What We've Lost Is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder

Published by Scribner on January 21, 2014

What We've Lost Is Nothing is marketed as a suspense novel. Since the story fails to generate suspense, if I were evaluating it as a suspense novel, I would call it a failure. But marketing aside, What We've Lost Is Nothing tells a good story that features interesting and (for the most part) credible characters, and it has something worthy to say about contemporary urban issues. If you ignore the marketing claims, it is a novel that merits attention.

Mary Elizabeth McPherson, having skipped school to do Ecstasy with her friend, doesn't notice that her house is being burglarized. The house of Sophea's Cambodian parents has also been burglarized, as have the houses of a French chef named Étienne, an elderly man named Arthur who is losing his vision, a newlywed of questionable mental soundness named Alicia, and other homeowners on the block. The houses are on Ilios Lane in Oak Park, Illinois, and the community's history of encouraging diversity among homeowners (perhaps coupled with gentrification of a troubled neighborhood) plays a conspicuous role in the novel.

What have the residents of Ilios Lane lost? Mary's dad, Michael, happy that his daughter was unharmed, tells the press they've lost nothing, while secretly believing he's lost something (his manhood?) that he can't quite define. His comment is refuted by a blogger who suggests that neighborhood residents have lost their sense of security. The Cambodians lost the sense that they were safe in America from the wrathful spirits of their homeland. Arthur lost notebooks that contained years of work and might be in danger of losing his independence. Alicia and her husband were on vacation but what they lost might be their marriage. Étienne lost his carefully cultivated illusions, including the façade that he has built for himself. By the end of the novel, the reader wonders whether Michael and some other characters have lost their minds.

The novel's best moments are found in the contrasting perspectives and lifestyles of the neighborhood residents. The Cambodians (invited for the first time into a neighbor's house) are puzzled by the lack of formality in the family pictures. When Mary reads to Arthur, the books that remind him of his past seem like ancient history to her. Nobody likes Étienne, who seems overly French for his neighbors' taste. Nearly all of them fear young people from outside the neighborhood, who are unfairly regarded as thugs and criminals.

The occasional appearance of overwrought posts by a semi-literate Oak Park blogger and entries in the Oak Park Moms Listserv add a nice comic touch to the story. The Moms are very concerned about "outsiders" in their neighborhood, despite the absence of any evidence that outsiders burglarized the Ilios Lane homes. Many of them are openly hostile to the "diversity" that was at one point the neighborhood's proudly defining characteristic. A more intelligent blogger, capable of subtle thought (and who loses her job because of her blog posts), points out that diversity is more than a question of who lives where; it is also a question of how people live and whether they are treated equally. The perceived conflict between diversity and security is the novel's best theme.

For the most part, the characters are developed with subtlety, although there are so many of them that a few central characters seem superficial. Michael is a jerk but he's kind of a crazy jerk and his craziness is not well explained. Arthur is underdeveloped and a neighborhood resident named Paja Coen, who pops up to act as a peacemaker from time to time, isn't developed at all. The other significant characters are strong and believable.

While I was reading What We've Lost is Nothing, I kept wondering where the story was going. It eventually leads to two key events involving Michael, Mary, and Susan, both more artificial than the story that precedes them. They seem displaced, as if they belong to an entirely different novel. Still, so much of this story is compelling that I recommend it despite my disappointment with the resolution.

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Duke City Split by Max Austin

Published by Random House/Alibi in April 8, 2014

If you like to root for the good guys or identify with the hero when you read a crime novel, you might want to give Duke City Split a pass. Good guys are in short supply and there is a distinct shortage of heroism. On the other hand, if you enjoy reading crime novels that focus on crime and criminals, Duke City Split is a fast moving, captivating story about a crime's unforeseen consequences.

Johnny Muller tells Mick Wyman about an armored car that delivers money from a casino to a small branch bank in strip mall just outside of Albuquerque. Mick tells his partner, Bud Knox. It seems like an easy score, although Bud prefers not to commit crimes near his Duke City home. Bud is married with children and (except for robbing banks) has settled down. Mick has less to lose. Mick and Bud have never involved a third person before but Johnny wants to participate and they need an extra set of hands to carry all the money. Complications ensue and by the end of the novel, a fair amount of blood has been shed.

