Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story by Max Marshall

Posted on September 25, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This investigative narrative of fraternity members turned drug dealers–and worse–exposes unsavory aspects of college life.

Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story is Max Marshall’s investigation into the series of arrests and criminal charges related to fraternities at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the individuals involved. A press conference during the College of Charleston’s 2016 summer break caught the attention of Marshall, a journalist, recent college graduate, and fraternity member himself. Mug shot photos showed five fraternity members and three friends. “They looked like guys who put in time at the gym, and maybe at the beach, and definitely at the putting green,” Marshall writes. These eight young men were accused of selling a variety of controlled substances, including Xanax, which, as police chief Greg Mullen put it, seemed to be “a drug of choice right now.” According to authorities, this case was also related to the recent murder of another fraternity member. Intrigued, Marshall follows the story of those eight arrests and the changing cultural identity of Greek organizations in the United States.

Among the Bros focuses on Mikey Schmidt, a Kappa Alpha, to whom Marshall spoke via a series of contraband cell phones as Mikey served 10 years without parole. Age 21 at the time of his arrest, Mikey is one of the flashiest characters in the story Marshall unearths, and he receives the most serious sentence of the group. He and his best friend, Rob Liljeberg III (also a Kappa Alpha), form the backbone of Marshall’s reporting. They put human faces on an investigation into the intersection of Greek life, drug dealing, and criminal activity by a particularly privileged and overwhelmingly white male demographic.

Over the course of four years, Marshall consulted police files, court transcripts, and other documents, and conducted more than 180 interviews with 124 sources. The narrative he presents is sad, deeply disquieting, and often sordid. The fraternity members he interviews all deny using date-rape drugs but allow that others around them do. He meets with one fraternity alumnus who describes mixing gin, Mountain Dew, Xanax, and cocaine–and then tries to sell Marshall his financial planning service. “When I asked an SAE [Sigma Alpha Epsilon] what his friends did the weekend after the Mother Emmanuel killings, he said, ‘Things just aren’t going to stop…. As insensitive as it sounds, it’s still Friday.'” The portrait these anecdotes paint is not flattering, but Marshall remains compassionate, sympathizing with the pull of belonging, and the promise of like-minded friends.

Among the Bros finishes without moral lessons or final conclusions, instead aiming to clearly report events that will disturb most readers. Combining excellent journalism and deftly paced storytelling, this chilling tale lifts a veil on a decadent and troubling lifestyle.

This review originally ran in the September 8, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 brand names I had to look up.

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Julia by Sandra Newman

Posted on September 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia

This feminist retelling of Orwell’s 1984 brings the original’s philosophies, wit, and horror to modern readers with a strikingly reinvented protagonist.

Julia returns the timelessly relevant world of 1984 to readers’ attentions with a female protagonist more clever and feeling, and perhaps more cynical, than George Orwell’s Winston Smith ever was.

Sandra Newman’s retelling matches closely Orwell’s familiar and disquieting original. Big Brother is the leader of the nation of Oceania, at war with Eastasia (or was it Eurasia?). Telescreens squawking nonstop propaganda constantly observe every move of the Citizens of Airstrip One, formerly London. Where Orwell offered Julia as colleague, lover, and co-conspirator to his antihero, Winston Smith, here Julia Worthing gets a backstory.

She grew up in Semi-Autonomous Zone 5, previously Kent; had her first affair with a Party member at the age of 14; and won a Hero of the Socialist Family badge for denouncing her mother (a more complex story than it immediately sounds). As an adult, Julia works in the Ministry of Truth’s Fiction Department as a mechanic, repairing and maintaining the machines that design plots for the mind-controlling entertainment of the masses. “She was perpetually fascinated by the plot machinery,” Newman writes, but “about the books that were the end result, she knew little and cared less.”

Julia lives a straightforward, self-serving life, outwardly obedient to Party regulations and a member of the Junior Anti-Sex League, but is secretly involved in a number of minor sexual affairs, trading in black-market goods for the simple pleasures of real chocolate. Though fond of Winston in some ways, she has no illusions about the possibilities their narrow world allows them and lives mostly at peace within her limits. Newman’s version does not differ from Orwell’s in these particulars, but it does expand Julia considerably, and appealingly, as a character increasingly wrestling with not only the contradictions between lived experience and the Party’s narrative but also questions of right and wrong. “Anything was possible when one was never told the truth.”

