F*ckface by Leah Hampton

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on July 14, 2020

The stories collected in F*ckface are set in the South, primarily in mountain communities in Appalachia. While the stories resist stereotyping characters as hillbillies (the protagonist in “Sparkle” tells a man that she grew up with indoor plumbing and “even read a few books when I was a kid, when I wasn’t losing my teeth”), many of the characters view outsiders with suspicion. At the same time, outsiders — such as the guide who gives visitors an environmental tour through a nature preserve in “Frogs” — tend to view locals with condescension. The guide admonishes the protagonist for damaging the ecosystem when she falls from the path and lands in the water, crushing some frogs’ eggs, because she didn’t wear the expensive hiking shoes that all the visitors are wearing. Only her twin brother understands that locals aren’t the problem.

The stories generally focus on relationships. The protagonist in “Sparkle” takes her husband’s friend to Dollywood and propositions him because of her long-standing crush and because her husband hasn’t touched her since she started complaining about the sameness in their life. A woman who has been sexting a married man in “Wireless” decides she’s willing to give him whatever he wants, even if she thinks it’s a bit kinky, because she views herself as invisible and doesn’t know when another opportunity will arrive.

Leah Hampton’s characters are a product of their environment and, like the environment, are too often misused. A woman who is approaching menopause fears that the work she once did at “Eastman” Chemical might have caused the lump in her breast. She can’t say anything bad about the company, despite the proliferation of cancer among its employees, because her husband was the company’s director of planning. A woman in “Mingo” argues with her husband about mountaintop removal and wonders if, in thirty years, he’ll look like her father-in-law, who makes her laugh by exposing his naked body in the hospital when she refuses to hand him his pants.

In “Boomer,” a forest fire raging toward Kentucky leaves a firefighter with no time to deal with the woman who is moving out of his life — but then, he never had time and that’s why she’s leaving. He feels like the world is ending, not entirely because of the approaching fire. A park ranger in “Parkway,” having grown tired of finding dead bodies, decides to find a new job while his family still knows his name.

Both home and work relationships are at the heart of “F*ckface,” a story that involves employees of Food Country wondering how their manager (you can guess what the employees call him) will deal with the dead bear in the parking lot. “Queen” uses bees as a metaphor for families; hives break apart and its members scatter or die for reasons that are not always apparent, leaving the person tending the hive to wonder whether she is to blame.

The woman narrating “Saint” in the second person recalls childhood memories of a brother who, when the memories are formed, has not yet died. The memories have turned him into a saint, and make his death a sort of martyrdom that she always anticipated, although she cannot prove that her memories are true. A young woman in “Meat” attends a funeral and thinks about a barn fire that killed hundreds of pigs during her college internship, prompting her to change her major.

My favorite story, “Devil,” describes a visit home by a 32-year-old Air Force tech sergeant shortly before his post-9/11 deployment to Bagram. Remembering the harsh discipline imposed by his Bible-quoting father, the tech sergeant still cringes, as he did when he was a child, at his father’s flashes of anger. Both parents condemn their child for his failure to live up to their Christian standards. The story suggests that the damage done to a child by parents who mistake discipline for love can never be undone.

F*ckface is a solid collection of stories, each managing to address Appalachian living and relationships in a different way. Other than “Devil,” none of the stories struck me as being special, but none of the stories struck me as being a waste of time, which sets the book ahead of most short story collections. I appreciated the complexity of the conflict between eco-friendly characters and those who need jobs, the kind of conflict that pits Appalachian residents against “outsiders” while sometimes tearing families or couples apart. I also appreciated the recognition that religion is a force that holds some Appalachian families together while destroying others.

Leah Hampton writes with a sure hand, seemingly certain of the story she wants to tell. She tells the story without a wasted word. That clarity of purpose adds power to stories that showcase large issues through small moments in ordinary lives.

RECOMMENDED

Bottled Goods by Sophie van Llewyn

First published in the UK in 2018; published by Harper Perennial on July 28, 2020

I would not classify Bottled Goods as magical realism or absurdist fiction, although the novel has surprising elements of both. Most the novel tells a straightforward story of a Romanian woman living under the reign of Nicolae Ceaușescu. She desires freedom — from her mother, from an oppressive political system, and eventually from her husband — but comes to understand that freedom is not an automatic guarantor of happiness.

