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.

Despair

Some people deny the horrors of genocide, hoping to protect the reputation of their country or community. Some listen but quickly set the past aside and move on. Others are left devastated. 

We Do Not Part by Han Tang, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, examines the response of two women years later to atrocities committed around the Korean War. The colleagues, one a writer and the other a photographer/videographer, both talented and compassionate, document the atrocities. A friendship forms and the unsettling subject matter inevitably intrudes and disrupts their own lives, eroding productivity and prompting nightmares. “Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively – brazenly – hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?” explains Kyungha. 

The collaboration ends after Kyungha enters a doomed marriage and Inseon abruptly takes up carpentry and returns home to care for a mother losing her memories. Before the separation, Kyungha describes a recurring nightmare – blackened tree stumps shrouded in snow – and the two women plan to produce a short film based on the imagery, with the slim hope that such a project might vanquish the nightmares. 

Four years pass, leaving Kyungha certain the film will never be made, yet friendship, mutual respect and shared pain endure. “There are people who actively change the course of their own life,” Kyungha says of Inseon. “They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So in that time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

Inseon enters a hospital in Seoul after slicing her fingers while cutting wood and she calls Kyungha with a favor – travel to Jeju Island, about 150 kilometers from the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, during an intensifying snowstorm and rescue a lone white songbird left forgotten in its cage. 

Kyungha makes the trip and trapped by the weather and her own deep depression she wanders about her friend’s home, examining the meticulous research compiled by Inseon about the widespread massacres conducted on the island between1948 and 1949.  

June of this year marked the 75th anniversary of when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, often referred to as the start of what many call the forgotten war. Fighting and divisions began earlier though, explains Grace Cho for the Nation, even as the US Army Military Government in Korea was the governing body of South Korea after World War II. 

Elections in 1948 formally separated the South and North, Cho explains, though the Soviet-controlled North rejected UN monitoring and many Koreans from both sides opposed permanent division. 

“Nowhere had the opposition to separate elections been as fierce as in the southern island province of Jeju, where most residents refused to vote in the election, and thereby threatened the legitimacy of the newly declared Republic of Korea,” Cho writes  With protests, strikes, and a growing insurgency, Jeju island was branded a “red island." In 1948, “an all-out offensive” against a band of an estimated a small group of guerilla fighters, estimated to number no more than 500, resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 people, or 10 percent of the island's population.” 

A US naval blockade prevented those who tried to escape. Anti-communist fervor continued throughout the Korean War with critics jailed, newspapers closed, and the Bodo League killing up to 300,000 people regarded as communist or sympathizers and other political prisoners. 

Over the years, authorities targeted family members of Jeju Island victims who asked questions and tried to investigate. “Unlike other Korean War massacres that were partly motivated by uncertainty about whether enemy soldiers might be hiding among civilians, the Bodo League massacres cannot be called ‘collateral damage’ or chalked up to ‘the fog of war,’” Cho goes on to explain. “They were highly coordinated, carried out simultaneously across several provinces of South Korea, and the groundwork for them had been laid in April 1949. While the registry began as a list of people to be re-educated, it turned into a slate of people to be killed during a national emergency, a reminder that surveillance of political groups can quickly escalate into something much darker.“

The novel recalls the Jeju Island massacre’s influence on one family. Some villagers resisted and others collaborated; years later, some went silent and others questioned and protested.  

Years of shame, denial, persecution and official subterfuge eliminated much of the historical record. Inseon's older, quiet parents protect their young daughter from the worst details early on, but as a teenager, she resents the quiet secrets, harboring hatred especially for her mother. At 17, she runs away to Seoul and after an accident wakes to her mother’s presence. Only then her mother, among the few who pressed for answers, shares what she knows about the massacre and the relatives who vanished. 

Inseon adopts her mother's determination to uncover the lost history, at one point searching for the homesite where her father once lived before the village was ravaged by fire: “it was easy to tell from the lack of trees where the houses and paths had been.” But questions go unanswered. “Not when I’d never been told how big his childhood home had been nor on which side of the village it had stood.” 

An uncle was 19 when the massacre took place and his parents worried because “he was the only man at home within the age range the soldiers and police were likely to suspect of communicating with the guerrillas in the hills.” With rumors of torture and executions, the parents convinced their son to hide in nearby hills. “He heard whistles and saw the homes burning but instinct told him to stay hidden,”  later returning to find the village destroyed and most of his family dead.  

