The Château by Paul Goldberg

Published by Picador on February 13, 2018

A cosmetic surgeon known as the Butt God plunges to his death. His college roommate, Bill Katzenelenbogen, recently fired from his gig as an investigative science reporter for the Washington Post, decides the death might merit a book, perhaps jumpstarting a new career. Bill was fired for insubordination, meaning he didn’t give a hoot about any of the stories he’d written during the last six years. He was one of the typing dead.

Bill needs the book to succeed because he has no income and, thanks to an unfortunate divorce, no savings. The book project forces Bill to reunite with his father (with no salary, Bill can’t afford a Ft. Lauderdale hotel) and to meet his stepmother Nell for the first time. His father (along with many other established immigrants who, having achieved modest wealth, hates new immigrants) lives in Château Sedan Nueve. His name is Melsor and he acquired his wealth through one of his shady operations, this one involving Medicaid fraud, of which he was acquitted.

Bill’s relationship with his father was never strong, but it deteriorated rapidly twenty years earlier after Melsor ignored Bill’s warning about a “miraculous” cancer treatment that killed Bill’s mother. The choice of doctor was one of many stop signs that Melsor spent his life barreling through.

Bill’s social, political, and religious observations as he muddles through his newly unemployed life are darkly amusing. He also expresses entertaining and wide-ranging opinions about relationships, interior design, Russian poetry, Russian vodka, aging, sex, aging sex, truth as an irrelevant virtue, global warming, real and fake news, fascism, and any number of other topics.

Bill’s father is even more hilarious. His philosophy is an eclectic assemblage of maxims from Russian poetry, Donal’d Tramp’s The Art of the Deal, and an amalgam of American and Russian ideals that have been conveniently edited to support his own financial interests. He is at war with the corrupt condominium Board that, in his view, is selling out the Château residents by accepting kickbacks in exchange for shoddy and needless construction that will increase the residents’ fees with no corresponding benefit. Whether his suspicions are true is both unclear and irrelevant, because believing them to be true fits Melsor’s jaded view of the world.

The story ends in ambiguity that highlights the ambiguous nature of the modern world. Readers who can’t bear any criticism of Trump will no doubt vilify Paul Goldberg as a liberal, that most detested of creatures, but the novel actually has little to do with Trump or American politics. It is more about American life, as seen through the lens of two perspectives: a Russian Jewish immigrant and his Americanized son, neither of whom have managed to live perfect lives but both of whom have strong opinions that readers are free to test with an open mind. To the extent that the novel criticizes the president, it does so lightly.

The story’s humor, and particularly its send-up of Florida condominium boards (which, according to a local journalist, are all assumed to be filled with corrupt back-biters and therefore evidence of corruption isn't newsworthy), kept me laughing consistently. The central characters have the kind of quirks that bring them to life, but they aren't based solely on stereotypes. The Château won’t appeal to every sense of humor (or to people who have no sense of humor), but it appealed greatly to mine.

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The Hush by John Hart

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 27, 2018

The Hush is a sequel to The Last Child, which I haven’t read. As I understand it, The Last Child is a straightforward suspense novel that deals with Johnny Merrimon’s search for his missing twin sister. The Hush returns Johnny as a central character, but the novel blends suspense with horror and the supernatural. It’s kind of a haunted woods story, although the woods are swampy which makes them even more foreboding. The supernatural slant will upset readers who think a sequel should be just like the novel it follows. I admire John Hart for changing up his game (there’s not much point in writing a sequel if you’re just going to rewrite the last book), but readers who can’t abide horror novels will likely be disappointed. In any event, the novel stands alone, and I don’t have the sense that I missed anything in The Hush by not reading The Last Child first.

Johnny lives alone in Hush Arbor, with no electricity or phone or running water, and no desire to leave. He inherited six thousand acres in North Carolina and is fighting to keep it. Sometimes he finds himself in the swamp in the middle of the night and has no recollection of walking there. The swamp was once thought to be haunted by slaves who were hung from its trees, as we learn in a flashback involving a young boy who made the mistake of hunting there in 1931.

