Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino

Published by Scribner on January 23, 2024

Last Acts is built on dark humor. Some of the humor derives from unlikely sources. Drug addition isn’t funny. Neither are school shootings. Everyone survives the shooting in Last Acts (the headlines speak of Mass Survival rather than Mass Murder) because the gun was too big for the shooter to handle. He fell down sobbing without managing to kill anyone.

Sobbing is a common experience in Last Acts. So many events in life promote tears. Look at the same events from a different perspective, however, and they might promote laughter. Drug addiction isn’t funny but people in rehab might be. School shootings aren’t funny but a survivor who forms a support group for victims of Mass Survival might give readers a reason to laugh. Marketing isn’t funny but, well, sure it is. How perspective influences attitude is an important theme of Last Acts.

The transition from loser to winner is another of the novel’s themes. It’s a transition that should make people happy, but are winners always happy? They might have been happier when they were losers. Change is the only constant. A loser who becomes a winner will probably become a loser again. But whether the person is really a loser is, again, a matter of perspective. A character named Felicia illustrates the point: “She was happy with her life, more or less. Sometimes the wind hit her and she felt certain she would sob. But more frequent were the days when she walked around smiling, confident that she would never die.”

The novel’s most important characters are Rizzo and his son Nick. Rizzo’s first name is David but he’s known to all as Rizzo. Rizzo has a gun shop in a strip mall that was developed by Buford Bellum, a serial entrepreneur who is at heart a con artist. Rizzo had a history of being fired from sales jobs until he believed Buford’s pitch that buying into the “business park” would guarantee his success. Instead, Rizzo has crushing debt, a store full of guns, and few customers willing to venture into the lonely mall to buy them.

The possibility of an afterlife is the only thing that mitigates Rizzo’s fear of death. When Nick dies from a drug overdose and is brought back to life, Rizzo’s hopes are dashed by Nick’s report that he experienced nothing after he died. Rizzo is terrified by the thought that his miserable life is all he will ever have.

Nick is a heroin addict. He needs drug treatment but, when Rizzo takes him to the most affordable treatment center, his credit cards are declined. Unsurprisingly, the center refuses Rizzo’s request to “just keep him for a for a few days” while Rizzo tries to find the money.

Nick goes to work in Rizzo’s failing gun shop, hoping to prove to his father than he is done screwing up his life. He tries to make a commercial for his father’s store, promoting sales by promising to donate some of their revenues to drug addiction treatment. Nick’s ad libs (“at Rizzo’s Firearms, we are shooting addiction dead”) cause multiple reshoots, but the commercial they eventually produce goes viral, bringing success and more opportunities to screw up. Life is a series of ups and downs. Nick and Rizzo both make the transition from loser to winner before they fall again.

Rizzo’s downfall occurs when he is held responsible (unjustly in the collective view of his gun-happy customers) for the failed school shooting. Nick’s production of the commercial for his father’s store seems to give birth to a career as a marketing consultant until he teams up with Buford Bellum. Neither father nor son can get ahead for long.

Nick and Rizzo love each other, albeit grudgingly. They would like to trust each other, but trust must be earned and neither parent nor child is capable of exercising sound judgment. Their comical mishaps promote guilty laughter (it isn’t nice, after all, to laugh at another’s misfortune). The story develops poignancy from the willingness of father and son to maintain a relationship despite their inevitable disappointment with each other. They can work through their issues because they know they’ll always have each other.

In the tradition of modern (or postmodern or whatever they are these days) novels, Last Acts ends abruptly, in the middle of an important development. That will annoy some readers. I’ve almost gotten used to it. Maybe Alexander Sammartino will write a sequel that explains the next chapters of his characters’ lives. He probably won’t, but I hope he does.

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You Only Call When You're in Trouble by Stephen McCauley

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on January 9, 2024

The literary market never tires of amusing domestic dramas about affluent people who live on the East Coast. You Only Call When You’re in Trouble is a novel of first world problems, the self-inflicted problems of upper middle class white people who have too much time on their hands. Yet the reader knows that everything will work out for most of them because, after all, that’s what happens to East Coast characters of comfortable means in amusing domestic dramas.

Cecily is 34. She teaches American Studies at a college in Chicago. It’s a tenure-track position and her class is popular because she shows a lot of videos. She has been in a relationship with Santosh for two-and-a-half years. Santosh’s mother, Neeta, doesn’t approve. It doesn’t help that Cecily is being investigated by her employer for sexual misconduct. Cecily accepted a grant to write a book that allowed her to take a semester off from teaching, but she doubts she will be able to return to work (or to finish writing a book that no longer interests her). To keep Cecily’s taint from spreading to Santosh, Neeta implements a plan to make Santosh choose between them.

