A look at some recent releases.
*
William Boyle, Saint of the Narrow Street
(Soho Crime)
William Boyle delivered a superb debut more than a decade ago with Gravesend. Since then, he has only gotten better. Luckily for readers, three things have stayed the same between that auspicious debut, the handful of novels that came after, and his new novel: Boyle’s undying love for New York City, his profound knowledge of Brooklynese, and his knack for engrossing and emotionally charged crime narratives that always center regular people. With Saint of the Narrows Street, Boyle cements himself as one of the finest chroniclers of Brooklyn’s heart, joining a list that includes authors like James McBride, Hubert Selby Jr., and Jonathan Lethem.
Risa Franzone has a small ground-floor apartment on Saint of the Narrows Street. She has a baby boy and a husband named Sav who’s running around on her. Life is hard, but Risa is somewhat content. Her sister Giulia lives nearby and always helps with the baby and Risa still has hopes that Sav might change and settle down now that he has a kid. Sadly, those hopes come crashing down when Sav shows up drunk to look for some clothes so he can run away with his new girlfriend and points a gun at Risa while she’s holding the baby. In the ensuing chaos, Risa hits Sav with a cast-iron pan. Sav goes down hard, hitting himself again on the way down. With the help of one of Sav’s best friends, a good guy named Christopher who everyone calls Chooch, the night ends with Sav’s body in the ground and three people and a baby holding a secret.
But secrets are hard to keep and everyone has ideas about why Sav went missing even if most buy Risa’s story that he grabbed his things and ran away. For the next eighteen years, life goes on, but not without that night coming back to haunt Risa, Giulia, Chooch, and Fabrizio, who once ate dirt from his father’s grave and eventually wants real answers.
Saint of the Narrows Street is epic in terms of breadth and scope. Boyle masterfully intertwines the lives of his main characters with a long list of smaller ones that come in and out of the narrative. Novels tend to have a spotlight, and Boyle swings it around to great effect, illuminating the small lives, the everyday events, the block’s bar, the family drama, the blind faith, the conversations around an old kitchen table that change everything. Boyle writes beautifully about people and he writes beautifully about Brooklyn, and this novel is him doing that for more than 400 pages, and it never gets old.
There are three scenes here, two around a table and one in Chooch’s house, that show Boyle can do brutal, that he can do blood and death. However, the reason these scenes hit hard is that the author sets them up perfectly and spends time building empathy so that when the violence comes, we care deeply about it. Crime with heart is hard to do, and Boyle offers a master class of that here. Intricate, heartfelt, rich, and beautifully written, Saint of the Narrows Street is Boyle’s best novel so far, and that’s saying a lot.
TJ Kline, The Bones Beneath My Skin
(Tor)
If you take a bunch of its elements separately–a gay man whose family turned its back on him, a tough army guy who doesn’t talk much, aliens, a conspiracy theorist blabbering on the radio–T.J. Klune’s The Bones Beneath My Skin reads like a collection of tropes. Ah, but Klune is a great storyteller, and this novel is so much more than the sum of its elements.
It’s 1995 and Nate Cartwright lost his job, his estranged parents died in a horrible murder-suicide, and his brother doesn’t want anything to do with him. Nate has no plan, but at least he has somewhere to run away to and hide: a small cabin his parents left him in Roseland, Oregon. The cabin and an old truck are all he got. The place is remote and maybe it will help Nate heal and think about things clearly, but when he gets there, he finds the opposite of peace and quiet. A strange man named Alex and a little girl named Artemis Darth Vader–Art for short–have invaded his cabin. Alex has a gun and they’re clearly on the run from something. Nate becomes their hostage, but only briefly. After that, Nates wants to stay with them. Art is special. Very special. And Alex, whom Nate might be developing a crush on, is rescuing her. Their story is completely unbelievable and entirely true. What they go through after Nate joins them is every stranger and far more important.
On the surface, The Bones Beneath My Skin is a speculative fiction action thriller full of escapes, shootouts, explosions, secret government agencies and experiments, and helicopters dropping from the sky. It’s an entertaining read that maintains impeccable pacing until the last fifty pages or so. However, there is a lot going on under the surface. Klune is a talented writer, but also a keen observer of humanity with a lot to say. This novel tackles a lot–grief, trauma, family, love, homosexuality, time and space–but it does so with brutal honesty and a surprising tenderness that’s very welcome. Art is one of the main characters, but she’s also the perfect vehicle for Klune to deliver a message he repeats a few times throughout the narrative: “We’re not alike. Not really. We’re separated by time and space. And yet, somehow, we’re all made of dust and stars.”
Art, Nate, and Alex are an unlikely trio who quickly become memorable. Their story is wild, but it’s also delves deep into what friendship and love are and how sometimes fate puts people in our life for reasons we don’t understand but need to trust. Also, the way their connection grows is wonderful, and Klune uses that to give readers something we need a lot of, especially right now: a queer love story that’s at once real and gritty and also packed to the gills with positive LGBTQ+ representation. Kudos for that, Mr. Klune. In fact, kudos for the entire novel, which will stick with readers for a long time.
Ricardo Silva Romero, Río Muerto
(tr. Victor Meadowcroft)
(World Editions)
I have always known that a lot of novels lose something in translation even when the translator is great. In Ricardo Silva Romero’s Río Muerto, wonderfully translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft, some of the things many readers in the US won’t get have deep roots in Latin American culture. For example, I smiled “listening” to the music of El General and Banda Blanca, but I wonder how many readers here will identify those songs. In any case, regardless of how much you get, Río Muerto is a superb short novel that bridges the gap between horror and crime in very unique ways.
Salomón Palacios, “the mute,” was shot down a few steps from his front door in Belén del Chamí by a small group of men. His young sons had to carry his body into the house and his widow, Hipólita, made sure he got a burial despite knowing no one wanted to have anything to do with her murdered husband. In the aftermath of Salomón’s murder, Hipólita breaks down. She rants, doesn’t shower, doesn’t feed her children, doesn’t leave the house. And then she does, and her goals are simple: call out everyone involved in her husband’s death and hope that a bullet finds here in the process. Meanwhile, Salomón watches everything. After dying, his ghost stuck around, watching everything and begging the local witch to send his wife and sons messages from him.
Río Muerto is narrated by Salomón’s ghost, but also by the author and, in a way, by the person who told the author the story. It sounds complicated, but Silva Romero pulls it off nicely. The novel is historically and politically charged, but also delivers great prose and a unique blend of grief and phantasmagoria. Silva Romero knows how to entertain, how to ramp up tension until we’re sure Hipólita and her sons are about to get killed. However, this novel shines because he mixes that with the story of Belén del Chamí–a town the Colombian government has refused to add it to the map–and a critique of the murder of civilians perpetrated by guerilla groups. The fusion of elements is strange and the voice fully embraces speculative fiction, but the end result is a crime novel that’s also a political horror novel and a story about how bad decisions can haunt us much more than any ghost.
Río Muerto is a window into a violent world as well as a tale about a family suffering at the hands of paramilitarism and bad neighbors. Silva Romero is a star in Colombia and hopefully this, his first novel to be translated to English, will put him on the map and ensure we get more of his work soon.
