Eléctrico W by Hervé Le Tellier

First published in French in 2011; published in translation by Other Press on June 18, 2013

The events described in Eléctrico W take place in Lisbon over the course of nine days. Antonio Flores is a photographer living in Paris, but during his childhood in Lisbon, he raced every day to catch a funicular tram called the Eléctrico W. One morning he missed the tram but met a girl called Duck, who eventually became his lover. Their romance ended with a forced separation after Duck's father discovered she was pregnant.

Antonio tells the story of Duck to Vincent Balmer, a journalist with whom Antonio has joined forces to cover the trial of Pinheiro, the "Mad Killer of Lisbon." Vincent, the novel's narrator, has an old flame of his own, a woman he loved despite her refusal to give herself to him. Of Irene he confesses: "the memory of her terrifies me because it's everywhere in me, ready to spring up as soon as I'm alone, when all it really is is regret." Vincent is chagrined when Antonio reveals that Irene was Antonio's lover before Antonio left Paris, and is even more discomfited by the news that Irene will be visiting Antonio in Lisbon.

Motivated by a combination of jealousy and confusion, Vincent embarks on a search for the long-lost Duck. Vincent's wanderings gives Hervé Le Tellier the opportunity to paint caricatures of Lisbon's colorful residents, including a surprising woman named Manuela Freire. Vincent believes he has bad luck with women, but perhaps (as Manuela suggests) his problem is his inability to recognize and seize the moment when a woman is giving him a chance. Vincent's interaction with the novel's female characters, as well as Antonio's momentary obsession with a young woman named Aurora, allows Le Tellier to explore various aspects of love and desire.

The perfect understatement of each plot thread adds to the novel's realism. The reader eventually learns that there is more to the story of Duck.  That story's completion gives Eléctrico W its final dramatic edge.

Le Tellier's elegant, atmospheric prose makes this a novel to savor. Le Tellier makes frequent reference to poets, both real and fictional, and there is a poetic sensibility to his phrasing and choice of words. One poem that Le Tellier quotes is, like Eléctrico W, about "lying and illusion and sincerity."  During the nine days, Vincent idly translates the fragmentary stories written by a (fabricated) poet who has appeared as a character in some of Le Tellier's other work. Le Tellier seems to be suggesting -- through the translated vignettes, Vincent's coverage of Pinhiero, and the character of Manuela -- that the line between fiction and reality is murky at best. Vincent is drawn, he tells us, to "unfashionable authors, the ones who failed to produce a major famous work by which they'll be remembered." Eléctrico W deserves a better fate than the forgotten books that appeal to Vincent. I wouldn't classify it as a major work, but if every good novel "is good in its own way" (as Vincent opines), Eléctrico W is good in many ways.

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Through Darkest America by Neal Barrett Jr.

First published in 1986

Howie Ryder's father taught him that "stock" are animals that happen to look like humans, animals that can neither speak nor reason, nothing more than a food source raised for slaughter, a gift from God after the War destroyed the unclean animals upon which men once fed. Through Darkest America is a dystopian novel modeled after a western, with humans playing the role of cattle. It also echoes a Civil War story as the Loyalist army clashes with the Rebel army, leaving Howie caught in the middle. For the most part, however, Through Darkest America is a coming-of-age novel.

After Howie's parents are killed -- reprisal for his father's expression of anti-government sentiments -- Howie takes up a bow and vows revenge. He is alone (his sister having been selected for Silver Island, a supposedly idyllic community that embodies the ideals of a rebuilding nation) until he takes up with an opportunist named Pardo, an arms dealer who seems to be supplying competing armies. Against this background, Neal Barrett delivers an entertaining action story populated by well-drawn characters.

I'm not sure why writers of post-apocalyptic fiction so often imagine that language after an apocalyptic event will leave everyone speaking like Festus on Gunsmoke. Language would surely change (it always does), but it would evolve into something new. Still, Barrett wrote Through Darkest America as a classic western, complete with cattle drives and horse thieves and women of pleasure, so it's forgivable (if not particularly credible) that his characters speak as they do.

