The Accidentals by Guadalupe Nettel

First published in Spain in 2023; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on April 29, 2025

Guadalupe Nettel is a Mexican writer best known for the novel Still Born. This is her third collection of short fiction. Most of the stories are set in Spanish-speaking countries. Characters are generally living with discontent or fear as they struggle to cope with the uncontrollable events that shape their lives and the secrets that burden their families.

My favorite entry is “Imprinting,” if only because it packs the surprise of an O. Henry story, albeit with a dark ending.  Antonia skips her college classes to accompany a friend who is visiting her sick mother in the hospital. As Antonia walks through the halls, she notices her uncle’s name on one of the doors. She has no clear memory of her uncle but knows that other family members refuse to talk about him. She drops into the room and, while growing close to him, begins to visit every day. The shocking ending allows the reader to deduce the reason why the family wants nothing to do with Frank.

A surprising revelation about family is also at the heart of “Playing with Fire.” The narrator asks herself “if I really knew these two boys who I had given birth to and raised so carefully for years.” When she goes on a camping trip with her disgruntled sons and angry husband, she learns that she doesn’t know any of them as well as she thought she did.

Another story that relies on surprise is “The Fellowship of Orphans.” An adult woman recalls her days in an orphanage, including the warnings the orphans were given about the risk of disappearing in Mexico City if they were to wander off. Walking through a park, she sees a poster with a photo of a missing man. After she spots the man, she calls the number on the poster and learns from the man’s mother that the man she saw is indeed the woman’s son. The woman says she will come to see him, but what happens next is not what the narrator expected. The story doesn’t pack the emotional punch that Nettel likely intended, but it sends a message about familial love — or the consequences of its absence.

“Life Elsewhere,” my second favorite in the collection, tells the story of a man who, after drama school, abandoned his hope for a theatrical career and settled into marriage. He disagreed with his wife about their choice of apartment — she preferred the one with better light, he liked the one in a more interesting building. His choice is rented before they can decide. He later finds that the apartment he wanted is inhabited by an actor he knew in school. Drawn to the apartment more than to his acquaintance, over the course of time and to his wife’s dismay he “began turning into just another member of the family.”

“The Pink Door” is a “be careful what you wish for” story. As is true of most such stories, it relies on something akin to magic to deliver its lesson. An aging man with a controlling wife enters what he believes to be a house of prostitution that suddenly appeared in his neighborhood. The business instead sells him sweets that change his life, making him realize that wished-for changes come with unanticipated consequences.

Three other stories are less appealing. A thousand-year-old monkey puzzle tree in a family’s yard was a source of pride until it became infected by a parasite and lost its leaves and branches. The father believed that the tree held the family together and despaired of the family’s future. “The Forest Under Earth” is built upon predictable comparisons of root systems to family connectedness, but the story goes nowhere.

“The Accidentals” compares the albatross to migrants who flee dictatorships but yearn to return home, an “accidental” being the name given to an albatross that strays from its usual migration route and ends up in an unfamiliar place, mating with an albatross it wouldn’t otherwise desire simply because it is the only available choice. Like “The Forest Under the Earth,” the author’s chosen metaphor is a bit too obvious.

“The Torpor” imagines a permanent pandemic. A couple fled from urban enforcement of social isolation restrictions to join a commune in the woods, then decided they needed the relative comfort of urban living when the woman became pregnant. The story has some imaginative touches of world building in a lasting pandemic but the woman’s vacillation between staying or leaving after returning to the city lacks an emotional punch.

Five of eight successful stories is a decent batting average for a collection. While the volume lacks a home run, it doesn’t have any strikeouts. Her sharp prose alone makes Nettel a writer worth reading.

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The Perturbation of O by Joseph G. Peterson

Published by University Of Iowa Press on April 29, 2025

This amusing novel is told almost entirely in the form of a chat between two characters. Fans of the movie My Dinner with Andre will probably enjoy The Perturbation of O for its celebration of conversation.

