F8 SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
BOOK REVIEW
Fictionweeks
on list
1.Where the Crawdads Singby
Delia Owens (G.P Putnam’s Sons:
$26) A young woman living on
her own in the coastal marshes of
North Carolina becomes a
murder suspect.41- Nickel Boys by Colson
Whitehead (Doubleday: $24.95)
A dramatization of American
history told through the story of
two boys sentenced to a reform
school in Jim Crow-era Florida
5- Dangerous Man by Robert Crais
(G.P Putnam’s Sons: $28) Elvis
Cole and Joe Pike try to
determine why a young Los
Angeles bank teller was seized by
kidnappers.
2- The New Girl by Daniel Silva
(Harper: $28.99) The chief of
Israeli intelligence partners with
the crown prince of Saudi Arabia,
whose daughter has been
kidnapped.
4- The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
(Gallery Books: $27.99) A nanny
working in a technology-laden
house in Scotland goes to jail
when one of the children dies.
1- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press:
$26) A son in his late 20s writes a
letter to his mother who cannot
read, unearthing a family’s
history rooted in Vietnam.
10- Hippie by Paulo Coelho (Knopf:
$25.95) A young Brazilian with
dreams of become a writer, sets
off on a journey in search of a
deeper meaning for his life.
3- Chances Are by Richard Russo
(Knopf: $26.95) Three college
friends in their 60s reunite on
Martha’s Vineyard and recall the
mysterious disappearance of the
woman each of them loved.
2- Lady in the Lake by Laura
Lippman (Morrow: $26.99) A
middle-aged housewife turned
aspiring reporter pursues the
murder of a young woman in
1960s Baltimore.
3- Normal People by Sally Rooney
(Hogarth: $26) A high school star
athlete and a loner connect while
attending Trinity College in
Dublin.
17Nonfiction
1.Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
(Random House: $27) A
collection of essays on
self-deception, surging beneath
the surface of our lives from
scammer culture to reality
television.1- Educatedby Tara Westover
(Random House: $28) A young
woman raised without schooling
by survivalists describes her path
to Cambridge University.
75- Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
(Avid Reader Press/Simon &
Schuster: $27) An investigative
look at the sex lives of three
American women for almost a
decade.
5- The Library Bookby Susan
Orlean (Simon & Schuster: $28)
The story of the 1986 fire at the
Los Angeles Public Library.
43- The Four Sacred Secrets by
Preethaji and Krishnaji (Atria:
$26) Scientific approaches with
ancient spiritual practices to
open your mind.
1- The Pioneersby David
McCullough (Simon & Schuster:
$30) The Pulitzer Prize-winning
historian rediscovers the settling
of the Northwest Territory
through five pioneers.
14- When You Love a Cat by M.H.
Clark and Jessica Phoeniz.
(Compendium: $10.95) The bond
between a cat and its human.
3- Make Your Bed by William H.
McRaven (Grand Central: $18)
The commencement speech
from Navy Seal, Adm. William H.
McRaven at the University of
Tex a s.
58- Unfreedom of the Press by Mark
R. Levin (Threshold: $28) The
radio host takes a critical look at
the role of the press and its
political ideology
12- Chaos: Charles Manson
by Tom O’Neill (Little, Brown:
$30) A journalist’s 20-year
fascination with the Manson
murders leads to new revelations
about the FBI’s involvement.
3BESTSELLERS
LOS ANGELES TIMES
AUGUST 25, 2019Fiction
1.The Overstoryby Richard Powers
($18.95)
2.The Witch Elmby Tana French ($17)
3.Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
($17)
4.Belovedby Toni Morrison ($16)5.A Gentleman in Moscowby Amor
Towles ($17)Nonfiction
1.Born a Crimeby Trevor Noah ($18)
2.Calypsoby David Sedaris ($17.99)
3.Sapiensby Yuval Noah Harari ($22.99)
4.How to See by Thich Nhat Hanh
($9.95)5.You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero ($16)Rankings are based on chain
results and a weekly poll of 125
Southland bookstores. For an
extended list: http://www.latimes.com/
booksPAPERBACKS
latimes.com
/booksCraving more?
Join us online for the latest book
news from Los Angeles and the
larger literary world.Inland
Téa Obreht
Random House: 384 pp., $27
Imagine you’re taking a walk in
Joshua Tree or thereabouts, and
you’ve gotten far enough from your
car or cabin to be surrounded by
desert. You take it in: a striking
cactus, some scrubby plants, then
an expanse of sand stretching to
the horizon shimmering under the
impossibly bright sky. Sweating,
you reach down for your water bot-
tle ... and it’s empty.
There is a flash of fear: Gosh,
I’m really thirsty. How far do I have
to go? How hot is it today, exactly?
Before hoofing it back to modern
comforts, you consider what it was
like to try to make it in the desert
West a century ago: the relentless
sun, the endless thirst, nothing be-
tween you and the elements but a
scrap of determined hope.
That is where Téa Obreht plops
us down, in a whisper of a town in
the Arizona Territory in 1893, in
“Inland,” her first book since her
201 1 bestselling debut, “The Tiger’s
Wife.” Suffused with magical real-
ism, “Inland” is a sweeping story of
the outcasts who drift into this des-
olate corner of the West. There’s a
huge cast, stretching back half a
century, who orbit around two
characters in particular.