“[I]t’s no coincidence that some thirty thousand people were killed on this island that winter, and another two hundred thousand were murdered on the mainland the next summer,” the novel states. “The governing U.S. military ordered that everyone on the island, all roughly three hundred thousand people, be wiped out if that’s what it took to stop their communization.” Members of a youth league were trained, infused with resentment against communities holding different beliefs. “The murderous impulse to point a gun at an infant’s head was not only allowed but rewarded…” 

The poetic quality of  Han's prose is inescapable. At one point, alone in Inseon’s home, Kyungha places her hand over a photo of bones. “Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away. Over what was no longer human – no. Over what remained human even now.”

Inseon’s findings are devastating for Kyungha, depressed before she began her journey, and the novel ends with her giving up on life, leaving shelter during the snowstorm and laying down to sleep. “Rapt in that strange, intense passion – and I couldn’t tell if it was excruciating pain or ecstasy – I walked through the biting wind, through the countless gathered who wore bodies spun from the wind. In that profound, uncanny euphoria, feeling my heart might rip open, I knew.”

The characters understand too well that leaders can instigate followers to turn on others easily, willingly. There is no guarantee that the resentment and hatred fueling genocide can’t happen again. 

The South Korean government issued an apology in 2003, and the police and defense ministry followed suit in 2019.  In April of this year, the executive board of UNESCO recognized the Jeju Massacre documents, as well as the truth-telling campaign that followed as “world heritage that belongs to all.”

Han's title refers to more than a friendship, but also to atrocities than can haunt with increasing intensity over the years, challenging societies or individuals who struggle to suppress the truth. 

Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Pryer wrote a 2014 essay about "Moral Injury: What Leaders Don't Mention When They Talk of War."  Pryer quotes Jonathan Shay from his 1994 book Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character: "Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to civilian life, so long as ‘what’s right’ has not also been violated."

The essay concludes: "Human beings are creatures of passion, and war displays this passion at its noblest and cruelest extremes. It stands to reason that our nation will not always choose only just wars to wage and that servicemembers will not always perform just combat actions. Nevertheless, human beings are also governed by moral forces. The great cost of underestimating these forces in the information age is surely too great to go long unnoticed and inadequately addressed. Our nation will not always be able to wage just wars justly, but we must try much harder to do so."

Revenge

 

A society that treats innocents as wrongdoers unleash more criminal behavior. 

Don’t let the title of Laura Lippman’s latest book, Prom Mom, put you off. Some readers will expect fluff and others will be left pleasantly surprised by the theme of social inequality that was on full display during the early days of the Covid pandemic. The tight, suspenseful plot covers all the angst, panic and self-interest of 2020.  

Amber Glass returns to her hometown of Baltimore in late 2019 to settle her stepfather’s estate, deciding to use a surprise inheritance to start a small folk-art gallery. She worries about others in town recognizing her – the notorious “Prom Mom” from 1997, a promising high school junior who hid a pregnancy, leaving a dead infant in a hotel room.  Amber finishes her studies in juvenile detention before starting a new life in New Orleans. Her prom date was a senior whom Amber tutored in French. He insisted she locked him out of the hotel room and didn't answer his knocking. Briefly labeled as “Cad Dad,” Joe moves on to a normal life, attending college, marrying a plastic surgeon and joining his uncle’s real estate business.  

Lippman keeps readers guessing about her characters' motivations. Amber makes little effort to hide her past, giving the gallery her own name  –  “wondering how the old life might have gone if it had not jumped the track and she had a right to know what she had lost, even if it means putting herself at risk for losing it all again.” She regrets her loss of privacy, the abrupt exit from high school, all due to a night of which she has no memory. “All Amber wanted for herself was what had been granted to Joe. Was that so much to ask? Probably. Apparently.” 

Joe and his wife seem devoted to each other, but appearances are deceiving. Meredith takes great pride in knowing about Joe's early transgressions and he credits her for shaping him into a model husband, a man who is sloppy about his extramarital dalliances. Society and rich parents tolerate the wealthy making excuses about failures, deluding themselves while using others to get what they want. 

For these characters, knowing others' secrets is power. 

