LARB Digital Edition: The Year in Fiction

By Lisa Locascio, Nathan Deuel, Rita Williams and Katie Ryder

The reviews selected for this month’s Digital Edition, Foreign Lands, Invisible Cities,” are a sampler of the places we readers of fiction visited this year. From the flood-prone hills of Haiti to the common courtyards of Queens, New York, fiction reminds us that everywhere we go we find humans who love and lust and scheme and hope. Some of the reviews mix personal history with criticism: Lisa Locascio describes her own fascination with Mormonism in terms of Ryan McIlvain's Elders, while Courtney Cook lets her love for Jane Gardam shine in her aptly-titled essay, Go Read Jane Gardam.” For a dash of digital-age, we include Susanna Luthi’s sharp take on The Circle, Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel that tackles big data collection, surveillance, and transparency.

It isn’t the stories alone that transport us: imagery and rhythm, form and tone all work together to take us elsewhere. This is evident in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light,” reviewed by Rita Williams. And discussed in both Nathan Deuel’s review of Lucy Corin’s One Hundred and One Apocalypses” and Katie Ryder’s essay on Renata Adler, whose 1976 Speedboat” was republished this year by NYRoB.

Some travel to see the great landmarks, others to meet and mingle with the natives. Michael LaPointe’s gorgeous review of Javier Marias’s The Infatuations” takes us deep into the sorrows and desires of Marias’s characters. And we round out the issue with Greg Cwik’s Donna Tartt's New Anti-Epic,” a review of both the writer and her latest novel, The Goldfinch. No doubt we’ll remember Tartt’s warm and seedy characters long after the twists and turns of the plot are forgotten and then, as with all dear and distant friends, consider visiting them again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940660059

Lisa Locascio

Lisa Locascio’s work has been published in The Believer, Salon, n+1, Bookforum, Tin House, American Short Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She is co-publisher of Joyland and editor of 7x7LA. Open Me is her first novel.

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Introduction

Fiction is the cheapest form of travel I know. Not only is the price right, but as a reader you get VIP status: front row seats, exposure to the best sites, intimate access to the most interesting people and moments. I’ll surrender the metaphor there, but you get the idea: even as the promise of virtual reality becomes more accessible, fiction holds its ground as the original virtual trip. And based on the range and quality of the books that appeared in 2013, I’m not worried. The reviews selected for this month’s Digital Edition, Foreign Lands, Invisible Cities, are a sampler of the places we readers of fiction got to visit this year. From the flood-prone hills of Haiti to the common courtyards of Queens, New York, fiction reminds us that everywhere we go we find humans who love and lust and scheme and hope. Some of the reviews mix personal history with criticism: Lisa Locascio describes her own fascination with Mormonism in terms of Ryan McIlvain's Elders, while Courtney Cook lets her love for Jane Gardam shine in her aptly-titled essay, Go Read Jane Gardam. For a dash of digital-age, we include Susanna Luthi’s sharp take on The Circle, Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel that tackles big data collection, surveillance, and transparency.

It isn’t the stories alone that transport us: imagery and rhythm, form and tone all work together to take us elsewhere. This is evident in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, reviewed by Rita Williams, and discussed in both Nathan Deuel’s review of Lucy Corin’s One Hundred and One Apocalypses and Katie Ryder’s essay on Renata Adler, whose 1976 Speedboat was republished this year by the New York Review of Books.

Some travel to see the great landmarks, others to meet and mingle with the natives. Michael LaPointe’s gorgeous review of Javier Marias’s The Infatuations takes us deep into the sorrows and desires of Marias’s characters. And we round out the issue with Greg Cwik’s Donna Tartt's New Anti-Epic, a review of both the writer and her latest novel, The Goldfinch (my favorite of 2013). I have no doubt that I’ll remember Tartt’s warm and seedy characters long after the twists and turns of the plot are forgotten…and then, as with all dear and distant friends, I’ll consider visiting them again.

Clarissa Romano

Senior Fiction Editor

Los Angeles Review of Books

Experimenting on Faith: Ryan McIlvain's Elders

By Lisa Locascio

IN MY LAST SEMESTER of college, I found myself inexplicably drawn to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not to any one congregation or adherent, but to the Church itself, and to its holy text, the Book of Mormon. I can’t pinpoint the source of my fixation any more precisely than to say that at some point in early 2007 I learned about the LDS belief in the eternal family, which holds that marriages sealed in the temple continue in the afterlife, uniting parents and children forever. My inspiration was quite possibly HBO’s massive marketing campaign for Big Love, which dominated my corner of the East Village that spring. Doctrinally assured reunion in heaven appealed intimately to me, the melancholy culturally Catholic but functionally agnostic child of lapsed Catholics. At 22 years old, I constantly missed my parents (alive and well but several states away) and the happy childhood over which they had presided. No one else seemed to suffer from the pervasive nostalgia I had begun to accept as inescapable.

As moderns, we are born into a tradition of disbelief, writes Patricia Hampl. The life of the spirit is not an assumption. It is a struggle. And the proof of its existence for a modern is not faith, but longing. My struggle was against logic, against the happily atheist peers aghast at my inclinations, against my own frantic attempts at adulthood. Religious longing didn’t have a place in my universe. I have been since childhood a secular humanist through and through, the kind of pain in the ass kid who liked to deconstruct contradictions between the Old and New Testaments to bother my CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) teachers. In fifth grade, I refused to begin the sacrament of confession (rebranded Reconciliation in a 1990s attempt at a kinder, friendlier Catholicism) because, as I patiently explained to the adults, I had no crimes to confess. I had done nothing wrong: I was 10 years old. My parents, wary of the iron-fisted morality that had warped their own upbringings, did not force the issue.

I couldn’t articulate it then, but what I was rejecting was the habit of self-incrimination, of shame and self-punishment. I would not police my inner life. (I did finally go to confession in the seventh grade, at the urging of a CCD teacher who had converted from Judaism; the fact that she had chosen her faith rather than blindly followed it appealed to me. I told the priest I was mean to my sister sometimes, hoping for penance on the rosary. He told me to think about it.) My parents taught me against the retrograde politics of Catholicism, even as they tried valiantly to initiate me into the mysticism of possibility that they believed the Church to represent. Before puberty I knew that homosexuality was no sin, that the Bible was simply a beautifully written book of some good ideas, and that a woman’s sovereignty over her body was absolute, even divinely ordained. I understood the symbiosis between faith and power, and learned not to take proscriptions too seriously.

Yet even as I skirted religion’s pitfalls, I continued to yearn for both its rigor as well as its access to the divine. I devoured mythologies — Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic — and carried totems. Determined to find real magic, like so many bookish suburbanites before me, I tried Wicca, sending away to Vermont for wands and constructing an altar of heirlooms in my bedroom. The candle smoke stains on my childhood bedroom's flowered wallpaper have long outlasted my commitment to polytheism, of which traces remain only in the syncretic prayer I involuntarily whisper in bad times. It begins Hail Mary, Mother of God, Blessed art thou amongst women and ends Blessed be and let it harm none. Even into adulthood, glimpses of Catholic Nuns and Buddhist monks in habit made me smile. Mass, and the veneration of the idols at Hindu temples alike filled me with something I privately called the Cathedral feeling. I wanted a guide to my own world of sprits, even as I