How Are You Going to Save Yourself? by JM Holmes

Published by Little, Brown and Company on August 21, 2018

Taken collectively, the stories in How Are You Going to Save Yourself explore the lives of young black men growing up. A character named Gio, whose high school years are spent in Pawtucket, narrates many of the stories. Others spotlight his friends, Rolls, Dub, and Rye.

Gio’s father played in the NFL, but he left Gio’s mother and lived a less successful life by the time Gio was in high school. In “The Legend of Lonnie Lion,” Gio’s father advises him never to marry a white girl (presumably because that’s what his father did). The story offers a glimpse of Gio’s broken home, his troubled relationship with his father, and his ill-fated relationship with a Jewish girlfriend. “What’s Wrong With You? What’s Wrong With Me?” is a dialog-heavy story that consists of a conversation among Gio and his friends that keeps circling back to interracial sex. The heart of the story concerns their attempt to understand why a kid is turned on by racially offensive language that should offend him.

That conversation appears in the collection’s first story and is echoed in “Cookouts,” the final story. We learn in “Cookouts” that Gio did not take his father’s advice. The story focuses on Gio’s post-high school relationship with a white girl named Maddie, who comes from a prosperous family and lives in a world that is much different than Gio’s. The relationship changes in seconds when Gio introduces race into their sexual relationship in a way that understandably shocks Maddie, but race has always been a lurking subtext in their relationship. At least in Gio’s mind, the relationship was haunted by ghosts that Maddie never met.

In “Kinfolk,” Gio collects modest life insurance proceeds from his father’s death and watches the dollars disappear as he parties with his friends. In “Tacoma,” Gio struggles to understand whether anything still binds him to him to his stepmother and stepsister after his father’s death. He wonders whether he will lose his mother and stepsister because he is too much like his father.

 “Be Good to Me” describes a girl’s first blowjob, one she was encouraged to give by a hand at the back of her head. The story then shifts to Rolls, who is trying (or not) to reconcile what he has learned (or not) in college with his self-serving beliefs about women. His attempt to apply what he learned about Kant’s philosophy of moral behavior to his life results only in confusion, as does his inability to separate his emotions from his lust. What happens next points to the ambiguity of so many unplanned sexual encounters, as neither the boy nor the girl are certain that they have any control over the situation, and both feel a sense of guilt. The story is a powerful look at what happens when people of both sexes act because they feel pressured, when they resist their own knowledge of the difference between right and wrong.

“Dress Code” explores the relationship of Dub, whose telemarketing job is going nowhere, and Simone, who hopes to improve her life when she accepts an offer to pose as an artist’s subject. This is one of my favorite stories in the volume, largely because of the tension it makes a reader feel as Dub and Simone both struggle with their self-esteem and as their lives move in different directions.

“Toll for the Passengers” is about a traffic accident that turns into extortion. But in the end, it’s about realizing that your life doesn’t need to be filled with drama, that your skin color doesn’t force you into needless confrontations. “Everything Is Flammable” demonstrates the tension between being street and being straight, the choice between a life of freedom that leads to prison or a life that is imprisoned by employment. The story suggests that every choice leads to risk.

It is the honesty in these stories, the unvarnished self-reflection, that makes them special. The stories span a period of years — long enough that when Gio goes back to the barbershop he frequented as a high school student, nobody remembers him — during which Gio and his friends change and mature, or don’t. The book’s title encapsulates its central theme: What changes can the characters make to save themselves in a changing world?

JM Holmes’ stories capture the confusion of coming of age, of choices made and friendships abandoned, of changing relationships with family members and lovers, and of changing times. He does that with striking prose: “I looked at the table legs, Serena Williams thick.” He tackles large social issues (like the conflict between Black Lives Matter and the police) through personal squabbles among family and friends. By telling small stories, Holmes brilliantly illuminates larger questions that continue to divide the country. Some of the stories make for brutal reading, but they are all the more vital because of that.

