How to Find Your Way in the Dark by Derek B. Miller

Published by Mariner Books on July 27, 2021

Billed as a “Sheldon Horowitz novel,” How to Find Your Way in the Dark features the elderly protagonist of Norwegian by Night during his tween and teen years. Beginning in the years before America’s entrance into World War II, Derek Miller’s novel focuses on Jewish boys who can’t understand why Americans of all religions aren’t asking their government to join the fight against Hitler. The story follows Sheldon from the age of eleven until his early adulthood, when America has finally entered the war and the country seems on the brink of confronting its own history of antisemitism. The novel’s social and political content serves as a background to a coming-of-age crime story about a boy who dreams of revenge for his father’s death.

Sheldon’s mother burned to death in a movie theater in Hartford. His father Joseph blamed himself for his wife’s presence in the theater, guilt that Sheldon believed his father did not deserve. Sheldon learned to hunt and shoot from his father. They made a living selling pelts to the Krupinski family, whose members skimmed the proceeds by lying about the money they received from buyers. Joseph knew he was being cheated but didn’t want to make waves. The consequence of not making waves is one of the novel’s themes.

The Krupinskis were cheating a mob family as well as Joseph. In the novel’s opening pages, Joseph borrows a truck from the Krupsinskis. A mob killer mistakes Joseph for a Krupinski and runs him off the road. Sheldon walks away from the accident, but his father dies. Getting revenge against the driver becomes young Sheldon’s mission in life.

Now an orphan, Sheldon goes to live with his father’s uncle, who is raising his son and daughter on his own. Abe and Mirabelle are both a bit older than Sheldon but they get along with him. Sheldon’s best friend, however, is Lenny Bernstein, whose plan in life is to make money as a comedian.

When Sheldon is fifteen, he and Lenny con their way into summer jobs as bellboys in a fancy Catskills resort. Lenny tries out his brand of anti-Nazi humor at various venues before Jewish audiences, earning lots of applause and laughter before he’s fired for telling political jokes instead of one-liners. In the background, albeit almost as an afterthought, Abe moves to Canada where he can enroll in the RAF and fight Nazis.

The plot gives Sheldon a chance to avenge his father’s death through a clever series of crimes at the resort. Sheldon’s scheme puts him at odds with Mirabelle, who indulges her desire for the good life by visiting the resort with a man Sheldon instantly loathes. The story combines humor and suspense as Sheldon tries to gain revenge without being murdered. When Sheldon moves to New York a few years later, revenge comes back to bite him, placing him in peril again.

How to Find Your Way in the Dark has been compared, at least in its blurbs, to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I had the sense that Miller intended to invite that comparison. The plots are entirely different but Miller’s story of young Jewish males on the East Coast during the pre-war years assures that the novels share certain themes. Chabon’s book is more nuanced than Miller’s in its depiction of American attitudes during the pre-war years, although Miller does give older Jewish characters the opportunity to explain their reluctance to work more aggressively to influence anti-Hitler opinion prior to Germany’s declaration of war against the United States. Chabon’s novel also creates a more carefully defined sense of American history that Miller’s.

While Miller’s book isn’t as remarkable as Chabon’s, few books are. If Miller’s novel comes up short, it is only by comparison to a Pulitzer Prize winner. Miller’s characters are sympathetic, the story is entertaining, and the sociopolitical background, while a bit heavy-handed, never threatens to overwhelm the storytelling.

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The Bachelor by Andrew Palmer

Published by Penguin/Hogarth Press on July 20, 2021

A young man confronts his emptiness as he befriends or dates several women while contemplating the reality TV show that share’s the novel’s title. The Bachelor follows the unnamed narrator for a period of several weeks as he ruminates upon his life while approaching his thirtieth birthday.

The narrator is a writer whose agent is waiting for a second novel that the narrator hasn’t started. He claims to be working on a story based on his grandfather’s life, but he lost interest in writing fiction after breaking up with Ashwani. They were both young writers in New York when they met and fell in love. After the narrator’s first novel was published, he reluctantly moved to Halifax, where Ashwani had taken a prestigious teaching position and was awaiting publication of her first novel. Their relationship deteriorated within months. They cancelled a planned a trip to Mumbai to visit Ashwani’s parents and the narrator instead decided to fly to Des Moines, where he has been offered the opportunity to housesit for his mother’s friend Sadie, who now lives in New York but isn’t ready to sell her Iowa home.