Cecily’s mother, Dorothy, is too preoccupied with her own problems to pay attention to Cecily’s life. After a series of business failures, Dorothy is opening a retreat center in Woodstock with Fiona Snow, the author of a self-help book that was entirely rewritten by a ghostwriter. The book earned a mention on Oprah ten years earlier. Fiona’s meager fame has since faded.

The only stable man in Cecily’s life is Dorothy’s brother Tom, an architect who specializes in “small spaces.” Tom has recently broken up with Alan, largely because Tom is more devoted to Cecily than he is to Alan. Tom is having problems at work due to an unreasonable client named Charlotte who happens to be a friend of Dorothy. Charlotte and her husband Oliver are quite wealthy, perhaps accounting for their status as the novel’s least agreeable characters.

Cecily is a likeable enough character. She has the good sense to recognize that she had “grown up white and middle class in a privileged part of the country during a period of relative stability and economic advantage.” Dorothy is a loving if somewhat ditzy mother and Tom is a caring uncle. Santosh plays a smaller role and is more difficult to like or dislike, although he is probably more judgmental in his assessment of Cecily than she deserves.

The novel’s focal point is a “gala” in Woodstock to celebrate the opening of Dorothy’s retreat center. The key characters all come together for the gala. Dorothy plans to use her time with Cecily to drop a bombshell — the true identity of Cecily’s father. The revelation occurs at about the novel’s midway point.

The story loses energy in its second half. The novel foreshadows certain confrontations. For the most part, they unfold as the reader will expect. In the modern fashion, the story ends with almost no plot threads resolved. Life goes on, except for one character, for whom it might not. We’ll never know unless Stephen McCauley writes a sequel. That’s unlikely to happen, but I was sufficiently engaged with the characters that I would probably read it. Readers who long for the days when stories had an actual ending might not be pleased with You Only Call When You’re in Trouble.

The novel’s amusement factor is high, in part because of its pointed observations. “In academia, discomfort of any kind was increasingly equated with trauma.” Cecily makes the valid point that colleges are “infantilizing twenty-year-olds at the exact moment they should be trained for adulthood.” Tom has a similar sense that therapists (including Alan’s) are always on the hunt for “Slights, Insults, Microaggressions, and Trauma” so they can polish them and add them to a trophy shelf. Tom thinks the tourist towns he knows “seemed both immensely appealing and utterly ridiculous.

Other fun sentences include:

“Like a lot of people who claim to resent the strictures and rules of middle-class, heterosexual life, Dorothy and even Charlotte got positively girlish at the mention of engagements, showers, and wedding dresses.”

“When he heard people talking about their longing for children, he suspected them of watching too much daytime TV.”

“Oliver’s sympathy, like that of most highly successful men, extended only to the people who didn’t need it.”

“Gray hair and CVs make for an inherently embarrassing combination, like condoms and senior discounts.”

For its skewering but good-hearted observations and interesting if predictable characters, You Only Call When You’re in Trouble is

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Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle

Published by Algonquin Books on January 9, 2024

Most of the stories in Old Crimes feature women who have reached or lived beyond middle age. An exception is “Filling Station,” a story about a man in his sixties who rents a room in a house where his grandparents used to live, a house that has been converted into a gas station. The room is an excuse to stay away from his wife, as is the time he devotes to a dying high school teacher he regards as a mentor. The other exception follows “a lineman for the county” who prides himself on his competence (he’ll survive the coming apocalypse because he is good with tools and knows how things work) but regrets his failure to make his relationships work.

“Low Tones” is the story of a woman who isn’t prepared to be old. She can no longer hear low frequencies, a convenient excuse for developing a case of selective hearing. She regrets the moments in her life when she wasn’t the person she wanted to be. Her husband has “a bad illness that leaves him making hand signals” and she doesn’t know if she can cope with him. Cancer has reached his brain and makes him say awful things to her, although he’s always been abusive. She’s annoyed by the young people she sees making out in a truck and feels empathy for an unrepentant woman who murdered her husband. I think the point of the story is that life doesn’t always turn out as one hopes, and never will if we don’t take control of it while we still can.

