BOOKS Newly Released Books Edan Lepucki’s ‘California,’ Alberto Moravia’s ‘Agostino,’ and More By JOHN WILLIAMSJULY 30, 2014 THE NEW YORK TIMES CALIFORNIA By Edan Lepucki 393 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $26. Post-apocalyptic novels remain stubbornly fashionable, and Edan Lepucki’s “California” hits all the familiar notes. Cal and Frida are a couple living in the wilderness after fleeing a Los Angeles in ruins. We’re told vaguely of severe weather events, of the time “before the earthquakes” and “before the Internet became a privilege for the very few.” The likely culprits of society’s collapse are global warming, economic disparity — maybe fracking. It’s left to our imagination. Cal and Frida eventually reunite with Micah, Frida’s radicalized brother, who is tyrannically running a fortified commune that has banned children. One character, seeking crucial back story from another, pleads, “Just hurry and tell me now.” The response: “You can’t make me rush a story like that.” Rushing the story is the opposite of Ms. Lepucki’s problem. A world in tatters should raise the stakes, but in slowly doling out details about a small group of desperate family and friends, “California” is more like a tempest in a teapot. HIGH AS THE HORSES’ BRIDLES By Scott Cheshire 304 pages. Henry Holt and Company. $26. This novel, Scott Cheshire’s first, begins in Queens in 1980, when Josiah Laudermilk, a 12-year-old with a fervently religious father, is moved to address a congregation and predicts the end of the world and the return of Jesus at the turn of the millennium. It ends with a jarring but deeply imagined scene about a tent revival in Kentucky in 1801. Stretched between these potent bookends is a more conventional story about Josiah, who had lost his faith and moved to California, but returns to Queens in 2005 to care for his ailing father. “I ran from his insistence I was special,” Josiah says, “from his compulsive and overwhelming need to believe.” In scenes like a conversation between a skeptical Josiah and two young Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mr. Cheshire skillfully writes about the burdens and silver linings offered by faith and other inheritances. MOTOR CITY BURNING By Bill Morris 321 pages. Pegasus Books. $24.95. Bill Morris’s new crime novel is set in the spring of 1968, just after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and nearly one year after a riot tore through Detroit. Willie Bledsoe is a former civil rights activist, disillusioned with the cause (“He had given up on King years ago”) and struggling to write a memoir about his time on the front lines. He’s also rightly concerned about his vague role in a murder during the turmoil of the previous summer. The book’s other main character, a cop named Frank Doyle, is closing in on answers. The Tigers’s pursuit of a World Series title and the songs of Motown provide the ambience. Some of the characters’ epiphanies about race and justice come too easy, but switching between Bledsoe and Doyle’s perspectives allows for a crackling pace, and Mr. Morris clearly loves the nooks and crannies of his hometown the way George Pelecanos loves Washington. MARINE PARK By Mark Chiusano 197 pages. Penguin Books. $15. The stories in Mark Chiusano’s debut collection all have links to Marine Park, a part of southern Brooklyn far removed from the gentrifying hordes. A few characters reappear throughout these tales: of shoveling snow, learning to drive and teenage love. The stories range from the present day to the middle of the last century, when locals “talked about the Dodgers, always the Dodgers, as if they would get to heaven through them.” Several firmly rooted in the community’s quiet routines feel competent but slim. Those that range more widely, either thematically or geographically — including one about a retiree who gets into trouble running a shady errand and another set in Los Alamos, N.M., during the Manhattan Project — showcase Mr. Chiusano’s more formidable talents. It will be worth watching what he does when he leaves the neighborhood. AGOSTINO By Alberto Moravia Translated by Michael F. Moore 111 pages. New York Review Books Classics. $14. Alberto Moravia’s short novel about a 13-year-old boy suffering through the “turmoil of his infatuation” with his widowed mother, “a big and beautiful woman still in her prime,” has been translated into English for the first time since 1947. (Written in 1942, it was first published in Italy in 1944.) During a summer vacation, Agostino wants to outgrow this strong attraction, even as he luxuriates in it. (His “pleasure in the beauty of the sea and the sky was related, he felt, mainly to the profound intimacy of his relations with his mother.”) He repeatedly seeks out the “brutal and humiliating company” of a group of boys. Their teasing hardens Agostino against his mother and himself. “He couldn’t say why he wanted so much to stop loving his mother, why he hated her love.” But his maturation only leads to more knotted thoughts about affection and sensuality. “What was the use of seeing things clearly,” he wonders, “if the only thing clarity brought was a new and deeper darkness?” THE LAST LOVER By Can Xue Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen 320 pages. Yale University Press. $16. Check your need for sense at the door. “The Last Lover,” the avant-garde writer Can Xue’s second novel to be translated into English, is set in a fictional Western country, but it might as well be Jupiter. She writes of someone, “His appearance was a little eccentric: a large specimen of a spider was stuck to his forehead.” The characters include Joe, a sales manager with “a profound feeling” that life had been “transformed into a dreamland,” and Reagan, a rubber tree plantation owner who “realized that little by little he was losing his mind.” In seeking love they and others move between fantasy and reality in a way David Lynch would appreciate. (“Reagan really was in the dining room, but at the same time he was upstairs in the bedroom.”) Not for all tastes, but fans of the surreal who want to make their own mental pictures will find a surfeit of raw material here.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 05:48:47 +0000