Gideon Anderson was an unenthused college student. A generous uncle covered his living expenses, leaving him with little incentive to make a life for himself. He lost interest in everything and responded to his disinterest by writing a book about all the reasons nothing mattered to him. “It told the brief story of my final year at the University of Chicago where I had squandered my time not participating in classes, not planning for my future, but where I had gone about squandering funds that my uncle sent me on a monthly basis, it was a memoir I had initially titled The Ark of Disquiet . . . .”

Gideon included in the manuscript “all the things that had filled me with loathing that year of my final year at the University of Chicago . . . filling it like Noah’s ark with all the creaturely memories that filled me with bile.” He printed it out and planned to “release that ark upon the waters of Lake Michigan, thereby flushing away the great turd of a manuscript.”

While waiting for appropriately stormy weather to assure that the manuscript would be washed away, Gideon attended a party where he sat next to a “Kentucky gentleman” who “had just published a book about his boyhood in Kentucky.” Gideon drunkenly told the story of his own book and of his plan to jettison the turd into Lake Michigan. The Kentucky gentleman persuaded Gideon to send it instead to his agent, who loved the book and sold it to a publisher that made it a best seller under the title Gideon’s Confession. The book spawned a Broadway musical and a movie, generating enough income to allow Gideon to continue living a comfortable life as a slacker, albeit one who was beleaguered by unwelcome fame.

The novel opens seventeen years later in a coffee shop, where Gideon is reading a manuscript written by the Kentucky gentleman’s grandson for which he agreed write a blurb. He’s spotted by Regina Blast, a woman who was the best friend of Gideon’s girlfriend when Gideon was still a student. Regina was interested in painting light. When Gideon saw her paintings, he got a boner (at least that’s how Regina recalls it). They slept together, ending Gideon’s relationship and Regina’s friendship with Gideon’s girlfriend.

Gideon wrote about Regina and her paintings in Gideon’s Confession. Regina thought his descriptions of her art were honest and perceptive, even if she didn’t appreciate his description of her body or the sexual encounter that subsequent lovers pleaded with her to reenact. The bulk of the novel consists of their conversation in the coffee shop.

Much of their discussion involves Oprah Winfrey. Oprah had Gideon on her show after he was proclaimed the King of Slack, the symbol of the Slacker Generation. Oprah later visited Regina in her studio to view the art that so enamored Gideon. The visit caused Regina to rethink her artwork after she made a sketch of Oprah. She found a perfect O in the sketch and thereafter became “primarily a painter of brushstrokes” that form Os.

Gideon and Regina trade delightfully over-the-top descriptions of Oprah. Says Gideon, “Oprah has a magnificence about her when you are with her in person that is hard to describe, and in my life I don’t think I have ever encountered anyone who was so magnificent as her.” Says Regina, “in all of my life, I have never come close to encountering a person who, like Oprah, possessed such a bottomless depth of humanity and understanding and lovingness . . . ” and on and on and on.

The conversations consist of long rambling sentences. Gideon and Regina repeatedly circle back to the same issues — Gideon’s book, Regina’s art, their sexual encounter, and lots of Oprah. The conversation would be maddening or boring if it weren’t so funny. And funny it is.

The story nevertheless raises interesting questions about the right of a memoir author to discuss intimate details of another person’s life, the nature of art, and the merits of being a slacker. Gideon’s memoir is seen by some as an anti-capitalist manifesto, but it seems clear that Gideon was simply blowing off steam. The story might therefore be seen as raising questions about how media sensations are promoted as geniuses or generational voices when, in fact, they don’t have much to say at all. Serious readers might therefore have serious conversations about The Perturbation of O, but I doubt they will have conversations as amusing as the one in which Gideon and Regina engage.

RECOMMENDED

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (graphic novel) by Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, et al.

