Mr. Tall by Tony Earley

Published by Little, Brown and Company on August 26, 2014

Generally set in Appalachia (primarily in Tennessee and North Carolina), the stories collected in Mr. Tall are surprising, funny, and moving. Protagonists have rich personalities while eccentric background characters contribute to the sense of realism that each story (except the last) conveys.

My favorite in the collection, "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands," is a sly domestic drama. Daryl is no longer tolerant of his wife and doesn't understand why his sweet clingy daughter, now in college, is no longer sweet or clingy. I particularly enjoyed Daryl's contemplation of his marital duties: "Find me a Hardee's. Find me a room. Stay with me until I die. It was all the same thing, really." Daryl's wife, on the other hand, makes it clear during the couple's weekend away that her first husband was infinitely superior to Daryl. The story is both an amusing and a biting look at a marriage gone sour that invites an obvious question: How do couples stay together when the only glue that binds them is mutual animosity? The answer turns out to be unexpectedly practical.

"Mr. Tall" is a wit-driven story about a young woman who bears the guilt of abandoning her family when she allows the only boy who ever chased her to catch her. Her introduction to marriage, sex, mules, and hillbilly living is hilarious. Even funnier is her adventure with her neighbor, Mr. Tall, although the humor is ultimately overtaken by an intense scene that explains why Mr. Tall is a recluse.

The background characters in "The Cryptozoologist" are a fugitive who bombed an abortion clinic and a skunk ape (a version of Bigfoot) but the protagonist is a woman who only begins to understand her husband years after he dies. The poignant story illuminates the importance of appreciating one's life partner as a unique person, rather than appreciating a shared lifestyle.

"Yard Art" is an achingly heartfelt story about the importance of the ordinary -- because what is ordinary to everyone else can be extraordinary to one person. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl," a good story that is nevertheless weaker than the others, tells of an aging woman's reaction to news that a girl disappeared on her block.

"Just Married" consists of four compact descriptions of aging, sometimes damaged people who are or once were married, and of the memories they carry of their younger lives. The last of the four ties the first three together, neatly and sweetly.

The final story is quite different from the others. The Jack in "Jack and the Mad Dog" is the Appalachian version of the once-famed Giant Killer, but his best days are behind him. He fears he has come to the end of his final story, "his mind free from the embarrassment of exposition, the regret of flashback, the dread of foreshadow." He's in pretty much the same boat (albeit a magic boat) as his rival, Tom Dooley, who also lacks cultural currency. After so many stories mired in self-indulgence with no regard for the farmer's daughters who surround him, can Jack develop a new narrative? The story is a contemplation of the slow death of Appalachian storytelling and a reminder of the power stories have to teach us about life (and death). We are, after all, characters in our own stories, just like Jack ... at least until the book is closed.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Shiro Project by David Khara

Published in France in 2011; published in translation by Le French Book on November 18, 2014

The Shiro Project begins with the release of a weaponized virus in a Maryland laboratory in 1957, then jumps to the Czech Republic in 2011 where the residents of a village are all dead. After that we go to the Israeli Embassy in Brussels to learn the story of Eytan Morg, a genetically modified Mossad agent who made his debut in The Bleiberg Project. Eytan spent most of his life capturing or killing escaped Nazis, but since there is not much point in chasing octogenarians, he has more recently devoted himself to a secret society called Consortium. The group is dedicated to creating a master race of superior beings who might even be superior to Eytan. To his surprise, Eytan he finds himself coerced into working with Consortium against a common enemy.

Flashback chapters fill us in on Eytan's past while chapters set in the present team Eytan with a Consortium agent named Elena who is Eytan's genetically-enhanced counterpart. When Elena isn't trying to kill Eytan, she admires and even wants to bed him. Such is the nature of the fickle heart.

The evildoers that occupy Eytan and Elena have their genesis in Unit 731, a covert agency of the Japanese government that experimented with chemical and biological warfare in China before and during World War II. Nefarious Pentagon conspirators also play a role.

The story is intelligent, drawing upon history to create credible villains, although the villains seem dated. The story is also a bit wooden, a description that applies equally to the protagonist. Eytan's egocentric attitude (people "believe in nothing" because they do not share his passion for his cause) is occasionally overbearing, but most of the time he's a reasonably likeable hero. We are told that Eytan "saw the value in each life he took." As sensitive killers go, Eytan is stuffy, more likely to deliver lectures than violence. His genetic programming apparently did not include a sense of humor.

Fortunately, the novel is more fun than Eytan. It delivers a satisfying amount of action, moves at a brisk pace, and leads to a pleasing (albeit predictable) resolution.

RECOMMENDED

J by Howard Jacobson

First published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Hogarth on October 14, 2014

J is accurately marketed as a "philosophical work of fiction." It is, unfortunately, strong on philosophy and weak on fiction. To his credit, Howard Jacobson raises important questions and avoids glib answers. He just doesn't do a very good job of storytelling.

