Take a Look at the Five and Ten by Connie Willis

Published by Subterranean Press on November 30, 2020

Take a Look at the Five and Ten is both a Christmas story and a love story. I’m not a fan of either genre but I’m a huge fan of Connie Willis. She is known for her science fiction, typically involving time travel or an historical setting. Take a Look at the Five and Ten involves science and history but it’s more of a mystery than science fiction.

The mystery resides in an old woman’s memory of a seasonal job she held at Woolworth’s when she was nineteen. The woman is Grandma Elving, who is actually the grandmother of Dave’s fourth wife. Dave likes to host holiday dinners. In addition to Elving, this year's attendees include Dave's current wife Jillian, Jillian's daughter Sloane, Aunt Mildred, who is related to Dave’s second wife, and Ori, whose mother was briefly married to Dave at some point in his chain of failed marriages. Ori narrates the story. Dave seems like a decent fellow, Ori is meek but pleasant, and Elving is sweet, although nobody wants to listen to her talk about Woolworth’s. Sloan, Jillian, and Mildred are all the kind of relatives who make people dread holiday dinners.

Grandma Elving has spent years boring her relatives with stories about Woolworth’s. It’s all she ever talks about. Everything reminds her of it. When Sloan brings her boyfriend Lassiter to Thanksgiving dinner, Lassiter is fascinated by the Woolworth’s story. He’s researching a phenomenon called Traumatic Flashbulb Memory. He’s sure that Elving suffered a trauma that caused her brain to capture all the surrounding circumstances while repressing the traumatic event. Lassiter wants to test his theory by testing Elving as she recounts all the details of her memory, which Elving is only too happy to do. Ori is only too happy to help Lassiter, despite her lack of interest in the Woolworth’s stories, because she quickly develops a thing for Lassiter.

The mystery surrounds the nature of the trauma that triggered Elving’s flashbulb memory. Whenever Elving seems to get close to recalling it, the memory slips away, leaving her to talk about Woolworth’s Christmas decorations and the perfume counter and her co-workers and whatever other Woolworth’s-related stories pop into her head. She happily goes on field trips with Ori and Lassiter (or sends them off to look for the nativity figures she’s always talking about) as they try to prompt her repressed memory.

Lassiter’s research eventually takes him in an unexpected direction that he can’t easily accept. That’s human nature. When data isn’t consistent with our theories, we cling to the theories and blame the data. But scientists need to be better than that. They need to abandon bad theories or revise them to account for nonconforming data. That ongoing process is what science is all about. (It should be what thinking is all about, yet a large body of people prefer to dismiss reliable data as “fake news” when it disproves a false conclusion that they find comforting.) Using the tools of a masterful storyteller, Willis makes that point without ever saying it out loud.

The novella-length story touches upon issues that engender debate among philosophers and neuroscientists. Are negative emotions (such as fear and distress) stronger than positive emotions (such as joy)? Is there a difference between happiness and joy and, if so, is the difference only one of degree? Yet this is ultimately the story of two people who, while coping with annoying relatives, are drawn to each other as Christmas approaches. It doesn’t necessarily need to be read on a deeper level — as a Christmas love story, it’s sweet enough to star Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in their younger days — but Willis offers greater depth for readers who want it.

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Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Algonquin Books on December 1, 2020

Majella O’Neill is the big girl in the title. Aghybogey in Northern Ireland is the small town. It’s a gossipy town that children who have means or scholarship-worthy smarts leave as soon as they reach adulthood. Having neither, Majella is still there, working the counter at a fish and chips takeaway. The novel follows her during a few days of her uneventful life — deadening days that are enlivened only by Majella’s snark and Michelle Gallen’s gift for capturing the essence of the villagers and the place and time in which they live.

