It started after my mother died. She was a concentration-camp survivor—a prodigy concert pianist in Vienna who was taken when she was only a girl. She taught me the piano by holding her hands over mine, bending my fingers into arches above the keys. When I was just a boy, she died in a car accident. Afterward, I was both boundlessly angry and attached to the piano. I played it with extreme force, sometimes bleeding onto the keys. I still feel her hands when I play. I feel them even more when I’m learning a new instrument.
As I write this, on a laptop in my kitchen, I can see at least a hundred instruments around me. There’s a Baroque guitar; some Colombian gaita flutes; a French musical saw; a shourangiz (a Persian instrument resembling a traditional poet’s lute); an Array mbira (a giant chromatic thumb piano, made in San Diego); a Turkish clarinet; and a Chinese guqin. A reproduction of an ancient Celtic harp sits near some giant penny whistles, a tar frame drum, a Roman sistrum, a long-neck banjo, and some duduks from Armenia. (Duduks are the haunting reed instruments used in movie soundtracks to convey xeno-profundity.) There are many more instruments in other rooms of the house, and I’ve learned to play them all. I’ve become a compulsive explorer of new instruments and the ways they make me feel.
Palumbi was diving in one of the most radioactive places on Earth: the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Archipelago. Nearly seven decades earlier, this ring-shaped band of islands – formerly an archetypal tropical paradise – had been used to test the atomic bomb. Over 12 years in the 1940s and 50s, the US blasted its tranquil waters and those of a neighbouring atoll with 67 nuclear weapons equivalent to 210 megatonnes of TNT – more than 7,000 times the force used at Hiroshima. Palumbi's navigation system was off because certain islands, still recorded on older maps, had been entirely vaporised by the explosions.
This dark past has left a devastating legacy for the Bikini islanders, who have been unable to return to their home ever since. But it has also created an accidental sanctuary: a place where wildlife is protected by the area's very toxicity. For almost 70 years, there has been no fishing.
With her focus on love and marriage, and some sort of redemption however serious the subject matter, she is at odds in today’s climate of angsty millennial fiction. “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain,” she admits cheerfully. “So, people give me grief about being too hopeful or too cheerful or too interested in family – it doesn’t matter. I’m not writing all the novels. I’m not the novelist for the age. You want horror, you can get horror. You want dystopia, you can get dystopia. You want disaffected ennui and depression, you got that covered.”
Her retort to those who complain that her fiction is “naive” or even Pollyanna-ish is: “How many serial killers do you know?” She likes to write about the people around her. “If you are writing about mobsters and murderers and psychopaths, then people say: ‘Oh, you’re telling the real story.’ And I think: ‘No, you’re not. Because you don’t know those people.’”
In Russo’s hands these intentions — and the expectations and forgiveness of others — are fine brushes and a palette. He paints a shining fresco of a working-class community, warts and all, a 30-year project come to fruition in this last, best book.
This is a strikingly assured and accomplished debut. Sara Ochs clearly has a fine understanding of the conventions and possibilities of the psychological thriller. She has devised an intricate and satisfying puzzle here. In the manner of a more seasoned crime writer, she shows an awareness of when it is best to be evasive, elusive, coy. She has an instinct for the timing of her crucial revelations. This sense of timing is impeccable and highly dramatic.