One is Nora Lark, a mother, wife
and farmer who does not suffer
fools. When the story begins, her
husband, who runs a small news-
paper, has gone off on a long er-
rand, and her elder sons have fol-
lowed. She’s at home with a vulner-
able crew — her youngest son, an
invalid mother, a teenage female
ward — and a well that has run dry.
The rituals of saving, rationing and
obtaining water are detailed in the
text but disrupted in practice.
Nora is thirsty. She is thirsty all the
time.
The other main character has a
different, deeper thirst. Lurie Mat-
tie can see the dead, and if he con-
nects with them too closely, he ab-
sorbs their unrealized desires —
what he calls their “want.” While
this is undeniably sad, it can have a
funny edge; when a young pick-
pocket dies, Lurie begins stealing
to satisfy him. “The want never
seemed to go away. Sometimes I’d
give in to it and lift a watch or a
book, which gave [him] no end of
glee.” It’s a quick hop from stealing
to joining a gang doing holdups,
which sets Lurie on the path that
will, after a long journey, bring him
to Arizona.
He gets there, however improb-
ably, on a camel.
As in her first book, Obreht
brings an exotic animal into a
world where it shouldn’t exist, yet it
does. The camel is taken from the
true story of the Camel Corps, an
idea hatched by Southern politi-
cians, which went sideways during
and after the Civil War. In “Inland,”
Lurie falls in with the camels and
their cameleers, becoming one
himself.
While Lurie wanders, Nora is
tied to the land. Capable and flinty,
she pings from one domestic crisis
to the next: Her boy is worried
about the tracks of a monster
(which resemble a camel’s); the
water house has been broken into;
the sheriff visits; and the teenager,
who holds séances, faints when
she’s clearing brush, claiming a
ghost visited her. “No doubt he will
reappear the first instant she is
tasked with something more ardu-
ous than sewing,” Nora says wryly.
Despite being a realist and askeptic, Nora secretly keeps up a
running conversation with the
ghost of her daughter, who died of
heatstroke when they were new ar-
rivals. The daughter, as sassy as
her mother, is an ephemeral being
ingrained into their home, some-
thing that Nora can’t admit to any-
one but that binds her to the place
indelibly.
Both Lurie and Nora introduce
us to a rich cast of characters along
the way. Nora’s husband, her best
friend and the local doctor spring
to life as she details their struggles
and strife in town. But because she
manages the challenge of surviving
in the desert by holding tight to her
emotions, some of her stories are
buried in layers of denial.
Lurie is more open, an adven-
turer with a romantic, poetic eye.
Spotting a row of ghosts by a
church graveyard, he explains,
“There were dozens. I saw them
flicker into being as the last of the
day faded: kids, peering over the
bluff, bright as falling stars.”
Traveling further into Ameri-
ca’s deserts with the cameleers,
Lurie gets closer to himself. The
lead man is called Hi Jolly, a man-
gling of his Muslim name. Lurie, an
Eastern European immigrant with
Muslim roots, was orphaned in
New York and had his identity ef-
faced and remade. He learns from
Hi Jolly not just how to manage a
camel but how to pray.
Whether with the Camel Corps
or striking out with the camel on
his own, Lurie keeps moving be-
cause of his bandit past. A relent-
less marshal pursues him seekingjustice, chasing him from town to
far-flung town. This tired Western
trope is livened up by the lawman’s
name — John Berger, same as the
British novelist and art critic re-
sponsible for the landmark BBC
series “Ways of Seeing.”
The cliché of the superhumanly
persistent lawman demonstrates
how hard it can be to work within
the mythologies of the American
West. What is the best way to write
about settling a land that was not
the empty expanse shown in old
movies but home to Native Ameri-
cans? Obreht has characters of
multiple white ethnicities and Lat-
inos — for all of them, the isolation
of their Arizona town allows for ac-
ceptance and reinvention.
Through their 1893 eyes, Native
Americans were frightening and
seldom-seen villains. But as it’s
2019, it’s unfortunate that among
all the varied characters we meet in
“Inland,” Native Americans don’t
ever leave the periphery. It’s a
missed opportunity.
At times, this sweeping story
seems almost too big for even a
writer of Obreht’s gifts. But it is
saved by the camel and his rider
Lurie, outsiders who can make a
home no place other than the emp-
tiest spaces of the West. Nora pro-
vides a difficult but necessary bal-
last as Lurie reverberates with the
yearning of lost souls. At some
point, all their wants become his
own, the legacy he would pass on to
any desert traveler.Kellogg is a former books editor of
The Times. She lives in Alabama.Desert desires and thirst
Téa Obreht’s ‘Inland’ is a sweeping story of magical realism and outcasts in the West
By Carolyn Kellogg
AUTHORTéa Obreht follows her bestselling 2011 debut, “The Tiger’s Wife,” with novel “Inland.”Ilan HarelPenguin Random HouseTupelo Hassman burst onto
the literary scene in 2012 with
“girlchild,” a novel that follows a
young woman growing up in pover-
ty in a Nevada trailer park. The
debut earned positive reviews and
gained the writer a host of fans
eager for a follow-up.
