The Shortlist THIS TOWN SLEEPS By Dennis Staples 211 pp. Counterpoint. $26. At one point in Staples’s “This Town Sleeps,” the 20-something narrator, Marion Lafournier, recalls: “When I was in middle school Ojibwe class, I first learned the concept of having an Indian name.
Or spirit name. The phrase we had to use for our English name actually translates to ‘pretend to be called. ’ Marion Lafournier indizhinikaaz. I pretend to be called Marion Lafournier.
” Names are meant to identify us, to distinguish us from our fellow human beings, to indicate each of us is an individual, with individual characteristics and desires. What does it mean to inhabit a space where even your name is contested? And where is the truth located — in the Anglican name you’ve always used, which feels like your name? Or in some other name you’ve never heard before, but which could hint at long-submerged possibilities?
In this novel we travel to familiar literary terrain: a community — in this case, an Indigenous reservation in northern Minnesota — that is still suffering from the ravages of colonialism and its aftermath. Yet Staples approaches this grand injustice with a fresh intimacy, informing us of the ways it continues to singe people’s lives, and how the search for truth — in one’s identity, hopes, love — defines them. For Marion, this pursuit begins with his romantic life. He starts an affair with Shannon, a former classmate and junior prom king.
Marion embraces his sexuality, but Shannon is still struggling to do so. Marion pursues the relationship with ardor; Shannon at first rejects but then embraces it, sometimes within a single encounter. Hovering over the community and the narrative is the death of Kayden Kelliher, an Ojibwe high school basketball star who was killed in a crime that remains mysterious. His absence haunts the town, and the various threads of this book soon merge into one: Marion’s attempt to discover the truth about Kayden’s life and death, and how both continue to affect the trajectories of those he left behind.
UNDER THE RAINBOW By Celia Laskey 278 pp. Riverhead. $27. Laskey’s “Under the Rainbow” stages a fascinating experiment in which a politically active L.
Group Text “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” will spark lively conversation among people who have run out of things to say. Welcome to Group Text, a mo...
group attempts to integrate a small town in Middle America. The nonprofit Acceptance Across America sends a task force to Big Burr, Kan. , after determining it to be the most homophobic city in the United States.
“The novel cycles through a large cast of narrators that includes Avery, who moved to Big Burr from Los Angeles when her mother, now separated from Avery’s other mom, volunteered to lead the task force (“try not to be too jealous”).”
Pining for home, Avery has developed a crush on a classmate that gives her “hetero shame,” i. e. the “fear of coming out as heterosexual to your lesbian mom. ” And then there’s David, who has also relocated with AAA to Big Burr, accompanied by his longtime partner, Miguel.
Complicating their already complicated (i. e. open) relationship, Miguel’s father, Arturo, has moved in with them after suffering a stroke. Now they can’t invite other men over to have sex with them.
Other chapters are devoted to Linda, a mother lost in grief over the recent death of her son; and Gabe, a married man finally reckoning with his homosexuality after years of repression (“I’ve been on Grindr for a while now, but … today, my 15th anniversary, is the first time I’ve considered going through with it”). Laskey composes elegant portraits of each character, drawing us into intimate worlds that pulse with light and sound, only to swiftly guide our attention elsewhere; if that character reappears at all, it will be in a minor role. Some voices are even more compelling than others, but over all Laskey inhabits each of their perspectives credibly, exhibiting a vocal range that grants the reader a panoramic view of the proceedings. You might have already guessed what Laskey’s after — these individuals will come together in ways that leave them forever altered; a few will even grow to recognize the humanity in people they’ve long reviled.
In Laskey’s artful hands this moral is delivered with such conviction and grace that it somehow feels fresh, and, thus, essential. THE GOD CHILD By Nana Oforiatta Ayim 241 pp. Bloomsbury. $26.
We meet Maya, the ostensible protagonist of Ayim’s “The God Child,” as a child of Ghanaian immigrants in Germany. Soon she will move to England for boarding school, and then back to Germany, and on to Ghana, before returning to England once more. Her father, Kwabena, a frustrated, austere doctor, misses Ghana without wanting to go back — Maya reflects on a Latin phrase he used to tell her: “Hic sunt leones. It did not mean that he would, like a lion, return home in all his power, but that he was the unknown in an unknown land, that he was lost.
” Her vain, erratic mother, Yaa, constantly tries to prove she both does and does not belong in Europe. In time, Kojo, Maya’s cousin, joins them from Ghana. He is the titular godchild, literally to Yaa, but also in another sense: an enigmatic figure who seems not quite of this world, and to bear esoteric knowledge from some other realm. Kojo teaches Maya about the importance of stories, not just the one they are writing, together, about the “sacred wisdoms” of Ghana, but those telling of their country’s past, before colonialism, and of the future that could still be theirs if they can wrest the power of narrative-making from the West, which still exerts a potent influence on many aspects of Ghanaian life.
This is a story that is obsessed with stories; indeed, “The God Child” could be described as a series of sharply drawn short fictions, each consequential on its own, each only glancingly connected to the others. As I read this book, with all its leaps in time and space, I sometimes had the sense that there was another narrative running just beneath the surface of the text, some alternate story that the characters I was reading about simultaneously inhabited. For instance, the few times Maya and Kojo’s “The Book of Histories” is mentioned, it is with great urgency (“we have to listen and look closer than before”); and they refer to details that are new to the reader, as if we’ve been privy to their process all along. At times this feeling was thrilling, and at others maddening.
Yet isn’t this precisely the experience of migration, of trying to situate yourself in contexts that weren’t created for you? Kojo and Maya’s migrations eventually lead them back to Ghana, where they hope to find material they need to complete their story, years in the making. A story that, like this one, will illuminate Ghana’s history; a story that will coax something whole from the broken parts of their lives.
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