Johnny drives to town once a month but prefers his own company. His father is dead. He avoids his mother and her new husband, a police detective named Clyde Hunt who apparently played a significant role in The Last Child. Johnny is trying to forget the past, but he knows he is forgetting how to live a normal life.

Johnny’s best friend, Jack Cross, is a new lawyer, having overcome a difficult childhood. Jack seems to be the only person who notices that Johnny is changing in ways that cannot be explained by isolation alone. His senses are abnormally heightened. His wounds heal with impossible speed. He is acutely aware of everything that happens in the woods and water, whether it involves animals, fish, humans, or trees. As the only person who visits Johnny, Jack senses the presence of something evil in the swamp and worries that it is affecting Johnny.

Johnny needs an appellate lawyer to save his land, but can’t afford one. Jack introduces him to an appellate lawyer in his firm who might represent him pro bono, for reasons that only she understands. Some of those reasons have to do with the arousal she feels when she thinks about Johnny, a sensation that multiplies when she meets him in person.

A grizzly death in the woods leads to a murder accusation, but the murder clearly couldn’t have been committed by one individual — a fact that doesn’t deter the sheriff from accusing Johnny. The murder provides the reader’s first inkling that The Hush is a horror novel. More deaths follow, as do a series of gruesome events with supernatural origins that are closely connected to the Hush, the Merrimon family, and North Carolina’s evil history as a slave state.

All of the secondary characters are created with an abundance of detail, including a rich hunter named Boyd who wants to buy Johnny’s land, a young woman named Cree who dreams (as Johnny does) about bloody events from the past, Cree’s mother who is trying to take Johnny’s land, a fellow named Leon who operates a ramshackle tavern/restaurant at the outskirts of the Hush, and the seemingly crazy old woman who raised Leon and who is the only person capable of understanding the dreams that trouble Johnny and Cree.

I don’t read many horror novels, but I enjoy them when the author creates an environment that is truly creepy. Hart does that in The Hush. As a place, the Hush is such a carefully rendered world that I set aside my skepticism about the supernatural and became absorbed in the story’s convincing detail. But The Hush is also the story of Johnny’s internal struggle — an eternal struggle between good and evil, when good and evil are not easily distinguished — and of his loyal friendship with Jack. Hart’s believable characters and settings, combined with a plot that is chilling and suspenseful, makes The Hush one of the best horror novels I’ve read in recent years.

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Zack by Mons Kallentoft and Markus Lutteman

First published in Sweden in 2014; published in translation by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on January 23, 2018

Zack Herry is a humble Detective Inspector in Sweden with a wealthy girlfriend whose father he saved from a robbery. Zack has moved ahead of older officers to land a gig in the Special Crimes Unit. At night, he likes to party with his friend Abdula, who supplies the cocaine. Zack is a little worried that his colleagues might be tumbling to his nocturnal activities. But when he’s sleeping rather than partying, he has nightmares about his mother, a police detective whose murder was never solved.

Zack puts those worries aside as he investigates the killings and mutilations of some Thai prostitutes who worked in a massage parlor. That gives Mons Kallentoft a chance to spotlight Sweden’s hate-spewing white supremacists, who seem to have particular disdain for Thai women. One of the police detectives wonders whether there has always been so much hate, or whether the internet has amplified the voice of racists. It’s a good question.

But white supremacists aren’t the only suspects. A motorcycle gang may have committed the murders to send a message about who controls the supply of Thai prostitutes in Sweden. A profiler suspects that a loner with a grudge against women is responsible. Turkish gangsters may also be responsible.

Meanwhile, Sukayana Prikon, who owns the massage parlor where the murdered women worked, is kidnapped. The reader joins Zack in wondering why she is subjected to some brutal moments that are left to play out in the reader’s imagination.

