Category Archives: just literary fiction

White Knight by Mara Rotundo

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Mara Rotundo’s debut novel, White Knight (Goldmund, 342 pages), is a love square set against the pandemic, literary fiction with strong elements of romantic domestic suspense and satire. It is a debut only in the sense that it is the first of her extraordinary writing she has allowed us to see. Her bio tells of many short stories and essays locked in a dusty drawer, like Bach’s music waiting to be found in that attic. If we could but read those writings, we would most likely find a step-by-step handbook for the development of a genuine writer, for in this book she springs full-grown from the loins of the muse, armed and dangerous.

For instance, these powerful lines start the romance,

“When her intrepid black eyes sunk their blade into his pudding face, a champagne cork popped somewhere. The earth’s rotation took a hit, the magnetic poles confused each other. She felt him melt, and he let her feel it.”

White Knight is a book of contradictions—a pulp novel love story on the surface. Continue reading →

A Book with No Author by Brent Robison

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If the code, “Brent Robison,” were to undergo a random mutation—which in the writing world we call a typo—more likely than not, that “n” in the first name would jump, as even genes sometimes do, to the last name, where, as “Robinson,” it would create a more stable configuration.  And, of course the now isolated and wobbly “t” in “Bret” would likely undergo reduplication—as giraffe vertebrae have done—leaving us with the better reinforced product “Brett Robinson.”

Such are the circumstances that may lead a man to fancy he has a similarly-named double. If he is a writer of excellent literary fiction, he will take that fancy far. If he also moonlights in some other profession, say, as a photographer or videographer, the twinning can take on multiple dimensions. Continue reading →

What Did You Do Today? by Anthony Varallo

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Fiction labeled magic realism is sometimes too squishy, to my taste, relying too much on novelty or hoped-for charm. Instead of providing an added charge to the storytelling, the other-worldly conceits can bring about a dilution, like a film that leans too heavily on special effects.

In What Did You Do Today? (UNT Press, 216 pages), winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, Anthony Varallo avoids this pitfall across 45 stories that often defy realistic convention. He knows how to strike the right balance between the ordinary and the frankly impossible. Bizarre events occur against a backdrop of everyday domesticity, as parents and children go about their lives.

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Zone 23 by C. J. Hopkins

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In his novel Zone 23 (SS&C Press, 483 pages) expat playwright C.J. Hopkins depicts a society, much like ours at its worse — some six or seven hundred years in the future — when any departures from prescribed ways of thinking are pathologized. Being melancholy, pondering larger philosophical questions, or contemplating the lack of fairness of the system can earn one a diagnosis of mental illness. Virtually everyone is on medication. Those who can’t be controlled by medication are deemed “Anti-Social Persons” and are removed from the society of “Normals” and relegated to various zones of abandoned and bombed-out cities, where they are eventually blown to bits by gamer-controlled drones.

Human reproduction is the central theme. That, too, has been pathologized. Continue reading →

The Coincidence Plot by Anil Menon

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Chances are you’ve never heard of Anil Menon. That’s a shame, but not your fault. Anil Menon is a brilliant Indian author writing wild, brainy and emotionally engaging stories and novels in English. His books, including the main one reviewed here, The Coincidence Plot (Simon & Schuster, 252 pages), are published by presses well known in the English speaking world, and his works can be found in online venues, but readers in the United States who would delight in his novels won’t find them in bookstores.

The Indian Constitution lists Hindi as the official language of the Union, but allows English to continue in use by the government, English being a legacy from British colonial rule. Today India has a growing population of 1.4 billion (it recently surpassed China in this) and of this billion, about 10.5 percent are English speakers. Anil Menon’s work is published for those millions upon millions of English speakers in India. Getting his novels from online sellers or by mail from India can be tedious, but it’s worth the hassle.
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A Book with No Author by Brent Robison

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Like an ancient Buddhist master, Brent Robison is fond of mind benders, and his restless spirit never tires of questioning reality. In his new novel, A Book with No Author (Recital Publishing, 223 pages), Robison’s wicked inquisitiveness is on display out of the gate. In a preface disclaiming Robison’s authorship of the book, he writes, “I, Brent Robison, am not the author of the fragmented story that follows.” Yet, plainly, the book cover bears his name, and the copyright is in place. The hall-of-mirrors never stop from there.

