The Obsoletes by Simeon Mills

Published by Skybound Books/Atria Books on May 14, 2019

Darryl and Kanga Livery are robot kids. Kanga sort of believes he is a real kid, having been raised that way by his robot parents. Their robot father was programmed to answer their questions with “Ask your mother” and their robot mother seemed to be depressed. The parents have disappeared, victims of obsolescence. Darryl is happy to see them gone but Kanga, who thought of them as real, misses them.

Parental absence leaves Darryl in the self-appointed role of mother, spending most of his time coaching Kanga not to do anything that would cause others to learn that he’s a robot. Anonymity is the key to robot survival. There are places in America where robots are accepted, other places where they are tolerated. In the Midwest, they are feared or viewed with anger because they take jobs away from humans. Are robots the story’s version of immigrants? You bet.

Darryl fears that Kanga’s skill at basketball will be the end of their anonymity. Darryl stops fretting about the loss of anonymity when he realizes that attending Kanga’s practices brings him into contact with Brooke Noon. Desire is apparently part of Darryl’s programming.

Being a sullen teen, on the other hand, is part of Kanga’s programming. Some of the story’s humor comes from Darryl’s efforts to keep his rebellious brother in check. And some of the humor derives from what initially seems to a competition between Darryl and Kanga for Brooke’s affection. Should Darryl’s loyalty be to his brother or to his robotic heart’s desire?

The story’s point lies in the realization that a young robot’s fears are pretty much the same as young human’s fears (apart from leaking oil): fear of rejection, fear of embarrassment, fear of growing up to be like your parents. And for nerdy boys, fear of girls. Coming to terms with those fears, developing an identity, deciding what’s important to you, is the same coming-of-age experience for every kid, even if the kid is a robot.

The Obsoletes pokes fun at American “values” (consisting chiefly of being American and winning international basketball competitions), parenting (“Few thrills in parenting compare with presenting a hypothetical consequence that immediately changes a kid’s behavior”), teachers, student athletes, prejudice, and hero worship. The basketball coach, who isn’t much of a coach and is an even worse teacher, is hilarious. His assistant, whose emotional development ended when he was a freshman basketball player, is almost as funny.

Maybe the story teaches obvious lessons, but it does so with an offbeat and entertaining plot. The story might not cut it as a coming-of-age story involving two human kids, but it adds a fresh take on a thoroughly explored theme by substituting robots. There are times (particularly when Kanga is on the basketball court) when the story goes too far over the top, and times (particularly when Darryl and Kanga interact with their creator) when the story loses its focus, but for the most part, The Obsoletes offers a view of growing up that emphasizes the familiar by contrasting it with the unconventional.

RECOMMENDED

Marley by Jon Clinch

Published by Atria Books on October 8, 2019

Thanks to Charles Dickens, the name Scrooge is synonymous with a certain crusty bitterness, a coldness of heart and lack of generosity. Thanks to Jon Clinch, we learn that Ebenezer Scrooge was once a different man. Clinch explains how Scrooge became the heartless miser who merited a life-changing visit by Christmas ghosts.

In Clinch’s expansion of the story Dickens told in A Christmas Carol, we learn how young Bob Cratchit meets Scrooge, but the bulk of the story fills in the details of Scrooge’s partnership with Jacob Marley. Scrooge & Marley is in the business of transportation. Scrooge keeps the books, both real and fictitious, and lives for the music played by the numbers he records. Marley handles transactions, some legitimate (rum), some unsavory (slaves), and some illegal. Scrooge is aware and approves of Marley’s tendency toward fraud, but he doesn’t know the half of it.

Marley is written in modern prose, but the names that Marley invents for fictitious people and businesses — Krook & Flite, Squeers & Trotter, Inspector Bucket — are worthy of Dickens. Scrooge is depicted in his youth as a man who would rather tend to his accounts than attend a Christmas party. He has no time for pleasure, including keeping company with Belle, the only woman who cares about him. Yet at this time in his life, Scrooge is capable of love, or at least of appreciating Belle’s kindness and generosity. Belle’s father is reluctant to give Belle’s hand in marriage, however, because he has doubts about Scrooge’s character, largely related to Scrooge’s involvement in the slave trade. Scrooge resolves to make whatever changes are necessary to win Belle’s hand — a decidedly unselfish act that prompts a schism between Scrooge and his business partner.

