Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

Published by Doubleday on March 10, 2020

Good Citizens Need Not Fear is an interlocking collection of wry, subversive stories about people who are living absurd lives in Ukraine. The first five take place while the Soviet Union was intact. The last four are post-breakup. Before the fall, people have money but nothing to spend it on. After the fall, there are fifteen brands of sausage but nobody can afford them.

Bureaucrats are the foil of the Soviet-era “Novostroïka.” Daniil’s building has no heat, but when he complains to the town council, they tell him the building does not exist. Deciding that Daniil is wasting the town’s gas by heating the apartment with a stove, the town turns off the gas. At the canning combine, Daniil pretends to work while the combine pretends to pay him. Daniil must go to extreme lengths to prove that his building exists — and perhaps to prove to himself that his own existence is real.

“Little Rabbit” introduces baby Zaya, who has been abandoned or orphaned and thus taken to the baby house. At five, her quirky nature causes the Commission to label her as a defective part in the Soviet machine, so she is sent to a psychoneurological internat for rehabilitation. Zaya, it turns out, is not so easily contained.

A poet in the Kirovka Cultural Club named Konstantin also earns rehabilitation when he is accused of telling a political joke. Since most of the words in the joke have been redacted from the report, the narrator of “Letter of Apology,” who has been assigned to rehabilitate Konstantin, does not know what the joke might have been. The narrator imagines himself destined for the Honor Guard, but after working with Konstantin and his beguiling wife Milena, the narrator will be lucky to keep his job. This is the most amusing story in the collection.

By the time “Miss USSR” takes place, Konstantin is running the Kirovka Cultural Club. He copies the American idea of holding a beauty pageant, but he is reprimanded for allowing an outlandish Ukranian beauty named Orynko to win on grounds that are suspected to be political. Konstantin is ordered to revoke her title, which he neglects to do. When his superior decides to hold a Miss USSR pageant, Konstantin wants to enter Orynko as Miss Ukraine, but she has been sent away. Konstantin recruits Zaya from the internat to stand as her replacement, leading to a bizarre chain of events that turn Konstantin into a local hero.

Konstantin returns in the post-Soviet story “Lucky Toss.” He has now purchased the apartment next to his own, where he displays a saint, charging pilgrims for the privilege of visiting her. He employs the bureaucrat who tried to rehabilitate him as a guard. The story takes a mystical turn after the guard accidentally breaks the saint’s teeth and then his own. “Lucky Toss” is one of only two stories in the book that didn’t appeal to me.

A couple of stories revolve around bootlegs of western record albums that are pressed into x-rays and thus known as “bone records.” “Bone Music” is set in the Soviet era. Smena has the luxury of living alone in a two-room apartment, but might lose it if she is sent to prison for making bootleg recordings of decadent Western rock ‘n’ roll. The post-Soviet story “Roach Brooch” recalls how a grandfather refused to get a tumor removed because its existence entitled him to a free monthly x-ray of his guitar-shaped pelvis. Bone records are even more valuable as post-Soviet memorabilia that tourists love to acquire. The story is ultimately about grandparents who feel abandoned by their children.

Finally, in the post-Soviet “Homecoming,” Zaya returns to the now shuttered internat. Playing interrogator or torturer or prison guard, she works for a business that recreates the experiences of Ivan Denisovich for tourists. The rather tame experience exposes tourists to an experience less harsh than the lives of the homeless people they see from the internat’s windows — until Zaya elevates their terror. The story, the last in the volume, reunites Zaya with Konstantin and gives the collection a sense of closure.

The least satisfying story, “The Ermine Coat,” features Milena as a seamstress who makes an ermine coat for the child of a wealthy Italian. She hopes to earn a commission that will allow her sister and niece to emigrate to Canada, a dream that the niece undermines.

The tragicomic stories in Good Citizens Need Not Fear illuminate life in Ukraine. I was struck by the similarity of living without freedom (during the Soviet days) and living with unbridled freedom (in the post-Soviet version of the Wild West). They are flip sides of the same coin of misery. The Soviet-era stories have more energy and bite, but the collection as a whole gives the reader a sense of the absurdity that characterized Ukrainian life as the nation transitioned from a Soviet to an independent state.

