The Fugitives by Christopher Sorrentino

Published by Simon & Schuster on February 9, 2016

The Fugitives is a difficult novel to classify (I regard that as a plus). It falls under the broad category of literary fiction, but it fits within (and elevates) the genre of crime fiction. It isn’t a comedy, exactly, but the story is light and filled with amusing moments when it isn’t a contemplation of death or failure or betrayal.

Some of The Fugitives is narrated by a writer with a talent for wasting time. Having been booted out of his New York home after a disastrous affair, Alexander “Sandy” Mulligan is now wasting time in Upper Michigan. The sojourn gives him a chance to ponder storytelling, which isn’t so different from living -- breaking time into discrete chunks of “anecdote and memory; association and reminiscence; conjecture, desire, and regret; the bones of the lunchtime saga over a glass of wine.” Unfortunately, he isn’t getting his new book written and is about to be sued for breach of contract.

Christopher Sorrentino advances the storytelling theme with a character named Salteau, a Native American (or not) who tells traditional stories to children twice a week at a public library. Meanwhile, a reporter from Chicago named Kat Danhoff, following a story about money stolen from a tribal casino, is taking an interest in Salteau for reasons unrelated to his role as a repository of folk tales. She thinks Salteau might be hiding something, or hiding from something … but is he part of a story that a journalist has any reason to pursue? And what should her editor do if the casino might pull its advertising if the story runs?

Mulligan’s description of his unfaithful past is the familiar stuff of literary fiction but Sorrentino finds ways to describe it that make his insights seem fresh. An extended paragraph about Mulligan’s lover’s underwear, in fact, is nearly enough to make the novel worthwhile. Sorrentino brings the same astute observational power to his third person account of Kat’s failed relationship with her first husband and her troubled relationship with the current one. My favorite line, though, is about an independent bookstore clerk who “shoved the books in a plastic bag as if they were socks or pork chops and sent her on her way, corroding a little more the romance that survived, God only knew why, in Kat’s heart.”

Sorrentino has fun with his offbeat plot and characters. That makes the book a fun read, even if it’s not particularly deep. Mulligan enjoys telling a good lie, particularly when he’s talking to a reporter, so his interaction with Kat is amusing. Identity confusion drives the plot and furthers one of the book’s themes: “Nearly everything is unknowable.” The future is “immune to prediction,” as is the novel’s ending.

The story bounces around in time and sometimes we see the same scene from the perspective of different characters, which might frustrate readers who are wedded to linear storytelling. Yet Sorrentino enhances the story by altering time and perspective and voice, techniques that not many writers can pull off quite so successfully. The techniques cause the reader to question just how reliable Mulligan might be in his first-person narrative. In a book about storytelling, that might be the most important question of all.

RECOMMENDED

City by Clifford D. Simak

First published in novel form in 1952 and revised in 1980; published by Open Road Media on July 21, 2015

In City, Clifford Simak imagined a future in which cities are dying. In early parts of the novel, cities are being abandoned as people flee to the country, where they can live like kings on large lots, commuting to work in the family plane. Later in the novel, Earth has all but been abandoned by humans, the population having fled to Jupiter and other planets, leaving behind a small settlement in Geneva and a bunch of forgotten cities, robots, and dogs.

Like many other sf novels of its era, City is a fix-up. Simak strung together stories he had written that occupy the same future history, most of which involve members of the Webster family over a number of generations, served always by Jenkins, their nearly ageless robot. Simak bridges the stories with new material that provides continuity. The transitional entries consist of the writings of a canine academic examining the old and beloved stories of Earth’s past. Dogs have inherited the Earth, as they should.

In the first story, squatters occupy homes abandoned by families that have moved to the country, making the cities havens for members of an underclass who have nowhere else to go. The few remaining farmers who grow crops in soil can’t compete with the hydroponic farms and, lacking jobs, are forced to join the squatters. The government has decided that the squatters and land farmers and other malcontents need to be “adjusted,” a notion that is resisted by people who prefer to think for themselves.

In the second installment, a man whose family (the Websters) has occupied an estate for generations discovers that he (like his father before him) has developed an irrational fear of leaving his land -- yet the future may depend on his ability to overcome that fear by helping a Martian who holds the key to humanity’s future. The grandson of the man in the second story is responsible for the talking dogs that appear in the third story. Apart from establishing the legacy of dogs, the story explores the future of human evolution.

The fourth tale also involves a dog, although this one hasn’t learned to talk, at least in the conventional way. The dog and his fleas accompany the dog’s human companion on a mission to learn why people have been unable to adapt to life on Jupiter. I get the sense that the story wasn’t written as part of the same future history but the one that follows continues the fourth story and ties in with the rest of the volume. The fourth and fifth stories both feature the same characters, a man who becomes something other than a man and a dog who becomes something other than a dog (although still a best friend). The stories discuss the wonderful futures that might lay within mankind’s grasp, and whether mankind would, or should, move in those directions.