RECOMMENDED

The Cassandra by Sharma Shields

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on February 12, 2019

The moral issues surrounding the development of atomic bombs in World War II are at the heart of The Cassandra. The central theme, however, is the way in which women’s lives were defined by men during the 1940s.

Mildred Groves has had visions of the future all her life. Since the visions are ugly, they made her unpopular and she learned to shut up about them. She is like Cassandra, a gifted prophet no one believed. Paradoxically, her gift makes her special but she wants nothing more than to be insignificant.

Mildred abandons her controlling mother and joins the Women’s Army Corps as a typist in 1944. Mildred’s mother hasn’t been well since Mildred pushed her into the river, but Mildred has had enough of her whining. Mildred leaves her small town in Central Washington to work at the Hanford Site, a newly constructed nuclear production facility. The work at the site is classified, so Mildred knows only that the workers are making an important contribution to the war effort.

Mildred’s visions become more powerful after she begins her work. She doesn’t connect the skulls and melting men in her visions to radiation, but she knows that she is seeing their future. Mildred has also started sleepwalking on perilous paths, but her new frenemy Beth is keeping an eye on her. The local doctor chalks it up to hysteria, which he regards as a common affliction of women. But how can anyone account for the coyote and rattlesnake and meadowlark who turn up to guide (or mislead) Mildred?

Mildred raises questions about soil contamination that her boss regards as impertinent for a woman to consider. He assures her that she will “go far for a woman” if she can “remain steady.” Mildred feels trivialized by everyone, even by women who work as scientists, even by Beth who seems to regard her as a puppy, adorable but simple-minded.

The Cassandra paints a sad picture of the 1940s, when women like Mildred were told they should want a husband followed by a house and children, and that employment was merely a pathway to that goal. Mildred doesn’t want the war to end, because her work gives her purpose and excitement that she never had at home.

While the story’s background is dark — women are second-class citizens, men are ravaging the environment while building a bomb that will kill millions — the plot is even darker. When Mildred becomes the victim of male violence, her experience has consequences that affect others in unexpected ways. Mildred learns the wrong lessons from her victimization — she learns to generalize her hatred — raising the question of whether Mildred will ever come to terms with her circumstances. Unfortunately, her ability to do so is complicated by the visions that haunt her. Yet the story’s ending suggests that women cannot improve their lives by becoming “vengeful, destructive, indiscriminate” — in other words, by acting like men — and that Mildred may be open to this lesson.

The story is built on ambiguities. Do Mildred's feelings for Beth include sexual attraction or simply a longing for affection? Are her visions real or is she mentally ill? While the visions seem to be real (Mildred sees future events that she probably isn’t capable of imagining), her actions near the end of the novel suggest that she has some serious mental health issues.

The story of Mildred’s job, of how she is changed by the experience of working and meeting men and living outside of her family home, and of how she responds to the knowledge that she has helped destroy millions of Japanese civilians, is compelling. The supernatural or mental health element — whatever the the conversations with a heron and rattlesnake are meant to be — detract more than they add to an otherwise strong story. To the extent that Mildred’s visions are a product of mental illness, however, it is easy to understand how she views her own violent victimization as punishment for the harm she unwittingly helped the government unleash in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The story also works as a reminder of how plutonium production at Hanford harmed the community with contaminated groundwater, rivers, and air. The site is still hazardous decades after serious cleanup efforts began. Cancers, sterility, miscarriages, and other injuries were largely ignored or denied by the government, or chalked up as the price of winning the war. The novel is dark but the darkness is appropriate to its subject matter. While I’m not sure The Cassandra is as disturbing or moving as it is meant to be, the novel illuminates important issues in the past that continue to have relevance today.

