Welcome to Cooper by Tariq Ashkanani

Published by Thomas & Mercer on October 1, 2021

Cooper is a desperate, desolate town in Nebraska, a place where people live when they are out of options. For being a nothing town, Cooper is a hotbed of criminal activity. Much of it is controlled by a gangster in Omaha named Marchenko, who also controls a local police detective named Joe Finch.

Joe is partnered with a new arrival in Cooper, a former DC detective who made drug busts, stole the drugs, and used them recreationally with his girlfriend before she died. Thomas Levine saved his skin by giving evidence against his partner in DC, who was selling his share of the stolen drugs. With help he probably didn’t deserve, Thomas found a new home in Cooper. History repeats itself as Thomas discovers that his new partner is corrupt.

Joe commits a murder, frames Thomas for it, and uses the threat of Thomas’ arrest to coerce Thomas’ assistance in an armed robbery. The man Joe kills may have murdered a woman whose eyes were gouged out — the latest in a series of similar murders — but Thomas comes to believe that the murder victim wasn’t the killer at all. Thomas attempts to find the true killer while dealing with his corrupt partner and a state cop who threatens to expose Thomas’ crimes.

The novel is written in the first person, although it isn’t always narrated by the same person. Most of it is narrated by Thomas, but the shifting perspectives add another layer of interest as the reader tries to identify each storyteller. Only at the novel’s end do we understand the significance of the narration.

Welcome to Cooper initially struck me as an attempt to emulate the classic noir of the 1930s to 1950s, but this is noir on steroids. The story is gruesome and gory at times, but not particularly graphic. Life is bleak for Thomas. He remind us of his darkness more often than is necessary. He blames himself for his girlfriend’s death and for all the other tragedy that comprises his life. Near the novel’s end, he seeks a form of redemption but Tariq Ashkanani doesn’t give Thomas the kind of life that leaves room for a lightened soul.

At its best, Welcome to Cooper is the story of two damaged loners who briefly find each other. We don’t see much of Cooper — this isn’t an atmospheric novel — but we’re told that the town is pit, a haven for the lost and abandoned. A bartender named Mary illustrates the kind of life that condemns someone to Cooper. Mary befriends Thomas, almost against his wishes. They form the kind of momentary connection that can change a life just by suggesting possibilities, even if the possibilities will never be realized.

Welcome to Cooper grew on me. I wasn’t expecting much after the first chapter, but as the story accumulates force, it becomes impossible to look away from the crash and burn that the reader anticipates.

Ashkanani’s characterization of Mary and Thomas is the novel’s strength. The key villain, a killer who Thomas ends up chasing, is an underdeveloped stereotype of evil, but the relentlessly bleak plot is compelling in a cringeworthy way. “Life sucks, then you die” isn’t the philosophy that drives bestsellers, but it describes the reality of certain noir novels, including Welcome to Cooper. Yet the novel’s ending, while far from happy, does suggest the slightest bit of hope for a better future for those who survive the present, the possibility that even the worst villains might feel empathy under the right circumstances, and the recognition that connections with other people, even fleeting connections, are all that really matter.

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Carry the Dog by Stephanie Gangi

Published by Algonquin Books on November 2, 2021

Carry the Dog is told in the first person by a woman who is nearing the age of sixty. Berenice (or Bea or Bean or Berry) Marx-Seger is still trying to find herself. She has a moderately famous ex-husband named Gary Going, a dying father named Albert, a brother she hasn’t seen in years named Henri (or Henry or Hank), a 22-year-old half-sister named Hannah (or Echo), no children, and temporary custody of a neighbor’s dog. Her immediate problems are a cancer scare, a potential museum exhibition of her dead mother’s controversial photography, and a growing feeling of loneliness that might be exacerbated by her hookups with her unfaithful ex. The dog’s indifference to her existence isn’t helping.

Bea is the child of Miri Marx, who was nearly charged with child pornography for featuring her nude children (including Bea) in photographs. Whether their poses were artistic or salacious is a matter of opinion. Bea’s opinion is unresolved, although she still feels the discomfort of being known as one of the Marx children.

Henry’s twin brother died in a fire while the boys were still young. Miri committed suicide a few months after taking photos of children at Woodstock. Bea twice married and divorced Gary, a rock star in an opening-act band who is now seventy but still seeking the spotlight. Bea wrote Gary’s biggest hit but has no ownership interest in the song. Judging by the lyrics, it’s a good song.

