Let the Games Begin (330 pages; Black Cat/Grove Press) by Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti (and translated by Kylee Doust), is an oversaturated, bordering-on-cartoonish romp founded on a larger-than-life premise. A two-bit Satanic cult based out of Rome, the Wilde Beasts of Abaddon, is desperate to enter the ranks of the truly Evil. Though the Wilde Beasts have multiple instances of viaduct graffiti and a botched orgy/human sacrifice under their belt, a rival cult has recently “disembowelled a fifty-eight-year-old nun…with a double-headed axe.” Thus, their leader, Mantos, a furniture salesman who styles himself the group’s “Charismatic Father,” decides they need to […]
Tag: novel
Betting on a Better Tomorrow in ’90s New York: Ali Liebegott’s ‘Cha-Ching!’
by Charlotte Bhaskar
Ali Liebegott’s Cha-Ching! (City Lights/Sister Spit; 248 pages) is a book worthy of its pleasingly onomatopoetic title. Though the plot is familiar—lost woman on the edge of thirty moves to New York City out of a desperate need to find herself, but becomes disillusioned by the city’s gritty reality yet manages to hoist herself up by her bootstraps—it is made fresh and compelling because of Liebegott’s optimistic and sincere protagonist, Theo, and her particular struggles as a “sirma’amsir” lesbian in ‘90s San Francisco. And it’s because of Liebegott’s carefully tempered rendering of Theo that the novel offers a subtle and […]
Skulking in the Comments Section: Travis Nichols’ ‘The More You Ignore Me’
by Walter Gordon
Travis Nichols’ hard-to-describe second novel, The More You Ignore Me (Coffee House Press; 211 pages), takes the form of a single, rambling blog comment—a decade-spanning, bitterly confessional manifesto written in response to a recipe posted on the fictitious BrendaCookingFun.com. Its author, the narrator—who goes unnamed except for two screen names: Linksys181 and Linksys157—resorts to commenting on a cooking website only because he’s been banned from doing the same on Charlico.com, a website dedicated to a wedding the narrator is deeply consumed with preventing. The reason for this obsession, and the nature of Linksys181’s relationship to Charli Vistons, the female half […]
Easy Rawlins Searches the Sunset Strip: Walter Mosley’s ‘Little Green’
by Christopher Connor
Little Green (Doubleday, 304 Pages), the new crime thriller from Walter Mosley, is the eleventh installment in the Easy Rawlins series, which kicked off with 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress. Easy is now older and edgier, navigating the reader through a layered mystery set against a racially tense Los Angeles in 1967. The story opens with Easy recovering from a near-fatal car accident. Enlivened with a voodoo concoction called Gator’s Blood, the private eye gets right back to work, helping his stalwart friend Mouse find Evander “Little Green” Noon, a young man who went missing after dropping acid on […]
From a Kurdish Mountain Town, to Streets of L.A.: Laleh Khadivi’s ‘The Walking’
by Rebecca Huval
Laleh Khadivi’s The Walking (Bloomsbury; 258 pages), the second novel in her projected trilogy about Iran, follows two Kurdish brothers who escape Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in search of a paradise that doesn’t exist. Khadivi’s mellifluous prose traces a gripping journey, one ranging from the fleeing of a mountain town to traveling across a desert, the making of an overseas voyage on a freight ship, and, finally, arriving on the unforgiving streets of Los Angeles. This is a story about illusions. The two brothers worship different ones that goad them onward — Ali betrays his family to defend his hopelessly ravaged […]
The Captivating Voice of an Irish Traveller: Gavin Corbett’s ‘This Is the Way’
by Alyssa Cami
Over the past few years, thanks in part to a TLC reality show, many of us have become fascinated with Irish Travellers, a group of unsettled people that moves about Ireland in caravans. For the most part, Travellers are a secretive culture, wary of outsiders, and in turn are viewed with a certain amount of disdain by “settled” people. In his second novel, This Is The Way (Faber and Faber; 230 pages), Irish writer Gavin Corbett explores the trials and tribulations of an Irish Traveller in an increasingly rooted world. Anthony Sonaghan fears a rekindled feud between the two halves […]
