Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Published by The Dial Press on August 13, 2013

The characters in Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's stories live in a gloomy world. They are divided by race and religion. Business is bad. Factories have killed all the fish. A war is coming; the war has started; the war will never end. One day we are winning the war; the next day we are losing. It's too hot; it's too cold; it's always raining; cars are buried in snow. To returning soldiers, people say "thank you for your service" and "you're really special" and "you're our hero" because that's what everyone else says, even though they barely know the guy and don't honestly care about him. The young men who don't enlist, who stay stuck in their jobs, are jealous of the attention heaped on the returning veterans.

Sayrafiezadeh's best stories focus on the workplace. Most of his characters are stuck in lives that are going nowhere. In "Cartographer," a bus strike becomes a metaphor for the narrator's motionless life. The short order cook in "Appetite," feeling more machine than human, worries that he will never become an adult, that he'll always be burning grilled cheese sandwiches. While his friends go off to fight a war, the Walmart assistant manager in "Associates" fantasizes about the daughter of the fence to whom he sells merchandise he's stolen from his store. The one bright spot belongs to the disabled janitor in "Victory" who feels fortunate when he starts dating a kleptomaniac who steals from the store where he works.

Some stories are grounded in the surrealistic war that the United States is fighting against an unnamed country. A soldier in "A Brief Encounter With the Enemy" behaves unheroically. Resentful of the pride his boss and co-workers express in his friend upon his return from service, the narrator of "Operators" makes an impulsive decision to enlist that he soon second-guesses. Armed with platitudes, a teacher in "Enchantment" returns home from the war, resuming his teaching job and his affair with a married women.

The only story that doesn't fit within either of those groups, "Paranoia," tells of the narrator's interrupted friendship with an undocumented immigrant.

Although none of these stories grabbed me on an emotional level, they're intellectually satisfying and laced with understated humor. The humor gains force as the same clichéd platitudes appear in multiple stories. Sayrafiezadeh is particularly adept at portraying the dreariness and soul-robbing impact of low-paying jobs. When the focus shifts to the war, the stories become less effective, in part because the nature of the war is so vague (although I suppose that's the point). No story stands out but collectively they humanize the marginalized, encouraging the reader to see the people we pass every day but never notice.

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The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison

Published by Penguin Books on June 25, 2013

Throughout most of the novel, The Silent Wife alternates third person point of view between Todd and Jodi, who have lived together as husband and wife for many years. Jodi is a therapist with a string of degrees. Todd is a real estate developer. He suffers from long-term depression, an affliction he's treating by having sex with a much younger woman: Natasha, his best friend's daughter.

A lengthy set-up -- the stuff of ordinary domestic drama -- left me scratching my head and wondering why The Silent Wife is marketed as a thriller. A.S.A. Harrison tells a well-written story, but I was waiting for it to turn into Fatal Attraction. That doesn't happen. Although there are elements of psychological tension, they are subdued; the story is more ironic than suspenseful. That doesn't make The Silent Wife a bad novel, but it won't live up to the expectations of readers who are expecting a thriller.

Given the title, it shouldn't be surprising that The Silent Wife is a quiet novel, written in soothing prose. As the novel's title implies, Jodi is not a wife who screams at her husband. "Jodi's great gift is her silence ... but silence is also her weapon." Her silence is "dense and purposeful, a barricade." Her typical response to adversity is denial.

Jodi is an interesting, well-formed, believable character, as is Todd, whose midlife crisis leaves him unable to make (or stick to) a decision. When he is with Jodi, he loves and wants Jodi; when he is with Natasha, he loves and wants Natasha; when he spots another pretty face, he wants her; when he's alone, he is tightly wrapped but coming uncoiled, an unraveling bundle of anxieties and sore spots.

Jodi is in therapy and, from her sessions with her therapist (presented in transcript form), we eventually learn the cause of her disengagement. Todd, on the other hand, doesn't need therapy to help him remember the formative events of his past. He is "ambushed by scenes of his childhood," particularly those involving his abusive father. The reader wonders, however, just how accurately Todd perceives himself. Neither Todd's background nor Jodi's adds much value to the story.

Natasha's naiveté and her shockingly self-centered view of her relationship with Todd is believable, given her age. Todd's willingness to tolerate her bossy, bratty personality is also marginally believable, given his midlife crisis. Jodi's mentally unhealthy response to Todd's behavior is fully convincing.

Even if The Silent Wife doesn't work as a suspense novel, as a story of irony it works quite well. The plot resolution is clever and its impact on Jodi's personality is satisfying. If you ignore the marketing and view this as a domestic novel that happens to include an element of crime, The Silent Wife is a pleasant reading experience. It just isn't a conventional thriller.