Newman (The Country of Ice Cream Star) offers a tragic and harrowing story in lovely, evocative prose, revealing all the ugliness and beautiful possibility of a world hopelessly scarred by hate and manipulation and yet, somehow, still capable of hope. Julia is double-, triple-, and quadruple-crossed: “All was false. It was known to be false, but everyone lied about the lies, until no one knew where the lies began and ended.” Electrically memorable, Julia is as startling and incendiary as 1984 ever was, with dark humor and pathos commenting on perennially timely questions.

This review originally ran in the August 31, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 questions.

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Silent City by Sarah Davis-Goff

Posted on September 15, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this darkly atmospheric novel set in a futuristic Dublin, a young woman fights for justice in an oppressive society ruled by fear during a zombie-like apocalypse.

Sarah Davis-Goff’s Silent City centers on a young woman faced with impossible choices in a post-apocalyptic version of Dublin. “To me, banshees are heroes. I saw images of banshees growing up at home on the island, women dressed in black, warriors. The ones who fight the skrake. HERE TO PROTECT, the grimy posters said.” Orpen was raised by her two mothers on an island devoid of other humans and, crucially, of skrake: monsters that bite, infect, and kill. The skrake “takes up your body and uses it like a puppet. Fast, vicious, strong, with long sharp teeth, the skrake is like a child’s bad dream.” Following the death of her mothers, Orpen ventures into a world she knows nothing about. She is bent on survival in this terrifying landscape of zombie-like beasts.

In the dystopian city that was once Dublin, she becomes a banshee, a member of the entirely female troops of paramilitary security forces ostensibly meant to protect, but actually used by “management” (entirely male, sinister, self-serving) to forage for supplies and keep other lowly citizens in check. Wallers work night and day, repairing and rebuilding the city’s walls against the skrake; the roles of farmers and breeders are equally humble. Banshees work in pairs: Orpen has found a surreal closeness and loyalty with her partner: “I never saw a woman who wasn’t sometimes beautiful, but Agata always is.”

The zombie apocalypse represents a possibly overdone subgenre, but Davis-Goff (Last Ones Left Alive) takes her readers into fresh territory here. Orpen’s struggles are not merely survivalist; raised with only two human companions and little context for other relationships, she must learn to chart new loyalties, friendships, and partnerships against existential questions of right and wrong. The city claims to provide protection and sustenance but, in fact, uses the banshees to commit atrocities and to exercise control over a subdued population, frightened into total silence lest they excite the skrake. Orpen and the women she serves alongside–all guilty of cruelties under orders–must balance loyalty against justice. “Those who can still feel for another, we feel it. I have to believe we do. I have to believe there are enough of us to change the world.”

Silent City is grim but hopeful, tackling questions of risk, trust, courage, morality, and sacrifice. Davis-Goff’s prose is stark but lovely. A strong feminist voice, austere circumstances, and a resolute sense of integrity make this dystopia memorable and inspiring.

This review originally ran in the August 25, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dreams.

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Mudflowers by Aley Waterman

Posted on September 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this reflective debut, young artists in Toronto form a love triangle with both transcendent and painful results for all.

Aley Waterman’s sensitive first novel, Mudflowers, follows a young woman exploring intimacy, biological and built families, and art. A love triangle twists and reshapes itself, with both trauma and revelation. “I wanted so badly to love in a good way,” says Sophie, the protagonist and narrator, 27 years old and a Newfoundland native who recently moved to Toronto, where she lives with a misogynistic writer and her best friend since childhood. He is a beautiful man named Alex who is also her on-and-off lover. Sophie sees Maggie reading her poetry at an event and is immediately swept away. Maggie is talented and enigmatic, “with big eyes full of wide highways.” The two become close friends and, sometimes, lovers.

Sophie creates glass mosaics for wealthy patrons, Maggie writes, and Alex works on indie films. They are young artists scraping together livings in a big city, taking drugs amid art events and the bar scene. They slide frankly and openly in and out of sexual relationships. Sophie obsesses over her mother’s death. Alex’s mother left when he was 12, their parallel losses an unspoken understanding. The addition of Maggie to their close relationship, forming a trio, acts as a magnetic force that both imbalances and strengthens the bond. Secrets surface, and the balance shifts again.

