It’s not surprising that James, an inveterate lobby-haunter if ever there was one, should have thought of the hotel first of all as a place for public performance. But the hotel has its zones of privacy also, its interchangeable rooms playing host nightly to a varying cast of inhabitants. If the public spaces of lobby and bar encourage promiscuous mingling and passing acquaintance, for a solo traveller like the narrator of Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel, the hotel room’s carefully constructed illusion of comfort and familiarity can trigger reflections, memories, moments of heightened imagination. Like the penitent in the confessional – or the reader of a novel – the hotel guest inhabits a solitude shared with others at one remove.
Ultimately, Zapata’s novel is about taking steps to create the world you wish to inhabit, whether through art or through the vital small deed of giving a wandering orphan a place to sleep.
The sense of place in the novel is palpable, the treatment of its characters empathetic and complex. Violence and grief saturate the forest of these words. The mosaic of Vera’s world is dark, but so is capitalism, which facilitates poverty and oppression. “Vera Violet” is a compelling read from a potent new voice.
There are probably more good novels about baseball than any other sport. More bad ones, too. Emily Nemens’s “The Cactus League” definitely belongs in that first lineup, though it’s unusual in at least two respects. The book is less a novel, really, than a series of very cleverly interlinked short stories. (There are nine, naturally, all set in Phoenix during the spring training — or Cactus League — season of 2011.) And very little ball actually gets played in them. Nemens’s real subject here is less the game of baseball itself, though she’s quite good at describing it, than its infrastructure, all the lives that professional baseball embraces. Her large cast includes a coach, some players, an owner, a physical therapist, an agent and his assistant, not to mention an organist, some people who run the concession stands, and the wives and the groupies — the middle-aged divorcées loitering by the parking lot in hopes of picking up a ballplayer for a night or two.
Nemens has a keen eye for detail, from the semi-feral unfinished tract homes in a suburban subdivision to the glittering routine of the players’ wives: “luncheons and spa days, cocktails and color consultations, mornings at the furrier’s and afternoons with the jeweler.” She’s brilliant with lists and with compression. Whole worlds are sketched in miniature, as in the chapter focused on Alex, a poor first-grader growing up in the shadow of luxury, which is to say, in America.
At first he seemed a child,
dirt on his lip and the sun
lighting up his hair behind him.