Cuyahoga by Pete Beatty

Published by Scribner on October 6, 2020

Cuyahoga revives a tradition of American storytelling: the tall tale. Impossible deeds and thrilling contests. Remember Paul Bunyan digging the Grand Canyon with his axe and eating more pancakes than the other contestants combined? Big Son is the new Paul Bunyan.

Cuyahoga is the story of two brothers, Big Son and Medium (“Meed”) Son, but Big is the character of legend. Unlike Paul Bunyan, Big has no ox, although a well-loved ox named Asa plays a role in the story. Like Paul Bunyan and John Henry and Davy Crockett, Big’s improbable deeds remind us of a time when the American frontier was wild and untamed, a time when Americans looked to wild and untamed characters for inspiration.

Big helped settle the land that lies to the west of Cleveland, across the Cuyahoga. “The first settlers found the place full of discouragements, such as mosquitoes, ague and poorly behaved wildlife wanting chastisement.” Big cleared the forest in record time and used the timber to build the houses that became Ohio City. When a lake objected to the settlement with storms and shipwrecks, Big brawled the lake and taught it a lesson. Tales come no taller than those that are told about Big Son.

Meed narrates Cuyahoga, telling us early in the novel that the stories of Big are “mostly” true, “simple and moral, easy to grab, the better to encourage someone over the head with.” Meed assembles tall tales about Big into an almanac that satisfies the American thirst for exaggeration. Yet the almanac doesn’t tell the whole story. Meed feels brotherly love for Big but — drawing on another book of tall tales — Meed also tells a Cain and Abel story of resentment.

Big and Meed both feel a desire for Cloe Inches, but Cloe has a tendency to run off when pressure begins to build. Perhaps she represents the first stirring of women’s liberation, or simply the American desire for freedom. Being chained to a life of domesticity clearly isn’t for Cloe. Although Cloe tells a competing suitor where her heart lies, adventure seems to be her heart’s true yearning.

The conflict that drives the plot splits the residents of Cleveland and the newer Ohio City: how many bridges, if any, should span the Cuyahoga to connect the old and new cities? When Cleveland builds a bridge, it charges Ohio City residents a toll to go back home (and charges an extra penny for peanuts), so one bridge is not the answer. Some people think that blowing up that bridge is the answer; others think a second bridge would solve the problem. In 1937, a new solution arrives after the other alternatives fail.

A key theme of Cuyahoga is the American character. Meed tells us that it favors “motion above nearly everything else.” Hence the need for bridges and steamboats, the desire to keep expanding the nation, “to move toward every compass point, always.” Betting on chance, whether in “rastling” contests or by starting a business, is another component of the American character.

Uneducated eloquence describes the voice in which Cuyahoga is told. In part because of Pete Beatty’s ability to link words into unexpected sentences, Cuyahoga coaxes guffaws and belly laughs that break up a steady stream of chuckles and grins. I particularly enjoyed the dentist who treats teeth with creosote and tells patients not to smoke for a few hours, lest they set their mouths on fire.

Near the novel’s end, Big swims in a race against his rival’s steamboat, human strength versus machine power, one of the enduring themes of American folklore. Tall tales represent the spirit of America, the struggle to defeat long odds, to overcome formidable obstacles and achieve unattainable goals, to become the master of one's fate. While Cuyahoga gives a modern twist to the tall tale, Big Son is a worthy addition to the tradition of larger-than-life American folk heroes.

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Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Published in Japan in 2018; published in translation by Grove Press on Press October 6, 2020

Like Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings explores the theme of personal freedom in a society that values conformity to social norms. Both novels address, in very different ways, the belief that Japanese women should have the right to choose the life they want to live, unconstrained by the conventional notion that women must marry and reproduce soon after reaching adulthood.

