"The Family Chao" by Lan Samantha Chang

An audio book.

On the way home after his first term at University, still a virgin, James tries to resuscitate an old man. His oriental parents have had a restaurant for decades, adapting their authentic menu to US tastes. The community is glad that the restaurant is still open, though the father's rather objectionable. Many ethnic outlets are moving away. His mother has recently moved into a Buddhist nunnery. Dargo (William), his handsome brother, has just split with Katherine (she's oriental, an orphan brought up by non-asians in the States) after 12 years. His brother Ming is the clever one. At least some of the brothers were bullied. People speculated that some of the brothers disliked their father Leo. They were brought up Christian. James has always fancied Alice, who works at the wholesale store.

Dargo wants money because he's bought an appartment to live with Brenda (who slept with all the cast in a school play). He asks his father for partnership in the firm, and asks Katherine for the return of his expensive engagement ring.

Alice is an artist. She hasn't even kissed a boy. She asks James for sex. He ejaculates with his clothes still on. He receives a message that his mother's had a stroke. He learns that the bag he picked up after helping the man had lots of cash in it. Where did it end up?

Dargo's mother tells him that he must love his cheating father otherwise he won't love the world. Dargo puts on a grand Xmas meal hoping to impress Brenda, his mother, and the community. A rival gives him a gift of meat. At the meal his father announces that he's selling the restaurant. It's suspected that the meat gift was the Chao's dog Alf. The father dies in suspicious circumstances. Soon after the mother dies (another stroke). Dargo is put on trial. The brothers are discussed online.

In court it's as if the family and their race are on trial rather than an individual. People wearing various badges (including "Justice for Alf" badges) appear at the trial. The bag contained $50. Olem (a worker at the restaurant) heard Dargo and his father argue about it. We learn that James found his father's body in the deep freeze room. The key to exit it was gone. Dargo says in court that he'd thought of locking his father in there but bottled out at the last moment. He breaks down hating his own weakness. Ming says that he'd hidden the key, that it was all his fault, and has a mental breakdown.

Outside court Olem says that she's Leo's daughter. Leo treated her mother badly, stealing from her to have the money to go to the States. Olem admits to being an immigrant without documentation. She says that when their mother suspected who Olem was, their mother went to the Buddhists. Alf is found.

Olem has the ring and the bag with $50k. James knows this, and that Olem was implicated in the murder, but doesn't say. Dargo gets 30 years. He feels he deserves it. Katherine remains bafflingly faithful, a friend of the family. Alice goes to New York thanks to contacts given to her by Ming.

For a whodunnit it does a good job of handling other themes. I missed the connections to “The Brothers Karamazov” (which I've not read). The brothers' attitude to Asians, their parents, the American Dream, etc are revealing. I like the way that the trial is used to bring these themes to the fore.

Other reviews

• Jonathan Lee (At the novel’s halfway point we are confronted with the words “THREE MONTHS LATER”. The central events on which the plot turns have taken place off stage, in an unlit space. Chang is more interested in consequences ... however appalled the sons might be by their father’s perspectives, they continue to absorb elements of his character. You are what you eat, the novel seems to suggest. And you eat what your family, or your country, puts on the table.)
• writingnearthelake
• lonesomereader (Lan Samantha Chang gives a modern-day retelling of “The Brothers Karamazov” to relate the story of a family with a domineering patriarch and three very different Chinese-American sons ... Leo is rudely vicious in maintaining his dominance and ready to serve up whatever the public wants to feed their appetites and line his pockets. He succumbs to the American ideology that whatever is most profitable is also correct. ... the tragedy which occurs sparks public reactions showing deep-seeded stereotypes and biases. Though their situation is unique and the brothers come armed with different points of view, they are churned into an ongoing discourse. It takes honest reconciliations to extract themselves from this and persist in building their own lives.)

"Belief Systems" by Tamar Yoseloff (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from Ambit, Bad Lillies, Magma, Shearsman, The Poetry Review, Wild Court, etc.

Sometimes there's dense, clipped phrasing with sound effects (e.g. "a slack clock melts frost/ ferns crust the skirting board// the country gathered in vagrancy/ before the stooping waif// he sinks in centuries of bracken/ a clockwork of hedgerows" from "Blue Rag Zine").

