All in Contemporary Fiction

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Many people have spoken of the power in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), but nothing can prepare its reader for the heart-wrenching narrative held within its pages. This story, told in alternating, first-person perspective, is a story of place. A native of the Mississippi Delta, Ward knows Sing, Unburied, Sing’s setting intimately. The delta, and its many unburied spirits, come to life in this moving coming-of-age story rich with themes of belonging, loss, addiction, and so much more.

James

James

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, The Classics

So often writers tease out an elaborate story by asking a series of compelling what-ifs. In the case of Percival Everett’s most recent novel, James (2024), this is certainly the case. Everett spins an alternate history of American slavery that draws the reader in and provokes readers to reconsider certain narratives. Because, what if? James is the tale of the enslaved man readers met a century ago in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Everett’s Jim is far more complicated and dynamic than his literary debut (à la Twain) depicted.

The Signature of All Things

The Signature of All Things

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Peppered with factoids and historical references that dangle carrots over plenty of delightful rabbit holes, Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things (2013), is a thoroughly researched historical fiction that quickly drew me in. Readers absorb all sorts of botanical and nineteenth-century truths— like ginseng is native to North America (Midwest to Maine)— and countless other little facts, references, and interwoven historical moments. Gilbert’s hefty historical fiction deftly interweaves scientific and historical research into the life of a nineteenth-century woman. Indeed, the novel centers on the life of one woman. Readers observe her, from birth to death, and the many scientific and social shifts witnessed over the century during which she lived. The novel opens with her birth, then takes a momentary pause in her story to tell that of her father’s youth. The Signature of All Things explores myriad themes, bold characters, and plenty of actual historical facts, but upon careful consideration, this is a story about adaptation in both scientific and human terms.

Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

George Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), is an astonishingly genre-bending tale set primarily in the in-between space that follows death and precedes whatever comes after. As the novel’s dust jacket explains, “bardo” is a Tibetan Buddhist term for the place souls occupy between death and reincarnation. Saunders is a master of written word (called the greatest American short story writer of our time by many), but this is his first foray into longer form fiction; and he dazzles.

My Murder

My Murder

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

What if science could bring people back to life complete with memories created prior to premature death? Surely such abilities would be fraught with ethical questions and ramifications. What if a serially killer targeted young women alone in the dark? What would the tipping point be at which the public would rally for these women to be brought back? These are some of the questions from which Katie Williams’ novel My Murder (2023) stems. Williams’ novel takes readers to a not-so-distant future when technology—medical and otherwise—changes certain fundamental certainties in life. Most notably, My Murder is set during a time when death need not be forever.

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Michiko Aoyama’s slender novel, What You Are Looking for is in the Library (2020, English translation 2023) connects a series of vignettes about largely disconnected individuals living in contemporary Tokyo. The central hub of the many spoked story is the community library with its large librarian who seems like a character who has stepped out of a Miyazaki film like My Neighbor Totoro.

The Fell

The Fell

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Try as we may, all of us remember the feeling during Covid lockdowns and quarantines when we wanted to escape the confines, climb out of our skin, anything to escape the mindless numb of every day. Sarah Moss puts flesh on those feelings in her post-pandemic novella, The Fell (2021, first American edition 2022). Coming in just under 200 pages, Moss’s latest fiction will haunt readers just as much as our own memories of COVID’s darkest days.

Damnation Spring

Damnation Spring

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Some books zoom in on a place and its local culture, bound to the setting both in terms of geography and time in ways that pull the reader in. Ash Davidson’s debut novel Damnation Spring (2021) does just that. Readers cozy up with the book firmly in the 21st-century, but within sentences Davidson’s prose transports them to 1977 amid the coastal redwoods and gritty logging families of Northern California. As anyone with knowledge of 1970s logging communities knows, this book deals with some very difficult themes (things like premature death, poverty, miscarriage, and adultery to name a few). Rural towns like the one readers come to know intimately in Damnation Spring, witnessed major cultural upheaval during the 1970s. Growing public environmentalist sentiment and dwindling old growth logging opportunities led to heated conflicts which often pitted neighbor against neighbor. It is a conflict that continues to play out in logging

Home

Home

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) is the story of a family with a son whose sorted past and heavy heart, continue to define and limit him well into middle age. As his father—“Reverend” to even his sons— faces the final journey after a long and upstanding life, Jack returns home to the town of Gilead, Iowa to face his inner demons and the setting for his earliest shame. This novel tells the story of his return, reception, and renewal. Robinson writes this novel, the second of four in the Gilead series, alternating close third-person perspectives between Jack, the wayward son, and his youngest sister Glory.

