When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash

Published by William Morrow on September 21, 2021

Racism and loss are dominant background themes in When Ghosts Come Home, a crime novel set in North Carolina in 1984. Winston Barnes is the Sheriff, but he’s likely to lose his reelection campaign to a good old boy named Bradley Frye who terrorizes black neighborhoods by shooting his gun while nightriding with a confederate flag on his pickup. Winston’s wife is battling cancer. His daughter Colleen just arrived home for an unexpected visit. Colleen made an impulsive decision to take a break from her husband in Texas after she experienced a stillbirth. Exactly why she thought it necessary to take that trip without talking it over with her husband first was never quite clear to me.

The plot begins when Winston is awakened by the sound of a low flying plane. Fearing that the plane might have crashed, he drives to the small local airport. Fearful because he is going out at night alone, Winston's wife calls one of his deputies and asks him to back up Winston.

At the airport, Winston finds a plane with broken landing gear that just avoided a collision at the end of the runway. The plane is empty, but he sees the body of Rodney Bellamy laying on the ground. Rodney has been shot. Winston finds Rodney's car is in the airport parking lot. Rodney’s wife, Janelle, tells Winston that he went to a 24-hour supermarket to buy diapers for their baby and didn’t return. Janelle has a much younger brother named Jay who got into trouble in Atlanta and has been exiled to Janelle’s home until he gets his act together.

None of the characters are entirely likable, although Jay is the most sympathetic. He was hanging with the wrong peers in Atlanta and was sent to North Carolina to get his life straight. Even before Rodney’s murder, Jay’s new life is troubled. His only friend is a white kid whose father doesn’t approve of blacks. Jay soon has a confrontation with Frye that makes him wish he hadn’t been pushed out of Atlanta.

Colleen’s grief and her feeling that her stillborn son’s ghost followed her from Texas is meant to give the story an emotional charge. Colleen’s decision to leave her husband in order to heal, her weeping every time she sees a baby, and her need to make a decision about her future seem artificial. The heart-tugging plot elements add little interest to the story.

Winston’s shooting of a black suspect in the early days of his law enforcement career has the similar feel of an event that Wiley Cash contrived to give Winston a burden that explains his troubled personality. Winston complains that his wife undermined his job or his masculinity by asking the deputy to provide backup at the airport. Winston’s failure to appreciate his dying wife’s concern makes him a bit of a jerk, although I suppose his mildly toxic masculinity is realistic. Still, I found it hard to care about Winston or his daughter.

The whodunit and the subplot involving Jay are sufficient to hold the reader's attention in the absence of compelling characters. Jay plays a collateral role in the larger mystery and creates a moral dilemma for Winston, who must decide whether to overlook the law in the interest of justice. A similar moral dilemma makes Winston weigh the arrest of a likely killer against the evil that the killing probably prevented.

As much as I believe in the power of fiction to expose the ugliness of racism, for a time I thought that the issue was overplayed, that the nightriding of the racist characters was almost cartoonish. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that some of the racists have underlying motivations for their obnoxious conduct that transcend race.

The surprise ending is partially telegraphed — there are clues that don’t make any sense unless they were planted to set up the ending — but in a key respect the ending comes as a shock. The ending is abrupt and not entirely satisfying, in part because it is never clear how the culprit managed to become part of the criminal enterprise that resulted in Rodney’s death. Still, I give Cash credit for the jarring, unconventional ending and for telling a story that is entertaining if not entirely credible.

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Mr Cadmus by Peter Ackroyd

First published in the UK in 2020; published by ‎ Canongate Books on September 21, 2021

Most of the story that unfolds in Mr Cadmus follows a British tradition of making murder the undercurrent of a whimsical story. Yet a growing darkness makes the story, by the end, more disturbing than whimsical.

Millicent Swallow and Maud Finch have an aunt in common, but they did not know each other until their teenage years, when the aunt introduced them. They also have murder in common. During their young lives, each killed for reasons they never came to regret. It is likely that neither woman is entirely right in the head, although they seem very proper and well suited to a quiet life in a gossipy village. As the years passed, they became as close as sisters, and by the early 1980s they occupy similar houses on the same street in Little Camborne, “the tiniest dot in a map of the county of Devonshire,” separated only by the house that stands between theirs.

