Audition

Individuals play multiple roles from day to day – child and parent, spouse and work colleague, friend and rival. Such exercises are more audition than performance, as the individual seeks approval from friends and strangers alike. Does moving more deliberately, strategizing like actors in a play, make us more content, more capable? 

In Audition by Katie Kitamura, the aging actress protagonist frets about her multiple roles, whether on the stage or during daily life, and she regularly plots her approach, gauging her audience’s assessment. The quest can be for bit parts or roles central to a story. Each role, each encounter, can go “awry, or did not cohere,” the protagonist muses. “I had come to see it as something of a crapshoot, you never knew if this would be the one when everything would come together or if it would fall by the wayside, another disposable performance, the detritus of a soon to be forgotten artistic endeavor.”

She dines with a young man at the start of the book, reflecting on how she cannot completely control  assumptions made by nearby diners. They might assume she is a mother treating a son to lunch or an older woman engaged in an unseemly affair. Theater audiences are generally familiar with the plot they have come to witness. Strangers in any public setting beyond the theater lack scripts or background knowledge. 

Such insights energize her acting but complicate her relationships on and off stage. “Tension grew out of every scene, scenes in which nothing took place and people said very little, and yet the pressure grew and grew so that by the end of the play I realized I had been in a sickening state of unease for some time, and when I emerged from the theater I was simultaneously invigorated and physically exhausted, every nerve in my body still standing on end.” 

The woman regularly muses on losing sight of "the shore," one's center and true self - when one “stumbled deep into the interior... if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.” She is unnerved about not being first to realize that a longtime treasured morning ritual has suddenly become a rut and frets about failures in reading her husband, a son and his girlfriend, her director. Routines and relationships can abruptly shift to some point of no return.

Boundaries between imagination and reality can become vague.  

With her son, she discovers “I no longer knew what he was  to me, or what I was to him. We had been playing parts, and for a period – for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person – the mechanism had held,” Kitamura concludes. “But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse. It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.” 

The compelling narrative is a warning. We constantly audition and re-audition for the parts we play in life, and the connections produced are fragmented, exhausting, tenuous. 

In need of a friend

A bright, talented, loving child lives grows up with a paranoid father who falls for conspiracy theories about politics, The parents neglect him, argue, scream and physically fight. Estranged from the father, the son leaves the miserable family to attend college and find success in an advertising career while struggling with the various extreme identities experienced with family, co-workers and friends. 

Identifying as they and trans in Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom, the protagonist yearns for love and understanding. But the family’s and country’s politics are in upheaval. People are angry and unhappy, and life can quickly move from one extreme to another. The character relies on drugs and alcohol, loses the job and endures a head injury after a violent breakup with a lover. The mother calls to report the father is missing, and they heads off for Arkansas in a stolen BMW with a new young friend in tow. 

The road trip is funny and wild as the odd couple philosophize, argue, drink and meet an assortment of characters on the road in the effort to find out what happened to the father. 

Carlstrom tells the story of two of the many individuals in this world who navigate life without real family support or guidance. They have little choice but to go through life relying on scraps of kindness of others who could otherwise walk away. 

In the end, the protagonist confides their love for Yivi like a little sister. “You might not realize this, but you single-handedly got me through the worst weeks of my life. If you ever need anything, I don’t care what it is, I’m here…. And if I never hear from you again after tomorrow, that’s okay. I’ll still be happy knowing that somewhere out there I have a psychic, communist, knife-wielding, drug-dealing, and huge-hearted garbage-goth friend named Yivi.” 

Good people are out there but for far too many, they are hard to find.

Family memories

We manipulate our memories and they also manipulate our behavior far into the future. Things Don’t Break on Their Own by Sarah Easter Collins is about a wealthy, dysfunctional family with a controlling and abusive father. The youngest daughter rebels against the control, refusing to be complacent like her mother and sister. She sees problems and speaks out in ways that challenge family dynamics.

At age 13, Laika abruptly vanishes on the way to school the day after a difficult birthday party for the mother. The older sister, Willa, while remaining compliant with her father’s wishes, continues the search and cannot forget the bond she had with Laika.

Twenty-five years later, Willa and her husband attend a dinner party hosted by a former lover and her wife, joined by a brother and a memory expert, another brother and a woman from France. Liv, the memory researcher, points out that any group is likely to have “wildly differing memories of a single event, when you’d be right in thinking that everyone experienced the exact same thing.”

Willa’s husband is close to her abusive father and joins the man in suggesting that the sister died years earlier. Willa cannot dismiss the concerns, and asks about factors that influence memory of events and Liv points to good health and sleep as well as “state of mind, wish fulfillment, stress. Embarrassment. Humiliation. Guilt.”

Liv also explains how entire communities and consumers will shade certain memories, collectively attempting to forget and put certain difficult people behind. One character notes, “given we’re constantly bombarded with information, much of which comes with a certain agenda attached. We need to know the extent to which our memories are reliable, and, equally, the extent to which memory itself can be deliberately constructed.

