Aquarium by David Vann

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on March 3, 2015

Aquarium is one of the most intense novels I've ever read. It isn't about fish, but it is, to the extent that fish teach us about people. In part, Aquarium is a coming of age story, the story of a girl named Caitlin who discovers her own identity and comes to accept harsh truths about her mother Sheri.

Aquarium is also about the possibility of change. The waspfish lives fifty feet underwater where light barely penetrates. Rise a few feet and the waspfish might experience a small change "as something enormous." So too might people who step outside the "narrow range" in which they live their lives. You cannot change the past, but it might be possible to change how your react to the past. Sheri hates her father but her father has changed. Can Sheri?

At 32, Caitlin Thompson looks back to the time when, at age 12, she visited an aquarium in Seattle every day after school before walking home. She likes the way the fish are protected from predators, unlike the real world, where people face all the risks of fish in the ocean. Every day, Caitlin runs into an old man at the aquarium who makes a point of talking to her. The encounters appear to be innocent but the situation is ominous. Is he a lonely old man or a child molester?

The leafy seadragon does nothing but hide. As the story progresses, Caitlin keeps parts of her life hidden but can't imagine living that way. "There has to be more than just hiding," the old man tells Caitlin, but hiding keeps the leafy seadragon safe. Caitlin values safety, enjoys being home with her mother even when Sheri is so wrapped up in her new boyfriend that Caitlin becomes invisible to her. Sheri is scraping by on the salary she earns unloading containers from cargo ships. The aquarium is her after-school babysitter. Sheri used to take Caitlin to work during overtime shifts until a customs inspector threatened to call social services. Caitlin's greatest fear is not of the old man but of social workers taking her away from her mother, particularly after the police correctly suspect that Sheri slapped her.

What Caitlin sees of adult life is unbearably sad. People are trapped by their lives. Sheri resents working a job "that meant nothing and would lead nowhere." Hatred inspired by the father who abandoned her to a hellacious existence consumes Sheri's memories. Sheri has good reason to feel angry but she is so consumed that she pollutes Caitlin with her rage and resentment. When Sheri lets the past control her, even Caitlin's home does not feel safe. The reader cringes at some of Sheri's behavior with Caitlin, but it is hard to blame Sheri for being the person she has become. At the same time, it is easy to be concerned about Caitlin. Many of the adults in the novel feel like they are living lives filled with dents that can never be repaired; they are Caitlin's role models.

I won't discuss what happens in Aquarium beyond the setup. The powerful story moves in unanticipated directions. Sensitive readers might find it too disturbing. It is often raw and painful, the kind of story that makes the reader want to scream at a character to make her understand how wrong she is. David Vann is able to spark that reaction by creating characters that are utterly convincing. Aquarium is not a sunny story of forgiveness, but it is a realistic story of redemption that reflects both the difficulty and the possibility of change.

Even if you do not read this extraordinary book, you should page through it to look at the pictures of fish. They are just as gorgeous as Vann's elegant prose.

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Mr. Tall by Tony Earley

Published by Little, Brown and Company on August 26, 2014

Generally set in Appalachia (primarily in Tennessee and North Carolina), the stories collected in Mr. Tall are surprising, funny, and moving. Protagonists have rich personalities while eccentric background characters contribute to the sense of realism that each story (except the last) conveys.

My favorite in the collection, "Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands," is a sly domestic drama. Daryl is no longer tolerant of his wife and doesn't understand why his sweet clingy daughter, now in college, is no longer sweet or clingy. I particularly enjoyed Daryl's contemplation of his marital duties: "Find me a Hardee's. Find me a room. Stay with me until I die. It was all the same thing, really." Daryl's wife, on the other hand, makes it clear during the couple's weekend away that her first husband was infinitely superior to Daryl. The story is both an amusing and a biting look at a marriage gone sour that invites an obvious question: How do couples stay together when the only glue that binds them is mutual animosity? The answer turns out to be unexpectedly practical.