Published by ‎ Pantheon on April 8, 2025

I read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy in an earlier century. Auster’s three novellas have been adapted into three graphic novels that appear in this volume. The first, City of Glass, was first published in 1994. I believe the other two appear here for the first time. City of Glass was adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli.

City of Glass follows mystery writer Daniel Quinn, who writes stories under the pseudonym William Wilson about a private detective named Max Work. When someone calls on the telephone and asks for Paul Auster, Quinn thinks the caller reached a wrong number, but on the third redial Quinn tells the caller that he is Auster. The theme of identity confusion continues when Quinn meets the caller, who introduces himself as Peter Stillman before explaining that his real name is Mr. Sad, which is also Quinn’s name. Stillman’s wife explains that Stillman had a monstrous childhood and that his father is about to be released from an asylum. They hire Quinn to protect Stillman. Later in the story, Quinn introduces himself to Stillman’s father as Peter Stillman, leading the father to believe he is talking to his son despite Quinn’s appearance because, after all, people change. Still later, after weeks of barely moving during his ongoing surveillance, Quinn feels he has become someone else.

The story follows Quinn as he follows Stillman’s father around his New York City neighborhood. Drawing the old man’s walking paths through the city, Quinn notes that the drawings spell out The Tower of Babel. The reader soon understands that the story is exploring the impact of language on identity. The old man claims to be inventing a new language by giving new words to broken objects. His attempt to discover the language of God motivated his abusive experimentation with his son. To the old man, the future of human salvation lies in becoming masters of the words we speak.

When Quinn loses track of the elder Stillman, he decides to ask Auster for help. The story moves on from there. By the end, Stillman might have lost his mind, or at least his identity (which, Auster suggests, might be the same thing).

City of Glass is my favorite of the graphic stories. Small panels — needed to leave room for narration — give the art a cramped feeling. The artistic style reminded me of Krazy Kat, but innovative drawing adds to the story. Fingerprints turn into mazes that turn into hallways. The younger Stillman’s dialog balloons seem to be coming from deep inside his body, yet his body changes from panel to panel. Sometimes he’s a ferryman, sometimes a bird, or a child, or a turd. Usually his wife is wearing a dress but sometimes she’s nude. While surveilling the elder Stillman, Quinn feels himself becoming part of the landscape; in a series of panels, he merges with the wall he's leaning against.

The narrator of the second novella, Ghosts, is a man named Blue. He is hired by White to spy on a writer named Black who spends much of his time wandering about the city. Identity confusion again becomes a theme as Blue begins to wonder whether Black and White are the same person. Blue also begins to feel that he might be the same person as Black. Much of the story takes place inside Blue’s head.

I recall Ghosts as my favorite of Auster’s trilogy but it is my least favorite adaptation as a graphic novel. Rather than following a traditional graphic format, the top half (more or less) of most pages features a drawing, following by text taken from Auster’s novel. A small percentage of the pages include traditional panels and dialog balloons. Toward the end, the pages consist almost entirely of art that relies heavily on shadow. Lorenzo Mattotti’s artistic style I can only describe as blocky. It didn’t appeal to me.

The narrator of the third novella, The Locked Room, was a childhood friend of Fanshawe. Fanshawe has gone missing. Sophie, his pregnant wife, hired Quinn, the private detective, to find Fanshawe but he failed. Assuming he is dead, Sophie follows Fanshawe’s instructions and contacts the narrator to determine whether any of the writing Fanshawe left behind is publishable. The work is quite good and the narrator arranges its publication. The narrator plans to write Fanshawe’s biography but receives a letter that purports to be from Fanshawe. After falling in love with Sophie, the narrator decides their relationship cannot go forward until he determines Fanshawe’s fate. He plays detective and this time the identity confusion is between the narrator and Fanshawe.

