The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

Published by Viking on June 9, 2011

The premise of Rebecca Makkai’s entertaining first novel is farfetched.  Librarian Lucy Hull takes an unintended road trip with ten-year-old Ian Drake, son of fundamentalist parents who have enrolled Ian in classes held by the notorious Pastor Bob, a “formerly” gay man who conducts classes designed to turn gay kids straight.  To Lucy’s dismay, Ian’s mother seems intent on saving him from the evil world of children’s literature.  The road trip, taken without the knowledge or consent of Ian’s parents, brings Lucy and Ian into contact with the man Lucy is dating (a musician whose most recent composition resembles the Mr. Clean jingle) and her father, a Russian immigrant with a hidden past and shady ties to organized crime who is nonetheless a decent fellow -- at least when it comes to Lucy.  If the road trip happened in the real world, reporters would be asking Lucy “What were you thinking?” as she’s hauled off to prison.  It’s never quite clear, even to Lucy, what she’s thinking, but the unlikely set-up makes it possible for Makkai to tell a funny story.  Makkai somehow manages to make it seem real, or perhaps the story has sufficient charm to encourage the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

As much as I enjoyed the story, I was left with a “Is that all there is?” feeling at the novel’s end, which seems too neat and painless given the improbable events that precede it.  As I finished reading I was wondering what point Makkai intended to make.  Of course, not all novels need to have a point; it’s often enough to tell a good story while introducing the reader to believable characters.  Yet The Borrower seems determined to deliver a message.  In that task, the novel fails -- or, at least, I failed to find a coherent message.  At one point, Lucy decides that it’s impossible for people to save people, but she’s convinced that books can save people (to that end, Lucy encourages Ian to read books that will save him from the closed-minded dictates of his parents’ religion).  I’m not sure that observation makes sense:  if a book opens a reader’s mind, information and advice coming from a trusted friend can likely achieve the same end.  At another point, Lucy observes that people cannot change.  While it’s true that people can’t change immutable characteristics of their birth (such as sexual identity, which Pastor Bob is determined to “fix” in the classes that Ian attends), it is also true that people can change many aspects of their life.  Lucy, in fact, comes to realize that she needs to change her life, but that realization is underwhelming, given that she decides she doesn’t like her job, or more particularly her boss, and concludes she should find a new one.  Since it was clear from the novel’s opening pages that Lucy’s boss was unlikable, it isn’t easy to understand why Lucy took so long to see the obvious.  If the road trip was a journey toward self-awareness for Lucy, it was a long drive to a trivial destination.

Having said all that, I fear I've made my reaction to the novel seem more negative than it actually was.  I appreciated Makkai’s ability to create engaging characters and to incorporate certain devices (like a very funny list of the things a ten-year-old will do while brushing his teeth) that make The Borrower an easy, amusing read.  While I was ultimately disappointed that the novel didn’t have more substance, I don’t regret the time I spent breezing through it.  The scenes that feature precocious ten-year-old Ian work well, and if Lucy’s attempt to learn something meaningful about her own life seems incomplete, that didn’t stop me from chuckling at the funny parts -- and there are a good many of them.  This is a promising first novel, one that encourages me to read Makkai’s next book.  I only hope it carries a bit more weight than this one.

RECOMMENDED

Consequences of the Heart by Peter Cunningham

First published in the UK in 1998; republished by GemmaMedia on May 4, 2011

On the strength of the only two Peter Cunningham novels I've read (this one and The Sea and the Silence), I have become a fan. Cunningham has written some thrillers and there are elements of a sedate literary thriller in Consequences of the Heart, but it is also a love story, a war story, and a generational story of two Irish families. Ultimately, this novel defies categorization other than to say it's a really good read.

Chud Conduit (sometimes known as Chud Church) is a bit of a cad. He has a gambling addiction, a lifelong problem with debt, and a chronic inability to keep his hands off other men's wives (and to be faithful to his own). His life in the small town of Monument, Ireland is inextricably tied with those of his childhood friends, Jack Santry and Rosa Bensey. In 1938, while they are coming of age, the three-way friendship leads Chud to the first defining moment of his life, the nature of which is slowly disclosed as the novel progresses, although the full truth is not revealed until the last page.

After spending some time in a Catholic reformatory, Chud takes a civilian job that leads to a position in the military. He rejoins Jack (who has become a colonel in the Santry family tradition of wartime service) and together they are part of the invading force on D-Day, where Jack's defining moment occurs -- one that, again, does not become clear until later in the story. Jack, Chud, and Rosa continue a difficult and evolving friendship after the war, leading Chud to commit a new life-defining act for the sake of Jack and Rosa.

