Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin

Published by Scribner on February 26, 2019

Mona Boyle, the beleaguered cleaning lady from Pretend I’m Dead, returns in Vacuum in the Dark. Someone is leaving hidden poops in one of the houses she cleans. That’s Mona’s life in a nutshell. Mona has an affinity for certain vacuum cleaners and an obsession with cleanliness that is probably symbolic of an unfulfilled desire to clean up her messy life.

The new imaginary companion in Mona’s head is Terry Gross, a sympathetic but honest companion, as one might expect her to be. Mona has gotten over Mr. Disgusting, more or less, but has replaced him with a new man she calls Dark. Of course, Dark is a less than perfect boyfriend, if being married and dishonest count as imperfections.

Mona believes she occupies a “very real place” between straight and gay, real because it isn’t the “fake, slutty island or amusement park” that bisexuality is often imagined to be. She has a new house to clean, owned by Hungarian artists with too many cats, and is attracted both to the wife and to the couple’s furniture, which she likes to fondle. Like her other clients, the Hungarians either want to have sex with Mona or include her in an art project.

Mona’s life continues to be isolated, despite her intimate interaction with various clients, but she finds a friend and kindred spirit in Maria Maria, another cleaner with whom she bonds. Late in the novel she meets yet another man and her life changes, as lives must. Whether the change is an improvement is unclear, as changes often are. When confronted with a choice between boring and stable or exciting and life-shattering, Mona always knows that whatever choice she makes will be wrong.

Vacuum in the Dark explores Mona’s experiences before she came to Taos. Some of those incidents are distressing, but the drama is wisely underplayed, preventing the story from becoming maudlin. At some point, Mona returns for a visit to her mother, giving the reader additional insight into Mona’s formative relationships. All the details of Mona’s past inform the reader’s understanding of the quirky person Mona has become. The reader can sympathize with Mona while appreciating her ability to cope, however shakily, with the life into which she has been thrust.

Jen Beagin has the kind of wit that sneaks up on a reader. She assembles sentences that seem to be informative until they suddenly become absurdly funny. Vacuum in the Dark is perfect for fans of dark humor. Mona’s observant nature, along with her snooping through the houses she cleans, gives her more knowledge about her clients than a cleaner should probably have, but her discoveries are a fertile source of laughter. Her self-discoveries are also amusing, but they add humanizing depth to the ongoing story of Mona’s life. It is an engaging story that could easily continue to entertain readers throughout upcoming stages of Mona’s life.

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Long Road to Liquor City by Macon Blair (Joe Flood, illus.)

Published by Oni Press on February 19, 2019

Liquor City is a legend, a place of which hobos can only dream. Until, that is, a legendary hobo bequeaths a map to Jed and Nathaniel. They follow the map as best they can, although they aren’t much for map reading. And while even other hobos tell him there’s no such place as Liquor City, Jed has faith. Without faith, Jed says, he has nothing. On the other hand, a woman tells Nathaniel that where you’re heading might not be as important as where you are. The differences between those two points of view drive the amusing but surprisingly serious story told in this graphic novel.

Jed and Nathaniel take an American journey, the kind of journey Mark Twain might have imagined, populated by fools and the scoundrels who fool them. Chased by a railroad guard who holds them responsible for his wife’s death, the hobos make their way to a tent revival and then to a hobo jungle where transgressions are punished by fighting a rooster to the death. (The king of the hobo jungle is thinking of franchising.) They search the swamp for a woman who knows ancient secrets (map reading perhaps being among them) and encounter a human trafficker of circus freaks.

The story is fanciful but entertaining. Nathaniel might prefer a less dangerous journey to New York (he has heard tales of hot dogs on every corner in this magical land) but Jed has been there and the residents are too strange for him — unlike the hobos and circus freaks with whom he travels.

Long Road to Liquor City blends action and laughs, all suitably rendered in an artistic style that straddles the line between cartoonish and noir-inspired realism. While the story features a variety of offbeat characters, it finds its heart in Jed and Nathaniel. The journey tests both their endurance and their bond of friendship. Whether Jed and Nathaniel will overcome their philosophical differences is the question that readers will ponder between chuckles.

