Ohio by Stephen Markley

Published by Simon & Schuster on August 21, 2018

In 2007, high school football star Rick Brinklan gets a parade with a casket borrowed from Wal-Mart because the Marines need to keep his body while investigating his death. The town of New Canaan celebrates with a cake decorated with an America flag and speeches by the members of his football team and ex-girlfriends (except those who are too high or ashamed to speak). Six years later, four vehicles converge on New Canaan and Stephen Markley launches four intersecting stories.

Bill Ashcraft has driven drunk and high from New Orleans to Ohio, where he plans to deliver a package. He doesn’t know what’s in the package but he’s sure it isn’t legal. His return to New Canaan and chance encounters in taverns (not to mention even more drug and alcohol consumption) trigger high school memories of betrayals and broken friendships, one involving one of Rick’s girlfriends, who has a woeful story of her own to tell. Ashcraft’s more recent memories include the loss of his best friend from New Canaan, a singer-songwriter who died in LA while Ashcraft was attending the Occupy protest in New York.

Stacey Moore is traveling to New Canaan to deliver a letter. Stacey discovered her sexual identity in New Canaan, skating on the periphery of Brinklan’s crowd despite her relationships with Ashcraft’s girlfriend and with the songwriter. Stacey’s time in New Canaan, like Ashcraft’s, is punctuated by memories (mostly of her adventurous sex life), but she also has a conversation that gives the reader a clue about the contents of Ashcraft’s package.

Dan Eaton, home from the war but missing an eye and part of his soul, returns to New Canaan to see Hailey Kowalczyk, the object of his childhood crush and enduring love, who is now married to a kid he knew in school. Dan signed up for his last tour because as bad as Iraq or Afghanistan might be, they feel more like home to him than Ohio. Before Dan can find Hailey, he is waylaid by Ashcraft, encounters several high school friends at New Canaan bars, responds to violence as only a man with one eye can, and remembers disturbing incidents from his tours of duty.

Tina Ross didn’t move far from New Canaan. She makes a quick trip to New Canaan to find her high school love, a football player who used her, abused her, and left her damaged. Her story is, in many ways, the most gruesome part of the novel; it is not suitable for squeamish readers.

In the final chapter, we finally learn what was in the package Ashcraft brought to New Canaan and see the consequences of its delivery. The story then jumps ahead four years to resolve a couple of mysteries and tie characters together in new ways.

The destructive power of the secrets we carry is one of the novel’s themes. Another is the nature of dreams of the future, the random ways that life interferes with the opportunity to achieve them, and the need to fight for your dreams even if you know the battle cannot be won. Another is change: the way people change, the way people are changing the Earth, and the fear that the world might be changing in dark ways to which many residents of towns like New Canaan are deliberately oblivious.

Characters engage in political debate, but the disagreements are expressed in intelligent language; neither side of the divide is presented as buffoonery. At the same time, the debates expose the narrow-minded hypocrisy of bumper sticker patriots who base their opinions on the assumed superiority of white heterosexual American-born males (although readers who share that viewpoint might think the bigots get the better of the arguments).

Characters are the strength of Ohio. Many of the primary and collateral characters are decent people who make an effort to help broken people. The broken characters are inspirational in their own way as they “rage against the faceless entropy” and “endure the Truth and struggle to extinction.” As much as the novel rages against small town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, it also recognizes that small towns are filled with people who reject bigotry and embrace the values of compassion and understanding. Those people are often taken for granted, but they are the people who give small towns whatever heart and soul they might have.

The first three stories are exceptional. Tina’s story is powerful but a bit forced, while the key event of the final chapter is too far removed from the story that precedes it to be convincing. While the four stories intersect, they never quite add up to something greater than their parts. Apart from the key event in the last chapter to which I alluded, the ways in which the stories tie together in the final chapter are clever, but the resolution doesn’t do justice to the deeper stories that precede it.

Still, some of the novel’s passages are breath-stopping in their perceptive examination of troubled characters who are struggling to find a way to make sense of life. While the stories don’t quite cohere to make an entirely successful novel, viewed a series of long, connected stories that provide an in-depth examination of haunted characters in a small Ohio town (perhaps the modern version of Winesburg), Ohio approaches the status of masterpiece.

