I Should Have Stayed Home by Horace McCoy

First published in 1938; published digitally by Open Road Media on January 15, 2013

Like many transplants to Hollywood, Ralph Carston craves fame and fortune and is just waiting for the miracle that will make it happen. His only friend in town is a sparkplug named Mona who starts out the novel by getting sent to jail for mouthing off to a judge. The momentary notoriety she earns from that episode leads to an invitation to a benefit for the Scottsboro boys hosted by a wealthy socialite. Although the hostess is a cougar with designs on Carston's chiseled body, she also has connections that could help him. Should Carston become her boy toy if that's his only chance at finding the break he needs?

At least by modern standards, Carston is an unusual protagonist. He's naïve, innocent, and polite. He's from Georgia, not well educated, and holds firm to racist beliefs. With his thick southern accent, he has no chance to become a movie star, despite his good looks, but he's ashamed to return to his home town without succeeding in his chosen profession -- particularly after the letters he wrote to his mother, bragging about his success, appeared in the local newspaper.

As he demonstrated in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Horace McCoy had a realistic (perhaps realistically jaded) view of Hollywood as the land of opportunity. As Mona points out in the novel's most dramatic moment, for every girl who leaves her job as a waitress to become a star, there are hundreds who ruin their lives chasing an impossible dream. Carston's attempt to bridge the enormous divide between the haves and the have-nots teaches him the difference between dreams and reality. Mona's participation in an effort to organize extras who are seeking better working conditions adds another dimension to the class division that supplies the novel's framework.

McCoy's hapless characters exemplify the mix of futility and misplaced optimism that prevailed during the era in which he wrote. All they want is a break, a chance to live the glamorous lives they read about in magazines. Yet for all but a few, the easy life is an illusion, well beyond their reach. Using stark, economical prose, McCoy captured those for whom luck is always bad, those who, desperate to climb the social or economic ladder, are exploited by the fortunate few they seek to emulate. He wrote about people who took chances with their lives, who didn't want to join their small town peers who "were doing the same old thing in the same old way and would go on doing it forever," but he avoided the fairytale endings that cheer people in hard times. His novels are grounded in harsh realism. I Should Have Stayed Home isn't his best work, but as an honest portrait of disappointed lives, it is true to the model he followed.

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The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

Published by Del Rey on February 12, 2013 

Although the other three human civilizations regard them as judgmental and aloof, the Sadiri have long been "the backbone of galactic law, diplomacy, and scientific discovery." They seem to be a lot like Vulcans: wicked bright with some telepathic ability but obsessively in control of their emotions. Their arrival on Cygnus Beta, a planet that has become a homeland for pioneers and refugees, seems out of character. Yet the Sadiri homeworld has been destroyed and they are desperate to perpetuate their ethnic existence. Cygnus Beta gives them a chance to do just that, in part because factional groups of Sadiri long ago settled on the planet. The Sadiri are also curious about the planet's legendary Caretakers, the "guardians of humanity" who (according to the legend) transported a chosen few from Terra to Cygnus Beta.

Against this imaginative background, The Best of All Possible Worlds becomes a road trip novel set on an alien planet. A Cygnian civil servant and biotechnician named Grace Delarua is assigned to help a Sadiri named Dllenahkh search for genetic cousins of the Sadiri in Cygnus Beta's remote homesteads. To find genetically appropriate mates for the Sadiri, Delarua and Dilenahkh (with some helpers) begin a tour of the Cygnus Beta hinterlands. The odyssey gives characters a chance to bond, to form love interests, and to have some low-key adventures.

Karen Lord's worldbuilding includes a couple of hidden cities, a place called Faerie ruled by the Faerie Queen, and a place where mischief is afoot that changes Delarua's life as a consequence of confronting it. All of that is interesting but not so remarkable as to engage my sense of wonder. The book has surprisingly little atmosphere, given that it's set on an alien planet. There is little about the surroundings that creates a feeling of "alienness." Fortunately, the cultural and political differences among the various cities or settlements on Cygnus Beta are more carefully detailed and therefore more convincing.

Although a love story is at the novel's heart (sort of like logical Spock and romantic Uhura), The Best of All Possible Worlds is more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging. To some extent, the novel is an exploration of ethics. Delarua confronts a dilemma and must decide what response is morally correct. The novel tells a slow-moving, cerebral story, light on action, heavy on relationships. For the most part, the story suffers from a lack of dramatic tension. The love story offers little drama since the outcome is all but preordained, while Delarua's moral crisis is so easily resolved the reader has little opportunity to become emotionally invested in her plight.