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The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

Published by Harper on May 19, 2020

Lionel Shriver is known for picking a social trend and exploring its ramifications by building a novel around it. In The Motion of the Body Through Space, the trend is exercise, or as one character calls it, “the fetishization of fitness.” While it lasts, fitness can be a great thing, although like so many great things, it can also lead to smugness and a sense of moral superiority — I’m fit and you’re fat. The novel might be read as an indictment of self-righteous people who judge or condemn those who criticize their behavior. People who question slavish devotion to exercise, for example, are ridiculed as envious slugs, while those who criticize laziness are scorned as fitness freaks. But the novel explores more than the lifestyle of extreme exercise. Its ultimate subject is aging and the inevitable decay that no amount of fitness training can defeat.

As Shriver makes clear, we enjoy the illusion that we are in control of our bodies, but “only at the body’s behest” do we exist at all. Some people hate their bodies, an antagonism that grows “into the central battle of their lives.” Others are happy with their bodies until they fail, which they ultimately will. All it takes is “a moment of clumsiness on the stairs or a bad oyster” to come undone. If nothing else, age will rob the body of its vitality. One point of Shriver’s novel is that nothing lasts, that healthy bodies will inevitably be overtaken by decay and disease. All that smugness might one day be — like so many other things — a source of regret.

Unlike her husband, Serenata Terpsichore has always exercised regularly — to the point where, at 60, she is contemplating a knee replacement. Serenata is an insular, self-contained person. She has always resented it when something she enjoys doing becomes trendy. If she discovers a band or a kind of footwear, she hates knowing that “whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasm or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity.”

Serenata is married to Remington Alabaster, probably because he is the only other human whose company she finds tolerable. Remington thinks Serenata wants “to hog all the benefits” of her habits and can’t abide anyone else enjoying them. To Remington, Serenata’s “lack of communal ties is a little chilling,” but Serenata has “no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba.”

Serenata and Remington have a daughter named Valeria who largely ignored them before deciding that she forgave them for unspecified wrongdoing. Now Valeria wants to save their souls with born-again fanaticism. Their son Deacon, on the other hand, was apparently born evil and has no desire to change. Deacon plays a relatively small role but he’s the only likable character in the novel. Remington bemoans the fact that their kids grew up to be white trash. Serenata and Remington can at least bond over their failure as parents.

The first third of the novel addresses Remington’s training and participation in a marathon, which Serenata not-so-secretly views with derision. During the marathon, Remington meets and later hires a sexy fitness trainer who uses the professional name Bambi Buffer. Bambi encourages Remington to complete the marathon and then to move on to the latest trend, triathlons. Training is important, Remington decides, because “Life comes down to nothing more than the motion of the body through space.” “Traversing distances,” in his view, is “all there is to do.”

Most of the characters suspect Serenata of undermining Remington out of envy. With a gimpy knee, she can no longer compete with runners, and she doesn’t look as hot on her bicycle as the gear-clad babes. Serenata, on the other hand, justly worries that something catastrophic will happen to Remington, given that he is in no condition (and never will be) to compete in a triathlon. I give Shriver credit for being fair to both perspectives. Serenata might not understand why Remington feels a need to prove himself, and Remington might not understand why Serenata is so unsupportive, but the reader will understand them both.

At some point, the story detours to provide a surprisingly contrived explanation of how Remington lost his government job to political correctness. Her reliance on superficial caricatures rather than her customary deep probe of an issue is disappointing. Some of the points made by Remington and Serenata are sound — of course we shouldn’t automatically believe accusations of workplace abuse or harassment simply because they are made, and employers often rely on pretexts to fire aging employees before they qualify for a full pension — but the allegations of work rule violations that gave Remington a new life of leisure, and the questioning he endures (apparently with no civil service protections whatsoever), are so unrealistic that they damage the novel’s credibility. Fortunately, the detour is relatively brief.