Some other pieces seem rather diluted to me. "Fault Lines" for example has lines of 1 to 6 words that fill a page from top to bottom. A piece of porcelain survived countless owners until the persona dropped it. The ending is "you said we can mend it,/      so we will make a start// learning to live/with what is fractured". A simple plot with too many words and too much white space, even if the stanzas are supposed to represent the jagged fragments.

Each of the 12 poems in the middle section, "Combines", is illustrated by a Rauschenberg (I recognise a few - the bed, the goat in a tyre). "Canyon" is laid out as equally-sized near-rectangles. It reads like a more colourful section of a BBC arts piece by Waldemar Januszczak - interesting enough. The next piece, "Rhyme", is in couplets that assonate or loosely rhyme - "that/back", "Stage/change", "uniforms/harm", etc. "Factum" is a loose mirror poem - a speculum? (first line like the final line, etc).

4 poems are mestostics - they have a central column of characters in bold that spell a sentence.

"Noise" is a page of lines that criss-cross the page.

"In Concert" is an easy read with standard poetic observations - "strangers sharing breath ... How strange to be silent together ... the intimacy of listening in the dark ... liquid longing of the strings ... Music could be conjured by a baton's wave".

My conclusion is that there's much variety in this book - "experimental" to mainstream. Don't be put off if you dislike the first poem you read.

"Hystopia" by David Means

An audio book, and my attention wavered.

It begins with editor's and pre-readers' notes about accuracy etc. The supposed novelist, Eugene Allen, an ex-soldier, killed himself and had a troubled sister. In the novel, Kennedy was president for 3 terms. Psych Corp is trying to preserve mental hygene after Vietnam. Unwanted memories are re-enacted hoping that the re-enactment will cancel out the original memory (like sine waves carefully synced). The technique is called "Enfolding". A drug, Tripizoid, helps.

Enfolding doesn't always work. To cancel a war memory requires canceling related memories too, and if a war memory involves someone who was a schoolmate, school/childhood memories may have to be eliminated.

Singleton, an agent, starts having an affair with Wendy, another agent. Such relationships aren't allowed. Orgasm can unfold the treatment. Singleton finds out that Rake, an ex-friend whose enfolding failed, may be committing multiple crimes. Singleton thinks that Psych Corps meant he and Wendy to find each other and investigate.

Wendy and Singleton find Hank and Meg (Rake's victim?). They tempt Rake out of hiding and set up a duel in which he dies. Singleton and Meg think they both knew Billy T before their unfolding treatment.

At the end there are more comments from people the supposed author knew, and more about the real Billy T and the author's sister.

The text is at times mesmeric, hallucinogenic in the intensity of its descriptions - think "Apocalypse Now".

Other reviews

• Laura Miller (As exquisite as Means’s stories are, their emotional tenor ranges from the grim to the tragic, which on top of the fact that they are short stories, limits their appeal to all but the most stout-hearted readers ... Hystopia shows the strain of an author pushing to adapt to a form in which he is not at home. ... For Means, whose great theme is the starkness and communicability of pain, as well as those flashes of beauty that make it worth bearing, many of the elements required by a novel are superfluous. Like enfolding, they keep us from looking at what he most wants us to see.)
• Jay McInerney (His vision tends toward the dystopian; the stories, set in contemporary Michigan and upstate New York, often feel post-apocalyptic, taking place as they do in poisoned landscapes littered with shuttered factories, populated with characters haunted by loss and prone to violence.)
• Anita Sethi

"To the Dogs" by Louise Welsh

An audio book.

Glasgow 2017. Jim, a professor (criminology) returns from a trip to Beijing to find that his son Eliot (23) has been caught dealing with drugs again. Maggie, his wife, (an architect) thought Eliot had sorted himself out. They have a daughter Sasha (11) too. Eddie Cranston, a lawyer who was at school with Jim, tries and succeeds (against Jim's wishes - he has shady contacts) to get the job of defending Eliot. Eliot breaks bail conditions and is imprisoned (in the same prison where Jim's father had been).