During a layover in Detroit as he travels to to Des Moines, the narrator reconnects with Maria, a poet he befriended in New York who now lives in an old Detroit mansion that offers living and working space to artists. In the mansion, the narrator comes across and steals a bad biography of the poet John Berryman. When he later confesses the theft to Maria, she sends him Berryman’s much better biography of Stephen Crane. Thinking that Berryman deserves a biography of similar quality, the narrator begins intermittent research of Berryman’s life, loves, and poetry. Berryman’s relationships with women, like the Bachelor’s relationships with contestants for his love, frame the protagonist’s own relationships.

The narrator fills time in Des Moines by watching and rewatching episodes of The Bachelor. The bachelor in this season is appearing for the second time, having come to regret his failure to select a mate in the first turn at bat. This time, he tells the audience, he has truly dedicated his heart to finding his perfect love. The narrator deconstructs the show with particular focus upon the need for female contestants to open up, to show their vulnerability, to discuss the tragedies that they have survived, all to demonstrate their ability to engage in an honest and open relationship that will prove their worthiness as a future wife. Allowing the reader to share the guilty pleasure that the narrator takes in The Bachelor while exposing its formulaic nature is the novel’s signature accomplishment.

In Des Moines, the narrator meets and dates a young woman named Jess who works for the dry cleaner. He has brooding telephone conversations with Laura, a college girlfriend with whom he has maintained a friendship. He spends time with Sadie when she visits the house. They connect over The Bachelor — a show that Sadie had dismissed before watching it — and use it as a springboard for discussing love and developing a love of their own.

Sadie introduces the narrator to a wealthy friend who wants him to housesit a ridiculously expensive home at the top of a mountain in Napa while it’s being renovated. The isolation, when Sadie isn’t visiting, gives the narrator more time to brood and think about Berryman. After returning to Iowa for an extended stay with his parents, he visits Minneapolis to dip into Berryman’s archives, where he strikes up a friendship with Dierdre. Where any of these friendships/relationships will go is uncertain, and the novel’s ending leaves them all up in the air.

The narrator sees himself in Berryman, having “spent a good deal of my life engaged in the exhausting and mostly thankless battle of trying to make things matter.” Like Berryman, “nothing sufficed. There was a hole in the middle of his world.” The narrator, on the other hand, is doing little to fill his hole as he contemplates the Chicago Bulls of his youth, recalls reading his brother’s determinedly literary journal entries, dissects Bachelor episodes, and thinks about (and occasionally calls) his former lovers. Berryman at least wrote some decent poetry. The narrator doesn’t do much of anything, apart from writing determinedly literary emails, having heartfelt discussions, and learning to swim.

Berryman wrote: “At thirty men think reluctantly back over their lives.” That pretty much summarizes The Bachelor, except that the narrator isn’t particularly reluctant to look back over a life that stopped amounting to much after he published his novel. The narrator recognizes that he disappeared from himself at some point. It seems like he might be ready to work past that emptiness, but it is far from certain where his life will go. Readers who want definitive endings — or any ending — to a novel won’t find one here. But as a snapshot of a life, The Bachelor is noteworthy for its ability to make the reader think about John Berryman’s thinking and for its subtle suggestion that people script their relationships in much the same way that contestants give detailed thought to how they will need to present themselves on the “unscripted” episodes of The Bachelor.

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Orgy by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Published digitally on Scribd on July 23, 2021

“Orgy” is the first true “pandemic story” I’ve encountered. I’m sure many more are on the way, but “Orgy” is a short story and presumably made it to market more quickly than the pandemic novels we’ll soon see.

Nessa is “closer to forty than girlhood.” She lives in Brooklyn with her roommate Laurie, a writer who specializes in essays about the microaggressions displayed by white women who wear yoga pants. Nessa is fed up with social distancing, although she understands its necessity. It is nevertheless interfering with a sex life that was once active and varied.