The epilog answers a critical question that I feared would go unanswered while tying the story together with a powerful conclusion. Howie is ultimately a tragic figure, surviving unimaginably painful ordeals while managing to hold onto his humanity -- at least to the extent that anyone could do so in the dystopian future that Barrett imagines. The ending of Through Darkest America sets up, and left me looking forward to reading, its sequel, Dawn's Uncertain Light.

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Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh

Published by Orbit on June 11, 2013

If Love Minus Eighty has a central theme, it's this: love is complicated. It's particularly complicated if you've fallen in love with a dead woman. Love Minus Eighty explores love in a light-hearted way from a variety of perspectives: characters are in love (both requited and unrequited), or want love, or are faking it, or fear it, or substitute manipulation and drama for actual love. Still, Love Minus Eighty will never be mistaken for a traditional romance novel. It's smart and funny, not trashy.

Love Minus Eighty features one of the best extrapolations of internet technology I've encountered. Will McIntosh mixes social networking with reality TV to create a medium that's both amusing and disturbing -- and utterly believable. In a future New York, the affluent live in High Town (built above the surface of old Manhattan) and wear skin-tight suits that, apart from using sensory filters to block bad smells and ugly sights, allow virtual access to others via screens that materialize in midair. Individuals who can attract enough followers at one time are rewarded with corporate sponsorship (earning money, for instance, by wearing a particular designer's boots). In its conglomeration of Facebook and Twitter and You Tube, Love Minus Eighty makes a telling point about all the people who "take time away from their own pathetic lives to watch [a self-made celebrity] live hers."

A woman named Lorelei manages to gain eight hundred viewers as she humiliates her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend, Rob Mashita. Having just watched Lorelei throw all his possessions out a window, the distracted Rob runs over a woman named Winter West. Winter dies without revivication insurance, but fortunately she's attractive, and her corpse is chosen for the bridesicle program and stored in a dating center at minus eighty. If she's very lucky, some wealthy man will pay to restore her to life, or at least awaken her for a quick chat. Out of guilt, Rob visits her from time to time, but he can't afford to restore her to consciousness for more than five minutes every few months.

Winter's death, and the possibility that she might never be revived -- or worse, that she might be thawed and buried if she proves to be unprofitable -- is at the heart of an engaging story. Although Love Minus Eighty is in essence a romantic comedy, it makes some serious points about the value and the downside of social networking, as well as the corporate tendency to place a monetary value on human life. It also delves into philosophy, asking the timeless question: "What's more real: what you think you are, or what external, objective reality tells you you are?" Just how real is virtual reality?

If you're looking for "hard" science fiction that explains how things work -- how death is cheated, how floating screens manage to pop into existence -- you won't find it here. That didn't bother me because the novel has the sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude that suggests it isn't meant to be taken seriously. The story's focus is on people rather than technology. The characters aren't multifaceted -- there is a clear division between likable and unlikable characters -- but that's forgivable in a comic novel. Love Minus Eighty doesn't require much analytical thinking (overthinking the story would probably destroy it) but the novel encourages empathy for its love-challenged characters, provokes easy laughter, and stimulates discussion about the future of social networking.

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Evil and the Mask by Fuminori Nakamura

First published in Japan in 2010; published in translation by Soho Crime on June 11, 2013

"It wasn't revenge. I simply wanted to set him on fire. Air, that was the word that came to mind. I felt as little emotion as air." Fumihiro wants to destroy evil, but does the killer of evil become the thing he kills? That question lies at the heart of Evil and the Mask, the second novel by Fuminori Nakamura (after The Thief) to be translated into English.

Evil and the Mask opens with a fascinating premise. It is a tradition for men in a certain family, after attaining the age of sixty, to sire a child who will become a cancer in the world, tasked with spreading misery. The men do this to punish the world for continuing to exist after they perish. In an attention-grabbing first chapter, Shozo Kuki explains the tradition to his youngest son, Fumihiro. Shozo tells Fumihiro he will experience hell when he turns fourteen. Hell will somehow involve Kaori, an orphaned girl Shozo adopted, and to whom Fumihiro becomes attached.

The novel jumps between the formative events of Fumihiro's childhood and the present, more than a dozen years later. The adult Fumihiro has changed his face to match that of Koichi Shintani, a dead man whose identity Fumihiro purchased on the black market. The plot springs forward along three twisted paths. One involves Shintani's past and the baggage that comes with it. Another brings Fumihiro (with Shintani's face) into Kaori's life again, but in a very different role. The third introduces a cultish group of pseudo-terrorists who use absurdity to undermine culture.