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Save Yourself by Kelly Braffet

Published by Crown on August 6, 2013

"A person can learn a lot from misery," says one of the characters in Save Yourself. If so, Kelly Braffet's characters are well-educated. The miseries of high school, of dysfunctional families, and of small town life are all vividly illustrated in Braffet's novel.

Patrick Cusimano's father, while driving drunk, killed a child named Ryan Czerpak. His brother Mike blames Patrick for calling the police to report his father's crime. The Czerpak family, on the other hand, has demonized Patrick because he waited nineteen hours before he called the police.

Two young women create additional tension in Patrick's life. One is Mike's girlfriend Caro, a waitress in a dead-end diner. The other is Layla Elshere, a sixteen-year-old Goth. As the daughter of a controversial preacher, Layla -- like Patrick -- knows what it is like to be ostracized because of an unpopular parent. Although Layla has a blood-drinking boyfriend, she is attracted to (and shares) Patrick's alienation, while Patrick justly regards Layla as a jailbait stalker.

The other key player is Layla's younger sister. Verna wants to be known as something other than the sister of "Freakshow" Elshere and is sometimes appalled by Layla's behavior, yet she's impatient with the repressed attitude of her parents and is drawn to the adventurous independence of Layla's antisocial friends.

With the possible exception of Verna, the characters in Save Yourself aren't particularly likable, but they've been written into being with such brutal honesty that whether they are likable is irrelevant. None of the primary characters are loathsome; they are capable of cruelty but they aren't malicious. Rather, they are reacting to the cruelty that surrounds them. Being nice, turning the other cheek, makes them feel powerless and marks them as weak. They're immature, confused, self-destructive, and insecure. They hate their lives. They have zero self-esteem and, given the parents and peers who are constantly pointing out their faults, it's easy to understand why. They are exploring possibilities, searching for acceptance, trying to empower themselves. They want better lives but they don't know how to change, so they dress up their lives "with some ugly throw pillows" and pretend to be satisfied. They make bad choices because that's what kids and young adults do, but Braffet makes their choices understandable (and forgivable).

Braffet's powerful storytelling drives home the theme of Save Yourself: that young people crave safety and acceptance and will do foolish things to attain them. She captures the perils of adolescence and young adulthood in language that is blunt but fluid. The male and female characters are equally convincing. The setting, a town of chain restaurants and beer bars and convenience stores that are "like purgatory, with snacks," is drawn with photographic realism.

Unfortunately, the storyline involving the Elshere sisters leads to an improbable denouement that struck me as contrived and out-of-step with the rest of the story. Braffet makes some of the novel's secondary characters ridiculously misogynistic and senselessly violent but fails to develop their personalities in a way that would make those characteristics believable. On the other hand, the resolution of the main conflict involving the two brothers is credible. The story of the brothers is dramatic while the story of the sisters becomes melodramatic. When the two stories intersect in the penultimate scene, the result is less than satisfying. Save Yourself isn't a bad novel -- much of it is quite good -- but had Braffet not been so determined to give the reader a thriller ending, she might have crafted a great novel.

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Sandrine's Case by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Mysterious Press on August 6, 2013

There are few novelists of intrigue I admire as much as Thomas Cook. Whether he's writing a spy story, a crime novel, or a courtroom drama, his approach is unconventional. Tension derives not from action but from the intense probing of his characters' lives. In Sandrine's Case, Cook uses a criminal trial to reveal not just the facts underlying a death, but the mind and soul of the accused, an unfeeling man who (his wife once said) is composed of scar tissue.

Sam Madison, an English professor at a liberal arts college in a small Georgia town, had a terrible argument with his wife Sandrine, a history professor at the same institution. He is accused of killing her and of attempting to disguise the murder as suicide. The evidence against him is circumstantial: a "sinister research history" on his computer; his role in obtaining the Demoral that killed her; the antihistamines in Sandrine's blood; a broken cup; a parody Sam wrote of noir fiction; "a silence when I should have spoken, a question I should have asked but hadn't." Sandrine had recently been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease, a condition that (according to the prosecutor) furnished Sam's motive: it was easier to kill than to face years serving as a caretaker, feeding and bathing his helpless wife. Sam fears that the jurors will despise him because he is an intellectual living a privileged life, but the most damning evidence against him are the words Sandrine spoke to her friends about Sam's detached, isolated nature. Sam is, according to Sandrine, a sociopath (or so she said in the last words she spoke to him), and he knows his "cold perhaps even haughty demeanor" is not playing well with the jury. He has good reason to fear that the trial has become a referendum on his marriage, that he will be punished for being a distant, uncaring husband.

