Aquarium by David Vann

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 3, 2015

Aquarium is one of the most intense novels I've ever read. It isn't about fish, but it is, to the extent that fish teach us about people. In part, Aquarium is a coming of age story, the story of a girl named Caitlin who discovers her own identity and comes to accept harsh truths about her mother Sheri.

Aquarium is also about the possibility of change. The waspfish lives fifty feet underwater where light barely penetrates. Rise a few feet and the waspfish might experience a small change "as something enormous." So too might people who step outside the "narrow range" in which they live their lives. You cannot change the past, but it might be possible to change how your react to the past. Sheri hates her father but her father has changed. Can Sheri?

At 32, Caitlin Thompson looks back to the time when, at age 12, she visited an aquarium in Seattle every day after school before walking home. She likes the way the fish are protected from predators, unlike the real world, where people face all the risks of fish in the ocean. Every day, Caitlin runs into an old man at the aquarium who makes a point of talking to her. The encounters appear to be innocent but the situation is ominous. Is he a lonely old man or a child molester?

The leafy seadragon does nothing but hide. As the story progresses, Caitlin keeps parts of her life hidden but can't imagine living that way. "There has to be more than just hiding," the old man tells Caitlin, but hiding keeps the leafy seadragon safe. Caitlin values safety, enjoys being home with her mother even when Sheri is so wrapped up in her new boyfriend that Caitlin becomes invisible to her. Sheri is scraping by on the salary she earns unloading containers from cargo ships. The aquarium is her after-school babysitter. Sheri used to take Caitlin to work during overtime shifts until a customs inspector threatened to call social services. Caitlin's greatest fear is not of the old man but of social workers taking her away from her mother, particularly after the police correctly suspect that Sheri slapped her.

What Caitlin sees of adult life is unbearably sad. People are trapped by their lives. Sheri resents working a job "that meant nothing and would lead nowhere." Hatred inspired by the father who abandoned her to a hellacious existence consumes Sheri's memories. Sheri has good reason to feel angry but she is so consumed that she pollutes Caitlin with her rage and resentment. When Sheri lets the past control her, even Caitlin's home does not feel safe. The reader cringes at some of Sheri's behavior with Caitlin, but it is hard to blame Sheri for being the person she has become. At the same time, it is easy to be concerned about Caitlin. Many of the adults in the novel feel like they are living lives filled with dents that can never be repaired; they are Caitlin's role models.

I won't discuss what happens in Aquarium beyond the setup. The powerful story moves in unanticipated directions. Sensitive readers might find it too disturbing. It is often raw and painful, the kind of story that makes the reader want to scream at a character to make her understand how wrong she is. David Vann is able to spark that reaction by creating characters that are utterly convincing. Aquarium is not a sunny story of forgiveness, but it is a realistic story of redemption that reflects both the difficulty and the possibility of change.

Even if you do not read this extraordinary book, you should page through it to look at the pictures of fish. They are just as gorgeous as Vann's elegant prose.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

If I Fall, I Die by Michael Christie

Published by Hogarth on January 20, 2015

Tragedy is no respecter of wealth, power, or fame. It claims equally "those treasured and those ignored." No shield or spell can protect us. How can we live in a world that is poised to harm "every face at every address"?

The first time Will Cardiel ventures outside his home, he's plunked with a slingshot. At age 11, Will's rude introduction to the outside world is exhilarating. Will had to sneak outside because his mother, Diane, refuses to allow him to set foot in the world. Even inside the home, Will must wear a helmet when he changes a lightbulb (although to calm his mother's fears, Will wears it whenever he gets out of bed). Home schooled and sheltered, Will has little knowledge of life beyond the walls of his home. He knows only that it is a dangerous place.

Diane moved Will to Thunder Bay after a series of family tragedies that are revealed as the novel unfolds. Diane once made films about "modern urban malaise" before succumbing to a malaise of her own. Agoraphobia does not begin to describe her condition. She has frequent panic attacks; she is overprotective of Will; she lives in fear of her own unchecked thoughts. Yet she has convinced herself that she has constructed not a prison, but a fortress to shield Will from the ever-present risk of death. Will has internalized his mother's fear but he cannot restrain his curiosity about life outside. When he does finally venture into the world, he meets his first friend, a garden hose thief named Marcus, but stumbles into a mystery when Marcus disappears.

The plot begins to take shape after Will enters the world and attends school. Isolation has made Will inexperienced and peculiar, thus fodder for the other students. Fortunately, Will isn't the only child who doesn't fit in with the popular crowd. After gaining the reluctant friendship of a Native and learning the thrill of skateboarding, Will begins to unravel the mystery of missing garden hoses as well as his missing friend Marcus.

