“My joke,” the mystery writer Joseph Hansen remarked in an interview, “was to take the true hard-boiled character in an American fiction tradition and make him homosexual.”
It was more than a joke. Hansen was a serious writer, a poet published in the New Yorker, a journalist and an author of novels and stories beyond crime fiction. But he is most celebrated for elegant, literary mystery novels. In 1970, when Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen were still knitting their fanciful plots, Hansen entered the field with “Fadeout.” It introduced a 40ish investigator named Dave Brandstetter, who was smart, observant, compassionate and gay.
If there’s a moral to this tale, beyond never naming a fictional character after a person you know, it’s that people love to put themselves at the centre of any story. For me, the most illuminating part was coming into contact with people who felt insulted because they weren’t in the novel. “Why am I not in it?” one neighbour complained. “I feel like I make myself a little bit known around here.”
One thing’s for certain: As we get to know these characters, they do not, as Joe claims invariably happens, “shed one layer of mystery after another, the dismal burlesque towards their inevitable ordinariness.” With revelation upon revelation, their ordinariness seems all the more mysterious, and this first-time novelist all the more masterly at writing in such an original voice.
“Exile did not work out exactly as our parents had planned,” novelist Ana Menéndez once explained in the foreword of a Cuban cookbook. “For their American children, Cuba is little more than a fairy-tale land of perfect fruit and blue hills. Every year the island and whatever promise it once held for us slips farther out of reach.” In her new novel, The Apartment, characters grapple with the pain of that elusive dream, which scholar Isabel Alvarez Borland and others have thoroughly charted as part of the Cuban American literary tradition of political exile, nostalgic longing, and survival—or despair. “Suicide is our one great national pastime. Our Cuban curse,” one character in The Apartment declares.
In marine biology, a whale fall is the body of a dead whale that has slowly descended to the bottom of the ocean. Scavengers strip its flesh, crustaceans and other creatures colonize its skeleton and its decaying bones help sustain countless organisms for years to come, part of the delicate balance of the undersea ecosystem.
It’s lovely, and in keeping with the majesty of the species, that in death a whale bestows life. Daniel Kraus’s thrilling new novel, “Whalefall,” spins the concept into a crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea. That much of the action takes place in an absurdly improbable setting — inside the various stomachs of a 60-ton sperm whale, where a scuba diver has been trapped after being inadvertently swallowed for lunch — well, that only adds to the book’s brash allure.
“Tom Lake” is a quiet and reassuring book, not a rabble-rouser. It’s highly conscious of Emily Gibbs’s speech about human failure to appreciate the little things, the Stage Manager’s line about the earth “straining away all the time to make something of itself,” and of the ravages to that earth. Domestic contentment is its North Star, generational continuity its reliable moon. Only a cynic could resist lying down on a nice soft blanket to marvel at Patchett’s twinkling planetarium.
The black-market melodrama’s doubled lives, Szalay argues, illustrate the contradictions of the narratives and myths the white middle-class US family has developed about itself, that it has told and retold to itself over and over (often, though of course not solely, through popular media). Throughout Second Lives, Szalay plumbs the depths of these stories, considering, across its five chapters, the genre’s origin in melodrama, gangster films, and mourning plays; reproductive labor and housework; gendered and racialized anxieties; emotional labor and affective self-management; and the stasis and repetition of seriality. In discussing these concerns, Szalay demonstrates how deindustrialization and the loss of the “family wage” have produced the black-market melodrama’s “most essential discovery […] that distinctions between home and work cannot in fact be maintained.” Prestige television—or “TV’s quality renaissance,” as Szalay calls it (and which he traces to the emergence of the black-market melodrama)—works in part to represent, mediate, and negotiate this discovery, even as it also represents, mediates, and negotiates the conditions under which this revelation has become the case.