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One of Us by Craig DiLouie

Published by Orbit on July 17, 2018

One of Us is an alternate history, set in Georgia in the 1980s. But One of Us is also an allegory. “Folks don’t care about the truth,” one of the characters thinks. “Not when it interfered with a comforting narrative.” And that pretty much sums up America today, a country divided between people who care about the truth and people who dismiss facts as “fake news” because it gets in the way of how they want to perceive the world.

In One of Us, Reagan is president and the B-52s are on the radio, although their songs are a bit different from the ones we know. A plague has infected children. Don’t worry, it isn’t a zombie plague, but it does turn some kids into monsters. At least, that’s what normal people call them. People in the novel who define themselves as normal are white, not well educated, and happy to exploit the plague kids when it comes time to harvest the cotton.

The plague is sexually transmitted. At school, Amy Green is taught the importance of abstinence and safe sex. She’s taught how to get a mandatory abortion if a plague kid makes her pregnant. She’s taught that it’s illegal for someone who carries the plague to have sex, and that it is illegal for anyone to have sex until they’re tested. That saddens Amy because, unbeknownst to all the other kids in her school, she carries the plague germ. So much for Amy’s sex life.

Enoch Bryant is known to the other kids as Dog. He looks kind of like a wolf, with long skinny arms like hairy pipe cleaners. He lives in the Homes as a ward of the state. A million plague kids have been abandoned to the Homes. Some are starting to show special abilities. Some kids who exhibit abilities (like Goof, who finishes other people’s sentences before they’re spoken) are taken away from the Homes to assist government agencies. Dog’s friend George (a/k/a Brain) is a genius, but he hides it. Brain is a born leader, and he intends to lead a revolution.

I view the story is an allegory of racial, ethnic, and religious oppression mixed with an allegory of discrimination against AIDS victims. The older generation praises progressive American values for segregating plague kids in Homes, rather than making them live in the woods or hunting them down like the less civilized European countries, but really the plague kids are slave labor for Georgia farms.

The younger (normal) generation is divided about the plague kids. Some agree with their parents, who benefit from exploiting the kids and see it as part of the natural order. Kids who are naturally rebellious empathize with the plague kids. They don’t view having the plague as a reason to lose freedom or dignity.

Judging from the dialog, pretty much everyone in the novel is a dumb Southern hick, including the teachers. This alternate history is even worse than our current reality, but it may be unfairly heavy-handed in its failure to give a voice to any “normal” adults who might be expected to resist the exploitation and mistreatment of children. Another strike is that the story plods at times, as young characters deal with their relationship angst. I kept wondering, “Is Brain’s revolution ever going to happen, or what?” When the story finally reaches a climax, it feels like an anticlimax.

Still, I like the novel’s message, which builds on Nietzsche’s warning that those who fight monsters must be careful not to become monsters. That’s particularly true when society defines monsters as anyone who happens to belong to a different group. One of Us does a nice job of reminding us that those who claim to be fighting monsters often make the monsters scapegoats for problems of their own making.

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The Sinners by Ace Atkins

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on July 17, 2018

If he lives to the end of The Sinners, Quinn Colson plans to get married. His friend Boom Kimbrough is supposed to be his best man, if he live to the end of the novel. Lillie Virgil, now working as a federal marshal in Memphis, plans to attend the wedding, if it happens (fortunately, nobody in The Sinners is trying to kill her). Fannie Hathcock, who runs the local titty bar, is not invited to the wedding. You’ll need to read the earlier books in the series to understand the history of those characters. And you should read the earlier books, because the Quinn Colson novels are lively, funny, and thoroughly entertaining.

The Sinners involves the intersection of Kimbrough, Hathcock, and the Pritchard family, which has a reputation for stock car racing and selling marijuana. Kimbrough has a truck driving job, but he’s not happy to learn that the cargo he’s hauling isn’t entirely legitimate. Heath Pritchard, having served his time in Parchman, is back in town, much to the displeasure of his nephews, Cody and Tyler, who took over the family drug business while their uncle was behind bars. Heath’s return coincides with the murder of one of Fannie’s employees (they have a troublesome habit of getting themselves killed). Quinn works on finding the killer when he isn’t avoiding the task of making wedding plans, but his investigation is only part of a much broader story of local crime and its connection to organized crime.

