Review by Kevin Brown

Victim, Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, tells the story of Javi, a Puerto Rican living in the Bronx. He does well in school and, through a meeting with a college counselor who’s volunteering at his school, ends up at an elite college, unlike his best friend, Gio, whose life takes a different path. Through that meeting with the counselor, Javi’s life seems to follow a traditional path toward the American success story, but Javi’s means of achieving what he seeks is complicated.

As the title conveys, Javi presents himself as a victim, whether of oppression or violence or racism, embellishing the stories he writes, first for his college newspaper, then for a national magazine. On the one hand, Boryga is satirizing the cult of victimhood, the approach that argues that one should use their stories to evoke pity as a means of accomplishing some goal. However, the ideas that Javi learns in college about systemic racism and other forms of oppression are true, as readers can see in Javi and Gio’s lives.

Javi’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t struggle with real suffering; it’s that he seeks the approval of others, especially via social media, so much that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to obtain that approval. He doesn’t care about the problems he details in his writing; he only cares about himself. His audience is also partly responsible, as the more his stories follow the expected arc of racial and class progress and success, as long as they fit the narrative his audience already believes, the more successful he becomes. Boryga reminds his audience that stories are more complicated than they seem and where the problem lies isn’t as obvious as one might think.

Victim by Andrew Boryga. Doubleday, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrites

Guest Post by Eleanor J. Bader

When Irish immigrant Tom Rourke lays eyes on Polly Gillespie, sparks begin to fly. Sure, she’s the newly-arrived mail-order bride of Captain Anthony Harrington, boss of Butte, Montana’s, Anaconda mine, and he’s a poverty-stricken, drink-and-drug-loving dreamer who pens letters for the illiterate, writes ditties for the town’s many bars, and periodically assists a local photographer, but no matter. Dire circumstances–and Polly’s matrimony–aside, the two determine that destiny has brought them together in a rare love-at-first-sighting, and has left them unwilling, or perhaps unable, to question its logic.

In short order, the pair concoct a plan to head to San Francisco, a journey that requires a bit of thievery and includes both idyllic moments and horrific violence. As bounty hunters set out to return Polly to her spouse, the pair have to duck and dodge to evade capture. The result is ribald, profane, and immensely entertaining. It’s also emotionally affecting.

Although I wanted more of Polly’s pre-Montana back story, The Heart in Winter merges comedy and tragedy effectively. Moreover, while the novel is set in the late 19th century, the tale is timeless, a deeply-felt look at the mysteries of attraction and the wildly unpredictable rumblings of heart and mind.

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Doubleday, July 2024.

Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The full title of Charan Ranganath’s work, Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters, implicitly lays out his goal, as he wants to talk about how and why our brains work, not those times when we believe they don’t. It’s that belief most of us have that Ranganath wants to disprove, as he argues that our brains are designed to forget almost everything we learn or experience; they couldn’t function otherwise.

Instead, he wants readers to see that our brains work quite well when it comes to memory, once we understand why we remember what we do and, thus, how we can retain more of what we want to remember. Part of the problem, he points out, isn’t memory; it’s our lack of attention and intention. We are easily distracted, and we don’t work to remember what we say we want to recall.

He delves into how our feelings do and don’t affect our memories, and he explores how and when our memories change, but also how reliable they often are. Ranganath draws on his experience with teaching to talk about how frequently testing oneself is more beneficial than the studying (i.e., cramming) that most students (and most adults) do.

I found the chapter on openness to novelty and “the strange” to be the most interesting, as we almost always talk about memory’s effects on our past, but, throughout the book, Ranganath also makes the case that our memory shapes who we are today and who we believe we can be tomorrow. His book looks forward as much as it looks back.

Why We Remember by Charan Ranganath. Doubleday, February 2024

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

The first half of the novel James by Percival Everett follows the plot of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn fairly closely, even taking parts of scenes almost word for word. And it seems as if Everett isn’t going to go beyond a few, superficial changes: when Jim is with other enslaved people, for example, they drop their dialect, and Jim can read and write. However, when Jim and Huck encounter the Duke and King, the novel takes a different, much darker and more realistic turn.

Unlike in Twain’s novel, Jim truly suffers, both physically—as several people whip and beat him—and emotionally, such as when he sees people he cares about die. Everett doesn’t only riff on Twain’s novel, though; he also pulls from writers ranging from Ralph Ellison to a variety of slave narratives, and Jim has imaginary conversations with some Enlightenment thinkers, questioning people like John Locke and Voltaire about their hypocrisy concerning slavery.

Writing is at the center of this novel, as Jim (and Everett) is the one telling this story, not a white man through the lens of a white boy from Missouri. Everett uses the change in narration to give Jim a voice, but also a name, as he uses writing to transform himself from a sidekick into a hero, to move from being an enslaved person without agency and choice to become James, a man who makes his own decisions and lives with the consequences. Everett knows this novel is only one more story, but he also knows that the stories we tell matter.

James by Percival Everett. Doubleday, March 2024.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite