Mysterious Setting by Kazushige Abe

Published in Japan in 2006; published in translation by Pushkin Press on July 2, 2024

Kazushige Abe’s 2006 novel tells the story of a teenage girl who finds meaning in her brief life that she was denied when she realized she would never be a troubadour. Shiori had her heart set on being a troubadour ever since she looked up the word and decided that it described the life she wanted to live. It turned out to be a poor choice for a girl who is tone deaf and afraid to compose lyrics that don’t capture her true emotions as fully as the sounds that her audiences interpret as screeches. Maybe she's a young Yoko Ono.

The narrator learns Shiori’s story from an old man in a park. The narrator returns repeatedly until the old man brings the story to a resolution.

Shiori was tormented by her older sister’s brutal honesty. Her sister recognized that Shiori’s first boyfriend was only with her because she paid for his CDs when they went shopping.

Shiori shopped for cat food at a pet store. She became captivated by the parakeets. The birds seemed to be upset by her singing, although Shiori thought they were encouraging her. Shiori blames herself when things do not go well for Japanese birds.

Shiori makes no friends at music school (she refuses to sing or to compose lyrics) so she begins to correspond with random pen pals. One is a Peruvian drummer who invites her to hear his band. The other band members quickly realize that they can take advantage of Shiori’s generous and gullible nature. The Peruvian takes the story in a different direction when he entrusts Shiori with a suitcase nuke — or maybe it’s just a suitcase.

Shiori is a lonely teen who has no talent for making friends. Even her family abandons her. But Shiori is true to herself. While the inclinations to which she is true might be unwise, Shiori will win hearts for standing her ground.

Mysterious Setting is odd and unpredictable, qualities that make the story a pleasure to read. Shiori is initially incapable of recognizing her faults and then is unable to stop blaming herself for them. There’s some of that in most of us, although Shiori’s tendency to take those qualities to an extreme generates the story’s dark humor.

The end of the old man’s story tests the boundaries of plausibility, but this isn’t a story the reader is meant to believe. Absurd situations fuel its humor while the dark ending makes Shiori even more likable.

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The Entire Sky by Joe Wilkins

Published by ‎ Little, Brown and Company on July 2, 2024

The Entire Sky is a story of choices, primarily the choice between suicide and endurance, but also the choice to notice when people need help or to leave them unseen, to help those we see or to condemn them. The story is heartwarming because good people dealing with tough circumstances, including poor decisions they've made in the past, decide to make the right choices.

Justin lived in Seattle. He wasn’t big enough to protect his mother from her boyfriend’s physical abuse, but he tried. His mother didn’t have the physical strength to protect Justin from her boyfriend’s retaliation and didn’t have the emotional strength to make her boyfriend leave. So Justin left instead, running away at first, later going to Montana to live with his mother’s brother Heck.

As the novel begins, Justin is running away again, this time to avoid the consequences of caving in Heck’s head with a maul. Justin’s backstory leading to that violent moment is interwoven with the story that unfolds in the present.

A key to Justin’s personality is his physical resemblance to Kurt Cobain and his love of Nirvana’s music. Apart from committing a murder (and nobody will be sorry about Heck’s death), Justin is polite, kind, and respectful — a young man readers will easily like.

With his guitar and a backpack, Justin hitchhikes to Billings, where he earns a few dollars busking. He doesn’t understand why people appreciate his “tribute” to Cobain until he reads about Cobain’s death in a newspaper. Justin’s travels end when a rancher finds him hiding in a bunkhouse and leaves him breakfast.

The rancher is Rene Bouchard. He’s old and battling pain in his knees, but he still tends his flock of sheep. His wife has just died. His daughter Lianne returned to Montana to help her father care for her dying mother. Lianne teaches at a community college but has separated from her husband and isn’t sure she wants to return to her former job, particularly after she shags Ves, her old friend from high school.

