The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of
Here They Come and
Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Bat Segundo interview with Murphy)
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in
Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of
Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by
The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents
all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Bat Segundo interview with McClear)
I’ve just read Black Swan Green myself – my reaction is here – and agree that it is ambitious, and also feel that it establishes literary skills that haven’t necessarily been evident in the style of fiction he’s chosen to write before this, notably a sustained narrative voice. But I do wonder whether you are right that it will split readers. Anyone expecting another Cloud Atlas will probably be disappointed, but I’m not convinced that many people would be reading him in the expectation that he would repeat himself. Surely the split over Saturday was largely political rather than literary, and I don’t think the political content of Black Swan Green, over the Falklands War for instance, would have the same response because it is so clearly filtered through the 13-year-old perspective of the narrator. (Mind you, I saw the political content of Saturday as McEwan’s way of showing us into the mind of Perowne, but many readers seemed to take it straight.)