In 1967, Alina Mungio is living with her mother. Alina’s Aunt Theresa regards Alina’s mother as one of the “low people” in the family but maintains a good relationship with Alina. Theresa’s husband and sons hold significant positions in the Party, giving Theresa more opportunity and less scrutiny than is typical for those who lack her connections. Theresa believes in and practices mystic rituals that been handed down for generations. Theresa’s mother shrunk Theresa’s father to hide him from the authorities after the Communists came into power. Alina’s mother wanted nothing to do with Theresa and once threatened to reveal where her father was hidden. Suffice it to say that Alina’s mother earns little sympathy during the course of the novel and, in the minds of many, will get what she deserves.

Two years later, Alina is working as a tour guide and translator for German tourists at a luxury resort. There she meets Liviu, another German-speaking guide. Their marriage gets off to a rough start on her wedding night and goes downhill from there. Life becomes even more difficult when Liviu’s brother defects to France, a decision that taints Liviu and Alina by association.

Alina and Liviu make their own plan to defect, but during much of the novel, they are fending off interrogations and trying (not always successfully) to stay out of jail. Alina also has to worry about her mother, whose betrayal of Alina’s grandfather is a small step from betraying Alina. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension focuses on whether the couple will be allowed to cross the border into Germany on what they claim is a trip in support of Liviu’s archeology research.

The final chapters breeze through several years of Alina’s life. Most of those years take place after the fall of Ceaușescu. The chapters seem like an afterthought, although they do add a sense of symmetry to a novel that might be seen as the story of Alina’s life. The most effective scenes occur while Alina is still in Romania, as she submits to interrogation and worse to avoid imprisonment. Alina’s fear and sense of helplessness gives the novel a harsh realism that counterbalances its mystical moments.

As is true of The Tiger’s Wife and other novels that assume the reality of local mystical beliefs and rituals, the reader will need to accept the reality of magic (or something similar to magic that allows the laws of physics to be bent) to appreciate all aspects of the story. Since the story is set in a country that routinely serves as a background for vampire fiction, it isn’t difficult to accept the story’s mystical elements. They certainly don’t overwhelm the larger story of a woman’s desire for freedom and her uncertainty about what to do with it. What does freedom mean to a woman who is never really free from the unwanted attention of men, no matter where she lives? When one finally has the freedom to make choices, will life necessarily be better than it was when choices were dictated?

Sophie van Llewyn has won awards for flash fiction, a literary form that doesn’t appeal to me. The flash fiction style is evident in the book’s construction. Chapters are short, each telling a brief segment of the story before moving on. Fortunately, Bottled Goods isn’t a collection of related flash fiction stories. Each chapter builds a foundation upon which subsequent chapters rest. The chapters integrate into a solid novel about the perils of living without freedom and the competing perils of living with it.

RECOMMENDED

The Last Human by Zack Jordan

Published by Del Rey on March 24, 2020

The Last Human tries to fit together a story of computer networks that interface with minds and a story of an organization of alien races that gives order to the galaxy. In a typical mind-network interface story, the minds are human, but in this one, only one human is known to exist. In most organization of species stories, humans are a significant part of the organization. In this one, the organization is more of a hierarchy, ranking species from smartest to dimmest. Humans would apparently be in the dim category if there were enough humans to count as part of the hierarchy. But humans have two qualities that set them apart — violence and selfishness.

For reasons that are eventually made clear (although not entirely clear), humans have disappeared from the future that is the novel’s setting. Countless other intelligent species inhabit the galaxy. More than a million of those have joined the Network, an association that allows member races to benefit from shared knowledge, but at the cost of obedience to certain rules. Humans, as we all know, are not good at obedience. Some will follow authoritarians but others reject authority on principle. Even when rules make sense — like wearing maks in a pandemic — a considerable number of humans will do as they please. Even if humans were still around, they would not be suited for the Network because following rules is not their best talent. The Network apparently learned this the hard way, although the details are again unclear.