Scrooge’s sister Fan is Belle’s best friend. While Fan’s mother thinks she would be a good match for Marley, Fan sees Marley for what he is, much to Marley’s consternation. Clinch imagines Marley as a charming but murderous rogue, a con-man whose people skills complement Scrooge’s talent with numbers. Yet Marley is more than willing to betray Scrooge if his partner’s newfound aversion to the slave trade will stand in the way of wealth acquisition.

Marley, of course, is a ghost by the time A Christmas Carol is told. Perhaps Clinch reimagines the chains Marley drags in Dickens’ story as the chains that bound the slaves he transported. Dickens made clear that the chains are related to Marley’s pursuit of wealth while alive, but if Marley was in the slave trade, it is easy to picture the chains as a fitting punishment for his earthly crimes.

Clinch deftly incorporates some of the melodrama that makes Dickens memorable, but does so in an understated style that is more suited to modern fiction. While the straightforward plot teaches lessons a reader might take from a Dickens story, the lessons are appropriately subdued. There are no ghosts of past and future, although Marley does have a premonition of the wronged souls he might encounter in his afterlife.

Just as A Christmas Carol ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that it is never too late to change for the better, Marley suggests the possibility of redemption at the end of a misspent life. Yet the novel also suggests that redemption comes only to those who choose it. Perhaps, as Marley tells Scrooge late in his life, there is no justice, but Marley is not in a position to ask for it. Perhaps the ledgers of which Scrooge is so fond, when applied to Marley, will never balance. The man’s efforts at decency, particularly with regard to Fan, are inevitably undercut by his self-interest. The little good he does and the questionable remorse he professes surely cannot compensate for the evil he has done.

And that, the reader will come to understand, is why Dickens envisioned justice for Marley as an eternity of tormented wandering. Clinch’s novel ultimately takes the lessons of the Dickens story and inverts them, illustrating the lesson that a chance of redemption is only a chance. It is up to the person who is given that chance to decide whether to seize it. Clinch illustrates that lesson with convincing characterizations and an imaginative plot, giving readers a better understanding of a classic story.

RECOMMENDED

Tears of the Trufflepig by Fernando A. Flores

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD x FSG Originals on May 14, 2019

Tears of the Trufflepig is more surrealistic than most of the novels I enjoy, but it is rooted in the harsh realities of our national condition. The novel is set in a time and place that is in many ways very much like the world we know. The differences caution the reader to understand that the North America envisioned in the novel is the North America the next generation might inherit.

A world food shortage has killed a fifth of the Earth’s population. Not only did the United States build a border wall, but a second border wall was erected by Mexico, and the US is talking about building a third. Border Protectors roam around between the walls to deter illegal crossings. Armed Americans make a sport of killing intruders who are trapped in the shooting gallery formed by the walls. The US is threatening a new law that will send Border Protectors into Mexico to stop the problem at its source. None of this has done anything to deter unlawful immigration.

Drugs have been legalized in the western world, putting an end to drug cartels. Looking for new sources of illicit revenue, an enterprising criminal kidnapped some scientists who developed a process of “filtering” that allowed them to “grow” new animals, beginning with the ivory-billed parrot, providing a revenue stream from the black-market sale of ivory. Through the widespread kidnapping of scientists and science students, the criminal also bred silver moon foxes for their fur and extinct animals for collectors. Shrunken heads are also in high demand, which isn’t good for indigenous people who contribute their heads. The criminal who started it all is dead, but the business continues, cartels having replaced drug dealing with filtering.

Against that background we meet Esteban Bellacosa, who acquires equipment in Texas for a construction company in Mexico. Bellacosa brought merchandise across the border before the walls went up, working with a boy who is now a priest and another boy who is now dead. He regards modern Mexicans and Americans as “stale imitations of the cultures they were meant to be a part of.” Bellacosa has hired a detective in Mexico to find his brother Oswaldo, who has been kidnapped and is being held in the south for reasons unknown to Bellacosa.