My favorite in this collection is “Commandments.” Three women meet regularly to gripe about the man who dated and dumped them all. They all aspired to be pampered for the rest of their lives by a rich man but none of them succeeded. This seems less than tragic, given that they all appear to have achieved pampering by less wealthy but comfortably affluent men. Each woman has been in therapy but they disregard their therapists’ advice to move on with their lives and devote their meetings to “beating that decayed horse down to its bare bones.” The story works because the waitress who brings their lunch is more interesting than the three women. She doesn’t seem to envy their designer clothes and purses. She knows the man they hate, recognizes him as an asshole, and governs herself accordingly. The waitress — “a living Bible of truth and common sense” — teaches a good lesson about karma and wisdom that surpasses anything the women have heard from their therapists.

The protagonist in “Swinger” is “the kind of invisible woman who might be referred to as sturdy or dependable, smart and practical.” She was living with a married man, waiting for him to get divorced, for three years before he died. The man had Polaroids of naked women that he kept in a shoe box, photos of his conquests, but never took one of her and now never will. An encounter with a burglar at the novel’s end gives the story a heartening twist.

A woman who got a divorce, relocated with the kids, found a new job, and dealt with the death of her father and decline of her mother never had time to have the breakdown she deserved. In “Sparrow,” memories of the past (including an old story about a boy’s disappearance that still haunts the town to which the woman moves) interweave with experiences in the present (including speculative whispers about the death of a young mother and her son). The story ends with a suspected child snatching. The point of the story seems to be that people want to keep themselves and their children safe but have no idea how to do it.

The other stories in the book are well crafted but I found them to be of less interest. A woman realizes that “evil and violent things” have always happened and always will. The purchase of an old confessional prompts characters to speak of their relatively inconsequential sins. A retired school librarian tries to teach biblical values to Bible-belters who don’t want to feed or educate children. A family gathering causes a drama teacher to see life as a play that is well into its third act. These and other stories are devoted to insightful character building, but they generally seemed longer than necessary, given how little the characters do after they are built. Still, the best stories in the collection make the book worth reading.

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This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack

First published in Great Britain in 2023; published by ‎ Soho Press on January 2, 2024

John Nealon grew up with an understanding that farming “was a glutinous realm, throbbing with pain across cycles of death and renewal that were tinted with green shit and blood-veined mucus.” When his father died, Nealon sold the cattle and rented out the farmland, keeping the house as his residence when he’s not traveling. Nealon studied art, demonstrated serious potential, and squandered his talent by devoting his days to alcohol and weed.

In the east of Ireland, Nealon met Olewyn. He either rescued or kidnapped her as she was riding a heroin high. He brought her back to his village in the west of Ireland. They married and Olweyn became pregnant. Nealon built a studio, furnished it with paints and canvasses, then watched his dreams die. “In the neatness and order of his new studio, Nealon recognized not a new beginning but an end, a memorial to everything he had already done and a lament to all those things his imagination now refused to reach for.” He spent the following years working as a carpenter.

Then Nealon was arrested and remanded to prison to await trial. After a ten-month detention in prison, Nealon’s trial was “set at naught by bad grammar and poor spelling.” The prosecution’s case collapsed and Nealon returned home to find an empty house. Nealon’s backstory is revealed in “separate strands and lurching incidents” as Nealon contemplates his life and lonely home.

As the novel begins, Nealon has no idea where his wife and child have gone. Instead of being greeted by his family, he is greeted by his ringing phone. A series of conversations with a stranger follow. The stranger seems to know everything about Nealon, including the precise moment Nealon enters his home and the location of his electrical main. The stranger wants to meet. The stranger hints that he knows the location of Nealon’s wife and child, so Nealon agrees to meet him.

Nealon conducts a paranoid search of his body and clothing for a transmitter, without result. How does the stranger seem to know his every move? An undefined threat, perhaps related to terrorism, has Ireland on high alert. Soldiers patrol the streets and set up checkpoints on local roads. Is the stranger related to the national threat? Nealon worries about his wife and son in this frightening historical moment. But perhaps it is not the moment that frightens them. Perhaps Nealon is the threat. Nealon comes to understand that they “should not be within psychic distance of him for fear the black radiance of his accumulated circumstances may shrivel and waste them.”

The story comes together during Nealon’s meeting with the stranger. Small observational details that seemed unimportant to the narrative suddenly gain new meaning. It takes some time to learn what Nealon might or might not have done that prompts the meeting. Nealon is accused of extraordinary crimes, improbably committed for altruistic purposes. Could the accusations be true? Is the terrorist threat a real thing? Mike McCormack leaves the reader with the stranger’s opinions but no clear answers.