Justin is astonished at how easily he fits in at Rene’s ranch. He loves watching lambs being born although he is appalled by the harsh realities of Rene's business. Rene and Lianne display decency and kindness that Justin has rarely experienced. Ves’ daughter Amy shares Justin’s appreciation of Nirvana’s music. Justin is even thinking of enrolling in school under a new name, but remaking a life is never easy. Justin will have more than his share of troubles to overcome as the novel moves toward a resolution.

Suicide is the novel’s primary theme. Cobain’s is probably the most notable celebrity suicide of his generation, the most notable in American life since Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. Rene is planning to end his life when Justin’s sudden arrival causes him to postpone his death. Justin reminds Rene of his son Franklin, who also committed suicide. The novel asks why so many boys choose to take their own lives, why American society fails to identify and help them.

Prejudice against gay men, harbored by Montanans who think of themselves as cowboys, is a secondary theme. Justin isn’t gay, but his long hair and earrings make him gay in the eyes of rednecks. Men like Heck who are ashamed of their attraction to other men use violence as a substitute for self-awareness. Franklin was gay and was targeted by other boys (and even some girls) despite his efforts to hide his sexual identity.

A third theme is the difficult relationship between fathers and sons, particularly when fathers (like Rene) find it difficult to express (or even feel) their emotions. Rene blames himself for Franklin’s suicide, as does Lianne for not responding more urgently to Franklin’s cries for help. They both regret that they didn’t listen to him.

Joe Wilkins conveys the unassuming lives of his Montana characters, finding virtue in their hard work and unselfish lives. Without wasting words, he strings together robust sentences to tell a powerful story. He calls attention to all the boys we don’t notice, the boys who succeed at being too small to see, the boys who drift, who sleep in the weeds or in the back seat of an abandoned car or, if they are very lucky, on a friend’s couch for a few nights. The story reminds us that we can look away when we see them, or we can see them as possibilities.

I didn’t try to guess how the story would end but I dreaded a realistic outcome. Wilkins satisfied me by offering two endings, perhaps to emphasize that life is about possibilities and choices. One is a little sad but far from hopeless. The one I preferred is closer to happy. Either one is a fitting conclusion to a powerful story.

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Beautiful Days by Zach Williams

Published by Doubleday on June 11, 2024

The stories collected in Beautiful Days are unexpected. They earn my recommendation simply because they are surprising, free from the typical domestic drama that seems to be the subject matter of most American short fiction. Some of the stories are a bit surreal, but most are not so far removed from reality that they lose their appeal.

In one of my favorite stories — “Lucca Castle,” the longest in the volume — a man who is grieving the loss of his wife and isn’t coping well with his daughter embarks on an experiment. The experiment essentially involves living in the moment and being open to anything, even if “anything” means sleeping all day and wallowing in grief. A younger woman at a diner takes an unlikely interest in him and, following a bizarre coincidence that might be interpreted as fate, they hook up. She brings him to a guru-like figure who might be a cult leader, a man who condemns the kind of wealth-acquisition work that is the protagonist’s career. By walking away from the cult, the experiment brings him closer to his daughter, closer to understanding how he needs to move ahead with his life.

“Ghost Image” is another of my favorites. It is narrated by a man who, while working at a meaningless temp job, pitied his boss for dreaming of a post-retirement career as a monorail conductor at Disney World. Years later, as a father whose unfaithful wife has died, having realized none of his own half-formed dreams, the man talks to his former boss as if he is a spirit, seeing him in a stranger in a bar, seeing him in the teenage son from whom he has become estranged. After abandoning his life, he journeys to a future where Disney World is shuttered and surrounded by the remnants of natural disasters, and imagines seeing his old boss wearing a conductor’s cap. The story is a reminder that when we are young, we don’t “know how long life takes, or what it does to you as you live it.” This is an odd and discomfiting story. Those qualities might contribute to my admiration of it.

