Booked & Printed
by Laurel Flores Fantouzzo
Guilt is an ambivalent engine. Besides being that which a court of law might determine, guilt can weigh a spirit down, drive a person in unexpected directions, and linger far past any hint of external judgment. But perhaps the most hazardous situation is when a person acts in the total absence of guilt, incapable of carrying any blame at all. This month, Booked & Printed explores protagonists measuring their relationships to their own culpability, or their unwillingness to take responsibility for it.
Every once in a while, a main character emerges into contemporary literature like a festering boil from a body of evil. To spend time with him is to feel yourself plunged into the constancy of his crimes, as if wading deeper and deeper into poisonous waste. And yet you follow him, despite the stench and the danger. The scandalous prose urges you on, and so your act of witness, as reader, is inexorable. Paula Bomer’s The Stalker gives us Doughty, that class of abhorrent character. He is an irredeemable, rank chauvinist whose exploits readers’ suffering eyeballs cannot turn away from.
The Stalker is largely set in New York City during the early 1990s. That time was a hangover from the materialist 1980s, the transition from Republican Bush rule to Democratic Clinton rule, a time of changing gender roles, and decidedly pre–#MeToo. In this mixed era, Doughty is lethally self-centered, and a malicious, horny numbskull. He lives to manipulate women in the service of his own impulses. He bullies and berates his mother. His loutish father, soon dead, is the only one to whom Doughty gives his unfettered affection. He is from a formerly wealthy, old-money family, but he is penniless and in debt now, living under the comical, very American delusion that he is always about to be rich, even as he plunges into homelessness. He cannot see the distance his former high school friends are attempting, and so he keeps ringing their phones and showing up on their doorsteps.
Doughty’s oblivious idiocy is as laugh-out-loud funny as his treatment of women is horrid. This is the book’s central project: to draw the enemy lines of patriarchal abuse through one blistering, satirical novel. Doughty’s corrosive contempt for the feminine is masked by his handsome face. He hides his true intentions through carefully calculated displays of pretended vulnerability and affection. His lies soften the hearts of the women he makes his prey. Doughty feels no guilt or fault for his crimes, only a sense of his own superiority, especially as a man. His arrogance is such that if justice were to ever find him, Doughty would believe himself above it, even as we watch and guffaw at his descent.
As odious as its main character is, The Stalker is one of the most hilarious and horrifying books to ever parse the crimes of sexism.
Lana Sabarwal’s Maya, Dead and Dreaming immerses readers into mid-twentieth-century, small-town Shogie. There, Munna is a rare Indian immigrant. She moved with her mother from Bombay as a child, and she grew up in a white American community that treated her with curiosity at best, and hostility at worst. Munna’s constant companion and ally, in childhood, was Maya, a brash and affectionate scion of Shogie’s wealthiest and most powerful family. As Munna and Maya grew older, they fell out with each other. Soon after, in 1938, Maya died by suicide, drowning as a teenager while drunk.
Now an adult, fourteen years later, Munna is troubled by the memory of Maya. She mulls what she might have done differently with their friendship. Her own guilt and memories are inflamed by an anonymous letter in her present-day 1952, left in the office of her professor boss, titled: “Why Maya Had to Die.” The anonymous author claims Maya’s death was sinister, and that it is time for the truth to be revealed. Maya haunts Munna’s dreams in earnest then, appearing in disturbing scenes to try and tell her something. To interpret those dreams, a strange and charismatic psychoanalyst, Karenina, joins Munna in her quest for the truth.
Lana Sabarwal’s debut is an absorbing investigative hunt, with a unique societal outcast as sleuth. Surrounded by mysterious agendas, and worried that more violence may follow, Munna wends her way through Shogie denizens’ complex personal histories. Karenina is an insightful, patient, and occasionally frustratingly opaque sidekick, slowing when Munna wishes to rush, and prodding when Munna is uncertain. Her Jungian expertise and quiet tactics are worthy companions to Munna’s impatient determination. Their uneasy, unfolding friendship is appealing. Their questions kick up new eddies of guilt, like mud from the bottom of the creek in which Maya drowned.
In the end, Munna’s motivating emotional guilt gives way to a vast network of culpability in small-town Shogie. The surprises she and Karenina reveal will linger with readers far beyond the end of the mystery.
In Amy K. Green’s Haven’t Killed in Years, mild-mannered Gwen Tanner does not welcome the severed limbs that appear at her doorstep. But she has an instant idea of why they might have been delivered to her. Years ago, her name was Marin Haggerty. She was the daughter of a prolific murderer, Abel Haggerty, now imprisoned. Gwen spent years in witness protection and in state institutions, then fashioned an anonymous life. She is terrified in her adulthood that her father’s sinister ways might one day activate in her DNA. Driven by secondhand guilt she worries will become firsthand guilt, Gwen races to find the killer dismembering victims. She is accompanied by a journalist with a more than slightly lurid interest in Abel Haggerty, and propelled to the backstories of the people of her past.
Haven’t Killed in Years is a dynamic thriller, concerned with the inheritance that family violence bestows. Twists of plot and character are well-paced revelations, deepening Gwen’s self-determination and her fate. The novel’s voice stays nimble and entertaining, keeping readers close to Gwen’s initial determination to stay far from her father, and her evolving motivation to come closer to the truths of his crimes. Her journey may have begun in lifelong guilt, but her shocking discoveries uncover a neighboring family secret that matches her own.
All Points Bulletin: The author of the 42 Street Library mysteries and the bartender Brian McNulty series, Con Lehane introduces a new P.I., a blacklisted Hollywood cartoonist who’s relocated to Hells Kitchen in New York in the ’50s, in the Red Scare Murders (Soho Crime) • Sarah Weinman delves into the 1978 spousal rape case that triggered a revolution in women’s rights in Without Consent (Echo). • YA mystery Sisters in the Wind (Henry Holt) by Ojibwe author Angeline Boulley is based on the real stories of Native children in foster care.