In addition to Mick, Bud, and Johnny, the primary characters include a crooked security guard and his crooked wife, a Chicago mobster, and two losers who are briefly mistaken for the actual bank robbers. All of them would like at least a piece of the stolen money, if not the entire score. The only significant characters not motivated by greed are two ineffectual FBI agents, but until the story's end they are relegated to a less significant role, mostly coming on the scene after various acts of mayhem have already been completed.

Duke City Split works because the story is believable and it is told without a wasted word. While the key characters are criminals, at least one of them is portrayed in a sympathetic way. A reader might not root for him, but Max Austin (a pen name of crime novelist Steve Brewer) makes it easy to understand and empathize with him. In the end, like many criminals, he's just a regular guy who makes poor choices. It's trickier to put a reader inside the heads of the bad guys than it is to make a reader cheer for the good guys. Austin does it well.

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When It's a Jar by Tom Holt

Published by Orbit on December 17, 2013

When It's a Jar pushes the multiverse theory to absurd limits ... except, when you think about it (as Tom Holt clearly has), it's impossible to do that because a popular version of the theory assumes that absurd events (indeed, all events) actually occur in some part of the multiverse. There is no limit to absurdity because, in the multiverse, there are no limits at all. Hence Holt's formula for fun.

When is a door not a door? When it could be anything, including a portal between dimensions. In Doughnut, Holt explored interdimensional travel through a donut hole using something called YouSpace. The doughnuts are present in When It's a Jar, but Holt has added the notion of a "constant object," something that stays the same no matter what dimension it occupies. Rather than spoiling the surprise of what the constant object happens to be, I'll just say that once it's revealed, parts of the novel that seemed to make no sense at all gain meaning while other parts gain new meaning. And that's just cool. Almost as cool, in fact, as the guy living in a jar who manages by a process of reasoning to figure out pretty much everything there is to know until his memories get wiped out, forcing him to start all over ... again and again and again.

The key character in When It's a Jar is hapless Maurice, who (after seeing a levitating doughnut and realizing that physics is whack) has dedicated himself to being an unhappy slacker, a profession that his degree in media studies encourages. Maurice's unwanted destiny is to be a hero (or so he is told, often by complete strangers). Poor Maurice feels displaced, which makes sense given his uncertainty as to his place in the multiverse, an uncertainty that grows as he visits different universes. In the universe he likes best -- the best of all possible worlds -- he is a genius physicist billionaire who married the woman he loves. In the one he inhabits during most of the novel, the woman he loves is shagging his old schoolmate. The heroic act that is expected of Maurice involves Max (last seen in Doughnut) who is also stuck in the wrong part of the multiverse. Max needs Maurice to rescue him and then to save Max's brother, Theo Bernstein (last seen in Doughnut) who is stuck in -- you guessed it -- a jar. Theo, by the way, is also God (sort of -- just read Doughnut).

Holt has an astonishing ability to surround cleverness with goofiness. Some scenes are just wickedly funny, including one in which Katz is drugged and made to tell the truth during a job interview. Some (like an elf's explanation of the reason newspapers endure) are thought-provoking. Yes, there are elves and goblins and dragons, because they have to exist somewhere in the multiverse, but no need to worry -- this isn't a traditional fantasy, and goblins occupy only a small but very funny part of the novel.

You could probably read, understand, and enjoy When It's a Jar without first reading Doughnut, but given the overlapping storylines and the fact that Doughnut is also a very funny book, it's better to read them both. While the two novels share characters and concepts, When It's a Jar moves the story into new dimensions of weirdness. Taken together, they represent a unique, witty, and intelligent take on the multiverse theory.

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American Romantic by Ward Just

Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on April 1, 2014

Ward Just is skilled at conveying emotions, at making the readers feel what his characters feel, and that is the greatest strength of American Romantic. It tells of the long life of Harry Sanders, in all its fullness as well as its thinness, and allows the reader to feel the highs and lows alongside Harry.

Harry starts the novel as an American mid-level bureaucrat in the Foreign Service on a tour of duty in Vietnam during the early 1960s. The war is smoldering and American-funded clinics are burning to the ground. Writing reports about wasted foreign aid is Harry's day job; nights he spends in temporary respite with Sieglinde, an x-ray technician serving on a German hospital ship until its sudden departure. When an opportunity arises for secret (and officially deniable) peace talks, the Ambassador gives Harry the leading role. Harry is smart and ambitious but sufficiently "under the radar" to take on the assignment without causing eyebrows to be raised. The harrowing mission leads to a moment of consequence in Harry's life.