As a child, Natsuki convinces herself that she is a magician and that her doll is an alien from the planet Popinpobopia. Every year she attends a family gathering with her parents. One year, her cousin Yuu tells her that he is also an alien and is just waiting to return home. Natsuki falls in love with Yuu because he is the only person who understands her. They stage a mock wedding and Natsuki eventually convinces Yuu to have sex with her. Natsuki and Yuu are discovered, scolded, and kept apart until well after they reach adulthood.

Natsuki’s only other experience with sex involves a college student who teaches cram sessions. When Natsuki tells her mother that the student had touched her and tricked her into giving him oral gratification, Natsuki’s mother dismisses the report as the product of Natsuki’s imagination. It seems likely that, true or not, Natsuki’s mother doesn’t want discussion of the incident to bring shame upon the family. Without giving her actions much thought, Natsuki eventually puts an end to one problem and creates another.

As an adult, Natsuki is unenthused about the idea of dating and sex. Succumbing to social pressure, she joins an online dating site and finds a man named Tomoya who wants to marry but does not want intimacy. That suits Natsuki, but the parents of Natsuki and Tomoya are soon pressuring them to have children. Tomoya would like to leave it all behind and visit the place where Natsuki’s family used to gather, a place that seems magical as he listens to Natsuki describe it. When they make that trip, they meet Yuu and change their lives in unusual ways.

The theme of freedom is first expressed in Natsuki’s belief that her town is a factory for the production of human babies. She believes her womb is simply a factory component designed to couple with a different factory component. Yuu and Tomoya agree that “everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told. They all used their reproductive organs for the Factory and did their jobs for the sake of the Factory.” Like the protagonist in Convenience Store Woman, Natsuki rejects society’s expectations about her duty to have sex and bear children. That simply isn’t the life she wants, but other options are lacking if she wants to live as an earthling.

The story becomes a bit loopy at the end, relying on dark humor to make its point about the dark side of human nature. The alternative lifestyle that Natsuki, Yuu and Tomoya eventually adopt takes on an absurdist quality. While I didn’t find the ending to be particularly satisfying, the entertaining story that precedes it makes a strong point about the difficulty that ordinary women in Japan encounter when they elevate freedom and individuality above the patriarchal society’s definition of a woman’s duty.

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Snow by John Banville

Published by Hanover Square Press on October 6, 2020

Most of Snow takes place in 1957, although an epilog recounts a meeting between two characters ten years later. Snow is the first of a two-book deal featuring St. John Strafford, a Protestant detective in Catholic Ireland. The same character appeared in The Secret Guests, a novel set during World War II that John Banville published under his penname Benjamin Black. Apparently, Banville has decided that he no longer needs to publish crime novels under a penname, or perhaps his publisher told him that his books will sell better if he publishes them under his real name.

Strafford is assigned to investigate the death of a priest named Father Tom in a prosperous Protestant home where Father Tom was a frequent guest. The killer cut off Father Tom’s junk, perhaps making the motive for the crime obvious, priests being notorious for misusing their junk.

Since the house was locked on the night of the priest’s death, suspects are limited to family members and the stable boy. The semi-doddering patriarch has a new wife, the first one having died in a fall on the same staircase where Father Tom was murdered. Most of the story’s modest intrigue comes from the interaction of the family members. Banville also tries to generate interest with the church’s desire to avoid publicizing the circumstances of the priest’s death and the discomfort that Strafford is made to feel as a member of a religious minority in Ireland.

Banville gained fame as a prose stylist. Reading the well-crafted language of a Banville novel is always pleasant, but he clearly doesn’t make the same effort in genre novels that he once devoted to literary fiction. His genre prose isn’t as dense or as lyrical as his literary prose. Nor does Banville’s genre work have the depth of his earlier books. While crime is a theme in some of Banville’s literary novels, including his most celebrated work, The Book of Evidence, his genre crime novels lack the heft of his best work.

The difference is evident in Snow. The novel follows the formula of a mystery novel by asking the reader to decide which of several suspects might be the murderer. While the clues seem to point in the direction of one or two characters, Banville employs the misdirection that characterizes the genre, only revealing the full truth of the crime in the epilog. The revelation doesn’t come as much of a surprise, giving the sense that Banville just isn’t trying very hard. The plot is certainly no better than average for a genre crime novel.

