New York

Brilliant, Scary Satire

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As a book reviewer, you can often feel like you’re on a high-speed train missing all the terrific possible stops along your route. People wherever you go mention books that you somehow never got to read read or read about because you’re too damned busy reading and reviewing other books. 

Back when I worked for half a dozen different publications, I remember weeks where I was reviewing three or more books on deadline and either reading or writing with no break whatsoever. Okay, I did eat and go to the john.  And maybe hit the gym, but in my head I was always thinking about the next review–and the one after that–and the one after that.

So I confess I missed the bravos for The Other Black Girl, but I am here to tell you that it is a laugh-out-loud, gorgeously written, and effing brilliant satire of the publishing world–and much more.  I love this powerful novel and I envy the author her style, her humor, her satire, her poise.  She is stone cold amazing. And for those readers who think MFA programs turn out cookie-cutter writers, guess again.  She is an original.

The set-up is great: Nella, whose name recalls the Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, is the only Black editorial assistant in the prestigious Wagner publishing house.  A publisher whose mail room staff is all people of color but whose editorial, art, and publicity staff are all uniformly white, many of them quite privileged.  Nella’s little cubicle is a lonely place, and “blacksplaining” cultural realities and events to her White colleagues often works her last nerve. 

She’s not a legacy hire and though her family was comfortable, they weren’t wealthy and that helps isolate her even more–at least in her own mind.  She’s also not happy being stuck at a low pay grade, though she loves the work, most of the time.  Enter Hazel, a much hipper Black editorial assistant with whom she feels she can (and should) bond, but things quickly get weird, competitive, and creepy in the extreme.

The author worked at Knopf for three years so she has an inside track on creating a workplace filled with kooks and quirks, competition, hypocrisy and back stabbing.    Like so many organizations today, Wagner makes feeble attempts to embrace diversity and the author’s wit here as elsewhere is stiletto-sharp.  The satire is never laid on too thick, however, and Nella is a wise, weary hero to admire and root for.

And so you feel you’re deep in a novel about workplace competition, Black solidarity and White cluelessness/condescension–until the book expands way beyond what you might expect when we learn the meaning of the title.  That’s when the book plunges deep into an alternate, hair-raising reality that’s a spoof conspiracy theorizing.  The  register becomes fantasy-horror and it’s a dazzling switch. I was glad that I put everything aside this weekend to read the book straight through.  The Other Black Girl is a knockout debut.

Lev Raphael, author, editor, and teacher, is a prize-winning publishing veteran.  His 27 books span genres from memoir to mystery.

When an Author’s Quirks Get in the Way: Chris Bohjalian and “The Flight Attendant”

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Chris Bohjalian’s most recent novel of suspense tells a gripping story about an alcoholic flight attendant, Cassie Bowden, who wakes up in a luxury hotel bed in Dubai next to a murdered man she slept with the night before.  His throat’s been slashed and there’s lots of blood in the bed.  When she drinks too much, she has blackouts, and she’s wondering if she could have killed him, though she can’t imagine why.

What should she do now?

Cassie has a history of bad choices and some of what she does immediately and in the days after her horrific discovery is truly off the wall–when it’s not just plain dumb.  The lawyer who eventually tries to help her has no problem calling her crazy.

So who killed Cassie’s sexy, wealthy hook-up?  And was he really a hedge fund manager?  Cassie doesn’t know, but before long she starts suspecting that she’s being followed.  In classic thriller style, her troubles escalate as the story unfolds, and often because of her own mistakes.  Cassie is almost a total screw-up, but it’s hard not to sympathize with her, given the alcoholism in her family.  And given that she’s painfully aware of how stuck she is in very bad patterns:

She wanted to be different from what she was–to be anything but what she was.  But every day that grew less and less likely.  Life, it seemed to her…was nothing but a narrowing of opportunities.  It was a funnel.

The details of her work life in the air and on the ground are fascinating, ditto how she interacts with her fellow flight attendants, and Bohjalian is at his best describing Cassie’s shame about her alcoholic blackouts.

But the writing is a bit odd at times. Streets and aisles are described as “thin” rather than “narrow” for no apparent reason. The author has a fondness for unusual words like “gamically,” “cycloid,” “niveous,” “ineludibly,” “noctivagant,” and “fioritura” which stop you right in your tracks.  The last one is a doozy.  It refers to vocal ornamentation in opera and seems totally out of place in describing a lawyer’s complaint to her client.

At a point when Cassie is longing for a drink, it’s not enough for Bohjalian to call it her ambrosia.  No, he has to pile on synonyms “amrita” and “essentia.”  Seriously?

You get the feeling with all these splashy word choices that Bohjalian is showing off, but why would a best-selling author bother?  Does he somehow feel that he has to jazz up his thriller with fancy-shmancy diction to prove that he’s more than just a genre writer?

Bohjalian also spends way too much time on Cassie’s amygdala, her “lizard” brain, and mistakenly thinks it’s a seat of reflection.  It isn’t.

Almost as annoying as his vocabulary or his weak grasp of neuroscience is the fact that his American characters sound British when they use “rather” as in statements like “I rather doubt that–” Even the narrative employs “rather” as a modifier way too often.  This is apparently a tic of his that nobody’s bothered to point out to him. Likewise, Bohjalian uses formal phrasing in a story that’s anything but formal, so time and again there are constructions like this one: “She hadn’t a choice.” Given the book that he’s written, “She didn’t have a choice” seems more direct and natural.

Despite the distracting quirks, I stuck with this thriller because the protagonist is a fascinating hot mess and Bohjalian is a solid story teller when he gets out of his own way.  The novel has some fine twists and a satisfying and surprisingly heartwarming ending.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in many genres including the newly-released mystery State University of Murder.  He teaches creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com where he also offers editing services.

Wonderful Writers I Have Known

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Nobody tells you that one of the best things that can happen when you become an author is that you get to hang out with other authors. At panels, conferences,  book signings, and just casually when you run into them on your travels. It may not be the Fellowship of The Ring, but there’s a connection.

When I’d only been publishing for a few years I was lucky enough to be on the Jewish Book Fair circuit at the same time as Walter Mosley.  We were both appearing in Houston and when I told the fair’s director how much I admired him, she graciously asked if I’d like to stay an extra day and meet him (!).  I not only joined a group for dinner, I heard him give a splendid reading.  Later Mosley and I had drinks and talked about the dynamics of building a series.

I’ve had dinner with the witty and urbane Edmund White in Paris after meeting him at an awards ceremony in D.C.  He gave me an insider’s advice about what to see in and near Paris that first-time tourists usually miss, and thanks to him I spent a glorious day at the amazing chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte. As he had predicted, it was almost empty of tourists.

At a summer Oxford University conference, thriller writer Val McDermid rescued me from the humiliating spectacle of passing out in an overcrowded, boiling hot lecture room which had just one measly fan off in a corner.  She deftly got me to the river where we sat cooling off for a few wonderful hours chatting about our careers, life, and love as we watched little boats pass by.

I can’t count how many authors have been gracious enough to write blurbs for my many books, and one who was too busy to read that particular book actually invited me to teach at the summer workshop she ran instead.  Author after author has been unfailingly kind to me in one way or another.

There’ve been some very colorful exceptions.  My favorite was the New York Times best seller who I had been exchanging some notes with because we admired each other’s work. That author invited me and my spouse over for drinks the next time we were in New York.The visit was going to be one fun piece of a blowout birthday weekend that included dinner at the Russian Tea Room.  When we got to New York and I called from the luxury hotel we’d splurged on, the writer insisted I had the date wrong. That wasn’t possible, since, well, I did know my own birthday and had said I was coming in for it. This literary star was super frosty on the phone and even sent a postcard later telling us about the wonderful menu we had missed at his home (it actually didn’t sound that great).

But a childhood TV hero of mine was staying at the hotel, and when I saw him in the lobby, I got to tell him how much I loved his show; I spent time that weekend with my best friend from college; the hotel’s Sunday brunch was stupendous; and I had terrific seats to see B.D. Wong and John Lithgow in M. Butterfly.

The generous and friendly ones have vastly outnumbered the others, and of course the exceptions have given me great material….

Lev Raphael is the author of two dozen books in genres from memoir to mystery, including a guide to the writer’s life: Writer’s Block is Bunk.