1) "Double Bind" by Chris Bohjalian
Psychological thriller, crime novel and “what-if” sequel to The Great Gatsby—with significant twists.
Schizophrenic, yes, and alcoholic—but Bobbie Crocker isn’t your stereotypical street person. Bohjalian (Before You Know Kindness, 2004, etc.) invests him with mystery; when he dies in Burlington, Vt., he leaves behind photographs from 1960s issues of Life magazine. Eartha Kitt, Dick Van Dyke, Muddy Waters—they’re celebrity shots he took, combined with elegant evocations of Jazz Age Long Island. Laurel Estabrook, social worker at Crocker’s shelter, discovers something else among them: a snapshot of herself riding a bike, just as she had, seven years before, when savaged by two thugs. The attack scarring her, she’d retreated into PTSD therapy, affairs with comforting, if noncommittal, father figures and a life less of ambition than service. Crocker’s photos provide Laurel clues to their strangely interconnected pasts—and she sets out to decode them. Had the homeless man actually been to the manor born, son of Tom and Daisy Buchanan of fabled West Egg? His sister denies it, having spent most of her 70 years trying to whitewash her parents’ reputation—Tom’s brutality and Daisy’s suspicious involvement in the car crash that killed one of his lovers. Had those wealthy, morally bankrupt parents caused Bobbie’s “double bind,” provoking schizophrenia by instilling in an unwanted child love/hate mixed messages? Or could Bobbie’s father be someone yet more notorious, the darkly glamorous star of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece? And why was Laurel’s own likeness found in Crocker’s cache? Sleuthing obsessively, she discovers that Bobbie had a son himself, a boy who grew up to terrify his father. And terrify her. Conflating literary lore, photographic analysis and meditations on homelessness and mental illness, Bohjalian produces his best and most complex fiction yet.
Ultra-clever, and moving, too.
2) "Invisible Monsters Remix" by Chuck Palahniuk
Palahniuk (Damned, 2011, etc.) plays literary DJ, revisiting and updating his 1999 novel Invisible Monsters.
In a new "Reintroduction," Palahniuk explains that Invisible Monsters was never meant to be a conventional narrative, resembling in its original incarnation the Sears catalogue or an old copy ofVogue magazine, jumping forward and backward in time with the quick-cut style changes of a classic MTV playlist. The elder statesman of transgressive fiction even sounds a bit cynical—“You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs and good times, fuck you.”—though with his skewed sense of humor, it’s generally hard to be sure. In matter of substance, there’s not much of a “remix” to be had here, just a, “Now, please jump to Chapter Forty,” Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style that doesn’t so much reorder the book as augment the disjointed, whiplash atmosphere its author intended. The book that Kirkus drubbed “Too clever by half” in 1999 is still here in its ghoulish entirety. The narrator is Shannon McFarland, a fashion model whose beauty has been obliterated in an enigmatic accident. While recovering in the hospital, Shannon meets Brandy Alexander, a voluptuous pre-surgical transsexual who adopts Shannon and takes her on the road, granting them new monikers, identities and trades in the process. Throw in some more drag queens, a knife-wielding ex-cop, plenty of drugs, sexual abuse and even a wedding, not to mention some eerie family values. The book is really a superfluous artifact, but that doesn’t change the fact that Palahniuk remains one of the most gifted writers in American fiction.
Not worth replacing your old paperback, but a nice collector’s item for Palahniuk’s cult.
3) "The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks
Through much of this impressive first novel, almost up until the awkward and misguided finale, young Scottish writer Banks achieves that fine British balance--between horrific content on the one hand and matter-of-fact comic delivery on the other. The narrator, whose cool prose is sometimes a bit too sophisticated for credibility, is 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, living outside a remote Scottish village--a cheerfully insane lad who tortures animals, imagines that he gets instructions from the "Factory" (the room upstairs where he cremates wasps), and fondly recalls the three grisly/farcical murders he committed from age six to age ten. Is there good reason for Frank to be so blithely unhinged, so devoted to his warfare against wildlife and his ritual killings? ("How the hell am I supposed to get heads and bodies for the Poles and the Bunker if I don't kill things?") There is indeed. His father, an ex-hippie and sometime chemist, is a shambling eccentric obsessed with measurement. His flower-child mother deserted Frank at birth, then briefly returned when he was three--and may have helped to cause little Frank's life-shattering accident. (A nasty old dog supposedly chewed off the toddler's genitals.) Furthermore, Frank's older half-brother Eric, who was deserted by two mothers, has gone certifiably bonkers--setting fires, eating dogs; his madness was triggered by a ghastly moment while working as a hospital orderly (a grotesque horror for only the very strongest of stomach); and now he has just escaped from the asylum, making his way home to Frank, "a force of fire and disruption approaching the sands of the island like a mad angel, head swarming with echoing screams of madness and delusion." Banks handles this gothic/clinical material, for the most part, with sure, deadpan restraint, echoing William Golding, Saki, and Joe Orton--while finding hilarity in fugitive Eric's loony phone-calls to Frank, in misogynistic Frank's drunken rambles with dwarf-pal Jamie. Here and there, however, the underlying themes of sex/aggression are spelled out lumpily. ("All our lives are symbols. . . women can give birth and men can kill.") And the final chapter, mixing Eric's violent homecoming with revelations about Frank's true sexuality, pushes a delicately gripping nightmare-novel over the edge into psycho-melodrama and sexual polemics. In sum: a nastily striking, somewhat uneven debut--at its dreadful best when not straining for symbolic shockers or cosmic resonance.