"Mr. Tall" is a wit-driven story about a young woman who bears the guilt of abandoning her family when she allows the only boy who ever chased her to catch her. Her introduction to marriage, sex, mules, and hillbilly living is hilarious. Even funnier is her adventure with her neighbor, Mr. Tall, although the humor is ultimately overtaken by an intense scene that explains why Mr. Tall is a recluse.

The background characters in "The Cryptozoologist" are a fugitive who bombed an abortion clinic and a skunk ape (a version of Bigfoot) but the protagonist is a woman who only begins to understand her husband years after he dies. The poignant story illuminates the importance of appreciating one's life partner as a unique person, rather than appreciating a shared lifestyle.

"Yard Art" is an achingly heartfelt story about the importance of the ordinary -- because what is ordinary to everyone else can be extraordinary to one person. "Have You Seen the Stolen Girl," a good story that is nevertheless weaker than the others, tells of an aging woman's reaction to news that a girl disappeared on her block.

"Just Married" consists of four compact descriptions of aging, sometimes damaged people who are or once were married, and of the memories they carry of their younger lives. The last of the four ties the first three together, neatly and sweetly.

The final story is quite different from the others. The Jack in "Jack and the Mad Dog" is the Appalachian version of the once-famed Giant Killer, but his best days are behind him. He fears he has come to the end of his final story, "his mind free from the embarrassment of exposition, the regret of flashback, the dread of foreshadow." He's in pretty much the same boat (albeit a magic boat) as his rival, Tom Dooley, who also lacks cultural currency. After so many stories mired in self-indulgence with no regard for the farmer's daughters who surround him, can Jack develop a new narrative? The story is a contemplation of the slow death of Appalachian storytelling and a reminder of the power stories have to teach us about life (and death). We are, after all, characters in our own stories, just like Jack ... at least until the book is closed.

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Far As the Eye Can See by Robert Bausch

Published by Bloomsbury USA on November 4, 2014

Far As the Eye Can See is in many respects an old-fashioned western informed by a modern sensibility. It is the story of a decent man living in a time and place that challenges decency. It is the story of a man who finds himself by helping others. It is sad, funny, exciting, and redemptive. This is one of the best westerns I've encountered and one of my favorite reads of 2014.

Bobby Hale (the most recent of many names he has adopted) made it through the Civil War knowing that if he died, nobody would give a lick. With a desire to roam and no desire to work, he hooks up with a wagon train, befriends an Indian named Big Tree, and takes up the life of a hunter and trapper. The story follows Hale on his wander through the West from 1869. His ambition is to live free, enjoy the empty spaces, and avoid death as long as he can. It turns out that life is not so simple.

Hale eventually takes a job as a guide for the Army, which is intent on solving the "Indian problem" -- although as Hale sees it, the problem is with the Army, not the Indians. He also befriends two women who are crossing the country in a wagon pulled by an ox, determined to reach Oregon. All of this (and a good deal more) occupies the first two-thirds of this eventful novel.

The prolog takes place in 1876, when Hale mistakenly shoots a teenage girl called Ink who is running away from her husband. The last third of the novel begins at that point. It leads to one of the most harrowing parts of a life that has been "one long everlasting war." Hale would like to make a different life but the west, and thus his life, is defined by violence. Yet that is not the only definition of life and change, Hale discovers, can come about in unexpected ways.

"There's a million ways to die out here," a character tells Hale, and that's the sense that the novel conveys. Isolated men in the wilderness die by mistake and by design. They die from disease, from bullets, from animal bites, from arrows. Hale is a frequent witness to the death that nature imposes without moral judgment. He also sees death imposed by man: Indians killing whites (usually in defense of their lives or liberty), Army troops slaughtering Indians, lone travelers robbed and hung from trees. He witnesses countless deaths at Little Bighorn. He causes a fair amount of death himself, usually with regret but always with the (sometimes mistaken) belief that he is doing the right thing. There are times when he feels "like ain't nothing under my skin but air, and I can't get enough of that to keep on living."