Mudflowers follows Sophie to an artist colony at a castle in France and eventually home to Newfoundland. Place is important to this thoughtful protagonist, who is given to contorted philosophic musings. Newfoundland is “the only place I had been to where there is enough space and isolation and distance from the world for people to really be themselves without even thinking about what that meant.” Earlier, she notes that “in cities so many lives are wildly proximate to each other, just divided by a wall here or a door there, but each wall determined some sort of fate, keeping us organized and away from one another.” She wonders: “What if the people who should be most important in life were just separated by a wall, and what if that wall meant those people never met!” Sophie has met the people most important to her, but keeping them together will be another feat.

Sophie’s physical travels are dwarfed by the scale of her cerebral and emotional movements, as she tortuously navigates desire and fear. She is preoccupied with art, how to love, and purposeful attention. “[W]as it how beauty was directed or how it was received that was most important?” she ponders. “How are you supposed to be a real person when you’re also supposed to be the woman inside of someone else’s mind?” She also often considers mothers and their absences: “Maybe we all need more mothers than we have,” she thinks. “Maybe we all need as many mothers as we can get.” Mudflowers is thought-provoking, expansive, and raw.

This review originally ran in the August 22, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 birds.

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The Last Language by Jennifer duBois

Posted on September 4, 2023 by pagesofjulia

A Harvard-trained linguist enters into an intimate relationship with a nonverbal man in this riveting riddle of a novel.

The Last Language by Jennifer duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes; Cartwheel; The Spectators) is an utterly compelling puzzle of linguistics, perspective, and some version of love. Angela is 27 years old when her husband dies suddenly; she is four months pregnant (a pregnancy she will lose, “because of the stress, possibly”) and has a four-year-old daughter. Just months later, she is kicked out of her Ph.D. program in linguistics at Harvard, following a nasty exchange with her “intellectual rival and personal archnemesis.” With her daughter, Angela moves in with her mother and takes a low-paying job running an experimental therapy for “facilitated communication” to help nonspeaking patients with motor impairments. This questionable opportunity will have profound consequences. Readers gradually become aware that Angela is writing her first-person narrative while incarcerated. She tells of her love affair with a young man who can communicate only through Angela herself. Or, if readers do not believe her account, she has taken egregious advantage of a seriously disabled man.

Angela’s background in linguistics gives her a complex, many-layered perspective on Sam O’Keefe’s ability to communicate and even to think: “if thinking was language, the linguistic determinist would argue, then there was nothing to discover within people who didn’t have it already.” Despite early reservations, she is quickly taken with Sam’s sardonic humor, the life behind his startling eyes, his wit and intelligence–at least according to her account. Angela is very smart and has a thoroughly expert grasp of languages and linguistic theory; she knows what this looks like, but she knows her love for Sam, and his for her, is real. Readers must decide for themselves. This question is at the deeply intriguing heart of The Last Language. Is Angela a deluded predator or among the most misunderstood lovers of all time? DuBois’s choice to give readers only her perspective on this story is critical to the contortions of this gripping psychological drama.

Angela is ardent. She makes poor decisions, but her love is pure. She sprinkles her narrative with linguistic trivia and philosophic musings: she anticipates the arguments of the prosecution in her case and those of the linguistic scholars who would say “a person cannot conceive of what he cannot name.” She writes to Sam, who will never read her account: “In a very real sense, there was no you.” Together, she and Sam read Nabokov: Pale Fire rather than Lolita, but the parallels present themselves. Backed by Angela’s academic scholarship and the philosophy of what constitutes humanity, The Last Language is a smart intellectual riddle and a mystery with the highest of stakes. Readers will find it unforgettable.

This review originally ran in the August 14, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 angles.

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A Fine Line: Searching for Balance Among Mountains by Graham Zimmerman

Posted on August 28, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Alpine climber Graham Zimmerman’s memoir, dense with lessons learned and offered, recounts how he sought balance between his sport and the other elements of life.

Graham Zimmerman felt strongly about climbing from his earliest experiences growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and by age 25 was an avid and accomplished international alpinist with his dreams focused on nothing else. But injury, loss, climate change, and a yearning for connection have forced him to consider how to combine his love for alpine ascents with social and environmental pursuits. A Fine Line: Searching for Balance Among Mountains is his thoughtful story of climbing communities in broader context, and his philosophies for a life well lived.