Like The Thief, Evil and the Mask is a novel of psychological suspense. The story's strength involves Fumihiro's struggle to shed one identity and to adopt another, to reinvent himself -- an impossible task, perhaps. It's easy to change a face and a name, not so easy to change your inner self, to abandon memories. Unlike The Thief, however, Evil and the Mask is so determinedly a novel of psychology that some characters indulge in lengthy analytical speeches -- about beauty, death, morality, anarchy, entropy, familial love, the motivations for violence and war, the nature of evil -- that too often seem forced.

Still, the character of Fumihiro is impressively constructed. The reader feels the crushing weight of his oppressive past, his struggle to feel something. His coffee has no flavor, he doesn't notice the cold. He is little more than an animated corpse. He has forsaken the happiness he experienced while he and Kaori were still innocent -- a happiness that the adult Fumihiro regards as "some kind of mistake" that "soon vanished into the distance." He still longs for Kaori but fears that another character's prediction will come true, that he will destroy the one thing in the world that remains precious to him if he gets close to her. Can Fumihiro shed the despondency that consumes him only by embracing madness? Whether his future is to be determined by destiny or choice, the novel's dramatic tension comes from the uncertainty of the path that Fumihiro's life will follow.

Evil and the Mask is a meditation on change and choice, on killing and on what it means to be alive. Apart from its philosophical implications, the story is intriguing. The plot threads weave together convincingly, although the storyline involving Shintani's past doesn't quite reach its potential. The ending (like The Thief, inconclusive, permitting the reader to imagine what might happen next) is satisfying.

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Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa by Benjamin Constable

Published by Gallery Books on June 4, 2013

Is Tomomi Ishikawa dead? Is she the angel of death? In a suicide letter she left at Ben Constable's apartment, Tomomi (a/k/a Butterfly) claims she has already died. The letter leads Ben to Tomomi's laptop, which contains another letter that leads him on a search for yet another letter. As Tomomi intended, the letters take Ben on a sort of treasure hunt as he roams through Paris finding clues in umbrellas, gardens, the underground metro, a bar, a park. He continues his quest in New York, where by chance he meets a woman who is connected to Tomomi in many ways. Equally odd are the emails Ben receives from Tomomi in New York, forwarded by someone who always seems to know where Ben is and what he's been doing.

The various letters and notebooks that Ben discovers describe real or imagined moments in Tomomi's life, feelings of despair, fantasies and visions. They are, to say the least, disturbing. Death is a pervasive theme. At one point Tomomi writes that "our existence, so tenuous, is protected by nothing more than a thin layer of choice, like tissue paper. Death is present in us all." There are all sorts of symbols of life and death in Tomomi's letters: stopped clocks, plants that survive in unlikely places, statues of long-buried writers. As Ben continues his search (for what, he doesn't know), he recalls conversations he had with Tomomi and he commits them to paper.

At times, Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa has the characteristics of a mystery or suspense novel, but Ben's nonchalant attitude, even when confronted by danger, assures that Three Lives won't be mistaken for a thriller. Ben's success at uncovering Tomomi's clues is difficult to believe, but I'm not sure the reader is supposed to believe it, any more than we are to believe in the imaginary cat that turns up from time to time. The plot depends upon a mountain of improbable coincidences, but as one of the characters opines, "coincidences are completely normal. What would be abnormal is if there were no coincidences." Whether or not that's true, this is the kind of parable-like story that encourages suspension of disbelief; that's part of its whimsical charm.

Not all mysteries have solutions. As Ben notes, "In real life we don't get the answers we need." In fact, we might not need answers at all. We just need to learn how to move on without them. That's a recurring theme in Three Lives, and one a reader needs to take to heart to enjoy the novel. The ending is at best ambiguous; the true (or best) ending is up to the reader to construct. Not all readers will be able or willing to do that. If you need certainty in your reading experiences, this trip through Benjamin Constable's wonderland probably isn't for you. In the end, what "really" happened to Ben and Tomomi just doesn't matter. Constable reminds us that this "homage to a curious friendship" is only a story. It's a clever and entertaining story, and that's enough for me.

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