Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro

Published by Knopf on October 18, 2022

The broken members of two neighboring families occasionally intersect in Signal Fires. The Wilfs seemed like a typical suburban family until, in 1985, their two children went for a drive. Sarah was 17. She didn’t think she should drive after drinking three beers so she gave the keys to her brother. Theo was 15 and unlicensed. Sarah claimed she was driving after Theo crashed the car into a tree near their home. The Wilf kids were fine but the car’s third passenger appeared to be bleeding to death. Ben Wilf, their father, ran to the car and made the mistake of moving the girl, not realizing that her neck was broken. Ben is a doctor who should knew better but, because he acted in a state of panic, he lives the rest of his life with the knowledge that he might have caused serious harm.

Years later, the Wilf family has changed. Sarah is in Los Angeles with two kids of her own. She works in the film industry and supports her family because her husband, a screenwriter who is better at writing than networking, can’t get a break. Theo has gone to Patagonia to escape his tormented life. Ben suffers a panic attack when, in an emergency, he delivers a neighbor’s baby. Ben’s wife Mimi will later be placed in a care center for dementia patients. The family will reunite when Mimi wanders off the premises and disappears.

The baby Ben delivers is Waldo Shenkman. Waldo’s parents are ill-equipped for parenting. His father lives in a permanent state of rage; his mother drinks. We see less of the Shenkmans than the Wilfs as the story is told, but Waldo becomes a central character. Waldo is an exceptionally bright kid who needs to survive childhood before he will thrive.

Although the story bounces around in time, the key members of the two families come together in the novel’s third act. They are driven to each other in a moment of crisis. Families in crisis have an opportunity to change, to improve. Sometimes they recognize that opportunity; sometimes their personalities are too entrenched. Sometimes the youngest members of a family, not yet irrevocably damaged, have the most clarity. How the family members will respond is the question that readers will ponder until the story reaches its end.

“Everything is connected” is a common theme of literary fiction. All moments, all people, are connected in obvious and unrecognized ways. People are connected by living on the same planet in the same galaxy, surrounded by the same stars, but we are often connected by small events that we fail to appreciate. Connections in Signal Fire lead to surprising bonds that arise from tragic events.

The stronger theme in Signal Fires is the challenge of surviving the harm caused by a festering family secret.  Every member of the Wilf family is touched by the car accident, the lie that was told, the failure to take responsibility and the lack of legal consequence. The family pointedly buries the truth, never speaking of it, even to each other. Ben comes to believe that “they shared a terror that if they spoke of what happened that night, their words would form a complete narrative more terrible than the shattered part each of them carried alone.” Theo is the most damaged, but Sarah uses alcohol to quiet her mind and Ben loses confidence in his ability to practice medicine. Sarah learns from AA that “you are only as sick as your secrets” and realizes that she is very sick indeed. How the family will overcome its secrets is the plot driver that gives the novel its tension.

Dani Shapiro’s descriptive prose sets the scene without burying it in words. I enjoyed Waldo’s description of exploding stars and the creation of new planets from stardust. I appreciated Ben’s memories of the “bang of a truck going over a manhole cover. The feel of a paper bag filled with hot chestnuts in his hands. The gush of an open hydrant in summertime.” The recipe ingredients Theo uses in the restaurants he eventually opens made my mouth water.

While Shapiro gives the reader moments of drama, Signal Fires ultimately succeeds as a character-driven novel. Shapiro details the lives of her characters, their growth and setbacks, the disconnect between their behavior and the way they want to behave. She gives her characters room to heal, a process that requires decades and the power of honest communication. She illustrates resilience in the face of plans that, like all plans, fail to survive contact with life. She acknowledges the importance of being recognized, even by just one or two people, for who you are, not for who you are expected to be. All of that occurs without excessive exposition, without melodrama, with an honest and steady look at how connections break and mend. This is an impressive novel.

