Aimed at the heart of America’s love for guns
THREE new novels about America’s deadly gun culture are to be released soon. Given the recent massacre in Florida, that seems like a gruesome coincidence, but don’t be amazed. There are so many shootings in the US that it’s impossible to publish a book about guns that doesn’t bleed into the day’s news.
Which poses a challenge: Who wants to turn from the looping clips of dying children to the pages of novels that re-enact those same horrors?
These three writers confront that dilemma in different ways. They don’t all hit the target, but to varying degrees they help clarify the cataclysm we’ve grown inured to in the face of a firearms lobby whose clergy of zealots promotes a pitiless ideology.
Steve Israel, a former congressman from New York, takes aim at the NRA with a goofy satire called Big Guns, to hit book shelves on April 17.
This is a follow-up to The Global War on Morris, Israel’s comedy about Washington’s bungling response to terrorism.
Clearly, 16 years in the
House provided him with a graduate education on the cosy relationship between America’s business leaders and our political representatives.
Jennifer Clement, the president of PEN International, offers a different experience in her haunting new novel, Gun Love.
Its hushed poetic pages tell the story of a girl named Pearl who has lived her whole life with her mother in a broken-down car in a Florida trailer park.
“Animal Kingdom and the Magic Kingdom were miles away,” Pearl says. “We were nowhere… Life was always like shoes on the wrong foot.”
Gun Love draws a vision of poverty far from urban America; here, children interact with public education only sporadically, and their parents have little access to steady work or medical care.
Tom Mcallister’s How to Be Safe is as startling as the crack of a bullet. The story’s volatile tone tears through the despair of our era’s devotion to guns.
In the opening pages, a young man kills 19 people and wounds 45 at a Pennsylvania high school.
Mcallister, the non-fiction editor of Barrelhouse magazine, constructs this preface entirely from the breathless clichés of “the playbook of mass murder” we all know so well: “They will call him a loner and they will quote former teachers saying he was bright but shy and they never thought he’d be capable of something like this. They will say nobody ever suspected it could happen here.”
But the rest of the novel focuses on Anna Crawford, an English teacher recently suspended from her job for insubordination.
In the chaotic hours after the shooting, Anna is considered a person of interest. Her photo is shown on TV above the words: “Former Teacher Had Motive”.
By the time she’s released a few days later, the FBI has destroyed her house. The intimate details of her personal history have been broadcast, analysed and mocked.
“I had been publicly cleared of all wrongdoing, but that didn’t matter,” she says. “My life was now about seeking forgiveness for things I hadn’t done.”
One of the novel’s most mesmerising elements is a series of short chapters on how to be safe in the modern world.
Mcallister’s upbeat instructions range from banal to fantastic: “Check outlets and light switches for loose connections. Keep a phone on your bedside table pre-dialled to 911. Try to grow wings.”
The narrative is also interrupted by disturbingly frank mini-profiles of the kids murdered in the initial mass shooting. Strafed with details of ordinary life, these one-paragraph sketches are anti-memorials that deconstruct the tender portraits we’re used to reading in the wake of each attack.
Like nothing else I’ve read, How to Be Safe contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humour and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that has been nursed to monstrous dimensions. – The Washington Post