The Wehrwolf by Alma Katsu

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on September 27, 2022

“The Wehrwolf” is a long short story but probably too short to be called a novella. The story is set in the German forest where the Brothers Grimm collected folklore to weave into their fairy tales. While the stories were later sanitized to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of city kids, Alma Katsu suggests that sturdy Germans of the forest were accustomed to seeing their children mauled in the woods and prepared their kids for the agony of life by terrorizing them with gruesome stories. Perhaps the Grimms unwittingly prepared Germans to accept Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Hans Sauer has returned from the front at the war’s end. Perhaps he is a deserter, although he claims he returned to protect his village from approaching allies. His return coincides with the gruesome death of a Roma in the woods, a man apparently torn apart by animals. Hans wants Uwe Fuchs to join his band of villagers in protecting the village. The Nazis have encouraged such local militias to defend the Homeland.

Uwe is uncertain about joining Hans, but he’s curious when Hans claims to have killed Russian soldiers. The bodies seem to have been attacked by animals. Uwe refuses to listen to the entreaties of his wife because he wears the pants in the family. The importance of marital equality, or maybe just "listen to your wife," might be one of the tale's intended lessons.

To be initiated into the band, Uwe is locked into a cellar with Jurgen Jäger, about whom dark stories are told. When Jurgen ties an old leather belt around his waist, he becomes a monster. A myth associates the belt with the devil, but to Uwe, it looks like an ordinary belt that might be found hanging in any barn. “A simple thing can turn you into a monster,” Uwe thinks, a thought that is presumably another of the story’s lessons. After Uwe is initiated, Hans can turn him into a werewolf simply by donning the belt.

Uwe’s disregard of his wife’s advice leads to an ending that is worthy of one of Grimm’s uncensored stories. Suffice it to say that Uwe learns and then teaches a lesson.

Like a fairy tale, the story invites the reader to draw obvious conclusions. While Uwe doesn’t want to accept the fact that he’s a monster, a reader might conclude that Uwe’s decision to join a militia to fight in support of a Nazi government is what makes him a monster. Not surprisingly, a willingness to kill Russian who are fighting Germany easily translates into a willingness to kill Germans who do not meet a standard of normalcy demanded by the werewolves. Apart from the irony of Aryan werewolves judging others for being abnormal, the story teaches another lesson: Those who give themselves the power to condemn others will inevitably misuse that power to enforce shared bigotry.

There are other lessons here about resisting the temptation of evil even if it makes us feel strong, the triumph of empathy over supremacy, and the immorality of vigilantism and unregulated militias. If this is a modern fairy tale, I’m not sure I would want a small child to read it, but it would have value for older kids and adults with weak minds who are attracted to authoritarian militias. I’m recommending it to everyone else for the polished prose.

RECOMMENDED

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell

Published by Hogarth on September 27, 2022

Cee watched her younger brother get caught in the furrows while swimming in the sea. She rescued Wayne (or at least his body) but nearly drowned, passing out on the beach. When she woke up, a man in a blue windbreaker drove her home, then disappeared. Cee had no idea what became of Wayne.

Cee was walking to school with Wayne when a car struck him. The driver was wearing a blue windbreaker. He carried Wayne home. Cee went to the bathroom but the man was gone by the time she finished. Cee had no idea what became of Wayne.

Cee was watching Wayne enjoy a ride on a carousel when he simply disappeared from his horse. Yes, a man with a blue windbreaker appears.

Cee is Cassandra Williams, the product of an interracial marriage. She narrates different versions of Wayne’s disappearance. Each story unfolds with dream-logic, details changing as the story progresses. Therapists have no success finding a useful memory, a failure that they attribute to a traumatic event that Cee must have buried. Yet from conversations with reliable sources, it seems that some of the details are true. Wayne disappeared. His body has never been found. Cee handed a blue windbreaker to her father. A pocket in the jacket apparently contained a clue to its owner.

As a young adult, Cee sees Wayne in crowds. She writes his name without realizing it. Cee is sure that Wayne died when was 7 and she was 12, but her mother is convinced that he is still alive. If he’s alive, she can’t blame Cee for killing him.

Cee’s mother has started a foundation called Vigil to support parents of missing children — parents who refuse to accept that their kids are probably dead. She is one of those grieving parents who has made a lucrative career for herself by exploiting tragedy. Perhaps that’s why she can’t admit that Wayne is gone; the media love the missing children of white mothers, but a dead black kid is just a statistic.

The Furrows is a novel of ambiguity. What happened to Wayne? Is he alive or dead? Did he disappear in each of the ways that Cee describes, perhaps in alternate realities? Is the young black man who took the name Wayne the real Wayne Williams and, if so, why do Cee and her parents fail to recognize him, despite the startling resemblance between Wayne’s father and the new Wayne? Why is the new Wayne following Cee and insinuating himself into her life?