When Theodore Cadmus moves into the middle house, the cousins are concerned. “I hope he doesn’t have any habits,” one cousin says. “Such as what?” the other asks. “Oh you know, food and so forth.” The cousins are quickly charmed by the new arrival, a single man in his 40s from Italy who lavishes the two women with attention and compliments. When reports of crime begin to crop up in the sleepy community and nearby villages, the reader will suspect they might relate to Mr Cadmus. The cousins do not suspect Cadmus of any crime. Surely he cannot be held accountable for the vicar who seems to have purloined the local parish’s property, although Cadmus and the vicar were together in a bank to which Cadmus paid a sudden visit. The cousins believe Cadmus is much too polite to be a criminal, even if his account of his past seems to change from conversation to conversation.

Theodore’s true past begins with a childhood on a small, misty island between Sardinia and Sicily. As a child, he kept his eye open for German soldiers and English spies. He was mistreated by both but had a particularly ugly encounter with a group of Englishmen. That episode gave him a dual purpose: revenge and finding hidden treasure at a location described on a map that a German soldier liberated from one of the Englishmen.

The story is odd and quirky, the kind of story in which the appearance of a parrot with a vulgar vocabulary is not unexpected, although the parrot’s fate might come as a shock. Mr Cadmus begins as an amusing story about eccentric characters who are not what they appear to be. The story eventually takes a darker turn, complete with brutal murders, voices from a grave, and a corpse whose “mouth and nostrils were stuffed with green amethysts so that he could no longer breathe.” The change in tone, complete with legends of a purple seagull, gives the novel a hint of the supernatural. While the change is a bit jarring, the ending is consistent with karma, given that none of the characters deserve to go unpunished.

Readers who want likeable characters and happy endings should avoid Mr Cadmus. Readers who want to be surprised — even if the story makes them cringe a bit — might be nourished by a plot that, if not entirely satisfying, is filled with unexpected events.

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Talk to Me by T.C. Boyle

Published by Ecco on September 14, 2021

T.C. Boyle tells stories that that are entirely original. His novels showcase the diversity and absurdity of the human experience. In Talk to Me, his focus is on the quasi-human experience of a chimpanzee who has been raised as a human.

Boyle draws on the work of Jane Goodall, the television appearances of J. Fred Muggs, and the episodic rise and fall of a branch of psychology that studies chimpanzees to gain insight into human cognition. Talk to Me is set in the 1970s. Its star is a chimpanzee named Sam who was stolen from his mother in infancy, taken to a breeder in Iowa, and loaned to a psychology professor in California named Guy Schermerhorn. The professor raises Sam in a human environment, teaches him sign language, and hopes to propel himself to fame and academic stardom by having Sam appear as a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

Several of the chapters are written from Sam’s perspective. Boyle supplies the vocabulary that Sam lacks to capture the essence of his experience, his emotions and reactions, his joys and fears. Maybe Boyle stretches the ability of a chimp to engage in complex reasoning, but maybe he doesn’t. The point is, we can’t know a chimpanzee’s thoughts, which is why using them as research animals raises serious ethical questions about primate experimentation. A priest in the novel, convinced that Sam has a soul, even baptizes Sam — another stretch, perhaps, but if souls exist, who is to say that animals can’t have them?

We quickly learn that Guy’s wife has left him and that Sam isn’t adjusting well to her absence. Early in the novel, a student named Aimee Villard — an introverted young woman who isn’t sure what she wants to make of her life — sees Sam on To Tell the Truth and knows she wants to meet him. She applies for a job at the ranch where Guy is raising Sam. As soon as she arrives, Sam — who has been on a rampage and is about to escape — becomes calm and subdued. He bonds instantly with Aimee and she returns his affection. Aimee finds in Sam what she has never found in a human relationship. Guy is thrilled to have an assistant who can control Sam. He’s also happy that Aimee is pretty and quickly seduces her. Aimee is happy to have a sex life but is even happier that she can spend all her non-coital time interacting with Sam.