4) "The House at Riverton" by Kate Morton
In Australian author Morton’s atmospheric first novel, a 98-year-old woman recollects her unwitting role in a fatal deception.
Grace, a prominent former archeologist, is living out her waning years in a British nursing home, when an American filmmaker, Ursula, asks her to consult on a movie about the scandalous 1924 suicide of a poet during a lavish soirée at Riverton, a country estate where Grace once served as parlor maid to the Hartford family. Extended flashbacks excavate the mysteries that surround Grace almost from the first. Why did Grace’s mother, herself a servant at Riverton before leaving under a cloud, send her 14-year-old daughter to work there? Who is Grace’s father? The domestic servant is a convenient expository device: Grace can eavesdrop on every Hartford family crisis. Hannah, her sister Emmeline and brother David occasionally visit Riverton, owned by their uncle, Lord Ashbury. Their father, Frederick, the second son, is an automobile pioneer. But World War I upends the destinies of the Hartford clan. David, his schoolmate Robbie and Grace’s heartthrob, Alfred, a footman, all go to fight. David is killed, Robbie drops out of sight and Alfred suffers shell shock. The war also claims the lives of Lord Ashbury and his eldest son, and Frederick inherits the title. Frederick’s business is mortgaged to American bankers, the Luxtons, who force a sale of his factory. To Frederick’s chagrin, Hannah marries Luxton scion Teddy, who, after flirting briefly with bohemian ways, reverts to stodgy banker-hood. Languishing in London while her estranged father lets Riverton decay, Hannah relies increasingly on Grace, now her personal maid. Hannah’s mistaken assumption that Grace knows shorthand leads both to make a tragic error in judgment. Meanwhile, Robbie resurfaces, his psyche scarred by war. Although ostensibly courting Emmeline, Robbie is drawn into an adulterous affair with Hannah that proves his undoing.
Though the climactic revelation feels contrived, Morton’s characters and their predicaments are affecting, and she recreates the period with a sure hand.
5) "Plain Truth" by Jodi Piccoult
An uneven reworking of tabloid headlines: a young woman is charged with infanticide, and a hard-boiled attorney agrees to defend her. With one crucial distinction: the defendant is Amish.
In the Amish community of Paradise, Pennsylvania, 18-year-old Katie Fisher, unwed, is the chief suspect in the death by asphyxiation of a newborn found in the Fisher family’s barn. A medical exam reveals that Katie has just given birth, but she insists she has never been pregnant. Enter Ellie Hathaway, a 39-year-old (and single) Philadelphia defense attorney visiting her aunt Leda. Leda, also Amish, prevails upon an initially reluctant Ellie to defend Katie. Ellie moves in with the Fishers to prepare Katie’s defense, a device that allows Picoult (Keeping Faith, 1999, etc.) to juxtapose the devout Amish (or Plain Folk) and their spartan way of life with city-slicker Ellie. But as Ellie befriends Katie, unsettling inconsistencies in the latter’s story emerge. As in Rashomon, the truth proves elusive, shifting, and often unwelcome. Is Katie suffering from a genuine psychosis, repressing events too traumatic to remember? Or was she simply trying to conceal an affair and pregnancy she knew would have led to her being shunned by her own people? The drama echoes with conflicts in Ellie’s own life: her loudly ticking biological clock, the end of a tepid relationship with another attorney, and the resumption of a love affair with Coop, her college sweetheart-turned-psychologist (and eventual expert witness on Katie’s behalf). All, of course, will be tidily resolved by trial’s end.
6) "I Am The Messenger" by Markus Zusak
7) "Odd Thomas" by Dean Koontz
Koontz’s suspense masterpieces (Intensity, 1996; The Face, 2002) have tight plots or strikingly enclosed worlds. But you can’t win ’em all, and despite the lift he strives for, these pages go by on automatic pilot.
Suspense here turns on the life of Odd Thomas, 21, an unassuming lad gifted with the power to see dead people who cannot tear themselves from Pico Mundo, Odd’s small hometown abroil on the Mojave Desert—as neither can Odd, whose “agoraphobia” has not let him drive or step outside the town. Ever. Koontz focuses on the little world of Pico Mundo itself, its physical layout and the lovable eccentrics who fill it chock-a-block. Among others, there’s 400-pound romance-and-mystery novelist P. Oswald Boone (better known as Little Ozzie), and Odd’s landlady Rosalia Sanchez, who fears turning invisible. Odd—a flashy fry-cook—works as a kind of Tom Cruise of the griddle at Terri Stambaugh’s Pico Mundo Grille. Terri is an Elvis savant who knows what the King was doing every hour of his life. Odd’s confidential tie with Police Chief Wyatt Porter has led Chief Porter to varied murderers and artists of mayhem whose victims have hung around and pointed out to Odd just who murdered them. Then to the grille comes strangely fungoid Bob Robertson, followed about by black bodachs, hungry doglike shadows sniffing out folks scented with death. When Odd secretly steals into Robertson’s house, he finds first a housekeeping mess, then a computer workroom of Spartan order whose files reveal the mind of a mass murderer. And Odd stumbles upon a room of pure blackness—perhaps an adjunct to King/Straub’s Black House? The date August 15 is torn from Robertson’s desk calendar. Terri tells Odd, who is often followed about by the tearful and warning ghost of Elvis, that Gladys Presley died on August 14 and Elvis on August 16. Does the missing date mean Robertson will go berserk on the 15th—and kill Odd as well?
With its tender surprise ending, call it It’s a Wonderful Sixth Sense, built out of wet pulp and milk.
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