Mockingbird by Chuck Wendig

Published by Angry Robot on September 6, 2012

Mockingbird fails to equal the emotional resonance of Blackbirds, the novel that introduced Miriam Black, but it is written with the same intensity.  Chuck Wendig again tells a fast-paced, enjoyable story that delivers a solid punch.

If you read Blackbirds, you know that Miriam envisions the death of any person she touches.  Miriam is living a mostly platonic life with her friend Louis in an Airstream on Long Beach Island -- not quite what she had in mind at the end of Blackbirds.  Working the checkout line at Ship Bottom Sundries isn’t for her, a truth she confirms when her smart mouth gets her fired.  To earn some cash, she accepts a gig forecasting the death of a hypochondriac who teaches at a boarding school.  There she meets twelve-year-old Lauren (“Wren”) Marten.  What she learns of Wren’s fate is beyond disturbing … and even worse is the knowledge that other girls at the school will meet the same gruesome death.  To do something about it, to change fate (a task she does not undertake lightly, given the events that transpired in Blackbirds), Miriam must find the man she sees in her visions.  Unfortunately for Miriam, fate doesn’t like to be changed.

The story is delightfully creepy but a bit over-the-top, and for that reason is less powerful than the story told in Blackbirds.  It is nonetheless a story told with intelligence and humor.  Wendig works Julius Caesar and The Waste Land and the myth of Philomela into the plot, not to mention a variety of talkative birds.  I also liked the motivation for the child killings -- it’s original and clever -- as well as the ethical dilemma Miriam must confront.

Mockingbird offers additional glimpses of Miriam’s childhood that contribute to the reader’s understanding of the character.  Miriam’s rebellion against her oppressive religious upbringing explains her foul mouth.  (Warning to readers who don’t like profanity:  this is not the book for you.)  Unlike Blackbirds, however, the Miriam who starts Mockingbird is pretty much the same Miriam we see at the end.  Her character doesn’t evolve in this novel as it did in the first one.  Perhaps that’s to be expected, but I would like to see her continue the journey of self-discovery she started in Blackbirds.

Wendig writes snappy prose that is filled with attitude.  He has a knack for making obnoxious characters endearing.  Miriam won my heart (again) when she made fun of Applebee’s (Crapplebee’s).  The novel’s abundant action scenes are blistering, and just when you least expect it, Wendig adds a touch of sweetness to the story.  Although Mockingbird isn’t as surprising or moving as Blackbirds, it made me anxious to read the next installment in the saga of Miriam Black.

RECOMMENDED

Nine Months by Paula Bomer

Published by Soho Press on August 21, 2012 

Nine Months is a counterpoint to smiling Super Mommies and happy chatter about the miracle of childbirth.  The story is disquieting but told with unvarnished honesty, in prose that is intense and immediate.  It’s also very funny.

Sonia isn’t made for the rituals of motherhood.  Hanging out with the neighborhood mommies reminds her of high school cliques.  She doesn’t agree that children are sacred, that mothers should sacrifice careers and passions to stay home with them.  She loves her two boys, envies their unbridled aggression, but raising them does not provide the sense of contentment that other moms seem to experience.  At the age of 35, she is deeply ambivalent about having a third child.  She feels her accidental fetus sucking the life out of her.

As the story begins, Sonia is experiencing guilt because she is “the worst thing on earth”:  a mother who left her children.  Even worse, although she’s in denial as she haunts malls and lays around her hotel rooms, she’s due to face the horror of labor for a third time.  Sonia thinks she deserves the pain of giving birth; it is a punishment she has earned.  After the baby is born, the story backtracks eight months.  We meet Sonia’s husband Dick.  We follow Sonia through the hellacious first trimester and the blissful second trimester of her pregnancy before, in a moment of panic, she begins a road trip that she defines as a “find-myself mission.”  The drive to Indiana and Colorado and Wisconsin seems more like an excuse to escape from the reality of her life than a vehicle to understand her life, but it gives her an opportunity to revisit her past and thus allows the reader to develop some insight into her acerbic personality.

Chunks of Nine Months are long rants, the sort of thing that usually bores or annoys me, but these are so well written and so amusing that I enjoyed reading them.  Paula Bomer’s take on female artists and poets and their relationship to motherhood is priceless.  Bomer has fun with parents who obsess about preschools, who eagerly medicate their kids, who gender stereotype them (having a daughter means having a helper with the housework), or who “treat their children like a combination between a science and an art project.”  Her description of parents who need to find a “disorder” to explain unexceptional behavior -- who fail to recognize that every kid isn’t just like every other kid -- is hilarious.  Sonia’s road trip gives Bomer the opportunity to lampoon a variety of lifestyles.

Yet not all of Nine Months is devoted to rage.  Some scenes are tender.  Some are erotic.  A few -- particularly those that focus on Sonia’s reaction to her pregnancy -- are insightful.  Whether Sonia is angry, crazy, or horny, she never slacks in her devotion to comical commentary.

