Review_FICTION
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ; MAY 25, 2015 28
Former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion rei-magines Treasure Island in his new novel, The
New World (reviewed on p. 31).
Purity
Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
$28 (576p) ISBN 978-0-374-23921-3
Secrets are power, and power corrupts
even the most idealistic in Franzen’s
(Freedom) exhaustive bildungsroman. Two
years out of college, self-conscious and
acerbic Purity “Pip” Tyler is saddled with
crushing student loans and an overbearing, emotionally disturbed mother
who refuses to reveal the identity of Pip’s
father. Living in Oakland, Calif., Pip
meets and confides in beautiful German
activist Annagret, who calls on her former
boyfriend, Andreas Wolf, to give Pip an
internship at his cultish Sunlight Project,
a WikiLeaks-like operation based in
Bolivia. Once there, Pip is both flattered
by and suspicious of the attention she
receives from the magnetic Wolf; when
she returns to America to do his bidding
in secret, she becomes increasingly
attached to people he may want to hurt.
Pip strives to retain her integrity, but the
world in which she is coming of age is, in
Franzen’s view, sick—its people born only
to suffer and harm. Mining the connection between Pip and Wolf, Franzen renders half a dozen characters over the
course of six decades, via extensive origin
stories that plumb their psychological
corners. Franzen succeeds more than he
fails, but the failures are damning. At
first, the mercurial, angry Pip and the
arrogant, abrasive Wolf seem as though
they’re meant to actively challenge the
reader’s sympathies. Then there are the
novel’s fathers, who are almost all abusive
or absent, and its mothers, who are disturbed, cruel, or dumb. Gradually, it
becomes clear that Franzen’s greatest
strength is his extensive, intricate narrative web—which includes a murder in
Berlin, stolen nukes in Amarillo, and a
billion-dollar trust. Though the novel
lacks resonance, its pieces fit together
with stunning craftsmanship. Agent: Susan
Golomb, Susan Golomb Agency. (Sept.)
Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Nights
Salman Rushdie. Random, $28 (304p) ISBN
978-0-8129-9891-7
In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph
Anton) invents his own cultural narrative—one that blends elements of 1,001
Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and
action/adventure comic books. The title is
a reference to the magical stretch of time
that unites the book’s three periods,
which are actually millennia apart. In the
first period (the 12th century), jinni prin-
cess Dunia falls in love with real-life phi-
losopher and advocate of reason and sci-
ence Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd) and bears
multiple children. In the second period
(current day), Dunia’s descendants, a
group including a gardener and a young
graphic novelist, are unaware of their
powerful lineage (despite the fact that
they inherited Dunia’s trademark earlobe-
lessness). Then they witness a great storm
devastating New York; worse, a slit
between the jinni world and the human
world opens and the dark jinni slip
through. The gardener suddenly finds
himself levitating, the artist hosting jinn
in his room. Dunia returns to defend the
human race by confronting her four
fiercest enemies, one by one: Zumurrud,
Zabardast, Shining Ruby, and Ra’im
Blood-Drinker. Rushdie even incorpo-
rates a third period, a far-future millen-
nium, further developing his story across
time. His magical realism celebrates the
power of metaphor, while both historic
accounts and fables are imbued with
familiar themes of migration and separa-
tion, reason and faith, repression and
freedom. Referencing Henry James, Mel
Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo
TV, and Aristotle, among others, Rushdie
provides readers with an intellectual trea-
sure chest cleverly disguised as a comic
pop-culture apocalyptic caprice. (Sept.)
Infinite Home
Kathleen Alcott. Riverhead, $27.95 (336p)
ISBN 978-1-59463-363-8
Alcott’s (The Dangers of Proximal
Alphabets) new novel takes place in a
sprawling Brooklyn brownstone, offering
a peek into the complicated lives of the
tenants who have come to live in it. The
inhabitants include landlord Edith,
sliding into senility; Paulie, a gentle man
with Williams syndrome, and his sister,
Claudia, who takes care of him; Thomas, a
struggling artist; and the beautiful, sensitive Adeleine. The future of these characters, and the brownstone itself, is put at
risk when Edith’s money-grubbing son,
Owen, attempts to foreclose the building
and force the tenants out. The threat of
eviction—and Edith’s slow, alarming
drift from reality—inspires the tenants to
seek out a way to save the property with
urgency, as the story culminates in a Little
Miss Sunshine–style road trip. Alcott’s
writing has an acute sensory quality, and
she’s at her imaginative best when
describing the small, quotidian moments
of her characters’ lives: when Thomas gets
a headache, it takes hold “with the swift
efficiency of a team of movers: whole parts
of his body emptied in minutes.” The
writing is dreamy and easy to inhabit, but
is occasionally undermined by its tendency toward abstraction, when it would
benefit more from precise plot development. Nevertheless, Alcott’s writing is
generous, and her peculiar cast of characters memorable. (Aug.)
; A Cure for Suicide
Jesse Ball. Pantheon, $23.95 (240p) ISBN
978-1-101-87012-9
This dystopian novel from Ball (Silence
Once Begun ) is both a puzzle box and a
©CH
A
RLO
T
T
EKN
E
EReviews