Robert Bausch writes the first-person narration in an uneducated voice that draws upon nature and experience for its eloquence. It is difficult to make that kind of a voice seem authentic rather than hokey, but Bausch manages the task with great skill. He softens the drama with humor and paints an unbroken landscape that stretches as far as the eye can see, but the novel's power comes from its descriptions of death and survival, humanity and inhumanity.

Hale experiences something like love on more than one occasion as the novel progresses, an emotion that surprises him with its intensity and that he nurtures as an antidote to all the harsh memories that haunt his dreams. At the same time, he can't quite decide what it is he wants (or needs). "It's a tragic kind of world we find ourselves in," he thinks, "all the time looking for some way to have what we want, hoping for nothing but a reason to hope." We make choices based on what we think we want, sometimes without appreciating what we have. Hale wonders if the things we want and for which we hope all just lies that we tell to help us cope with hardship of living. The question for Hale, and for the reader, is whether we can recognize something in life that is worth cherishing, something that makes us more than "a savage animal that can talk."

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The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

Published by The Dial Press on June 10, 2014

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers features wonderfully eccentric characters, but this character-driven novel has the added virtue of telling a multi-layered story that combines humor with intrigue while exploring the mysteries that come from knowing (and depending upon) other people. The characters have, to varying degrees, invented their lives and hidden their pasts, or settled on histories that suit them in the moment, sometimes because they do not know the full truth, other times because they want to conceal it.

In 2011, when the novel opens, Tooley Zylberberg has settled down, having purchased a small used bookshop in a small Welch village. It is a quirky shop, the sort that every booklover wants to find, but it earns no income, forcing Tooley to pay her sole employee, Fogg, from her meager savings. Although she is marching toward insolvency, Tooley keeps the place because it makes her feel rooted after living a rootless life. She avoids friendships because friendships require a past ("your past only mattered if others sought to know it") and she would prefer not to have one. Or so she tries to tell herself until an urgent Facebook message sends her flying across the ocean to meet someone in New York, only to cross it again to visit another person from her past in Italy. Her travels prompt her to reinterpret her life and to develop new understandings of the friends who were once part of it.

We learn about Tooley's past (as she understood it at the time) when the novel begins to jump to earlier decades. In 1999, at the age of 20, Tooley's exploration of New York City leads her to a law student named Duncan McGrory. He becomes the new presence in her life, an addition to her current traveling companions: an elderly man with a Russian accent named Humphrey who blames his misfortune on "the Moron Problem" and an affable itinerant Canadian con artist named Venn.

The novel's third time frame begins in 1988 as Tooley leaves Australia and travels to Bangkok with Paul, a contractor who installs modems in small American embassies. There she encounters flighty Sarah, who afterwards continues to drift in and out of her life. The significance of Tooley's time with Paul and Sarah only becomes clear in the novel's last half. In fact, it is only in the closing chapters that Tooley puts the pieces together and begins to understand her life from a new perspective.

The novel's fragmented structure allows intrigue to build as the reader watches and anticipates the reconstruction of Tooley's life. By emphasizing the relative nature of time, the novel suggests that memory is a form of time travel and raises the possibility that we change the past whenever we visit it. In a related passage that I loved, the novel argues that readers keep their books because they contain our past, "the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect."

Apart from its thoughts about time and memory, The Rise & Fall is largely about the fictions that people make of their lives and the difficulty of piercing the fictions of others. As Humphrey says: "Nothing, not even dictionaries, can tell you what anything means. The reality of things is just sad, for the most part." And if reality is sad, inventing a happier version of your life is a way to cope. Yet when memories, in their retelling, "chip loose from the events themselves," detaching the present from the reality of the past, isolation can be the consequence of dishonesty. And while it may be impossible to penetrate the fictions of others, the novel wisely suggests that the key to understanding people lies is accepting "that to be surprised or disappointed or even betrayed [is] not a catastrophe." All of that is nutritious fruit to chew upon.