RECOMMENDED

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on October 11, 2022

After Lane left Gil, he sold his apartment in New York City, purchased a house in Phoenix that he found online, and walked to Phoenix from New York. The stroll took five months. Years later, when he returned to New York to visit the death bed of his friend Van Alsten, he told Lane about the walk. “You finally did something,” she responded.

The walk was apparently the first and last noteworthy act in Gil’s meek life. He’s a fine person in his own way, but colorless. We learn almost nothing about the walk. If Gil has any other story worth telling, the story is never told.

Gil has the kind of background that might shape an interesting person. His parents were killed by a drunk driver. He later inherited his grandparents’ ill-gotten wealth and wore the money like “a coat of shame.” He might have given the money away but for meeting and falling in love with Lane. When she disappeared from his life, she left behind a note that said, “I met someone.” That all happens before the story begins.

In Phoenix, Gil befriends Tom, the son of his neighbors (Ted and Ardis), because Tom needs a playmate and Gil is available. Gil befriends (but initially refuses to date) a surgeon named Sarah. He befriends a man who is obsessed with birds. None of these friendships have an obvious impact on Gil, who drifts through the novel with the substance of a ghost.

Gil nevertheless finds ways to fill his days. His focus is on being helpful. He volunteers for a battered women’s shelter, where his gender causes him to be viewed with suspicion. He intervenes on Tom’s behalf when Tom is bullied and later offers to help the bully. He helps the drunk driver who killed his parents. He learns that a friend is cheating on another friend but keeps the information to himself. He buys night vision goggles so he can search for someone who is shooting birds at night.

Otherwise, Gil takes note of the world he inhabits without making much effort to interact with it. He notices birds, the evolutionary descendants of dinosaurs, and learns how climate change has reduced the number of avian species. Handing out Halloween candy, he feels like a dinosaur himself.

Gil is far from interesting. When Gil wonders how he would behave if he had unrestrained freedom, he thinks he would tear down all the No Parking signs. Gil is unhappy with the direction of the country after Trump’s election and wishes the birds would help. Yes, that’s strange, but it is no less strange that someone with wealth and unlimited time on his hands cannot envision doing anything more revolutionary than removing No Parking signs. Why should a reader care about Gil? I can’t find a reason.

Gil learns another secret at the novel’s end but, like everything Gil learns, he does nothing with it. Gil is among the most passive protagonists I’ve encountered. He does manage a nonviolent confrontation with a sketchy character as the story winds down, but the momentary hint of drama merely highlights the story’s failure to manufacture tension.

The novel’s lesson seems to be that being alone can be good but being with other people is better. How Gil manages to internalize that lesson by drifting into the lives of people with whom he never fully engages is far from clear. Nor is the expression of the lesson particularly meaningful. To assure the reader gets the point — I admit I might otherwise have missed it — Lydia Millet explains that being alone is a “closed loop” but opening the loop brings the world inside you. And we’re all linked to each other by evolution and dinosaurs. And only fear and loneliness prevent us from becoming one with the world. Or something like that. I might have been yawning so much when this anticlimactic explanation arrived that I failed to bring it inside me and become one with the novel. Maybe the final observation, that we all have no beginning and no end, is a little too zen for me.

Lydia Millet’s prose is graceful. Some of her characters skate on the edge of being interesting. Those attributes save the novel from a “not recommended” rating, but Dinosaurs doesn’t earn an enthusiastic recommendation because Millet fails to deliver the wisdom that she must have intended.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Pilgrim Hawk by Glenway Wescott

First published in 1940

“The lower classes have a way of making one ashamed of one’s sex,” Alex tells her friend Alwyn, although the people who should be ashamed in The Pilgram Hawk are those who have been born to money. Alwyn Tower is vaguely embarrassed or vaguely bored or just vague as he narrates an afternoon spent visiting Alexandra Henry in her impressive home near Paris. Like Alwyn, Alex is an American. The afternoon is marked by an unexpected visit from Larry and Madeleine Cullen, a wealthy couple from Ireland.

