Guest Post by Colm McKenna

Bonsai, Alejandro Zambra’s first novel feels like it is over before it has even begun. I read it this morning over two coffees. By the time I finished it, I had eight, largely monosyllabic notes scrawled across the front-end paper; more often than not, my comments will spill over onto the half-title page. That is not to say that there is little noteworthy in Zambra’s book. Moreso, it is indicative of a well-crafted, engrossing story, a story in which narrative takes absolute precedent.

I find myself falling into Zambra’s stories without the teething problems that even the most ardent reader sometimes confronts in the opening few pages of a book. There is a mediopassive effect to Zambra’s prose. I think this ease stems from his self-contained, self-referential narratives; we are made to know from the off that we need only dedicate our attention to once-lovers Julio and Emilia, and that the periphery characters exist here only insofar as they reveal our protagonists. Those others could be fleshed out; they all have their favorite books, their ambitions, and secrets; they all go on dates and fall in love, but these details are not of any concern to the story being told. The narrative itself stands over the world like something tangible; when characters move on from Julio and Emilia, they move away from the story that is being told. In this self-contained narrative, this distance is equivalent to dropping out of the world.

Bonsai: A Novel by Alejandro Zambra; translated by Megan McDowell. Penguin Books, August 2022.

Reviewer bio: Colm McKenna is a second-hand bookseller based in Paris. He has published and self-published an array of short stories and articles, hoping to eventually release a collection of stories. He is mainly interested in the works of John Cowper Powys, Claude Houghton, and a range of Latin American writers.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

In Disorientation, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s first novel, Ingrid Wang is in the eighth year of her doctoral work, and she is largely ignoring her dissertation on Xiao-Wen Chou, a canonical Chinese American poet. She is almost thirty, engaged to be married, and her department chair has hinted that she could take over his position if she can simply finish her degree. Her life appears to be going well, but Chou makes it clear in her novel that appearances are never what they seem. Ingrid makes a discovery that leads her into an existential crisis where she has to face her identity as a Taiwanese American in the very white Northeast, her engagement to Stephen—who translated a Japanese author’s autofiction, even though he doesn’t speak Japanese—and who she hopes to become. Chou satirizes a variety of topics in her novel—academia, identity politics, the far right, the debate over free speech and what some call cancel culture—and, at times, that satire can simultaneously feel too broad and too spot on; however, her notes at the end of the novel remind readers that everything in her work has too much basis in the world for us to ignore her critiques and questions.

Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou. Penguin, March 2022.

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 or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

I was expecting Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book to bring back vivid memories from the decade I spent in college and graduate school; what I wasn’t expecting was how Klosterman would present the decade’s events, culture, and people differently than I remembered them. Klosterman covers what most readers would expect: the elections—ranging from Ross Perot’s role in 1992 to the Supreme Court’s role in 2000—the rise of the internet; the music that changed the decade, whether Nirvana or Tupac; the stereotypes and reality of Generation X; the video store’s impact on movie making; the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet empire; major news events, such as the Anita Hill accusations, the Columbine shooting, and the O.J. Simpson trial. Where Klosterman shines, though, is in repositioning what he discusses, asking questions about why nineteen percent of the country voted for Ross Perot (full disclosure: I was one of those, and, yes, I regretted it within a year), how the nineties were more about the potential of the Internet than the Internet itself, and how George H.W. Bush lost the 1992 election after having the highest approval rating in history the year before. Rather than a walk through nostalgia, Klosterman helps redefine how we should view the nineties.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman. Penguin Books, January 2023.

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 or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Cindy Dale

A six-hour Amtrak ride from NYC to Syracuse loomed. Searching for something to read, I came across Dana Spiotta’s Wayward, a novel that, surprisingly, takes place in Syracuse. I downloaded the sample on my Kindle, vowing to save the balance of the book for the train if I liked it. But once I started down the rabbit hole with 52-year-old protagonist Sam Raymond, I couldn’t stop. Sam’s having a midlife crisis and impulsively buys a fixer-upper in a sketchy Syracuse neighborhood and announces she’s leaving her husband. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Ally, sides with dad. But this is not your typical midlife crisis novel! Set just after the 2016 election that upset so many apple carts, we follow Sam as he buys the ramshackle house, joins a radical feminist group, witnesses a cop shoot a young black boy at 3 a.m., does a disastrous night of stand-up at a local comedy club, and grapples with the impending death of her mother from cancer and the daughter who’s no longer speaking to her. Throughout, the history of Syracuse (the city L.M. Baum modeled Oz after!), the backstory about the suffragette icons of the late 1800s, and the etymology of a plethora of SAT words are seamlessly woven into the narrative. There are so many unexpected twists and thought-provoking riffs on getting old and the meaning of life in our wacked, wired world.

Wayward by Dana Spiotta. Penguin Random House, June 2022.

Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.

Guest Post by Cindy Dale

Take heart would be novelists who are not twenty-something! One of the best debut novels I’ve read this year is Bonnie Garmin’s Lessons in Chemistry. Garmin is 64 and proof positive that it’s never too late! Set in the early 1960s, back when women were still expected to marry, stay home, and raise the kids, the novel follows heroine chemist Elizabeth Zott as she faces prejudice and discrimination head-on. This is not a rah-rah sisterhood woman’s rights novel, however. It’s a nuanced, very witty, thought-provoking novel on life and all its ups and downs. Elizabeth encounters plenty of both. She meets her soul mate, Nobel-nominated fellow chemist Calvin Evans, at a second-tier lab. When he dies suddenly, Elizabeth is left, (unbeknownst to her at the time) pregnant with their daughter, Mad. Calvin’s death results in Elizabeth’s ungracious firing at the lab after which she serendipitously falls into hosting a TV show called Supper at Six. Stubborn and unwilling to play the happy homemaker, Elizabeth turns the show into a chemistry lesson of sorts, infusing the show with lots of lessons on life. Oh, and perhaps the best character of all: Six-thirty, the family’s very smart and loyal rescue dog!

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmin. Penguin Random House, April 2022.

Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.

If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.