Amber studies Joe’s seemingly perfect life on social media, and the gallery's name serves as bait for getting Joe to stop by. More meetings follow that hurry along Joe’s unraveling marriage. Joe and Meredith are accustomed to money ensuring a comfortable life while expecting the vulnerable to do their dirty work. But Amber has her own money and plans, uncovering the couple's secrets and upending the narrative.  

Terrible decisions and callous disregard for others contribute to a noir plot with plenty of dark humor. Dates are key to understanding character motivation and what happened on that prom night years before. The book leaves unresolved strands, including questions about Amber’s relationship with her stepfather and an odd clash with Joe’s best friend in a liquor store. 

Early in the book, Amber observes, “There’s simply not a lot of suspense in most people’s lives.” That's simply not true for an observant, intelligent protagonist who learns just how much she was wronged. 

Lies of omission can be as evil and consequential as outright falsehoods. 

Pain

While treating patient complaints about pain, doctors typically inquire about the type, sharp or dull, and the intensity on a scale from one to ten. Most pain addressed by doctors is imposed from external sources such as an illness, an accident or an attack by another creature. Such pain can be temporary, sporadic or permanent, but is often regarded as separate from the sufferer, suggests Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Another source of pain is internal, the agony associated with deep shame, guilt and other emotions linked with regret linked to situations over which an individual had some measure of control. The encyclopedia touches on this category only briefly: “Like other experiences as conscious episodes, pains are thought to be private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge."  The internal pain is based on individuals' experiences, memories and agency and can be soul-crushing.  

The Rest Is Memory by Lily Tuck eloquently captures the tension between the two categories. The novel weaves historical facts with an imagined description of the final months for a young Catholic girl from a rural village of Southeast Poland during World War II. The cover is a photograph of the child, revealing her as simultaneously earnest and afraid. Despite her parents' unhappy marriage and poverty, the adolescent appreciates her life and the animals, including a mean guard dog kept on a chain. 

Germans conquer Poland in September 1939, an event unknown for the rural family until schools are closed and soldiers confiscate the family farm in summer of 1942 and shoot the father dead.  

Czeslawa and her mother arrive at Auschwitz on December 13, 1942, assigned identification numbers and endless work with sub-optimal tools. Conditions are horrific and the work is grueling, nonstop to the point that prisoners lose all strength and motivation. Perhaps the only comfort is mother and daughter share a cramped bed and hushed conversations at night. 

Thoughtful despite her lack of education, Czeslawa often frets about leaving behind the dog known as Pies, meaning “dog” in Polish. “Although she did not like the dog – she was afraid of him – she often dreams about him. In one of the dreams, she is walking through a field of wheat and the dog is following her. The dog is friendly and when she speaks to him, the dog wags his tail. Another thing that she remarks about the dog is that his eyes are different colors…. In the dream, Czeslawa thinks that this a sign of good luck and she wishes she had had time to free Pies.”  

In another dream, the dog has pups and when Czeslawa tries to retrieve one, the dog bites. And on another night, the girl wonders if the dog dreams of her. 

The mother tells stories, increasingly revealing more secrets from her own youth while reticent about talking about the farm or abusive husband. Eventually, the woman admits that the dog surely is dead. Yet the daughter persists, continuing to worry about the dog’s fate. “For some reason she cannot explain Czeslawa keeps thinking about the dog – the dog with no name.” 

And at another point, Czeslawa slips while working and a guard sets his dog loose. The dog bites and infection begins. The prisoners fear the camp's doctors and like other prisoners unable to work, weakened by dysentery, disease, malnutrition, injuries and more, Czeslawa is sent to the gas chambers.  

The mother died on February 18, 1943, at age 47. Czeslawa, 14, died the following month on March 12. 

The novel's title is based on the final words of the poem "Nostos" by Louise Glück, “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” The poem's title refers to the long journeys undertaken by the heroes of Greek literature and is tied to the Greek words for pain, travel and the longing for home and the past. 

Ripping the most vulnerable from their homes, separating families and disrupting lives, denying individuals due process, is pure evil. A child is mistreated, tortured, yet retains the compassion to worry about an unloved pet left behind. All humans are equally worthy of dignity and basic rights - and those capable of imposing physical and mental anguish on the most vulnerable in society are lacking in conscience and basic humanity. 