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House Arrest by Mike Lawson

Published by Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press on February 5, 2019

House Arrest is, I think, the thirteenth Joe DeMarco novel. I haven’t kept up with the series because I can’t read everything, and the couple I did read struck me as being okay but nothing special. House Arrest, on the other end, is a book I truly enjoyed.

DeMarco is a lawyer who does off-the-books projects of various kinds for John Mahoney, the Democratic majority leader in the House. He’s occasionally loaned to other politicians who need help. The books are set in the current political world (it is clear that the unnamed president in this book is Trump and that the unnamed House Speaker is Paul Ryan), but the key political characters are fictional. The novel takes place before the 2018 midterms, so Republicans still control the House.

As the novel opens, someone wearing a wig and a Capitol Police uniform kills Congressman Lyle Canton, the Republican Whip, in his Capitol office. Nobody liked Canton, but his biggest enemy was Sebastian Spear, a billionaire who had an affair with Canton’s wife before she got drunk and drove into a tree.

Joe DeMarco was in his office in the subbasement of the Capitol when the murder occurred. An FBI agent interviews him and finds his explanation for being in his office late on a Friday night unconvincing. It doesn’t help that DeMarco’s father was a Mafia hit man and that the FBI can’t figure out what DeMarco’s job is. A search of his office reveals evidence that links him to Canton’s murder. A dozen heavily armed agents in full body armor smash into DeMarco’s home as he’s making dinner and, as the novel’s title suggests, place him under arrest.

It’s good to have friends in high places, including the House leader of the Democratic Party. While Joe languishes in jail, his friend Emma, a retired-but-still-active spook with the DIA, pulls some strings and takes a look at the formidable evidence accumulated by the FBI. But even friends in high places might be an inadequate shield when DeMarco is attacked by prisoners attached to MS-13.

The novel rather drastically changes DeMarco’s life, in that his career has always depended on keeping a law profile. After his arrest for killing a congressman, DeMarco is front page news and will not be able to play the same invisible role for his boss. Whether he will even have a job depends on the election result, which Mike Lawson notes in an afterword was unknown to him when he finished writing the book. Series fans can breathe a sigh of relief that DeMarco might not be evicted from his basement office.

DeMarco actually lurks in the background (he’s either in jail or in a hospital bed) during most of the novel, but Lawson managed to craft a tight, imaginative plot without him. When DeMarco finally returns to action, the story reaches a satisfying climax. The DeMarco novels I’ve read have been uneven, which is why I haven’t tried to read them all. House Arrest, however, benefits from a creative plot that encouraged me to renew my interest in the series.

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The White Book by Han Kang

First published in South Korea in 2016; published in translation in Great Britain in 2017; published by Crown/Hogarth on February 19, 2019

The unnamed narrator of The White Book decides to write about white things, expecting to be transformed by the experience. Most chapters of The White Book revolve around a white item on the list. The white door on an apartment she rented. Rice cakes before they are steamed. A handkerchief falling from a balcony rail. The Korean phrase “laughing whitely,” meaning cheerless or forced laughter. Frost that causes leaves to fall from trees, “incrementally lightening their burden.” The chapters are short, sometimes only a single paragraph. A couple of sections are written in verse.

The narrator associates some of the white objects with “oppressive fragments of memory” that “constantly drift to the surface” as she walks the streets of a bleak and unfamiliar city (presumably Warsaw) that is cloaked in white fog. She has seen footage taken by American aircraft showing how the rubble of the bombed city looked like white snow.

Sugar cubes remind the narrator of her of her childhood. From her mother, she learned of the white newborn gown that was used during the premature birth of her mother’s first baby. The baby died after two hours and the birthing gown became a white burial shroud. She imagines her mother’s white breast milk that the baby will never consume. Had that death not occurred, the narrator would not have been born. For that reason and others, the narrator is living a haunted life.

To some extent, The White Book is a meditation on color and light: the way objects in the dark may appear as a hazy white glow; the way the moon can be bright white or pale blue or mottled; the way a stage becomes an island of white light surrounded by a dark sea. It is also a meditation on culture. The narrator spreads a white skirt on her mother’s grave and burns it, white smoke ascending so that her mother’s spirit will be able to wear it. She performs the ritual while wondering whether anyone believes in its literal truth, but appreciates the silent solemnity of the act.