Nessa is bisexual and, when she plays the game of looking at subway passengers and asking herself whether she would sleep with them, searches for ways to say yes. Yet Nessa’s regular booty-call partners aren’t risking contact with her during the pandemic, presumably because they regard her as a “third-tier friend — not worth the risk of sharing a restaurant meal with. It is a cold reckoning at the end of the world.”

Nessa receives an email inviting her to an orgy. She believes the email is from members of the furry community and that the orgy will be a costume party, so she dons her pig nose and tail, rips some holes in her leotards, and sets out into the night over her roommate’s objection that she’s breaching the lockdown. The orgy isn’t quite what she expects, in part because she receives an unexpected reaction to a story she likes to tell, a story that is “one of the foundational myths of herself.”

The desire to scratch an itch after a pandemic-induced dry spell is an interesting concept for a story, but the story’s greater interest lies in the impact of the pandemic on New Yorkers. Nessa has recently delivered groceries to a 15-year-old girl who refused to wear a mask and became ill with COVID. As she ponders the girl’s decision to make “a potentially dumb choice just to feel something like free,” she wonders if that is exactly what she is doing by attending an orgy. Yet “the pure glory of having a body and being alive” is something she has felt since she arrived in New York.

The story’s closing paragraphs suggest that Nessa doesn’t need an orgy to understand that sexual freedom is still essential to her sense of self. “Orgy” thus not only delivers insight into the protagonist butoffers a larger view of how the pandemic has collectively affected the lives of people who have taken it seriously and those who have not.

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The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

 Published in Argentina in 2016; published in translation by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 20, 2021

The Woman from Uruguay is written as a confession, or perhaps an explanation. The narrator tells the story of a couple of eventful days in his life, bracketed by less dramatic events before and after those days. He is speaking to his wife, the mother of his child. He asks banal questions like, “At what point did the monster you and I were start getting paralyzed?” It almost seems that he is bringing his wife up to speed on his life before and after they broke up. Since she is certainly aware of much of the story, including the reason their relationship ended, the narrator is clearly speaking to a larger reading audience while pretending to be engaged in an intimate communication.

The narrator is Lucas Pereyra, a writer who lives in Argentina. He’s recently been paid a book advance. The funds are in his bank account in Uruguay. He intends to travel to Uruguay to pick up the funds, which he desperately needs. He wants to repay money he borrowed from his wife and friends and to spend nine months writing the book without needing to take on a teaching job. He plans to smuggle the cash into Argentina to avoid paying taxes. The amount exceeds import limits and he knows he’ll be in trouble if he’s caught by Customs.

Lucas has an ulterior motive for visiting Uruguay. He wants to see Magali Guerra Zabala, a woman he met once before while attending a writer’s conference in Uruguay. Their time together was frustratingly limited because they both needed to return to their lives and partners. They experienced “the sadness of fresh, just-discovered love.” Lucas can’t seem to get Guerra out of his mind. They begin an email exchange with promises to meet again.

Most of the story follows Lucas in Uruguay as he picks up the money and visits with Guerra. Nothing goes as he planned. Perhaps the novel should be seen as a commentary on the futility of planning, or at least as a comment on the risk that expectations will lead to unexpected turmoil.

Guerra offers familiar opinions of men in general (“The problem is you guys will hump anything that moves”) and of Lucas in particular (“You send me an email out of the blue saying you’re coming, you suddenly show up, you want us to race off to a hotel and have sex, and then you’re off to catch the ferry to go back”). Lucas offers familiar opinions of women in general (generally focused on how women make him feel “wounded, sexually, I mean, the injured male, depressed”) and of Guerra in particular (“How did I get mixed up in this Venezuelan soap opera?”).

Pedro Mairal creates some moments of drama that don’t involve relationships. He adds a crime to the story to create a conflict that forces Lucas to confront his life and his relationship with his wife when he returns to Argentina. Lucas does seem to learn something from his Uruguayan adventure and he at least claims to have changed his life. The primary change seems to be a willingness to accept his sorry fate. Whether readers will learn life lessons from Lucas’ experiences that they haven’t learned from similar stories, or from life, is doubtful.