After seven years, the wait is
over. Hassman’s second novel,
“gods with a little g,” tells the story
of a teenager named Helen who
is desperate to escape her life in
the fictional town of Rosary, Calif.
It’s more than typical teen angst
— the town is run by religious
fundamentalists who have effec-
tively banned the internet to insu-
late young people from all things
secular.
Helen, mourning the recent
death of her mother, finds solace in
a group of teenage misfits. She also
befriends two young newcomers —
Win, a boy with a checkered past,
and his sister, a transgender girl
named Rainbolene — and they
help one another deal with growing
up in a community that prizes con-
formity above all else.
“Teenagehood is, in my experi-
ence, very tough, and it’s tough for
Helen,” Hassman says.
The Santa Cruz native grew up
in California and Nevada. She
worked in Los Angeles for the non-
profit A Window Between Worlds
before attending Santa Monica
College and USC, then earned a
master’s degree at Columbia Uni-
versity in New York.
Two years ago, she and her
family moved to Charleston, S.C.,
where her husband is attending
school. Hassman teaches remotely
at Santa Monica College and Cal
State East Bay.
She talks about the inspiration
for her coming-of-age story in an
interview from Charleston.
This book takes place in Cali-
fornia, and “girlchild” also takes
place in the Southwest. Is that
familiar terrain?
Yes. I was born in Santa Cruz
and lived so many years all around
the Bay Area, with a few years
outside of Reno, where “girlchild”
is set, and I lived for 10 years in L.A.
So aside from a couple of years in
New York, it’s mostly been Cali-
fornia.Why chose small-town settings?
I think it’s because I’m slightly
terrified, or greatly terrified, of
towns like Rosary. I am so com-
fortable in Los Angeles and New
York; I feel right at home. I like to
be a teeny-tiny fish. So I think that
I’m comfortable writing about
small towns because there’s a
tension built in it for me.Where did you get the idea for the
town of Rosary?
Yeah, it was definitely inspired
by what we see around us. JeffChang talks about this a lot, if you
know his work. He wrote “We Gon’
Be Alright,” which is a collection of
essays about racial segregation.
Moving to the South and getting a
chance to see that here definitely
informed everything about that in
the book. It’s hard to escape that
here, and it all feels very tricky to
me, these quiet ways of separating
people. My neighborhood doesn’t
have any exits; there’s only one
way in, and this is to keep people
out. There’s one exit where you go
in, and you can only leave that way,
so you can’t just drive through. It
feels complicated to me. I mean,
everything feels complicated to
me. But you see it everywhere. You
don’t have to be in the South,
obviously. And that was part of
setting the book in California. I
think I wanted to note that this
happens everywhere, especially
now. There’s no safe place from
that.Was it difficult for you to write
about the high school experi-
ence?
I dropped out of high school
about two weeks into 10th grade
and started working, so my life was
a disaster. But this was fun for me
mostly, especially compared to
“girlchild,” which wasn’t fun. I
have two friends that I made
when I was 13, and we were total
misfits, and the way that we
raised each other and saved each
other’s lives — I mean it sounds
so corny, but that was nice to
think about. It was nice to
think that this is a thing that
teenagers manage to replicate,
over and over.Helen is such a fully formed char-
acter. Do you remember when
she first came to you?
Rainbolene was the first person
I thought of that’s in this book,
and Win, and I wanted to knowthem together, so Helen came as
someone who could witness this
love that they have for each other
that I admire so much in siblings. I
have a loved one who lives in a
rural area in a Bible Belt state and
is trans and was a teenage trans
person, and this goes back to the
life support of friendships — be-
cause of the friendships and sib-
lings that are in that person’s life,
they’re safe. And I have four broth-
ers, and I love them very much,
and that also informs that.What do you think Helen’s rela-
tionship with religion is like? At
one point, she refers to herself as
a “frenemy” of God. Do you think
she’s still a believer at all, or has
she kind of given up?
Oh, I do think she’s still a be-
liever, though not in that prescrip-
tive way that her dad favors. I can’t
imagine that anyone doesn’t have
some kind of questions about it. I
feel like humans are plugs looking
for an outlet, wanting to feel con-
nected to some bigger plan, and
she definitely has that plug, and
she has the instinct to find the
connection.There are so many funny mo-
ments in this book. Was having
the humor in the book a con-
scious decision?
I don’t know how to be funny on
purpose. But with “girlchild,” my
editor at one point said, “You
know, you’re funny.” And I’ll never
forget that moment, because I was
like, “I — really? Oh!” I think at
least, if nothing else, it opened the
door to just be funny, should such
a thing occur. I don’t know what
happens if you try to do it on pur-
pose. I know there are people who
do that for a living, but it seems
like magic to me.Schaub is a writer and book critic
based in Austin, Texas.The mystery and magic of being a teen
By Michael Schaub
“TEENAGEHOODis ... tough
for Helen,” Tupelo Hassman
says of her “gods” character.Melissa Toms