October 12, 2024
Four novels this week explore love and all its permutations—loving the right person; love between a mother and daughter; love from afar; first love; inappropriate love; erotic love; love and money. The subject is approached through family drama, unbridled passion, and comedy. We also highlight a new collection of essays by one of the most important contemporary chroniclers of race in America today.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, The Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Don't Be a Stranger
By Susan Minot
Published by Knopf
The smoldering love affair that drives Minot’s new novel is a marvel of intensity. Ivy, an older divorced woman is a writer and single mother; Ansel is a seductive musician recently out of prison. Along with the passionate sexual tension of Ivy’s attraction, we feel her tormented self-doubt as she navigates the land mines of their relationship, alongside her duties as a mother. Minot captures the gray areas of the affair’s trajectory and how complicated it is to cure “yourself of an addiction, an obsession, of a kind of mindset.” The novel shines with both the specificity of the entanglement, and its relatability. It’s not just another mid-life crisis!
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Blood Test
By Charles Baxter
Published by Pantheon
Baxter’s novel (the latest of a dozen) shows off his range as a writer with a hilarious comedy set in the Midwest. Brock is a hapless insurance agent and Sunday school teacher, a divorced father of a certain age with a nice girlfriend and an ex who lives with a worthless subcontractor. His life is a quiet one—that is, until he decides to try an experimental blood test that can predict behavior. The test reveals he has a proclivity toward murder. A satire of the first order (one character even slips on a banana peel) book-lovers will have as much fun reading this novel as the author probably had writing it.
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Blue Light Hours
By Bruna Dantas Lobato
Published by Black Cat
This gentle debut by a Brazilian translator (and workshop instructor at The Center) is an intimate exploration of a long-distance mother/daughter relationship after the daughter leaves Brazil for college in Vermont. She speaks regularly to her mother, who has health problems, over Skype. The blue light of the college dorm lamp and the computer screens that separate them illuminate their faces, and we observe the daughter becoming more independent as time passes. The author has said, “I hadn’t been able to find a novel that fully captured my experiences as an immigrant in the 21st century or novels that fully conveyed the fragility and tenderness of the mother-daughter bond.” She has written a lovely one.
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Love Can't Feed You
By Cherry Lou Sy
Published by Dutton
Seventeen-year-old Queenie and her father move from the Philippines to Brooklyn where her mother has already been working as a nurse. The bonds of this Filipino family’s dynamics begin to shift—Queenie’s mother is the breadwinner, her father a janitor. She is straddling the desire to be her own person while finding her way in this new culture as her parents try to establish their own identities. Sy cites The Lover as an inspiration: “I wondered what would happen if the characters in Duras’s book would have children, but set with my specific background.” Queenie’s relationship with her mother’s patron’s grandson jumpstarts her poignant coming of age in this affecting novel.
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The Message
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published by One World
Coates is a brilliant observer of race, in fiction and nonfiction. The three connected essays in his new collection derive from his teachings at Howard University. In each, he begins with a letter to his students. In his first trip to Dakar, Senegal he attempts to reconcile his Afrocentric upbringing with this modern city. He travels to Israel and Palestine to speak to dissidents and students. And in Columbia, South Carolina he encounters a teacher whose job is jeopardized by teaching one of Coates’s books. This trio of locations allows the author to investigate both the myths and the truths of storytelling.