Not yet 40 at its writing, Zimmerman acknowledges “this is not a complete work,” calling his book “a signpost along the way.” It is still dense with lessons learned and offered, however. At just over 200 pages, A Fine Line reads quickly, many of its action sequences adrenaline-filled as Zimmerman recounts climbs with varying levels of success. It is also a neatly organized memoir, with the tensions between climbing and everything else appearing early. Following a major award, he experiences a significant fall, injury, and lengthy recovery, emphasizing the dangerous nature of his passion and his financial insecurity. The women he attempts to date react poorly to months-long absences on risky expeditions. Frequently climbing at high altitudes amid shrinking glaciers also alerts Zimmerman (trained in geology and glaciology) to the impacts of human-caused climate change. And the young alpinist wrestles with loss, as numerous fellow climbers–his friends–die in the mountains. A mentor cites what he calls the “100-year plan”: to make decisions that will set one up to live to be 100. “I was 26 and only occasionally thought about turning 30, let alone ticking over into triple digits,” Zimmerman reflects. “Do I have a death wish…? No, just a case of severe myopia.” This plan, and meeting the fellow athlete whom he would marry, reset the narrator’s views on risk. Over time he comes to focus on being not just a better climber, but a smarter, safer one: “It hadn’t been more time in the mountains that had set me up for success; rather, it was a stable relationship and being surrounded by positive influences.”

As its subtitle forecasts, A Fine Line is about finding balance between an extreme sport in remote natural settings and “actual life in the lower regions.” As a crafted work of memoir, the book mirrors that achievement with its own balance between gorgeously written adrenaline rushes and philosophic reflections about intentional living, healthy relationships, athletic ambition, and service to human communities and the natural world. Obviously for fans of extreme outdoor sports, Zimmerman’s debut is also recommended for readers seeking wisdom and balance in any pursuit.

This review originally ran in the August 4, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pitches.

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The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage by Philippe Sands

Posted on August 21, 2023 by pagesofjulia

The 2018 freeing of an Indian Ocean archipelago from British colonial rule is both a complex case of international law and a stirring tale of injustice and homecoming.

In The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage, Philippe Sands combines a moving story of human tragedy and injustice with the complexities of international law to great effect.

The Chagos Archipelago is a little-known collection of islands in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius, colonized over centuries by the Portuguese, Dutch, and French before becoming a British colony as part of Mauritius. In 1973, the British forcibly removed its longtime residents, ostensibly to make way for a United States military base on a single island. Residents for generations, in many cases descended from enslaved coconut oil workers, were deported en masse with no notice, forced to leave behind their homes, memories, pets, and any possessions that didn’t fit in a single small trunk. Among them was Liseby Elysé, recently married, 20 years old, and four months pregnant. Decades later, in 2018, Madame Elysé would be present for the decision of the International Court of Justice in The Hague that would allow her to return to her home island, for which she’d yearned all those years. Her testimony would be an important part of that case.

Sands (East West Street; The Ratline) was part of the legal team representing Mauritius in its bid to free the Chagos from British control. With decades of international law experience and an intimate knowledge of many of the judges and lawyers involved, Sands brings authoritative expertise to this subject matter; as an actor in the case at hand, he acknowledges his personal perspective, including an admiration of Madame Elysé and other Chagossian activists. Madame Elysé cannot read or write, but in Sands’s recounting she is a natural storyteller, has an excellent memory, and speaks eloquently and unwaveringly of her strong feelings for her home. This sense of place and feeling of loss for her homeland, even nearly 50 years after leaving, strikes a common chord of human connection to the place from whence one came.

With a lawyer’s careful research and methodical laying out of the facts, Sands rewinds to 1945 and Ralph Bunche’s work on decolonization at the founding of the United Nations; briefly reviews Chagossian history over centuries; and then zooms into the finer points of international law on separation of colonies after World War II. The Last Colony is both a neat work of detailed legal points and history, and a deeply felt narrative about the injustice of deportation and the dwindling number of Chagossians with strong ties to their homeland. Madame Elysé is an impressive, courageous figure and emblem, putting a human face on colonialism’s continuing wrongs, both for the International Court and this book. There is much to appreciate about this little-known story in Sands’s sensitive telling.