The Locked Room tells the most straightforward story in the trilogy, although Auster writes at the end of the novella that the three stories “are finally the same story.” Paul Karasik illustrates the story in modern graphic art fashion: sometimes using panels, sometimes surrounding panels with a larger drawing, sometimes foregoing art to make more room for the text, sometimes foregoing the text and letting the art speak for itself. The art is appealing but the lettering is rather cramped, making the story difficult to read. I nevertheless enjoyed the arrangement of words to make the shape of a person as the story begins.

Baffling as it might sometimes be, I recommend The New York Trilogy for the beauty of its language and the intriguing nature of its themes of identity and language. The graphic version adds visual interest. I’m not sure this is a good introduction to the trilogy for people who haven’t read the text version, but it is a fun way to revisit the trilogy for those who are already familiar with it.

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The Influencers by Anna-Marie McLemore

Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, on April 15, 2025

Someone murdered August Ingraham and set fire to a wing of his mansion, although not the wing in which his body was found. The prime suspects are five sisters: April, June, July, January, and possibly March, although March (the youngest) hasn’t been seen for a while. Another suspect is their mother, May Iverson, August’s wife and the creator of Mother May I.

August was only married to May for a couple of years and wasn’t in the picture when May’s five daughters were born. Their biological father, Ernesto Iniesta, had an argument with August a couple of weeks before his death and is also a suspect, at least in the eyes of true crime podcasters. A neighbor who had a reasonable grudge against August also had a motive, but he became an unlikely suspect after his dead body was discovered outside the burning house.

The Influencers is presented as a whodunit, yet as the title implies, it is more a sendup of online personalities.  The novel skewers a certain kind of “influencer,” internet celebrities or wannabes who place their enviable lives on display for the world to see, except for the parts they try to conceal.

Chapters written in the third person generally narrate the actions of family members. Other chapters offer first-person thoughts spoken collectively by followers of the family members. The followers are obsessed; their obsession contributes to the humor. They believe they are best positioned to solve August’s murder, as they know more about the family than the police will ever learn.

May is “famous for picture-worthy after-school snacks and homemade costumes and glamorous New Year’s Eve parties,” as well as lifestyle and fashion advice, product lines (such as Mother May I dish towels), and product endorsements. On her Mother May I platforms, she posted daily videos of her children growing up, sometimes to their displeasure.

The non-identical twins, pale June and dark July, made a career of their mother’s career. They “followed their mother into the world of making money off polishing and posting their daily lives. June and July each had their own personal brands,” but they post some content collectively as the Summer Girls. According to their fans, “It was June we loved for having no filter, no brakes, and July we loved for her gentle way of moving through the world.” June is even a bit motherly in her relationship with May. “If June didn’t keep an eye on her, she was going to fund a line of vitamin-infused nail polish or an independent film about reverse racism.”

Growing up, April was the problem solver, the replacement mom who stepped in to help the other girls when May was busy hawking products. Now April has a fabric store and, in the collective opinion of Mother May I fans, is too competent to have burned down a part of the house while August (presumably dead at the time) was in a different wing. “Rather than such scattershot arson, she would have set the fire close enough to the corpse to turn all evidence to cinders. She might have even been able to make both look like accidents.”

January works in theater as a lighting designer. She keeps to herself and away from cameras. Maybe she’s never gotten over her mother filming them as they shopped for her first training bra or her mother’s broadcast about her “many feelings” when her daughter had her first period. I’ve never had a period (wrong gender for the curse), but I can imagine being mortified if my mother discussed her feels about my bodily discharges with the entire world.

The followers debate the potential of each Iverson to be a killer based on what they know of their personalities (or on how they dress or wear makeup). They dissect new footage of the family that a true-crime blogger has posted to her site while the Iversons try to discover the source of the video clips. The videos appear to be candid camera recordings, some of which portray May and the girls in a negative light, the kind of recordings that May would never have posted. Who took the videos and who released them to podcasters is another mystery the followers want to unravel.

Sharp-eyed followers identify a guy lurking in the background of certain videos who might be named Luke, who always wears a sweatshirt, and who may or may not be dating June or July. Luke Sweatshirt is another murder suspect.

