia Reeves
To get ahead, former electric worker Roscoe Martin plots to electrify his wife’s family farm with an illegal connection to Alabama Power’s lines. Tragedy strikes a line work and tears apart two families. In prison, Roscoe buries himself in non-electrical work at the dairy and handling the bloodhounds that track escaping prisoners. It’s a touching look at one preemptive move sets life down the wrong path. Had Roscoe been patient, the farm would have been electrified in a few years anyway. Reeves’ alternation between third-person chapters and Roscoe’s first-person narrative is a key facet – it allows certain mysteries to stay intact until the climax.

A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin
I devoured this revelatory compilation of cutting-edge short story author who spent most of her life writing in obscurity. The stories contain a lot of connective tissue through locations (El Paso, New Mexico, Oakland, Mexico, Chile), jobs (nursing, cleaning women), addictions and recovery. These are tales of everyday people, putting the wrong change in laundromats, carrying on with young Indians, resisting the kindness of nuns, and rediscovering an old flame incapacitated in a hospital bed. Trying to  pick a favorite is difficult, but clear standouts emerged – Dear Conchi, A Manual for Cleaning Women, Friends, Strays.

The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea, Philip Hoare
This well-documented, engaging study of delves into the biology of whales, whaling, what we know and don’t know about these mammoth creatures plying the oceans. Plus, I got an education in a certain famous author with whom I share a last name. Hoare takes us through the 19th century, visiting whaling ports and retracing the voyages of Herman Melville, then plunges into the gluttony of 20th century whaling that pushed almost every species to extinction.

The Big It and Other Stories, A.B. Guthrie
I never expected that Guthrie was responsible for one of the first “adult” stories I read in school. But there it was, The Bargain, still fresh in my mind from the eighth grade. Guthries’ collected tales center around the Montana town of Moon Dance, based on Choteau and the same Rocky Mountain Front geography later recreated by Ivan Doig. If I can’t be in the West, I will read everything I can about the West.

The Changeling, Victor Lavalle
I didn’t need another story about New York City until I ran into The Changeling. Lavalle’s book threads the needle, building the story of a man from a broken family who sees his own family broken in a horrific moment. His subsequent pursuit of the truth leads him on a history of a New York City too seldom illuminated – abandoned islands in the East River, colonies of 19th century Norwegians, forgotten parks and cemeteries. Lavalle expertly weaves the city’s history with the story of Apollo, who runs into forces of nature that upend his life as a used book dealer and father. Elements of magical realism throughout The Changeling delve into supernatural and everyday horror.

Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, Jason Zinoman
Growing up, my parents always let us watch Johnny Carson during the summer, but the real treat was when we were allowed to extend our viewing to Late Night with David Letterman, which veered into zanier territory that often mocked the institution of television itself. Zinoman goes deeper than a typical celebrity bio, gauging Letterman’s impact as the late-night maverick went from gritty underdog to status quo, analyzing his ups and downs and the debt today’s broader late-night pool owes to Letterman.
More importantly to me, this is no unauthorized biography – the author interviewed Letterman, who supplied frequently frank answers. Zinoman digs into the subversive nature of Letterman’s work, and traces its evolution into a mainstream operation, where his biggest moments became his most open (his post-9/11 monologue, announcement of his son’s birth, coming clean about an affair exposed in an extortion attempt). The depth of Zinoman’s reporting makes this an essential book about Letterman’s influence on late-night talk shows and as close to a biography as anyone will write about the insular host.

This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
Every story in this collection deals with unfaithful men and the women they hurt. Despite his reputation, I have struggled with Diaz at times. The travails of Yunior and Rafa grow stale and repetitive over the course of the collection, and sometimes the point that these men are ogres to women and strangers to themselves gets delivered with a sledgehammer’s subtlety. Great lines and prose fills every story. The collection hits its pinnacle in Otravida, Otravez, the only story told from a woman’s perspective. She works in a laundry and hunts for houses with her man, whose still married to a woman back in the DR. Also worth noting is Miss Lora, in which Yunior takes up with his family’s middle-aged neighbor after his brother’s death. Elsewhere, the female characters are often a little thin, just reactions to the infidelity swirling around their lives. If you experience each story in a vacuum, you might feel differently. As a collection, the theme is entirely too pulverizing.

