Small Hours by Jennifer Kitses

Published by Grand Central Publishing on June 13, 2017

Small Hours is a slice-of-married-life family drama. The slice consists of an eventful, life-changing day for both spouses, although since they spend little of that day together. They make independent decisions after experiencing unrelated events, but their decisions are ultimately connected.

Tom and Helen Foster have moved to the “achingly quiet” town of Devon in the Hudson Valley to raise their two daughters. Tom, a wire service editor, is increasingly overwhelmed by anxiety while Helen, a graphic designer, works off her anger by punching a bag at the local gym.

Tom and Helen are keeping secrets. Tom’s anxiety concerns a recently born daughter Helen doesn’t know about. Tom would like to play an active parenting role with that daughter, just as he does with his other daughters, but he fears Helen would leave him if he told her the truth.

Helen knows about Tom’s affair and thinks she has moved past it. Still, Helen is consumed with anger. The anger is partly driven by credit card balances she hasn’t told Tom about, and partly by the difficulty of balancing the demands of her underpaid work-at-home job with the demands of her daughters. But Helen also feels her life spinning out of control in small ways that make her question her fitness as a mother, including her run-in with a couple of teenage girls she dismisses as white trash.

The slow build of tension makes the reader understand that the situations in which Tom and Helen find themselves are unsustainable. Tom’s bond with Donna’s child is growing, as is Donna’s concern about her daughter’s “secret daddy.” Tom and Helen are increasingly on edge as the story progresses. The characters are searching for a happy ending to their stories, but it seems likely that one character's happiness will hurt at least one other character. How all of that will shake out is the primary question that drive the plot.

Neither Helen nor Tom are ideal people. Helen is remarkably needy. Her needs are unfulfilled, and probably incapable of being fulfilled. Tom is remarkably selfish, as he demonstrates repeatedly. The story doesn’t make for pleasant reading because Helen and Tom are at their worst and I can’t imagine wanting to know either of them. The story nevertheless has value because Jennifer Kitses opens a window on the problems and attitudes of realistic characters. Even the secondary characters (particularly a teenage boy who stands up for Helen, a “good kid who made bad choices”) are recognizable as people, not just stereotypes inserted to move the story along.

The novel ends with Helen and Tom making decisions. They have more decisions to make, and their decisions will have consequences, but Kitses leaves it to the reader to imagine how it will all play out. Small Hours is a novel of small moments, but it offers big insights into the choices that are forced upon people as they struggle to decide how their lives should proceed.

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Deep Freeze by John Sandford

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on October 17, 2017

David Birkmann starts Deep Freeze by killing a woman he was hoping to seduce. The killing is unplanned, not quite an accident but certainly not premeditated. After arranging the body to make the death appear to have been accidental, Dave the Bug Boy (exterminator by trade) bugs out. But why does the dead woman’s body turn up in the water by the sewage treatment plant?

Virgil Flowers’ latest mystery involves small town secrets, and there are a lot of those in Deep Freeze. Some involve affairs, some involve adventurous sex, some involve rivalries and jealousies. Of course, nothing is really a secret in a small Minnesota town that craves gossip.

A subplot involves Barbie and Ken dolls that have been modified in ways that … well, let’s just say that Mattel doesn’t like it. That’s a fun diversion from the main story, although the subplot raises serious questions about whether law enforcement agencies (at the bidding of politicians) should use their scarce resources to help corporations with civil matters like copyright infringement. Virgil doesn’t dwell on the issue, but he’s clearly annoyed to have his murder investigation interrupted by an investigation of people who really aren’t harming anyone (unless you count Barbie’s reputation).

The plot hustles along as Virgil interviews one town resident after another, matching stories, discarding theories, trying to figure out who is telling the truth and whether their lies relate to the murder. A couple of brawls enliven the story, but this is more a police procedural, a detective at work, than anything else. It isn’t a whodunit (we know whodunit from the opening pages) and the mystery of the displaced body gets solved well before the ending, so Deep Freeze is less a novel of suspense than an entertaining slice of Virgil Flowers’ life. To be fair, there are some tense moments at the end, but this isn’t an action novel. Since Virgil is an entertaining character who surrounds himself with entertaining characters, I’m fine with the story’s low-key nature.

I love John Sandford’s deadly accurate portrayal of small town politics, including the sheriff who doesn’t want to investigate anyone if the investigation might irritate influential people or cost him votes. I also love the friendly insults that characters exchange. Sandford’s novels are worth reading for the banter, apart from the plots. Readers searching for a traditional mystery will need to search elsewhere, but Sandford fans who want to spend time with an old friend will find little to complain about in Deep Freeze.