Shriver took the risk of writing about two disagreeable characters. Readers who need to like characters to like a book might be turned off by Serenata and her husband. As Remington eventually tells Serenata, she is so separate from others, so disdainful of the need for company and contemptuous of their support, that she seems a creature of self-satisfied intellect, devoid of empathy. She has excluded everyone but Remington, including her children, from her bubble. Remington, on the other hand, is just plain stubborn, which might explain why their marriage has survived. He is also too easily taken in by the hot trainer, although that's a common enough failing of aging men.

So The Motion of the Body Through Space is about fitness and trends and families and the conflict between self and being part of something larger. Readers might draw their own lessons from those themes, but the humility that accompanies aging is the novel’s final lesson. “But this brand of humility wasn’t the sort you graciously embraced. It was foisted on you. You grew humble because you had been humbled.” At the same time, the epiphany that the great benefit of growing old is letting go (i.e., no longer caring about the world’s problems because you know you will die before the apocalypse) is one I hope I never have.

The penultimate chapter reads like a suspense novel as the reader wonders how Remington will fare in his greatest challenge. It is the best part of the novel. The rest of the ride is uneven, like the gravel road on which Remington wipes out while biking. Still, the story is always engaging. I am a fan of Shriver’s work and I enjoyed nearly all of this novel despite hitting a couple of potholes along the path to the novel's conclusion.

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Liar's Paradox by Taylor Stevens

Published by Kensington on December 18, 2018

As the first book in the Jack and Jill series (currently consisting of this novel and Liar’s Legacy), Liar’s Paradox introduces Clare and her two children. In a backstory that evolves into the central story, we learn that while Clare worked for the CIA as an agent in Moscow, she ran into some trouble with her handler, a fellow named Boris who wanted to take her to bed. Clare was already in bed with Dimitry, the son of the Ministry of Defense. Her rejection of Boris places her in a precarious position, as does her pregnancy by Dimitry, who might or might not be a KGB agent. Clare expected Dimitry to join her when she escaped from Moscow but he never made the rendezvous, for reasons she didn’t understand at the time.

The pregnancy turned into the twins known as Jack and Jill. Like most of the other characters, including Clare, they have used a variety of names during their lives. By the time they were born, Clare had amassed a following of enemies, both inside and outside the CIA. She knew that children would be a vulnerability, so she raised them to survive without her. Their survival skills at this point are well honed, but the consequence of Clare’s unorthodox parenting is that her children hate her. Or maybe it’s sort of a love-hate relationship. They don’t want Clare’s enemies to kill her, if only because they would prefer to kill her themselves.

As the story begins, Jill is a 26-year-old drug addict with an enabling lover named Robert. Jack kidnaps her (the only safe way to deal with her) because Clare wants to see them. In a panic, Robert goes to the police and the media give Jack and Jill a troubling amount of publicity. When they arrive at Clare’s home in the woods, however, they discover that it is under assault. A fellow named Holden has accepted a contract from the Broker to kidnap Clare, an endeavor that leads to the death of most of his team members. Ironically, Jill has taken a few contracts from the Broker herself, the better to make use of her skills when she’s not high.

Much of the plot develops Clare’s backstory, including her search over the years for Dimitry, who seems to be resurfacing, and about whom Jack and Jill know little. In the present, the plot turns into a credible action story. Clare finds herself bound and under guard in a vessel at port. As Jack and Jill try to find her, they need to go through Holden, whose nature turns out to be a surprise.

Taylor Stevens is the reigning master at creating damaged female thriller protagonists. Jill is an intriguing character because of her animosity toward her mother and, for that matter, all of society. At times, she is nearly feral in her reaction to others, including Jack. When she gains control of herself, she is smart and extraordinarily capable, although still driven by emotions she barely recognizes.

While Clare is entering her senior years, she is still cunning, devious, and deadly. Taken together, Clare and Jill are two of the most formidable female action heroes in thrillerworld. As she always does, Stevens achieves a perfect balance of characterization and action in this novel and in the one that follows.