The plot revolves around a bigger mystery, the clues to which are cleverly woven into the story. I was able to guess the surprise well before it was revealed but I don't count that as a shortcoming in a book that isn't meant to be a mystery novel. The story might be a little too sunshiny and the ending too predictable -- lessons are spelled out explicitly in the apparent belief that readers aren't bright enough to learn them otherwise -- but I did not regard those as serious flaws since they did not impair my enjoyment of the story.

Fear is the dominant theme of If I Fall, I Die. The need to muster the bravery to confront fear is its message. Despite its serious theme, the first half of the novel is peppered with humor. Much of that comes from Will's unique perspective as he sees (and often misunderstands) the outside world for the first time. A character named Titus speaks a confused but lyrical language that is all his own -- almost reason in itself to read the novel. Other reasons I recommend If I Fall, I Die are the story's charm, the appealing characters, and the original plot.

RECOMMENDED

Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda

Published in the Netherlands in 2010; published in translation by Hogarth on January 13, 2015

Bonita Avenue is an intricate relationship drama, the kind of story I might deride as a soap opera if it were not crafted in such elegant prose. It is a big, complex novel. The characters are its strength, starting with Aaron Bever, self-destructive photographer whose shaky mental health deteriorates during the eight-year course of the novel. Bever once befriended (and practiced judo with) Siem Sigurius, a winner of the Fields Medal who taught at Berkeley. Aaron met Siem in Holland when Aaron was dating Joni, the daughter of Tineke, Siem's second wife. Other key characters include Joni's troubled younger sister Janis and Siem's troubled son Wilbert, who remained in Holland in the care of his uncle (and later in prison) after the Sigurius family moved to America.

The story swivels around the pivotal date of May 13, 2000, when a fireworks warehouse exploded in Roombeek, a suburb of Enschede. Much of the drama stems from a secretive but lucrative business enterprise in which Joni and Aaron engaged while they were dating. We learn about that time in Aaron's life in flashbacks that are inspired by a chance encounter Aaron has with Tineke on a train, eight years after Joni moved to America. We also learn about the Sigurius family history from Joni's perspective and from Siem's as the novel's focus shifts from chapter to chapter. It is a tortured history. This is a family of secrets, each more startling than the last. Their discovery tears lives and relationships apart.

The novel's theme is shame, living with it, living without it, choosing not to live because of it. Sometimes the story treads a thin line between drama and melodrama. Since Bonita Avenue scores points for both entertainment and literary value, that didn't bother me until late in the novel, when several scenes that are a bit over-the-top give way to a scene that is way over-the-top. There may be too many shocks in Bonita Avenue for a single novel to bear. At some point, the sheer weight of them begins to detract from the novel's credibility. Siem, who teaches probability theory, says that the probability of the improbable happening is huge, but when the improbable happens over and over, I have to wonder whether it is all just too much. Despite that, my interest in the improbable story never wavered. Still, the story ends quite abruptly and when it did, I felt relieved.

Peter Buwalda imagines an interesting continuum of characters that range from the sexually repressed to the shockingly liberated, from the relatively stable to the wildly unhinged. Point of view and time frames change from chapter to chapter, challenging the reader to understand who is speaking and when the described events took place. That's a reasonable literary technique -- there's nothing wrong with challenging a reader -- but I was troubled by the story's redundancy, particularly in explanations of central events in characters' lives. Buwalda's evocative prose and strong characterization earned my admiration and recommendation despite my reservations about the plot and the failure to deliver a tighter story.

RECOMMENDED

Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner

Published in Germany in 1932; published in translation by Other Press on March 3, 2015

The Blood Brothers are a group of boys (mostly in their teens) living rough and dispensing rough justice in Berlin in the early 1930s. They're all running from something -- from home, from an institution, from the law. They live in fear of apprehension, of being asked for their papers, of spending a night without food or shelter. Like hundreds of other boys in Berlin, they "prefer to starve at liberty to being half-fed in welfare."

Willi Kludas, older than the rest, jumps the wall and escapes an institution after beating one of the staff members. He takes a harrowing trip to Berlin, then scrounges for money so he can pay to sleep in a basement, buy cigarettes, or purchase the affection of a girl. His story is similar to Ludwig's, who is also arrested as a runaway. When Ludwig escapes, he is arrested for a crime he didn't commit. Of course, he runs again at his first opportunity, but not before spending time in various institutions. It is Ludwig who introduces Willi to the rest of the gang.