Majella isn’t particularly happy but she makes a point of not being overly sad. People occasionally upset her but, after she calms down, she’s stoic. Her life is boring. She has the same conversations with the same people, listens to and repeats the same jokes, takes the same orders from the same customers, day after day. She relieves her boredom by sleeping as much as she can. On Sunday nights she goes the pub and drinks alone, accepting such offers to shag as might come along. She doesn’t get excited about birthdays but she’s happy to have turned 27 because she likes the number. She has a long list (with subdivisions) of things she doesn’t like and a much shorter list of things, including sex, that she does like. List entries serve as chapter subheadings. The text that follows each entry illustrates why she likes or dislikes the listed item.

Majella is widely regarded as a spinster. She lives with her mother, whose fondness for whiskey and pain pills makes Majella the family wage earner. Her father has disappeared and her Uncle Bobby is said to have blown himself up while planting a booby trap for the IRA. She works with a gossipy married man and occasionally has sex with him because why not? Majella’s sex partner choices are limited but after she learned how to masturbate, she didn’t have much use for men anyway.

Majella’s life might not be the life she wants, but she has learned to cope because she sees no alternative and she doesn’t want to become the people she dislikes. As best she can, she avoids interaction with most people and tries not to make eye contact with anyone. What Majella lacks in ambition she makes up for with attitude and unspoken opinions. She doesn’t like the new doctor because, unlike the old doctor, the new one tries to diagnose problems rather than dispensing pain pills. She has little use for the police or drunks or townspeople who express their sympathy for the loss of her recently deceased grandmother. She dislikes flirting, hypocrisy, telephone calls, nicknames, and a variety of other things. Her daily illustrations of the things she dislikes range from amusing to hilarious.

Gallen’s rendition of the local dialect (“What canna get chew?” “But sure it’s wild hard these days tae find steady work, y’know.”) is a joy to read. She captures the atmosphere of Northern Ireland and the tension between Catholics and Protestants without ever taking it on directly. That narrative decision is true to the story, as Majella accepts the world in which she lives — the border guards who bothered her father when she was young, the arrests that villagers don’t talk about, the revered Cause that she doesn’t really understand — without giving it much thought. The novel is ultimately a snapshot of a few days in Majella’s life. The focus is on Majella and, as one would expect from a snapshot, everything in the background is just a bit blurred.

The murder of an elderly woman lurks in the novel’s background, as do arrests of Majella’s neighbors and customers. Speculation about the whereabouts of Majella’s missing father and the contents of her grandmother’s will contribute to the plot. Still, Big Girl, Small Town is the kind of novel that doesn’t need an identifiable plot. Learning how Majella lives her life, watching her move from one dreary day to the next, tells a story of its own. While the last third of the novel brings some change to Majella’s life, it isn’t clear that Majella is ready for change. An epiphany on the final page suggests she might have learned something from all the episodes of Dallas she watched, but the story brings no firm resolution. Majella has a good bit of life yet to live and the reader will just have to wonder what she might make of it. She is such a sympathetic character that the reader can’t help but root for her to make a wise choice.

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In the Black by Patrick S. Tomlinson

Published by Tor on October 13, 2020

In the Black is a fun mix of space opera and military science fiction. It is also a story of interstellar intrigue involving a fragile peace between humans and aliens that may be undermined by traitors on both sides.

Susan Kamala commands a warship owned by the Combined Corporate Defense Fleet. Her cruiser, the Ansari, is patrolling near a colonized planet called Grendel. In relative terms, Grendel is near the treaty line that divides corporate space from free space. A Xre ship commanded by a Xre called Thuk has been quietly picking off recon drones in corporate space. Kamala is not amused. In defiance of orders designed to forestall interstellar war, she launches a clandestine attack that bedevils the Xre.

Ageless Corporation has a controlling interest in Grendel. The CEO of Ageless is Tyson Abington. Although Ageless is in competition with two other major corporations, it has teamed with them on a project involving Grendel. News of the skirmish with the Xre also jeopardize Ageless’ interests if it were publicized. Another of the Ageless projects hits a snag when a bulk carrier returning from a mining operation is infected by a plague. News of the plague leaks, sending investors into a tizzy and leading Abington to suspect there is a spy in his camp. Among Abington’s lesser problems is his executive assistant. She’s an AI but the new body that Abington gifted her at her request has apparently made her horny.