Sarya the Daughter is a human who, for unconvincing reasons, is raised by Shenya the Widow, a member of a race whose children typically hatch and immediately battle each other to the death. Sarya is unhappy not to have a network implant — she uses an external device for connectivity — a fact that handicaps her almost as much as her Tier 1.8 intelligence. Sarya is also handicapped by being a human (everyone hates humans for reasons that are eventually revealed) although nobody recognizes her as one because nobody has ever seen a human. The only entity on Watertower Station that seems to know Sarya is human, apart from her mother, is a multi-bodied alien with hive intelligence called Observer.

The orbital Watertower Station is home to Shenya, Sarya, and 24,000 other entities from a multitude of species that have joined the Network. The Network invites species to join when they evolve sufficient (Tier 1.8) intelligence. Species with less intelligence are protected without being networked, although they sometimes provide useful services. The Network provides a common language and shared information that protects against disease, war, famine, “and other such inconveniences.”

It the Network a good thing? Order has value, but Observer views the Network as trading freedom for order. During the course of the novel, Sarya waffles between viewing the Network as good and viewing it as evil. Where she will come to rest in the end is the question that drives the plot after it is finally set in motion.

What does it mean to be human? Many believe that to be human is to be free, to make the choices that suit us. Humans believe that’s a good thing, but since humans often make harmful choices, nonhumans might disagree. The human tendency to choose conquest, to take what they want, to care about themselves and dislike anyone or anything different, makes humanity a species that doesn't play well with others. When Sarya journeys to something she perceives as a planet, she experiences being human on a primal level: walking on grass, breathing unrecycled air, seeing the sky instead of a ceiling, eating meat instead of bland but nutritious food bars, getting buzzed on alcohol, listening and dancing to music (which few Network species define as art).

It takes the plot some time to set up. Circumstances eventually take Sarya on a journey of discovery, which initially involves finding the surviving members of the human race and then forces her to decide whether she should kill them all.

How Sarya acquires and wields the vast power at her disposal near the novel’s end (can she really hold the universe in the palm of her hand?) is unclear, at least to me. In fact, I found it difficult to wrap my head around key plot points. I set aside confusion during much of the novel with the expectation that it would all be clarified at the end. Some things were made clear, some weren’t, and I was still mildly confused by the last page.

Maybe the confusion is my fault. With so many crises brewing in the world, I find myself easily distracted unless a book is particularly gripping. I wouldn’t put The Last Human in that category. There are times when the story zips along and times when it meanders, seemingly searching for a way to recover the plot. The novel has the sense of “I’m making this up as I go along.” Sometimes that works, but sometimes it’s helpful to start out with a map. The Last Human makes some detours that left me lost.

Was Zack Jordan trying to write a comedy or a serious story into which some laughs were injected? Again, I’m not sure that an overall vision existed for this book before it came into being. Chapters that present the Network as a user’s manual are clearly meant to be funny (and some of them are), but the story’s tone suddenly changes, without transition, from whimsical and silly to dark and apocalyptic.

This is Jordan’s first novel. His ambition may have exceeded his ability to deliver. Yet the characters of Sarya and Shenya are engaging, the background is interesting, and the book shows promise, even if it doesn’t fully succeed.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson

Published by Algonquin Books on July 21, 2020

The Lives of Edie Pritchard follows a woman through three segments of her life, focusing on the choices she makes as she transitions (or doesn’t) to what might be considered a “new life.” But we only get one life. The novel’s point, I think, is that our life is defined by the choices we make. Sometimes those choices don’t seem like a choice at all, particularly when we decide that not to make a change is the most responsible choice, even if we might prefer a different life to the one we're living.

Edie Pritchard begins the novel in Gladstone, Montana. She dates and eventually marries Dean Linderman, a dull but decent fellow who has a more exciting and less decent brother named Roy. There was a time when Edie came close to letting Roy have his way with her. Roy doesn’t handle rejection well, so he continues to pursue Edie even after she marries his brother. Dean doesn’t handle his insecurity well, even though Edie gives him no reason to be jealous.