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The Body Politic by Brian Platzer

Published by Atria Books on March 3, 2020

The Body Politic is more about the body than politics, although a key character works for John Edwards and Hillary Clinton before joining the Trump administration. The two primary characters, Tess and David, each have health issues that are scrambling their lives and testing their marriage. David’s problems began when he fell from a height. Since then he has dealt with dizziness, headaches, blurred vision, nausea, and other problems that are amplified when he does anything more strenuous than sleeping. The problems are likely neurological but no doctor has made a definitive diagnosis or provided an effective treatment, so David has tried every alternative he can find, from herbal remedies to meditation.

Tess was physically healthy until she became depressed and, like David, started spending all day in bed, rendering both David and Tess ineffective parents of their two children. Tess is determined to stay with David and help him recover. He is devoted to her despite her infidelity. Tess has a distressing personal history that includes the violent death of her mother at the hands of her father when she was young. She has been disturbed by her memories of her mother’s murder but begins to question the accuracy of those memories when she reconnects with her father after years of estrangement.

The side-switching political consultant, Tazio, is David’s best friend, although he is also close to Tess and to another mutual friend named Angelica. By the novel’s end, having praised Trump lavishly on Fox News, he’s scored a job in the Trump administration, perhaps with the intention of influencing its policies as an infiltrator from the left. By the novel’s end, however, it is unclear whether Tazio has any political philosophy or just enjoys being recognized.

The story is driven largely by David’s medical issues and Tess’s struggle to cope with David’s infirmity, her own depression, her feelings about Tazio, and her potentially unreliable memories about her childhood trauma. Eventual confrontations with Tess’s father and his new wife add to the domestic drama. While the novel has all the ingredients of a soap opera, it avoids sensationalism and the tear-jerking moments that often make domestic dramas unendurable. In fact, when Tess has an epiphany during a confrontation with David that redefines her understanding of their marriage, it is a moment of sheer and brutal honesty, the kind that most domestic stories try without success to achieve.

Abused women give the plot a unifying theme. Tess, her mother, Angelica, and the current wife of Tess’s father have all experienced harm, directly or indirectly, that was inflicted by men. Yet at this point, while Tess’s father clearly has an anger management problem, he seems to control his urges to be physically violent. Whether his wife and children should stay with him is a question that — to the author’s credit — encourages subtle analysis rather than knee-jerk reactions.

There are moments when it seems as if David is taking advantage of Tess by not pulling his weight in their marriage, a failing that could arguably be a form of psychological abuse, but it seems clear that David is doing his best to cope with a disease that is real despite the medical industry’s inability to give it a name. Brian Platzer builds sympathy for David slowly as the novel progresses. The depression from which Tess suffers is just as real and her struggle to fight against it also earns the reader’s respect. Equally compelling is her struggle to come to terms with her past and to deal responsibly with her feelings about her father and Tazio. Finding the strength to move on is closely related to the theme of abuse.

Dealing with pain is another theme. David is a good guy, but there is a difference between enduring pain and making a point of enduring pain. One of his healers eventually helps him understand that “constantly confronting everyone with his pain didn’t make him feel better, and it disturbed other people.” Sometimes it’s better to suffer in silence. The healer also suggests, albeit belatedly, that David should approach each day with the assumption that he will be in constant pain and take joy in the moments when he is not. That’s a gloomy way to live, but less gloomy than wallowing in misery.

None of the issues that Platzer explores have easy answers, nor does Platzer offer any. I admire that. People who crave easy answers are easy prey for the charlatans who peddle simplistic solutions to complex problems. People who spend their lives as self-defined victims create self-imposed barriers to happiness. Finding a way forward is often a process of trial and error. No single solution works for everyone, regardless of what spiritual advisors and social workers and snake oil salesmen tell us. The novel illustrates that point in many ways.

The Body Politic is a bit scattered and unfocused, as if it’s not quite sure whether it wants to be about Tess and David or Tess and her father or Tazio and Trump. Tazio drifts in and out, as if Platzer was uncertain of his role in the novel. But if the narrative moves in many different directions, that’s a reflection of life. The characters have unresolved issues and maybe those issues will never be resolved, but the novel reminds us that we need to make as much progress as we can, even if the path forward is unmarked.