A reporter named Paco Herbert hires Bellacosa to join him for a swanky, underground dinner. Attending the dinner alone would be suspicious; Bellacosa’s job is to be camouflage. Guests remain anonymous, but they are required to eat whatever extinct animals they are served. There they see a filtered animal with a beak and hooves and crocodile skin known as a Trufflepig.

Herbert is obsessed with the Aranaña, a forgotten people who, according to legend, could cross effortlessly between reality and the world of dreams. The Aranaña were supposedly closed off from civilization for centuries before their sudden reappearance as refugees. Legend has it that Trufflepigs were part of Aranaña culture, “accessible to them only in a dream state.” But the Trufflepig marked an era that, like most of the Aranaña, is now in the past. Perhaps the Aranaña have something in common with all the people who, like Oswaldo, have been disappeared.

Bellacosa becomes involved in a bizarre plot to which no summary could do justice. Bellacosa eventually steals a Trufflepig for reasons he can’t explain, and is surprised when he becomes attached to the gentle docility of the undemanding creature.

The story is filled with symbols of change, from the Trufflepig and the Aranaña to Tarot cards that represent the transition from past to future. The story’s surrealistic nature might be explained by the fact that Bellacosa sometimes describes events that he perceives after taking peyote. But the reader who looks beyond the story’s strangeness will find recognizable characters and events. Frequent references to music, film, food, and literature help ground the book in a familiar reality. While the political landscape is a natural outgrowth of America’s ascending nationalism, Bellacosa would be mourning the past and wondering about the future in any life. He has lost his wife and daughter, and (in a sense) his brother.

The story works because Bellacosa is something of an Everyman. He lives a lonely life, substituting harmless chats with waitresses for social interaction. He is caught up in circumstances he can’t control and doesn’t really understand. He is a powerless figure who, in his own small way, tucks a Trufflepig under his arm and takes a stand that will probably never be noticed. The novel seems to suggest that if more of us were like Bellacosa and if fewer of us championed walls and supported the corrupt desire for wealth, we could all share a more welcoming world. That's a good message, and Tears of the Trufflepig delivers it through an entertaining, albeit strange, story.

RECOMMENDED

Bloody Genius by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 1, 2019

Virgil Flowers novels tend to be a bit lighter than their companion Lucas Davenport novels, but neither series is crushingly heavy. Bloody Genius, like all of John Sanford’s novels, tells a fun story featuring likeable characters who trade barbs while laboring to solve a crime. Apart from following a successful formula, Bloody Genius offers one of the most engaging mysteries that Sanford has created. For that reason, I would rank it as one of the best of Sanford’s Virgil Flowers novels.

A professor sneaks a woman into a library at midnight, where he comes upon someone in his cubicle. The professor is clobbered on the head with his own laptop and the woman, who sees little and avoids being seen, decides that discretion is the better part of being a witness. For much of the novel, the police do not know who she is and are not even certain that anyone was in the library except the professor and his killer.

Since the professor has powerful friends with political connections, Virgil Flowers is dispatched to Minneapolis to assist the local homicide detectives, who have nothing. Flowers is careful not to step on the toes of the lead investigator, Margaret Trane. She overcomes her initial animosity toward Flowers, in part because Flowers is charming and funny and in part because he clearly isn’t trying to steal her thunder.

The reader knows more about the murder than the police, although the reader doesn’t know why the professor was killed or the identity of either the killer or the disappearing woman. Forearmed with that knowledge, the reader can enjoy Flowers’ investigatory missteps as he pursues theories that ultimately don’t fit how the murder occurred. The suicide (or murder) of another character and a mugging that might have been an attempted murder may or may not be related.

With all of those plot threads, the reader is never quite sure whether each new fact is a red herring or a clue. Did the murder have something to do with an academic dustup between the professor, who considered himself to be a real scientist, and members of the Cultural Affairs department, who the professor derided as useless? Did the cocaine in the professor’s desk tie into a motivation for murder? Why is a recorded conversation about a mysterious “experiment” hidden on a country-western CD in the professor’s sound system? Did the killing have anything to do with a malpractice lawsuit against the professor? Do seemingly unrelated crimes, including the theft of rare maps, furnish clues to the murder?

