Staff Pick: Two Crime Novels

The “staff picks” shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, these books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we offer our own “Staff Picks” in a feature appearing irregularly.The Adventuress by Audrey Niffenegger recommended by EmilyIf I was going to attempt to classify Audrey Niffenegger’s beautiful, strange, and self-described “novel in pictures,” I might put it somewhere in the hinterlands of the graphic novel/comic book genre (that’s where it was when I first saw it at Foyles bookshop in London), but it feels to me much more like a children’s picture book for adults. It is the book’s stunning aquatints that give it its surreal, haunted and haunting quality, rather than the minimal narration provided on facing pages. The titular Adventuress is the creation of an alchemist father, and her dreamlike adventures include a coerced marriage, a metamorphosis into a moth, an affair with Napoleon, and the birth of a cat-child. As in another of her novels in pictures, The Three Incestuous Sisters, Niffenegger explores the fragility of happiness, the psychic costs of freakishness, and the pain and destruction caused by betrayal, and – in spite of these darker interests – the possibility of peace and reconciliation. For those who know Marcel Dzama’s work (made famous by a print series in McSweeney’s), Niffenegger’s is reminiscent but somewhat less intent on disturbing. I also find myself thinking of William Blake’s work when I consider Niffenegger’s – but perhaps that has only to do with her medium. A startling book, both for its form and for the story it tells.The Late Hector Kipling by David Thewlis recommended by AndrewWhen middle-aged British painter Hector Kipling begins to draw us into his life, that life is a thing to behold. A noted artist, living with the lovely and loving Eleni, doted on by his parents, Hector also enjoys the camaraderie of his closest friends, fellow artists themselves. Then, as Hector’s world begins to unravel, there is a disconnect between his narrated thoughts and his actions, and in one gothic twist after another, we descend into darkness.Author David Thewlis is indeed British actor David Thewlis, veteran of Mike Leigh films, including a mesmerizing (and I believe largely improvised) turn in Naked. In his first novel, Thewlis’ narration is vibrant, his dialogue caustic, and there’s a beating heart beneath the lacerating prose.Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam recommended by EdanI can count the number of memoirs I’ve read on three fingers, but I’d certainly read more if they were as funny and entertaining as this one. Ostensibly about how Klam’s spoiled upbringing didn’t prepare her for the harsh realities of the working world, Please Excuse My Daughter actually covers much more than that, from Klam’s brief and ill-fated relationship with a Mafioso, to her torturous honeymoon with the delightful if diabetic Paul. This ain’t serious reading, but it’s heartfelt, and, man, is it hilarious and readable. This a Sunday-afternoon-in-July kind of book.

Sometimes I just want to read a book from beginning to end as quickly as possible. Too often I’m halfway through a handful of books, chipping away at each of them in tiny portions when I’m on the train, and not terribly invested in any of them. Not having finished a book in a few weeks gives me the lethargic, underperforming feeling that some people get from not going to the gym. I recently spent five weeks mired in a life of Grant, some theology by Chesterton, and two novels that I started with optimism and then abandoned in disappointment (reading the early works of a writer you discovered via their later works is such a cruel gamble). At least I enjoyed the Grant biography, enormously in fact, but five weeks of reading with only one book added to my shelf was demoralizing.

I was then granted two pieces of good fortune. The first, a weekend with nothing to do. Oh, March 24 and 25, how delightfully brunch- and errand-free you were. The second, Arcadia by Lauren Groff. I had seen the beautiful cover, and my former bookselling co-workers were all tweeting about it, so I decided I would devote the weekend to it, hoping to recapture that ol’ reading magic.

I have never unwittingly made such a good reading decision. Arcadia was perfect for this venture, both because I was immediately in love with it, and because the book itself is about experiences that wrap around you until the outside world fades away.

The book is titled after a hippie commune where our hero, Bit, grows up in the 1970s. Arcadia’s charismatic founder and leader, Handy, is a folk singer, drug enthusiast, and inspiring speaker, whom the members of Arcadia traveled with until settling on a donated farm in rural New York. The commune supports itself with profits from Handy’s concert tours, a store that sells handmade goods, and occasionally the sale of drugs.

Arcadia is uniformly vegan, occasionally nudist, usually stoned, ostensibly dedicated to equality, and can be difficult to endure, with its cold winters, hand-me-down clothes, isolation, gossip, and scant rations. But these more sensational aspects of commune life, except for the gossip, are on the periphery of Bit’s experience of Arcadia. To him it is a beloved home, a nurturing village of people where he grows up with dozens of surrogate parents and sibling, falls in love for the first time, learns about sex and drugs, and delivers babies.

The novel is divided into four parts, dropping in on Bit when he is 5, 15, 35, and 45 (roughly), and tracing the lifespan of Arcadia from optimistic experiment to perhaps inevitable demise, then as the legacy that Bit carries with him in his adult life. As a child, Bit is brought up on the dream of Arcadia, believing it as second nature. Even when he is 15, and the cracks in Arcadia’s foundation have become chasms, Bit is still a true believer at heart. In the middle of a photography workshop one day, part of Arcadia’s wide-ranging tutorial program, “he feels, with a gathering of wonder, how this is exactly what makes Arcadia great: this attention to potential, this patience for the individual, the necessary space for the expansion of the soul.”

In the poem “Angel” by Lermontov, an angel is flying down from heaven to deliver an infant soul to the world. As he flies, he sings a beautiful song, more beautiful than any earthly music.

And within the young soul the sound of his songs
Remained, wordless, but alive.

For the rest of his life, that soul vainly yearns for the songs of heaven. Minus a bit of the Russian melodrama, Bit reminds me of this poem. The ideals of Arcadia in their purest form had been instilled in Bit at his purest age, and he never gets over it.

Bit’s Arcadia is such a thrumming, vivid, beautiful place, it’s hard to believe Groff herself did not grow up there. Reading it in one fell swoop as I did, I felt that I too was walking the rolling hills of New York with a bunch of hopeful nudists. And it’s easy to see why even decades later, Arcadia feels more real to Bit than his life in New York City, why he’s always more attuned to the past.

“It isn’t important if the story was ever true” he says, “he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”

The real story of Arcadia — the story of an exciting but flawed leader whose oversized dreams eventually can’t sustain themselves — is an interesting but perhaps a common one. Bit’s version of the story, of a place and group of people that wanted to be perfect, is the one he needs. Groff lets both stories exist, showing us how Bit forms one from the other, and how his version shapes his life.