Missionaries by Phil Klay

In the immortal words of Bruce Springsteen, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn91L9goKfQ), "War! What is it good for?" Phil Klay, an Iraq war veteran and debut novelist, might echo the Boss.  "Absolutely nothing!"

Klay, like many soldier-novelists before him, (Karl Marlantes' "Matterhorn" comes to mind) brings a searing honesty and the visceral horror of war to the page in ways that may cause some readers to have to look away. And this is part of what infuriates him. How dare we send our young men and women off to fight for dubious reasons and then forget where they even are and what they are seeing every day in the field.

"Missionaries" follows four disparate characters as their lives intertwine in the killing fields of Columbia during the so-called war on drugs. Mason, a medic seeking a safer assignment now that he's a father, and Lisette, a correspondent hoping to make a name for herself in long form journalism, thought they had experienced the worst in Afghanistan. Yet in Columbia Abel saw his entire village destroyed by narco terrorists and Juan Pablo, a military man, is losing control of the various factions vying for power over the cocaine trade. Graft and corruption is rampant. Those who refuse to pay face the enforcers who seem to change every few months. No one can trust anyone.

Klay is an exquisite wordsmith. His powerful collection of short stories, "Redeployment," won the National Book Award in 2014. He excels at depicting the absurdity of war and the oh-so-human responses of soldiers to disfigurement and death, the way black humor is used to deflect emotions that might ravage a person. He also nails the interpersonal relationships of couples long separated by overseas assignments as they try to maintain honesty while abstaining from truths that might be more than each partner could bear to hear.

"Missionaries" is a brutal history lesson in the globalization of warfare in the 21st century, providing a window into the tricky ways that countries defuse blame as each contributes to the creation of modern drone technology allowing violence to be rained down on the innocent from the comfort of a trailer nestled in the suburban hills outside London or DC.

My initial critique of this book was that it could have benefited from a strategic editing of its over four hundred pages, but in retrospect, I've changed my mind. When a soldier-writer bares his soul on the page the very least we can do is bear witness.

A Reading Job Well Done and Other Thoughts

For the third year in a row I have been asked to participate in the choosing of the top ten literary fiction books of the year for Library Journal. Three of us have been voraciously reading for two months as we suffered over whittling the list down from a hefty number of fifty-five! And still there were some that I'm sure we have missed. But yesterday afternoon in a zoom meeting - what else - we found serendipity among us and decided on our top ten in record time. I can't wait for the article to be published (December issue) so that I can share with you the wonderfully diverse list of authors and their marvelously original works.

In the mean time, bear with me as I adjust to this horrible new "upgrade" to the Blogger format which has been giving me fits. I simply do not have the psychic energy right now to create a new blog on Wordpress and try to import ten years' worth of work. Maybe this winter?

One of the most rewarding benefits of participating in a project like this is being introduced to authors I might never have crossed paths with and being able to share my excitement with you readers. After all, yes, we had to narrow down our choices to ten but honestly there were really no losers. Each novel is noteworthy in its own way and I have enough material to last for months!

Stunning books by debut authors vied for attention with established award winners like Sigrid Nunez, Martin Amis, Marilynn Robinson, and James McBride. My admiration for writers continues to grow unchecked.

Today I am taking a break from the news and from serious fiction to try to revitalize my waning sense of humor. In two weeks we may have a new president and my stomach is in knots. It's fitting that I relax on the swing, on what may be our last warm day of the year, with Christopher Buckley's satire "Make Russia Great Again," though I must admit it's pretty difficult to even work up a laugh as we face the waning months of this destructive administration.

Tomorrow I'll get serious again with my thoughts on Phil Klay's "The Missionaries."

The Fire Next Time, Book Discussion of James Baldwin's Classic

Long before Ta-Nehisi Coates penned his sorrowful yet powerfully angry letter to his son, "Between the World and Me," James Baldwin wrote a similar missive to his nephew in the introduction to "The Fire Next Time." What's so difficult for me to tell you is that, though sixty years separates the two books, the letters sound almost identical.

The fear is palpable, the fear that if the young Black boy refuses to accept what he's been taught, to despise himself, that he's less than his white counterparts, if he goes about with his head held high, he will be a target of white resentment. Baldwin exhorts his namesake, "If you know whence you came, there is no limit to where you can go."

Diane Rehm, who retired from her daily NPR radio program a few years ago, is still doing what she loves - talking about books. Next month? "1984." This month it was the Baldwin. She was joined by several academic scholars including Princeton's Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. whose new book "Begin Again" delves into James Baldwin's work as it relates to America's history with race, poet and writer for the Atlantic Clint Smith, and author of "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," Jeanne Theoharis. What an inspiring way to spend an afternoon!

Like Ms. Rehm I too was ashamed to admit that I had never read this particular book of Baldwin's. What an eye opener! It could have been written yesterday. Baldwin is especially eloquent when he talks about his youth, his abusive step-father who was ironically, a preacher, and Baldwin's own decision to best the man by following in his footsteps and being better, more powerful. He discovered the power of words early on, controlling the congregation with his sermons. He soon lost his faith, but he honed those words for years and, by the time he returned in 1963 from self-exile in Paris, he was, according to Glaude, at the height of his talents and ready to bear witness to the movement.

Theoharis posited that Baldwin demands that this nation grow up and reckon with its racial past by accepting that the myths we have always taught and told ourselves are not necessarily the truth, that no one in white America is completely innocent of setting up the structure that holds its Black citizens back to this very day.