RECOMMENDED

Seek and Destroy by Alan McDermott

Published by Thomas & Mercer on November 14, 2018

Seek and Destroy is the second novel in Alan McDermott’s Eva Driscoll series, which spins off from his Tom Gray series. The novel is self-contained and can be read as a stand-alone, although it assumes a familiarity with a conspiratorial organization called the ESO and with some of the characters, including Gray, who is “a hero to the right wing” but “a terrorist in the eyes of many.”

Eva Driscoll has been secretly pardoned from the prison sentence she earned by investigating the ESO and her brother’s murder. Her team members took new identities and escaped to presumptive safety, but in India, Farooq Naser has just received a “we found you” video. Eva is in Munich with her lover Carl Huff, but a message from Farooq sparks a reunion of Eva’s team in Europe.

Meanwhile, Henry Langton is on an uncharted island leading a group that is charged with eliminating Eva and her team. That’s not going well so he decides to attack Gray in the hope that Gray will contact Eva’s team for help. Then he plans to follow the team members as they lead him to Eva. The plan doesn’t seem particularly plausible but plausibility is never a strong point in thrillers of this nature.

Eliminating Eva isn’t easy because Eva, like most action heroes, is indestructible. In one scene, armed just with a handgun, she takes out eight armed men. Yes, she gets a boo-boo on her cheek, but there’s never a sense that Eva is actually at risk. The same is true when Gray, Eva, and some expendables assault Langston’s island. They easily take out more than twice their number of trained mercenaries and sure, a couple of expendables don’t make it, but the reader will not work up a sweat worrying about the central characters.

Whether Eva qualifies as an action “hero” depends, I suppose, on whether the reader thinks a vengeful killer who assassinates unarmed technicians because they assisted a bad guy is justified in her lawlessness. Not to be outdone, Gray puts some gratuitous bullets in an unarmed character who is bleeding to death because he figures death alone isn’t a sufficient punishment for his misbehavior. I didn’t care much for the self-righteous avenger attitudes of Driscoll and Gray but readers who confuse self-righteous anger with morality might like them.

The novel justifies its title with a good amount of travel and destruction, as Driscoll and her team make their way to Mexico to arm themselves so they can launch an underwater attack on Langston’s island to rescue Gray’s kid, where she is being held hostage. The island invasion is preposterous, but that’s the nature of modern action thrillers. The travel gives the novel the story a certain amount of atmosphere.

McDermott writes fluidly and the novel maintains the kind of pace that action thrillers need. He takes time to give Eva and Gray personalities, even if the personalities are fairly standard and not particularly admirable. The conspirators are playing the long game, infiltrating government and hoping to place one of their own in the American presidency, an overdone premise that has become tiresome. Nothing about Seek and Destroy allows it to rise near the top of the mountain of books just like it. Die-hard action novel fans and followers of the Tom Gray series might want to read it, but other thriller fans can find better books to occupy their time.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Last Looks by Howard Michael Gould

Published by Dutton on August 14, 2018

Charlie Waldo is one of the more interesting characters to appear in recent crime fiction. Waldo has adopted a minimalist approach to life. He wants to own no more than one hundred things. That’s instantly amusing because Waldo must struggle with profound questions, such as whether socks count as one thing or two, and what he will need to give up if he acquires a gun.

Waldo maintains a small carbon footprint by living without plumbing and electricity in a tiny dwelling at the edge of the woods on a mountain. He only travels by bicycle or public transportation. Waldo is retired from the LAPD and hasn’t shaved in three years (a razor not making his list of one hundred possessions), but his former girlfriend, Lorena Nascimento, wants him to help her private detective agency on a celebrity case. Waldo used to be something of a celebrity cop and Laura claims that his presence would help her lock down the client. Waldo stopped being a cop, however, when he took advantage of three-strike laws to coerce an incriminating statement that was used to convict an innocent man of murder. Hence Waldo’s sense of guilt, which has exploded into feeling guilty about everything, including existing.