The setting is the same as other books in the series: a small redneck community in fictional Tibbehah County, Mississippi, whose residents exemplify confederate values: white supremacy, religious hypocrisy, and ignorance disguised as righteousness. Atkins’ characters are always nicely balanced. Quinn is a decent man who feels guilt about his less exemplary conduct. Hathcock, who doesn’t even try to be exemplary, is becoming one of my favorite Atkins characters because she’s smart, speaks her mind, and doesn’t need a bunch of people who think they can make American great again “trying to tell me how to run my business because they were born with a pecker between their bowed legs.”

The story races along, leading to eventual car chases and shootouts, but the action is secondary to drama that come from the characters’ interaction: the dynamic between Heath and his nephews; the friendship between Quinn and Kimbrough (a bond that is threatened by an act of violence); Hatchcock’s response to the criminals who seek firmer control of her operation. Ace Atkins always tells a good story, and he does it again in The Sinners, but his characters make the Quinn Colson series special.

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We All Love the Beautiful Girls by Joanne Proulx

First published in Canada in 2017; published by Grand Central Publishing on August 28, 2018

We All Love the Beautiful Girls is an intense examination of an eventful year in the life of a married couple and their teenage son. The first days of January introduce two couples in their 40s playing Pictionary:  Michael and Mia Slate, Peter and Helen Conrad. Michael and Mia have been married for two decades but still enjoy a vigorous (and rough) sex life, complete with a safe word that Mia never invokes. Michael and Peter are in business together. The Slates’ son, Finn, is finishing high school. The Conrads’ daughter, Frankie, has an ambiguous teenage friendship with Finn, who has a sex buddy relationship with an older girl named Jess when she isn’t with her rich boyfriend, who is the brother of Finn’s best friend. The novel is set in a prosperous community in Canada.

The drama begins in February, when Michael discovers that Peter has taken over ownership of their business by abusing Michael’s trust. The only thing that distracts Michael from the shock of discovering that betrayal is the realization that Finn is well past his curfew. In segments of the story told in believable language from Finn’s point of view, we follow Finn to a party where teenage drama and a combination of alcohol and drugs leave him upset and wasted. Finn nearly freezes to death, leading to the loss of his hand. Every word in this section of the novel conveys tension; it is completely absorbing.

Finn continues to narrate part the story from his first-person perspective while the rest of the story is told in the third person. The first-person focus on Finn lets the reader understand the family dynamic from a perspective that Finn’s self-centered father and self-pitying mother cannot provide. The story follows the characters through a number of confrontations and potentially life-altering events as they struggle to move beyond their respective crises.

To some extent, We All Love the Beautiful Girls is a relationship drama. Can the long and intense friendship between Mia and Helen survive Peter’s betrayal of Michael? Can either marriage survive? What about Finn’s friendship with Frankie and his romantic (from his perspective) relationship with Jess, who is probably engaged only because of her boyfriend’s wealth? Can Finn’s friendship with his best friend survive the fact that they betrayed each other with their careless actions?

Finn’s friends and their parents are breaking up for all the usual reasons, “like every other human being trying to survive love on this planet.” Michael hits baseballs and smokes weed with a kid who might be turning into a surrogate son, a stranger to whom he can open up, something he seems incapable of doing with Finn. For his part, Finn is convinced (with reason) that his parents don’t understand how he feels and aren’t doing enough to help him cope with his loss. Mia at least understands that having a child means loving him in difficult times — “no quitting” — but Finn’s parents struggle to find the right way to express their support.

While the novel examines characters in the context of familial and other relationships, it also probes deeply into the interiors of Michael, Mia, and Finn, each of whom must probe their own interiors, to find themselves, during the course of the novel. Michael is rooted in anger that he can’t express, that always bubbles just below the surface but threatens to manifest itself in senseless violence. Mia is feeling her age and, while flirting an old friend who represents Michael in his lawsuit against Peter, wonders if rejuvenating her sex life would rejuvenate the rest of her life. Michael and Mia can’t agree upon an approach to Finn’s disability, while Finn is understandably self-conscious, doing his best to ignore or conceal his missing hand while refusing to participate in therapy or to wear a prosthetic.

The last third of the novel brings each family member to a climactic moment, one that requires a choice to be made. The cliché is that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, but that isn’t always true. Finn wants to believe it, but the novel’s most powerful question is whether Finn and his parents will gain strength from or be destroyed by their losses. Some of their initial reactions to adversity might be shameful, but that only makes them human. Yet bad actions often have consequences that are more severe than intended, and people who make poor decisions, as well as their victims, must live with the resulting harm. The novel illustrates that the things we do to make ourselves feel powerful may actually weaken us by forcing us to recognize and live with the consequences of our destructive impulses.