Guy is a self-centered jerk, but the novel’s primary villain is Donald Moncrief, a professor in Iowa who owns Sam. Conflict arises between Guy and Moncrief. Guy has staked his academic reputation on Sam, while Moncrief is certain that evolutionary psychology and primate studies are a dead end. Besides, Sam is getting too old to continue living as a human. Yet living as a human is all Sam has ever known. If part of that lifestyle goes against his instincts (he’d rather be climbing trees than sitting in a chair and answering Guy’s questions), his relationship with Aimee makes the tedium of a human lifestyle worth enduring. Like a human, Sam is motivated to make sacrifices in exchange for love and acceptance.

The story takes off when Aimee is separated from Sam. The scenes of Sam in a cage —not understanding how to live without Aimee, not understanding that he’s not a human, not understanding his relationship to the shrieking primates in neighboring cages — are powerful and affecting. The choices Aimee makes about Sam, including a very difficult choice at the novel’s end, are easy to understand and appreciate.

Boyle makes it easy to empathize with Aimee. Like Sam, although perhaps less selfishly, love motivates Aimee to make sacrifices. She wants to do what’s right for Sam, but the sacrifices she needs to make to let him live a meaningful life are overwhelming. Sam can’t be left unattended for a minute. His sense of humor, his curiosity, and his temper all motivate him to engage in acts that range from mild mischief to wholesale destruction. By the end of the novel, Aimee’s devotion to Sam is complete. She can have no relationships with humans. She can hold no ordinary job. She can’t continue her education. She can’t live in an apartment. But she perseveres because the alternative is to condemn Sam to a life in a cage, a life in which he is controlled by cattle prods, a life without love or fun or intellectual stimulation.

Talk to Me illustrates the difficult moral questions that surround scientific inquiry into animal behavior, as well as the philosophical questions that surround animal intelligence. Is there a difference in kind rather than degree between animal intelligence and human intelligence? Do animals have souls? Do people? If freedom is a cherished value for humans, why do humans feel entitled to put animals in cages? If most decent humans now regard slavery as fundamentally wrong, will a time come when decent humans believe it is wrong to cage animals?

Boyle’s prose is low-key, yet he occasionally delivers a sentence that shines: “In the evenings, he made the rounds of the bars, exploring what lack of purpose involved at its core.” Boyle proves again in Talk to Me that he is a masterful storyteller. The novel blends tragedy and offbeat comedy in a unique plot that is absorbing from beginning to end.

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The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Published by Scribner on September 7, 2021

The line between fiction and nonfiction becomes fuzzy when writers make characters out of real people. In some novels, such as Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, the character is modeled upon, but does not purport to tell the life of, a real person. Mann based his novel on the composer Arnold Schoenberg but gave the character a different name and attributed his musical creativity to a pact with the devil.

Colm Tóibín writes about Doctor Faustus and Schoenberg’s reaction to that novel in The Magician, Tóibín’s own blend of fiction and biographical fact. Tóibín does not disguise his subject; the story’s protagonist is Thomas Mann and the story hews closely to the details of Mann’s life.

Writers who essentially write a biography in the form of a novel run a couple of risks. First, they are constrained by historical fact, which limits the ability to let imagination take flight, as Mann did when he turned Schoenberg into someone other than Schoenberg. Second, if they choose a subject who is not particularly interesting, the novel is likely to be dull. R.J. Gadney stumbled across the first of those barriers to compelling fiction in Albert Einstein Speaking, turning Einstein’s life into a dry checklist of events without ever bringing Einstein to life. Mann is a literary icon but not an exciting one, creating the risk that a book about his life might be dull. Fortunately, Tóibín recognized and overcame that risk.

