In this respect, “All-Night Pharmacy” is somewhat autobiographical. The protagonist, her sister and her mother are all wrestling with the knowledge that their forebears endured unimaginable suffering so that they could prosper in the United States. This incalculable debt starts to feel like a chokehold when the sisters fail to make the most of their opportunities.
“I was interested in the ways that historical traumas affect people who are several generations removed,” Madievsky says, “and might not even know that they’re reacting in some way to those traumas.”
I rattled with the truck as my family and I drove a short way to the corral to get the sheep. It had been donated to us to help feed the many who were scheduled to show up later in the day in celebration and reverence for a relative who was reaching a pinnacle in her/their life: the Kinaałda, or what has been loosely translated as the Diné puberty ceremony. An intense and refreshing four days of family, song, and food. The ceremony is a moment when beauty of the beyond and beauty of the world come together as we sit around a fire and grind corn, tell stories, and prepare food.
As we rolled up to the corral, my mom was worrying because there was no one to do the butchering. Butchering for ceremony takes a tremendous amount of labor and often requires several people. She had called everyone in our family, even distant family, and I had posted on social media asking for anyone who might happen to be free. But no one responded. There is no blame here. Times change, pressures build. We are often pulled in so many directions. I told my mom we had to do it ourselves. Uncertain, she agreed, and I would do it.
The Midnight News borrows tropes from a number of genres aside from mystery, with elements of espionage, romance. psychological thriller and even literary fiction evident on the page. The result is a nuanced discussion of women’s autonomy in England in the 1940s, particularly as it relates to their own bodies and sexual freedoms.
“Was a human being just a container to be filled by time with whatever it happens to have handy?” Such unstable compounds fill everyone in Kairos, the magnificent new novel from German author Jenny Erpenbeck. The text keeps coming back to the question of identity; the passage above follows up by changing the analogy, unsettlingly: “Did you have any control over what you saw in the mirror?” The metaphors are vivid yet volatile—one moment a test tube, the next a mirror image, each expressed in active terms. In just two sentences, they assert a rhetoric of rare intelligence and imagination, along with the ability to turn on a dime.
Is it possible to change the contours of your personality late in life, with, as the woman with the prophetic space heater puts it, “the knowledge of a long dusk coming on”? The final scene in The Librarianist features an answer as modest as it is revolutionary, but deWitt has spent the preceding pages making the oxymoron of a modest revolution utterly believable. The answer is: maybe a little bit. Maybe enough.
“Evidence of Things Not Seen” offers a road map for moving the true crime genre past its pulpy roots and toward something more compassionate — and interesting. Weinman calls this a shift from “providing answers to asking more questions.” The questions this book raises are critical and timely, and I look forward to seeing what these writers ask next.