The narrator of “Trial Run” works for a small analytics firm. Someone has been sending antisemitic emails to the business’ employees. The emails target the manager. Since the emails began immediately after a diversity workshop, there is reason to believe that the sender is an employee. The business has hired a security guard, but he seems to be a believer in conspiracy theories, leading the narrator to wonder whether the guard sent the emails. Another suspect is a paranoid co-worker who overshares, a man who might be “hiding below the surface of routine, awaiting, with all the patience of a fanatic, some dark eventuality in which to reveal himself.” The story is an amusing take on office politics and daily fears.

In the most surreal story, Jacob and Ronna rented a vacation cottage but they can’t recall how long they’ve been there or even where the cottage is located. They argue about ways to investigate their circumstances and fail to follow through on their plans. Their behavior grows progressively more bizarre. Their toddler never seems to be injured when he falls, never seems to be hungry when his parents leave for days to explore the wilderness. Like a snapping turtle, he never seems to grow older. In his crib, Ronna believes him to be safe from scary things. His parents might be the scariest thing in his life, which might or might not be the point of “Wood Sorrel House.”

“Red Light” tells the story of a kinky hookup with a woman whose boyfriend (his description is a bit freakish) likes to watch her have sex while hiding in the closet. In “Neighbors,” an elderly woman’s son asks her neighbor to check on his mother. The mother is dead but someone is standing in her bedroom, a resident of “an unbroken field, containing everything.” The protagonist in “Mousetraps” has a strange conversation with a hardware store owner who questions the value of humane mousetraps.

Three other stories, including one about a fellow who suddenly grows an extra toe, didn’t do much for me. On the whole, however, this is a diverse collection of enjoyable, offbeat stories.

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Godwin by Joseph O'Neill

Published by Pantheon on June 4, 2024

A character named Jean-Luc Lefebvre pontificates that “Sport is recreational and therefore optional. Nobody is under a duty to like it. Either it interests you or it doesn’t.” The sport that most of the world calls football has never interested me, although I have friends (most of whom were born outside of the US) who are passionate about the sport Americans call soccer. The trick that great storytellers conjure is making a reader care about a topic that is of little interest to them. Joseph O’Neill did that in Godwin, a book that is built around a potential soccer star from one of the world’s poorest nations.

While soccer is part of the novel's foundation, Godwin is more broadly about people and cultures that, while vastly different from each other in many ways, are united by the twin forces of soccer and corruption.At its heart, and more importantly, Godwin is about family, a fluid term that has differing and changing meanings.

The first section of Godwin is narrated by Mark Wolfe. Mark is a technical writer specializing in grant applications. He generally works from home and prefers to stay at home because travel and adventures “boil down to a sequence of uncontrollable, unpleasant, and unwanted events.” Those words turn out to be prescient.

Mark lives in Pittsburg and works in a cooperative of technical writers. An incident of rude behavior at his office — the kind of thing he usually avoids by working from home — is resolved by his agreement to take a leave of absence. Mark’s half-brother, Geoff Anibal, contacts him as his leave begins and asks for his help with a project in London. Mark doesn’t like Geoff but Mark’s wife Sushila convinces him that it would be good for him to spend time with his brother. Mark takes a trip to England to learn what Geoff wants. Their mutual mother lives in France but Mark has no desire to rekindle his relationship with her.

Geoff’s gig involves identifying promising soccer players (primarily from disadvantaged nations) and hooking them up with European teams. He describes himself as an intermediary or agent, depending on the services he provides, which seem to be scant. Geoff sends Mark on an adventure. It is an adventure that Mark must fund, knowing that Geoff’s promises to reimburse his expenses will come to nothing. The mission is to find a promising young soccer player named Godwin who lives in an unknown African nation and whose existence and prowess are only confirmed by a few minutes of video.

Mark’s mission generates about half the novel’s plot. In a manic mood, Mark enlists an aging French soccer agent (Lefebvre) as his partner. The partnership does not go as Mark planned. Lefebvre competes with Geoff to be the liveliest character and is by far the best storyteller.

The other half of the plot is centered on the cooperative that helps Mark earn his livelihood. Most sections of the novel that advance the plot thread are narrated by Lakesha Williams, a medical writer in the writer’s co-op. Her narrative fleshes out the cooperative’s key members, including Mark, who returns to work after his European adventure with renewed energy and purpose. Internal politics leads to a leadership change that Mark soon regrets and that leaves Lakesha feeling threatened. She will later experience conflict between her commitment to the ideals of the cooperative movement — “solidarity, self-responsibility, equity” — and her fading tolerance for new group members who are driven by a self-absorbed drive for power and dominance.

O’Neill fills the lives and backgrounds of significant characters with interesting details, from Lakesha’s initial reluctance to leave north Milwaukee to Lefebvre’s encyclopedic knowledge of soccer history. O’Neill details the cultural and political differences of the African nations that Lefebvre scouts for soccer talent. While this could the dull content of a treatise, O’Neill’s lively prose keeps the story in constant motion.

In subtle ways, O’Neill explores the world’s enduring difficulty with tribalism. One example is the co-op’s devolution from a group of supportive individuals working toward common goals to a group of battling factions. Another is the complaint of a German resident about the influx of Africans who disturb the established (white) order in his native land by increasing the demand for resources that the established order would rather not share. Another is his discussion of African nations in conflict. Far right complaints about “globalism” are reflected in conflicts between tribalism and cooperation.

In more direct ways, O’Neill explores the importance of family. Apart from Geoff, family members take on more prominent roles in the novel’s second half. Mark tolerates Suchila’s father, a racist Tamil immigrant, but he’s surprised when Suchila interferes with his family relationships by engaging in email correspondence with his mother. Surprising events tie together Mark’s mother, Geoff, Lefebre, and Mark. The story also touches upon Lakesha’s difficult relationship with her sister in Milwaukee.

We have families into which we are born, families we make for ourselves, and families that we fall into without giving the process much thought. Those concepts of family are each represented here. O’Neill recognizes that no two families are alike, but they have features in common, ranging from love and responsibility to resentment and exploitation.

The intertwined plot threads in Godwin — the search for Godwin and unrest at the co-op — come together to tell a captivating story. A surprise near the end upsets both plot threads, but they never unravel. Characters are forced to change but they endure because that’s what people do, regardless of culture or nationality. Sometimes they endure with the help of family, other times in spite of family strife. O’Neill’s ability to tell a story that is both familiar and different from any other I’ve read makes Godwin one of my favorite novels of 2024.

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Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

Published by Knopf on May 14, 2024

Blue Ruin is, I think, about the difference between art and life. Whenever we interact with others, the is at least the possibility that life becomes a performance — and what is a performance if not art?

Two artists are at the center of Blue Ruin. The narrator is Jason Gates. He has used other names, but he’s known to most as Jay. After living in different parts of the world as he tried “to engineer a way to bump into myself,” Jay is now in America.

An artist who no longer makes art, Jay is delivering groceries during the pandemic. He survived a COVID infection but he’s fatigued and weak. He’s been living in his car because his roommates kicked him out after he got sick. He’s trying to save money so he can afford a security deposit.

Jay collapses while delivering groceries to Alice, a woman he used to date but hasn’t seen in twenty years. While Jay’s collapse is related to his health, it is triggered by his sense of shame at seeing Alice while he’s in a destitute condition. “I felt as if my spirit were being pulled from my body with tongs, stretched out on display. See me, Alice. Nothing but a ragged membrane. A dirty scrap of ectoplasm, separating nothing from nothing.”

When they were together, Jay lost Alice to Rob, the novel’s other key character. Rob and Jay were once friends. Rob continued to paint and went on to earn a good living as a working artist.

Alice takes pity on Jay and brings him to a country home where she lets him sleep in a barn loft. She must keep Jay’s presence a secret because the property owner is only allowing Rob, Alice, a gallerist named Marshal, and Marshal’s girlfriend Nicole to stay on the property.

Jay’s backstory occupies the novel’s middle pages. Jay’s initial desire to be a painter gives way to performance art. Jay and his friend Rob do a lot of drugs, but Rob manages to produce an occasional painting. They are in constant artistic competition that draws them together and pulls them apart.