Larry would prefer to be drinking at home, which is why Madeleine makes him travel. Madeleine is accompanied by a hawk she acquired while trotting the globe. She named the hawk Lucy. Larry detests Lucy. Larry might also detest Madeleine, although he sees her (through an alcoholic haze) as the object of his devotion, albeit an object he threatens to leave, and who threatens to leave him, during the afternoon’s course. During a moment when the women have gone off together, Larry delivers a self-indulgent lecture on love that manages to be both naïve and jaded.

Lucy is the most likable character. She wears a hood and is kept on a leash, but now and then protests captivity until Madeleine hangs the poor hawk upside down, an indignity Lucy suffers until she becomes exhausted and resumes her subjugated status. Lucy makes clear that she will never be owned, unlike Madeleine (who depends on Larry to support her frivolous lifestyle) and Larry (who would probably have no one if not for Madeleine’s willingness to tolerate him). The Cullens’ relationship has left them just as frustrated as Lucy and for similar reasons. Like all trained raptors, Lucy is trading the security of a satisfied appetite for freedom. Lucy might, at any moment, make a different choice. So it is with the Cullens.

In keeping with the themes of privilege and class, Alex has two servants (Eva and Jean) who are less stuffy than Alex and her guests. The Cullens brought along their chauffeur, a man named Ricketts who is driving them to Hungary. Ricketts provokes Jean by flirting with Eva. Larry believes the chauffeur might have behaved improperly with Madeleine but good drivers are hard to find.

The novel takes place in the 1920s, after the dust of the First World War has settled but before the Great Depression has unsettled those who are less fortunate than Alex and Alwyn. Although he is the narrator, we learn little about Alwyn beyond his occupation as a writer, nor would we be wise to believe anything he reveals. Alex is a novelist who tells the story from memory. Writers embellish and tell the truth as they see it, if at all. As Alwyn describes the Cullens throughout the afternoon, he revises his impressions of them as a writer might revise a story. Alex confesses his unreliability when he realizes that he has been reading his own meaning into events others might understand quite differently. He doubts his own judgment, a confession that invites the reader to doubt the subtle details of his narrative as well as his conclusions.

The story is subdued in tone; Alwyn’s voice is imperturbable. Larry drinks his way through the afternoon, providing a moment of tension as he approaches Lucy with nefarious intent. Another tense moment involves a confrontation in the kitchen between the servants and chauffeur. A third occurs when a gun appears. Alex and Alwyn have different perspectives on the intended use of the gun.

Glenway Wescott’s prose is elegant and precise. This is a novel of hidden power, its apparent simplicity masking its depth. The novel has drifted off the radar of most readers, but it deserves to be remembered.

RECOMMENDED

The Maze by Nelson DeMille

Published by ‎ Scribner on October 11, 2022

Some John Corey novels are nonstop action. The Maze keeps the reader waiting for action to break out. It inevitably does, albeit in a pronged scene near the novel’s end. During the wait, Corey’s snark becomes the story.

Corey is on a three-quarter disability retirement. He can’t take a law enforcement job without losing his disability — not that he could return to law enforcement without crossing all the bridges that he’s burned. Corey is wasting time at his uncle’s Long Island vacation home, idly wondering whether he should become a mercenary while keeping an eye out for an SVR hit team (or anyone else who might want to kill him). While he waits, he’s offered a job with a couple of former NYPD colleagues in a private investigation firm.

Not so coincidentally, one of Corey’s former lovers, Beth Penrose, comes back into his life and bed. She encourages Corey to take the job. When he discovers that the firm hosts parties, complete with hookers, for local politicians and cops, Corey wonders whether Beth is setting him up as a spy. Without waiting to learn the truth, he decides to go undercover and gather evidence of political and police corruption.

The Maze has a lightweight plot. Since the gunplay comes late in the story, the reader is largely left with Corey’s unspoken thoughts. The thoughts are amusing but not a substantial foundation for a thriller. While the plot eventually makes a connection to the discovery of several dead bodies, the corpses add little but background to the story. The Maze left me with the feeling that Nelson DeMille phoned this one in based on an idea that he sketched out on a napkin. At least he didn’t hand it off to his son, as he did with the previous Corey novel. I'm getting the impression that DeMille, like many successful writers, has decided he can feed thin gruel to his base and they'll lap it up.