Too Much Happiness, Alice Munro
This is my first touch of the Canadian short-story master, and she converts readers with a few stories and turns of phrase. Munro has a knack for a gut-punch of a final line. Finally tackling works from this Canadian short story master, I went with her 2009 Man Booker Prize-winning collection. Face chronicles a man born with purple scarring and his childhood confidante’s attempt to mimic him. Some Women traces the interactions of the women caring for dying man while his wife works. Dimensions follows a young mother’s life after a horrific triple murder. I hit a wall with the title story, but there are some towering highs in Too Much Happiness thanks to its unsparing stories.
A bleakness occupies all of these tales, but I return to Free Radicals and Child's Play the most. Free Radical has echoes of A Good Man is Hard to Find, a widow who receives a dangerous yet loquacious visitor. Child’s Play turns little childhood fears of the different and strange into a lifelong bond over a horrific yet ambiguous secret. Child's Play was the most harrowing, built on a secret between two girls at summer camp. The final story, which gives the collection its title, just shut me down and I had to stop reading here because I could not connect with it. I might try again at some point. But I'll probably still be thinking about Child's Play.

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard and the Nez Perce War, Daniel Sharfstein
I knew the basics of Chief Joseph’s band of Nez Perce, his famous “I will fight no more forever” statement and their flight across the mountain territories toward Canada. I have driven through northeastern Oregon, the sparsely populated country of Joseph’s band, and am still perplexed at how it could not have been shared with the settlers.
But post-Little Bighorn, sharing land with Indians was far from the government’s mind. Joseph was one of many chiefs of a band of nontreaty Nez Perce. General Howard, once head of Reconstructions’ Freedman’s Bureau and namesake of Howard University, has none of the same sympathy for Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Howard let subordinate officers catch the Nez Perce a few days short of the Canadian border in Montana. Tribal leaders counted on Howard’s slack pace, not the racing cavalry of Col. Nelson Miles.
Juxtaposing Chief Joseph and his relentless, unflappable effort to restore his tribe’s holdings in the Wallow Valley, Sharfstein can’t help but make Joseph’s Army counterparts seem like lesser men. They profit off their interactions with Joseph. There are other accounts of Joseph and the officer he encountered throughout a quarter-century. But Sharfstein deftly distills his tale for the 21st century, and it’s hard not to sympathize with Joseph while admiring his relentless quest to return to his tribe’s ancestral valley.
Sharfstein also mixes in players like Erskine Wood and James Bradley, and portrays the horrors of the Nez Perce’s flight through the few brutal battles that defined their path (White Bird Canyon, Big Hole, Yellowstone, Bear Paw). It’s hard not to feel for the Nez Perce, who could have escaped their fate with a few different decisions. Through it all stands Chief Joseph, the man who never stopped his eloquent arguments for returning his band to the native Wallowa Valley.

Anything is Possible, Elizabeth Stroud
Lucy Barton, protagonist of Stroud’s last novel, figures so heavily in this novel – or series of interconnected short stories, read it how you wish – that I wonder if intertwining the two might have created a more complex, innovative narrative. On its own merits, Anything is Possible brings to life the rural Illinois world introduced in My Name is Lucy Barton. We see the reunion of Lucy Barton with her estranged siblings. A girl raised in Maine’s Aroostook County leaves after becoming an actress and the dementia of a parent reframes her entire upbringing. In The Gift, a standard tale about Christmas tradition diverges when a grandfather must find his granddaughter’s favorite stuffed animal at the darkened theatre and ends up challenged by the play’s lead actor. Stroud is skillful at weaving these different people together yet letting every story stand alone. Only at the end do I feel Anything is Possible didn’t need closer synergy with My Name is Lucy Barton, because the former is the superior work.