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Dunbar by Edward St, Aubyn

Published by Crown Publishing/Hogarth on Oct. 3, 2017

Dunbar is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of novels that are — based on? inspired by? completely unrelated to? — a Shakespeare play. The publisher’s website uses the word “retelling” but that isn’t the most accurate descriptor, based on the novels in the series that I’ve read.

Dunbar shares some elements with King Lear (descent into madness, bequeathing a kingdom to two daughters while ignoring a third, family strife), but the story is more comedy than tragedy. The kingdom is a corporate empire; battles are waged by trading firms and corporate raiders rather than armies. Since no author is going to improve on Shakespeare, I think it best to view Dunbar as “inspired by” Lear and then ignore the inspiration entirely, reading the novel as a literary work that stands on its own. From that perspective, I give Edward St. Aubyn credit for writing a story that is amusing and entertaining if not particularly deep.

Henry Dunbar is off his meds, but only because he spit them into a plant next to his institutional bed. Dunbar is a media mogul, perhaps the world’s most powerful person, but his haughty daughters Abigail and Megan are making him take a “lovely long holiday” at a psychiatric hospital. Their goal is to take the Dunbar Trust private again, giving them control over the vast media organization. Dunbar’s daughter Florence, half-sister of Abigail and Megan, is kept in the dark about her father’s location as well as the future of the family business.

Complicit in Henry’s institutionalization is Dr. Bob, with whom both Megan and Abigail are enjoying sadistic sex, and who has been promised a seat on the Board and a healthy salary. But Dr. Bob is even more Machiavellian than the sisters, setting up a troika of self-interested villains for the reader to root against.

Not that Dunbar deserves the reader’s cheers. Dunbar might deserve a measure of pity, but his lifelong narcissism is largely to blame for his current state of lonely emptiness. His only friend (he’s betrayed all his past friends) is newly acquired, another patient who has gone off his meds and who facilitates Dunbar’s escape. But the friend only wants to escape to the nearest pub, while Dunbar (as always) has grander ambitions.

St. Aubyn uses dry British wit to make Dunbar the kind of modern family drama that exposes the dark side of each relevant family member. The two evil daughters only have a dark side, and St. Aubyn exploits their pettiness and self-absorption to substantial comedic effect, while never quite making them convincing characters. Characters in comedies are often exaggerated to make a point, but one downside to turning a Shakespearean tragedy into a comedy is that the story’s tragic aspects demand true villains and a truly tragic hero, not caricatures.

The plot involves a good bit of corporate intrigue, back-stabbing, and betrayal as various forces vie for control of Dunbar Trust. The plot’s focus, however, is on family intrigue. The ending abruptly veers toward darkness (St. Aubyn didn’t have much choice about that if he wanted to do even the most abstract retelling of Lear), but the darkness is incongruous, given that the story is played for laughs until that point. Nor is Dunbar a particularly meaty novel, despite its themes of betrayal. As a comedy, however, the story succeeds, and St. Aubyn’s prose is always a pleasure to read.

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The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins

Published by Scribner on July 4, 2017

The Graybar Hotel is a collection of stories about men in jail or prison. Most are told in the first person, although not always by the same narrator. They generally progress from the Kalamazoo Jail to a Michigan prison, although “The Boy Who Dreams Too Much” takes place in a transitional facility where prisoners are transferred after leaving jail as they await an assignment to a prison. “Swans,” which tells of a friendship that the narrator had before he was incarcerated, takes place in a reformatory, although it is narrated by an adult who is eight years into a life sentence. The last story, “Leche Quemada,” is told in the third person and focuses on a man who, having just been released from prison, soon realizes that a part of his mind will always live behind bars.

The tone is set in “County,” the collection’s first story. The narrator’s new cellmate in the Kalamazoo Jail describes being hit by a Cadillac, the conversation being one more way to pass time in days that are filled with emptiness, just like the fake suicide attempt that hastens the new inmate’s desired path back to prison.

Some of the stories deal with the theme of alienation, an inmate’s desire to connect in some way with the outside world. The narrator of “The Human Number” makes random collect calls from jail, connecting with people so lonely or bored that they are willing to chat with an inmate they don’t know. The narrator of “The World Out There” makes up a story about a girl who is sitting in the stands of a baseball game he’s watching on television.