Given Mann’s reserved and scholarly nature, it would be difficult to make Mann’s the story of Mann's life lively. Tóibín defeated that problem by surrounding Mann with colorful people (including Mann’s children and their varied marital or sex partners), by giving the reader occasional glimpses of Mann’s attraction to young males, and by focusing on the political issues that played an unwelcome role in Mann’s life. Much of the story’s intrigue derives from Mann’s internal struggle with his early embrace of German nationalism and his later recognition that the nationalism embraced by the Nazi party was antithetical to his belief in freedom, democracy, and humanity. Tóibín suggests that Mann was often caught in the middle, between those (including his children) who criticized him for being insufficiently anti-fascist, and those (including the FBI) who regarded Mann and his children as dangerously liberal in their advocacy of anti-fascism. Mann did eventually speak out against Hitler and did so passionately, but for the most part he just wanted to be left alone so he can read and write.

Tóibín portrays Mann as a person whose nature, shaped by German culture, is circumspect and a bit ponderous, a man who has playful moments but prefers the solitude that allows him to think deeply about the human condition and to reveal his thoughts in novels rather than conversation. Although we learn the background to Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus, Tóibín spends little time on the content of Mann’s works, focusing instead on the act of creation, the moments of inspiration, the mulling of artistic choices, and the hours spent committing words to paper.

Mann’s confidence in his art contrasts with (as Tóibín sees it) his insecurity as a public figure. Mann transformed his political thinking after the First World War, viewing German’s defeat as a lesson that the nation needed to internalize. He feared the direction Germany was taking as its population embraced Hitler, and then feared for himself and his family as he moved to other European countries and eventually to America. Yet at what point and to what degree he should speak out against Hitler was a question that troubled him, although not as much as it troubled his brother and children. Mann is Germany’s most celebrated writer during Hitler’s rise, just as Einstein (who makes a brief appearance in the story) is Germany’s most celebrated scientist. Both are men who could speak with intellectual and moral authority. Some in America advised Mann not to advocate for America’s participation in the war, lest he jeopardize his relationship with Roosevelt, while most of his family demanded that he make his opinions known. Tóibín’s depiction of Mann’s internal struggle is one of the novel’s highlights, as are the political machinations of the State Department and FBI in their fevered belief that intellectual freedom and nontraditional sexuality must be suppressed in the name of restraining communism and preserving crabbed American notions of morality. American hospitality turns out to be a fickle thing and Mann winds up in Switzerland after the war is over.

As envisioned by Tóibín, Mann is never quite happy with the person he has become. He “wished he were a different sort of writer, less concerned with the details of the world and more with larger, more eternal questions.” He isn’t certain whether his novels evoked emotion in same way that musical compositions express yearning. His own yearnings were confined to diaries (presumably a primary source that informed Tóibín’s understanding of Mann). For a time, Mann feared that his private writings would fall into the hands of Nazis who would use them to destroy his career. His emotions are so intensely private that they are only expressed in novels. Even his warm regard for his children is never spoken. By the novel’s end, when he decides it would be too painful to attend the funeral of his oldest son, he learns from a letter that the feelings of adulation expressed by the general public are not shared by his surviving children.

Tóibín is a meticulous researcher. I can only assume The Magician is grounded in fact, even if some of those facts are revealed in imagined conversations. Whether or not Tóibín’s interpretation of Mann is accurate, his skill at crafting characters in depth is fully displayed. The bottled-up Mann, who often responds to conflict with silence or a conspiratorial glance at his wife, is presented in credible detail as someone who can’t reconcile his emotional conflicts, who can only give full expression to his feelings by attributing them to characters in his novels. Mann is reticent but comfortable discussing matters of intellect; he is hopeless at discussing matters of the heart or loins. He is capable of revising his opinions — in some ways, he becomes a new person before the war, just as his post-war homeland becomes a new country — but he cannot change his deeply ingrained inability to express himself emotionally. He understands and regrets this flaw, but he seems incapable of addressing it. Instead of trying, he buries himself in his writing, the only task that gives him comfort.

