PAGING THROUGH
MYSTERIES
For the love of all that’s right and true in the world, you’ve got to read Jess Kidd’s debut “Himself” (Atria), a fabulously imaginative, darkly comic Irish tale set “in the arse-end of beyond” in a village called Mulderigg. Reading this picaresque novel is like nursing a pint in a pub while a seanchaí, a traditional storyteller, trills the air with magic and mystery and a local modulates the narrative with irreverent commentary from a stool in the corner.
When our story’s rakish hero, Mahony, returns to Mulderigg, the place of his birth, tongues wag, hearts flutter and bibles are thumped. For Mahony, with his long hair and his leather and his “corrupting presence in the village,” has the kind of “natural charm altogether capable of beguiling the hardest bastard of humankind.” He’s also a man “looking for a drop of avenging.”
Here’s why. As an infant, Mahony was abandoned and given over to the care of the village priest and a few pious nuns. It was 1950. His “mammy” was only 16 and didn’t want him, he was told. His father was unknown, he was told. Twenty years later, the only clue Mahony has to his past is scribbled on the back of an old photo. Mahony returns to the village hoping to unravel the mystery of himself and discover what happened to his mother. His search uncovers “a rake of motives and not one reliable witness.”
In Mahony, the author has created a literary descendant of Henry Fielding’s “Tom Jones” (also a foundling with parental issues), and in Mulderigg she’s imagined a literary neighborhood akin to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, a place populated with eccentric characters, living and dead. The plot races to an ending of Biblical proportions (as most Irish tales do) and it’ll bring tears to your sorry eyes and joy to your hardened heart.
A few pages into Melissa Scrivner Love’s achingly beautiful debut, “Lola” (Crown), I knew I was reading something special. There’s a significant reveal in the book’s opening chapters that shifts the focus of this stunning thriller from the streets of south central Los Angeles to a whole other place, honing our attention on the novel’s main character, a woman of such emotional depth and moral complexity that she haunted me for days after I turned the last page. Her name is Lola.
Brown-skinned and wiry, Lola knows “most of the world doesn’t notice her,” and for most of her life that’s how she’s survived. Lola’s just trying to “duck under, not break those glass ceilings she keeps hearing about.” But Lola’s worldview changes when the Crenshaw Six, an ambitious local gang, are double-crossed during a drug deal they hoped would expand their fiefdom. The consequences? Lola has 46 hours to make things right or she dies slowly, drawn and quartered between four black cartel SUVs.
Lola is going to get compared to Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Both female characters are damaged from years of sexual abuse. Both are cornered in dire circumstances not all of their making, and they take control of their own destinies (violently and with little mercy). But Scrivner Love does better than Steig Larrson by creating a female character who is not just standing up to males, she’s actually reconstructing gender for herself and her community. In Lola’s case although it’s far from pretty, it feels real. Lola stops “pretending affection” when she feels “resentment.” Toward the end of her 46 hours, “Lola and her blade” force a pedophile to “forget his entitlement.” Lola “salivates at the terror in his eyes” before running him from her neighborhood.