By the sixth tale, the planet is pretty much empty unless you count the dogs and robots and mutants. One of the last humans on the planet, living with the rest of the humans in Geneva (the last city in the world), is a Webster. He returns to his ancestral home where he meets the family robot, talks to dogs, wonders what the dogs hear that men can’t, and asks himself what went wrong. This is a quiet, surprising story about hope and rebirth. It is one of the book’s highlights.

Jenkins returns in the next-to-last story, which takes place about 7,000 years after the first one. Dogs (and a bunch of other talking animals) have inherited the Earth. This is where we find out whether they’ve made it a better world than humans did.

The final story in the original volume takes place about 12,000 years beyond the first story and, wouldn’t you know it, people are gone but ants are still troublesome. The story is pure Simak: a quiet, thoughtful story about the virtue of doing the right thing even when the result will be sad, because it is better to be sad (or dead) than to betray your values.

City was published in 1952. It was reissued in 1980 with an additional story, written twenty years after the others and appropriately titled “Epilog.” The story was Simak’s contribution to a volume that commemorated John W. Campbell after his death. The epilog is a perfect fit, showing no sign of a two decade lag since the original stories were concluded.

City touches upon themes that are common in Simak’s fiction: individualism that resists “mob psychology”; the inevitable continuation of evolution; the human drive for social approval; the virtue of a simple agrarian lifestyle; how wonderful it would be to use our brains in full, instead of using just a tiny part; the importance of work and sacrifice to humanity’s future; the benefits of conflict and competition and tenacity; the curse of memory; and the belief that as time goes on and on, things will get better, although not in ways that we can possibly anticipate. Adding those themes together creates the sense that Simak believed in a human destiny that we are still far from achieving -- and maybe a canine destiny, and a robot destiny, as well.

RECOMMENDED

Descent by Tim Johnston

Published by Algonquin on January 6, 2015;reprinted in paperback on December 1, 2015

Descent is a suspense novel with uncommon literary quality. The plot -- a teenage girl goes missing, leaving frantic parents to worry about her fate -- might be overused, but the story has rarely been told with the kind of quality prose that Tim Johnston wields. In any event, “girl goes missing” is only a backdrop for a story that moves in unexpected directions.

Caitlin, a runner, is with her parents in the Rockies, where she is training for collegiate competition. She goes off one morning with her younger brother, Sean, who follows her on his trail bike. Her brother ends up in the hospital, the apparent victim of a biking accident. Caitlin is missing.

The novel bounces around in time. In what might be called “the present,” Caitlin’s father (Grant) is helping out an old widower in Colorado in exchange for a place to stay. His wife and son have both left him to his misery. Caitlin’s mother (Angela) has gone back to Wisconsin where she carries on inner conversations with her long-dead twin. Sean is trying to live with the shame of not doing more to help Caitlin.

Caitlin’s story unfolds intermittently in short, italicized chapters. Sean has dark adventures of his own, collateral to the main plot but worthy of inclusion in a thriller. Grant deals with family drama in a family that is not his own. Although the troubles that Sean and Grant experience are not directly caused by Caitlin’s disappearance, they would not have happened but for that critical event. Tim Johnston seems to be illustrating how misfortunes compound, how one tragedy can give birth to a chain reaction of unforeseeable consequences. By the end, the story seems to be about how the smallest change of circumstances -- arriving 5 minutes later, taking a different path -- can dictate the course of a life.

Descent is intense and powerful, peppered with surprising moments of drama. It is a work of fiction, but everything about the story seem real -- not just events but emotions, reactions, regrets ... all the things people think and do and feel that define their lives.

Writers are often admonished to show, not tell. Johnston shows the grief the family endures through countless small scenes that recount their actions, their distractions, their quarrels, their memories. Angela’s exploration of an empty house, a house that is haunted by Caitlin’s absence, is heartbreaking. Sean’s drifting and Grant’s drinking, two different approaches to isolation, tell the reader more than pages of exposition possibly good.

Much of Descent is about the impact that a missing child has on the rest of the family, but the story is multifaceted. Descent is about a father trying to reconnect with his son. It’s about deceptive appearances -- people who hide their evil behind a friendly façade but, more importantly, people who are better than they know themselves to be. It’s about the confusion of coincidence and fate, of destiny and free will. It is about the true nature of heroism. Descent is a fascinating exploration of themes that give the novel substantially greater depth than a typical thriller without sacrificing the pace and suspense that thriller readers crave.

RECOMMENDED

The Illegal by Lawrence Hill

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on January 25, 2016

The key nations in The Illegal are creations of fiction but they could stand for any number of lands in which one group oppresses another, in which the “haves” lack compassion for the “have nots,” in which people who believe in racial or national purity wish to keep others from sharing in their nation’s prosperity.