This review originally ran in the August 1, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 dogs.

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People Collide by Isle McElroy

Posted on August 18, 2023 by pagesofjulia

In this smart, absorbing, thought-provoking novel, a husband and wife mysteriously swap bodies and experience widely varying impressions and reactions.

Isle McElroy (The Atmospherians) takes readers on a mind-bending journey of gender exploration and body politics with People Collide. Much of the novel is told from the perspective of Eli Harding, an American man living in Bulgaria with his wife, Elizabeth, a highly accomplished writer with a prestigious teaching fellowship. Eli is also a writer, but less successful–at everything–than his impressive spouse. In the novel’s opening pages, he discovers that he has woken up in Elizabeth’s body. Elizabeth herself has disappeared.

Eli first hides away in the couple’s apartment, waiting for Elizabeth–whom he assumes now occupies his body–to return, or for this mysterious “Incident” (as he thinks of it) to right itself. When he ventures out, he dresses Elizabeth’s body, applies makeup, and decides that she was right: a male friend was condescending to her all this time. Then both Eli’s mother and Elizabeth’s parents push for action: he is sent to Paris by his own mother (who believes he is Elizabeth) to search for her vanished son. He finds his wife–indeed, in his own body–and the surreality intensifies.

People Collide comments on gender and the roles that the larger world expects from people who present as men and as women. Elizabeth is an ambitious, dominant, talented, driven, no-nonsense individual; Eli is a hardworking writer but has mostly made his living as a restaurant server. He’s followed her to Bulgaria for her more prestigious work. They do not disagree that she is his superior: “‘I’m smarter than you, I’m kinder than you, I’m more talented and better looking. And you benefit from all of that. It’s exhausting. And I want to benefit. Things should be easy for me.’ It didn’t hurt to hear her say those things. I felt the same way.” Eli’s well-muscled body is six inches taller than Elizabeth’s, and she carries it “with a graceful confidence that I had never shown in my life.” He used to walk too quickly for her, which she found “frustrating and selfish.” In her body, he notes: “I never slowed down for her. Not until now, when I had no other choice.”

Beyond the gender binary and the public’s assumptions based upon appearances, McElroy’s insightful novel also examines class, privilege, the art world, and family relationships. Elizabeth’s parents are smugly satisfied with their money, connections, and community in a small, liberal, artsy town in Michigan; they look down upon Eli’s thrice-divorced mother. Everyone judges Eli harshly for abandoning his wife–an irony, because it was, in fact, Elizabeth who did the abandoning, in his body.

People Collide is sly, clever, funny, provocative, and compelling. It offers a world and a story to get lost in.

This review originally ran in the July 28, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 steps.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Tim O’Brien

Posted on August 14, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Following Friday’s review of America Fantastica, here’s Tim O’Brien: Route 66 Meets MAGA America.

Tim O’Brien is the author of the novels Going After Cacciato; The Things They Carried; In the Lake of the Woods; and others, as well as memoirs including If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He has won the National Book Award for Fiction, the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. O’Brien has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His eighth novel, America Fantastica, a wild ride through a paranoid nation, will be published by Mariner Books on October 24, 2023.

What brought you back to writing a novel after more than 20 years?

Tim O’Brien
(photo: Tad O’Brien)

The character of Angie Bing. She came into my head, I don’t know, 20 years ago, as did the antihero, Boyd. I tried to push them away for a long time. They just kept yapping at me. Put me in a book! Especially Angie. It was that voice inside my head for all those years that convinced me to at least try. And it was fun. I enjoyed her.

I was pretty determined not to ever write another novel. It’s hard work and often frustrating, all the things that go with a 400-something page book. Five years of my life. I was a little reluctant to do it, but once I started, I got a kind of perverse pleasure out of it.

America Fantastica contains so many characters, events, places. How do you stay organized?

The organizational tool is my head. It’s nothing much beyond that. Occasionally I would lose chronology, but then I simply go back and reread and rediscover.

The novel switches voices among many of those characters. How fun or difficult is that?