I recommend The Maze with reservations to John Corey fans because it’s a John Corey novel. To readers who haven’t followed the series, I suggest starting with earlier, meatier entries and working your way forward. If you don’t get around to this one, the world won’t end.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD on October 4, 2022

Do you think you are smarter than an octopus? The octopus might disagree. You might be smart in the way that humans can be smart, but the octopus is smart in the way that octopi are smart. There is little basis for comparison because exploring and surviving in an underwater environment requires a different intelligence than exploring and surviving on land. All I can tell you is that, after reading The Mountain in the Sea, I might never eat octopus again. And I certainly don’t want to piss one off.

The Mountain in the Sea imagines that most of the oceans’ natural resources — in particular, their aquatic life — have been depleted. Automated fishing ships nevertheless continue to harvest as many fish as they can find. Some ships are staffed with slaves because robots that gut and freeze fish are difficult to maintain, while humans are expendable.

Con Dao, an archipelago in Vietnam, was acquired by DIANIMA, an international tech company. Con Dao has served as a tourism destination favored by divers, and as a prison destination for dissidents. DIANIMA evacuated the locals and tourists to preserve Con Dao in its natural state, although automated monks from Tibet were allowed to stand guard over their turtle sanctuary.

DIANIMA supposedly intends to protect ocean life (with armed drones that attack automated fishing ships if they come too near) but its true purpose is likely more nefarious. The world’s only advanced android (named Evrim) was developed by DIANIMA and resides in Con Dao because its existence is illegal everywhere else. Evim’s smile is “like the shadow of your own death.”

Ha Nguyen is a scientist who studies octopi in Con Dao. She wonders about the extent of their evolutionary development. Do they communicate with a form of language? Do they have writing? Have they developed a cosmology? Do they regard humans as gods or demons? Much of the novel follows Ha as she tries to communicate with octopi and to understand their (and her own) place in the universe.

The other critical branch of the novel follows Eiko, who was kidnapped into slavery after taking the wrong taxi on his way to a new job with DIANIMA. That plot thread follows a small band of captives who plot a way to defeat the artificial intelligence that runs the slave ship. Or does Eiko misunderstand the true nature of a fellow captive’s plan for freedom?

Eiko’s story gives the novel most of its action, while Ha’s is more contemplative. Yet both stories create tension as the protagonists encounter and cope with different kinds of threats. (A third subplot involving a Russian hacker named Rustem is less successful.) The elements of a thriller hold The Mountain in the Sea together, but this is less an action novel than a cerebral thought experiment that brings together natural evolution, human intervention in species development, and environmental crisis.

In addition to the difficulty of communication with nonhumans, consciousness is a theme that pervades Ha’s thoughts and the novel as a whole. What does it mean? Is Evrim conscious? What about the automated monks? Or the slave ship that threatens to starve humans to death if they stop gutting and freezing fish? Or the octopi? They all seem self-aware, but does consciousness require more than that? The automonks and Evrim have been programmed to be self-aware, but isn’t that also true of humans, who are programmed by evolution and the DNA it produces? At the same time, are we hardwired to fear any consciousness that might compete with our own?

The evolutionary development of a species of octopus that uses symbolic communication, that overcomes the short life span that is common to octopi, that raises families, protects its elders, and is cautious but curious in interactions with humans, is explained with sufficient scientific detail to give the novel credibility without bogging down the story. Chapters are separated by passages from two books (one about oceans, one about artificial intelligence) that treat the reader to interesting facts and bold opinions.

Science fiction stories that explore consciousness in artificial beings have been around for decades, as have stories about the difficulty of communicating with aliens. Stories that explore communication with non-human life on Earth are less common. The Mountain in the Sea succeeds by inviting the reader to imagine the possibility of awakening human consciousness as we connect to species that are different from humans yet similar in important ways.

RECOMMENDED