We All Love the Beautiful Girls tells a smart and nuanced story, blending themes of love and karma with themes of pain and anger. The story balances depressing realities against hope that people can overcome their worst tendencies and can address the horrors that befall them. The story’s touching, poignant moments never feel contrived or melodramatic, although Finn’s meditations on love and Mia’s remonstrations with Michael and repeated comments about the difficulty of forgiveness and the importance of not quitting on your kids sometimes seem like a heavy-handed attempt to scream the novel’s lessons at readers who might not otherwise get it. Still, the strong characters, dramatic plot, and sharp prose easily overcome the novel’s few flaws.

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Night Hawks by Charles Johnson

Published by Scribner on May 1, 2018

Many of the stories in Night Hawks address questions of religion or philosophy. Toshiro Ogami, the “imitation priest” in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra,” left the monastery because he did not have the political or family connections needed to rise in his religion. He translates English books into Japanese while rehabilitating an old, abandoned temple. An African American woman whose book he is translating finds him there. Quite inadvertently, she helps him overcome his self-doubt and find the harmonious unity that has always eluded him.

“Idols of the Cave” is told in the second person, putting the reader in the shoes of a Muslim American soldier who is being court martialed after tumbling into a cave in Afghanistan that had once been occupied by Buddhist monks. A treasure trove of ancient wisdom sparks a discussion between the Muslim soldier and a Christian major and an outcome that Aristotle might categorize as either comedy or tragedy — the court martialed soldier does not know which characterization would be more accurate.

“The Weave” describes the theft of wigs and extensions made from human hair from a salon by a former employee who believes she was unjustly fired for burning a customer. The hair comes from the heads of Buddhist women who are shorn in order to let go of all things cosmetic. The story, narrated by the thief’s boyfriend, is about letting go of the things that turned the former salon employee into a thief, including her pain and “the absurdities of color and caste.”

A student of Socrates, presumably Plato, narrates “The Cynic.” He laments the condition of postwar Athens, the prevalence of people who aspire to power rather than good, who learn from sophists how to disguise truth and perfection, and at the same time challenges the wisdom of Socrates, Aristotle, and particularly Diogenes, who forces Plato to consider the possibility that it is more important to be than to understand.

Other stories are closer to home, but are still informed by philosophy, particularly by Buddhist thought. A Seattle cab driver in “Occupying Arthur Whitfield,” ruminating about the unfair divide between the 1% and the rest of us, burglarizes the home of a wealthy man, only to learn that the differences between the rich and poor are often less significant that the suffering that all human beings share. A similar lesson is learned in “Welcome to Westwood,” when the narrator, irritated by the loud music played by a neighbor, learns to replace his irritation with compassion.

“The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones” is a fictionalized account of the narrator’s encounter with a real-life black man in Seattle who gained some fame by dressing as a superhero and fighting (or, as the police viewed it, committing) crimes. The point of the story is that people have the power to invent themselves, perhaps the most important superpower of all.

Another real-life African American, the playwright August Wilson, is the subject of “Night Hawks,” a story written as a wide-ranging conversation that touches on the soul of the artist, the difference between tough exteriors and sensitive interiors, “the ambiguous state of black America,” and the tragedy of art that never reaches the audience that most needs to see it. Reality intrudes on intellectualism when the two men observe the night hawks who roost at an IHOP at 3 a.m., a juxtaposition that suggests the importance of art as a refuge from the violence and suffering that surrounds us all.

The remaining inhabitants of Earth in “4189” are immortal, but some of them use a forbidden drug that helps them imagine they might die, which is essential to appreciating a moment of time. But death, the only forbidden fruit, becomes the only taste that Shane and his lover crave. This story is about a society that subordinates individuality for the collective good. With its surprise ending, this is one of the best science fiction short stories I’ve read this year.

A song that contains a map to freedom for runaway slaves is at the center of “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” On the silly side, “Guinea Pig” describes an experiment in which a student briefly inhabits the mind of the researcher’s dog.

All of Charles Johnson’s stories are carefully polished gems. This collection demonstrates Johnson’s versatility, blending philosophy with the reality of modern street life. It is the product of a warm, generous, and thoughtful mind, the kind of enriching fiction that offers a chance to take a break and feel grateful for life and for artists who help us understand the possibilities it offers.

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