While I have reservations about The Best of All Possible Worlds, in the end I liked the characters and enjoyed the road trip setting. I also liked the way Lord played with creation myths. While the story is better in concept than in execution, the ending is satisfying. Fans of romance fiction, however, will probably be more enthused about the novel than I am.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker

Published in the Netherlands in 2010; published in translation by Penguin Books on February 26, 2013 

A Dutch woman who introduces herself to people as Emilie rents an isolated house near Caernarfon, Wales, where she ponders Emily Dickinson. She looks out the window at night, recalling a former lover. She thinks about the uncle who once wandered off into a pond and just stood there, half submerged. She wonders about the geese in the field next to the house; some have gone missing. She fears meeting the owner of the black sheep that have wandered onto her property. Every now and then she is overcome by tears. Why is she in Wales? Perhaps, as Dickinson might have done by writing poetry, Emilie is trying "to hold back time, to make it bearable." Something has clearly gone wrong in Emilie's life, something from which she is fleeing. Soon enough, the story shifts to Holland and we begin to learn what might have prompted her reclusive behavior. It takes some time, however, for an explanation to come into focus, as Gerbrand Bakker teases the reader with bits of the truth, never quite revealing Emilie's story in its entirety.

Although the scenes of Emilie in isolation are somber, those in which characters interact with one another -- Emilie and an inquisitive couple who own a bakery; Emilie and a doctor who doesn't believe her (no one does) when she explains that a badger bit her foot; Emilie's husband, Rutger, and her bickering parents; Rutger and the enigmatic police officer who befriends him -- are almost whimsical. As the novel unfolds, the reader wonders whether Emile will begin to let people into her life. She meets the sheep farmer as well as a student who is mapping a hiking path that runs through her property. Whether she will make a meaningful connection with either of them is a question that contributes much of the novel's dramatic tension.

Ten White Geese is not a plot-heavy story, but it does have some surprises. Although the story is realistic, it has a surrealistic quality. As is true of Dickinson's poetry, Ten White Geese is ambiguous, open to diverse interpretations. How much of the novel is unvarnished truth, how much is perspective (truth told slant, as Dickinson would say), is unclear. A reader who is so inclined will probably be able to discern symbolism in the vulnerable geese, in the foot injuries that two characters suffer, in the black sheep and in a stone circle that occupies Emilie's attention.

Although Emilie, before coming to Wales, was writing about the "all-too-eager canonization" of Dickinson, Bakker is clearly a fan. Ten White Geese quotes lines from Dickinson's poetry, quarrels with Dickinson's biographer, and makes references to the poems that assume the reader's familiarity with at least her best known work. Bees and roses show up in Dickinson's poetry and in Emilie's life. Some of Dickinson's recurring themes (death, pain, separation) are echoed in the story. There are obvious parallels between Emilie and Dickinson. Emilie describes Dickinson as a "puling woman who hid herself away in her house and garden, wordlessly insisting with everything she did or did not do that people should just ignore her, yet fishing for validation like a whimpering child, scared to death that the affection she showed others ... would remain unanswered." She could be describing herself.

While I wouldn't necessarily characterize Bakker's prose as lyrical, there is a poetic sensibility in his careful word choices, in the rhythm of his sentences, and in the novel's hidden meanings. This melancholy novel invites rereading (alongside an anthology of Dickinson's poetry), with each new investigation of the text yielding a new way of understanding the story.

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Perfect Hatred by Leighton Gage

Published by Soho Crime on February 19, 2013

Perfect Hatred is the sixth in a series of police procedurals featuring Mario Silva, Chief Inspector for Brazil's Federal Police. He would like to be investigating an act of terrorism in São Paulo, where a baby carriage, pushed by a Muslim man disguised as a woman, explodes in front of the American consulate, killing dozens. For political reasons, that investigation is left to Hector Costa, who heads the São Paulo field office of the Federal Police, while Silva is sent to Curitiba, where Plínio Saldana, a political candidate for a governorship, has been assassinated by a man who seems to have no motive. Shortly after the candidate's bodyguard kills the assassin, the bodyguard is murdered. A third storyline involves a wealthy landowner named Orlando Muniz. Having killed a priest, Muniz needs to eliminate the prosecutor as well as the primary witness (who happens to be Mario Silva) if he wants to avoid prison.

The assassination story is couched in political and family intrigue. It seems unlikely that the incumbent governor would have orchestrated the killing, given the probability that Saldana's wife would step into his candidacy and ride the sympathy vote to an easy victory. Could Saldana's father or brother, who resented Saldana's anti-corruption platform, have hired the killer? Could his wife or his lover be the culprit? Perhaps a staff member? As in any good police procedural, the list of suspects grows as the novel progresses. The reader will suspect a connection between Saldana's death and the terrorist bombing (on the ground that interweaving plotlines always grow together), but what could it be? The answer is both surprising and satisfying.