It was a great pleasure, going from voice to voice. There are some pretty nasty people in the book–most of them, in fact–and it was fun being nasty. I see it around me so much. It was a sort of Jonathan Swift/Mark Twain fun, curmudgeonly. You call a bank or an airline and they’ll have that message on: “Our phone lines are unusually busy; please hold.” They’re not unusually busy. They’re usually busy. In fact, they’re always busy. Things like that were fun to strike back at.

Do you have a favorite character?

No. Characters, probably for all writers, are like your own children. You don’t pick them. They’re very different. I don’t approve of most of the characters in this book, but I don’t approve of most of the people I see on CNN and Fox, either.

This work of fiction is centered on the lying or fictionalizing of its characters.

It’s been a theme that’s gone through my entire work and probably my entire life, going way back even to my childhood. I grew up in a small town and spent a lot of my time in my own head, imagining I was not in this godawful place. That followed me to Vietnam and has followed me through adulthood. It’s astonishing the things that we witness that seem almost impossible, incredible, especially during the Trump years. How can this be happening in a country I really had loved as a kid? It seemed as if I were living in a fairy tale that couldn’t be true, and yet seemed true. And so all of my work has to do with this blend of our imaginations and the realities we see around us. This book probably is the most blunt about it. Boyd seemed to represent for me what I’m witnessing socially, culturally, and politically in this country, a kind of shameless lying or deceit. I wanted to have as a foil someone who was pretty certain about the world–Angie has a kind of religious certainty about the world. The tug of war between them was fascinating.

Angie came first?

They came together. I imagined her originally as a bank teller, and then almost instantly I imagined Boyd as a small-town entrepreneur (later a JCPenney manager), and within 20 minutes or so I had him robbing that bank as the novel begins. Robbing it essentially for entertainment, as a way of making himself move out of his lethargy and do something in the world. When he invited her along, or made her come along, a kind of Route 66 theme dominated, and it stayed throughout the entire book. It’s sort of a Route 66 meets MAGA America kind of book.

I knew it would be set during those years. They were the years that I was living through, with my mouth agape as I watched the television set. It seemed appropriate to have a character who was a shameless liar and had been his entire life, and to find out why. Why do people do this sort of thing? There’s a quote at the beginning of the book by Yeats: “We had fed the heart on fantasies, / The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” That’s what I saw happening around me, that sort of fantasy: of a lost election being a winning election, for example. I wanted a hero who was part of the conspiracy world, coming up with these bizarre fantasies about the world and apparently believing in them, repeating them enough to believe in them.

By having such a human being as one of the two main characters in the book I felt I was trying to get into what made people do these sorts of things. For my hero, Boyd, it goes back to his childhood, as we learn late in the book. He began, even as a kid, living in a fantasy world as a way of escaping the world he was in. It can have terrible consequences, and did for him: a broken marriage, a lost career. But on the other hand, fantasy keeps us going. The fantasy that tomorrow will be better than today. Maybe fantasy isn’t the word, but the hope or the dream that things will improve for all of us. I’ll win the lottery, I’ll have a great time in Yellowstone, I’ll meet the girl of my dreams or the boy of my dreams. I think we need fantasy. So there’s that tug of war, when what we need can have terrible consequences. That will always fascinate me, and has since I was a kid.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on my golf game.

Nothing. I’d been working on this book all the way through page proofs and so on; it still feels like in my head I’m working on it.

Are you one of those writers who’s never done, even when it’s printed and published?

I am. I’ve made changes in The Things They Carried; In the Lake of the Woods; [Going After] Cacciato. I slip them in when they print a paperback edition. Most of them minor and none of them noticed, except by scholars. I did have a letter from a high school English teacher once who disputed my changes.

This interview originally ran on July 27, 2023 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: America Fantastica by Tim O’Brien

Posted on August 11, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on July 27, 2023.

Set against the backdrop of an unnamed but recognizable American presidency, Tim O’Brien’s black comedy, America Fantastica, takes both the dark and the comic to epic proportions with simultaneous absurdism and poignancy. O’Brien (The Things They Carried; If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home) here offers his first novel in more than 20 years–a sprawling, madcap tale of road trips, crimes large and small, love, loss, and, most of all, lying. Like The Things They Carried, America Fantastica revels in detail and highly specific lists, so that the world it portrays feels robust and brimming.