The conversation triggers outbursts from two guests and helps Willa discover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance and the father’s role as he attempted to mask evidence of ugly control and abuse.

Families grow together, heal together, form memories together. Family members can break a cycle of lies, control and abuse by reckoning with the truth. Only then can painful memories be set aside, allowing forgiveness and love to thrive once again.

Interruptions

The tale is a familiar one...

Shares of  a small Canadian metals company skyrocket by 250 percent after the US government agrees to support the company's exploration efforts with a road in remote northwest Alaska.   

"The White House on Monday announced a partnership with Trilogy Metals as part of a push to unlock domestic supplies of copper and other critical minerals in the Ambler mining district in Alaska," reports CNBC. "Opponents of the long-debated Ambler Road project, a 211-mile industrial road through the Alaskan wilderness, have said it will harm landscapes that support local communities and wildlife."

The news story recalls the mystery novel Interruptions, set in Sitka and first published more than two decades ago, later released as an e-book in 2009.  

Two teenaged boys enjoy exploring the wilderness near their homes in Sitka, Alaska, and that includes following a mining engineer who is consulting on an unpopular road project. Gavin convinces his best friend to skip school and follow the engineer, intent on gathering evidence to to stop construction of the road crossing Baranof Island.  

The boys steal the engineer's backpack and trouble soon follows. One child is murdered. The other boy's mother, a leading opponent of the road, abruptly goes missing. Mother and son have no choice but to work separately to find the killer and expose secrets behind an unnecessary road that would forever change the character of an Alaskan community.

Back to the news: "The Ambler Road Project is a proposal for a 211-mile industrial access road and is intended to facilitate the development of at least four large-scale mines and potentially hundreds of smaller mines across the region," reports an opposition website. "It would cross 11 major river systems...."

The two proposed roads, one from a mystery novel and the other from the news, are more than a thousand miles apart and yet both have ties to mining exploration and Alaska Native corporations. 

When Interruptions was first published, Sitka was Alaska's fifth largest city with a population of 8,800. Its rank has since fallen to twelfth with about 8,200 people. On the other hand, Wiseman, near the Ambler road project, has about 24 people. 

End justifies the means?

 

In This Book Will Bury Me by Ashley Winstead, Jane Sharp, a senior in college, is at a loss after her middle-aged father stops taking his blood pressure medication and effectively kills himself with a heart attack. Soon afterward, she watches a news story about a women’s body found in a Florida lake and a detective imploring the public for their help. “A sense of purpose struck me, so intense it caused a searing heat in my chest, as if I were being shocked back to life.” 

Jane becomes obsessed about solving who killed Indira Babatunde and why her father decided to stop taking his medication – and she joins an online true-crime forum, a mix of amateur and experienced investigators who pose questions, examine clues. develop theories – not to mention accessing bank records and hacking computer accounts. The site is open to true crime followers of all levels, and anything goes as members compete to find answers - unlike police who must follow  the law, preserve evidence and meet a high standard of proof. And what's stopping a savvy murderer from also logging on to the site to study techniques or follow the progress of any particular investigation?  

Jane is sensitive, observant, when examining photograph and documents – and she also reads people well, asking astute questions and pinpointing leads from the start. The obsession leads Jane to drop out of college and lose her job at Starbucks, but she also attracts the attention of a private subgroup, an exclusive group of true crime aficionados who soon focus on the murder of three college students in Idaho. With little money and fewer friends, Jane is astonished by the sudden twist in her life: “I’ve come to think fate is a trap we set for ourselves.” 

More than halfway through the book, soon after a second set of women are murdered, Jane travels to Idaho to examine the scene of the crime and meet her fellow sleuths in person. Early encounters are awkward: “My world was one of flat, 2D text, where people wearing anime avatar masks ruled comment threads with pithy quips and takedowns, and you weren’t forced to be present, three-dimensional, accountable to the face and body to which you’d been born. Mine was the brave new frontier, and this world, where people were beautiful and charming and it still mattered, was the old and antiquated. I’d never fit in here. Long live the internet, the revenge of the nerds.”

Two of the sleuths are older and parental figures. Former detective George Lightly notices a plastic bag of ashes on her desk, knows her father recently died and gives her an urn with the words, “It’s what we will never know about the ones we love that binds us to them.”

Along the way, the group resolves the murders in Idaho despite some misdirection from the murderer. Authorities prefer their theory about the first and reject Jane’s theory about different killers for each set of murders. And she remains persistent in trying to find out why her father stopped taking his medication and why he refused to lose weight, Jane gathers a few answers about an abusive childhood and a secret hobby – but not enough to understand his motivation. Still, the father's writing triggers an idea on how to resolve the two Idaho cases with one proverbial stone.

