Review_FICTIONReview_FICTION
38 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 2, 2020
In Genevieve Hudson’s luminous debut novel,
Boys of Alabama, a German teenager confronts
an evangelist’s dark side (reviewed on p. 41).★ Catherine House
Elisabeth Thomas. Custom House, $26.99
(240p) ISBN 978-0-06-290565-9
Thomas’s spellbinding debut opens in
1996 on Ines Murillo’s first night at a small,
highly selective college in the Pennsylvania
woods. Drunk after a party, Ines reflects on
her relief that behind Catherine House’s
locked gates, no one knows about her past.
Renowned for controversial research
regarding a mysterious elemental substance
called plasm, the school holds classes year-
round, and students remain confined to
Catherine’s rural estate. Eager to disasso-
ciate from a past trauma, Ines falls behind
on her work while seeking solace in a string
of sexual encounters before finding a group
of friends who feel closer to family than
anything she’s ever known. Still, Ines can’t
ignore her growing suspicions about the
school’s plasm experimentation in “psy-
chosexual healing,” in which students are
subjected to mass hypnosis. Ines’s academic
probation leads her to forced isolation in
the “Restoration Center,” where a professor
places plasm pins in her head and tells her
she’ll never think of her past life again.
Surreal imagery, spare characterization,
and artful, hypnotic prose lend Thomas’s
tale a delirious air, but at the book’s core
lies a profound portrait of depression and
adolescent turmoil. Fans of Donna
Tartt’s The Secret History will devour this
philosophical fever dream. Agent: Kent
Wolf, Friedrich Agency. (May)Only the River
Anne Raeff. Counterpoint, $26 (320p)
ISBN 978-1-64009-334-8
Raeff’s engrossing tale of refugees and
war (after Winter Kept Us Warm) traces the
connection between two families affected
by the Nicaraguan Revolution. After the
Anschluss in 1938, 13-year-old Pepa, a
Jew, flees Vienna with her family for
Nicaragua, eventually settling in El
Castillo, where, as doctors, her parents
dedicate themselves to fighting yellow
fever. At 14, Pepa walks though the jungleat night and watches people dancing in the
plaza, where she meets a boy named
Guillermo and falls in love. However, a few
years later, while Pepa carries Guillermo’s
child, her family abruptly leaves for New
York, and she is separated from Guillermo
forever. Pepa marries a Jewish man and has
another child with him, Liliana. Decades
later, Pepa’s son, William, sets out to join
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, where he is
presumed dead in 1982. Guillermo’s
daughter, Federica, also fights the Contras.
It isn’t until Liliana travels to Nicaragua
in the mid-2000s to find answers about
her older brother’s disappearance, that
Pepa’s and Guillermo’s stories merge again.
Raeff’s seamless web artfully depicts the
characters’ will to survive and to fight for
what they believe in. This heartfelt story
of separation and confluence will move
readers. (May)The Motion of the Body
Through Space
Lionel Shriver. Harper, $28.99 (352p)
ISBN 978-0-06-232825-0
Shriver’s bitter satire of the elite exercise
industry (after the collection Property) huffs
along with sobering reflections on aging.
Serenata Terpsichore and Remington
Alabaster, married for 32 years, have
recently moved to Hudson, N.Y., in the
wake of Remington losing his civil
engineering job in Albany. The couple’s
bumptious domestic bickering comes to a
head after sedentary Remington, at 64,
announces he will run marathon. Serenata,
who’s been a runner for years, scolds himfor the unwelcome “incursion into her
territory.” Nevertheless, Remington trains,
buys neon-colored running gear and a
“brushed-steel, state-of-the-art” treadmill
with surround sound. At the finish line,
he is accompanied by Bambi Buffer, a late
30-something woman in a lavender sports
bra whom Serenata derisively refers to as an
“anatomy illustration.” Bambi encourages
Remington toward a new goal, the Lake
Placid MettleMan Triathlon. With Serenata
as a mouthpiece, Shriver casts her familiar
brand of mordant humor at easy targets,
but unlike in the work of Edward St.
Aubyn, for instance, the narrator’s
meanness serves no apparent purpose,
and the razor-sharp observation isn’t
balanced by self-implication. The result
is underwhelming. (May)★ Shadowplay
Joseph O’Connor. Europa, $26 (400p)
ISBN 978-1-60945-593-4
O’Connor’s high-spirited latest (after
The Star of the Sea) puts ample flesh on the
bones of the little-known story of the the-
atrical ménage involving celebrity actors
Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and Irving’s
business manager, Bram Stoker. Composed
(like Dracula) in epistolary style from diary
entries, letters, recording transcripts, and
the like, the narrative follows Stoker as he
moves with his family from Dublin to
London in 1879 to help Irving establish
his Lyceum Theatre. Over the next quarter
century the two indulge in a frequently
bitter love/hate relationship—Irving drives
Stoker mercilessly and cruelly taunts him
for his literary ambitions. Via commentary
from Terry on Dracula, O’Connor’s narra-
tive suggests that Stoker likely channeled
the personality of Irving and the drama of
their contretemps into his tale of the
imperious vampire scourge. O’Connor’s
characters are magnificently realized and
colorfully depicted by the virtues that
define them: Irving’s egotism, Terry’s
feminism, Stoker’s stoicism, and—for
the brief time he appears—Oscar Wilde’s
witticisms. The repartee O’Connor
imagines between them is priceless, in
particular when they refer to each other
by their nicknames (“Chief” for Irving,
“Auntie” for Stoker), and he fills the tale
with numerous rib nudges that readers of
Dracula will recognize. This novel blows
the dust off its Victorian trappings andFiction
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© thomas teal