The opinionated characters in The Rise & Fall cover vast ground in their amusing conversations, from political systems to the myth of meritocracy, from the benefits of having faith in human beings to the advantages of living apart from them, from the perils to the joy of nonconformity. Some chats are silly, others are profound, all contribute to the eager turning of pages. Graceful prose, unpredictable characters, startling humor and rich insights into human nature make The Rise & Fall of Great Powers a true pleasure to read.

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Sandrine's Case by Thomas H. Cook

Published by Mysterious Press on August 6, 2013

There are few novelists of intrigue I admire as much as Thomas Cook. Whether he's writing a spy story, a crime novel, or a courtroom drama, his approach is unconventional. Tension derives not from action but from the intense probing of his characters' lives. In Sandrine's Case, Cook uses a criminal trial to reveal not just the facts underlying a death, but the mind and soul of the accused, an unfeeling man who (his wife once said) is composed of scar tissue.

Sam Madison, an English professor at a liberal arts college in a small Georgia town, had a terrible argument with his wife Sandrine, a history professor at the same institution. He is accused of killing her and of attempting to disguise the murder as suicide. The evidence against him is circumstantial: a "sinister research history" on his computer; his role in obtaining the Demoral that killed her; the antihistamines in Sandrine's blood; a broken cup; a parody Sam wrote of noir fiction; "a silence when I should have spoken, a question I should have asked but hadn't." Sandrine had recently been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease, a condition that (according to the prosecutor) furnished Sam's motive: it was easier to kill than to face years serving as a caretaker, feeding and bathing his helpless wife. Sam fears that the jurors will despise him because he is an intellectual living a privileged life, but the most damning evidence against him are the words Sandrine spoke to her friends about Sam's detached, isolated nature. Sam is, according to Sandrine, a sociopath (or so she said in the last words she spoke to him), and he knows his "cold perhaps even haughty demeanor" is not playing well with the jury. He has good reason to fear that the trial has become a referendum on his marriage, that he will be punished for being a distant, uncaring husband.

The ultimate mystery in Sandrine's Case is not what Sam did or did not do, but whether Sam is correct in certain suspicions he begins to harbor about Sandrine. Since Sandrine's Case is told in the first person from Sam's perspective, it obviously isn't a whodunit. Sam feels enormous guilt, but for much of the novel his precise role in Sandrine's death is unclear. Was he possessed, after twenty years of sharing a home with his wife and daughter, to murder Sandrine, despite his belief that "no man had ever been loved by a more worthy woman"? As Sam slowly disintegrates -- thinking about the testimony of the witnesses at his trial, reliving the police interrogations, recalling (in bits and pieces) his life with Sandrine -- he begins, perhaps for the first time, to understand himself, to come to terms with his deep sense of failure, a judgment he "put on everyone else," particularly Sandrine, because he feared to judge himself. The testimony of witnesses teaches Sam what Sandrine really thought of him, and seeing himself through Sandrine's eyes is a revelatory experience.

Sam describes Sandrine's academic writing as "graceful and carefully measured," a description that applies equally to Cook's prose. Sam, who laments "what a low culture we have now," has never read a crime novel (unless you count Crime and Punishment or other works of literary genius). If he were to do so, Sandrine's Case would be a good place to start. Cook's insight into his characters and his elegant prose are undeniably the stuff of quality literature, yet he (unlike Sam, whose failed novel became more academic with each rewrite) never fails to tell a compelling story. There might be more courtroom theatrics in a Grisham novel, but there is more bare honesty, more heart, in Sandrine's Case than you'll find in a dozen Grishams. It is a strangely redemptive, life-affirming story about death, a decidedly different take on courtroom fiction, but in its own quiet way, a small masterpiece.

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