Discoveries

Was It Beautiful?

Alison McGhee

Shaye Areheart: 256 pp., $23

“Was It Beautiful?” proves an excellent example of why one should not give up on a book too soon. Walk away, do some work, come back and give it a second shot. Alison McGhee’s is a novel of simple explanations (“His hearing had slipped away decibel by decibel, that beautiful word with the bells chiming inside”), simple movement (home, a diner, Main Street) and Faulkner’s favorite, most ferocious question: Can we ever really know one another?

It is an old-fashioned novel, the story of a husband whose wife has left him with his beloved cat (Genghis, “the king of cats”), trying to puzzle out what happened the day his 27-year-old son stood resolutely in front of a train. It is an almost impossible question for a simple 50-year-old man to answer. He appeals to Sophie, his son’s wife, and Burl, his best friend who is a Welsh tenor and the town’s postman, for help, asking questions, remembering moments, trying to continue living. He tries to free his flock of geese; they won’t leave. He tries to kill himself; his friend won’t let him. The story picks up speed like a train in a snowy field as the father connects moments, memories and associations to explain why his son killed himself. This is as close to an answer he gets: “a slight child hanging a wind chime made of his mother’s silver knives from a piece of clothesline that turned into a child climbing an abandoned fire tower that turned into the memory of a song hovering over fields while a man without music ran down a road in search.... “

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On This Day

Nathaniel Bellows

HarperCollins: 288 pp., $24.95

All in a few months, Father dies of cancer and Mother kills herself, leaving their children, Joan and Warren, ages 20 and 18, alone in the house they grew up in, turning out the lights, hiding from trick-or-treaters on Halloween, telling everyone around them they can manage, trying to fend off unwanted relatives. Their father’s friend and business partner cheats them out of the money he gets from selling the family nursery out from under them. They should be bereft. But their bond is so strong, you know they’ll be all right. “On This Day” has the same buoyancy in the face of tragedy as Susan Minot’s classic, “Monkeys.” Even though it’s a novel wrapped around a suicide wrapped around the question: Can we ever really know each other? It is written in the present tense. “On This Day” is in fact a triumph of the present tense over the desire to die.

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The Stone Virgins

Yvonne Vera

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 184 pp., $20

Reading about how a young girl survived the guerrilla war in Rhodesia in the early 1980s is an exercise in unflinching commitment that Yvonne Vera makes easier with pure fictional art. Two years after the war, civil unrest in the province of Matabeleland in the new Zimbabwe put rural communities between the fighting dissidents and the fighting soldiers. Nonceba and her twin sister live in a country village called Kezi, south of Bulawayo. Nonceba watches a man decapitate her sister. He then rapes and maims Nonceba. While she is recovering, a man who loved her sister comes to take Nonceba to his home, where she will be safe. But they do not become lovers.

Vera focuses on the minute, the endless succession of nanoseconds within seconds, worlds within worlds. Steps, grass, a bucket of water spilling, her sister’s blood on the ground: All are presented in slow motion as if Vera were giving the world a moment longer to take it all back, to go back to normal. The combinations of beauty and horror, as terrible and bizarre as they sometimes are, etch themselves into a reader’s skin and memory. “The women want to take the day into their own arms and embrace it, but how? To embrace the land and earth, the horizon, and triumph? To forget the hesitant moment, death, the years of deafness and struggle and declare this to be a vanished day, but how?” Yes, how?