I apologize for being a bit vague in that synopsis but I don't want to spoil what is quite a remarkable story. It is the story of Chud's life, summarized from interview transcripts that he has edited and arranged in twelve binders. The story begins with Chud's grandfather in the 1890's and ends with the marriage of Jack's granddaughter in 1999, save for a brief concluding chapter that takes place a year later. No synopsis could do justice to the rich tale that Chud tells. The pages are dense with information. Characters come and go, but Chud, Jack, and Rosa are the constants. Most of the novel is written in the first person from Chud's point of view, with a few passages written in the third person, describing events as Chud imagines them to have occurred. Although the novel covers much ground, the pace is often languid, creating the contemplative feel of a memoir. There are nonetheless times (particularly on D-Day) when action is intense and dramatic. Even at its slowest, the story is never dull. At nearly the midway point, when I was beginning to wonder if the novel would be a mostly uneventful chronicle of Chud's life -- a love story or one of love unrequited -- it took an unexpected turn. Dramatic events then began to pile on top of each other without ever reaching the point of melodrama. For the most part, the story feels intensely real.

Family conflicts and buried secrets are familiar turf for novelists, but when Peter Cunningham plows that ground in Consequences of the Heart, he makes it fertile. No matter how many character flaws Chud demonstrates -- and he manages a goodly number -- it's impossible to dislike him. At the very least, Cunningham makes it easy to understand Chud and to empathize with him. The war changed Chud because "if you land at dawn on the shore of a continent and actually take it by force, you are inclined ever afterwards to doubt the merits of caution." Chud is nothing if not incautious; that's one reason he's so likable.

My one quibble concerns Jack's daughter-in-law, who is very angry at Chud for the incident that occurred in 1938. That didn't seem credible to me, given that she wasn't alive when it happened. Her actions and the events that follow at the end of the novel are almost over-the-top, but I forgive Cunningham for that because it makes a good story. An odd story, to be sure, but this tale of lifelong friendships among three people who followed their natures, however unconventional, is one I'll remember.

RECOMMENDED

Degrees of Freedom by Simon Morden

Published by Orbit on May 31, 2011

It has been about a year since the Americans destroyed Oshicora Tower and buried the Artificial Intelligence known as Michael beneath a pile of rubble, an event that occurred in Theories of Flight, the middle novel of the Petrovich Trilogy.  World governments revile Petrovich, regarding him as a terrorist because of his conduct in that novel and the first, Equations of Life, while the residents of the Freezone regard him as their de facto leader, if not their savior.  Now the Freezone’s actual leader, Sonja Oshicora, is at odds with Petrovich, who has discovered what appears to be a nuclear bomb in the Freezone, apparently an undetonated device installed by the Armageddonists decades earlier.  (At last, the trilogy’s readers are given a meaningful glimpse of Armageddon’s cause.)  Petrovich soon discovers that neither the bomb nor Sonja’s actions are what they appear to be, leaving Petrovich once more to take on the task of saving the Freezone’s residents from internal and external forces that threaten its destruction.  Fortunately for Petrovich, he’s not acting quite so single-handedly this time, having assembled a loyal cadre of friends during the course of the first two novels, not to mention his wife, a deadly ex-nun.

In addition to the interesting question of how one builds a functioning, beneficial government that actually serves its people in the aftermath of Armageddon (a creative and intriguing problem I haven’t often seen science fiction address), Simon Morden takes on a more familiar theme, one that science fiction writers have tackled since at least the days of Asimov:  what is the difference between a human and an artificially intelligent machine?  Petrovich decides that Michael will have to convince the Catholic Church that a machine can have a soul.  I thought it would have been fascinating to see that conversation play out; unfortunately, it all happens offstage.  That disappointing omission makes the story seem incomplete, but that’s one of my few complaints about this surprisingly satisfying conclusion to the trilogy.

Morden delivers a nice blend of drama, action, and comedy in this novel.  Where the second novel seemed to feature violence for the sake of violence, the action scenes in this one are more purposeful.  The comedy that was overdone in the first novel and perhaps lacking in the second is more carefully balanced in this one:  funny little bits pop up here and there, my favorite being a character (Tabletop) who amuses herself by molding Petrovich’s plastic explosives into animal figures.  I was also fond of the character Valentina, a Russian whose zeal for revolution leaves her itching to foment an uprising against the Freezone’s oppressors (she makes sure her followers are supplied with red flags, because it’s the “traditional color of such occasions” and “doesn’t show blood”).

