A new novel by Kate Walbert chronicles five generations of women’s struggles, from suffrage to the War on Terror.

Kate Walbert’s latest novel, A Short History of Women, is an accomplished, absorbing, and ferociously graceful work. The novel centers around five generations of American women, the eras ranging from the first decade of the 1900s to post-9/1l, the locales spanning from New York to Patagonia. Walbert, writing in a style that is at once delicate and intense, illuminates the limitations her women struggle against—from the battle for suffrage to the quiet indignities of contemporary domesticity—and the often brutal ways in which they seek their freedom.

This pursuit of freedom drives much of the novel’s action. The opening line—“Mum starved herself for suffrage, Grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far”—foregrounds Dorothy Trevor Townsend’s final push for liberation, an event that echoes throughout the novel. Her fight is felt as an unshakeable trauma by her two children—Evelyn, who becomes a successful but emotionally isolated professor of chemistry at Barnard, and Thomas, who descends into misery and alcoholism. But Dorothy Townsend proves an inspiration to Thomas’s daughter, Dorothy Townsend Barrett. Weary of the dullness of late-life domesticity, the younger Dorothy wants, with increasingly desperate urgency, to “do something,” an impulse that compels her to take illegal photographs of war casualties returning to a military base:

Today, she plans to fight back. She can almost taste it; see herself in the resistance. Dorothy Barrett, granddaughter to the suffragette, mother to three: Caroline, Liz, and the dead one, James; wife to Charles. She mounts the camera on the track and angles the lens toward where the plane will descend—they come from the east, she has learned, out of Mecca, the bodies mostly coffined, then wrapped in flags, but sometimes carried in a tiny box.

Kate Walbert

Her daughters, Caroline and Liz, are less inclined toward rebellion. Liz, in particular, lacks the drive to explore her own discontent, let alone do something about it. They watch in horror as their mother’s actions at the military base lead to tangible changes in her life—arrests, separation from her husband of many years, the launch of a confessional blog, a renewed desire to understand what it means to lead a gratifying life—as they grapple with taking meaningful action in their own lives. Caroline, still mourning her daughter’s departure for college, takes to reading her mother’s blog in the middle of the night. Liz, ensconced in the comfortable but repetitive landscape of privileged urban domesticity, seems utterly disconnected from world and self—in one quietly wrenching scene, she gets staggeringly drunk in the middle of the day with another mother—but lacks the ability, or even the desire, to understand why she hungers so desperately for escape.

The novel’s technical grace is remarkable, Walbert’s prose masterful. Her sentences spiral beautifully outward, as evidenced in Evelyn’s ruminations in the midst of her mother’s self-starvation:

I climb the stairs. Adults only, Grandmother says, and even so, Grandmother stays away, Mum now preferring her solitude, she said, the word closing around Mum as a shell would around a seed, as hard as the steel of a submarine. She sits within it, and you can no more get to her than she can get to you. It is as if she is going somewhere; she has made up her mind. Or maybe she’s just waiting for time to pass; for something to be over. She is caught in there, in her solitude, held in the light and poured steel of it and moving away at great speed.

A Short History of Women begins with Evelyn recounting her mother’s death, and in the novel’s final pages, Evelyn, now an old woman, circles back to that life-altering moment with shattering beauty. Between these two poles in time, the narrative leaps around with unbroken fluidity, the deeply realized characters reflecting each other in moving and complex ways. Walbert resists drawing easy parallels between the lives of her women; rather, the chapters, all centering around crucial moments in the characters’ lives, create a perfect interlocking, a luminous patchwork of mystery and discovery, of persistent struggle and occasional triumph.

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Keith Lee Morris’s new novel exposes the hidden desires and fears of the local darts champions.

Darts. Drugs. An undercover DEA agent. A drowned woman. Keith Lee Morris’s The Dart League King is a refreshingly adventurous and expertly crafted exploration of a peculiar, dart-loving small town in Idaho. Spanning a single night, the novel is at once compact and expansive, driven equally by character and plot, as Morris plumbs the secrets and heartaches of five residents of Garnet Lake, Idaho.

One of the most remarkable aspects of The Dart League King is the sheer force of the author’s language. The novel is propelled by sentences that reach for—and achieve—a vigorous, colloquial elegance. Morris maintains a skillful balance between the conversational and the poetic—in one moment, clouds are described as being “tall as fucking death, like the grim reaper dressed up and coming over the hills”—and despite his penchant for breathlessly sprawling sentences, there’s always a masterful sense of control. The linguistic scales are frequently pressed, but never tipped too far:

“Vince Thompson’s head hurt like a son of a bitch, a condition that could have been improved, no doubt, if he’d had access to even a single alcoholic beverage of one goddamn variety or another during the course of the last fucking hour or so, but no, even such a simple pleasure as that was going to be denied him tonight, apparently, what with goddamn Bill eyeing him from behind the fucking bar like he, Vince, was a goddamn cattle rustler and Bill was John Fucking Wayne, and so it was starting to look like he was going to have to shoot Russell fucking Harmon stone-cold sober, and Jesus Christ Almighty his head hurt like that asshole Clint Harmon had hit him with a two-by-four, I mean was it his imagination or was his fucking head actually lopsided, like swollen up on the left side so it looked like his brain was ready to leak out his left ear, or was that just a fucking optical illusion caused by the fact that his left eye was even more screwed up than usual?”