Jane evolves and matures over the course of 432 pages, sometimes rationalizing and other times feeling a measure of a guilt about investigation shortcuts. Securing justice for the murder victims is enough for Jane and the fast-paced novel – and it doesn’t matter if the public doesn’t have a clue about what really happened in Idaho. 

Self-reliance

 

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore tells the story of a camp named Self-Reliance in the Adirondacks, owned by a family that is anything but self-reliant. Instead, the family thrives on lies, secrets and inequality.

Peter Van Laar, wealthy and proud of his numerous New York business connections, owns a children’s the summer camp that has been in the family for three generations. A small town nearby, Shattuck, supplies cooks, groundskeepers and maids who appreciate steady work in the rural setting and are willing to keep secrets to protect the Van Laars and their own families.

Alice, Peter’s wife, is timid and fragile, and the couple has two children, Bear and Barbara. The siblings, destined to never meet, are nothing like the parents nor each other, yet both display deep appreciation for the forest as well as kind and attentive camp staffers.  

In 1961, Bear goes missing and is presumed dead. A grounds man who had befriended the boy has a heart attack soon after the search begins and becomes an easy scapegoat for the authorities. The boy’s body is never found. 

The couple quickly has another child, Barbara, who is difficult and unconcerned about her appearance. Alice, insecure and unnerved by her husband’s age and ambition, tries to raise Barbara as she was raised, believing “that part of a mother’s duty was to be her daughter’s first, best critic; to fortify her during her childhood, so that in womanhood she could gracefully withstand any assault or insult launched in her direction.” 

In 1975, Barbara vanishes from the camp. 

Camp counselors are typically former campers from the wealthy families, but Louise, Barbara's counselor, stands out for growing up in Shattuck and not completing college. Instead, she obtained the competitive position after dating John Paul, son of one of Van Laar's wealthy friends.  Theirs is an unlikely match though: Louise is a poor local, who “continually found herself entangled in tricky situations without meaning to be, and at last she resigned herself to the idea that in a place as small as Shattuck, no one was permitted to be invisible. She was pretty, athletic, intelligent, but also poor, and the daughter of an alcoholic.”

John Paul abuses various substances and manipulates Louise, pretending the two are engaged but keeping the relationship a secret from friends and family. Alice sees the flaws in John Paul and other children of her husband’s friends. They “already had the air that all these men had. The feeling he was owed something. Everything.” But since Bear's death, Alice is unstable and quiet, relying on medication and alcohol to get through each day.

When Bárbara goes missing, John Paul takes off in his car and is later arrested for drunk driving. Bloodied clothes are found in his car, and he claims they were given to him by Louise. History repeats and she immediately becomes a suspect.  

Fortunately, the young state police investigator has experience observing entitlement and inequality in action, noting that the rich, “generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.”

A few townspeople bitterly recall the unfair accusations associated with Bear’s disappearance from years before, and they assist Louise in large ways and small. 

In the end, both Van Laar children are found – one dead and the other alive. And the investigator realizes that the poor are truly the self-reliant ones. They do fine and “don’t need on anyone but themselves.” On the other hand, “it’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.” 

Threats lurk in the woods surrounding the camp, but there are also “gods” who may come to the rescue. 

Disaster prep

 

Two elegantly simply plotlines intertwine in Tilt by Emma Pattee: The first is a day in Portland, Oregon, when the Cascadia earthquake strikes, bringing chaos to the city, and the story of a pregnant woman walking miles to connect with her husband. The second is the backstory to their 14-year relationship. The would-be actor and playwright met as young adults, the same age as college students who tried to jumpstart their careers, “but we were not students at a college. A fact that we never said out loud but it was in every sentence. We were on step behind where we thought we should be.”

Time passes, and the couple abruptly find themselves in their thirties with a child on the way, struggling to keep up. “Summer is really over. In a moment, it’ll start raining, then be Christmas, then a whole new year. Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there’s a new moment to try and grasp.”

The husband still pursues an acting career, working at a coffee shop with flexible hours while the wife puts her writing aside after finding an office job with healthcare benefits. The earthquake pushes any dreams for the future aside. There is no cell service, few passable roads, houses and bridges are down, and readers are left in suspense about why a woman so close to giving birth would ever walk miles to the distant coffee shop rather than home or hospital. The couple had sat through an earthquake preparation class a few years earlier, the husband preparing for a tryout for a role role as a geologist. Yet that memory includes no mention of a key recommendation for any disaster: Family members should plan a meeting place in advance.

The two plots collide with the conclusion, the protagonist's motivation becoming clear, with recollection of a conversation between the wife and husband the previous night. She vows to make a new start, to head to L.A, to quit her job, to write her play. “And if I ever see your father again, I will tell him that I get it now, that stuck is stuck is stuck…. That he’s big-time to me. He is time to me.”

Disasters can strike suddenly and broadly, destroying an entire region, or roll in with slow motion, touching one family at a time.