Blame

By Michelle Huneven
Picador

Michelle Huneven’s Blame spans twenty years in fewer than 300 pages but avoids any frantic pacing or strange leaps. Patsy MacLemoore, the main character, is an alcoholic. A young academic, her scholarly accomplishments initially help to balance negative effects of her alcoholism. Huneven’s protagonist has a professorship at a at a small liberal arts college. She had a small but sunny house, friends, family nearby, and was pretty, with long blonde hair, long tanned legs and a dazzling smile. At the county jail, the regular inmates call her “Professor” when she wakes up there after having had too much to drink.

When Patsy wakes up in jail—again—she assumes she’d simply had too much to drink; perhaps she’d driven even though her license had been revoked. She tries joking with the officers, the lawyers. She’d blacked out—again—and doesn’t know what she’d done to land in jail. “What is it?” she asks, “I really don’t remember. Did I kill someone?” She’s joking. Then they read her the police report. A mother and daughter, killed in her driveway, hit by a car.

Patsy pleads guilty and goes to prison. Huneven’s depiction of prison is sobering and not heavy-handed. She doesn’t romanticize Patsy’s prison experience, but neither does she withhold from her readers the moments of grace Patsy does experience there. In prison, Patsy sobers up, leaves prison and returns to town.

Patsy loses many friends, but miraculously (isn’t friendship and forgiveness always a miracle?), she is not left completely alone. Her ex-boyfriend visits her every week, becoming one of her most faithful and loyal friends. Her parents are gentle with her. Her brother looks out for her. When she leaves prison, she comes home to an apartment lovingly appointed by her best friend and his boyfriend. She meets an older man in AA and remains sober, gets married. Many years later, Patsy learns what happened when she blacked out in the car that night. That new information changes Patsy’s new and hard-won self-perception.

I didn’t want this book to end. The story isn’t incomplete, not by any means. Huneven’s feel for just the right bit of detail was wonderfully effective. I felt attached to these characters, their lives and stories, their back-stories, and their private moments very early on and simply wanted even more by the time the book ended. I loved them. I loved the depth with which Huneven wrote them. I am a sucker for stories depicting people who are deeply flawed but who are nevertheless very much loved. This was one of those stories and I hope to find another one like it again.

Review by kristina grob

Mesopotamia

By Arthur Nersesian
Akashic

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Review by Brittany Shoot

Mathilda Savitch

By Victor Lodato
Picador

Despite years of being told not to, I immediately judged Victor Lodato’s novel Mathilda Savitch by the cover. I opened it expecting to speed through a mature version of Harriet the Spy with a twist of Tim Burton’s eccentricity. The title suggested a fantastic world not unlike Coraline; however, the fantasy of Mathilda Savitch is of the saddest shade.

Young Mathilda Savitch is a teenager who introduces herself in the first line of the book by saying, “I want to be awful.” Disoriented by the sudden death of her older sister Helene, Mathilda descends into an internal world of obsessive compulsive habits, nightmares, and delusion. Her home reflects her dark imagination, as her mother has succumbed to depression and alcoholism while her father weakly tries to maintain the family’s previous levity.

Mathilda Savitch is bitterly funny at times, reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye or The Bell Jar. While it’s supposed to be a coming-of-age story—addressing menstruation, sexual experimentation, as well as basic rebellion—it feels more like a moment fixed in time.

While there are wonderful moments in the book, it isn’t flawless. A parallel theme of terrorism felt superficial and gratuitous. I also wasn’t completely convinced by Mathilda’s voice, especially when it came to puberty and sexuality. As a woman, I did not sense authenticity in these moments as I did when she was frustrated with her parents or missing her sister. Her thoughts, which compose the majority of the book, often sound more like staged monologues.

In fact, Lodato is a playwright and a poet, and this is his debut novel. Bits of the text read like poetry—“Window eyes, a window nose, and a door for a mouth”—while other parts sound like a play. Overall, however, Lodato has captured a painful stream of consciousness. I could imagine myself as a sometimes unhappy teenager wanting to find a dark place, alone, to obsess over Mathilda Savitch like a secret friend. This is a book worth reading, and although a fast read, it is not best suited for the beach.

Review by Claire Burrows