For reasons that are at least partially Roy’s fault, he crashes his car and is rescued by Edie. The circumstances are innocent but Dean can’t rid himself of his suspicion that there is more to the story. Some of the drama in the first section surrounds Dean’s belief that Roy should get justice of some sort from the people who, in Dean’s view, are responsible for Roy’s accident. Edie views this as men being men and, even though she’s still young, she’s pretty sick of men being men. The first section ends with Edie Linderman making a choice about whether she wants to stay with Dean or leave Gladstone.

In the second segment, Edie is middle-aged and living in Granite Valley, Montana. She’s married to Gary Dunn, with whom she has a daughter named Jennifer. Gary, like Dean, has a problem with unwarranted jealousy, as if it is Edie’s fault that men are attracted to her. When Roy calls to tell her that Dean is dying of cancer and wants to say goodbye, Gary’s reaction is inappropriate. He’s never been able to accept the fact of Edie’s earlier marriage. At some point, Edie finds herself back in Gladstone, this time with Jennifer. When Gary arrives uninvited, it seems a confrontation between Roy, Dean, Gary, and another guy might ensue. All of this “men being men” is again too much for Edie. The second section ends with Edie Dunn making a choice about whether she wants to stay with Gary or leave Granite Valley.

In the third segment, Edie is in her sixties, living contentedly alone in Gladstone, free from the drama that men insist on causing. The drama reappears when her granddaughter visits, bringing with her a boyfriend and her boyfriend’s brother, who is clearly going to cause trouble. The segment reunites Edie with Roy, who helps her rescue the granddaughter from “men being men,” although whether the effort is worthwhile is debatable. Whether Edie and Roy will get together on Edie's terms is an underlying question. The answer is one of the story’s many surprises.

A good bit more occurs during the course of the story but the plot sketch above provides some sense of what the novel is about. Each section generates dramatic tension that centers largely on whether men will harm Edie because of their desire or jealousy or bad judgment or inability to exercise self-control. Despite its subject matter, The Lives of Edie Pritchard avoids becoming a soap opera by its close examination of how Edie’s life is dictated both by choices she makes and by choices she feels forced to make. The novel seems to suggest that no matter how much we try to distance ourselves from trouble, it is always waiting around the next bend.

Roy changes quite a bit during the course of the novel, perhaps not fundamentally but behaviorally. Edie has always known who she is and stays true to herself. Her changes are those that come with age and the acquisition of experience and wisdom. By the last segment, Edie has demonstrated remarkable resilience and proves that she doesn't need a man to protect or guide her.

Larry Watson’s writing is, as always, a combination of power and grace. He manages to infuse elements of a thriller in what is essentially a domestic drama — or in this case, three domestic dramas that add up to a life.

The theme of “maleness” as something with which women must cope is explored without bashing men, although I suspect most men will see something of their instinctive selves in some of the characters. Recognizing those instincts is the key to banishing them and becoming a man who is more respectful toward women. For that reason, I suspect The Lives of Edie Pritchard is a novel that will appeal equally to readers of both sexes. Any reader is likely to become caught up in the peaks and valleys of the plot and to either identify with a character or to recognize a character in someone we know well.

RECOMMENDED

Pew by Catherine Lacey

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 21, 2020

The narrator of Pew is a boy or a girl of uncertain race and nationality, somewhere on the border of being a child or an adult, male or female, brown or white. The narrator has learned that church pews provide a place to sleep that is sheltered from the elements and peaceful when no service is being held. A pastor decides to call the narrator Pew after the congregation finds the stranger sleeping on a pew during a service. The couple who usually occupy that pew decide it is their Christian duty to bring the stranger home. They soon become uncomfortable and even a bit fearful because Pew will not answer their questions about just who or what Pew is.

Pew understands English but rarely speaks. Pew privately engages with a refugee child named Nelson who meets Pew at another home where Pew is taken for meetings with a therapist. Nelson tells Pew that his “whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was some kind of misunderstanding. Must have been some other guy.” Nelson notes that Pew’s skin sometimes seems lighter and sometimes darker. One of the community leaders notes that he’s never seen a person who looks quite like Pew, presumably because it is so hard to pin down what Pew looks like. Gazing down at “this body” in private, Pew wonders: “Did everyone feel this vacillating, animal loneliness after removing clothes? How could I still be this thing, answering to its endless needs and betrayals?”

