At Eoghan Walls THE GOSPEL OF ORLA (236 pp., seven stories, paperback, $16.95), the hard-nosed 14-year-old protagonist runs away from home and finds God – in the form of a “crazy hairy” man wrapped in a blanket who steals her bicycle. Enraged and frightened, she pulls out a pocketknife and demands his name.
“Jesus?” she asks, when he tells her. “Jesus damn Jesus like the Jesus Jesus?” He nods.
Her bicycle is gone and Orla has to return home to her widowed father and toddler sister in the village of Glasson Dock in northern England. But she is determined to come up with a new plan. It’s unfair that her grieving father can do what he wants, which is drink; what Orla wants is to steal and skip class and get out of there. When Jesus returns her bike, she shows him how to use an iPhone — it pokes and scrolls, transfixed — and it turns out he’s the real deal: a true miracle worker who raises her cat from the dead. She sees possibilities. She persuades him to flee to Ireland with her and try to resurrect her mother.
As coming-of-age stories go, “The Gospel of Orla” is winningly off-kilter. Walls refuses easy sentimentality, and the story is lively and surprisingly, perfectly paced. Orla’s irreverence is seductive – “Everyone was all so nice after mom died, even Suzie B, who’s a two-sided snail” – and her sense of injustice captivates. We don’t live forever: Orla is right to find this deeply confused. Walls’ prodigious novel asks what we might look to for solace. A miracle shouldn’t be too much to ask.
“Forget what you know about mermaids,” pleads teen Ren, the narrator of Jade Song’s debut, CHLORINE (237 pages, Morrow, $30). “You think mermaids have no power.” To have a fish body, Ren insists, is to be omnipotent.
Song’s gripping novel subverts the norms of multi-people lore – clamshell bras, underwater kingdoms, the love of a sailor or prince. “For too long you’ve been inundated with G-rated fairy tales,” says Ren. She is not benevolent or seductive; she is ruthless and mutilated.
When she’s still human, the fastest on her swim team and the favorite of her voluptuous coach, Ren is lonely. Her father returns to China to build a business: “What’s it called when immigrants go backwards,” Ren wonders, “when they wake up from the nightmare masquerading as a dream?” Ren asks when he’ll be back, and he promises, “As soon as you go under the minute in the 100-meter freestyle.” Ren’s mother also pressures and urges her to impress Ivy League recruiters.
Ren finds a friend in Cathy, who helps her insert a tampon in a wonderfully awkward moment. Only Cathy cherishes Ren, whether she wins or loses, has two legs or a tail. Cathy’s love letters to Ren, overwrought in that adolescent way, run throughout the book.
Her mind is warped from stress and Ren decides the only way to be the best is to transform herself. Her metamorphosis is gruesome, but only for the reader: “Mermaids enjoy pain,” she says. Change requires a little pain, Ren shows us. Delusion too.
‘The mermaid must die,’ says a screenwriter to Penny, the narrator of Julia Langbein’s sublime AMERICAN MERMAID (329 pp., Doubleday, $28), who has also written a novel called ‘American Mermaid’. Penny has left Connecticut and a low-paying job as a teacher that she happily tried out in Hollywood, adapting her surprise bestseller for the screen. Killing Sylvia, her formidable mermaid protagonist, would be a major departure from her novel.
The show’s writers have also decided that they should eroticize the asexual Sylvia. “There’s just no way to sexualize a fish,” Penny tells them. “She’ll have to gain your interest some other way.” The writers – both men – are stubborn and tactless; their conversations with Penny are very funny. In an extended, riotous text thread about multi-folk sex, they somehow bring in Saoirse Ronan, Ina Garten, and “cum soup.” Their demeaning proposed tagline for the trailer: “FIRST. GOLF. FEMINISM.”
Langbein interweaves Penny’s story with chapters from her own novel, and this book-within-a-book structure allows us to mourn the gap between the novel Penny wrote and the version she told will make a good movie. become. (“Are my story‘ she complains to her shark of a cop. “Not really,” the officer responds. “You sold it.”) The writers confront Penny about major changes made to the main script; Penny, unable to explain them, begins to suspect that Sylvia came to life to edit the screenplay and reclaim her fate. Langbein’s novel delves into how we decide who owns a story — and, far more captivatingly, how we know when a story succeeds.
The motto for Anna Metcalfe’s eerie and enchanting debut, CHRYSALIS (259 pages, random house, $27), comes from Vladimir Nabokov, who was obsessed with butterflies. After emerging from the cocoon, Nabokov writes, “the butterfly sees the world, the great and terrible face of the gaping entomologist.” The comma is suggestive: to the viewed, the viewer is both by the world, and the world itself.
Metcalfe divides her novel among three first-person narrators, each closely observing the same unnamed woman – a fitness influencer who posts “Still Life” videos of her posing for hours on end. The first vantage point is Elliot’s: he goes to her gym and watches them lift weights, captivated by her self-control. We also hear from the woman’s mother, Bella, who talks about how much she wished her mercurial daughter needed her when she was younger. The last part is from the influencer’s girlfriend, Susie, who helped the woman through a bad breakup, and now watches her videos and reads all the comments.
“Do you really need the people in your life,” the woman asks her followers, “or do they need you?” She advocates radical solitude: “Cut yourself off.” People go wild for the excuse of being selfish in the name of self-care. The woman uses false terms such as ‘loneliness’ and ‘being alone’, and soon her followers begin to disappear: they give up their lives and go into the woods to seek peace and quiet.
“Chrysalis” is an exciting look at how we spin silk around us by watching the world on our screens. We are the gaping entomologist; we are the doll, always a little fixed.
Claire Luchette is the author of ‘Agatha from Little Neon’.