"At times, greed, revenge, selfishness, and dishonesty are being celebrated and even accepted as the norm, which creates an imbalance in our understanding of basic human morality," explains Diane Whitehead of Childhood Education International. "Our basic humanity and lifelong capacity to live successful and cooperative lives within societies begins in childhood. If we care about children and care about the continuation of our humanity, then we must do our part. Our children need examples of moral behavior as they grow and learn. How do we all – including teachers, parents, grandparents, caregivers, neighbors, business leaders, and government officials – model through our everyday actions that we value compassion, generosity, acceptance of others, honesty, and kindness?"

Children observe the actions of the adults surrounding them, judging and acting accordingly. Some will go along with the bullying and brutality while others have an inner strength to resist.  

One afternoon

 

The novel Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford captures a child’s perspective in this brief novel with minimal details, minimal plot, minimal characterization.  A few lovely passages describe a summer afternoon of childhood play while adults sit on porch, drinking and ignoring their children. 

The writing has a dreamlike quality, rambling about an afternoon for a group of cousins. The memory could belong to one individual or the collective. The setting is an unmarried aunt’s home, with a small patch of woods nearby, somewhat familiar but leaving plenty of strange questions that go unanswered. The children are both hyper and bored together, inventing challenges. The exact number of cousins is unknown. Only four “main players,” those who happen to be older or admired, are named. Others, including the narrator, are regarded as unimportant and also-rans, blurring together like a watercolor,  an exact count never given. 

The vague setting, the lack of names and details, creates an atmosphere of unease: “We didn’t know what to hope for, thing or nothing. Thing meant that our day, only somewhat extraordinary, would become truly remarkable… It opened things up in ways both surprising and permanent. Nothing, on the other hand, meant that we would need to go downstairs eventually an get ourselves a 7UP, start thinking about the 9 times tables or something along those lines.”    

Accuracy is constantly in question as the unnamed narrator relays childhood memories that mostly center on one afternoon. A brother is sure his 3-year-old sister has gone missing and the group sets out to search. The children switch quickly from cooperation to competition, compassion to cruelty. Clues about family disappointments and failures abound in overheard snippets of adult conversations, old photographs and claims over a mother's possessions.

The afternoon stretches out expansively, foreshadowing adult outcomes for the four named characters, and these adult careers and relationships are relegated to a few pages, meaningless when stacked next to that strange and adventuresome afternoon. Still, the novel delivers little in the way of suspense or motivation. The older children fail to escape the influences of a dysfunctional extended family.  Not by chance, Abi, the youngest child labeled as “missing,” achieves success as an artist. No trying to tag along for her. Age, stealth and an ability to vanish in that crowd of cousins lend protective distance from troubled family members. 

The book leaves many unanswered questions, and readers will give up caring. One afternoon does not make a life. The quest promises thrill but in the end the lingering memory and novel seem pointless. Children who flourish shake off childhood labels, anxieties and family issues. They move on and take control of the life they have now.      

Finally, the publisher made a terrible mistake by describing the novel as “a warped Nancy Drew detective story.” The phrase snag a few who developed a love a reading with that protagonist, but a false promise guarantees disappointment. Idle Grounds has little mystery, spunk or resolution.

Regrets and secrets

Hang onto every day as precious – that’s the theme of both The Life Impossible by Matt Haig and Sandwich by Catherine Newman. Both writers point out that each of us, at this moment, is both the oldest and youngest we’ll ever be. “If only we could always have the perspective of the future with us as we live that present,” one protagonist notes. Attitudes on age can be adjusted with new experiences.  

Both novels address aging and struggling with painful memories and regrets. In both, the protagonist has traveled to a vacation community – an inherited and modest Ibiza home in the first and a rented cottage on Cape Cod in the second. Secrets and new aspirations spill from the female protagonists. Both books engage the reader from the start, Sandwich with slapstick humor and Impossible Life with intrigue.

In Sandwich Rocky spends the week at the rickety Cape rental cabin with her husband, adult children who also welcome her elderly parents for two days. Rocky is gregarious, fun, and a tad narcissistic and frequently toys with the notion of seeking divorce from her generally capable husband who prides himself on not apologizing and manages to “look away from anything you don’t want to see.” The two argue often and playfully, and Rocky limits the secrets she shares with him. 