The restless energy of the language complements the tumultuous lives of the central characters. Tristan Mackey, Russell Harmon, Vince Thompson, Brice Habersham, and Kelly Ashton spend the night of the dart league championship struggling to manage personal catastrophes of varying sorts: the local deep-thinker, Tristan, is haunted by his failure to prevent the drowning death of a lover; the dart league king himself, Russell, fueled by too much booze and coke, is fretting about debts, lost love, and the odds of winning the tournament; Vince, a small-time dealer, is looking to settle a score; Brice, the convenience store owner/undercover DEA agent, who has somehow managed never to have had sex with his emotionally unstable wife, is planning to take down both Russell and Vince; Kelly, the single mother struggling to escape Garnet Lake, is torn between two very different men. It’s a volatile cast of characters, each of whom contains an explosive set of internal and external conflicts. The result is a novel that crackles with life—a story that is as dynamic as it is compressed.

Keith Lee Morris

The Dart League King creates the kind of suspense and momentum that makes it a difficult book to put down—quite a feat, considering how little actually happens in much of the novel. The characters spend a lot of time standing around, thinking, and waiting, but even through the most contemplative stretches the tension never sags. Morris suspends his characters long enough to allow their innermost desires and fears to surface, but simultaneously keeps the plot moving and the tensions climbing.

The perils of writing a novel about small towns (or any other frequently traversed landscape) are plentiful: an author can’t simply reflect our pre-existing perceptions of small-town America and its inhabitants, can’t yield to the expected and the clichéd, but instead must make an ostensibly ordinary setting as strange and dazzling as an exotic island. Keith Lee Morris succeeds in this task: his Garnet Lake is surprising and singular, filled with its unique codes, indignities, and mysteries. Garnet Lake is not just any small town, but a landscape so precisely rendered that one could not imagine it existing in any other fictional world but that of The Dart League King.

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For Mary Miller’s characters, the world is anything but big. These are women trapped in little towns and little lives, but the emotional resonance is limitless.

A Review of Mary Miller’s Big World

Mary Miller is a master of tone. The characters in her debut collection, Big World, can often seem directionless, but there’s a riveting undercurrent of tension, an authenticity of voice, that surges through Miller’s run-down landscapes and episodic narratives. Each story builds upon and enriches one another, not necessarily through variety, but by layering the same psychic desolation, the same sad and aimless women.

While still working within the frame of realism, Miller challenges expectations of narrative shape, relinquishing traditional structure for something more asymmetrical, abrupt, and intriguing. Big World triumphs by inhabiting a persistent tonal landscape, a recurring state of mind.

The collection opens with “Leak,” the story of a young woman coping with her mother’s death and her grieving, inept father, who “probably catalogued my needs in his head, checked them off one by one: food, water, shelter, love.” While the dead parent premise is not an uncommon one, the story thwarts the reader’s expectations at nearly every turn. The narrator’s trip to Florida with her father, though posing as the story’s central action, turns out to be uneventful—they pass time in the car, lunch at Shoney’s, and arrive intact in Panama City—yet there’s a sense that the story’s essential matter is right there, gurgling beneath the surface, needling the characters but not pushing them to eruption. Afterward, the narrator drifts from visiting her aunt to hanging out with her emotionally stunted, sun-allergic friend to attempting to care for her father; the eponymous leak, discovered in the story’s opening pages, returns at the end to embody both the immediate predicament and the desperate state of her life: “I was hoping the ceiling would hold.”

Miller’s prose has a tonal flatness that seems like just the right pitch for her downtrodden characters; lunch at Shoney’s and a boy setting himself on fire are rendered with approximately the same affect. However, this simple directness does not equal dullness. Each of her sharply honed sentences contains a kind of pressure that is crucial to every story’s momentum, and the tone is elastic enough to allow for flashes of piercing interiority and slightly more expansive, though always matter-of-fact, musings:

“I read an article about loneliness in a Jesus magazine while I ate. None of my coworkers believed in Jesus. We made fun of the earnest and plain-looking women who congregated in the religious section, one of them offering advice while the other protested mildly, their quilted bible covers in paisley prints. Sometimes I got the urge to join them. It wasn’t because there was something missing. The something missing was the plight of humanity—any idiot knew that—it couldn’t be filled with food or alcohol or drawing blood from skin.” (“Fast Trains”)

For Miller’s characters, the world is anything but big. These are women trapped in little towns and little lives, and the claustrophobia of limited options is mirrored by the small spaces in which the stories unfold: a hotel room, a house, a waiting room. The “something missing” is all the doors that will never open for the women who populate Big World. But while their lives might be hampered by the dual burdens of past loss and everyday discontentment, the stories themselves never feel limited in scope; on the contrary, the emotional resonance in Miller’s best stories is limitless.

