Illegal Liaisons by Grażyna Plebanek

First published in Poland in 2010; published in translation by New Europe Books on August 13, 2013

Illegal Liaisons is a novel of characters who stand on "the threshold of happiness and scruples, sexual fulfillment and moral trembling." Jonathan (born Januszek) abandoned his plan to live as a citizen of the world when he married Magda (nicknamed Megi), took a job in Poland as a journalist, had children, and wrote some moderately successful children's fairy tales. As the novel opens, Jonathan is moving to Brussels where Megi has taken a job. There gets his own job, teaching a writing class. Living in Brussels restores Jonathan's sense that the world is his home, a home that is "large, sunny, and full of love" -- large enough, at any rate, to hold both his wife and his new mistress. Frustrated with "the smallness of his family life," including his role as homemaker, Jonathan is renewed by his affair with Andrea. He loves Megi but in a different way he loves Andrea. When a friend tells him he'll never leave Megi and asks "What would you do without her?" Jonathan responds "Which one?" Frustrated both by his inability to choose and by the choices he has made, Jonathan's dilemmas become more worrisome as the story unfolds.

Illegal Liaisons follows the arc of a fairly common domestic drama -- the ordinariness of the story is the novel's only serious weakness -- but the characters are sharp and the writing is lively. Sentences like "Megi fell silent, and Jonathan thought how uncomfortable he felt with his backside sticking out in front of an embittered woman" encourage the reader to keep turning the pages. Jonathan's complimentary description of a writing student who had "no fear of thinking and a resistance to haste" applies equally to Grażyna Plebanek's construction of Illegal Liaisons. Some of the narrative is erotic, and while I thought it was tasteful, the descriptive language might be too graphic for some readers.

Jonathan is an amusingly opinionated character. He is locked in an identity crisis, not sure if he is a serious author or a dabbler in children's books, an idealist or an empty vessel. He doesn't know why he needs Andrea or why she needs him (which raises the broader question of why people need each other, why spouses in a happy marriage have affairs). Jonathan is sex-obsessed to a degree that is almost comical but not altogether unrealistic. A typical sentence in the book will say something like "He wondered if she was wearing panties," a thought that is entirely removed from whatever conversation Jonathan is having (and to which he is likely paying no attention). Readers who seek out admirable protagonists will want to avoid Illegal Liaisons, while readers who appreciate nuanced characters, who want to learn something about human nature from Jonathan's conflict, will consider their time with this likable cad well spent.

Occasional sections of the novel, always brief and italicized, focus on Megi. Despite their brevity, they are the most revealing and surprising passages in the novel. Another couple, spouses "condemned to each other," adds an additional dimension to Plebanek's exploration of marital relationships.

Pondering an apparently unfinished story written by one of Jonathan's students, a character asks "What happened next?" The response he receives is "That's the best question possible." Meaning, I suppose, it's best for the story to continue in the reader's imagination. Although Illegal Liaisons reaches a resolution of sorts, it leaves ample room for the reader to imagine what's next.

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The Thicket by Joe Lansdale

Published by Mulholland Books on September 10, 2013

Give Joe Lansdale credit for versatility. He's written mysteries and suspense novels, science fiction and horror, comic books and cartoons. If he isn't making your bones shake with fear, he's making your teeth rattle with laughter. The Thicket is an old-fashioned western with a modern sensibility and a considerable amount of humor. Many books make me smile but few make me laugh-out-loud. This one did, repeatedly -- when I wasn't gagging at Lansdale's descriptions of carnage and mayhem.

In an attention-grabbing first sentence, we learn that sixteen-year-old Jack Parker will "take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog" before finding true love and killing someone. After Jack's parents (like many others in East Texas) die of smallpox, Jack's grandfather decides to send Jack and his sister Lola to live with their aunt in Kansas. Before they travel far, desperados make off with Lola. Hence Jack's need to take up with gun-shooting folk who can help him track the bad guys. Eustace, the slave's son, is a semi-reliable tracker. Shorty, the gun-shooting dwarf, learned his craft from Annie Oakley. The angry hog is named Hog. Eventually a woman of ill-repute named Jimmie Sue joins the posse, as well as two others. The search take them to the Big Thicket, a hiding place for all things evil.

It's easy to feel sympathy for Jack, who does his best to maintain his naïve innocence despite his dark experiences in a rough world, and for Jimmie Sue, who has had a difficult life. More surprising is the sympathy Lansdale creates for Eustace and Shorty. They are violent and greedy but not truly evil -- they generally direct their violence (if not their thievery) at people who deserve it -- and their status as underdogs makes it easy to cheer for them. Some of the characters are so outrageous that liking them isn't an issue, including the sheriff who only ever shot three women "in the line of duty, or nearabouts." As always, Lansdale creates landscapes and attitudes that draw the reader into the time and place in which the novel is set.