It’s not that often I come to admire a fictional character, but Petrovich is a truly admirable creation:  a self-sacrificing hero, an idealist who refuses to be seduced by power and fame.  Petrovich is the kind of unwilling leader we wish for in the real world:  someone with the wisdom to exercise power nobly for the betterment of society before standing aside to let everyone else do their part.  He’s a character of sufficient complexity to experience guilt about the consequences of his actions without feeling remorse for doing the right thing.  He gives a speech toward the novel’s end about how he’s changed because of the events described in the trilogy, how he’s learned to be unselfish, to value his friends and to be a reliable friend to them, but it’s clear that Petrovich had integrity from the start, and it’s his integrity, his consistent refusal to take the easy path when he doesn’t feel it’s morally correct, that makes him so interesting. 

Perhaps us Yanks should be disturbed that Petrovich characterizes Americans (or maybe just the members of the administration that rose to power after Armageddon) as “a bunch of nuclear-armed fundamentalist xenophobic psychopaths” but there are, after all, some American politicians who fit that description (and some Brits as well).  I don’t mind that Morden made the United States the baddest power on the planet, but Morden’s version of an American president made whacky by religious zeal is a stereotype we’ve seen many times.  That’s a minor quibble, though, and I actually liked the scenes in which Petrovich gets payback against the United States in a relatively nonviolent way.

Ultimately, I think this is the best novel of the trilogy.  I doubt it will make such sense to readers who haven’t read the first two, and so (despite my criticisms of the second novel, a book that in restrospect seems like filler designed to bridge the first and third) I recommend reading them all.  It’s great fun and not quite like anything I’ve read.  If Morden wants to give us more Petrovich stories, I’ll read them.  (Minor point:  If Morden does publish another Petrovich novel with Orbit, he needs to convince Orbit to lay out some cash for real cover art.  The geometric designs Orbit came up with give me a headache.)

RECOMMENDED

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Published by Margaret K. McElderry (a division of Simon & Schuster) on June 7, 2011

Blood Red Road is a young adult novel and, as an old adult, I’m not part of its target demographic.  I thought I might like it anyway; I still enjoy the Heinlein juveniles I was reading as a kid and I’m generally a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction.  Blood Red Road is apparently a post-apocalyptic story (we’re told that reading and writing have largely become lost skills) but the nature of the apocalyptic event is never revealed.  Although the characters seem human enough, it’s not even clear to me that this story takes place on Earth; I can’t imagine any sort of apocalypse that would produce giant carnivorous Dune-style sandworms (recast as “hellwurms,” these have legs and claws).  Too much in this novel is left unexplained, perhaps because no credible explanation could be concocted (e.g., what kind of weapon is a “bolt shooter” and how does it work in the absence of a power source?).  The gaps in narrative logic are one of many reasons the novel just didn’t work for me.

Eighteen-year-old Saba has always blamed her nine-year-old sister Emmi for their mother’s death during childbirth.  When their father dies while trying to prevent five horsemen from stealing her twin brother Lugh, Saba suddenly finds herself in charge of Emmi’s welfare.  She twice tries to dump Emmi on the only responsible adults she can find so that she can rescue Lugh, but she can’t rid herself of Emmi that easily (after all, the conventions to which the novel adheres require Saba to learn to love her kid sister).  Saba undergoes a couple of ordeals that test her mettle as she tracks down her brother’s captors.  She also falls in love with the guy she keeps pretending to hate.

My most significant gripe about this novel is its utter predictability.  Saba’s adventures are predictable, the love story is predictable, and Saba learns predictable lessons like “nobody asks to be born into this world” and “never give up.”  The story is too shallow to generate interest, much less dramatic tension.  Although Saba lives in a violent world, the violence she experiences is so far from graphic that it’s difficult to take seriously.  That’s probably a plus for impressionable young adults but the muted tone robs the story of its potential power.

Another complaint:  there are elements in the story that border on fantasy, from a “heartstone” that grows warm when Saba is “near her heart’s desire” to a pet crow that might be the smartest character in the book.  So is this a realistic story of a post-apocalyptic future or a fantasy romance?  I think it tries to be both and doesn’t succeed very well at either one.