Stephanie Gangi juggles several dramatic plot elements. Bea’s life is full of unresolved issues and regrets. She regrets her age, her inability to attract the touch of a young man. She doesn’t know how to respond to MOMA’s request for access to a storage unit filled with her mother’s photographs and notes. Perhaps she should instead sell everything in the unit (she needs the money), but is that the right thing to do? She finds footage shot by a documentarian in the storage unit and comes to understand the impact that the documentarian had on her mother and on her twin brothers. She feels that she has been betrayed by the significant actors in her life: her mother, Gary, and most recently, Echo. Sometimes she’s right and sometimes she makes assumptions based on incomplete information, as dramatic people tend to do.

A series of events force Bea to reevaluate her life. Did she abandon her family or did they abandon her? Should she try to reconnect with her living brother or is it too late? Did her mother abuse her by photographing her in the nude or is that something she’s been told by people who don’t understand the creation of art? Did her mother have demons of her own that drove her to exploit her children? Are Bea’s memories of her childhood accurate or has she suppressed trauma? In one of the novel’s most insightful moments, Bea realizes that she needs to organize the memories of her past so they take up less space, making room for the present.

Bea has collected a good amount of baggage in her life, but the plot never seems forced. Bea’s unusual life has produced unusual problems, but Gangi makes them seem like real problems, the kind of problems that someone who was raised by a self-absorbed parent and who ran away as a teen with an older rock star might have. Bea is never weepy about her circumstances and the reader is never asked to pity her, but it is easy to sympathize with Bea’s difficulty coping with her accumulation of life-changing issues. When, at sixty, she takes small and indecisive steps to start cleaning up the mess, her decisions seem completely natural.

This is difficult material for a writer to handle without going over the top, but Gangi crafts Bea as a credible, sympathetic character whose coping skills are constantly tested. When Bea says “Half the time I feel like I’m invisible to the world and the other half I am disappearing myself,” she’s expressing authentic feelings that are shared by a large group of people.

With fluid and straightforward prose, Carry the Dog teaches a valuable lesson — we are the sum of our parts, all the parts, not just the trauma. Life is always changing and the story isn’t written until it ends. It is a verity of psychologists that confronting the past is the only way to escape from its grip. Bea’s journey, her stops and starts as she gains the courage to examine her life, to define herself by her entire life and not just its worst moments, to live in the present instead of the past, makes a compelling story.

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The Alchemist by Paulo Cuelho

First published in Brazil in 1988; first publised in English translation in 1993.

The Alchemist is one of those books that I’ve heard about for years but never got around to reading. I was finally nudged to read it, as well as The Giver, when Aaron Rodgers recommended them during the book club segment of his Tuesday appearances on Pat McAfee's show.

The plot is simple. A boy named Santiago is a happy shepherd in Andalusia, leading his sheep from village to village, selling their wool and dreaming about a village girl he finds particularly attractive. Wondering if the girl is his destiny, he asks a Gypsy to tell his fortune. She tells him that he will find treasure and, in exchange for a tenth of the treasure, directs him to the pyramids in Egypt.

Santiago’s journey connects him with several people who offer advice about living. An old man who calls himself the King of Salem tells Santiago that the world’s greatest lie is that “at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” From the old man, Santiago learns the importance of discovering your Personal Legend and understanding that “whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe.” Personal Legends seem clear in youth, when we are not afraid to dream, but become cloudy as we age and begin to believe that our Personal Legend is unattainable.

Santiago travels to Africa, where he works for a time for a crystal merchant, meets a professor whose Personal Legend is the study of alchemy, and moves on to an oasis in the desert. There he falls in love with a desert woman and meets the alchemist the professor is trying to find. From the various people he encounters, and from the sand, the wind, and everything around him, he learns secrets of the universe. Those secrets can be derived, the alchemist tells him, from even a single grain of sand, because everything is connected to everything else, all originating in the soul of the universe.

At various points, Santiago believes he should abandon his quest for treasure, perhaps to return to Andalusia and his life as a shepherd, perhaps to stay in the oasis. At various points he suffers setbacks (thieves and tribal wars are particularly vexing), but always finds new omens because the universe will always help us achieve our Personal Legend if we know how to understand the messages it sends us.