Like many fans of celebrities, the Mother May I followers are fickle. When they like what they see, they can’t get enough of it. When it seems the family is about to melt down, they are just as happy to be cheering against them. That seemed like a particularly telling observation about the nature of people who become absorbed in the details of Kardashian-type celebrities.

As the novel nears its end, the central mystery — who killed August? — is temporarily overshadowed by a second — what happened to March? Both reveals are surprising, although the explanation of August’s death and the fire in his mansion is underwhelming.

The novel is long and the pace sometimes drags, in part because endless descriptions of the Iverson family’s fashion choices become a bit wearing (no pun intended). Anna-Marie McLemore’s central point is the importance of children building their own identities and the damage caused by mothers who shape their children with the intent to monetize them, but the story suffers from redundant reminders about all the ways in which May failed her kids. Still, the story always maintained my interest and a steady diet of comedic moments kept me smiling.

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Don't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo

Published by Tordotcom on April 8, 2025

Don’t Sleep with the Dead is marketed as a companion to Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful, a book that allows F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character Jordan Baker to provide a woman’s perspective on The Great Gatsby. Before I read Don’t Sleep with the Dead, I was unaware of its companionship with The Chosen and the Beautiful, a novel I didn’t read. That’s what I get for paying little attention to marketing materials when I choose books. I’m certain that a familiarity with the earlier work would have enhanced my incomplete understanding of this novella.

Nick Carraway is on “the wrong side of forty.” He’s living in New York City, working as a columnist at the Herald Tribune, and trying to put 1922 behind him. Jay Gatsby died that year but when Nick finds himself in an alley where gay men congregate, about to be stomped by the police, he believes he is rescued by Gatsby.

When Nick calls Jordan in Paris to tell her that he saw Gatsby, she’s not surprised. She tells him that the dead are coming back in France. “Old soldiers, mostly.” They can’t speak because their throats are blistered by mustard gas.

And then, as if Gatsby’s reincarnation isn’t sufficient, the story becomes strange. Nick tells a story about his grandfather’s brother, who came to America and was drafted into the Civil War. “In the two-room shack with the river roaring in the spring flood, Leith Carraway used his old Sheffield razor to loosen his face from his head and traded it for another.” Nick’s mother gives him a less glamorous explanation for his granduncle’s slashed face, but Nick believes “that was where it started, the Carraway belief that duty could be put off on someone else, and that if you only made the right sacrifice, spilled the right blood using the right name, that fate might be delayed or even distracted.”

We then learn that this Nick is also an imposter. Nick went to Canada when he was conscripted to fight in the first World War. A talented relative cut out a paper doll and turned it into a replacement Nick. The paper doll Nick went to war in Nick’s place. The original Nick died in a car accident shortly after the war ended and the paper Nick took over his life.

Strangeness abounds in the novella. Nick bargains with the devil because he wants to learn what happened to Gatsby in Hell. The devil sends him to a woman made of wax. And so on.

The devil alters its appearance at will and Nick’s granduncle is not the only character who swaps faces. “One night, drunk, I’d met March at the Morocco and he’d put on Gatsby’s face for me.” All this was a bit much for me, although I appreciated the imaginative take on Fitzgerald’s novel and the urgency with which the story is told. Still, unless wielded by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I’m not a fan of magical realism.

I credit Vo for her creative and elegant prose style. Unfortunately, the novel makes so many references to events and characters in The Chosen and the Beautiful that I became quite lost. I can’t judge the story fairly as a companion to the earlier novel because I lack the necessary context. I'm reviewing it as a standalone work, perhaps unfairly, because that is how it is marketed. My guess is that readers who enjoyed The Chosen and the Beautiful will enjoy the companion novella. For other readers, I can only recommend reading The Chosen and the Beautiful first (if you’re a fan of magical realism) and, if you enjoy it, moving on to Don’t Sleep with the Dead to learn the rest of the story.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS