Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle

(Doubleday)

 Amazon

The Gargoyle is a brutal story about a man terribly disfigured in a car crash, burned to an almost unrecognizable crisp following an alcohol and cocaine binge. Incongruously, it’s also about timeless love.

The nameless narrator may have been burned beyond recognition, but Maryanne Engel knows him. They’ve never met before, at least that he can remember, but she finds him in his recovery room and helps nurse him back to health through endless skin grafting, morphine doses, and physical therapy.

Maryanne is many things—an artist, a sculptor, a storyteller, a fantastic cook, and a tattooed schizophrenic. As Maryanne helps the narrator overcome his inclinations toward suicide and substance abuse, she gradually fills him in on their past romances. Davidson’s story mixes violence in the present with destruction in the past, conveying the intense connection that Maryanne feels about the man she perceives as her soulmate.

At times jarring, at times hopeless, at times saturated with a sense of inevitability, Maryanne’s stories are captivating and the narrator finds himself thoroughly dependent on her. Until, inevitably, the tables are turned and the narrator finds he must take care of Maryanne, trying everything he can think of to pull her out of her own spiral toward self-destruction. Davidson’s debut novel is a riveting page-turner. I’m hoping he’s hard at work on something equally fascinating.

—Lara Killian

Willy Vlautin

Northline

(Faber and Faber; US: 25 Dec 2008)

 Amazon

Las Vegas can be a scary place to live, sort of like Bakersfield except with continuous sunshine and slot machines in every corner market.

William Anderson, chief economist for the state of Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation noted on Friday, 18 September 2009, that the jobless rate in the Nevada area continued at a record-breaking pace in August with unemployment in the gaming and construction industries topping out at 13.4 percent.

The jobless rate in the Reno, Nevada area is at 12.4 percent, however. Why the discrepancy between north and south? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Las Vegas Sun explains:

Anderson said, “There are certainly a number of factors accounting for the high unemployment rate in Southern Nevada compared to the north.”

The Las Vegas area “is more concentrated in those industries or sectors which have been impacted the most by the current recession,” he said. “For instance, as of August, 8.7 percent of all jobs in Southern Nevada were in the hard-hit construction sector, compared to 5.7 percent in the Reno metro area.”

He said the gaming and recreation sectors in the Las Vegas area have been harder hit than in Reno. “In the Las Vegas metro area, leisure and hospitality establishments account for nearly 30 percent of all jobs in the region.” In the Reno area, that percentage is 17.4 percent.

—Rodger Jacobs

Ian Colford

Evidence

(The Porcupine’s Quill)

 Amazon

Drawing on the author’s experiences traveling in locales such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Turkey, Canadian writer Ian Colford’s first collection of short stories centers around a feeling of otherness, of always being the outsider, misunderstood by locals who mill through dusty urban streets and struggle to make their own way.

Colford’s protagonists range in occupation from teachers to research assistants to hotel clerks and even a minor felon, but each character shares in some way a resignation about his place in the host country. The expectation is always that the locals will remain at arm’s length, rejecting efforts at assimilation.

In each tale the central character is seeking a way to improve his life, and is largely unattached to other people or places. America is the destination of choice in many of the stories, the towns described along the way more like a mooring to drift alongside temporarily than a meaningful stopping point.

The author carefully avoids specifics that would connect a story concretely with a particular place. His measured prose sketches the gritty poverty that might accompany transient workers who slowly find their hope worn down under daily difficulties. Yet there is also a theme of random kindness that runs through the stories, when a secondary character sometimes shines a unexpected ray of hope or truth into the bleak everyday toil of the protagonist.

Colford’s collection will appeal to anyone who has ever wandered through a city off the beaten path and found themselves an outsider. Whether you relish the experience or find it uncomfortable, these stories proffer a spare, elegant window on a lonely, precarious existence.

—Lara Killian

I don’t read a lot of poetry in general. But this quirky little volume by Canadian poet Sandra Kasturi (with a foreword by Neil Gaiman) jumped into my pile of library books recently. 

The Animal Bridegroom (2007) is part poetry, part twisted fairytale, and totally fascinating. Mermaids, princesses, sharp-toothed wolves, and all manner of nasties populate Kasturi’s verses. The reader is forced to consider some of the darker implications behind those beloved Grimm tales.

If you had been the one, trapped by trickery in a gingerbread house deep in the woods, to push the witch to her death headfirst into the oven, would you struggle with depression and guilt for the rest of your life? 

Little Red Riding Hood is the “lost strawberry girl”, followed by a “thousand eyes gathering yellow / In the creeping dusk.” Princes who want to spirit away the sleeping beauty and keep her all dolled up for showing off have unattractive motivations compared to the knightly gentlemen of fairytale lore. Portraying witches and changelings, wolves and thorny rose gardens, Kasturi pays tribute to myths and legends, fables and ballads, with their menagerie of creatures and characters, at once so familiar and yet misunderstood. I haven’t enjoyed a book of poetry so much in a long while.