The novel fits into the book club’s self-help theme. We often hear from famous people that if you just persevere, you too can attain your dream. Perseverance is important, but it also helps to have the traits that success demands. Perhaps, however, our Personal Legends are always built from the traits we know we have.

When he’s not throwing footballs, Rodgers talks about embracing the present, opening the mind to new people and experiences, and not being deterred by obstacles. Those lessons are central to The Alchemist.

Paulo Cuelho’s message resonates with an enormous number of people. It is one of the bestselling books in history. There are denser, more complex novels that explore the same lessons in greater depth, sometimes with greater realism (Santiago’s ability to turn himself into the wind, or at least to communicate with the wind, the sun, and the hand that made all, make the novel allegorical rather than realistic). Perhaps The Alchemist is valued for its simplicity and the directness with which Cuelho spells out the novel’s inspirational lessons. Read on a different level — the level that had greater appeal to me—the novel tells an engaging adventure story about a likable boy who arguably comes of age by pursuing his dreams. Self-help enthusiasts will probably want to put The Alchemist high on their reading lists, although I’m guessing that most readers in that camp will have discovered the novel long ago.

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The Family by Naomi Krupitsky

Published by ‎G.P. Putnam's Sons on November 2, 2021

The Family isn’t quite a feminist version of The Godfather, but it does spotlight the role of two young women in a male-dominated crime family. Much of the time, their role is to fret and worry, but the two central  characters become an argument for the empowerment of women as they change the family dynamic.

Before World War II, two girls are born into an Italian crime family in New York. Sofia is the daughter of Joey Colicchio. Joey and his friend Carlo worked for Tommy Fianzo. Carlo wanted out of the Family business. To facilitate that goal, he began to skim some of the money that he has been tasked with collecting. Tommy noticed and Carlo disappeared. To assure that Joey didn’t turn against him, Tommy gave him a piece of the Family’s operation in Brooklyn in exchange of a slice of the profits.

For years, Carlo’s widow is a broken shell of a woman. She raises their daughter Antonia with the Family’s help. Sofia is Joey’s daughter. In their childhood, Antonia and Sofia are inseparable. They understand what happened to Carlo but they never talk about it. Separating family from the Family, they both realize, is a complicated task.

The story follows Antonia and Sofia into adulthood. Their lives are similar but with key differences. The same is true of their personalities. Antonia is reserved; Sofia is bold. They both marry men who work for the Family, despite the warning Antonia receives from her mother not to speak to boys with slicked back hair, Antonia views her husband as a security blanket. Sofia bases her choice on passion. She falls in love (and gets pregnant by) with a young Jewish man. Her husband must sell his soul to avoid Joey’s wrath.

Much of the novel focuses on the differences between the two women as they drift apart and come back together. Antonia is happy to be a wife and mother but would like to escape to a place that exists far from the Family that took her father away. Sonia wants something more than a domestic life. The Family might be the answer to her dreams if she can convince her father to let her play an untraditional role in a man’s world.

To the extent that The Family is a story about families, the story of Sonia’s husband, although saved for the last quarter of the novel, is its most compelling component. He is uprooted by the war, wonders if he will ever see his mother again, is made to disavow his heritage, and gets a glimpse (courtesy of a Jewish gangster) of the life he should have had and still desperately wants. He makes a dangerous choice that gives the novel its late-blooming drama.

Tension is slow to build, in part because Naomi Krupitsky devotes redundant passages to explaining exactly what Antonia and Sofia are feeling at all times in their lives. Neither woman has a moment of insecurity or regret that Krupitsky fails to express. A bit more showing and a bit less explaining would have tightened the story. Even at the end, a dramatic, fast-moving scene is slowed by a dissection of what the characters are feeling and what they recall of their past feelings. The reader just wants to know what’s going to happen. The walk to the story’s resolution should have been a sprint, or at least a jog.

The novel's redundant recitation of feelings is offset by Krupitsky’s fluid and evocative prose. The last quarter of the story is suspenseful and the ending is surprising. Sofia’s refusal to play a role written by the Family men seems to be the heart of the novel until Antonia has her own moment of truth — a moment that gives her a chance to grow as a woman in a man’s world of crime. The Family is a fresh and original take on the crime family genre.