At the meeting’s conclusion, Nealon has an epiphany. McCormack does not spell out Nealon’s conclusions or the reasoning that brings Nealon to a new understanding of his life. The stranger gives Nealon a choice, but the choice and its consequences are just as unclear as the stranger’s identity. Perhaps the choice involves a return to, or renunciation of, the past. Readers who like to discuss ambiguous literature will find enough material in This Plague of Souls to fuel a lengthy debate.

Despite (or because of) its puzzling and frustrating plot, This Plague of Souls is a joy to read, if only for the sharpness of McCormack’s prose and the depth of Nealon’s isolated existence. Perhaps a second reading would help my comprehension of the novel’s ending and the point that McCormack wanted to make. I will leave it to more scholarly minds to undertake that analysis. I’m happy to have experienced the story and its telling.

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Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

First published in the UK in 2023; published by Grove Atlantic on December 22, 2023

Prophet Song is a dystopian tale of an authoritarian Irish government that makes drastic changes in the lives of Dubliners after a far-right political party is voted into office. Irish citizens naively believe they still have rights, but rights are useless when an unchecked government disregards them.

Larry Stack is the deputy general secretary of the Teachers Union of Ireland. The garda accuse him of acting against the interests of the state by (in Stack’s view) engaging in peaceful industrial action to better the working conditions of teachers. Workers who organize and demand better wages are branded as communists by the far right political party that controls the government. The Garda treat a peaceful march for workers’ rights as a riot. The Garda begin to snatch up union leaders pursuant to newly enacted emergency powers. They place Larry in detention. They arrest journalists. They impose curfews. As time goes on, the government takes control of the media and cuts off access to foreign news.

Larry and his wife Eilish have four kids. Eilish must do her best to hold the family together until Larry returns. But will he return? She wants her oldest son Mark to leave the country so he will not be conscripted into national service, but the government won’t renew the family’s passports. Her plan to smuggle Mark into Northern Ireland is foiled when he refuses to run away from the fight against tyranny.

After Mark disappears, Eilish’s daughter tells her they should all leave the country, but Eilish’s father is developing dementia and she doesn’t know who will take care of him. A sister who lives in Canada tells her that “history is a silent record of people who did not know when to leave.”

When an insurrection takes root, the reader sees it from Eilish’s limited perspective. It is a topic of conversation among people standing in line at the grocer, the subject of newspaper articles she skims. Her attention is focused on more personal issues. She loses her job when her son is branded a traitor. Her younger son blames her for his father’s disappearance. The butcher refuses to serve her because Mark’s name has been published in a list of traitors.

The focus on Eilish gives the novel its power. As the novel moves forward, Eilish finds herself in the middle of a civil war that she can’t wrap her head around. She doesn’t want to abandon her life. She can’t grasp the reality that she can never have that life back. Her house is literally in the middle of a war zone; a newly constructed checkpoint prevents her from traveling on her street. Bombs are falling; mortars are exploding; her roof is collapsing. When rebels seize the street, their curfew and restrictions are just as bad as the government’s, leaving Eilish to tell a curfew enforcer that her son didn’t fight to replace a government with “more of the same.”

The last stages of the story move with the pace of a thriller as Eilish undertakes a journey to freedom. The novel invites the reader to ask what freedom means and what price is worth paying for it. Like other refugees, Eilish regards freedom as an abstract concept that is secondary to the struggle to keep her children alive. While Eilish once believed in free will, she now understands that she has lost the ability to make meaningful choices. Her options are dictated by men with guns.

I don’t think I’ve read another novel that brought home quite so forcefully the experience of civilians who struggle to live in a war zone. Eilish’s constant fear, her desperate attempts to keep her children safe, her self-recriminations for not bringing them out of the country (even at the risk of leaving her husband and father behind) while there was still an opportunity for safe travel, all invite sympathy and understanding, not just for Eilish but for anyone whose life has been disrupted by war.

Scenes that might be familiar — a parent whose mind is slipping away, a child who hurls vile insults at a parent in response to stressful moments — are devoid of the melodrama that a lesser writer might invoke. Paul Lynch strips the scenes to their essence, underplaying the drama to achieve a greater sense of realism.

Prophet Song isn’t overly difficult to read, although long blocks of text without paragraph breaks might be unappealing to some readers. (Read the Amazon reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s novels and you’ll learn that some readers don’t know how to use bookmarks when a writer refuses to make reading easy for them.) The story is so engaging that empathic readers — even those with limited attention spans — should be able to stick with it. Those who do will be rewarded, just as Lynch was rewarded with a well-deserved Booker Prize.

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