Many of the stories are slices of life behind bars. “Sunshine” is a vignette about an inmate whose sister may or may not have cancer. “In the Dayroom with Stinky” relates a series of conversations between inmates. “Daytime Drama” focuses on an inmate who seems to be having mental health issues. “Depakote” talks about cigarettes, prison scams, and the perils of owing debts to other prisoners. A goose gets caught in the prison’s razor wire in “Brother Goose.”

A couple of stories discuss the lives that inmates led before they entered prison. “Six Pictures of a Fire at Night” spotlights Catfish, who cleaned up suicides and other dead bodies for a living and who may or may not have killed his wife. But “Engulfed” suggests that the inmates who talk about their outside lives are probably lying, and that the lies are an essential means for inmates to feel less bad about themselves, to construct a more productive past than the one they lived.

The most poignant story, “573543,” mixes memories of the narrator’s time as an addict with the arbitrariness of prison guards who are eager to dehumanize inmates in ways that drugs never manage to accomplish.

This is a strong collection and a valuable contribution to the genre of prison literature. Incarceration is challenging and dehumanizing, but Curtis Dawkins makes the reader remember that the majority of prisoners are ordinary people who, like most of us, are trying to make the best of our circumstances.

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Sourdough by Robin Sloan

Published by MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux on Sept. 5, 2017

Sourdough is partly about connections that join the past, present and future. The novel explores food as a connecting force, in the form of cultural migration of foods and recipes that are handed down through generations. The novel suggests “food is history of the deepest kind,” a record of both tradition and evolution as tastes and mechanisms of production have changed from decade to decade, stretching back to "the dawn of hunger." Food also connects people and cultures in the present, at least for those who are gastronomically adventurous and open to the world.

The way we eat has also evolved (changes in packaging and the development of interstate highways created fast food in the 1950s) and that evolution continues as consumers embrace (for example) organic alternatives to processed foods. But evolution can bring about drastic change. Robin Sloan imagines a food product called Slurry that provides all of the body’s nutritional needs. It’s all anyone needs to eat and it’s so much healthier than potato chips. It can feed the world if people don’t mind eating goo, and it is inexpensive to produce. Feeding the world is undeniably a worthy goal, but nutrition without pleasure is a tough choice to make.

Sourdough’s central character, Lois Clary, is a programmer in a robotic industry who is on a mission to replace manual workers, but the demanding work ties her stomach in knots. Only a specific soup and sandwich combo from a delivery service can relax her, but the place operates illegally and is soon out of business. Luckily for Lois, however, the owners have dubbed her their “number one eater” and make a gift to her of their special starter for sourdough bread. It is, they say, a part of their culture (they are Mazg from some mysterious part of the world that Lois cannot identify). Unlike any other starter, this one carves a recognizable face into the crust of each loaf. The face depends on the music that is playing as the bread rises.

Lois lives in ultramodern San Francisco, doing an ultramodern high tech job, but her newfound ability to make sourdough, her “serendipity bread,” provides her with a connection to a task that countless people have performed for generations. She also finds a connection to the bread itself when she ponders the living organism that changes flour into bread. The story’s point might be that Lois, who as a programmer is working to make repetitive labor obsolete, finds greater satisfaction in the repetitive labor of baking bread.

Yet Sourdough does not reject the inevitability of change. The novel is also an appreciation of imaginative, science-based food. Lois joins a cross between a farmer’s market and a food fair that hosts people who take an experimental, edgy approach to food production. The chapter that describes “Lembas cakes manufactured whole by living organisms” and “algorithmically optimized bagels” and cookies made from bugs made me want to visit the place.

But the novel might also send the message that technology is no match for nature. I thoroughly enjoyed Sloan’s descriptions of the wars that bacteria fight, the extent to which they work together to defeat enemies and achieve common goals, and the ability of humans to benefit from those wars when they bake bread. The descriptions of bacteria engaged in a clash of civilizations might seem fanciful at first blush, but the novel opens up a microscopic world to the reader’s imagination in a way that rings true.

There are people who embrace the past and fear the future. There are people who embrace the future and reject the past. The ultimate point of Sourdough might be that the past and future coexist, that it is possible to embrace them both in the present. All by thinking about bread.

The novel’s plot is engaging, its characters are fittingly quirky, and its ending is endearingly whimsical. As a work of philosophy, food history, or just entertainment, I cannot find any fault in Sourdough.

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