Some topics suggest the transitory and impermanent nature of all things: pristine snow that darkens with a city’s grime or mutely disappears; waves that become “dazzlingly white” before shattering in “a spray of white:” a white dog that sickens and dies; sturdy white bones that shatter and turn to sand; the ash of a cremated body; the white hair of lovers who will soon part from each other forever. Small white pills ease pain, impeding the body’s progress toward the white light that is said to be death. Yet sugar cubes remind her of her childhood, memories that “remain inviolate to the ravages of time,” evidence that time and suffering do not bring everything to ruin.

We come to understand that the narrator has suffered losses, including a lost love that makes her fearful of loving again, and that she was once on the brink of suicide, but now holds those thoughts in reserve. She is surrounded by dreariness but also delicacy — a white butterfly, white reeds growing in a marsh — and that balance between light and dark is one that could change at any moment, in either direction. Through abstract associations of light and whiteness, The White Book portrays a woman who has lived on the edge between life and death, but who is slowly reconstructing herself, as the city to which she has traveled is still reconstructing itself after the bombings that failed to destroy it completely.

Fragmented storytelling risks a loss of the narrative cohesion upon which readers depend to help them find a story’s meaning. Han Kang wields the form with great skill, allowing meaning to coalesce as the fragments accumulate. If the story is sometimes depressing, it is ultimately uplifting, and the prose (for which the translator, Deborah Smith, presumably deserves some credit) is always exquisite.

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Who Killed the Fonz? by James Boice

Published by Simon & Schuster on February 19, 2019

Who Killed the Fonz? is simple, amusing, a little schmaltzy, and somewhat predictable. In other words, it’s like a typical episode of Happy Days.

Richard (no longer Richie) Cunningham has grown up. He has a wife and children. Joanie and Chachi are still in Milwaukee. His father has died but his mother moved to the LA area and lives with him. He is a screenwriter who, despite an Oscar nomination, is widely seen as washed up. Nobody wants to make the movie he’s been working on for three years. His agent is giving him a chance to write a movie called Space Battles (a Star Wars knockoff with blood and boobs), calling it Richard’s last chance.

On the day he gets that news, he learns that Fonzie crashed his motorcycle into a guardrail and plummeted into a river. His body was not recovered but his funeral has been scheduled. And so Richard goes back to Milwaukee, attends the funeral with Potsie and Ralph, and pokes his nose into Fonzie’s mysterious death. He also meets a friendly fellow who is running for governor and gets (he hopes) a career jumpstart by writing and directing the guy’s campaign commercial. The candidate and his wife, of course, were great fans of Fonzie, who had a lot of admirers despite being a loner who refused to abandon his greaser image.

Fonzie, the story tells us, was always true to himself, in many ways helping Richie find the courage to be who he wanted and needed to be. To thine own self be true is the novel’s theme, although spoken in Fonzie’s voice. So this simple story teaches a simple lesson just like a Happy Days episode. That’s not all bad.

I won’t say anything about the mystery surrounding Fonzie’s death or the other plot elements. I could complain that the ending is predictable, but this is the kind of book that, like a Happy Days episode, demands a predictable ending. I will say that an appreciation of the story demands a familiarity with the television series. It wouldn’t be meaningful for a reader to think about Richie’s adult life or his relationship with Fonzie without having seen some episodes, a few of which the novel describes.

I don’t remember when I stopped watching the show (it was before the 10-year run ended), and I have to admit that the only described episode I remember involved Fonzie locking a burglar in a closet. Fonzie was more memorable than the plots, at least to me. That might be true of this book, as well. The plot is amusing but it primarily serves as a vehicle for bringing Fonzie back into the lives of readers who watched Happy Days 40 years ago (or younger readers who watched it in reruns).

Fonzie is a television icon and the characters in the novel remember him in an idealized way — “the tough guy with impeccable virtue, the philosopher with grease-covered hands, the lone wolf whose loyalty to those he considered a friend was unbreakable” — the way in which icons deserve to be remembered. Like most Happy Days episodes, Who Killed the Fonz is pleasant but forgettable, while reminding us that Fonzie was one of the most entertaining television characters to emerge from the 1970s.

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