Jay’s most successful concept is to lock himself in a room where an audience can watch him on video as he paints a self-portrait and then destroys the painting. Select individuals see a blurry Polaroid of the painting but nobody sees the actual creation. In his next show, Jay stares at a wall (signifying a “stand in the corner” punishment that his parents used to impose). He enjoys modest success with his performances, enough to keep him in drugs, although Alice comes from money and pays their larger expenses. She falls into his drug use but doesn’t have Jay’s stamina. Rob blames Jay (with some justification) for inflicting damage on Alice.

When Alice took up with Rob, Jay disappeared, occasionally surfacing to make a work of art, often blissfully unaware that some parts of the art world were still noticing his contributions. Jay’s disappearance was itself a work of art, or part of one, the final piece (he calls it Fugue) of a three-piece performance. Jay’s art is a product of his inability to live an unexamined life. His life “presented itself as an endless decision tree, a constant steeplechase of exhausting and difficult choices.” Through Jay, Blue Ruin examines the process of life change: “we slip from one life to another without even realizing. There are breaks, moments of transition when we leave behind not just places or times, but whole forms of existence, worlds to which we can never return.”

As the story circles back to the present, Jay’s presence in the barn becomes a source of tension. Alice’s difficult relationship with Rob and her unresolved feelings for Jay contribute to the drama. Rob would like Jay to leave, but Alice wants him to stay. Malcolm sees Jay’s reappearance as the culmination of a masterpiece (he’s particularly impressed with Rob living in his car) and hopes to monetize it, although Jay isn’t sure that what he’s been doing is a performance or that, if it is, the performance is over.

Near the end, we learn of Rob’s backstory and gain insight into his anger. His life went off course when he was working as an assistant to a successful artist who turned out to be untrustworthy. Rob feels that he (unlike Jay) has sold out, that he’s no longer making art that is true but is working for money, feeding collectors with what they want, not with something he feels the need to make. He envies Jay for never allowing money to get in the way of his artistic vision.

Threats and violence are themes in the novel, as is the question of racial division. The story is not violent, although a threat of violence emerges at the end. Rob doesn’t believe that Jay’s reappearance was coincidental and wonders if Jay is there to kill him. The George Floyd murder occurs near the novel’s end and becomes a topic of conversation — and possibly of racial tension between white Malcolm and black Nicole. Rob’s Jamaican ancestry becomes an issue when he meets Alice’s Vietnamese family in France.

The nature of art is the story’s larger theme. Jay hates the commercialism of most art, at least the art that is displayed and sold. He arguably sabotages his career on a couple of occasions because he resents the way money corrupts the purity of art.

Perhaps Jay gravitates to performance art because performances can’t be traded in a marketplace. His Fugue piece is meant as an exit from the art world, “a kind of artwork without form or function except to cross its own border, to cross out of itself and make a successful exit.” But isn’t all of life a performance? Is Jay’s life really art? The dynamic between Jay and Rob embodies the theme of art as a commodity versus art as a mirror that reflects the artist.

Additional themes include the insecurity of rich people who buy art they don’t really understand or appreciate (“they’re always terrified someone will realize they’re just wankers like the rest of us”) and the difficulty of maintaining artistic integrity — the freedom to create art that feels true — when earning a living requires the creation of art that appeals to patrons or buyers. The latter theme might be at the heart of the relationship between commercially successful Rob and impoverished Jay. Should Jay be jealous of Rob’s success? Should Rob be jealous of Jay’s freedom?

The story offers a bit of understated relationship drama in the Jay-Alice-Rob triangle. Both the drama and its resolution feel honest.

The quoted passages should make clear that Hari Kanzru’s prose is several notches above average. His story is thought provoking and his characters are carefully crafted. I don’t know much about art apart from literature, but I appreciate Kanzru’s ability to tell a meaningful story about the intersection of art and life.

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