When I was about thirteen, and even more insecure about my literary tastes than I am now, I got into a conversation with someone who referred to Jane Austen as “light.” I was horrified. Austen was romantic, of course, but her novels were important. They had depth! They absolutely could not be light, or the self-satisfaction I got from reading them, patting myself on the back for enjoying serious literature, would be completely ruined.
I still remember my mom’s response when I blurted these half-formed anxieties to her. “Just because something is light,” she said, “doesn’t mean it isn’t good.”
It’s a bright fall day in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The air is chilly and crisp, and sunlight shines through leaves tinted in the deep reds, oranges and golds of late afternoon. And there, just to the right of a winding footpath, lies a cadaver, a nude male mottled in the purples and blues of a bruise.
Lying on his back, nestled among the leaves, he looks almost as if he’s fallen asleep—but he’s actually working. His job is to decompose so that scientists can study his body’s biological undoing and answer morbid questions about how mummified tissue breaks down. These answers might one day assist in murder investigations and could possibly reveal new ways to identify John and Jane Does. Compared to some of his peers nearby, this body is new at the job. In fact, he’s just getting started.
“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare wrote in “The Tempest.” It’s a particularly apt citation for Karen Joy Fowler’s new novel, “Booth,” about the family of Junius Brutus Booth, one of the most famous Shakespearean actors of his time – and the father of John Wilkes Booth, the incensed anti-abolitionist who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865.
Of course, the line is also an apt motto for a writer who is well aware that the best historical fiction helps us recognize connections between the past and present, and see both afresh. The pre-Civil War political landscape evoked by Fowler in “Booth” abounds in implicit parallels with today’s polarized society, including the breakdown of civility in Congress and beyond, and attempts to block voters’ rights. Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob ring loud and clear in the wake of the events of January 6, 2021.
Every family shares a stage, but some are more crowded than others. In her exquisite new historical novel, “Booth,” acclaimed author Karen Joy Fowler raises the curtain on a cast of ego-driven, grief-haunted siblings and parents jostling for a spotlight even as they carelessly shove into the shadows the more timid among them.
In “Ocean State,” O’Nan is subverting the thriller, borrowing its momentum to propel this bracing, chilling novel. Whereas thrillers tend to use murders as a prurient jumping-off point, the entryway to the reader’s pleasure — that chance to play Columbo or Kinsey Millhone in our heads — O’Nan takes his time, humanizing this story to make the hole where the victim was suitably substantial.