The decision to make Pew an indefinite person, someone who defies labels, is a stroke of genius that allows Catherine Lacey to explore the nature of identity and how important identity is to people who don’t know how to react to someone until that person has been defined. Few of the characters can accept that Pew is just a person. They want Pew to be a male or female person or a gay or straight person or a sexually traumatized person or a black or white or foreign or American person. The need to label Pew before deciding how (or whether) to interact with Pew is a theme that permeates the story. The ability to “identify each other,” in the words of a community leader, is what makes us “civilized.” Another community member worries about allowing Pew to interact with the community’s teens (despite Pew’s lack of inclination to do so) without knowing if Pew is “this way or that.”

The Reverend is quite insistent on knowing whether Pew is biologically a boy or girl (you are what God made you, the Reverend insists, you don’t get to decide) but he doesn’t want to find out the hard way. He insists that all people are entitled to “the same kind of respect,” regardless of gender beliefs or national origin, but Pew wonders how many kinds of respect exist. When Pew remains silent rather than answering questions, most of the community views him with even greater suspicion on the theory that someone who doesn’t speak must have something to hide. Pew, in fact, has nothing to hide but nothing to share. Pew has no memory of parents or home or belonging. Pew’s memories are primal. Pew remembers hunger. Pew remembers the terror of being a child “so small that anyone could just pick you up and take you anywhere at any time,” a terror that makes Pew feel “it’s a wonder there are people at all.”

While the community claims a religious motivation to help Pew (“the whole congregation is concerned, but we know God sent you to us for a reason”), it is clear they want to know how to classify Pew so they can send this stranger to a place where s/he might be “more comfortable” — i.e., somewhere that isn’t here, a place where they won’t be reminded that Pew exists. They claim to want what is best for Pew while reserving the right to decide for themselves what is best for Pew, a decision that will clearly be driven by whatever they feel is best for their own lives.

A religious festival is approaching that fills everyone with dread. The festival was originally seen as a way to reconcile the white community with the segregated black community, although the black community no longer participates. The concept of wearing masks to confess sins at a festival is sufficiently intriguing to warrant a novel of its own, but it is just one of several background elements that create a vague sense of unease that permeates the novel. A nurse at a clinic where Pew refuses to undress is disturbed by some people who recently appeared. Some sort of unrest in a neighboring county is dominating the news. Characters speak of living in a time of evilness before they turn off the news and change the topic, avoiding any substantive discussion of the evil that surrounds and threatens to invade their community. All of this unrest is deliberately undefined, a sort of background noise that heightens the reader’s sense of anxiety as the story moves forward.

The novel contains stories within stories. A (presumably) gay character talks to Pew about how the community isn’t so bad because “no one acts ugly to me. Not to my face.” The character wants Pew to know that being different is tolerated, if not accepted, by the community. Another character talks to Pew about the quiet grief he endures regarding his daughter’s decision to renounce science and equality to marry into the church: “what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become — what kind of grief is that?” A woman named Tammy remembers a Latvian woman who was kind to her when she ran away from home at 17, an immigrant who had to make a new life among strangers, a woman with whom Tammy instantly bonded because they both felt misplaced, a sensation that has gripped Tammy since childhood, when she felt that her existence was an accident. Tammy and her husband later tell a tragic story about ill-fated peacocks, ending with the moral: “There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know until it’s too late.”

There is so much stuffed into this relatively short novel that it might take two or three readings to unpack it all. I can imagine professors using it as a teaching tool, not just in literature classes but in philosophy and a variety of social sciences. From a casual reader’s standpoint, the story is beautifully told, raising universal questions that are particularly timely given the worldwide rise of nationalism and white supremacy and intolerance of nontraditional gender identities. Pew is provocative in its multi-faceted portrayal of people who feel like outcasts because they do not easily fit within the narrow boundaries that a community is prepared to accept, no matter how much the community might claim to treat everyone with respect. Some readers might dislike Pew for its ambiguity, but the importance of feeling okay with ambiguity is the novel’s point. I’ve never read a novel that makes the point quite so effectively.

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