The various plotlines come together in a central mystery: Who is killing the prostitutes, and why? But a closely-related mystery is just as engrossing: Will Zack solve the murders before he gets fired?

Zack engages in the requisite chases, shootouts, and fights, but he’s also an interesting, deeply conflicted character. People tell him that he’s a good person because he’s on the side of good people, but he feels no remorse when he kills bad people. That troubles him, so maybe he is a good person. Zack knows he has a drug problem, he knows it is impairing his judgment and jeopardizing a job, but like most people with a drug problem, he’s losing control of his ability to contain the consequences of his addiction. That can be a trite trait if an author uses addiction in an obvious effort to make a character seem realistic or interesting, but Zack’s addiction is integral to his being — and that, in turn, makes the character both interesting and realistic. The fact that his mother was murdered and that he became a cop to find her killer adds another dimension to his character.

Secondary characters, including a blind detective named Rudolph, the unfortunate massage parlor owner, and a lesbian detective who partners with Zack (and unlike most women, readily resists his charms) are developed to a satisfying degree of depth. The solution to the mystery isn’t particularly noteworthy, but the cinematic style of storytelling makes the action easy to visualize (perhaps too easy for sensitive readers who don’t want to picture wolves devouring the legs of dangling humans). The novel’s steady pace turns into a sprint as the novel nears its end. The theme of human trafficking is trendy and overdone in modern thrillers, but I’ll forgive Kallentoft since I’m happy to read any Scandinavian thriller that doesn’t dwell on snow and frigid weather and how depressing it is to be alive.

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Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

First published in Iceland in 2018; published in translation by Grove Atlantic/Black Cat on February 13, 2018

Here’s some good advice from Jónas’ mom: “Instead of putting an end to your existence, can’t you put an end to being you and just become someone else?” The question in Hotel Silence is whether Jónas will listen to his mother.

Jónas kept a diary of his sexual experiences. Reading it, he remembers how Gudrún told him that she was pregnant, a revelation that led to marriage. They named the baby Waterlily. Only later did Gudrún tell Jónas that she was pregnant by another man. Jónas and Gudrún have been divorced (and Jónas has been celibate) for eight years, but he has nevertheless had a water lily tattooed over his heart.

Jónas visits his mother regularly, but she doesn’t always remember the visits. He has become obsessed with celebrity suicides and is considering how to take his own life in a way that won’t burden Waterlily with his empty flesh.

Jónas decides to do the deed at Hotel Silence in a remote country that has been devastated by war. Iceland hasn’t had a war in centuries, leaving Jónas unprepared for a city where nearly all the stores are closed and the hotel clerk warns him of the places where land mines and unexploded bombs make walking treacherous. Fifi and his sister May are running the hotel by default, the owner having fled to a less dangerous place. The only other regular occupant is May’s son, who was born in the basement as bombs fell.

Jónas gives himself a week to live. He has taken a drill and some tools with him and finds himself making small repairs so that his room will be more comfortable, although (as he repeatedly tells May) he isn’t a carpenter or a plumber — his skill is furniture restoration. Eventually he’s pressed into making repairs elsewhere in the hotel, and later in other buildings. His neighbor asks him if he plans to fix the whole country with his little drill, but it seems obvious to the reader that Jónas is really trying to fix himself, to find a reason to live another day.

Despite his desire for death, Jónas repeatedly encounters people who are surrounded by death but persist in living. He realizes early on that “in the land of death there isn’t the same urgency to die.” The novel’s central question is whether and when Jónas will end his life. Will staying in a country that needs to reinvent itself inspire him to reinvent himself?