The case Waldo is asked to investigate involves a locked room mystery and a hard-drinking British actor named Pinch who was found inside his locked home with his murdered wife. The police don’t think the case is much of a mystery. A dirty cop, on the other hand, thinks Lorena has stolen something and that Waldo knows where to find it. Those facts drive a subplot, while the main attraction initially involves Waldo’s unwillingness to help Pinch (who is responsible for more carbon emissions in one day than 500 Kenyans in a year) and later (after Waldo relents) focuses on the locked room mystery.

In the tradition of private eye novels, Waldo is beaten up, finds a dead body in his driveway, encounters hostile police officers, is accused of multiple murders, is beaten up again, is locked up, and engages in a chase that ends with another beating. Suffice it to say that Waldo has a series of bad days and questions his decision to come down from his mountain to rejoin society, even temporarily. Yet he also finds himself smitten with a woman, something that hasn’t happened in his life for quite a long time. Sadly for Waldo, the woman is involved in the murder mystery, adding another complication to the plot.

The mystery is a good one, involving the interplay of several characters and the kind of scandalous Hollywood behavior that helps gossip websites earn their profits. While the story moves at a decent pace, Howard Michael Gould takes time to develop his characters. The supporting characters are quirky, but none are quirkier than Waldo. Everyone who meets Waldo thinks he is damaged, and of course they are right. But to Waldo, living with strict rules that minimize his ability to harm other people or the planet is a way to repair damage. Perhaps, the story suggests, there are better ways to repair damage, but even by the novel’s end, Waldo remains loveably challenged by life.

The ending suggests that Waldo will have another adventure, which I believe will be published this summer. It took me some time to get around to reading Last Looks, but I will not wait so long to read its sequel.

RECOMMENDED

Neon Prey by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on April 23, 2019

Neon Prey is the kind of book that John Sandford can write on auto-pilot and still entertain. The novel is filled with chase scenes and shootouts and banter. The plot has no substance to speak of, unless you count chase scenes and shootouts as a substantive plot, but Sandford does action scenes so well that the reader needs nothing more. At this point, Prey novels are just an excuse to check in with familiar characters to see how their lives are going. Suffice it to say that their lives are exciting.

Sandford’s Prey novels are light with patches of darkness. Neon Prey (Neon because much of the action is in Vegas) might be darker than most, simply because a fair number of characters (innocent and guilty alike) die, and characters who don’t die take a bullet. Even darker is the cannibal. Yes, there’s a cannibal and yes, that's been done before, in both fiction and the real world.

Lucas Davenport and Marshal buddies Bob and Rae are joined by an FBI agent who resembles a young Davenport, much to Rae’s delight. The plot involves a killer named Deese who is arrested after beating a man who refused to pay his debt to a loan shark. Deese is charged with furthering a racketeering conspiracy and is released on bail. Getting bail on a federal violent crime isn’t easy, but the judge gets a piece of the action so everyone’s happy. Everyone except Deese’s victims, because Deese is the aforementioned cannibal.

Deese cuts off his monitoring device in Louisiana. Federal Marshals Rae Givens and Bob Matees are searching Deese’s property when they find a bunch of buried bodies. The number and condition of the bodies and the contents of Deese’s grill are, to say the least, disturbing. Bob and Rae ask Lucas to use his clout to get the Marshals assigned to find Deese because they know the FBI isn’t good at finding people. For that matter, they don’t think FBI agents are good at anything.

From there, the story involves tracking Deese, who hooks up with a home invader and a young woman who is along for the ride (and the drugs). Deese and his accomplices go on a crime spree, staying a step ahead of the Marshals and FBI for much of the novel, but keeping them busy with shootouts and rising body counts and some clever schemes to avoid being captured.

The Prey stories are darkly amusing because of Davenport’s nonchalant joking with Bob and Rae in the face of mayhem. After 29 Prey novels, readers know what to expect, and Neon Prey is exactly what a series fan expects to read. There’s nothing new or different here, but the action, dialog, and skillful storytelling are enough to sweep the reader along, as they always are in a Sandford novel.

RECOMMENDED