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Blue-Skinned Gods by S.J. Sindu

Published by ‎ Soho Press on November 2, 2021

People engage in spiritual journeys to achieve personal growth. Blue-Skinned Gods tells the story of a man who needed to shed the cloak of spiritualism before he could find himself.

Kalki has blue skin. In an ashram on the outskirts of Tamil Nadu, Kalki’s parents raise him to be a god, the tenth incarnation of Vishnu. Kalki sometimes thinks he sees earlier incarnations, particularly Krishna. During playtime, he reenacts stories from Hindu mythology, always playing the heroic god. As Kalki gets older, he leads meditation and yoga sessions in the ashram. Even as a child, he engages in prayers and rituals that heal visitors. Or, at least, he believes he is healing them.

Despite — or because of — his status as a god, Kalki lacks faith. At some point he comes to realize that gods don’t need faith. Others have faith in their gods, but gods have nothing to prove. Yet Kalki has doubts, even as he passes tests that prove his divinity. S.J. Sindu plants clues that allow the reader to understand that the tests might be rigged, that Kalki’s father is using Kalki to attract believers to their ashram. Kalki is his meal ticket. He jealously protects Kalki from any outside influence that might have a negative impact on the ashram. Unfortunately for Kalki, his father believes that any glimpse of the larger world might divert Kalki from the course that his father has plotted.

Culture and religion are significant forces in the story’s background. Kalki’s family follows Vishnu. Kalki’s controlling father refuses to allow him to read Hindu texts favored by worshippers of Shiva. More important to the plot is India’s caste system. When Kalki falls in love with Roopi, a girl he believes he cured who works as a servant at the ashram, Kalki’s father puts an end to their relationship. Roopi comes from one of the higher castes but she isn’t Brahmin and therefore wouldn’t be a suitable mate for Kalki even if he were a mere mortal. Kalki’s father also forbids a friendship between Kalki and a transvestite whose status as a hijra is honored by Hindu mythology. Sindu illustrates social injustice in India by contrasting the god Kalki is forced to be with gods in his lineage who were less concerned with caste and sexuality.

As Kalki gets a bit older, foreign visitors to the ashram give him insight into the world he has never glimpsed. Kalki reads books that his father has forbidden for fear that literature might open Kalki’s mind to new understandings. One of those visitors exposes Kalki’s father as a hypocrite. A female visitor who might be in love with Kalki’s mother drives a wedge between his parents.

Kalki’s best friend is a cousin named Lakshman. Kalki’s true test comes when Lakshman’s mother is stricken with cancer. Lakshman and Kalki are separated for years after Lakshman moves to America. Their next meeting marks a turning point in the novel.

The last half of the story is driven by Kalki’s identity quest. If Kalki is not a god, perhaps he is a guru. Or maybe he’s a drunk. Or bi. Or a singer. As Kalki tries to understand himself, he knows only that he feels like a fraud who has harmed the people he cares about. It’s not easy being blue.

The story is told in memory. We learn early on that in the present, Kalki is a professor. He tells his students that religion is in a crisis perpetrated by scandal: Catholic priests and Hindu swamis using their positions to sexually abuse children; Middle Eastern honor killings, terrorist acts, and extreme reprisals committed in the name of religion; Buddhist monks inciting genocide in Sri Lanka. Having come to understand that he was not a god but a fraud, it is no surprise that the adult Kalki views much of religion as perpetuating a harmful charade for the benefit of charlatans.

The story at times threatens to become a soap opera, particularly when the controlling nature and unfaithfulness of Kalki’s father drives Kalki’s mother to an extreme response. Sindu's characterization of the father is a bit heavy handed. A scene in which Lakshman explodes at Kalki over a perceived grievance makes little sense, given that Lakshman is just fine with Kalki before and after the explosion The attempt at inclusiveness (including an off-camera gay sex scene) sometimes feels a bit forced. The plot loses some of its appeal after Kalki journeys to America and experiences a whirlwind identity crisis.

Yet the story as a whole is engaging. The lessons it offers about religion and intolerance, truth and fraud, are worthwhile. And Kalki, blue skin notwithstanding, comes across as representative of other young people whose parents have tried to fit them into a life that pleases the parent without regard to the child’s right to find his or her own way of living.

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