Monthly Archives: February 2021

A few years ago I read Davies’ novel The Fortunes and knew that I had found a brilliant writer to follow. In four unconnected chronological sections, Davies told the history of the Chinese in America with the most poignant stories imaginable. It was a tour de force of making the historical, personal in the vein of Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and The Woman Warrior.

In his new and very different novel, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, Davies tells a universal but very twenty-first century story. A young couple make the difficult decision to abort a baby who may have major congenital difficulties. It’s a wrenching decision that haunts their lives but may have driven them closer together. They go on to conceive a second child who turns out to have developmental difficulties but not the kind that show up in tests during pregnancy. The child may well be autistic; a doctor describes him as “2e,” doubly exceptional: brilliant and difficult. The possibility of an autism diagnosis hangs over the parents, but they put off the certainty that could come with testing. What difference would it make? They are doing their best to love and nurture their difficult child as he is.

I read this short book in two sittings, unable to put it down for long, not because of the plot, of which there is very little, but because the writing is perfectly attuned to the parents’ feelings. The father narrates and we never learn his name, his wife’s name, or their son’s name. The book consists mostly of dialogue between the husband and wife along with the husband’s thoughts. The reader sees the son only from a distance, watches how his life affects his parents. It’s a beautiful, moving novel about chance and choices. The paradox of Schrodinger’s cat enters the text several times, emphasizing the random and contingent nature of our lives, the way not-knowing shapes us.

Just before I read the book I listened to an interview with Davies on the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing. As I expected, Davies’ insights into the novel and its conception were enlightening. He talked about how the narrator is haunted by uncertainty and how the many white spaces in the book were designed to provide space for readers to enter the page with their own uncertainties and thoughts about chance. It’s a thoughtful and gripping novel.

I’m sure you can tell that I’ve been reading more escapist novels than usual in this strange winter of our isolation. Southern noir certainly fills the bill.

Echoes of The Great Gatsby haunt The Fortunate Ones, a story of moral decay among the moneyed classes in Nashville, TN. Charlie Boykin, brought up on the wrong side of the tracks by a beautiful but feckless mother, unexpectedly receives a scholarship to a prestigious private school. Charismatic student Archer Creigh is assigned to him as a mentor and much to Charlie’s mystification and delight, he and Arch become close friends. Suddenly his life expectations are changed and with Arch at his side he’s admitted to Nashville’s upper crust. Arch introduces Charlie to the glamorous Baltom family and when Charlie’s mother is hired as Mrs. Baltom’s assistant and they move into the garage apartment, everything seems just perfect. Charlie has a crush on Vanessa Baltom although he knows that she’s in love with Arch. Everyone’s in love with Arch Creigh–he’s the golden boy. 

The story is told by Charlie as a flashback; he’s our Nick Carraway guide to this privileged but morally bankrupt world. As Charlie matures into early adulthood his idealization of Arch and the Baltom family undergoes several revisions, but it’s not until Arch runs for Mayor and then Senator, that Charlie sees how his own life has been manipulated. 

There’s lots of plot here and well delineated characters that make it all, told in a haunting tone of wistfulness, nostalgia, and regret. I found myself thinking of Ethan Canin’s wonderful novel America, America, another story of a young man drawn into the orbit of a wealthy political family for better or for worse.  

This mystery is #6 in a series featuring the retired New York police detective Dave Gurney. I haven’t read the earlier titles in the series but now that I’ve enjoyed this one so much, I’ll go back and try the others in order.

White River Burning takes place in upstate New York in the present day. It’s the one-year anniversary of the fatal shooting of a Black motorist by a white policeman. The policeman was cleared of guilt. During a demonstration in town led by the Black Defense Alliance a policeman is shot.  More killings, some quite gruesome, add fuel to the literal flames and the town is featured on RAM-TV, a right-wing national news show. This ups the ante for the police; the crimes must be solved quickly before White River is the focus of any more negative national attention and more violence occurs. 

After the first killing, the District Attorney calls on Gurney to help him out. It’s a messy situation, with ambitious, belligerent cops jockeying for position and pushing their own version of events. Gurney senses something’s wrong–the evidence gathered is thin in some spots and too thick in others. As an outsider, how much can he push back?  The police wish he’d stop picking holes in their tidy case. But Gurney’s too much of a problem solver to leave it alone, despite the tension his involvement raises with his wife Madeleine, who wishes he’d just find a quiet hobby. 

It’s easy to see why Gurney was hailed as a hero before he retired; he’s analytical and persistent. So is the author, John Verdon. The plot is so timely and realistic it will have you thinking of the current state of race relations in the U.S. Kirkus Reviews said: “It’s easy to see why this series is so popular, blending as it does the hard-boiled social observations of noir fiction with the inscrutable pleasures of classic ‘whodunit’ puzzle-solving.” That just about nails it.