Sandford spins the plot elements with the skill of a master juggler. The eventual solution to the professor’s murder is clever. The crime is also one that an astute reader with esoteric knowledge that I lack might be able to solve. On top of a winning plot, Sandford ends the novel with a nice action scene and packs the story with his usual irreverent and profanity-laden dialog. I loved all of it, although readers who can’t abide the F-word (or the word pussy when it isn’t followed by the word cat), will want to steer clear of Bloody Genius. In my view, the naughty words just add to the fun.

RECOMMENDED

Country by Michael Hughes

Published in the UK in 2018; published digitally by HarperCollins on Oct. 1, 2019

Country offers different perspectives on the Troubles, as seen by key characters on both sides of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is 1994 and the generation of men who signed up to fight for a united Ireland are sick of the conflict. The IRA is splintering. Peace might finally be at hand — a ceasefire is imminent — but a determined group of Republicans want to continue the fight. Country tells the story of a small group of Provisional IRA fighters as they battle British soldiers, Protestant loyalists, informers, and each other.

A dispute between Pig (the group’s leader) and Achill (its feared sniper) concerning the ownership of the teenage girls who warm their beds at night endangers the group’s goal of unsettling the peace talks between the British and the IRA. The story then follows Nellie as she is enticed by the British to become an informer. She is dating (and eventually weds for the sake of appearances) a member of the IRA named Brian Campbell, but she spends their brief marriage scheming a way to get out of Ireland and begin a better life.

The story follows Pig’s brother Dog before it focuses on Henry Morrow, a captain in the SAS who is tasked with contacting the fighters to get a sense of their willingness to support peace negotiations. The spotlight then shifts to Pig, who feels betrayed by IRA leadership. He feel the tide turning. Locals welcome the ceasefire, yearn for an end to checkpoints. Pig won’t stand to see his years of struggle come to nothing.

The story develops the backgrounds of the IRA fighters — the hardcore few who are determined to thwart peace — in unflattering detail. If they were not killing on behalf of the IRA, they would be finding some other way to channel the violence that has been bred in their bones. One wishes he lived in the age of Braveheart so he could hack the British into pieces with his sword. Others don’t enjoy killing but are so caught up in the cause that they have lost all perspective. They kill their own for the smallest reasons — repairing cars for the police becomes a capital crime. These men have legitimate grievances, but the novel suggests that it should have been clear by 1994 that violence was only delaying the objectives they hoped to achieve.

In one of the strongest scenes, men discuss the pride that drives them. Pride in being Irish, pride in being hard men. Yet Achill knows that the English are proud to be English. Having been humiliated by Pig, Achill is too proud to continue the fight under Pig’s command. Pride causes men to fight and it causes them to stop fighting.

There are times when characters from both sides acknowledge that Catholic or Protestant, Irish or British, they are all members of the human race. They bond over football and ancestry and beer. A man who meets with Henry has grudging admiration for the soldier, while Henry feels the same. On occasion, men on both sides will decide not to kill, but when they believe that killing is necessary, no amount of admiration for the opponent will stop them, regardless of which side of the conflict they support. Violence blinds them to the possibility of no violence.

Country tells a fascinating story, but it has a couple of weaknesses. The IRA members love to give speeches to each other, and then praise each other for “a good spake, not a word out of place,” as if they were all students of rhetorical criticism. And while that may accurately reflect the Irish gift of gab, the endless speechifying becomes tedious at points. At the same time, I gather the novel is supposed to evoke Homer’s Iliad, so the dialog is likely meant to serve that purpose.

I also wonder whether the portrayal of the IRA members as hooligans who quarrel about their collections of 14-year-old girls might reflect the bias of an author who grew up in Northern Ireland. Still, while the IRA members are stereotypes of evil, Hughes does make a point of humanizing them, acknowledging that there is some justice in their cause, if not in their use of violence to thwart peace.

In the end, I tend to soak up the lyrical prose of nearly all Irish writers, and Country is no exception. The prose makes the novel compelling, speechifying notwithstanding, and a steady stream of tension and tragedy add substance to Hughes’ style.

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