Children of God Go Bowling
By Shannon Olson
Viking, 292 pages, $24.95
With her first novel, “Welcome to My Planet,” Minnesota writer Shannon Olson was hailed as America’s answer to Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding. Her second novel, “Children of God Go Bowling,” is another strike, at once charming, uproarious and poignant. Olson presents the further adventures of her eponymous hero, now 33, out of graduate school and “sick of living in life’s Switzerland. Not committed to anything or anyone.”
In her eighth year of therapy, Shannon has “been working on It’s Not Always About Me” as she navigates St. Paul’s “heartburn-inducing singles buffet.” After a near-miss with a guy who’s engaged, she wonders whether her college buddy Adam might be her Mr. Right after all.
Much of the novel unfolds during therapy sessions in which she analyzes her relationships with Adam and her mother, Flo. The curious title comes from group therapy, where one member confesses he feels most connected, ” ‘like a child of God,’ ” when bowling, because ” ‘pretty much everyone is bad at bowling.’ ” There are hilarious riffs on an overthinker’s paranoid response to psychological tests and on how Minnesotans and Lutherans use “different” as their “most damning adjective,” and “quality” to mean ” ‘just like us.’ “
Olson is clearly quality and wonderfully different–in a non-Minnesotan sense, of course.
The Memoir Club
By Laura Kalpakian
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St. Martin’s, 280 pages, $24.95
In “The Memoir Club,” Laura Kalpakian’s ninth novel, six Portland women meet for a class in memoir writing. It’s a handy device for excavating misery in its myriad mutations, but stilted dialogue and contrived situations make one wish for an amnesia epidemic.
The class roster is a checklist of female tribulations: Gynecologist Caryn Henley is mired in guilt over having broken up her marriage with an affair; she blames it (and herself) for her two children’s deaths in a plane crash with their father. Her loyal friend Nurse Nell, who works with her in a women’s health clinic, drags her to the class as a last-ditch effort to exorcise her grief. Rusty pines after the daughter she was forced to give up at birth, Korean-born Jill McDougall wonders who she really is, and Francine learns that the husband she worshipped had a second family.
Kalpakian writes with a heavy hand, not trusting her readers’ intelligence to catch even unsubtle references to Proustian madeleines. “The Memoir Club” is awash in overworked metaphors, including a “sea of grief” that threatens to drown Kalpakian’s prose along with her characters. It’s all too soapy to be moving, as when Nell declares, “I am amazed how love changes the way I see the world.”
Dear Mrs. Lindbergh
By Kathleen Hughes
Norton, 302 pages, $24.95
A woman grounded by maternal responsibilities yearns for flight in Kathleen Hughes’ pensive first novel, “Dear Mrs. Lindbergh.”
Octogenarians Henry and Ruth Gutterson disappear while driving home to their Iowa farm after Thanksgiving in Chicago with their grown children. Searching for clues, their son and daughter delve into their parents’ past, particularly their passion for aviation.
They unearth a trove of letters Ruth wrote over 50 years to Anne Morrow Lindbergh detailing her longing for adventure. The confessional missives read like an unedited journal, both revealing and repetitive.
There’s an old-fashioned, muted tone to Hughes’ story, a flatness suited to the expansive Midwestern landscape. But Hughes has an unfortunate tendency to land her long sentences heavily, often using two words where one will do: “some fluke, anomaly,” “hollowed out, eviscerated.”
What soars are details of early air-mail aviation, an occupation so dangerous that of the first 40 pilots transporting air mail in 1918, only nine were still alive seven years later.
Ruth loves the view from on high, “the rest of the world, cracked open for her like a geode.”
“Flying is living,” she gushes.
Departures
By Lorna J. Cook
St. Martin’s, 242 pages, $22.95
Lorna J. Cook’s first novel, “Departures,” focuses on two Michigan siblings on the cusp of adulthood. Seventeen-year-old Suzen VanderZee suspects her preoccupied mother of adultery, prefers horticulture to college and has a crush on her lesbian boss at the nursery where she interns. Meanwhile, her 15-year-old brother, Evan, is in the throes of his first flirtation, with a girl who flouts authority. Frightened, he yearns for escape and urges his father, an English professor, to take the family abroad on a long-overdue sabbatical.
These deadly earnest teenagers are on a journey, coming to terms with their parents’ sexuality and their own. Suzen regards her parents’ marriage “as the cycles of a washing machine: agitate, rinse, spin.” Evan likens their anger to snow, “quiet and cold, accumulating in the background until you are surprised by its depth.” Cook allows us–and eventually her two teens–to see that neither has the parents right.
With highly literate prose that occasionally veers into the self-conscious, “Departures” captures the hubbub of a large family and the vast gulch between generations in a clear-eyed meditation on maturation.
Swimming Naked
By Stacy Sims
Viking, 243 pages, $24.95
Just when you think you’ve had it with coming-of-age stories about dysfunctional families, along comes Stacy Sims with a fresh, edgy angle. Her brutally moving first novel, “Swimming Naked,” which is due out this month, is told from the perspective of 30-year-old Lucy Greene, a chain-smoking photography curator from Ohio who depicts her family as if they were grotesques in a Diane Arbus photograph.
Lucy is in Florida to attend her 58-year-old mother, who is dying of metastasized lung cancer. With the regularity of a metronome, she alternates between her bleak present and her family’s hellish past. Sims opens with an annual vacation to a lakeside cottage, “an attempt to make us feel as though we were a happy little family, with rituals and everything.” When Lucy’s mother takes her skinny-dipping alone under the stars, 6-year-old Lucy is dazzled:
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“It seemed she was saying something to me where the words were the same as what she actually meant. I was speechless with suspicion.”
Back at the cottage, the spell is broken when a storm erupts, terrifying her older sister, Anna, one of the strangest neurotics in literature. Their father is struck by lightning during the storm and disappears a few months later.
At her mother’s deathbed decades later, Lucy learns he’s still alive, “a fat old man, a moronic Arbus freak.” Anna, meanwhile, ends up in and out of rehab for multiple addictions. Lucy comments: “Anna’s view of the world made mine seem utterly wholesome and compassionate, like I was Walker Evans alongside her Robert Mapplethorpe, both of us capturing completely different images of the same incidents for the family album.”
Sims works toward a stunningly beautiful climax while bringing painful pictures into excruciating focus.