Wellness

Wellness

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness (2023), peals the onion of modern, middle-aged life. It nails so many truisms about contemporary life in terms of fitness, AI, health trends, Facebook wars, married life, love, polyamory, mindfulness groups, parenting in the digital age, careers in academia, and urban gentrification, to name a few. Many of the contemporary elements are laugh-out-loud funny, others are crushingly depressing. Woven into the pre-pandemic age of twenty-teens Chicago contemporary storyline are a number of backstory character-driven vignettes. These reach back in time to highlight traumas and generational family dysfunction with which the main characters live, whether they are conscious of that fact or not. Many read almost as stand-alone pieces, but together they create the patchwork of Hill’s characters’ lives. Wellness is witty and poignant, delightful and difficult

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a poetic, organic coming-of-age novel about a Vietnamese American child, Little Dog. Vuong crafts the novel as a letter of sorts that Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother. It is intimately personal, written in first person, as it bounces from point to point in the narrative of his childhood and adolescence.

The Covenant of Water

The Covenant of Water

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

The Covenant of Water (2023) by Abraham Verghese well-deserves the title of (my personal) most anticipated book of the year. As soon as I heard that Verghese, author of the beautiful, difficult book Cutting for Stone, had a new book coming out, this one set predominantly in India, I got a little giddy. Verghese’s career as a surgeon (he is faculty at Stanford’s School of Medicine, after all) blends with his incredibly artful prose to make moving, fascinating reads. Even after many months of anticipation, The Covenant of Water wowed me, moved me, and left me feeling connected to something bigger and more beautiful than any single life.

When We Cease to Understand the World

When We Cease to Understand the World

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, Nonfiction, My List of Required Reads

The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (WWI and WWII). This novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 explores the cracks between fact and fiction, between progress and destruction, between genius and madness. Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving history, math, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to be exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.

Barkskins

Barkskins

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

When I picked up Barkskins (2016) by Annie Proulx, I expected a book about trees. And trees there most certainly are growing among its pages, although not in the Richard Powers’ The Overstory sort of way; trees are not characters and the tree-inspired figurative constructs with which Proulx crafts her novel differ greatly from Powers’. What I found was something more than trees but certainly relating to them both as a subject and a metaphor. Proulx’s multi-generational story spans the course three and half centuries. In that sense, it is tree-like; many arboreal species live much longer than that. Spread over so much time, this hefty novel (it exceeds 700 pages) comes to life with a large cast of characters, so large that the family trees at the book’s end are useful, even necessary. At the heart of all their stories is a familial link to trees.

Trust

Trust

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel that plays with various texts as it scaffolds a story across genre: a novel, two memoirs (although one reads more like an incomplete autobiography), and a diary. Broken into four sections authored by four different characters, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel constructs a layered tale about a New York City financial mogul and his wife during the 1920s and 30s.

Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Certain stories resonate in history. Specific people become fascinating characters lodged in the minds and hearts of a nation; their feats become a part of culture. Yet, often these fictions fail to realistically reflect the history; over time characterizations and backgrounds shift. This is especially true for famous historical figures who left no written records, many of them women and people of color. Such has certainly been the case with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, particularly with regard to the young Shoshoni woman who accompanied them for most of their journey. Even the spelling of her name—Sacagawea (derived from Mandan for “Bird Woman”) or Sacajewea (from her native Shoshoni meaning “boat-launcher) is uncertain. And yet, she was a woman with a voice, even if written history fails to capture any of her actual words. Debra Magpie Earling’s The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (May 2023) provides her a voice and a story in a spectacularly crafted novel that provides Sacajewea with her own journals, in an answer of sorts of the famous Journals of Lewis and Clark.

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