Zantoroland is an island in the Indian Ocean. It was colonized by a succession of European nations that imported African slaves. The population, largely black, is divided into two primary ethnic groups. The majority group, currently in power, is oppressing (and often murdering) the minority population.

The black natives of Zantoroland were once enslaved by the residents of Freedom State, a larger nearby island that is now one of the wealthiest nations in the world. When Freedom State abolished slavery, it also deported most blacks to Zantoroland. The political party that currently controls the government in Freedom State wants to be seen as making good on a campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigrants, including political refugees who fled Zantoroland to avoid being arrested and killed.

Keita Ali is 15 when the novel gets rolling and in his twenties when most of the story takes place. His father, a freelance journalist, is treated as an enemy of the state. Keita is clearly fated for death. He cannot get help from his sister in the United States because she seems to have disappeared.

Keita is a promising marathon runner. After gaining the opportunity to train in Freedom State, Keita decides to go into hiding, knowing that his return to Zantoroland would eventually cost him his life. Soon he finds himself running, literally and figuratively, in order to save himself and his sister.

That background provides the framework for the story that follows. It is driven by a political scandal that ties together key characters, all of whom are developed in convincing detail. In addition to Keita, a key character is a disabled sports reporter named Viola Hill who would prefer to be covering the immigration crisis. Another important character is Ivernia Beech, an 85-year-old white woman who is in danger of losing her right to live independently because she committed the twin offenses of getting old and befriending an undocumented immigrant.

A third central character is John, an impoverished ninth-grader on an academic scholarship at a school for the gifted. As a school project, John is making a documentary. What he films, quite by accident, puts his life at risk. Other significant characters include a police officer who befriends Kieta, an immigration official who is caught up in a scandal of his own, a woman who has established herself as the “queen” of the slum that harbors much of Freedom Land’s black population, and various principles in the marathon world who either support or want to exploit Keita.

There are clear parallels between the story told in The Illegal and the ongoing American debate about immigration, although the emphasis is on political refugees rather than undocumented immigrants who cross borders for economic reasons. The issue is complex (despite the simplistic ways in which many people try to define it) and, while that complexity is recognized in The Illegal, the story is fairly simple. The story is justly sympathetic to individuals who are in desperate situations while recognizing that decent people can oppose illegal immigration without joining the rude or racist contingent that makes political debate so ugly. The novel represents various points of view fairly and honestly, although it does not disguise the ugliness of opinions that are motivated by hatred or racism.

Keita is such a nice guy that he’s a bit one-dimensional. Lack of depth keeps The Illegal from becoming a stellar novel. It is a feel-good novel, which makes it predictable and unsurprising. Still, there’s nothing wrong with feeling good now and then. The Illegal left me with a warm feeling about several of its characters. That is enough motivation for me to recommend the novel.

RECOMMENDED

The Art of War by Stephen Coonts

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 2, 2016

As he has often done, Stephen Coonts teams series hero Jake Grafton with series hero Tommy Carmellini in The Art of War. The strength of those characters and a couple of powerful moments sold me on the novel. The plot is standard for a modern thriller, meaning it approaches the outlandish. Fortunately, the book races from scene to scene with so much energy that it leaves little time to think about the story's improbability.

The Chinese navy is the bad guy in The Art of War. Chinese naval commanders want to control the South China Sea, but worry that Americans might interfere with their grand design. They take steps to keep that from happening. Big steps, on several fronts, calculated to disrupt America’s various intelligence agencies and, for that matter, the government and the entire country.

Coonts pushes the Chinese shenanigans rather far, to a point that nearly exceeded my generous willingness to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. Fortunately, The Art of War never became so ridiculously improbable that I lost interest in it. To his credit, Coonts recognizes and addresses some of the reasons that his imagined scenario is largely divorced from political and economic reality.

The good guys in The Art of War are in the CIA. One is Grafton, who takes over as the agency’s acting director early in the novel. His contribution to the story is told from a third person perspective. Carmellini, an all-purpose spook who is usually tasked with planting bugs in foreign embassies, is the novel’s action hero. He tells his part of the story in the first person.

Some of Coonts’ characters have obvious political biases but, unlike some thriller writers, Coonts doesn’t let them overwhelm the story. I appreciate that, since I read fiction to be entertained, not indoctrinated. At the same time, Coonts isn’t afraid to show the ugly side of America -- an “us versus them” ugliness that too many people eagerly embrace when they use race or ancestry to define “real Americans.” That’s refreshing, and it gives the story a realistic sense of balance.

The Art of War blends action with drama. As is typical of thrillers, the action dominates at the end, but unlike many thrillers, it isn’t mindless action. Engaging characters, a certain slyness of wit in the storytelling, and a satisfying conclusion make this a fun novel.

RECOMMENDED