Its opening lines set the tone, far-reaching and grandiose: “The contagion was as old as Africa, older than Babylon, wafting from century to century upon sunlight and moonbeams and the vibrations of wagging tongues. During the second decade of the twenty-first century, the contagion alighted in Fulda, California, riding aboard the bytes of a MacBook Air…. Reinvigorated by repeated utterance, fertilized by outrage, mythomania claimed its earliest victims among chat room patrons–the disappointed, the defeated, the disrespected, and the genetically suspicious…. The disease spread northward into Oregon, eastward into Idaho, arriving on Pennsylvania Avenue in January of 2017.”

Readers first meet O’Brien’s antihero in action. “On an afternoon in late August of the year 2019, after locking up the JCPenney store on South Spruce Street, Boyd Halverson strode out to his car, started the engine, sat without moving for several minutes, then blinked and wiped his eyes and resolved to make changes in his life. He had grown sick and tired of synthetics, rayon in particular.” He departs his Kiwanis brunch early to head to the bank, where he presents a gun and leaves with just under $81,000 and the teller, “a diminutive redhead named Angie Bing.” She is technically kidnapped, but Boyd will repeatedly try and fail to ditch her over the coming months. His name is not really Boyd Halverson and his entire résumé is a fiction. He had in fact been married, had a child, had an impressive career as a foreign correspondent and nearly won a Pulitzer Prize. But that life was built on lies, culminating when “at last he collided with the sudden, brutal, and well-earned catastrophe he’d been patiently anticipating for decades.”

Boyd and Angie hit the road, seeking first Boyd’s ex-wife, Evelyn, and then her father, Dooney, against whom Boyd holds a significant grudge. Their travels prompt movements by an increasingly colorful cast of bizarre characters. Dooney and his partner Calvin flee the possibly murderous Boyd from Port Aransas, Tex., to Bemidji, Minn., and onward. Randy, Angie’s boyfriend, an almost-laughably amoral electrician/rodeo cowboy/burglar, tracks Angie from Santa Rosalía, Mexico, to Santa Monica, Calif., and beyond. Along the way, he meets two ex-cons at a diner in Los Angeles who latch onto his interest in an unreported bank robbery. These characters set the tone of a novel dealing equally in ludicrous comedy, political commentary, and pathos. They will be joined in O’Brien’s imaginative, wide-ranging tale by a violent, egomaniacal CFO; a bank president and his wife, both with a gift and passion for fraud; a racist cop; an Amazonian CrossFit gym owner and amateur detective; a small-town sex worker with either an excellent act or multiple personalities. Events range from disturbing to ridiculous, often simultaneously, as when Boyd gets his toes broken with a monkey wrench by an unlikely pair of sidekicks. These characters and events, in a series of deftly drawn American locales, form a fantasmagoria, a version of reality that both bizarrely exaggerates and digs directly into the emotional truth of the real world.

O’Brien opens with a Yeats epigraph: “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/ The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” His novel speaks of a nation that craves delusion and deception; O’Brien’s profile of the 2019 United States is savage, blending satire and realism. “Off with their heads! Climatologists? Chemists? Off with their tongues! Who needs reality when you have Venom? Who needs history when you can manufacture your own?” Is it plausible that Boyd, an esteemed investigative journalist, exposed as a liar, might in turn expose larger wrongs than his own?

America Fantastica showcases a broad emotional range, as Boyd Halverson (aka Otis Birdsong, aka Junior, et al.) turns out to harbor some very real trauma amid a fabricated personal history, and at least one complex personal relationship. It is a story chock-full of lies or fictions, a theme O’Brien has explored in earlier works as well. “[Boyd] had fervently believed every word, every unearned moment of an unlived life. Yes, he was a Princeton graduate. Yes, he had distinguished himself in the Hindu Kush, scaled Mount McKinley, survived brain cancer, scored near-perfect on his SATs. But so what? Why risk failure when a fib was always conveniently at hand?” By the novel’s end, readers will have learned–more or less, as far as we can tell–the “real” truth. This feels in some respects like a hopeful conclusion. But the truth itself is more grim than hopeful, which is perhaps the most realistic–truthful–possibility.

As in the earlier works for which he has long been recognized, O’Brien here demonstrates an electric combination of deadpan humor, vicious wit, and a masterful eye for detail in capturing a peculiarly American form of torment.

Rating: 7 wiggles.

Come back Monday for my interview with O’Brien.

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