Hotel Silence is a rumination on war and ruin. At the same time, it’s a very personal story of a man who imagines himself ruined and his journey of rediscovery. Some of the themes might be obvious, particularly the importance of finding purpose in life as an incentive to keep living, but the more subtle theme involves the struggle to make sense of life when it doesn’t go the way one imagined it would. The juxtaposition of Jónas’ emotional suffering with the more intense suffering of women who lost everything in a war brings home the point that misfortune is arbitrary, that it is unrelated to one’s value as a person, and that persevering in the face of adversity is based on the power of hope for a better future, even if “better” is nothing more than making a connection with another person.

Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s prose is effortless and economical. Her focus on a small, slice-of-life story makes it possible to illuminate big themes. As the title implies, this is a quiet story — the silence that follows a war, the voices that are not yet ready to speak — but the story suggests that “Silence saves the world.” I don’t know if that’s true, but the silence between sentences in this masterful story speaks volumes.

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Feast Days by Ian Mackenzie

Published by Little, Brown and Company on March 13, 2018

A married couple moved to São Paulo, a city “hairy with crime,” for the husband’s job. The wife, having no opportunity for Brazilian employment, is an observer. Emma narrates her observations of local politics and protests, the contrast between wealth and poverty in Brazil, expensive meals (unlike her husband, she would rather eat food than discuss it), her first experience as a robbery victim, the difficulty of mastering Portuguese, the lure of invented cognates, the glassy apartment buildings that resemble aquariums, and the country’s never-ending social obligations.

Feast Days is a detached account of Emma’s external observations mixed with more personal but still detached observations of her own life. Emma is not terribly satisfied with her lot, but at least while she’s in Brazil, she doesn’t seem inclined to make any changes to enhance her happiness, or even to voice her concerns, perhaps because she doesn’t know what changes she might desire or whether true happiness is attainable.

An affair is on offer, but it hardly seems worth the effort. Emma seems to think that sticking to marriage creates a history, and marriage is nothing more than a shared history of being married. A dull marriage, she thinks, is better than starting over, because nothing is more dull than revealing yourself in each new relationship, telling the same stories, getting fucked in the pretty much the same way by each new boyfriend.

Emma likes to talk, not because she has anything important to say, but because she enjoys “the lapidary construction of sentences,” syntax more important than content. Having no particular skills beyond an affinity for English grammar, Emma resentfully keeps the home and occasionally tutors prosperous Brazilians for cash. She also does volunteer work, helping Haitian refugees while marveling that the Brazilian government treats them well, having a more compassionate attitude about “shithole countries” than American politicians.

Emma is unenthused about the prospect of having a child, a source of largely unspoken conflict with her husband. Emma wonders why men are incapable of talking about anything but their work, and occasionally asks questions like “Is there a market for that?” to make herself understood. She ruminates on the phrase “the disaster of heterosexuality” as a possible explanation for being dissatisfied with her life.

Emma encounters a fair amount of sexism in Brazil, but it might not be as obnoxious as the sexism she endured at a Las Vegas engagement party hosted by her in-laws, where all of the gated community residents wanted to know about her wedding plans and how many children she would have. Nobody asked her whether she had a life; they assumed her job was getting married.

Collateral characters play their roles, but Feast Days is very much Emma’s story. She refers to her husband not by name but as “my husband” or, in flashbacks, “the man who would become my husband.” We learn a bit about Emma’s past from those flashbacks, and a brief chapter gives us a snapshot of her future, but the story’s focus is on Emma’s cabined life in Brazil. Unfortunately, that portion of her life is so uneventful that I would have preferred to read more about her past or future.

Emma loves words and so, I must assume, does Ian Makenzie. His use of words is more interesting than Emma, who is such an uninvolved observer that I found it difficult to warm up to her. She doesn’t seem to feel anything (other than ennui which isn’t really a feeling); she holds no fundamental beliefs that aren’t rooted in etymology. Feast Days appeals to the intellect, not the heart, but I’m recommending it for its prose and for the occasional insights it offers into a life of a woman who has been thrust into a role for which she is ill-suited.

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