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Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford

Published by HarperCollins/Ecco on May 12, 2020

Sorry for Your Trouble collects stories of loss, usually caused by death or divorce. Many of the characters have ties to Louisiana or Ireland, although Maine and Paris seem to be their preferred vacation destinations. They have generally reached (or at least are approaching) an age that permits sober reflection on mistakes made and reckonings to come.

My favorite entry in this nine-story collection, “Second Language,” is one of the longer ones. After his wife’s sudden death evicts him from his “infallible, magical, irreplaceable world,” a businessman moves from Idaho to New York and meets a divorced woman who feels her life is “composed of some strange, insubstantial paper that she couldn’t quite keep hold of.” They marry, but he depended on his first wife to invent the “workable, reliable mind-set” that made him feel married, and is disappointed that his second wife has a more independent view of partnership. His new wife, on the other hand, understands that her husband “believed in greater and greater closeness, of shared complications, of difficult-to-overcome frictions leading to even greater depths of intimacy and knowledge of each other,” while she simply isn’t that kind of person. Ford dissects the lives and philosophies of the two principal characters, their relationship and its aftermath, exposing hidden barriers to the kind of understanding (of life, ourselves, other people) that we expect or hope to achieve.

I also give high marks to “The Run of Yourself.” After the death of Peter Boyce’s Irish wife, Peter rents a summer house in Maine near the one he and his wife used to rent. He rents a different house — not the one in which his wife died — so he can revisit pleasant memories without being haunted by thoughts of the crusty person his wife became after she fell ill. A visit from his daughter only underscores the distance between them. He has come to realize that he only needs to make small adjustments in his life because, at his age, there is “nothing further to learn or imagine or re-invent.” Doing a favor for a troubled young woman might change his mind about that.

With two exceptions, I enjoyed all of the remaining stories, although to a slightly lesser extent. In “Nothing to Declare,” a relatively young Sandy “nonchalantly loved” Barbara when they traveled to Iceland together, but the emotion was fading by the time he left her there. “She was, he felt, pretentious and self-infatuated. Leaving was a fine idea. What he’d been missing was miss-able. In the stark light her face bore a coarseness he hadn’t noticed, but supposed he would come to dislike.” A couple of decades later, when Sandy kisses Barbara in New Orleans during a chance encounter, Sandy’s feelings are ambiguous, but it isn’t clear that either Sandy or Barbara have fundamentally changed.

The transplanted Irishman in “Happy” dies after living an intellectual’s life. Bobbi “Happy” Kamper, his “surviving paramour,” joins friends for end-of-summer cocktails in Maine, a gathering that represents “a reversion to some way of being that pre-dated everything that life had sadly become.”

In “Displaced,” a 16-year-old boy who lost his father hopes to bond with an older Irish boy, but the friendship only increases his confusion about life. A divorcing American in “Crossing” who encounters brash American tourists in Ireland before he visits with his solicitor wonders whether he would be pathetic if he were to let a tear leak out in remembrance of the past.

In “Jimmy Green — 1992,” the disgraced former mayor of a small Louisiana town winds up in Paris for no particular reason. He watches the results of the American election in an American bar with a French woman and, because of his slight preference for the winning candidate, learns that Americans abroad can be even more obnoxious than Americans at home. The unpleasant episode is easily written off as an inevitable advance in the disassembling of his life.

 “Leaving for Kenosha” struck me as a story of less substance. The friend of the daughter of a divorced man is moving to Kenosha with her family. The divorced man has “a feeling of impendment” as he thinks about his daughter one day growing up and moving away. “A Free Day,” the story I liked the least, briefly follows a woman who is having an affair of convenience.

Ford has achieved a perfection of style, a fluid and harmonious voice that few writers manage with such consistency. His characters have a fundamental decency that allows them to grieve their losses without anger. They are civilized if a bit too restrained for their own good. They aren’t the kind of people who make headlines, for reasons good or bad, but they remind the reader that people who are capable of using their intellect are always striving for a balance of intellect and emotional awareness that is incredibly difficult to achieve.

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