Dive into videos, memories, bias and the Kremlin
Charles Finch rounds up four excellent new mysteries, from Iowa to Norway, from puritanical cops and disenchanted spies to video-store clerks and weary rockers, from dark to strange to unputdownable.
UNIVERSAL HARVESTER By John Darnielle Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 214 pp.
The eerie second novel ( ***| out of four) by indie musician John Darnielle — his first, 2014’s Wolf in White Van, was an unexpected nominee for the National Book Award — is about a video store clerk in rural Iowa in the recent past who discovers that some of the VHS tapes being returned have been spliced with disturbing footage of captives on a farm. The store’s owner and a customer both grow obsessed; Jeremy just wants to leave the whole thing alone. Uni
versal Harvester is a Lynchian experience, lonely and purposely enigmatic. Its deference for the Midwest seems at times like a form of sentimentality, but a more generous way to look at it is that VHS tapes and cornfields have in common a certain lostness within our great quicksilver technologized world. Darnielle, who is rapidly becoming a writer to reckon with, seems here to want to believe that someone, somewhere, is keeping tabs anyway.
A DIVIDED SPY By Charles Cumming St. Martin’s Press, 368 pp.
John Updike once observed that contemporary spy fiction has never stopped yearning for the Cold War. Well: Be careful what you wish for. Charles Cumming’s third novel ( ***) about British secret agent Thomas Kell involves the overlapping deceptions of England, Russia and ISIS, which suddenly feels almost too topical for comfort. Kell — grizzled, trying to smoke less — tracks a closeted Russian agent through his lover, and from there trips onto a homegrown British jihadist. It’s a smart, nuanced, readable tale, reminiscent of Olen Steinhauer or Robert Littell. You want just a little more from Kell — he’s slightly anonymous, his problems slightly generic — but Cumming has mastered the texture and language of espionage.
A Divided Spy may lack the echt cool of Deighton and le Carré, who were there for the real thing, but it’s a fine specimen of a genre headed back toward the Kremlin.
LITTLE DEATHS By Emma Flint Hachette, 311 pp.
This debut ( ***) has many of a debut’s characteristic shortcomings. I also couldn’t stop reading it. It’s about a beautiful cocktail waitress named Rose Malone whose two children are murdered. It’s Queens in 1965, and her loose-limbed lifestyle is held — as it easily might have been, in that bizarrely puritanical American moment — as evidence that she probably did it herself. A single reporter believes that she may be innocent. The magic of Flint’s book lies in its feverish, spellbinding, summer-sticky atmosphere. On a technical level there are some blunders: She’s too slow to implicate other suspects, creates too many one-note characters, unfurls a solution that teeters between shocking and silly. But she’s created a nuanced historical portrait of lower-middle-class life, and the desperate obsession that Rose and her accusers share seeps slowly into the reader, in the best style of Ross Macdonald or Megan Abbott.
ENCIRCLING By Carl Frode Tiller Graywolf Press, 336 pp.
Traditional genre novels are so often about the moments when love, no matter how profound, isn’t enough to keep us safe. This Norwegian novel ( ***|), the first in a trilogy that has drawn wide acclaim in Europe, is a beautiful meditation on the subtler ways we fail each other, our quieter forms of grief. It begins with a failing rocker, Jon, bolting from the band that looks like his last chance, and then composing a letter to the companion of his adolescent years, David. Why is he narrating their history? It turns out David cannot remember his life — in the book’s next two sections, his stepfather and a second friend, Silje, write similar accounts. Characters appear in radically different light in each, anecdotes taking on new meaning through new tellings. And the mystery of David’s own path lingers. It’s thrilling to know two more books will arrive to tell its story.