—Lara Killian

Tony Hillerman

Dance Hall of the Dead

(HarperCollins)

 Amazon

I don’t know if we’ll ever see the likes of Tony Hillerman again. His gift of imagining life through the eyes of a culture not his own was developed through an impoverished childhood in Oklahoma (he was once quoted as saying that the Joads were the people with enough money to get to California), decorated combat service in World War II, a degree from the University of Oklahoma and years working as a journalist, then a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico which qualified him to become head of the department. This less-pressured career path (no SAT prep courses or Guggenheim grants required) is reflected in his writing, in particular his novels set in the American Southwest.

Dance Hall of the Dead, Hillerman’s third detective novel and his second featuring Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police, was originally published in 1973 and won the 1974 Edgar Award of the Mystery Writers of America for best novel. The story begins with the disappearance of two teenage boys, one Navajo and one Zuñi. After the Zuñi boy is found murdered, the Navajo becomes a suspect, although many Zuñi attribute the murder to a kachina (spirit) because the murdered boy had communicated forbidden sacred knowledge to the Navajo.

Leaphorn’s investigation brings him into contact with a number of characters, each struggling with their own issues of identity and exclusion. George Bowlegs, the missing Navajo boy, is trying to learn about Zuñi spiritual ways to compensate for what he feels is lacking in his own community, but is rebuffed by the Zuñi who prefer to keep knowledge of their traditions within their own tribe. Members of the Golden Fleece commune are belagana (white people) who reject modern American life and are trying to create an alternative. Chester Reynolds, an anthropologist whose ideas have been mocked by members of his academic community, is desperate to find evidence which will vindicate his theories and win him a place of respect. Ted Isaacs, a young anthropologist working for Reynolds, seeks to escape his impoverished childhood through career success. The important question in each case is just how far each individual will go to get what they want, and what they’re willing to give up in order to get it.

Like some of Conan Doyle’s best Sherlock Holmes stories, in Dance Hall of the Dead Leaphorn fails to solve the mystery in time but justice is delivered from another quarter. And rather than try to impose his will upon a situation clearly beyond his control, Leaphorn leaves another character with a dilemma where the only constraints are that of personal integrity: he could get away with something which will get him exactly what he wants, and chances are good that he will never be caught. Now what will he do?

Hillerman was awarded a commendation by the Navajo Tribal Council for his sensitive portrayals of Navajo culture; his appreciation of Native American ways of life and of the stark landscapes of the American Southwest has won him many fans outside the Navajo community as well.

Although critical of certain aspects of the Native cultures, Hillerman reserves his sharpest satire for the Anglos who bumble into Native affairs armed with their dominant cultural status but devoid of understanding or appreciation for people outside their own narrow world. One such bumbler in Dance Hall of the Dead is FBI Agent John O’Malley, who becomes involved in the murder investigation. Leaphorn contemplates why all FBI agents seem to look and act the same and imagines the recruiting process:

He had a sudden vision of an office in the Department of Justice building in Washington, a clerk sending out draft notices to all the male cheerleaders and drum majors at U.S.C., Brigham Young, Arizona State, and Notre Dame, ordering them to get their hair cut and report for duty.

Maybe it doesn’t work quite like that, but it often seems like it does.

—Sarah Boslaugh

Tony Hillerman

A Thief of Time

(HarperCollins)

 Amazon

If the economy has put the kibosh on your travel plans this summer, you can still take a virtual journey to Navajo country in the company of Tony Hillerman whose detective novels have done as much as anything else to foster an appreciation for the cultures and peoples of this region.

The story and characters in A Thief of Time, first published in 1988, seem as fresh today as when the book first came out. The precipitating event in this novel is the murder of Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, an anthropologist working in Chaco Canyon. Officer Jim Chee and Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn are both called in to work on the case, which ultimately uncovers a wide network of people, both Caucasian and Native American, who are involved in the illegal excavation and sale of Native artifacts.

A Thief of Time is one of Hillerman’s best-plotted stories and is particularly rich in descriptions of the Navajo traditions as well. Hillerman has always used Leaphorn and Chee to represent contrasting attitudes toward their Navajo heritage: in this book they become reconciled when Leaphorn, dealing with the recent death of his wife Emma, asks Chee (who studies and practices the ancient Navajo spiritual ways) to help him come to terms with his grief.

Hillerman also gets some digs in at the competitive, hothouse nature of academia, where the urge to impress an advisor or publish a career-making article can become so overwhelming as to prompt otherwise normal people into risky, even criminal, behavior.

If this story has a “ripped from the headlines” aspects it’s because the problem of artifact theft has not gone away in the intervening years. The case of Utah physician James Redd, who committed suicide in June after being charged along with several others with trafficking in stolen artifacts, once again brought national focus to the continuing existence of this crime.

A Thief of Time was re-released by HarperCollins in May.

—Sarah Boslaugh