Irish Daily Mail

LITERARY FICTION

- by CLAIRE ALLFREE

HOW A WOMAN BECOMES A LAKE by Marjorie Celona (Virago €19.10)

A WOMAN comes across a ten-year-old boy alone in a forest car park on a freezing New Year’s Day. The boy, Jesse, is later reunited with his mother, but the woman is never seen again. What really happened out there, in the forest, with its hard-tofollow trails that lead to a large frozen lake? And what secret is Jesse keeping buttoned up inside his chest?

This may sound like a run-of-the-mill psychologi­cal thriller, but Celona’s icily unsentimen­tal novel offers less predictabl­e riches, unspooling instead into the complicate­d lives of her protagonis­ts, from confused young Jesse, who lives in terror of his adored dead-beat dad, to the missing woman’s grief-stricken husband, who struggles to get out of bed in the mornings, and the compassion­ate policeman in charge of the case.

The fate of the woman is gradually made known through a drip-feed of unconventi­onal reveals, but for the reader its ramificati­ons have the shock value of cracking ice. An excellent novel about the indelible damage dysfunctio­nal parenting can inflict on a vulnerable child.

ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS by Jami Attenberg (Serpent’s Tail €21)

WHAT must it have been like to be Barbra, thinks Barbra’s grandchild at the very end of this novel, and to have been in love with a man like that? It’s not a spoiler: from the outset we know her grandfathe­r Victor is a bit of a monster and eventually we learn why, too.

Attenberg sets her seventh novel over the course of one day as the septuagena­rian Victor, a real estate developer who lost much of his money in a hushedup scandal, lies dying in a hospital bed.

His daughter Alex, who has rushed to her mother’s side, has always known that dreadful truths about her father lie buried, and she is determined to get the pursed-up Barbra to finally reveal them.

Meanwhile, her sister-in-law is having a full-blown crisis in a local drug store, while her brother Gary refuses to come home at all.

Attenberg’s effortless prose glints with psychologi­cal precision in this deceptivel­y breezy novel which, in examining the impact of a toxic patriarch on the members of his own family, holds up a mirror to our times.

THE NIGHTWATCH­MAN by Louise Erdrich (Corsair €27.50)

ERDRICH writes meaty, sprawling books about Native American communitie­s that stem from personal experience: she is a quarter Chippewa.

In the 1950s, her grandfathe­r successful­ly fought for his Turtle Mountain tribe against a government Bill enforcing Native American assimilati­on by terminatin­g their rights to ancient tribal land.

The story of his efforts chugs along in the background of this messy, affectiona­te novel, which is most obviously political in the way it places the bustle of everyday life for its Chippewa characters firmly centre stage.

Part of it is concerned with sparky young Patrice’s efforts to track down her missing sister Vera, who left for the city and hasn’t been heard of since. But Erdrich has a wayward approach to the plot and her dream-haunted tale darts off in impulsive, sometimes lurid directions. The prose is uneven, the structure is baggy but, through a mix of the earthy and the numinous, Erdrich brings a community to rollicking life.

 ??  ??
 ??  ??
 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from Ireland