Tottenville Review

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding would make the perfect graduation present. That’s not to imply that one will necessarily outgrow this novel, only that it is preoccupied with the sort of questions most of us first grapple with in early adulthood. What are my ambitions? Who are my friends? What counts as success? The charm of this novel is that it approaches these concerns as earnestly as its college-aged characters do, but without the same angst. To put it another way, The Art of Fielding lacks pretension. With its short sentences, short chapters, and simple themes, The Art of Fielding is a novel unafraid to use what one character describes as, “those big little words: love, work, art.” Continue reading "Notable Debut of the Year: The Art of Fielding"…

Big Book, Small Package

I like a mammoth tome as much as anyone, but it’s short works—stories, parables, letters, journal entries, and aphorisms—that I return to again and again. So when I first picked up Joseph Salvatore’s debut story collection, To Assume a Pleasing Shape, I was a happy man: only 121 pages! In the end, however, I found myself having to immediately read all 121 pages again, but not because they were a breeze, rather because Salvatore’s writing is the kind that invites re-reading, and freely dipping in here and there. This kind of writing is rare. Continue reading "To Assume a Pleasing Shape"…

Reading a novel on the subway is such a tease; novels are for plane trips, for the Metro-North to Connecticut. But a collection of short stories—now there’s a form that facilitates brief dips into an alternate reality. You finish the story and get off the train, and the real world seems both slightly duller for not being as expertly crafted, and slightly brighter, your senses newly sharpened from your literary travels. At least that’s the idea—the ideal.

Patricia Engel’s debut collection, Vida, is not quite the ideal, but it’s good for a week’s worth of commuting. Her stories are linked by the persistence of a central character, Sabina, who speaks in the first person in all but one of the stories (“Green,” narrated, inexplicably, in the second person). Sabina’s parents are from Columbia, but she was born in suburban New Jersey, “in the one town that only kept [Latinos] as maids,” where “all the mothers were doughier versions of their husbands.” The family is financially well-off, and Sabina’s mother is marked as an outsider as much for her designer outfits as for her dark skin and thick accent.
Continue reading "A Commuter Collection"…

Every season, it seems, those in the know—the literary powers that be—send out a subtle decree telling readers which novels to love, which ones to buy, which ones are written by The Next Big Thing: aka The Geniuses. It is a subtle decree, sent down from on high, that’s harder to ignore for not knowing exactly who it came from. It would be too much to attach nefarious designs to the regularity of, every year, the arrival of new, not unattractive literary geniuses, their debut novels (that often follow a quiet, but precocious collection of stories) in tow, to be reviewed and reviewed and reviewed. Such is the case with Karen Russell and her novel Swamplandia!. It’s hard to ignore the uniform swooning that surrounds this book, and if I could write a good review based solely on envy (not just of the attention, but of Russell’s ample talent), I certainly would.

Continue reading "Fantasy Island"…

Much of the French novel The Last Brother takes place in a tropical forest—a forest so fetid, overgrown, and unpredictable that it becomes a character in its own right. The forest’s constant presence gives The Last Brother the air of a fairy tale, a mood well suited to its child protagonist, who must navigate one of the darkest corners of history with little help from the adult world.
Continue reading "Lost Boys"…

Considering having kids?  Feeling ambivalent about it?  Be warned that Sarah Braunstein’s debut novel, The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, is a powerful reminder of just how fraught parent-child relationships can be.  Set in the northeast from 1980 through the 1990s, the interconnected scenes and stories that compose this interesting book showcase children who both willfully (running away, acting out, taking sides in divorce) and unintentionally (wandering off, getting lost, being abducted) cause their parents no end of grief.  Of course, their parents cause them grief, too.  And yet these children, strong-willed and resourceful, face even tragedies such as orphan-hood and kidnapping with impressive aplomb. Continue reading "The Kids are Alright"…

In The Staying Freight, the first story in VOLT, Alan Heathcock’s debut collection, a farmer accidentally drives a tractor over his young son, killing him. Numbed by grief, he leaves his despairing wife and walks off into the forest. From there, Freight requires we suspend our disbelief, while we ask for greater faith in our human ability to do extraordinary and strange things—often quietly. (If a tree falls in the woods and nobody’s around to hear it…this tone moves through all the stories.) The farmer’s walk becomes a months-long exodus from his old life, his human life. His hair grows, his nails grow, he loses his ability to speak; he becomes feral. Through this transformation, he gives himself over to something greater. He plunges into the unfeeling, amoral subconscious of nature itself.

Continue reading "Stop Over in a Quiet Town"…

Téa Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, draws on unexpected strengths. Like her heroine, a young doctor named Natalia, Obreht seems possessed of a supple courage. She is not afraid to grasp big topics: the war in Yugoslavia, religious, cultural, and national divisions, the conflict between old and new ways of seeing the world, the ties of family and the undoing of families. Most of all, this is a book unafraid to deal head-on with the challenge of writing about death, who is less a theme than an off stage character. In the heavier hands of another writer, these topics would be deadening. But Obreht’s fragility does not just come from the little things and the sense of felt experiences that make her scenes real and tender, like the tiles on the floor of a bathroom abandoned during the war, smashed up so that the goats kept there by passing soldiers won’t slip; it also comes from a more unexpected support. Continue reading "The Twist in the Tiger’s Tail"…

The current unrest in the Arab world underscores a long-held political truism—it is often the youth who form the vanguard of revolutionary movements. Driven by an abundance of idealism and energy, the young can topple regimes, or as is often the case, destroy their lives trying to do so. But what happens when the youth grow old, when their wide-eyed idealism is corroded by the patina of painful failure and murdered dreams? In his novella, The Shadow of What We Were, Luis Sepulveda addresses this issue with an uncommon combination of delicacy, humor, and sobriety. The end result is a delight.
Continue reading "Aged in Revolt"…

As I write this review the world waits to see how the initially successful revolutions in Egypt will play out. Will this once great nation become the beacon of a free and modern Arab civilization or will it succumb to the forces of the primitive and barbaric Islam that is causing so much destruction in the modern world? Continue reading "Don’t Dig No Pakistanis"…