There are also problems on board Thuk’s ship, which seems to have been sabotaged. Those problems force Kamala to choose between war and humanitarian diplomacy as Thuk’s ship nears the treaty line. The problems affect Kamala more directly when the Defense Fleet appears to regard her with disfavor.

The plot builds tension that befits an action novel, but key characters display a sense of humor that balances the tension. Kamala, Abington, and Thuk all have convincing personalities that add credibility to the story. Patrick S. Tomlinson’s intelligent plot emphasizes diplomacy as much as military conflict and takes a surprising twist by the novel’s end. The story does not end at that point, however, as In the Black is the first novel in a series. Since the novel moves quicky and is free of padding, the story merits another novel.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 3, 2020

Aphasia consists of a handful of sentences. The sentences roam and meander for pages before marching to a halt. To his credit, Mauro Javier Cárdenas breaks up the sentences with commas and dashes and parentheticals so that, with a bit of concentration, it’s possible to follow them to the end. Aphasia isn’t Ulysses. Still, the style makes Aphasia a challenge to read. Readers who admire “page turners” with short sentences and five paragraph chapters — techniques that create the illusion of a fast-moving plot by giving the reader little content to test their attention spans — might detest Aphasia.

Antonio is a reader. Antonio's narrative makes reference to various works of literature, often drawing parallels to his own life. Antonio has two daughters and an ex-wife. He works as a database analyst for an insurance company. He thinks of himself as playing at that job while he writes a novel. For twelve years, Antonio has spent his free time working on a novel that is set in Bogotá. To that end he interviews and records his mother, Leonora, both to get information about family history and to find a voice in which to tell the story.

Much of Aphasia consists of transcribed or recalled conversations and Antonio’s editorial asides. In addition to conversations with Leonora, we read about Antonio’s conversations with his ex-wife Ida (who tells Antonio stories about her Czech parents) and his sister Estela. Antonio learns from them that his father sexually abused his sister and a stepdaughter, but Estela insists that their mother sexually abused Antonio. Since Estela suffers from a serious mental illness, it is difficult to separate her delusions from reality, although the illness appears to have developed later in her life, after she finished college. Leonora, however, believes that her husband abused Estela because she has heard stories about incestuous behavior within his family. Where the truth lies is something of a mystery to Antonio and the reader.

In any event, Antonio feels pained about his role in having his sister institutionalized. Later, after her release, Estela faces criminal charges for an incident with a knife and fears deportation — yet another source of anxiety for Antonio. He also has reservations about his dating site hookups, particularly when his neighbors lodge noise complaints that anger his ex-wife.

To what do these long sentences add up? By the end, Aphasia reads as a domestic drama told from Antonio’s ambivalent point of view. The novel’s title refers to (in Antonio’s words) “inability to comprehend and form language because of a dysfunction in specific brain regions” but Antonio tells us that it is also a metaphor for excessive paralysis, an apt description of Antonio’s life. The one lesson that Antonio internalizes from the people he’s talked to is that no matter how you live your life, it slips away. You need to figure out what you want to do and do it before it’s lights out. It’s always good to be reminded of that, although it’s a fairly common theme.

I’m not sure why Cárdenas’ settled on this writing style — run-on sentences that go on for pages. I assume he was trying to make a point but I struggled to grasp it. Life is challenging and so is my writing?

Is Aphasia worth the challenge? Some aspects of the novel, including recollections of life in Columbia and Czechia, are interesting, as is Estela’s paranoia about her family and Barack Obama. But Antonio isn’t very interesting. I’m not usually thrilled with novels by writers who write about being writers, while Antonio’s observations about more substantial literary figures add little to the story. The novel peters out without resolving any of the storylines in Antonio’s present and it’s never clear that he learned the full story of his parents’ past. In the end, this novel of Antonio’s ambivalence left me ambivalent.

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