The novel's beginning sets a promising scene. J takes place in a future of shared conventional thinking. Spontaneity and unpredictability are scorned. Jazz, wit, and other forms of improvisation have fallen out of favor. Art is a "primordial celebration of the natural world." It is meant to provoke feelings of tranquility and harmony, not anxiety or despair.

Prevailing sentiment in Jacobson's future is that we must forget the past. Conversations about the seminal event of the relatively recent past begin with "what happened, if it happened." The "twin itches" of recollection and penance are no longer scratched. People apologize without reference to any offense for which an apology might be due because random apologies eradicate and anesthetize guilt. Walls and monuments that commemorate war and suffering are gone, the "recriminatory past" replaced with an "unimpeachable future." Access to books (and therefore ideas) is restricted. Even "hoarding heirlooms" is an offense, although one the authorities will overlook if it is not carried to excess.

It is against this wonderfully detailed background that a plot fails to emerge. Instead, Jacobson gives the reader a jumble of loosely connected storylines. It is as if Jacobson put all of his effort into creating the story's background and failed to find a story that would fit within it.

One plot thread involves a romance between Kevern "Coco" Cohen, the child of parents who hid their past from him while they are still alive, and his lover Ailinn, who thinks that memories are best forgotten since memories are mostly bad. Kevern slowly uncovers his past as the story slowly moves forward. The path he travels is full of dull digressions.

Another thread is something like a murder mystery as a detective investigates a series of deaths. That story goes nowhere. Another involves a woman who had an affair with her teacher who seems to have been added to the story only because someone needed to provide an explanation of what happened, if it happened. Then there's an art historian who exists to reinforce the book's central conceit while adding little of substance to the novel.

While I was unimpressed with Jacobson's story (or failure to tell a story), I found the novel worth reading for its thoughtful exploration of ideas. One set of characters, for example, wars over the dichotomy of "never forget" and "don't live in the past." Having conquered oppression, a character suggests, "there is no need for all the morbid remembering and re-remembering. I don't say we should forget, I say we have been given the chance to progress and we should take it." Through its characters, the novel allows competing philosophies to spar: acknowledging that the past is past should not bring "automatic absolution" for past atrocities versus the sense that people of the present should not be made to bear the burden of guilt for things done by earlier generations. Jacobson also has some insightful things to say about cultural identity as a "shapely, long-ingested, cultural antagonism, in which everything, from who we worship to what we eat, is accounted for and made clear. We are who we are because we are not them."

Jacobson is a clever prose stylist -- sometimes too clever, he conveys the sense of a writer being clever for the sake of being clever -- but the cleverness kept me reading even when I had doubts about the content. There are some lengthy dead spots, including a woman in a coma whose search for words might have made a strong creative writing essay but added little to Jacobson's effort. The characters are haphazard constructs of beautiful prose; I wish Jacobson had made them worthy of the language he expended on them. For ideas and style, I would recommend J; for plot and storytelling, I cannot. My Recommended With Reservations is a compromise verdict.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak

First published in 1953

First published in 1953 after being serialized in a science fiction magazine, Ring Around the Sun continues to hold profound meaning for the modern reader. Simak's early take on the multiverse theory (which he describes as a series of worlds, each traveling a second behind the last) anticipates a theme that would later become commonplace in science fiction. The novel also addresses evolution in the guise of mutants who have abilities that are unavailable to most people. They aren't super-powered, but they have a strong intuitive sense that helps them understand people and situations, causing them to gravitate to positions of leadership.

None of these themes are known to Jay Vickers as the novel begins. He knows only that new products are appearing -- razor blades that never grow dull, affordable cars that will last forever, houses that are freely available to people with low incomes, artificial carbohydrates that promise to end famine. The value of these remarkable achievements is disputed by those who view them as a challenge to an economy that depends on new product sales for continuing employment of factory workers. Simak doesn't use the phrase "planned obsolescence" (the phrase was not popularized until 1954) but, always a cutting edge thinker, Simak's novel illustrates both the benefit and harms of deliberately manufacturing products that will require replacement.

As Vickers becomes aware of rumblings about a conspiracy to destroy the American economy (given the time frame, communists are the natural suspects), he is approached by a man who blames mutants for the products. Vickers eventually learns the truth, and learns some surprising things about his true nature -- surprising to the reader, not just to Vickers.

The novel's themes -- the tension between business and consumers, suspicion of and discrimination against those who are labeled as "different," enslavement to technology and commerce, the advantages of a simple lifestyle rooted in self-sufficiency, the desire to escape mundane reality by living an invented "second life," the nature of evolution and the purpose of life -- are enduring. Although decades have passed since its publication, nothing about Ring Around the Sun feels dated. It is a classic work of sf from one of the genre's strongest thinkers.

RECOMMENDED

Happy Thanksgiving!