The boisterous family, constantly bantering, attract attention wherever they go – the beach, shops, or restaurants. The son’s girlfriend compares her large family with Rocky’s, describing them as fun and chaotic, but not “so … intentional the way you guys always seem.” 

Rocky cherishes the memories triggered by the annual stays at the cottage and enjoys hearing her children complain about the conveniences and décor.  “People insist you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.” 

The Life Impossible is a darker book about a woman who mulls over regrets from years before. “The trouble with tragedy is that it tars everything that comes after,” observes Grace Winters, a retired math teacher, in her seventies, for whom the “unknown variable must always be found.”  She finds a theme in all she meets and identifies her own theme as guilt. She finds comfort in blaming herself for the death of a young son followed by an affair and cheating on a beloved husband: “Grief felt like the only way to keep close to them” and she sees “everyone on Earth as someone’s grief waiting to happen.” 

Two events at the start trigger motivation for Grace who who depressingly concedes, “I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.”  

First, Grace receives a distressing note from a former student about his own hardships, and the rest of the book follows as her response, self-analysis that she hopes will be useful. Maurice does not appear in the novel other than sending another note, and Grace strives to be both blunt and kind. “Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.”  She recalls Maurice, especially his propensity to say sorry for things he had not done.  “It is like an admission that everyone in the world is a little to blame for everything.” 

She becomes more accepting of her past, explaining that “one good thing about having regrets is that I no longer judge others too harshly.” And she warns him against “incredibly common” worry: “Along with loneliness it is the polluted air that most minds live in, the ting that deprives us of the present moment, trapping us in the past and future all at once.” 

Grace also receives notice from a law firm. An acquaintance from the start of both their teaching careers bequeathed Grace a small home on a busy roadway in Ibiza. Grace knew Christine briefly, opening her home one lonely Christmas night and encouraging the woman to pursue a singing career,  

With few friends or activities, Grace takes off for Ibiza to inspect the home. The change in scene initially does not help. “The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.” 

Suspecting foul play, Grace moves out of her comfort zone making inquiries of the woman’s friends. The book takes odd turns into fantasy and telepathy and mind control, and Grace increasingly discovers she enjoys new people and experiences, moving beyond old ruts and choices. She seeks understanding rather than love. “There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love.” 

Recalling the relationship with her husband, she finds she is less resistant to close relationships and appreciates someone by her side who can be “a shock absorber to the madness of experience.”   

In both books, the protagonists assume that their own experiences will guide others, and other characters ensure that the self-absorption does not go too far. Abrupt withdrawal from old regrets and everyday problems, along with the release of secrets, can offer survival mechanisms. 

Predators and prey

 

Hauntingly beautiful and demonstrating the power of memory, The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo makes it easy to suspend disbelief about creatures who transition between fox and human form in Manchuria, 1908. The author doles out just enough detail in this magical tale, foxes are charming, clever and ageless, for readers to understand the differences with humans while preserving a sense of mystery. Foxes are sly in getting what they want. The more impulsive ones are ruthless, impatient predators while others are more self-disciplined, resisting their nature and striving to live a full millennium. 

Foxes take control with flattery, companionship and feigned subservience. Some foxes are reckless and others like Snow, the protagonist, are cooperative and wary in society: “Nobody likes to feel a fool, and the downside of playing with people’s feelings is the whiplash fury of betrayal.”

Only a few humans, often near death, recognize they are under the watchful eyes of foxes: "Dark as a bottomless pool, like a lake under moonlight. Bao is falling, sinking. Images flicker past: Ears lifted and a sharp muzzle across endless waves of grass. A lonely shape trotting down a mountain. Blink and he’s back, staring into the eyes of this stranger. Unreadable eyes, grave yet inhuman. They pierce Bao to the depths of his soul, or perhaps that’s the knife wound in his side.”

Interactions between foxes and humans require a delicate balance. Fox emotions are intense. Snow, the protagonist and fox wife, seeks revenge for the death of her cub, wrested by its den by a hunter on assignment for a photographer. “Grief continually amazed me with its ability to resurface at inconvenient moments. Whether I was sleeping in the grass or walking beside railway tracks by myself, the wind blowing and the lonely sun shining down, it always found me.” To track the photographer, Snow takes a job as companion for an elderly woman whose family owns a popular medicine shop. An investigator also tracks the photographer after the death of a courtesan in an alley, a beautiful woman last seen with a foxlike man.

The two searches collide, and during their travels, the two women each encounter a past love. Snow meets her estranged husband whom she partially blames for the cub’s death: “it was a lot easier to consider Kuro dead to me than to deal with the pain that his presence reminded me of. I should have known better. What you bury eventually comes to light in some form or other.” Her employer Tagtaa, in her sixties, encounters the young boy whom she was once served as a companion when both were children. Bao’s choices often displeased his parents, a pattern that continued into his adulthood as he pursues a career as investigator rather than scholar. 

Bao’s parents had forbidden marriage with Tagtaa, a child of a Mongolian concubine, but he still felt attraction. “She’s aged but hasn’t changed. Over the years he’s observed this phenomenon in his old friends – though their bodies have weathered, stretched, or shrunk, the same soul peeks out from within.” Notably, both Bao and Tagtaa admire foxes after memorable encounters with the creatures in their youth. Bao's experience left him with the ability to discern truth from lies, aiding his investigative work. And another fox, possibly Kuro, rescued Tagtaa as a child. 

Tagtaa longs to meet a fox again though Kuro, the fox husband, urges caution. Tagtaa confides her belief that foxes are gods or spirts, but he cautions that not all foxes mean well. “It depends on what you want to believe. What’s important is the ability to tell truth from lies,” Kuro explains. “Or perhaps truth from what’s merely hope.” Snow, his wife, overhears the conversation: “Hope, of course, is the most painful thing in the universe. Clinging to a thin strand is the most agonizing way to live.”

Humans feel angry panic after being tricked by a fox. “That’s what leads to all those tales of disillusionment and discovering yourself naked, covered with fleas and eating rotting meat in an abandoned grave," Snow notes. "Of course that exact scenario seldom happens, but it’s a good metaphor for how people feel when they discover they’ve been duped. That’s why a careful fox refrains from unduly influencing others.”

Parental expectations, lost loves, class inequality interfere with the present day for each character. Intelligent and self-disciplined foxes and humans who admire them are keenly aware of the period’s class and gender inequality, thus connecting with readers by offering relevant and modern insights. The novel is a cautionary fable for divided societies where the corrupt show disdain for those who work hard, the spendthrifts who scoff at the savers, the impulsive mock the patient, and the ignorant willfully resent the success and guidance from those with expertise.  

Never-ending enigma

 

A Princess Diana impersonator with a sister who could be a twin, a precocious child raised in foster care, a cryptocurrency firm with organized crime connections all in Las Vegas – what could go wrong? 

Chris Bohjalian's The Princess of Las Vegas is a fast-paced mystery about a successful Princess Diana impersonator in a second-rate casino who is estranged from her sister after trauma with a stepfather followed by their mother’s death. Regardless of the hard feelings, the younger sister moves to Las Vegas with her precocious and newly adopted teenager, lured by a high-paying position with her boyfriend's crypto company. Meanwhile, the two brothers who own and operate the Buckingham Palace Casino are found dead in the space of a few days, suicides from all appearances, except that that the reader is witness to the first murder with the novel's early pages. 

Diana is popular among those who recall where they were on August 31, 1997, and the fictional Chrissy Dowling is a Las Vegas legend who relies on Adderall and Valium to get through two shows per night and days spent in a poolside cabana. She is intensely proud of her work, constantly researching the royal family and tweaking the show. She hopes that her tribute show touches “a chord of orphic remembrance,” reminding “us who we once were and, sometimes, where we once were emotionally and literally.” 

Still, the suicides followed by the death of Chrissy's love interest has her and other casino staff worried about losing their jobs. 

A lot of luck comes into play in the story – but in Las Vegas, that makes perfect sense. Often, we don't recognize the luck waiting before us.  “None of us, even when we are breathing our last, understand fully the role that chance will have played in our lives, the ways that what we supposed was good luck prevented us from experiencing better luck, or the way that a small misfortune saved us from a far worse one.” 

Princess Diana, a quiet, gentle and beautiful woman adored by the world but resented by her family, was an enigma and the contradictions of her life will continue to remain an inspiration for novelists for years to come. Consider Royal Escape, in which a princess yearns to flee the royal trap where security provides no protection at all. 

Bohjalian delivers a story with modern twists that dig deep into the mysteries of human nature and family angst.