My reservations about the novel are few.  Some scenes are predictable, as when Sonia recalls (and bemoans) her lost youth.  On occasion, Sonia’s judgmental nature wears thin, particularly when she indulges her sense of East Coast superiority.  Given that much of Nine Months is a road novel, the sense of place is surprisingly thin -- Indiana is so much like Colorado that I wondered whether Bomer has ever visited either state.  The “you can’t go home again” vibe that appears mid-story isn’t terribly original.  The “road trip of self-discovery” theme has also been done to death, but this one has some freshness, even if Sonia doesn’t discover anything more profound than “I hate myself when I’m pregnant.”

Nine Months is probably not a book that Super Mommies will appreciate.  Nor is it the right book for readers who want characters to behave in exemplary ways.  (When, near the end, an ex-lover gives Sonia a rather cruel lecture about her willingness to inflict pain to satisfy her self-indulgent whims, I wanted to applaud.)  But Nine Months generates serious laughter, the writing is sharp, and Bomer manages to create sympathy and understanding for Sonia despite her shockingly irresponsible behavior.  That’s a pretty good trick for a debut novelist.

RECOMMENDED

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

First published in 1955

Despite its acclaim as an early vision of America after a nuclear war, The Long Tomorrow doesn't have the same impact as the best examples of post-apocalyptic fiction. Leigh Brackett's 1955 novel nonetheless deserves its status as a science fiction "classic," albeit more for the message it delivers than for the quality of the story it tells.

After the war, cities are widely regarded as a source of wickedness, although Len Colter's grandmother remembers them with fondness, as places with electricity and indoor plumbing, supermarkets and movie theaters. The people best equipped to survive the annihilation aren't city dwellers but those who are accustomed to living a simple rural life. The Mennonites have multiplied, a trend that is enhanced by a constitutional amendment prohibiting cities of more than one thousand residents. The religious values that inform the Mennonite leaders also (not so coincidentally) work to their economic advantage. The Mennonites, however, have little use for members of another fast-growing religion, the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists who preach hatred and urge that sinners (including those who advocate urban growth) be subjected to the usual range of biblical torments, including death by stoning.

Len has a rebellious instinct that no amount of whipping will extinguish. His desire for knowledge, his will to know what exists in the world beyond the village limits, might be sinful -- the sin of pride, his father tells him -- but Len is willing to accept damnation for the sake of learning the truth. After his grandmother explains that, before the war, the government built a town in the west called Bartorstown, populated with scientists dedicated to a secret project, Len resolves to find it, hoping it will be the source of enlightenment he craves. Thus Len and his cousin Esau begin a journey across a post-apocalyptic landscape. The truth about Bartorstown comes as a surprise and the story takes an interesting turn as it nears the end.

Like many dystopian tales, The Long Tomorrow has a cautionary message. This one is about the evils of intolerance and thought-control, the value of independent thinking. The fear of cities expressed in Brackett's novel is really a fear of progressive thinking, a belief that life was better (in modern terms, that "family values" were stronger) in the good old days. Knowledge is condemned because it was misused; a retreat from knowledge is seen as the path to salvation. Still, as Len comes to realize, even if we can be cleansed of sin (as his people believe), we can never be cleansed of knowledge -- "there is no mystical escape from it." Deliberate ignorance is not the antidote to dangerous knowledge; wisdom is. Perhaps themes that were compelling in 1955 now seem dated, but the argument that there should be limits to knowledge, particularly when knowledge contradicts biblical teachings, retains a twenty-first century following. The argument that cities were destroyed in a nuclear war because they were "sinful" finds echoes in similar remarks made about New Orleans after Katrina.

I've never been as appreciative of Brackett's prose as some sf fans. She was a perfectly capable writer, but (at least to me) her style is no more "literary" than that of many other well-recognized sf writers of her era. Still, her writing becomes more resonant as the story progresses. On occasion the novel has the flavor of a western; at other times there's a hint of Huckleberry Finn, although Huck's trip down the Mississippi is vastly more eventful than Len's underwhelming voyage along the Ohio River. Other "message" novels manage more subtlety than this one. Although The Long Tomorrow doesn't make it into my personal canon of cherished sf novels from the 1950s, it endures as an enjoyable read.

RECOMMENDED

The Barcelona Brothers by Carlos Zanón

Published by Other Press on August 28, 2012

“Like a black angel of memory, almost every tale, every occurrence finds an echo inside the walls of the barrio.”  The Barcelona Brothers (from which this quotation is drawn) tells a story of intertwined lives, of barrio residents reacting to the echo of a dramatic event that will force them to reexamine their desperate lives.

The novel opens with the mother of all bar fights.  Tanveer Hussein loses.  His assailant, Epi Dalmau, flees.  Epi’s brother Alex, a medicated schizophrenic, witnesses the killing, as does Salva, the bar’s owner.  Rumors spread around the barrio about the cause and perpetrator of the assault on Tanveer, all of them wrong.  As the story progresses, glimpses of the past alternate with snatches of the present, providing clues to Epi’s motive for attacking Tanveer. That Tanveer deserves to die becomes increasingly apparent as his violent life is revealed, yet Epi seems an unlikely assassin.