A writer can’t be faulted for writing books that sell, and crime fiction typically outsells literary fiction, but the best writers in the crime genre fuse the strongest qualities of literary fiction and genre fiction. Banville hasn’t done that.

I’m giving Snow a cautious recommendation because Banville holds the reader’s interest with a mildly entertaining if undemanding story. Readers who are looking for something more from a writer who was once regarded as a rising literary giant will likely be disappointed.

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The Light Years by R.W.W. Greene

Published by Angry Robot on February 11, 2020

The Light Years builds on a science fiction premise I haven’t seen before. Most elements of the future that R.W.W. Greene imagines are familiar. Traders roam through the galaxy at relativistic speeds, returning home having aged less (relatively speaking) than the family members they left behind. The traders belong to a guild. Investors purchase shares in trading ships, taking a proportionate share of profits that the ship generates. The ships are family-operated, more or less.

Earth is a memory, most of its inhabitants having been incinerated by a solar event. The United Americas evacuated people on a dozen worm-drive ships and a bunch of ships that could not travel faster than light. Other groups of nations joined the evacuation. After the Caliphate and the United Americas settled their respective worlds, they destroyed each other in a war that lasted two days.

Here’s the new wrinkle to that background. Given the nature of relativity, it isn’t productive for a trader to begin a romance, go on a six-month voyage, and return to a lover who has aged fifty years. Traders therefore contract an arranged marriage, usually by bribing a family to donate a spouse in exchange for enough cash to live a better life.

Adem Sadiq is an engineer on the Hajj. His family arranges his marriage with Hisako Saski. They fund her education in physics, with a specialization that might help her understand wormhole drives, a technology that was lost when the UA was destroyed. The arrangement assures that Hisako and her parents will have a better life while bringing fresh blood to the crew of the Hajj. Adem’s only concern is that his new wife won’t want him to sleep with a crew member named Sarat, a pastime he enjoys.

Some of the story revolves around the relationship between Adem and Hisako, which for a long time is platonic, despite their shared interest in music. Adem is a nice guy and Hisako resents being sold into something resembling bondage, a situation that doesn’t lend itself to connubial bliss. That’s an interesting concept, although Greene could have done more with it.

The bulk of the story concerns a salvage operation that the Hajj undertakes. A badly damaged UA ship might yield a treasure trove of lost technology, including both a wormhole drive and the world-destroying weapon that ended the Two Day War. An investor/uncle named Rakin would like to sell the tech while a minority of family members think life-improving knowledge should be given away for the benefit of humanity, although only after instructions for building the world-destroying weapon are wiped from the memory banks. That conflict provides most the tension that develops in the novel’s later stages.

Whether Adem and Hisako will bond is a question that will interest readers who favor romance themes. Since the romantic plot thread never devolves into cheesiness, it contributes something to the story, although the contribution has little impact. Greene does raise philosophical questions about what it means to be happy, questions of a highly individualistic nature to which there are no easy answers. The exploration of those questions isn’t profound, but at least Greene makes an attempt to give a reader something to chew on.

The larger plot, involving the conflict over the salvaged technology, leads to an unexciting resolution. In fact, the plot generally fizzles out after a strong beginning. As a debut novel, however, The Light Years shows promise. With either greater depth or enough action to excite, the novel could have been exceptional. As it stands, it works well enough to earn a mild recommendation but not well enough to suggest it be placed near the top of a science fiction fan’s reading list.

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The Boy's Club by Erica Katz

Published by Harper on August 4, 2020

The largest law firms in the United States believe themselves to be stocked with the best lawyers. That attitude reflects arrogance rather than reality. Most lawyers in Big Law lack creativity and have little regard for justice. They help big businesses move money back and forth while returning scant value to society. None of that comes through in The Boy’s Club, a novel that is not so much an indictment of Big Law as an industry but of sexism in its upper echelons. There is merit in telling that story, but the pseudonymous Erica Katz doesn’t tell it effectively.