In a recent interview, Miller commented that “Humans are so complicated and damaged and I love them so much.” There’s both a simplicity and a vastness to that statement that perfectly captures her aesthetic. In her debut, she establishes herself as a chronicler of female loneliness and dysfunction, of women who keep losing themselves in grief and bad choices, who struggle to peel back the pains of everyday life and expose the grit beneath.

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Obsession distorts the lens through which we view the world; things that once seemed unfathomable become terrifically and terrifyingly plausible.

Vacation, Deb Olin Unferth’s captivating debut novel, is, among other things, an off-kilter ode to obsession. Obsession distorts the lens through which we view the world; things that once seemed unfathomable become terrifically and terrifyingly plausible. Such is the story for Myers, the character at the center of Vacation. Before separating from his wife, Myers discovers that she has started following a man, Gray, and begins following her (and, consequently, Gray) himself, along the way becoming fixated on the motives of all involved:

“Best-case scenario: the guy had committed a crime she had witnessed. Another guy had committed a crime and this man was the victim. She needed to tell him something. Someone paid her to follow him… There were other reasons—political, philosophical, messianic. She expected terrible or wonderful events to stem from him. She had gone mad.”

Of course, none of these conjectures adequately explains his wife’s compulsion; her reasons remain enigmatic, though unfailingly compelling, even to herself. Myers and his wife, never able to engage in direct confrontation, can only wander their unnamed, Manhattan-esque city, like two ships with malfunctioning navigational equipment circling each other in the night. Not surprisingly, the increasingly intricate web of secrecy, deception, obsession, and passive-aggressive rage leads to the dissolution of Myers’ marriage and his anguished hunt for Gray.

Myers, as it turns out, is acquainted with Gray from his college days and sets out to confront the man who so gravely upset his life. The men connect via e-mail, setting meetings in Syracuse and then in Nicaragua. Gray is absent at both meetings, sending Myers on a chase that leads to a rather desolate corner of the earth—the missed meetings and missed connections serving as a painful mirror of the disconnect between Myers and his wife. In a sense, Unferth is working with a familiar form: the quest, the journey, the stranger comes to town, though the novel moves in a decidedly existential direction. Gray is the Godot that never comes, leaving Myers to wade through dark and nebulous emotional terrain – not to mention an earthquake, travel problems, and the various other misfortunes he encounters en route to his showdown with Gray.

In addition to the Myers/Gray/Wife story, other narrative threads are afoot. Most significantly, there’s the story of Claire, who is searching for her real father, a rogue dolphin trainer. As the novel progresses, Claire and Myers’ narratives intersect beautifully, both technically and thematically, and the passages narrated by Myers’ wife and Gray are equally compelling. The narratives of the central players are interspersed with interjections from peripheral characters, a “chorus” which serves to demonstrate that Myers and his wife are not the only ones in the grips of obsession.

Unferth eschews many conventions—i.e. resolution, traditional character development, and, to a degree, plausibility. Vacation is rooted in neither the world that most readers will recognize as their own or an unmistakably non-realist landscape. Instead, the logic of the novel is reminiscent of an Antonioni film, like The Passenger, but with more heart and vibrancy. The characters’ desires are driven by the cosmic, though they do also ache for concrete things: wife, father, satisfactory answers, someone to blame.

The strength and precision of Unferth’s language goes a long way toward holding the novel together. She specializes in a kind of spare beauty punctuated by striking moments of high style:

“A man struggling in water looks somewhat like the inside of a jewel box or a crystal. The tiny bubbles shine whitely and sparkle. The more the man thrashes, the more it seems that gems and bits of silver and pearl are falling around him, as if he were caught inside a heavy opera costume, as if he were crashing through the stained glass of a cathedral, as if he were wrapped in air and light.”

Her aptitude for both lean, piercing descriptive moments and more maximalist turns results in a richly textured, often surprising linguistic landscape.

It is a formidable task to produce work that asks “the big questions” in a way that does justice to the enormity of those questions, that gives compelling voice and sight to the chaos, the sheer implausibility, of human existence and history, what Steven Millhauser calls “the blazing thing that deserves the name of reality.” Unferth’s imaginative, fractured, uncompromising Vacation is urgently contemporary without failing to strike at the heart of the most enduring human concerns.

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