A jarring change in the point of view occurs when the narrator shifts from Cee to the young man who calls himself Wayne. The new Wayne tells stories about being orphaned when his parents were murdered in bed, stories about life on the streets, stories about prison. Stories about going to school with a kid named Wayne.

The new Wayne’s mentor spouted glib theories about time that add to the novel’s ambiguity; in the realm of theoretical physics, time is ambiguous. The new Wayne seems to have alternate realities of his own; he sees himself on video stomping a victim during a fight but is sure he wasn’t there.

More interesting than the novel’s issues with time are its issues with race. Wayne’s white mother can’t accept his death, but his black father tells Cee “for us, death is everywhere.” When Cee’s mother accuses the new Wayne of stalking the family, it’s clear that the police will take her side to the detriment of the new Wayne.

Ambiguous novels sometimes fail to resonate with me. The Furrows had me scratching my head at times. I’m not sure what to make of the emphasis on time. I think Namwali Serpell tries to make a larger point about living in the moment, paying attention to life, but I’m not sure if that is her intent. I didn’t understand the ending at all. Still, the ambiguity prompted me to think about deeper meanings. This clearly isn’t the kind of ambiguity that signals an author who doesn’t know what she wants to say. Readers who give the novel a second reading (or a very close first reading) might unpack more of its secrets.

The story makes insightful points about the impact of race and class on grieving and socially acceptable responses to loss. Other readers might find other insights. In the end, some novels succeed because they make the reader feel (in the words of new Wayne) “a certain kind of way.” I’d put The Furrows into that category.

RECOMMENDED

Suspect by Scott Turow

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 27, 2022

Scott Turow’s latest legal thriller is set, as usual, in fictional Kindle County, Illinois. Suspect differs from many of Turow’s novels in that the narrator/protagonist is not a lawyer. Clarice Granum, known to her boss as Pinky, is a bisexual nonconformist who dropped out of the police academy and took a job as an investigator for Rik Dudek, a 52-year-old lawyer in Highland Isle.

Rik is representing Lucia Gomez-Barrera, the chief of police in Highland Isle, in a hearing before a commission that will decide whether she should keep her job. Three male police officers have accused her of demanding sexual favors in exchange for promotions. One of the officers has retired and taken a position with Moritz Vojczek, a former cop turned property developer who is known locally as the Ritz. Lucia encouraged the Ritz’s resignation from the force and he has long resented the loss of his pension, although he has achieved enormous wealth and doesn’t need it.

Lucia suspects the Ritz of orchestrating the accusations. While two of the accusers are sleazy, one is squeaky clean. Rik proves his ability as a trial lawyer when he cross-examines the accusers, assisted by evidence that Pinky has uncovered. The hearing seems to be going sideways, however, when a photo turns up that appears to show one of the cops going down on Lucia while she’s sitting in her office. Lucia’s life might go sideways when one of her accusers dies under suspicious circumstances.

In a subplot that eventually merges with the main plot, Pinky becomes curious about a guy in a neighboring apartment who is keeping odd hours. Pinky gets close to the guy because he’s intriguing — maybe he’s a spy? — creating the possibility of a dangerous liaison. Pinky also needs to work out her relationship with a cop she once dated, a woman who seems to be carrying a torch for her. Since the cop is involved in a death investigation and since Lucia is a suspect, Pinky can’t serve Lucia’s needs without addressing the cop’s feeling of abandonment or rejection.

Suspect lacks the suspense and intricate plotting of Turow’s best work, but the cross-examinations are fun. The initial focus on sexual harassment rather than criminal defense makes the story fresh. Rik doesn’t have much personality but Pinky has plenty, at least if an unwillingness to settle down and an unquenchable willingness to have sex count as a personality. The story proceeds steadily to an unsurprising conclusion, but the path is sufficiently twisty to hold a reader’s interest.

RECOMMENDED

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

Published by Random House on September 20, 2022

References to the pandemic have been sneaking into recent novels, usually adding color to the background. Lucy by the Sea is the first novel I’ve read that both makes the pandemic central to the plot and takes the viral spread of death seriously. Since the novel begins in New York, the US epicenter of the pandemic in its early days, the fear of death that the characters experience rings true. Because they rapidly scamper from New York, however, their fear is largely animated by news reports rather than firsthand experience. The pandemic is therefore central to the plot while still remaining in the background. In most respects, Lucy by the Sea is a typical New York domestic drama, complete with infidelity and family crises and a protagonist who writes novels.