An interesting issue arises from a character's belief that terrorism suspects forfeit their right to a fair trial by engaging in acts of terrorism (a view that, of course, assumes the authorities never err in their identification of terrorists). When a Mossad agent commits a double murder (in a fashion that echoes an act of terrorism), nobody who might be regarded as a "good guy" seems particularly troubled. Silva's sensible position (in the abstract, at least) is that the police should try harder to find the evidence needed to prove guilt rather than fretting that the guilty might go free. Yet, when a murder suspect is in a life-threatening situation, Silva must make a difficult choice whether to save him. Whether Silva makes the right decision is the kind of moral question that spells the difference between a thriller that is ordinary and one that makes the reader think.

A number of characters (many of them police investigators) circulate through the novel. Except for Muniz, who is "a psychopath with the morals of a feral cat," the characters don't have much personality. Still, this is a plot-driven novel, and the plot is entertaining if unlikely. The twin investigations are methodical, but they move the story forward at a steady pace. Occasional scenes of violence are written in vivid language, heightening the drama, and the South American settings are described in colorful detail. Despite the plotline involving terrorism, Leighton Gage is careful to avoid stereotyping or denigrating Muslims. The terrorism story is nevertheless unoriginal, featuring caricatures of terrorists, while the effort Muniz makes to kill Silva is uninspired. The best parts of Perfect Hatred kept me guessing and, since that's what a police procedural should do, I recommend it to fans of the genre.

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The Burning Air by Erin Kelly

Published by Pamela Dorman Books on February 21, 2013 

I was prepared to abandon The Burning Air in its early stages, thinking the story was the sort of clichéd family drama that just doesn't appeal to me. I'm glad I stuck with it. The plot is anything but clichéd, and the drama is both powerful and convincing.

Lydia has a tumor and expects to die soon, a fact she has concealed from her husband and children. She has been keeping journals all her life, and now feels compelled to write about the shameful event she has long kept hidden. This device is a familiar start to a novel, a suspense builder that leaves the reader wondering about Lydia's dark secret. The next sections follow Sophie, Lydia's daughter, as she copes with Lydia's hospitalization and death. Lydia's secret lurks in the background -- or has it disappeared altogether? -- as the story evolves into the saga of the MacBride family.

The first quarter of The Burning Air seems to foreshadow a mundane story about a dysfunctional family, complete with resentments and infidelity and Sophie's mental health issues. All of this is familiar territory, but the story takes on a new dimension when Sophie's baby goes missing, along with her brother's new girlfriend. The missing child energizes the story while giving the reader cause to feel sympathy for Sophie, whose litany of woes threatened to make her too tedious to bear. But how, the reader wonders, does this missing child relate to Lydia and her terrible secret?

Erin Kelly leaves the reader with a bit of a cliffhanger as the focus suddenly shifts from the present to the past and from Sophie to a new character, Darcy Kellaway, whose story is told in the first person. It is an engrossing psychological study of a life gone wrong. The characterization of homeschooled Darcy and of Darcy's domineering mother is detailed and convincing. Kelly makes it easy to understand why Darcy develops a twisted, life-dominating obsession, and watching him dedicate his life to revenge is fascinating. Kelly teases the reader with occasional reminders of Lydia's secret and rather dramatically reconfirms its existence, even dropping a hint as to what it involves, but it remains a mystery as the story circles back to Sophie's missing baby. The final sections of Darcy's story make it possible for the reader to reinterpret seemingly inconsequential events that take place earlier in the novel.

Just when the plot seems to be coming to a climax, the story again changes point of view, this time focusing on Lydia's husband, Rowan. Picking up with the discovery of the missing child, the story moves forward at a furious pace, ending only after another shift of perspective, this time to the person responsible for the baby's disappearance (and for whom it is impossible not to feel sympathy). We finally learn Lydia's secret, and it ties up a dangling plot thread in a satisfying conclusion to a skillfully crafted story.

In short, a book I nearly quit reading in its early stages became increasingly intense as the story neared its midpoint and absorbed my attention in its second half. The Burning Air is a family drama but there's nothing mundane about it. The characters are believable and Kelly's prose is elegant. The story takes unexpected turns but never strays from the path of plausibility. In fact, it's the "this could really happen" vibe that makes the story so chilling. After a slow start, The Burning Air turned out to be an intelligent thriller.

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