It’s not often that a writer is equally adept at poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, yet Lee Upton has been an exception to the rule for over a decade. Unsurprisingly, her latest novel—Wrongful—only cements that fact, as it’s a thoroughly stirring and imaginative but realistic mystery/character study (in the self-aware vein of Agatha Christie) that exemplifies her many talents.
Per the official synopsis:
When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton & Company)
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures the allure of gardens for those with equivocal feelings about fellow humans, writing that Sally Seton “often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” Gardens offer us a glimpse into prelapsarian natural beauty and slow living, but as Olivia Laing demonstrates in The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, not everyone gets to relish the peace of these Edens. They are inherently politicized and deeply emotional spaces.
Laing’s celebrated works of creative nonfiction include To the River and The Lonely City, both of which prove she is unrivaled in her ability to interweave memoir with accounts of English landscapes and other artistic touchstones.…
Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions by Marina Rubin (Crowsnest Books)
Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions by Marina Rubin is a recent collection of seventeen short stories about various female characters such as Daisy in “Jaula” about whom Rubin writes, “In writing circles, she was known more for her beauty than her talent.” It’s a trick for the reader. After she has an alleged romantic encounter with a famous male writer, the critics change their tune about Daisy: “Turns out the girl could write.” The trick could become a feminist critique, the “jaula” of the title a cage into which women characters and often women writers find themselves trapped.
The trick, a sort of epiphany, might even begin with the title, even with the cover of the book itself, showing an attractive blonde gazing out over a vague flame behind the capitalized letters KNOCKOUT BEAUTY.…
To talk about this book, we must start with the mountain. Close your eyes.
You are a thousand feet tall and thousands of miles wide. Many things crack and spurt and shoot across your back, all monster magic words: bloodroot, spotted skunk cabbage, blackberry cane, poison ivy. You feel the hushed step of deer, the turkeys raking through the mud. You see the man, moving through the brush like a “diseased fox,” stalk and kill two women in the woods. You are the only witness to their deaths, and the violence of this act sinks into you like a splinter. Things split and break loose. Things that live deep within you slip out. This is where the book begins: a murder, a trembling, a magic shaking out of the mountain and upending the lives of our main characters, sisters Sheila and Angie. …
Joy Ride by Ron Slate (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
A poet of ideas and emotions, Ron Slate comes as close as anyone to the phrase in Roethe’s villanelle, “The Waking,” “we think by feeling.” While his poems embody ideas and convey feelings, they evoke experiences, they are experiences. They are about boats, gulls, travels to Istanbul, to Brazil, to France. They are about family, friends, and acquaintances, doubt, certainty, grief, joy, imagination, baseball, jazz, and drums, also, airports, hospitals, a neighborhood bar, and a joy ride in a black and white (patrol car) with two women. There’s an investment of self and an absence of ego. They evoke solitude and life with others, experiences borne out of passed down stories, memories, and images embedded in thoughts. …
It was almost two am. I was in the common room of my college dorm, reading The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. It was Saturday; I had given up a night of partying and fun with friends to sit alone and read. Three of my friends came in and I was so engrossed in the book that I didn’t notice until they were a foot away from me. Two of them were visibly tipsy, eyes narrowed by tiredness. K leaned in and hugged me, relaxing all her body weight onto my shoulders, limbs loosening into sleep.
“Okay let’s go” the other two said and hoisted K up from me.
“Get high with that yet?” one of them says, looking at the battered copy lying in my lap.…
In most novels that have beautiful nature writing, nature only acts as a backdrop, a pretty painting and landscape to hold the real stories between people. I’d be spellbound reading those well-drawn details of beauty, of peace and green and spring. But The Overstory by Richard Powers takes it to another level, making those descriptions seem inadequate and superficial for something so grand and miraculous: trees. In response to the Overstory, the trees would say to the Romantic poets– Shelley, Byron, Keats, “You only like me for my looks? Nothing else?” Powers gives us that something else. He illuminates for us their history, biology, personifies their desires, fears, hopes, and very soul, beyond merely their commercial or aesthetic appeal. It brings forth the forest as an alive, dynamic system that’s buzzing with life and its own dramas at every moment, inside and underground.…