Some of the plot seems forced, including the crime drama and the revelation that leads to the destruction of Lucas’ relationship. With regard to the revelation, I got the impression that Mairal was trying to be hip and trendy. If so, themes that might be hip in Venezuela are a bit stale to readers who encounter those themes on a regular basis.

In the end, Lucas feels betrayed by his wife (notwithstanding the number of times he cheated on her) and can’t decide whether he was betrayed (in a nonsexual way) by Guerra. Is there more to the story? Not really. Nothing in The Woman from Uruguay is particularly profound or unexpected. We know that things go wrong in life. We know that people betray each other. We know that some women enjoy making drama and that some men can’t keep it in their pants. That seems to be just as true in Uruguay as it is everywhere else in the world. Those are throw-away observations in deeper novels, but they seem to be the whole point of Mairal’s novel. Despite Mairal’s fluid prose and evocative descriptions of Uruguay, he offers little in The Woman from Uruguay that is fresh or exciting.

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The Council of Animals by Nick McDonell

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 20, 2021

Novels that attribute human speech and characteristics to animals are often intended to shed light on the human condition. I suppose the same might be said of Warner Brothers cartoons. In any event, the nonhuman characters in The Council of Animals judge humans from an animal perspective. The verdict is mixed.

The novel imagines that all animals can speak to each other using a common language called Grak. The animals meet in a council to decide how they should respond to an undefined event known as the Calamity. The Calamity destroyed the ecosystem. Some forests turned to plastic. All creatures suffered, but the outcome was disastrous for humans, few of whom are still alive.

In theory, the council consists of one representative of each species in the Animal Kingdom. In practice, only a few representatives attend the meeting. Too much political representation, after all, is unwieldy. The job of attendees is to decide the fate of the remaining humans. Some animals favor eating them. Others would let them live. In a Shakespearean moment, a bear cradles a skull and thinks: “Humanity or not? I voted for them before. But whether they are worth the struggle, or only chew toys? Better to take my diurnal death, and hibernate, and perhaps dream of honey.”

The story of the council meeting and its aftermath is told by an historian. “History is a dark tale that doesn’t wag,” the historian tells us. The council meeting is attended by a horse, a bear, a baboon, a dog, a cat, and a crow. The dog once accompanied a human General in a war against people who, for reasons the dog cannot comprehend, forbade bacon. The dog generally likes humans, as dogs do, but is easily distracted by thrown sticks. The cat also favors humans but, as cats do, has its own agenda. According to the cat, “It is better to accept what cannot be changed, and pee on it.” The baboon doesn’t like humans at all and is rather Machiavellian in his manipulation of the horse. The crow is lost in his eccentric religion; nothing much matters to the bird except the Great Egg.

Eventually a few of the animals decide to make contact with the surviving humans, having heard a rumor that one of them speaks grak. They meet a boy who overcomes his misery by reading. The historian tells us that the boy loses himself in books that convey “not only the pain of life but some of its joy, some of our pleasures, whether sleeping in the sunshine, hearing the final notes of a blue sheep aria, or knowing, for a little while, the mind of another animal.” The story follows the group’s progress and eventually leads to a confrontation, followed by an amusing resolution.

Nick McDonell uses birds to satirize religion. He employs the entire Animal Kingdom to suggest that humans are not the only species to experience prejudice. Insects and rodents are rather put off by the failure of other animals to give them respect. A scorpion complains that mammals are no better than insects but will never be fair. A baboon complains that baboons “are not a monolith. Species does not determine what an animal thinks.”

Another similarity between animals and humans is the propensity of some (but not all) toward violence and authoritarianism. “We evolved to eat each other,” laments the historian. Leaders arouse the violent tendencies of their followers to cement their power. The historian wonders why we are “continually surprised by the rapacity, violence, and arrogance of those creatures who ascent to leadership.”

The novel leads to an ending that might be described as cute, perhaps because there were few possible endings to the story that a reader might be willing to accept. The Council of Animals doesn’t have the political significance of Animal Farm or the world-building complexity of Watership Down, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is — a quirky allegorical story that uses animals to remind humans of our foibles. In that regard, it resembles last year’s Talking Animals, another book about anthropomorphic animals that won my admiration.

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