Initially, Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood’s CONSTELLATIONS FROM EVE (Texas Tech University, 211 pp., $29.95) looks like it’s going to be a straightforward chronicle of beautiful people’s bad decisions – a romance whose first meeting contains the seeds of its eventual failure, a female friendship whose intense closeness is coupled with its acute toxicity.
But soon the novel turns out to be more complex. At one point, Eve, an artist, marvels at the “labyrinth structure” of a film, perhaps a signal of Rosewood’s own goals. The story shares a conceit with works of speculative fiction, though not the explicitly speculative gear: alternate histories, in which different versions of Eve lead different lives.
Rosewood’s prose tends towards the figurative and lyrical (she describes a child’s recklessness, writing that he “went out into the unknown as if the whole world were a bed of clouds”). Her characters regularly display quirky impulsiveness: Eve digs a hole and buries her cell phone to quell the desire to control it; Eve and her best friend walk across the thin ice of a frozen lake. While these behaviors may sound out of tune at times, they can also surprise and at times be terrifying. The centerpiece of the novel is the strongest part, a horror-like tale in which Eve’s overwhelming compulsion to love (as a wife does to her husband, as a mother does to her son, as an artist does to her muse) deprives her of her agency and threatens her. common sense.
Both Rosewood and William Brewer, the author of the novel THE RED ARROW (Knopf, 254 pp., $27), quote from the book “The Order of Time” by the physicist Carlo Rovelli. Rosewood does that in her headline; Brewer in dialogue with the fictional physicist, who has disappeared while collaborating on his memoir with the narrator of the novel. The story of the quest for the Physicist soon gives way to a digressive, detailed first-person examination of major depression and its consequences. Brewer is mainly concerned with how love can sometimes paradoxically feed rather than reduce depression.
The novel is carefully structured, sharply observed and often humorous. Brewer has an understated, melodic style with a confident mastery of rhythm; a highlight is a two-page description of a cross-country trip in a single sentence. Detours en route to the physicist’s final psychedelic encounter include an Italian travelogue, a publishing satirical account, an account of a West Virginia chemical spill that reads like a tribute to Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” (in which Brewer skillfully depicts which its protagonist claims to be incapable of describing), perhaps too many quotes from other writers (Michael Herr, Geoff Dyer, Fernando Pessoa, and Denis Johnson, among others), and meditations on the fear of artistic influence and the unreliability of memory. This book has eccentricity and power, executed with remarkable style.
Like “The Red Arrow”, David Santos Donaldson’s GREENLAND (Amistad, 324 pp., $26.99) is a first-person story about a writer who struggles to complete a manuscript within a publisher’s deadline. Both books are heavily metafictional and intertextual, and in both, psychological pressure blurs the lines between author and subject. “Greenland” also contains a nested story of Mohammed El Adl, an Egyptian tram conductor who had a doomed romance with EM Forster during World War I.
The writer under pressure is Kip Starling, who a century later is writing a novel about Mohammed in a Brooklyn brownstone. Donaldson neatly weaves together the timelines of Mohammed and Kip, connecting 1917 to 2019 to portray, in Kip’s words, “where we queer, black, colonial men come from.” While Donaldson’s dialogue is stiff at times, he’s adept at character nuances, and taking risks here serves him well: to a transformative journey into the land of the novel’s title, Kip can come across as difficult, at times insufferable and the reactions of his husband and his best friend confirm that this lecture is intended.
As a result, Kip feels like a real person on the page, rather than a mild-mannered, pleasant representative of the demographic he belongs to. Mohammed is not so lavishly realized – his chapters lean towards melodrama – but this also seems intentional, a matter of Kip’s aesthetic decisions as rendered by Donaldson. “Greenland” is a refreshing novel from an author who makes unconventional artistic choices to serve his goals. As Kip says: “not necessarily something pleasant, but an honest sound.”
Erin Swan does something very different from the other writers discussed here. WALK ON THE DISAPPEARED EARTH (Viking, 375pp., $27) is an epic along the lines of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” or Namwali Serpell’s “The Old Drift”, whose frameworks allow their authors to advance their skills with both historical and speculative fiction. It’s a strange, ambitious novel set over two centuries, and its protagonists are a procession of mothers, its main event being a climate apocalypse in which in an alternate 2017 the world “freezes and thaws and overflows and burns, but doesn’t seem ready to to die,” the story is composed of histories that have been misremembered, forgotten, lost, or deliberately destroyed.
Swan’s staccato sentences can be suggestive, as when she describes a psychiatric ward with “girls with faces like shreds torn from paper.” Some of her characters see the world through veils of ignorance because of their isolated circumstances. Bea, a mute teenager in Kansas City in 1975, grew up in secret until she escaped her abusive home; Moon, a young woman on Mars in 2073, has never known any other living beings except the mysterious uncles who accompany her on her travels. Swan’s prose miraculously portrays things they cannot comprehend, but whose meaning is nevertheless clear to the reader. This rich, endlessly captivating novel is, it is hoped, the first in a long career for an author who has the talent and imagination to write whatever she wants.
Dexter Palmer is the author of three novels, most recently “Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen.”