Later, the story shifts to Sieglinde who, having fled her "doomed love affair" with Harry, travels without a destination. Her story (less interesting than Harry's) is abandoned midway through the novel when the story jumps to the present. Harry is now in genteel retirement in the south of France. The reader catches up on his life through his memories, sometimes focusing (again with less interest) on people who are part of Harry's life, particularly his wife. After another moment of consequence, for which Harry is again unprepared, the story returns to Harry's present.

Some themes of American Romantic -- the unwelcome American on foreign soil, the ambiguity of male-female relationships, the sense of unavoidable destiny, the struggle to reconcile religion with the harsh reality of daily living -- echo Graham Greene. Like the stories told around Harry's father's table when he was young, the point of American Romantic is often revealed indirectly. The stories told at his father's table by important political figures stopped short of their ending, requiring the listener to read between the lines because the storyteller, lost in memory, was unable to state aloud the story's "missing piece." The same can be said of American Romantic. There are often hidden meanings in stray remarks, unfinished stories, and half-buried memories.

What to make of the title? Sieglinde tells Harry that he is an American romantic because he believes an invisible hand is shaping events and issuing warnings that he does not understand. An ambassador tells Harry that "in diplomacy you are the master of your own fate as long as you keep your eyes open," yet Harry thinks "of diplomacy as Sisyphus thought of his wretched stone." Whether Harry shapes his own fate or is guided by an invisible hand is left for the reader to decide. By the time he retires, perhaps Harry is a romantic in a different sense. He looks back on a life that, but for its two moments of consequence, took place in the blink of an eye, and he understands that "failure is more commanding than success." On the other hand, failures alone do not define a life, as we realize upon reaching the book's predictable but satisfying conclusion, which can only be described as ... romantic.

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The Roving Party by Rohan Wilson

First published in Australia in 2011; published by Soho Press on February 25, 2014

Manalargena, the chief of an Aboriginal clan in Tasmania, knowing his clan must fight to survive, recruits Black Bill to join them. Bill declines on the ground that he follows the direction of a white man, John Batman. Bill fails to mention that Batman, intending to collect on a contract from the governor, has already engaged him to hunt Manalargena and his clan, earning a bounty for each one killed or captured. Yet Manalargena, a witch who "has a meanness even God won't forgive," is believed to be (and believes himself to be) protected by a demon. He is not an easy man to kill.

Bill joins the roving party, nine men (including four convicts and two free blacks) following John Batman's lead. They are hard, rough men, cruel men who have been treated cruelly. They fight each other as often as they fight the tribesman they hunt. They regard the Aborigines as uncivilized savages but they are hardly exemplars of civil behavior. Bill, the toughest of them, stands above the fray, but as "a black man raised white" he finds little acceptance among the other members of the roving party. Bill is earning a share of the bounty to hunt his own people, a decision that even Batman's white employees cannot respect. Katherine, Bill's pregnant wife, does not approve of his decision to follow Batman, despite the food his employment puts on the table.

The Roving Party is a fast moving story of violence, but much of the dramatic tension comes from Bill's internal conflict, the doubt that gnaws at him despite his best efforts to ignore his conscience. Although raised and educated by a white family, Bill knows himself to be rooted in those he has been assigned to capture and kill. After the hunt ends, its impact on Bill -- misfortune that he attributes to Manalargena's witchcraft -- continues to drive the story to its powerful conclusion. This is, in a sense, an unconventional story of redemption. It is also a story of a man's struggle to find himself.

The men in the roving party are not academically inclined, but they consider weighty philosophical issues as they hunt their fellow man. Why are the clansmen more deserving of death than the hunters? How do men of any race learn to suffer life with dignity? Do wretched men who commit heinous crimes deserve to have their lives ended by a rope around the neck, their sentences pronounced by judges who "never get their hands dirty with men's blood"? Toward the novel's end, Bill ponders the relationship between strength and sorrow and the uncertain nature of justice.

Rohan Wilson paints the Tasmanian landscape in vivid brushstrokes. From tribesmen to slave traders to prisoners, Wilson's minor characters -- often described with just a few choice words -- are infused with authenticity. There are hints of Hemingway in the stark eloquence of Wilson's prose and in the masculinity that defines the story, yet the novel's strongest characters are women. The Roving Party tells a brutal story but it is a brutality tempered with tenderness and wisdom. It deserves the acclaim it has earned since its 2011 publication in Australia.

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