A.D.: After Death, Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire
Two young masters of comics writing team up on this bold tale about a future where death has been cured, people live in the mountains after an unknown cataclysm and memory is fleeting for those who survive.

The Sporting Club, Thomas McGuane
Two lifelong friends reunite at the wilderness club they both belong to in northern Lower Michigan. Stanton is unpredictable and almost unhinged in his constant efforts to upstage the taciturn Quinn. Their constant battles tie into the club’s centennial celebration and clashes with the groundskeepers.

Last Car over the Sagamore Bridge, Robert Orner
I stumbled onto Orner’s short-short fiction in a writing course and was instantly smitten. He conveys so much in just a few hundred words, telling complete stories that end when other stories are just beginning. He puts on a clinic in almost every story, especially when a paroled murderer responds to a piece of hate mail threatening his life. A prison hockey game’s participants forgets that the guards always win. A failing gubernatorial candidate confides in his campaign manager that his marriage will end after the election. Spokane might be the most brutal among brutal moments, with a lady recounting her experience with a boyfriend in that city to her lover/husband.

Giant of the Senate, Al Franken
 It’s unlikely that anyone not politically aligned with Al Franken will select this book, but they should if only for Franken’s humor. You might not agree with every policy position – or any of them – but his self-deprecating style should endear him to those outside of his political lane. The laughs don’t really stop, although it is possible to extract the serious moments of Franken’s Senate career, the disappointments and real people he encountered along the trail. He spares his political enemies no quarter, but goes out of his way not to treat them as stereotypical politicians but actual people. Having just visited some of the remote places he mentions, it was interesting to see how we traveled the state from farm country to the Iron Range, as well as his interactions with Senate Republicans. (Update – I read the book and wrote this brief review this three months before revelations about Franken ended his Senate career. I stand by my review even if no one ever reads this book again).

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, Michael Finkel
Having read one of Finkel’s articles about Chris Knight several years ago, it was interesting to see the narrative expanded into a book, albeit a brisk 200 pages. Knight’s 27 years living in the Maine woods (close to civilization in central Maine, not the impenetrable wild North Woods) show what humans could do if they had the freedom to just exist every day. Now, Knight is no saint, having survived those many decades by stealing from cabins, houses and a camp for autistic children (the last one bothers me, although the camp gets a cut of Finkel’s book proceeds) - he became a local bogeyman. A fluke led to Finkel’s intercession into Knight’s story – of all the letters Knight received in jail, he responded to Finkel’s. The outcome of that relationship is not surprising, but the importance of Knight’s journey is how he survived in the wild without detection and what happens when he returns to society. Knight also illustrates the difficulty, if not impossibility, of breaking away from society, since he committed more than 1,000 burglaries in those 27 years to gather supplies for his camp. The book doesn’t provide many answers, just a few fleeting glimpses at a man who walked away from the world in 1986.

Roughneck, Jeff Lemire
Lemire is at the top of his game in another graphic novel set in small Canadian town. A former hockey enforcer drinks and fights around his hometown of Pitimon when his sister unexpectedly returns while fleeing her abusive boyfriend. Beautifully illustrated and fully embracing the sparse surroundings of the frozen north, Lemire’s story balances the brutal and poignant, his expressive art a key element in the narrative.

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Richard Yates
I have an easy rule for used book searches – pick up any Richard Yates I don’t own. Yates presents his unyielding vision of post-WWII America, stripping away the gilding often applied to that era. In Out with the Old, man stuck in a tuberculosis ward tries to reconnect with his family around the holidays. A transfer student tells tall tales while alienating even his sympathetic teacher in Dr. Jack-O-Lantern. A cheating wife goes to visit her ailing husband in a similar TB ward in the punishingly sad No Pain Whatsoever. The failure-prone narrator of A Glutton for Punishment could have been me. As much as I detest writers writing about writers, I could not deny the charm of Builders, in which a young newspaperman transforms the tales of a cabbie paying him a pittance. I’m going to have to reread these to pick up the layer nuances Yates embeds in every tale.