The Thicket is often a funny novel but it isn't shallow. Lansdale's characters occasionally debate the meaning of life, paying particular attention to faith and prayer. Jack's grandfather taught him that comforting religious beliefs are preferable to thinking "too much on my own, cause it might lead to other ideas that might be right but unpleasant." Shorty argues that faith in God's will leads to "disappointment and false expectations." Jack's Christian teachings, cautioning against vengeance and urging him to turn the other cheek, are at odds with the more violent but arguably more effective methods that Eustace and Shorty believe will help them find Lola. Still, this isn't a heavy philosophical tome. Lansdale uses the discussions of morality to poke good natured fun at hypocrisy.

Some aspects of the story (like the hooker with a heart of gold) are clichéd but the clichés are played for laughs -- and more often than not Lansdale gives the cliché a little twist. Fans of shoot-outs will be amused by the most hilarious gunfight I've encountered. Gore aside, The Thicket left me smiling.

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Fool's War by Sarah Zettel

First published in 1997; published digitally by Open Road Media on May 21, 2013

The world known as the Farther Kingdom was founded during the Slow Burn. Many members of the Islamic faith emigrated to the Farther Kingdom to avoid a drastic fate, including some of Katmer Al Shei's ancestors. Al Shei is the Chief Engineer of a mail packet ship called the Pasadena, which she owns in partnership with Marcus Tully, her brother-in-law. The "mail" she delivers is actually digitalized data. Al Shei's wealthy uncle has hired Evelyn Dobbs to act as the ship's Fool. Al Shei has hired Jermina Yerusha as the new pilot, although prejudice against Freers like Yerusha is even stronger than prejudice against Muslims. Freers follow a quasi-religion that makes unsettling uses of Artificial Intelligences, sometimes adopting them as foster children with the hope that the AI will one day capture a soul. Al Shei, on the other hand, is old school. She refuses to allow an AI to run her ship, in part because some AIs fostered by Freers have caused mayhem.

Against that background (with, of course, several other characters who crew the Pasadena), a conspiracy-thriller plot develops as Al Shei fulfills a contract to deliver data from Earth to the Farther Kingdom. When things start to go massively haywire on the Pasadena, Al Shei suspects that Tully smuggled something on board the ship that has infected it like a virus. The Fool turns out to be no fool; she's the Pasadena's best chance of surviving the crisis. Fools have a secret and that secret eventually changes the novel's direction.

The truly imaginative aspect of this clever novel, of course, is the notion of a ship's Fool who functions as a morale officer and counselor while playing a hidden role. The precise nature of the threat to the Pasadena is also original. Other aspects of Fool's War are more familiar, particularly the direct interface between the human mind and computer software/data storage, but Sarah Zettel gives those notions a fresh context while describing the experience of riding a data stream in innovative terms. Particularly appealing is the way AIs are spontaneously and accidentally "born" and the implications of artificial life that isn't created by humans. In fact, that concept grounds the novel, and Zettel uses it to take AI fiction to an entirely new level.

Zettel also put some significant thought into the novel's political background. Freedom and its price is a recurring theme. Freedom means one thing to bankers but something quite different to inhabitants of Liberty Colonies where libertarian philosophy prevails (resulting in blood feuds fought by private armies as families resolve their differences without the benefit of a stabilizing government). The Freers believe AIs represent the ultimate in human freedom while some AIs reject humanity entirely, believing freedom means being true to their AI nature. It's commonly suggested that righteous wars are fought for freedom, but Fool's War makes the intelligent point that wars are often fought when different groups clash over the meaning of freedom.

War is, as the title suggests, another of the novel's themes. In many respects the war in the novel is different from those fought by humans against each other, but the fundamental lesson that Fool's War teaches applies to all wars: wars break out when people (or AIs) "become careless with the lives of outsiders." There's one other lesson I particularly like: "When we play the fool, how the theater expands!"

Fool's War didn't stir me emotionally as do the best science fiction novels, but it is intellectually satisfying and hugely entertaining, and the last chapters do have moments of emotional resonance. Zettel doesn't have the following of writers in the science fiction pantheon, but Fool's War is a book that deserves the attention of sf fans.

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The Paris Lawyer by Sylvie Granotier

First published in France in 2011; published in translation by Le French Book on July 2, 2012

Catherine Monsigny, a young lawyer, takes on the defense of Myriam Villetreix who is accused of poisoning Gaston, the man who apparently saved her from deportation by marrying her. Catherine sees the case as her springboard to fame, although she wonders how she will interest Parisian reporters in the murder of a farmer in a rural community in central France. It happens to be the same community where Catherine's mother was murdered when Catherine was only four years old. Catherine's mother was killed in a park where Catherine was found crying in a stroller. The killer was never identified.

As Catherine was growing up, her bottled-up father refused to talk to her about her mother. Her father always tried to replace the reality of her mother's death with a myth, casting her mother as a princess struck down by evil witches, and Catherine as a girl who is protected by fairies. Her memories of that day -- someone handing her the piece of cloth she had dropped -- might be false. She may have been too young to remember anything, as her father has always insisted.