The story drifts from past to present, from one damaged character to another.  Whether they are central to the story or playing a bit part, the characters are unique and unforgettable.  Tiffany Brisette, Tanveer’s girlfriend, is driven by the need to feel empowered.  She thinks she can control the game when she’s with a man because she’s the only one who knows they’re playing a game.  Her sister Jamelia, a little slow and befuddled by life (and by far the novel’s sweetest character), is convinced that God will eventually punish Tiffany for being mean to everyone.  Aging part-time sex worker Rocío Baeza just wants to stay alive while she supplements her family’s income.  Allawi, like barbers everywhere, is the barrio’s central repository of gossip.

Carlos Zanón writes with insight and sensitivity about hopeless and forgotten lives.  His characters are incapable of planning or of achieving goals because in their lives “one thing knocks away another, like in a billiards game.”  Their aspirations are simple -- a stable relationship, a job, a good life -- but unattainable.  Although they seem destined to make bad choices, it’s not clear that good choices are ever available.  They are prisoners of their own fatalism.  They live together but they are alone, “their hearts withered by solitude.”

The barrio itself is virtually a character.  This isn’t the Barcelona of fashion models, art museums, and trendy tapas bars, where happy tourists play on white sand beaches.  It is a gritty place where dreams shatter like the windows of abandoned cars, a locked warehouse that isolates the poor and the mentally ill and the drug addicted, a place where the criminal underclass allies with the Arab immigrants who are shunned elsewhere.

Zanón’s powerful prose builds and maintains teeth-clenching tension as the story moves to a conclusion that the reader will both anticipate and dread.  It seems inevitable that at least one luckless life will end tragically, yet the final chapters leave room for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps.  Some readers will dislike the uncertainty, the feeling that the novel isn’t quite finished, but I appreciated the respite it offered from the sense of impending doom that pervades much of the story.

Although I loved The Barcelona Brothers, I recognize that many readers will not.  If you are looking for humor and warmth, look elsewhere.  If you do not like a book unless you like the characters, if you believe fictional characters should always learn lessons or experience moral transformations, this is not the book for you.  The world doesn't always work that way, and The Barcelona Brothers reflects that reality.

It is a tribute to Zanón that he made me care so much about such disagreeable people.  If, like me, you appreciate strong and uncompromising writing that examines the hearts and minds of realistic (albeit broken) characters in dark settings, you will find much to admire in The Barcelona Brothers.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle

Published by Spiegel & Grau on August 21, 2012

A large man who calls himself Pepper is detained for 72 hours of observation in a psychiatric hospital after a run-in with a trio of cops who are too lazy to arrest him. Drugged into a zombie-like state by psychotropic medications, Pepper is menaced by some sort of creature. Is it real or a construct of his addled brain? Is it the Devil or is there a logical explanation for the creature's presence?

As the days go by, the hospital turns out to be a lot like Hotel California: you can check out, but you can never leave. When patients start to check out -- killed by the Devil? -- Pepper decides to investigate. Whatever the thing might be, it lives behind a silver door and staff members seem to be protecting it.

The Devil in Silver is an unconventional horror story. Victor LaValle's accurate rendering of a psychiatric ward is enough to provoke shudders -- more so, in fact, than the resident monster. The novel's strength lies in its characterization of Pepper and the other patients. Their antics provide a large dose of comedy to offset the horror. The sheer loopiness of the story is, in fact, what sustained my interest. This isn't the most politically correct novel you'll ever read, but it's often quite funny.

The best horror stories persuade the reader that the nightmare is real. The Devil in Silver is just too goofy to be frightening, but again, this isn't a conventional horror story. Instead, LaValle seems to suggest that true horror is found in the abuse of power: by trigger-happy police officers, by hospital administrators who place profit ahead of treatment, by clinicians who overmedicate patients because a docile patient population is less work. Some chapters seem like an homage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to which LaValle makes occasional reference, but The Devil in Silver moves in a much different direction than Ken Kesey's classic.

While The Devil in Silver is entertaining, it does have faults. The narration calls attention to itself with a flippant attitude and it occasionally speaks directly to the reader (with phrases like "you won't be too surprised to learn"). The narrative voice is distracting; it frequently took me out of the story. A long section devoted to the history of a rat named LeClair is an amusing but unnecessary digression. A chapter that doesn't work very well recounts the story of Vincent Van Gough to make a veiled point about the lack of attention given to institutionalized patients in contemporary America. The ending is a bit of a letdown.

Faults notwithstanding, The Devil in Silver works as light comedy that addresses a dark subject. It isn't easy to avoid burying the serious within the fluff of frivolity, but LaValle manages to balance humor and tragedy in a story that is strange but purposeful.

RECOMMENDED