Willi and Ludwig are the primary characters but other gang members make regular appearances. Fred joins the gang after escaping from the room into which his father has locked him. Walter is frail but is deemed heroic after being shot in a dustup with a rival gang. Heinz can't hold his liquor. Fred cooks up most of the illegal schemes to keep the gang in money. Konrad and Jonny provide the gang's muscle. Ulli leads (more or less) an "affiliated" gang.

The novel's moral focus sharpens when the gang turns to picking pockets and stealing purses for survival. Not all gang members are comfortable with theft. Even the ones who steal tend to be decent young men who did not choose their lives, who commit crimes as a last resort, preferring to work when they can -- although, without papers, their work is limited to shoveling snow and mending shoes. But what can gang members do who disagree with the crimes the gang commits? The Blood Brothers take care of each other with a fierce loyalty that was missing in their own families. Refusing to participate would be an unforgivable measure of disloyalty. Is it worth leaving the gang in order to hold one's moral center, even if that means losing the protection and companionship that are essential to surviving on the street? Are the other means of survival even worse than stealing?

Blood Brothers conveys a strong sense of realism. Ernst Haffner draws a sharp contrast between the Alexanderplatz portrayed in the cinema, a place full of cheap thrills and champagne lounges where "aristocratic gangsters won't do a job except in tops and tails," and the reality of homeless drifters, desperate prostitutes, brutal pimps, brutal police, and the unemployed who depend on casual crime for food. Poverty bedevils youth and the elderly alike.

Blood Brothers doesn't quite achieve the dramatic impact that Haffner must have intended but it does generate sympathy for its unfortunate characters. Except for Willi and Ludwig, there is too little to differentiate the characters from each other. The novel does a better job of depicting the impact of poverty on groups of young men than it does of telling individual stories. The ending is a bit rushed and a tad preachy. The novel is nonetheless an effective condemnation of a system that it more interested in whether people have "papers" than jobs. It's also a testament to the human spirit -- the drive not just to survive but to live free -- and to the bonds of friendship forged by hardship.

RECOMMENDED

The Deep by Nick Cutter

Published by Gallery Books on January 13, 2015

If this is the apocalypse, Luke Nelson thinks, at least it is orderly. People get the Spots, then they get the `Gets, then they wander away with blank minds. Luke's brother Clay, eight miles deep in the ocean near Guam, might have the answer to the phenomenon.

The Deep falls into the "strange entity discovered at the bottom of the ocean" subgenre of horror novels. The entity, nicknamed "ambrosia," has properties unlike any substance known to science. Ambrosia appears to have the curative powers that humanity needs in a time of crisis. Of course, this is a horror novel so the reader knows better, thanks in part to clues that Nick Cutter plants about its true nature. One of those clues is delivered in mysterious messages written in a submarine that returns from Clay's base in the Mariana Trench.

Cutter does a reasonable amount of character building although he sometimes slows the story's pace with flashbacks to Luke's past. Luke carries the scars of a difficult childhood and the guilt of allowing his son to go missing under his care, events that make him wish he would become afflicted with `Gets and forget everything that haunts him. I understand the technique of prolonging tension by cutting away from the present to talk about the past, but Cutter's frequent resort to that device is sometimes frustrating. For the most part, however, Cutter steadily builds a sense of dread, conjuring primal fears and encouraging the reader to share them with Luke.

A few too many scenes tell us about the characters' dreams. That often strikes me as something writers toss into a book to fill pages when they can't think of a creative way to advance the plot. The dreams are relevant here because they are presumably influenced by sinister forces at the bottom of the ocean, but horror-filled dreams seem like a cheap way to fill the pages of a horror novel. The characters' waking fantasies ("did I see/feel/hear that or am I hallucinating?") do a better job of provoking shivers.

But what about the bottom line? Parts of the book (particularly a diary written by one of the scientists on the ocean floor) are decidedly creepy. Parts of the book are at least borderline scary. The plot threads connect in a way that might be difficult to accept, but horror novels demand that disbelief be suspended before opening the book so that did not bother me. The nemesis that threatens Luke and the rest of humankind is formulaic -- in fact, it echoes the nemesis in Cutter's last novel, The Troop -- but Cutter wields the formula deftly.

A passage that describes Luke's work with stray dogs is quite moving. Other parts of the book that attempt to explain characters and their motivations are founded on clichés. But still, the ending -- the explanation for all the horror -- is clever. I like the way it plays with the meaning of evil. This isn't a deep book but, as horror novels go, it is at least slightly better than average.

RECOMMENDED