Category Archives: Fiction

Sometimes a novel is just a story; sometimes it’s more than that. Sometimes a novel captures a place and time in such a way that it takes us beyond the characters’ lives. They’re part of the time and place, artifacts of it; their stories resonate with the social, political, and cultural environment. I’m thinking about Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn; The Girls by Emma Cline; City on Fire by GarthRisk Hallberg; and Emma Straub’s Modern Lovers to name a few.

Ohio, due out in mid-August, is as much about the characters as it is about the place and time where they came to adulthood. The title signals that as well as the Hopperesque cover, which is a brilliant entrée into the dark small-town story. The Hopper reference here is no accident. Markley’s genius is to recreate a dispiriting post-9/11 world of rust belt poverty, violence, drug addiction, and ennui, all delivered with a visceral punch. In fact, it’s harder for me to write about the plot and characters–there are many–than it is to describe that social milieu. That’s the good and the not-so-good about the book. There are many characters and I sometimes had difficulty remembering the backstories of each one when they reappeared. That didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this very noirish novel, just diluted it slightly.

Four characters anchor the story–high school alumni who converge on their home town of New Canaan one night, setting in motion a whirligig of violence and redemption. As they visit old haunts they meet up with other people from their high school days and Markley fills us in on the backstory of all their loves and losses. It’s pretty grim; no one has escaped from those dark high school years unscathed. A line from Nathan Hill’s The Nix is apropos: “Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.” Markley’s characters are not just supporting characters in their friends’ lives, they’re supporting characters in a larger story about the way we live now.

Fans of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom should enjoy this one.

I was in the gym last week riding a stationary bicycle called an Expresso, which has a video screen and movable handlebars. It allows you to pick a scenic ride and steer around curves, change gears, etc. It’s something to distract you from the boring activity you’re engaged in. A way to trick the mind and body.

Last week I was also reading William Maxwell’s novel, first published in 1980, So Long, See You Tomorrow. Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker for many years and he’s a writer’s writer, a peerless prose stylist, whose writing is clarity itself and seems to have sprung forth effortlessly from a swiftly moving pen. You think about how easy he makes it look, how you could do that too! Well, probably not. But it did make me think about how the good writer is always right there with us when we read.

So let’s say that when you read a novel, you’re getting on the bicycle that the writer has constructed. You think you’re in control: you set the speed you’ll read at, turn the pages, stay on course, and you expect that when you’re done you’ve done something good for your brain. Then you realize that the author has climbed up right behind you.

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, Maxwell sets out to tell a story that has a simple plot. A teenage boy recounts how the father of a friend murdered his next door neighbor. The setting is a small town in Illinois. (I’m not giving anything away; this is how the book begins.) Maxwell goes back and forth in time so we see cause and effect. A pretty straightforward ride, yes? The first jolt is when we hear the name of the son of the murderer: Cletus Smith. Maxwell writes that it’s not his real name. Wham, he’s shaking the bicycle seat. Why, in a novel, is he telling us this? Are we riding through memoir territory? What other surprises are on the road ahead?

From that point on, Maxwell is looking over our shoulder, nudging us to turn left here, right there, varying the pacing. Like changes in the landscape, there are changes in point of view. Even the family dog weighs in. It all serves to deepen our engagement with the characters and the plot. We find ourselves thinking about issues of memory, friendship, and the human condition. We’re in his hands, getting a good workout.

The title refers to the setting of this novel in the northernmost part of Norway, in the summer, where two unlikely Americans meet at a Viking Museum. I need to back up to set the scene for this unusual, affecting story.

Francis, a young artist, has just broken up with her boyfriend, who tells her that painting is of no use to the world: “What you do doesn’t help anybody.” Other parts of Francis’s life are broken: her parents are divorcing and her younger sister Sarah is getting married to a man that her parents dislike. Everyone is unhappy. Francis has the opportunity for an internship in Lofoten, a group of islands 95 miles north of the Arctic circle and it seems like the right time to get away. She’ll be working on something called the Yellow Project.

Yasha, a young man of 17, lives with his father in Brighton Beach where they own a bakery. Their lives are broken, too. Yasha and his father Vassily immigrated from Russia 10 years ago, but Yasha’s mother never followed them and refuses to communicate with them. They both miss her terribly and after Yasha’s high school graduation they decide to return to Russia to find her. Vassily suffers a heart attack in Russia and Yasha, according to his father’s wishes, takes his body to–you guessed it–Lofoten, to bury him as he wished. In the time Yasha spends in Lofoten, he finds much more than he ever imagined–he grows up, for one thing.

The joy of reading this unusual novel is in Dinerstein’s writing, which is circular, elliptical, and utterly captivating. She manages to convey the way we think and converse–the serious and mundane things that crash about simultaneously in our heads; the emotions we can’t or won’t convey; and the feelings of loss and loneliness that we all share. The setting and supporting characters are delineated in a few quick strokes, but their voices are unique.