The ultimate mystery in Sandrine's Case is not what Sam did or did not do, but whether Sam is correct in certain suspicions he begins to harbor about Sandrine. Since Sandrine's Case is told in the first person from Sam's perspective, it obviously isn't a whodunit. Sam feels enormous guilt, but for much of the novel his precise role in Sandrine's death is unclear. Was he possessed, after twenty years of sharing a home with his wife and daughter, to murder Sandrine, despite his belief that "no man had ever been loved by a more worthy woman"? As Sam slowly disintegrates -- thinking about the testimony of the witnesses at his trial, reliving the police interrogations, recalling (in bits and pieces) his life with Sandrine -- he begins, perhaps for the first time, to understand himself, to come to terms with his deep sense of failure, a judgment he "put on everyone else," particularly Sandrine, because he feared to judge himself. The testimony of witnesses teaches Sam what Sandrine really thought of him, and seeing himself through Sandrine's eyes is a revelatory experience.

Sam describes Sandrine's academic writing as "graceful and carefully measured," a description that applies equally to Cook's prose. Sam, who laments "what a low culture we have now," has never read a crime novel (unless you count Crime and Punishment or other works of literary genius). If he were to do so, Sandrine's Case would be a good place to start. Cook's insight into his characters and his elegant prose are undeniably the stuff of quality literature, yet he (unlike Sam, whose failed novel became more academic with each rewrite) never fails to tell a compelling story. There might be more courtroom theatrics in a Grisham novel, but there is more bare honesty, more heart, in Sandrine's Case than you'll find in a dozen Grishams. It is a strangely redemptive, life-affirming story about death, a decidedly different take on courtroom fiction, but in its own quiet way, a small masterpiece.

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Lexicon by Max Barry

Published by Penguin Press on June 18, 2013

Research suggests that babies babble the phonemes of hundreds of languages and that parental encouragement of recognized sounds shapes the language the babies learn to speak.  If that is so, perhaps there is meaning in those root sounds that we don’t fully understand.  Maybe the brain has a fundamental language (akin to machine language) from which all other languages derive.  That concept, at any rate, provides a foundation for understanding the story that Max Barry tells in Lexicon.

Building on various “confusion of tongue” myths that explain the divergence of language (including the Tower of Babel), Lexicon becomes a contemplation of words:  how they shape our lives, how we use them as tools to manipulate others, how we weaponize them.  Barry’s novel imagines tangible words that literally have the power to kill, but it’s easy to see that as a metaphor for our use of words to control and even to destroy others, psychologically if not physically.

The story begins with Wi Parkel’s kidnapping from an airport.  People who have taken the names of dead poets are trying to kill him.  Wil has no idea why he’s been targeted.  Has he been mistaken for someone else, or has he forgotten his former identity?  He knows only that this has something to do with an incident that wiped out all three thousand residents of Broken Hill, Australia.

Soon the story takes us to Emily Ruff, sixteen and homeless.  Emily is recruited to take a series of tests because she’s unusually persuasive.  If she passes, she’ll attend a school where the teachers have taken the names of (mostly dead) poets.  The school’s approach to persuasion is holistic, with special attention to the power of words.

The narrative jumps around in time, challenging the reader to reorder the novel’s events in linear time to make sense of the story.  How Wil’s story will intersect with Emily’s isn’t immediately clear, although Barry plants clues in the first third of the novel that make it possible for the reader to guess the truth before it’s revealed.   The novel’s clever construction engages the reader’s attention by adding the elements of an intellectual mystery to two very different stories:  while Wil’s story has all the elements of a thriller (including chases and gun battles and a conspiracy that could lead to world domination), Emily’s is a science fiction coming-of-age tale.  The eventual joinder of the two stories transcends genres.

To the extent that it is a lengthy parable about the power of language, Lexicon strikes me as something that China Mieville might write.  They are stylistically different authors -- Barry uses more humor than Mieville -- but the depth of abstract thought that characterizes Mieville’s writing is present here.  Like Mieville, Barry takes familiar themes (“power corrupts”) and illustrates them in imaginative ways.  Barry riffs on the manipulative potential of the internet and on the insidious nature of online data collection while telling some of the story -- or providing enlightened commentary on the story’s themes -- in the form of IRC chats and online forum posts (including, a bit ironically, posts on Barry’s own online political forum).  He explores the conflict between our dual instincts for privacy and intimacy.  He suggests that we are enslaved by primal desires in the same way that words hold us in bondage.

Lexicon isn’t as purposefully goofy as some of Barry’s other novels, but like his other works, moments of humor lighten a serious theme.  It’s possible to put all of the deep thinking aside and enjoy Lexicon as an ingeniously plotted amalgam of genre stories:  romance and science fiction and action/adventure and mystery/thriller.  It’s better to appreciate Lexicon on each of its different levels:  for its humor, its excitement, and its ability to stimulate thought about the magical power of words (even words we don’t recognize or consciously understand ) to influence our lives.

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