Beach Reading

Six new books for you, all fiction, all great. I hope you enjoy!

The Sellout, Paul Beatty
This is possibly the most brilliant satirical novel since A Confederacy of Dunces. The protagonist, known by his last name, Me, is a fixture in the town of Dickens, California, a stand-in for Compton. He saves the life of one of its more famous residents, Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving member of the cast of the Little Rascals. Hominy decides to express his gratitude by becoming his slave. Me watches his city deteriorate and decides to rescue it by reinstating segregation throughout the city. He is charged with multiple counts of violating multiple constitutional amendments, and his case is heard at the Supreme Court. All absurd, of course, but Beatty is exploring how people can be oppressed in an allegedly free society. He draws the connection between yelling “Fire” in a theater, and shouting “Racism!” in a post-racial society. This was the first American book to win the Booker Prize, and it is certainly a classic. Brilliant does not do it justice.

Dead in Long Beach, California, Venita Blackburn
Coral enters her brother’s apartment in Long Beach, to find him dead from a gunshot wound. She calls 911, watches dispassionately as they remove the body, grabs her brother’s phone and leaves. For the next week, Coral goes about her daily life, interrupting to answer the texts her dead brother gets, pretending to be him: arranging future dates, making plans, telling no one of his death. As absurd as this is, it doesn’t register that way. Instead, we feel that Coral is grieving in her own unique way. So this is a novel about grief, about not making judgments, animated by sharp, precise, brilliant writing.

This Other Eden, Paul Harding
Malaga is an island off the coast of Maine, home to a small group of mixed-race families. Paul Harding reimagines its history over the course of a few years in the 1910s. The islanders live in poverty, but they are self-sufficient and content with their isolated existence. But the rise of the eugenics movement prompts the community on the mainland to intervene in the lives of the islanders, for their own benefit, of course, ultimately disrupting the “Eden” they have created. This novel is really about love, prejudice, and is written so beautifully as to make you cry. An astonishing work.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver reimagines David Copperfield, Dickens’ chronicle of a young boy amidst the poverty of Victorian England, to Appalachia, with a distinctive voice that pierces our hearts with its description and critique of the pervasive institutionalized poverty of rural America. We see Demon’s life from his perspective, from childhood to early adulthood, through foster homes, football heroics and opioid destruction. Funny, biting, tragic, the lives of Demon’s friends and neighbors and lovers demand respect for their struggles, more so for their failures. This book left an indelible imprint, a brilliant, vital addition to the Great American Novel.

Prophet Song, Paul Lynch
An Irish family trying to survive as civil war erupts. The father, a trade unionist, is taken by the police and seemingly disappears. An emergency decree has suspended civil liberties, and Eilish, his wife, searches vainly for his whereabouts. She attempts to save her eldest son by sending him across the border to Northern Ireland, but he flees to join the rebels fighting the government. Eilish’s sister lives in Toronto and urges the rest of the family to flee, but Eilish hesitates, until it may be too late. We are not told of the reasons for the loss of liberties or what the rebels are fighting for, a purposefully ambiguous backdrop so as to universalize the story. How does a country of laws abandon them? When is it time to flee the violence, or stay and fight, or just stay and hope the violence passes? Heart-wrenching choices that Eilish has to navigate on her own as her window closes gradually but inexorably. A profound work.

The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma
This novel, from 2015, is a biblical parable of a Nigerian family unraveling when the father is transferred to a job in a distant city and his four young boys stray from his firm grip that had kept them on the right path. The eldest brothers, once close, turn into Cain and Abel, ripping apart the family. Sad, poignant, but we are drawn to the characters, rooting for them and their relationships to heal even as they fray and dissolve. A beautiful work.