Categories
Historical Fiction

CURIOUS TOYS by Elizabeth Hand

I’m not a big fan of serial killer novels, but some books transcend the genre–Thomas Harris’s RED DRAGON, for example, or BIRDMAN and THE TREATMENT by Mo Hayder. To that list add CURIOUS TOYS by Elizabeth Hand, published late last year (2019).

This is historical fiction of the first water, set in the summer of 1915 at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park and brought to life with a heady potion of sensory detail, slang, historical context, and sheer bravado that reminded me of Sarah Waters. The relentless August heat, the constant recorded screams from the Hell Gate ride, the miasma of scorched cotton candy and spilled beer, all twist the reader’s nerves to a painful pitch before the action even gets underway.

This is not the musical STATE FAIR, with apple pies and prize pigs and fun for the entire family. This is more NIGHTMARE ALLEY, with the two-faced She-Male, a gruesome film adaptation of Dante’s INFERNO, illicit sex on the dark rides, hashish cigarettes, French postcards, and a fake fortune teller. The main protagonist, 14-year-old Pin, has been masquerading as a boy all summer, relieved to be free from a gender assignment she’s always hated, but equally afraid of being found out.

Pin is not alone in grappling with forbidden physical desires; other tormented characters include a scenario writer for the booming Chicago movie industry, the serial killer himself, and the diminutive, obsessive Henry Darger. Darger is only one of several historical figures in CURIOUS TOYS, but he is clearly one of Hand’s own obsessions. In real life, Darger would go on to become an outsider artist and writer of international reputation. In the novel he functions as a sort of eccentric detective–emphasis on “eccentric”–in a bravura move that would seem a stretch for another writer, but that Hand pulls off elegantly, even movingly.

As she has proved before, most notably in the brilliant GENERATION LOSS, Hand can write the sort of suspense that takes over your life for the duration of the book, and do it with clean, elegant prose. CURIOUS TOYS ups the ante with the sort of thematic echoes that are the province of literature. Various dolls throughout the book connect with each other, and various beholders confuse them with real women, pointing to a kind of universal darkness in the male psyche. Darger’s obsession with little girls closely mirrors that of the killer, as Pin, at the end, mirrors the killer’s victims. The dovetailing of the movie business with the amusement park carries serious weight, as characters repeatedly choose illusion over reality: the killer in his carefully posed photos, the police in their frequent leaps to false conclusions, even, in a positive spin, Pin’s refusal of the trap of her birth gender.

CURIOUS TOYS is a dark ride that throws long shadows.

Categories
Contemporary Novels

AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones

Celestial and Roy have been married for 18 months when Roy is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to 12 years in prison. It’s a scenario that could happen to anyone in the US, but we all know it’s more likely to happen if you’re black, which Roy happens to be. This undercurrent of racism is all the more distressing because the characters take it so completely for granted (“You don’t have to tell me that,” one of them says. “I’ve been black all my life.”). Yet the political concerns never overwhelm the entirely human stories of the three people who live in the heart of the book: Roy, Celestial, and her lifelong best friend Andre.

The novel begins on the night of the arrest, switches to epistolary mode to quickly cover five years of Roy’s imprisonment, and then takes us moment by moment through the subsequent climactic events. The first-person voices of the three main characters are distinct and compelling–Roy’s gentle but not limitless sense of humor, Celestial’s intensity, Andre’s righteous solidity. (I could have done with fewer TV references, but that’s just me.) All three of them instantly won my sympathy, powerfully enough to stay with them when they each made bad decisions later on. There are plenty of secrets to go around, and a crowd of colorful supporting characters, all of them vivid and believable.

The novel is gripping and funny and sad, but it also tackles big questions head on. What are the various kinds of love and how do you tell them apart? Where does loyalty to yourself begin and loyalty to others end? How much of the burden of injustice must each of us take on? Nothing in AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE is easy, especially the answers to these questions.

The book was a huge critical and commercial success, and deservedly so. It’s got a ripped-from-the-headlines issue, riveting suspense, and timeless human emotions.

Categories
Contemporary Novels

COME WITH ME by Helen Schulman

COME WITH ME is a novel about the “many-worlds” interpretation of Quantum Mechanics that was originally proposed by physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950s. This is the idea that every decision we make splits off an alternate reality–in other words, all possibilities exist simultaneously, each in its own parallel universe.

What’s remarkable is that Helen Schulman has explored these ideas in a completely mainstream novel that is set in the present-day consensus reality of one disintegrating family. Amy is living the humiliation of working for her college roommate’s 19-year-old son at a start-up tech company. But she’s got to keep the money coming in; her journalist husband, Dan, is melting down because he can’t find a job, and they have three kids to raise. Jack, the oldest, is completely obsessed with his long-distance girlfriend. His twin younger brothers (with the Seussian nicknames “Thing 1” and “Thing 2”) have their own problems. Theo is being bullied and Miles spends every possible moment playing Magic: The Gathering.

It quickly becomes apparent that all the characters are either living in alternate worlds (Jack is on FaceTime 24/7; a trans woman, Maryam, has had her body surgically altered to match her true gender) or contemplating life-disrupting changes, either in the past (Amy’s miscarriage) or future (Dan’s growing obsession with Maryam). Along the way we get highly relevant side trips into virtual reality programming, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, teen suicide, and much more.

I confess that I did not approach the novel with my left brain, tracking all the correspondences. The characters are too sympathetic and richly drawn, the writing too hypnotic. Instead I enjoyed it like a piece of music, listening to the echoes everywhere, like guitars drenched in reverb. The repeated invitations from one character to another to “come with me.” The many turning points, the roads not taken, the piling up of consequences.

In the end, Schulman herself backs away from a strict scientific interpretation, and instead follows her heart, choosing to believe that some things are, after all, meant to be. And I’m glad I came with her.