As a child, Alexandra (“Alex”) Vogel always did what she wanted to do. Her willfulness got her anything she desired. Her drive got her into a top law school and a job at Klasko, one of the top Big Law firms. Now she wants to make partner in Mergers & Acquisitions, the most competitive practice group in the firm. It’s also the group that generates the most revenue, allowing partners to make their own rules and to break the firm’s rules with impunity.

Alex spends most of her first year deciding whether she wants to “match” with a particular practice group. The group will then decide whether to accept her. Alex hopes to match with M&A, as does her best friend in the firm, Carmen. The M&A group, however, is a boy’s club that selects female first year associates based on how hot they are, not on their talent. (“Talent,” in this case, refers to a lawyer’s ability to attract and retain clients. The firm sees males as more likely to do so, since most of the business executives they deal with are males who bond with their lawyers over drinks at strip clubs.)

Alex has the usual life of a first year Big Law associate, meaning she has no life to speak of outside of work. She’s expected to bill every hour of every day. She is handsomely compensated for her efforts, but Sam, her live-in boyfriend, grows weary of never seeing her. Alex purports to love Sam but that doesn’t stop her from having an affair with the most successful M&A partner, Peter Dunn. Flattered by Dunn’s attention, Alex cheats on Sam while ignoring the likelihood that Dunn is probably sleeping with every woman who meets his standard of hotness.

There’s not much more to a plot that is fairly predictable. All the high-powered men behave atrociously toward women. Catty women talk about Alex behind her back, although it is easy to see why they think she is trying to sleep her way to the top. Gary Kaplan, the firm’s best client, assaults Alex and turns out to be a serial abuser of women. Kaplan relies on wealth and nondisclosure agreements to keep his victims from reporting his assaults. Klasko relies on settlements and nondisclosure agreements to keep female associates from suing for sexual harassment. Eventually Alex does something that she thinks might make the world a better place for women while knowing that the fight must continue.

Katz makes Kaplan over-the-top to make her point. News stories tell us about powerful men who sexually abuse women, but Kaplan actually flies women from Miami to New York and pays them to accept brutal beatings. The point could have been made without bludgeoning the reader with such unlikely evidence that Kaplan is a foul specimen of maleness.

Alex is a spectacularly unsympathetic character. Her primary complaint about life at her firm is not that her boss slept with her but that he didn't sleep with her (and his wife) exclusively. That's a complaint fueled by jealousy, not by sexual harassment. Alex feels sorry for herself when Sam gets tired of her inattention, a rather hypocritical reaction, given that she is cheating on him with a married man. She also feels sorry for herself when she learns that she’s not the only first year associate to be ill-treated at her firm, apparently because she’s too self-absorbed to take note of the firm’s culture. Her belated efforts to change that culture are too contrived to redeem her. Despite a bonding moment in another contrived scene with an associate who is about to kill herself, Alex’s love of money, shopping, and expensive wine clearly outweigh her concern about her co-workers (much less the female support staff, who are barely on her radar).

Promotional materials characterize The Boy’s Club as a novel about “sex and power” that has been optioned to Netflix, presumably because cheesy stories of sex and power have been a consistent television draw since the days of Dallas and Dynasty. I wouldn’t call The Boy’s Club cheesy, but the characters are shallow and the story holds no surprises. From a stylistic perspective, The Boy’s Club is well written. Still, this is a novel in which style triumphs over substance.

The Boy’s Club comes across as a “message” novel. It’s a good message, but only people who willfully ignore the news need to be awakened to the fact that powerful men often behave atrociously. So do powerful women (albeit in different ways). The prose quality and some interesting scenes kept me reading, but the predictable story and unpleasant protagonist kept me from enjoying the book from beginning to end.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS