Discoveries: ‘Mattaponi Queen’ by Belle Boggs

Mattaponi Queen

Stories

Belle Boggs

Graywolf Press: 228 pp., $15 paper

Belle Boggs, a Virginia girl, has been cured in a mixture equal parts American West and East: an MFA in fiction from UC Irvine and an award recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. These stories, set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation in Virginia’s Tidewater region, are rich in the details of small-town life. Boggs is precise — she has studied the movements of young and old alike, how they peer through windows, dreaming of other towns; how they peer through windshields at landmarks they’ve seen for half a century or more.

There are larger forces at work too: the religious right and the backcountry, the leave-me-alone left, rich and poor, old and young — all do a yin-yang dance that plays out in property disputes, at weddings and funerals, in relationships leeched of all recognizable love. How do you break free of small-town life? Do you really want to? Best of all, Boggs knows her landscape — how the mildew smells, what frost looks like on a badly tended garden, how trees around an old house look different from one decade to the next. Reading these stories is satisfying, like going to a concert in which the musicians, you can just tell, have given everything for the moment: your unforgettable evening.

The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

A Novel

William Nicholson

Soho: 346 pp., $24

Sussex, England, is not unlike Connecticut: a place of pretty gardens, lovely homes, nice cars and houses. Rich ground for disillusionment; a fertile crescent for someone’s midlife crisis. It’s Laura Kinross’ turn in William Nicholson’s “The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life.” As she looks at her husband, Henry, across the breakfast table, there’s barely suppressed rage in the air. Laura and Henry have two children. One morning, a letter arrives from the great love of her life, oozing insouciance. Every few decades, literature gives us a P.G. Wodehouse or an E.F. Benson — in between those times, we guiltily long for more. We long for characters that move through village life or suburbs like ticking time bombs and threaten to blow the whole charade like a bad movie. Nicholson’s Henry and Laura, flirting with suburban danger, fill that need. “Her everyday life has retreated to some infinite distance,” Laura thinks of her carefully constructed life. “She’s young again and her heart is breaking.”

The Ghost of Milagro Creek

A Novel

Melanie Sumner

Algonquin / Shannon Ravenel: 256 pp., $13.95 paper

To be Apache in the modern American West; to raise two sons between the mini-malls and barrios outside Taos, N.M.: What is it like? Ignacia Vigil Romero, a medicine woman — very old school — raises her sons among Latino, Native American and white neighbors, all of them wary and in awe of her skills. When both sons fall for the same girl, the reader falls through layers of time into countless stories of danger, love — a love strong enough to inspire murder — the pressures of community and blood boiling. You move tentatively across the page: “There were frozen patches in the road now, slick roots and icy stones. In the falling light, he watched the shadows sliding in and out of the piñon. When a crow’s caw startled him, he slipped on a root and hit the dirt.” You remember Willa Cather’s “O Pioneers!” and Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Frome” — books set in wildly different landscapes in which true love becomes a death cage. “Tu eres mi vida,” one of the sons tells the girl. Oh, how you wish he hadn’t.

Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.