Baldwin's own words on the end page of this brief, cogent work seem prescient. ""Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands....If we, conscious white and conscious blacks...do not falter in our duty now....we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world." We work together or lose it all.

Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore

Every now and then, if you're lucky, a novel grabs you at hello and doesn't let go. Such is the case with this gripping debut novel from Elizabeth Wetmore. https://www.elizabethwetmore.com/ I actually gasped at the unexpectedly powerful first paragraph and then marveled at Ms. Wetmore's visual writing style and wildly apt metaphors.

It's said that this is the year of the woman and I've discovered that so many books on the Library Journal long list for best literary fiction of the year feature wonderfully resilient, powerful female characters. "Valentine" introduces them in abundance.

Fourteen-year-old Glory's is the first voice we hear as she rises to consciousness from the desert floor. When she spots the man passed out in the bed of his pickup, the horror of what happened to her the night before dawns just as the agony from her injuries slams her fully awake. The vast, arid landscape of the west Texas oil fields offers little hope of escape but on the horizon a farmhouse beckons if she can hobble her way there.

Mary Rose can scarcely believe what she sees when the broken girl knocks at her door but she takes Glory in, compels her daughter to call the sheriff, and grabs her rifle when the pickup pulls into her driveway, joining her fate to Glory's from that moment on.

Gossip runs like a wildfire through Odessa. When the rape charges are filed everyone has an opinion. Corinne, recently widowed, angry at the world, and drinking way more than she should sits at the bar with one ear tuned to the conversation of the two old guys a few stools down as they opine that "those Mexican gals grow up quick. She was no kid, she knew what she was doing." We cheer for Corinne as she laces into them but somehow we understand that little good may come of it.

Mary Rose has had to leave her farm and move into town for her own safety. Since she offered to testify her life has become a living hell, death threats come fast and furious as her phone rings off the wall. Her husband thinks she's losing her mind and sometimes she thinks so too. Only her new neighbor Corinne intuits her full fury.

This piercingly angry novel tears open the window into small town prejudice, class warfare, the nature of evil and yes, the satisfaction of revenge. Wetmore describes lives as dry and desiccated as the landscape that envelopes them yet, when pushed to the limit, these women rise up and change each other's futures.

 

Working at Reading!

It's fall and that means that work begins on top ten lists all over the publishing world. Library Journal is no exception. I so look forward to the December issue to see what books knocked reviewers out this year in all my favorite genres but I work in literary fiction and this year there are many outstanding novels to consider, not to mention the extraordinary number of debut novelists whose names we'd like to get out in front of the reading public.


This is all an excuse to explain why I may be absent for a little while as I read madly, deeply, writers from all over the globe and writers from right here at home that will sound very familiar to you, authors like James McBride, Louise Erdrich, or Marilynne Robinson.


Several of the books in contention I've already reviewed. A couple of standouts you may want to be watching for are Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's "A Girl is a Body of Water." The title alone is enough to draw you in. 

Set in 1970s Uganda, this bewitching coming-of-age novel introduces readers to a smart, feisty heroine, Kirabo Nnamiiro, and her complicated extended family. Though deeply loved by the grandparents who are raising her, Kirabo yearns for knowledge of the woman who abandoned her at birth. She consults Nsuuta, the village seer, who recognizes in Kirabo evidence of the local myth of the first women; fiercely independent, changeable, and powerful, like the water from which they came. An exceptional student, Kirabo moves to Kampala, where her father has agreed to finance her education. It is here, as an observer of her unhappy, powerless stepmother and under the influence of her self-sufficient, modern aunt Abi, that Kirabo will learn to unravel the complexity of her lineage and to navigate the rapidly changing world for women in a modern Uganda. Though the novel is rife with the everyday fact of disappointment and loss, the overall atmosphere is one of joyous, feminist abandon. VERDICT A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction and the Kwani Manuscript Project for her first novel, Kintu, UK-based Makumbi is a mesmerizing storyteller, slowly pulling readers in with a captivating cast of multifaceted characters and a soupçon of magical realism guaranteed to appeal to fans of Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, or Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing.


Another that actually hurt to read it was so spot on was "Like a Bird" by Fariha Roisin.

DEBUT In her extraordinary first novel, Róisín exposes the damaging effects of colorism through the Chatterjee family, who unconsciously pit their golden child, light-skinned, confident Alyssa, against Taylia, dark and brooding like her immigrant father and an unwelcome reminder of his roots in Calcutta. Crippled by low self-esteem and a poor body image, Taylia withdraws into her studies, hiding behind baggy, gender-neutral clothing, while her sister flaunts her sexuality and flouts her father's strict moral code. After Alyssa's shocking death, Taylia yearns finally to be seen by her grieving family, but rather than support her in the aftermath of a horrific rape at the hands of a trusted family friend, they exile her from their Upper West Side home. Róisín is masterly in her visceral representation of Taylia's despair and rage, her depression and self-loathing, and her inability to be open to even small acts of kindness. Yet as weeks of her wandering in the city unfold, readers sense Taylia's innate strength, a survival instinct at her core that enables her to find work in a bakery and a friend in Kat, its owner. VERDICT In lustrous, lyrical language, multifaceted artist Róisín has written an ode to the joy and healing power of self-love. This powerful novel is highly recommended


Both of these  novels will be out this month and if this is really the year of the woman then these two books should be on your list. They soar with tough, resilient, funny young women that you'll enjoy getting to know. These writers may not be household names right now but they are going places. Trust me.