Fiction in brief: From Lombard to Woolf
From the glittery Hollywood back lots of the '30s to a creepy, isolated house in modern-day New York, four new novels have settings that draw you in. USA TODAY's Jocelyn McClurg and Brian Truitt take a look.
A Touch of Stardust
By Kate Alcott
Doubleday, 296 pp.
*** out of four
Julie Crawford, fresh out of Smith College and harboring screenwriting dreams, arrives in Hollywood just as Atlanta is burning. It's late 1938, Gone With the Wind is filming, and Julie is a green studio go-fer. She's rescued by screwball comedienne Carole Lombard, who hires Julie as her personal assistant. That gives Julie, and the happy reader, a ringside seat to Lombard's affair with Clark Gable, aka Rhett Butler. (Weirdly, they really did call each other "Ma" and "Pa.") Julie has her own budding love story, with assistant producer Andy Weinstein, who's Jewish and all too aware of the looming disaster in Europe. Our fictional heroine shows pluck as she tries to crack the male screenwriters' room, but it's the funny, ribald, likable (and doomed) Lombard who shines brightest here, throwing off more than a touch of stardust.
— McClurg
Delicious Foods
By James Hannaham
Little, Brown, 384 pp.
***½
James Hannaham's satirical and darkly humorous look at racism, drugs and the American South begins intensely — with a teenager driving for his life using bloody stumps where his hands should be — and doesn't let up. Darlene is a widowed prostitute whose life and husband have been taken from her by various unfortunate circumstances. She's tricked into abandoning her son Eddie and winds up enslaved at a Louisiana fruit farm where cocaine is used to keep the workers in line. Delicious Foods is told from her point of view as well as by Eddie, who seeks his mom's whereabouts as a young child but later has to build a life without her or his fingers. The highlight, however, is the third narrator: Scotty, the irreverent voice of crack personified, acting as a Greek chorus and Darlene's controlling, white-powder master. "Not to be egotistical or nothing," he says smarmily, "but I am irresistible." And so, too, is this brutal and beautiful tome.
— Truitt
Adeline: A Novel of Virginia Woolf
By Norah Vincent
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 277 pp.
***
The great English writer Virginia Woolf continues to fascinate, obsess, mystify, 74 years after she drowned herself in the River Ouse. This spring brings two more notable titles to the Bloomsbury oeuvre, Viviane Forrester's brilliant, provocative biography Virginia Woolf: A Portrait, and Norah Vincent's daring novel Adeline. Vincent strives for the poetic with mixed results (good luck emulating Woolf's sui generis prose), but her psychological approach is intriguing. Vincent's Woolf has a literal split personality: Virginia and Adeline (Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen), who secretly talk to each other. Adeline is a girl stuck at 13, Woolf's age when her mother died. Adeline is a lure to the past, and toward the river, and death. It's a risky take on Woolf's "madness" — a little outré and not always persuasive, but never dull.
— McClurg
House of Echoes
By Brendan Duffy
Ballantine, 400 pp.
***
Shades of The Shining are spattered through Brendan Duffy's debut novel — a large isolated house, a young family, nutty and somewhat supernatural goings-on — but House of Echoes grounds itself in different ways for an enjoyable read. The Tierneys have uprooted themselves from New York City to a rural upstate mansion near a small village where a 1777 massacre occurred. The paterfamilias, Ben, is a struggling writer who's moved the clan to an inherited place of his family's so he can turn it into an inn and give his bipolar wife, Caroline, and troubled 8-year-old son, Charlie, a fresh start. However, the townsfolk aren't exactly the neighborly sort, and compounding trouble is an increasing number of dead animals, strange fires and a mysterious "Watcher" in the woods in whom Charlie's taken a keen interest — all of which nicely raise the book's creep factor.
— Truitt