Everything works in jam-packed tale
In the first chapter of Amy Jo Burns’ second novel, “Mercury,” named for the fictional small town in western Pennsylvania where it is set, Marley and Waylon Joseph are at a Little League field, watching their son’s game. The pay phone won’t stop ringing, so Waylon answers it. Turns out a rotting corpse has been found in the attic of the local church. OK, so this is a mystery.
In the second chapter, as Waylon and his brothers (the “sons” of Joseph and Sons Roofing) assemble to clean up the mess, it becomes clear the book is more of a family gothic. There’s a band of brothers, there’s a “long tradition of children disappointed by their fathers.” There’s a long-suffering matriarch and a loose-cannon patriarch. There are secrets, misunderstandings and old wounds aplenty.
And then there’s this: Marley calls her best friend to tell her the body has been found. “At least it’s over now,” says the friend. “Tell me we did the right thing,” replies Marley. Whoa. High-end literary soap opera?
Now we come to Chapter Three, set about 10 years earlier. “In June of 1990, Marley West and her mother blew into Mercury in their teal Acura ... On the far side of the road, Marley spotted three men standing atop an empty building.” Wait. Coming of age story?
This jam-packed, intense book is all of the above and will ultimately resolve on all three levels. What ties it altogether is Burns’ passion for her characters, tunneling ever more deeply into how they understand themselves and how they define and misunderstand each other. Making sense of who people are and how they turned out that way is the real game here.
In an afterword, the author describes herself as the daughter, granddaughter, niece and sister of roofers, and she weaves the physical and business aspects of the trade into her story. This both grounds and elevates “Mercury,” opening the narrative potential of all the things people might do on a roof, from attaching flashing to watching the sunset to — well, I guess you’ll have to read the book. — Marion Winik, Minneapolis Star Tribune
I thought its arch humor and obsession with gender equality would make Bonnie Garmus’ “Lessons in Chemistry” a special flavor for the general public. We saw how that went. Now along comes Sarah Blakley-Cartwright’s debut adult novel, “Alice Sadie Celine.” Here again we have whimsical, tongue-in-cheek writing, and another very smart, explicitly feminist character, a brilliant female celebrity who violates social mores. As we now know, people love that.
But with “Alice Sadie Celine,” we are not talking about transgressing the mores of the 1950s and ’60s. Here the issue is more explosive: Blakley Cartwright’s very smart woman has a red-hot lesbian affair with her daughter’s best friend.
Beautiful, self-confident Alice, a daughter of the 1%, and super-serious loner Sadie, daughter of academic single mom Celine, have been inseparable since high school. As the book opens, the girls are in their 20s. Though she has moved to LA to pursue acting, Alice is back home in the Bay Area to appear in a theater production of Shakespeare. Celine goes three nights in a row.
After which, Alice and Celine repair to the Airbnb. Celine has never been interested in Alice, in fact hasn’t ever understood why Sadie chose her to be her “person.” But she adores her daughter. So why would she sleep with Alice? Is it even believable? Honestly, it’s just on the edge — but in Celine, Blakley-Cartwright has created a character who is that crazy, that powerful and that obsessed with breaking boundaries.
After a gentle start, this book goes gangbusters, then has a completely unexpected and ingenious ending. It’s almost as if Blakley-Cartwright invites us to participate in a thought experiment — how the hell is this going to turn out? She gets the prize for the winning solution. — Marion Winik