Gallatin Canyon, Thomas McGuane
The Sporting Club left me wanting more of McGuane’s incisive short fiction, and Gallatin Canyon does not disappoint. The title story wraps the collection in a brutal bough, as a narrator travels the namesake canyon north of Yellowstone to sell some property in Idaho, only for an encounter with another driver to go horribly awry. Old Friends reunites two men in Montana as one flees impending legal trouble. Two drug users hunt for a forgotten totem pole they intend to swap for a score. Ice brings late-night revelations during an ice-skating voyage too far out on a frozen Great Lake.

Plainsong, Kent Haruf
My second attempt at this saga of late 20th century life on Colorado’s Eastern Plains proved more successful. The characters are raw and real, avoiding the pitfalls that could easily transform them into small-town stereotypes. There are some unresolved plot threads but the simple language propels this story through visceral scenes of farm life and human life.

The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History, Stephen Talty
The author finds a strong tale of a dogged Italian-American police detective, Joseph Petrosino, trying to break a secret society in the early 1900s while struggling against the hate and bigotry aimed at Italian immigrants, even from his other officers. The author drops us into the New York City of Theodore Roosevelt and goes in-depth with underworld operations made the city an uneasy place. I’m not sure how tall, blonde and blue-eyed Leonardo DiCaprio will portray stout, dark-complexioned Petrosino but it didn’t take away from enjoyment of Petrosino’s tale. With my own Italian ancestors journeying to New York and Connecticut around this time, Talty’s recreation of turn of the century NYC opened me up to a world familiar to them.

The Plains Indians of the 20th Century, Peter Iverson (editor)
One of those $5 scholarly finds at a used store that might someday inform some fiction about the Great Plains. These short pieces remind us that the ending of the frontier did not end the struggle for tribes of the plains (or anywhere else, really). Of special interest is the interview with Ben Reifel, who would later become the first Lakota elected to Congress.

Heart Songs, Annie Proulx
At times, Annie Proulx makes me want to quit written because she steeps every sentence in poetry, and I see the clumsy lines inhabiting my own stories. As for Heart Songs, these tales of Upper New England travel backroads and bogs most of us might never consider, bringing us face-to-face with hardscrabble inhabitants of little hollows and rolling farms chopped up into vacation homes for millionaires. The brutality comes to a head in the final story, Negatives, when a photographer visiting a millionaire friend becomes infatuated with a local never-do-well. Proulx’s fiction clings to the reader and claws its way into memory.

The President and the Assassin, Scott Miller
Miller brings one of our lesser-known presidents, William McKinley, and juxtaposes his rise with the anarchist movement of the late 19th century that produced his assassin, Leon Czolgosz. Too often terrorism is portrayed as a 20th century concern, but poverty and awful working conditions spurred similar violence more than century ago. McKinley pushed America’s imperial instincts beyond the Manifest Destiny, adding Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico through his first term. Although a reluctant imperialist and overshadowed by his giant personality of the man who would replace him, McKinley set the United States on a course it continues to follow in the 21st century, sometimes to its detriment. McKinley comes off as a mostly decent man – lurching from his bullet wounds, he implored those around him not to hurt Czolgosz.

Nebraska, Ron Hansen
The first tale, Wickedness, has the blizzard of 1888 as its central character, sweeping across the Plains toward Omaha and changing or ending lives along the way. Can I Just Sit Here for a While boils with Midwestern angst and men pushing boundaries. Even in stories that skirt the supernatural, Hansen grounds his characters as they trudge through unsparing winters and seek escape from their tormentors.