A Cult Built Out of Anguish and Desolation: Fiona Maazel’s ‘Woke Up Lonely’
by Christopher Connor
Woke Up Lonely (Graywolf Press, 336 pages), the new novel from author Fiona Maazel (Last Last Chance), is an imaginative thriller about a cult leader and the ex-wife in charge of spying on him. By balancing humorous adventures with an indictment of our modern world, in which solitude reigns despite all the new methods of communication, Maazel delivers a wild read teeming with emotion. Thurlow Dan is the founder of the Helix, a cult based on the principle that lonely people need someone with whom they can share their feelings. At the start of the novel, the Helix has grown […]
Discovering L.A., and the Mother She Never Knew: Anna Stothard’s ‘The Pink Hotel’
by Alyssa Cami
In her second novel, The Pink Hotel (Picador Original, 280 pages), just published in the United States, Anna Stothard tells the tale of a 17-year-old girl’s attempts find out more about the life and death of her party-girl mother, Lily, while on an extended trip to Los Angeles. The book opens on the nameless narrator at the wild, drug-filled party that is meant to be a memorial for Lily, exploring her mother’s room in the Venice Beach hotel she owned. Having been abandoned at the age of three, the narrator barely remembers her mother and the other people at the […]
On an Island, Making Sense of Loss: Ron Currie Jr.’s ‘Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles’
by Christopher Connor
Ron Currie Jr.’s new novel, Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking, 352 pages), begins with an epigraph from the movie Rocky: “women weaken legs.” Currie’s aim is to entertain, but hidden beneath his comedy about a man who cannot have the woman he loves is a heart-wrenching tale of a narrator who loses control of his life in unimaginable ways. The narrator, a writer who happens to be named Ron Currie, Jr., has been obsessed with a woman named Emma since eighth grade. She broke his heart as a teenager, but following her divorce the pair begins a new relationship. When […]
A Girl’s Honesty Sees Her Through Adults’ Lunacy: Lenore Zion’s ‘Stupid Children’
by Paul Wilner
There’s a lot of good writing out there—an amazing amount, really, considering the ongoing moaning and groaning going on about the “death of literacy’’ and other current cultural shibboleths—but not that much that is truly original, free of clearly demarcated literary influences, antecedents and referents. A thousand Eggers, David Foster Wallaces, let alone Kerouac and Salinger imitators, bloom from every Brooklyn basement and suburban redoubt. All the more remarkable, then, when someone finds a way to make it new, speaking her own truths against the powers of the past. Which makes Los Angeles author Lenore Zion’s first novel, Stupid Children […]
Galvanized Yet Undone by a Tragedy: Dennis Mahoney’s ‘Fellow Mortals’
by Christopher Connor
On the first page of Dennis Mahoney’s first novel, Fellow Mortals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pages), a fire burns down two houses and damages two more on Arcadia Street. It’s pretty much all downhill from there for the characters. As their lives creep along in the aftermath of that tragedy, Mahoney’s characters show us how a single event can galvanize a group of people yet destroy them at the same time. Infelicitous mailman Henry Cooper starts the blaze on Arcadia Street while trying to light a cigar on his route. The fire demolishes the houses of Nan and Joan […]
The Weight of Her Husband’s Long Friendship: Joan Frank’s ‘Make It Stay’
by Christopher Connor
As love connects us to our closest friends, these friends can’t help but define us as we grow older. Over time, even the lovers and other friends of these people we hold close become intertwined in our lives. Joan Frank’s fifth book of fiction, her new novel, Make It Stay (The Permanent Press, 160 pages), examines the close friendship between two men, and how their love grows in the face of old age, spouses, children, and tragedy. Neil, a Scottish immigrant, finds his way to the quiet Northern California town of Mira Flores. He meets Mike, the boisterous owner of […]