Lucy Barton narrates the story from her privileged perspective. Lucy is a novelist who lives in New York. She has appeared in a couple of novels that the New York literary establishment holds in high regard, but I haven't read them so Lucy is new to me. She is an older white woman who feels insulted when her daughter’s boyfriend mentions that she only writes books about older white women. Not that it’s wrong to do so, but Lucy by the Sea is very much a novel about an older white woman.

Lucy has been a widow for more than a year. Although her age and location enhance her vulnerability to the virus, she doesn’t watch the news and is surprised when William, her first husband, insists that she accompany him to Maine until it is safe to return to the city. She tries not to be angry with her dead husband for leaving her to cope with a pandemic but seems to be grateful that a former husband came along to protect her.

Lucy is surprised that people in Maine assume New Yorkers feel superior to them. Lucy shouldn’t be surprised because she does, in fact, feel superior. Avoiding contact with people in Maine is not difficult for her because she doesn’t want to know them, apart from a man who gives her his undivided attention when they’re together.

Quarantined in Maine, Lucy starts watching the news. She congratulates herself for being angry about George Floyd. It reminds her of her “deep response” to the brutality inflicted on Abner Luima. I suppose belated wokeness is better than none, but I suspect that Lucy is more concerned about the impact of police violence on her emotions than the harm it causes to the victims. She recalls that a black writer at a conference told her about being afraid of driving alone on an empty Indiana road and says “I thought about that for a long time” without revealing what she thought. Why Lucy so frequently tells the reader that she thinks unspecified thoughts about various topics was a mystery to me.

On the other hand, when Lucy describes her thoughts, they are so uninteresing that she should have kept them to herself. When William gets excited about potato parasites (a topic within his field of scientific expertise), Lucy takes note of her own (fleeting) interest: “I thought about how when a person is really excited about something, it can be contagious.” Usually she’s thinking about how something makes her feel. Much of the novel consists of Lucy telling the reader “this made me happy” or “this made me sad” which, as plots go, isn’t much of one.

Lucy admonishes herself for being selfish (not giving up a place in a long line for an older man) and, again, seems pleased with her self-awareness, her recognition that she is selfish, while making no effort to change. She does not recognize (although the reader will) her talent for sucking the pleasure out of every moment. Standing near the water and admiring the view, she begins to fret about what might happen if she falls, so she goes inside again where she can feel safe in her isolation. Lucy enjoys talking with William but hates him when he doesn’t give her his undivided attention.

Lucy frets about growing old and the risk of dementia. She frets about losing her ex-husband the way she lost her husband. She frets about her childhood. She frets about her children. She frets about college students not respecting her work. She frets about whether people have free will. She frets about her hair. She frets about cultural divisions in the country (something she apparently failed to notice until she left New York). She is “petrified” about her lack of connection to her New York apartment. She feels “great anguish” that her adult children do not contact her as often as they did when they were younger, which makes her fret about whether she was “the mother I thought I had been.” Late in the novel, she writes “In December, I noticed a drop in my mood,” In February, she reports “I often felt sad.” Some months later, “An emptiness had come into me.” She might be the dreariest person alive.

William is also depressed — not because he is living with Lucy, although that would be a depressing experience for most men. William is lonely and Lucy provides relief, although they can’t resume their marital intimacy because William has a medical problem. That might be why he’s depressed and lonely, but Lucy is too self-absorbed to see William’s depression as anything other than reflection of her own unhappiness. Lucy’s friend Charlene appears to be lonely, which only makes Lucy frightened that she might appear to others to be lonely.

Part of the story revolves around Lucy’s family. Lucy worries that one of her daughters is demonizing her husband because (as she knows from personal experience) women sometimes do that to justify their desire to have an affair. According to William, Lucy’s mother is a “whack job,” but Lucy has unresolved feelings about her (she imagines receiving daily guidance from a nice mother). Lucy’s daughter refuses to abandon a husband who refuses to leave Brooklyn, but she’s frightened by refrigerated trucks collecting people who have died. Lucy’s sister joins a far-right church that finds masks during a pandemic to be ungodly (she trusts God to protect her) and admonishes Lucy for believing that germs can kill people. People in Lucy’s family eventually get sick with COVID; a daughter has a difficult pregnancy; her daughters’ marriages are troubled through no fault of their adoring husbands, perhaps because the daughters are emulating their mother. Lucy has some good advice for one of her daughters, although she’s largely repeating the unheeded advice she got from her psychiatrist.

Lucy by the Sea might be a good book for women who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are in bad marriages. It might be a good book for older, sheltered women of means who live in New York. It wasn’t a good book for me but I’m probably the wrong reader for it. I’m tired of reading mundane observations like “we do the best we can.”

Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer and her writing style is fluid, so who am I to complain about her work? I can only say that I found the book more annoying than appealing.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I Walk Between the Raindrops by T.C. Boyle

Published by Ecco on September 13, 2022

Many of the T.C. Boyle stories collected in this volume were published in Esquire, The New Yorker, Playboy, or literary reviews. They vary in style and subject matter but not in quality. The title story didn’t speak to me, but the others include some of the best short fiction I’ve read in recent memory.

My favorites:

The narrator of “The Thirteenth Day” is quarantined on a cruise ship with a passenger from Wuhan who has COVID-19. Fear, privation, domestic discord, and culture war lunacy ensue. The story is so realistic it reads as if Boyle was actually a passenger on the ship.

“Big Mary” is a large woman who beats every man she arm-wrestles. She slowly becomes the lead vocalist for a bar band before jealousy (largely the narrator’s) leads to the kind of drama that breaks up bands.

“The Shape of a Teardrop” - Parents evict their loser son because he refuses to work, knowing his wages will be garnished for child support. The mother insists she loves her son but her brand of tough love suggests her primary loyalty is to herself. This is the kind of story that makes me even more grateful to have been raised in a functional family.

A medical student practices surgery on dogs in a hospital's “Dog Lab.” The story highlights the ethical issues surrounding the use of dogs that would otherwise have been euthanized (a fate that is only delayed by the surgeries). The issues cause a rift between the student and his girlfriend. No spoiler intended, but if you want to know whether a dog lover will appreciate the ending, the answer is yes.

The narrator of “Not Me” is an unhappy high school teacher who, unlike some of his unhappy colleagues, is not sleeping with a student. Sleeping with students is against the rules but sleeping with other teachers turns out to be just as problematic.

“The Apartment” - A man agrees to pay a monthly sum to an old woman for the duration of her life in exchange for ownership of her apartment when she dies. The man and the old woman both are wagering on the duration of her life. “We all make bargains in this life,” the woman later says. “Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.”

Other stories I enjoyed:

“These Are the Circumstances” - Nick’s wife Laurel persuades him to go on a nature walk/bath ($25 per hour per person) so they can gain the meditative and calming benefit of communing with leaves and dirt. Nick is bored after three minutes of watching twigs float downstream. He misses his phone. Laurel sees beauty where Nick sees danger. They might both be right, but nature later has an adverse impact on Nick’s life. This is a good story for husbands who oppose their wives’ insistence that they get off the couch.

“Key to the Kingdom” - A stranger knocks on a writer’s door and raises the possibility that he’s the writer’s son, triggering memories of a return to the writer’s alma mater after the publication of his first novel and an unexpected sexual encounter. The knowledge is one more in a series of burdens that the writer has never been able to carry.

“SCS 750” - The ability to get a good job or medical treatment or decent seating on the train is dependent on a Social Credit Score that defines trustworthiness. The score is shaped by conformity to rigid rules (not avoiding surveillance cameras, not buying more than one bottle of gin at a time, not watching porn or playing video games all day, not expressing antisocial thoughts). The narrator chooses friends and relationships based on their impact on his score, a clever twist on the common dystopian theme of government-enforced limits on individuality.

“Asleep at the Wheel” takes place in the future of self-driving cars, including Ubers that want to take their passengers on a shopping trip to stores that have purchased advertising from Uber. The story describes two events. One is a mother’s evening with a man her car told her to avoid. The other follows drunken kids who, inspired by Rebel Without a Cause, decide to disable the self-driving capability of stolen cars and drive them off a cliff. Meanwhile, gentle robotic police make the reader wonder whether society might get something right in the future.

I was indifferent to these three:

The title story tells five interlocking mini-stories. The first and last address a man’s feeling of powerlessness when he is harassed by a woman while waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine’s Day. One follows a man who deals with the aftermath of a mudslide. One is about a suicide prevention worker’s relationship with a woman who threatens suicide. The only interesting segment involves a matchmaking dinner party. The hosts try to bring two obese people together, a plan that alienates a fat man who wonders why the hosts would assume he is attracted to fat women. All the segments are all meant to address the theme of “fathomless, inexpressible, heartbreaking loneliness,” but the dinner party segment is the only one that touched my heart.

“The Hyena” - The residents of a village go mad. Perhaps there was something in the bread.

“What’s Love Got to Do with It?” tells of a conversation an older woman has with a college student during a train ride. The student is an incel who describes with sympathy another incel who went on a killing spree at a sorority house. The incel wants to be seen but doesn’t understand that the woman only sees him for what he is. I don’t see a college virgin opening up to a woman who is likely oler than his mother about his sexual insecurities, but Boyle’s description of those insecurities seems spot on.

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