IMAGINE ME GONE by Adam Haslet Nominated for Putlizer Prize and Nat'l Bk Award '17

"Imagine Me Gone" was short listed for both the Putlizer and Nat'l Book Award ('17).  An award for masochism is bestowed to whomever completes Adam Haslet's sorrowful novel.  It's about a family  contending with multi-generational mental illness & suicide.  Haslet's writing is suffocating.  It creates a fugue state of overwhelmingly depression.  The novel begins with a death that foreshadows an ominous veil of darkness.  It shifts back to a light young romance between Margaret, a young American woman and John, a charming British gentleman in London in 1960.   The two become engaged and Margaret returns to the states to plan their wedding only to be called back to tend to her hospitalized fiancee.  What Margaret didn't or couldn't comprehend is what John's on-going mental illness & how it impact their lives.  Writer William Styron ("Sophie's Choice") wrote about his battles with depression in his memoir "Darkness Visible."  Both Styron and Haslet are brilliant writers.  "Imagine Me Gone" attempts to capture what Styron expressed in his memoir by letting the reader into a world of darkness that is unfathomable but for those who suffer from debilitating depression.  Styron wrote, "No light, but rather darkness visible."  Margaret and John get married & move to the states where they raise their children, Michael, Celia and Alec.  The story has the narrative of all 5 family members.  John's depression, the "beast" returns if it ever went away only to project everything he is incapable of doing or feeling and from which there is no getting better.  John takes his young children, Celia & Alec out in a boat.  He tells them to imagine him gone, it's just the two of them and imagine him gone.  He asks them now what do you do?  Stuck out in the boat they lose one oar & find themselves helpless & adrift.  Michael the eldest has his own madness.  Margaret, Celia & Alec struggle to contend with a beloved sibling which is a demanding & futile undertaking.  Haslet's penetrating writing carves some understanding of mental suffering.  "What do you fear when you fear everything?  Time passing and not passing.  Death and life.  I {Michael} could say my lungs never filled with enough air."  Clearly, the pain it exacts on loved ones is behemoth,  although no one's capacity is infinite.  Michael is also consumed with gaining restitution for slavery and issues of social injustice.  The only relief Michael finds came from music.  Haslet's potent writing snares the reader in  crushing tentacles of agony.  Had I imagined how grueling & how far the suffering in "Imagine me Gone" would go, I would not have commenced this forlorn sojourn.  "I had never before understood the invisibility of a human...a spirit we can never see."

Brandon Hobson's "Where the Dead Sit Talking" Is a Coming of Age Novel of a Native Amer. Boy in Foster Care

 Brandon Hobson's novel "Where the Dead Sit Talking" was a selected as a finalist for the Nat'l Book Award ('18).  Hobson's beautifully voiced narrative is set in 1980s rural OK.  Sequoyah is a young Cherokee boy whose single mother struggles with alcohol & drugs land her in prison and sends Sequoyah into the social system which has him in & out of shelters & various foster homes.  He loved his mother despite her haphazard lifestyle and the accidental scarring of his face she caused by splattering bacon grease.  His facial disfigurement sets him further apart from others.  Sequoyah narrates with an authentic dispassion that served to shield him from perpetual displacement.  Sequoyah believes everything that happens in his life is his fault.  His pain & loneliness make him feel invisible. He wants to become someone else entirely.  He couldn't allow himself to feel sad for his mom being in prison.  He grew used to being separated from her.  Still, he clung to the hope of being reunited knowing it wouldn't happen.  Sequoyah's lyrical plaintive voice is deeply moving.  While at his mother's probation hearing which was denied "She turned and looked at me which destroyed me.  I was overwhelmed by grief & couldn't bear to feel anything more."  Sequoyah tries to convince himself it's better to feel empty but he yearns for a friend, a connection a safe haven.  His fear of people leaving him is constant.  His desire to appease whatever family takes him in is aching for the reader.   How can he get his foster families to like him and make him feel welcome?  The shelters where he was placed were cold, dead and lonely, filled with a sadness he couldn't bear. In most foster homes he felt as if he were a chore and not worth the money they were paid.  At age 15 Sequoyah is placed with the Troutt family who have 2 other foster children; George & Rosemary.  George is Sequoyah's age & they share a room.  George has debilitating trauma of his own.  Rosemary is slightly older and of Cherokee lineage.  Sequoyah forms a strong attachment to Rosemary that is anchored by hope & grief.  He is struck by the strength of grief which seemed to hold him together.  "Where the Dead Sit Talking" is a magnificent work suffused with melancholy & lyricism.  Spending much of his time in solitude he listened for the voices of his ancestors who spoke of secrets and the future. "When I spoke to them they listened.  Staring up at me with huge, watery eyes, I talked to them when I was afraid or angry or hurting."  Hobson is a member of the Cherokee Nation Tribe.  His masterful novel is powerfully wrenching.  It's imbued with dignity along with the suffering  of growing up without a permanent home.