I give Moira Young credit for having her characters speak in a consistent voice, but I found the voice troubling.  It resembles the language spoken by the less educated characters in a TV western crossed with the language spoken by TV hillbillies.  (In fact, Young’s characters sound like they’re imitating the characters on Firefly -- a wonderfully funny show that exploits that style of speaking for comedic effect.)  Language would change after an apocalyptic event but it would evolve into something new; words like “britches” that have all but disappeared from our vocabulary would not make a sudden reappearance.

In short, I thought the novel was predictable, unoriginal and unconvincing.  On a positive note, the story moves along at a quick pace and Young’s writing style is lively.  For those reasons, young readers might enjoy it -- particularly those who haven’t been exposed to truly well-written examples of post-apocalyptic fiction and who might not realize that Blood Red Road suffers from comparison.  To be fair, the marketing materials claim the book is appropriate for readers who are 14 or older.  To a 14-year-old looking for a post-apocalyptic love story, I might recommend the novel; to other readers, not so much.  As an adult who reviews novels for other adults, I have to rate this one:

NOT RECOMMENDED

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on June 2, 2011

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is very different from the other two Sara Gran novels I've read -- Come Closer and Dope -- but like those novels it is quirky and engaging. This novel is playful where the other two were serious. If you're looking for a straightforward detective story, keep looking: this isn't it. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead resides somewhere between strange and bizarre. That's what I liked about it: I enjoyed its offbeat nature.

Claire DeWitt is the world's greatest private detective -- just ask her -- although her failure to find a friend who went missing when they were both teenagers has been a lifelong frustration. Claire is hired to find Vic Willing, a New Orleans prosecutor with some inherited wealth who disappeared after Katrina. He's been declared dead but his nephew wants Claire to find out what happened to him. Her first "clue" is a business card she finds on a restaurant floor that has no apparent connection to anything. This turns out to be consistent with Claire's unconventional detection methods, which include consulting the I Ching, divining personalities from fingerprints, and denting her rented truck so it will fit in with her surroundings. She rivals Sherlock Holmes in her deductive ability although she seems to pull clues from the ether as much as from close observation.

As Claire endeavors to solve the case, she gets involved with a drive-by shooting, wonders about people messing with electrical transformers atop utility poles who aren't wearing utility company uniforms, ponders the obscure advice about detecting proffered in a French tome on the subject, gets high (because drugs take you to places where you can find clues), is shot at (repeatedly), and reminisces about her mentor, Constance, who taught her most of what she knows about sleuthing while trying (unsuccessfully) to get Claire "to see something better in people, something that would lead us up a little higher."

Claire repeatedly says that we all have mysteries but we rarely want to solve them. Fear of the truth is one of the novel's themes. Clues are central to the novel but not in the usual sense. Clues in this novel aren't only the fruit of detection; they're the key to understanding life. We're told, for instance, that you can't change a person's life, you can only "leave clues ... and hope that they understand, and choose to follow."

The titular "city of the dead" is New Orleans -- a city in which it's "easy to die." Post-Katrina New Orleans plays a key role in the story. One of the characters says that there's "a lot to love" about New Orleans but "it ain't no place for happy endings." That's exactly how Gran portrays it. The novel takes a hard, honest look at the violence that endures in the spirited but tragic city. Gran realistically portrays what passes for a criminal justice system there: a dysfunctional alliance of police and prosecutors that was broken even before Katrina's devastation. Maybe the picture she paints of New Orleans is too bleak -- Gran hammers at the city's abysmal murder rate again and again, almost approaching literary overkill -- but I think the city deserves the spotlight she shines on it and I'm pleased to see the attention she focuses on a vibrant city that continues its struggle to recapture its glory. Gran clearly loves the city (a place where, Claire observes, "magic is real") and feels for the impoverished residents who were most affected by Katrina. There's a poignant moment in which a drug dealer talks about the anger that swelled within him in the aftermath of Katrina, anger that (as Claire points out) would be recognized as a symptom of PTSD under other circumstances or in a different place.

Claire does manage to solve the mystery of Willing's disappearance (she's the world's greatest detective, after all) although she fails to solve all the mysteries in her own life. The solution to the Willing mystery is a little sad, but remember: there are no happy endings in New Orleans. Within the context of this unconventional novel, it's nearly perfect.

I love the way the story is structured, I love the dialog, and I love the message. I hope Gran writes more Claire DeWitt novels.

RECOMMENDED