Catherine is an introspective character. She is young and naïve. "She believes in everything she has not experienced." Yet she is also rebellious and adventurous, as she proves by bedding one of her clients early the novel, shortly after she gets him acquitted. She wonders whether she is (like some of the people she sees accused of sex crimes) a mere "consumer of flesh," unable to see her partners as anything other than objects of her desire. As the novel progresses, Catherine undergoes a maturation process, feeling by the end of the story that, at the age of twenty-six, she is "older than the rest of the world."

In part, The Paris Lawyer is a family drama. The primary focus is on Catherine as she discovers her mother's secrets, but it is also on Catherine's father, who coped with his wife's death as best he could (although not in the way that Catherine wanted) and lives in fear that his daughter no longer needs him. To a lesser extent, the story involves a different family drama, that of Myriam and Gaston, "two people mistreated by life" who either loved or despised each other, depending on the observer's viewpoint. More fundamentally, The Paris Lawyer is a thriller, cleverly woven from various plot threads in ways that are both obvious and subtle. Title notwithstanding, it is a psychological thriller rather than a legal thriller. Myriam's trial remains in the background for much of the novel, serving as a framework for the larger story.

Sylvie Granotier slowly builds a suspenseful atmosphere from a series of ambiguous incidents and flashes of buried memories. Through much of the novel, I was puzzled about where the plot was taking me, a pleasant departure from the stacks of predictable thrillers that substitute silliness for depth. The Paris Lawyer is ultimately a contemplation of guilt in all its different guises, but it is also a good story that ends with surprising revelations about the killers of Gaston and of Catherine's mother. Its only flaws (small ones, I think) are that the novel's denouement borders on melodrama and the story is more intellectually than emotionally engaging.

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& Sons by David Gilbert

Published by Random House on July 23, 2013

We meet Philip at the funeral of his father, Charlie Topping. Also present is Charlie's childhood friend, the renowned novelist A.N. Dyer, now nearing the age of eighty. Philip gives us lengthy introductions to A.N.'s older sons: recovering miscreant Richard, a screenwriter noticed in Hollywood only because of his family name; and stoner Jamie, whose videos (including daily shots of a former girlfriend while she was dying and after her death) reflect his "almost incandescent urge for the dreadful thing." Philip was the fifth grade teacher of A.N.'s third son, Andy, whose existence came as a surprise to A.N.'s wife and prompted a divorce. At seventeen, Andy is significantly younger than his middle-aged brothers. Andy views his famous father as annoyingly needy while his older brothers have always thought A.N. to be so distant as to approach nonexistence.

Philip provides the novel's narrative framework, telling each son's story, occasionally A.N.'s, and sometimes his own. Philip has current knowledge of the sons because, needing a place to live after his indiscretions cause him to lose his job, he has accepted A.N.'s offer to take up temporary residence in A.N.'s home. A.N. is dying (or perhaps it's just wishful thinking on his part) and the occasion of his impending death gives him reason to insist that his three sons come together. The family gathering will give A.N. a chance to meet Richard's teenage grandchildren, and Richard a chance to meet Andy, for the first time. It also gives A.N. a chance to reveal an improbable secret to his older sons. As A.N.'s ex-wife acidly tells him, the secret "takes narcissism to a whole new level, even for you."

We learn about A.N. Dyer through his own eyes (he describes himself as a "self-pitying writer" who is "easily overwhelmed by the basics of how to live") and those of others, but also through the books he wrote, books that echo his own life. The lead character in Tiro's Corruption has an acerbic view of anyone who lives beyond the boundaries of Manhattan, while Dyer's alter-ego in Eastern Time is a "secret pervert" (albeit a tame one). When A.N. advises Andy not to be "a ghost haunting your own life," he seems to be teaching a lesson learned by the protagonist in The Bend of Light, a "tin man" with an illusory heart who dies alone. Ampersand, A.N.'s celebrated novel about the cruelty of privileged adolescents, imparts critical facts about A.N.'s friendship with Charlie Topping. The use of books within a book to shed light upon A.N. is a clever device that will make & Sons linger in my memory.

To a small extent, & Sons is a typical New York literary novel, the kind that skewers the pretentious while itself being a bit pretentious. A scene depicting a snobbish book party is familiar, but it is enlivened by the attendance of anti-snobs Andy and Emmett (Richard's son), a pair of ultra-cool teenagers who add a healthy dose of comedy to the novel's mix. The novel's best comic moment, however, comes from poor A.N.'s confusion (and mortification) when he appears to meet his best known fictional character at the same party.

More importantly, and as the title implies, & Sons is about fathers and sons, about the distance that grows between them until it is impossible to "reach across the divide." Philip comes to understand his father only in death -- and that (the novel seems to say) is the only time a life can be truly understood. There are aspects of the way Philip tells this story (is he a reliable narrator?) that I found troubling, and an out-of-the-blue event near the novel's end seemed like a bad choice, but it does lead to some poignant moments in the closing pages. Unlike Ampersand, & Sons is never "emotionally claustrophobic" but neither is it melodramatic. While you wouldn't expect a novel about people's lives to wrap up neatly -- because complex lives never do -- & Sons at least ends on a moving and satisfying note.

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