A.J. Campbell discovers a short story in an obscure literary journal that changes his world. But the change is not welcome, because the fiction is based on his life.  He has no idea how the writer could know so much about him, or why he would be the subject of the stories. Worse, his life is messy; divorce, and painful rebuilding. Incensed by invasion of his privacy, he embarks of a difficult task of finding the author who “stole” his life story, and his life.

Yet while the echo-chamber storyline could derail, it always rights itself through the constraints of a gothic detective-thriller plot. We find the narrator earnestly on the trail of his persecutor Continue reading →

There’s Something I Want You to Do, by Charles Baxter

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The Short-Story Novel

There is probably a better term for this, but I don’t know what it is. I refer to a book of short stories, so put together as to feature similar themes and recurrent appearances of the same characters: Charles Baxter, There’s Something I Want You To Do, Penguin Random House, 2015, Vintage paperback, 2016, 221 pp. The result being, if not a novel, at least something resembling a novel. All of the stories in this collection have titles featuring one aspect or another of human character, positive or negative. Part One: bravery, loyalty, chastity, charity, forbearance; Part Two: lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, vanity. The stories are presented so that—with one exception—each story in Part One has a companion story (same characters) in Part Two.

America in the Twenty-First Century: Full of Somethings Somebody Wants

Quotations from various stories in the collection: “something has happened, I need to say something to you, something was about to happen, something is out there, we’re going somewhere [or nowhere?], something will happen to me, something wants something from me, there’s a thing that’s come up.” And, of course, the line that provides the title of the book: “There’s something I want you to do.” That line appears five times in various contexts. Continue reading →

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

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Machines Like Me (Nan A. Talese, 352 pages) by Ian McEwan is set in the possible world of the 1980s if Alan Turing had not died in 1954, Kennedy had not been shot in Dallas, and Britain had not won the war in the Falklands. In the story, Open Source information has allowed technological progress to sprint ahead, and the automatization of work is leading, first to high unemployment and then, presumably, to the creation of a universally idle population supported by the labor of machines. The hero, Charlie Friend, has recently purchased a life-like robot named Adam and he and his new love interest Miranda Blacke will together train and condition Adam to develop a personality and consciousness. Continue reading →

Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu, translated by Sean Cotter

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In “he Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Louis Borges’s postulates a novel so complex it would become “a labyrinth in which all men would become lost.” Left unfinished by its fictional author, the novel is a legacy emblematic of the innumerable possibilities of existence. For Borges, multitude makes the case for universal elusiveness—a sublimity in extremis.

With celebrated Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu’s massive novel Solenoid, we are deep into Borges territory. Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press, 672 pages) is a chronicle told by an unnamed high school teacher whose Kafkaesque days are spent at public School 86 in Bucharest, “the saddest city in the world.” At night, the unnamed protagonist surrenders himself to the phantasmagoric spell of a “solenoid” buried beneath his house; the solenoid is a strange electromagnetic coil with dimension-bending properties. The solenoid causes the narrator to float above his bed. We learn how the mysterious contraption is built from concepts of Nicholas Tesla and the notion of the hypercube. Later, the solenoid is revealed to be one among an array of solenoids buried throughout the city. Ultimately, the narrator meets a woman with whom he falls deeply in love. In a finale that owes as much to science fiction as James Joyce, the couple, and the entire city of Bucharest, are launched spaceship-like from the surface of the earth, trailing a cone of infrastructure and debris. Continue reading →

Young Pushkin, by Yury Tynyanov

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Yury Tynyanov, Young Pushkin: A Novel

(translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush (New York: Overlook/Rookery) 2008, 515 pp.

[the Russian original: Юрий Тынянов, Пушкин (М: Издательство «Правда»), 1981]

Introduction

This is a historical novel, treating the life of Russia’s greatest poet from the year of his birth, 1799, to shortly after he graduated from the Lycée school in Tsarskoe Selo in 1817. Tynyanov’s original plan was to cover all of Aleksandr Pushkin’s life, until his death in a duel in 1837, but the author’s health failed. Beginning in 1935, the novel was serialized, but by 1943 Tynyanov was terminally ill with multiple sclerosis; at the end of that year he died at the age of forty-nine, leaving Part One (“Childhood”) and Part Two (“The Lycée”) completed to his exacting standards. What is Part Three as published here (“Youth”) is clearly in rough draft form, lacking the literary polish of the first two parts (more on this later). Even worse, what would be, say, Parts Four and Five—in which we would meet the mature poet, plus his mature literary works—remained a chimera. Continue reading →