I’ve always preferred the flights of imagination that inspire pure fiction, as opposed to the “based on a true story/actual person” brand of fiction. Writers who want to enhance a biography with fiction are constrained by the factual frame that contains their subject. Tóibín has written some true masterpieces of fiction. The Magician and The Master (a similar novel about Henry James) could be regarded as masterpieces of the subgenre of biographical fiction (or whatever it might be called). For my taste, The Magician doesn’t have the wow factor of Let the Great World Spin, but it is an impressive achievement.

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Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Published by Doubleday on September 14, 2021

Harlem Shuffle is set in the 1950s and 60s. Raymond Carney owns a furniture store in Harlem. Carney’s father was disreputable. Carney raised himself after his mother died. He has a business degree from Queens College, a wife and kids, and dreams. He longs to move to a larger apartment in a nicer building, a dream he entertains as he walks the streets of Harlem, inspecting the buildings that he passes and imaging life inside their walls, a dream he defers whenever his savings shrink.

The Harlem atmosphere is as important to the novel as the plot. Harlem is changing. The World’s Fair promises a better future, but upward mobility for some results in misfortune for others. Through the course of the novel, Carney sees buildings that offer affordable housing torn down by developers while landmark businesses close. Some blame rioters for businesses that were destined to fail anyway, leading Carney to ask: “How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?” Carney keeps his business open, knowing the protests will pass and that protests won’t stop white cops from killing Harlem residents. The parallel between Harlem protests against police violence and similar BLM protests in recent years illustrates Colson Whitehead’s point: everything changes — “the textile warehouses and women’s hat stores and shoeshine stands, the greasy spoons” are reduced to rubble to make way for the World Trade Center — but nothing really changes, including police violence.

The plot follows several years in Carney’s life, years marked by upward mobility that is only partially attributable to his success selling high quality furniture, often on credit, some of which has been “gently used.” It’s not an easy business and Carney worries that his wife would leave him if she learned how he supplements his income.

Carney and his cousin Freddy ran together when they were young. Carney got his life together but Freddy’s life was “a haze of lost seasons” filled with aimless loafing, burglaries, running numbers, and a stretch of jail time. On occasion, Carney fences goods that Freddy steals, although Carney doesn’t ask whether they are stolen so he can imagine himself to be honest. And for the most part, he is. No worse, at least, than the cops to whom he pays protection money or the city workers he bribes for permits.

Freddy’s life takes another wrong turn when he joins a plan to rob the Hotel Theresa, a decision that brings “guns and hard men” into his life. Freddy proposes Carney as a fence for jewelry recovered from the hotel’s safe deposit boxes, but Carney refuses. Unfortunately for Carney, Freddy gets him involved anyway, connecting Carney to a hard man who becomes a source of grief while promoting Carney’s career as a middleman between jewelry thieves and a white midtown jeweler who gives Carney a fair deal on the stolen goods.

The story travels through peaks and valleys. Two peaks involve threats or acts of violence directed toward Carney or Freddy. Carney is not a violent man but he knows where to find a violent man when he needs help. Another peak involves a banker who took money from Carney in exchange for a favor the banker didn’t deliver. Carney executes a plan with several moving parts to take revenge against the banker.

Favors are the grease that lubricates all business in New York. Envelopes of cash assure that the police don’t bother Carney or buy their assistance when he needs to set his plan in motion. A cop talks about “a circulation, a movement of envelopes that keep the city running.” Carney later contemplates the chain of events that depend on an exchange of envelopes. “Disrespect the order and the whole system breaks down.”

After reading two Pulitzer Prize winners from Whitehead, I was surprised to read something that almost falls within the genre of crime fiction. But the “almost” is important. Harlem Shuffle reminded me of The 25th Hour, in that crime is the context that drives a deeper story. Harlem Shuffle is the story of a man divided, a man who (like many others, as he is surprised to learn) preserves an illusion of honesty while knowing that’s he a criminal, a man who struggles to draw a shifting line between crimes he is willing to commit — crimes that are no worse than those committed by a wealthy white family that drive the novel’s last act — and crimes that are far removed from his nature. The themes of change and personal struggle and the Harlem atmosphere transform a fairly ordinary crime story into something special.

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