Sigrid Nunez's Nat'l Book Award Winner '18 THE FRIEND is a Novel Reader's Best Friend I LOVED IT!

THE FRIEND which took home the bone for this year's Nat'l Book Award is about the relationship between a woman & her best friend, her dog Apollo.  This ingenious & captivating novel by Sigrid Nunez (b US 1951) is about so much more than a friendship between a human being and a dog.  This friendship between an unnamed narrator and her inherited Great Dane she names Apollo, surpasses what constitutes friendship.  The female narrator is grieving over the recent suicide of her dearest male companion.  Both are writers and each other's intellectual soulmate & confidant.  Her psychiatrist tells her she is mourning as a lover or wife would.  But she never suspected her friend was contemplating taking his own life.  After the funeral, wife #3 (the man was an ignominious womanizer) asks if the woman would take ownership of the Great Dane whom her departed husband found abandoned and adopted.  Despite protestations that her building wouldn't permit her to have a dog (which are true) and the fact that she's always been lifelong cat person, she agrees to take ownership of the dog.  Perhaps her decision is made out of loneliness or a means to stay connected to  her closest friend.  As her grief and depression escalate her feelings for Apollo become profound.  "I sing with joy at the thought of seeing him and for sure this love is not like any love I've ever felt." We feel sympathy for the narrator whose aware her most significant relationship is with a dog.   The narrator maintains a perpetual dialogue with her deceased companion.  She ruminates with him over their past lives, literature and the demise of nobility in being a writer and the vast apathy for reading. She thinks writers are elitist, egotistic and privileged snobs.  She incessantly drops literary icons like  Woolf, Chekov, Proust, Rilke  and their views.  Particularly she mentions Ackerly & his madness at the heart for his dog.  And Rilke's view on love.  She asks Apollo what are "if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other."  The narrator makes astute observations on how she perceives others and how she perceives them accessing and Apollo.  She has a discerning eye and a hilarious self-deprecation.  Nunez's novel THE FRIEND is a melancholy & endearing treasure.  "What we miss-what we lose and what we mourn-isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are."

A PLACE for US by Fatima Farheen Mizra - India's 2nd Generation Siblings Assimilation in CA

Fatima Farheen Mizra (b US 1991) was raised by parents who immigrated from India to CA.  Mizra's long winded meandering contemporary saga is of a family of Indian heritage, Islamic faith & Muslim traditions.  Unquestioned traditions, faith & social decorums become questioned & adapted by the children of immigrants from India much to the dismay of their parents.  The father Rafiq & Layla had an arranged marriage.  They met only briefly before they wed and moved to CA.  Layla had never been far from her family's home in India.   Rafiq & Layla become immersed in their Muslim community in CA which revolves around the Mosque.  Mizra's melancholy & thoughtful novel is as much about family dynamics & dysfunction as it is about the assimilation of a 2nd generation.  The novel begins with the wedding of the oldest daughter, Hadia to a man she chose.  This is radical & defies a sacrosanct tradition.  The novel shifts chronologically between past & present where propriety & beliefs were omnipotent.  Huda is the 2nd daughter & Amar, the favored male child.   The narration comes through all 5 voices and the perspectives are an eye opening emotional coaster ride.  Rafiq & Layla accepted their Islamic faith as habit, a way of living steadfastly held.  Men & women were kept apart at worship & at all social gatherings.  The siblings were able to look beyond limits of propriety that their parents could not.  A teenage Amar falls in love with the daughter of a family from their religious community.  Still, this is scandalous beyond acceptance.  The repercussions of coercing an end to their platonic young relationship have crushing consequences for Amar & his family.  A PLACE for US becomes repetitive & uneventful in too many places.  However, there are situations of poetic beauty, familial love and ephiphanies that fill the pages with a shimmering richness & tenderness.  Rafiq regrets his strict parenting of Amar that cost his son's love.  Layla too has regrets regarding her son.  How were they to know the moments that would define them? Hadia & Hudu don't abandon their Muslim heritage nor do they embrace it with the unwavering fervor of their parents.  Neither sister will submit to obsolete restrictions.  Amar & his sisters discover life on their own terms.  For Amar it struck him like a blow that his sisters never experienced doubts in their certainty of being Muslim or of a heaven or hell. "Maybe they had all gotten it right in their own way, which meant that no way was superior to any other."  Rafiq observes each generation losing touch bit by bit.  He wonders if for his children's children, would there even be a point for adhering to their ancestral heritage.   Yet Rafiq perceives "how miraculous it is that we receive in this world the very things we need from it."