Discoveries

Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!, N.D. Williams, Xlibris: 550 pp., 23.95

Sailing out of the blue, “Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!” is a novel that takes on the sometimes fragile but powerful threads that bind personal lives to the politics of the world. N.D. Williams was born in Guyana and went to school in Jamaica. He has written several novels and short stories and won literary prizes, such as the 1976 Casa de Las Americas prize for fiction. His books are not experimental in terms of language. They are not raving manifestos. They do not include eye-popping sex and violence. And yet they are considered outsider fiction. This happens, and when it does, the authors are forced to self-publish their manuscripts, as Williams has done in this case.

Radix, the central character in “Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!,” came to the United States when he was 26. He helped his mother clean houses, got himself educated and became a high school teacher in the Bronx, the perfect setting for a novel about dysfunctional urban life. “Look at it,” his friend Mahmood says. “Have you ever stopped to look at it? It’s like a warehouse. One huge warehouse. And we clock in every morning and the kids report every day .... Public education, right? Taking attendance is like taking inventory.... [O]ur job is really to keep them off the streets for six hours so they won’t get into trouble and get thrown into that other warehouse ... on Riker’s Island.”

When the Soviet Union falls, Radix becomes nervous because, as his friend Mahmood says, “No balance to the world. No alternative. Except our friend in Havana, Fidel.” Radix’s anxiety grows all the more keen as he threads his way between an honest life and a darker side: the carjackings and break-ins and the police who don’t like you for one reason or another (in Radix’s case, it’s skin color). He admires his friend, the handyman Blackwelder: “Here was a man free of nostalgia and orthodoxy. No regrets, no hankering for old island pursuits.... Blackwelder was in pursuit of no dream.”

Radix, however, needs a dream, and in his life as an immigrant, he has fallen between the cracks of island love (a kind of tribal love), democracy and communism. When a student in the high school is shot by the police for “resisting arrest,” he finds his lack of a dream all the more painful. Life, at least urban life, stops making sense. “The old systems crumbling, dogmas unmasked; gratuitous acts of hopelessness corroding the stations of city life here in this nineteen ninety two world; trees crashing in the forests....How could he explain the sequence of events set in motion by Xavier’s death?”

Books like Williams’ have to remain outsider fiction because they are not about or sprung from people who change the system from within. They were never let in. They nibble away at the margins.

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Some of Her Friends That Year: New and Selected Stories, Maxine Chernoff, Coffee House Press: 312 pp., $16.95

Maxine Chernoff is a quiet writer who packs a powerful punch when she chooses her battles. Her novel, “A Boy in Winter,” about a young boy who kills his friend with a crossbow by accident, is one example. “Some of her Friends That Year” is no exception. Her characters are plain-spoken but existentially confused. “November afternoons while Amy worked alone in the studio, words spoken to her came back, unencumbered by feeling, trees in a forest falling and only Amy to hear them.” These stories, like her novels, are not about certainties. They tend to be about all the things we don’t know, vague floating feelings. “Maybe there would be new words soon to describe these feelings,” says a mother in the story, “Coming Apart and Together” (which begins with the wonderful line, “All the Buddhists were getting divorced that spring.”). Often her characters know each other well and tell each other everything, but their minds are still full of the questions: Did I do the right thing? Did I say the wrong thing? There are few chances for redemption or correction; these are not the kind of people who go back and retrace steps. That’s for the movies. “We are lucky,” says one character in true Chernoff style, “to have whatever we are given.”