Cranston's girlfriend Becky was a student of Jim until 2 years before. Her (god?) father was a criminal. Jim gets email saying that Lejur, a Chinese student he'd talked to on his trip, has disappeared. One of Jim's PhD students kills himself (maybe because Jim neglected to send a reference about him). Jim becomes a candidate for the university headship. A new learning hub is being planned. A builder befriends him. In prison, Eliot (who owes money to suppliers) is attacked, nearly killed. The builder had offered to protect him. Cranston has money problems. Jim (without telling Maggie) pays Eliot's debts. He's sent photos showing paying the debt and photos of his wife with a builder. Saudi royalty offer the university a big donation. A colleague, Ron Ferguson, loudly protests. He deals with a student protest against the Saudi offer - "blood money".

Jim contacts a Chinese dissident trying to help Lejur. He gets a phone call from someone offering to get Lejur freed in return for a student being given a first Sasha is threatened, so he meets a blackmailer and gives him info helpful to a builder making a bid. The blackmailer knew Jim's dad. His son is the builder, Peter Hendeson, who Jim met earlier. Ron Ferguson sees the 2 of them together. There's a tussle. Ron falls and dies.

A year later, the new buildings, including the Ferguson Lecture Theatre, are about to open. Saudi money's involved.

I liked 'The Cutting Room'. However, this novel left me cold. The moral dilemmas were presented clearly and I soon suspected how Jim would deal with them. Jim's ancestry is used as the explanation of his more surprising behaviour and reactions. Maggie and Jim's reaction to Eddie's behaviour and near-death experience is explained by their unconditional love.

Other reviews

• David Robinson (Jim Brennan is, we are told, not only the son of a violent criminal but has a professorship in criminology. If having a vice-principal as your main protagonist in a crime novel is already stretching credibility, those two things stretch it even further. My own guess is that Welsh knows this, which is why she fleshes out Jim’s own back story so well)
• Susan Osborne (Her cleverly plotted novel neatly contrasts straightforward crime with the dubious morality of accepting funding from repressive regimes)
• schatjesshelves (The one thing that bothered me is Jim’s lack of understanding of criminals. Despite his upbringing and his degrees in criminology, he seems constantly surprised by their behaviour. The addition of subplots is problematic. The result is a narrative that becomes disjointed and bogged down. ... The plot becomes increasingly convoluted and I found myself becoming annoyed with the constant piling on of Jim’s problems; it felt like they were added just to confuse. The stereotypical characterization of gangsters does not impress. And then the ending seems rushed and leaves unanswered questions.)

"Popular song" by Harry Man (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

Poems from "Ink, Sweat & Tears", Magma, etc. Over 30 people get "Special thanks" at the end, and there are 4 pages of notes.

I can see how Luke Kennard might like the book. I guess with this type of zany poetry one should expect poems to contain a mix of good and unsuccessful lines, and for there to be a mix of good and unsuccessful poems. My guess is that many other readers will notice the patchiness but disagree with me about which items are the successes and failures. There's a large margin of error.

Many of the poems are between 1 and 2 pages long, so there was room to weed out iffy lines.

Titles include "Naked as a Pork Loin Steak in a Poppy Field, I Consider a Horse from the Future". In contrast there's also "Broadleaf" which is a straightforward 1st-person PoV about being a tree - "I realise now, just how green I was ... I'm all about giving back to the community"

There's an SF theme - e.g. "After the magnesium rain, Phobos/ appears as if thrown over the lip// of Echus Chasma, like evidence of life/ being called down for tea and, from way up there,/ a chucked raisin - the reply".

"The Moon Is a CD of Bowie's Greatest Hits" is 4 pages of sentences (mostly one-liners) starting with "The moon is". Some work, some don't - it's up to the reader to do the editing. Here are 2 examples -

• "The moon is a face anticipating a kiss"
• "The moon is explaining to our neighbours how their son's tricycle ended up in the pond and why it now smells so strongly of Malibu and burnt plastic and we're sorry"

"If Xanadu Did Future Calm" begins with "As future plans reverse the harm/ neutrinos go superheavy/ where our universe shakes hands/ with one immeasurable by man/ becoming a Big Bang singularity", which has notes, but they don't help me. The poem does a lot of tech-name-dropping.

p.46, p.50, p.54 - No. p.58 is an N+20. No.

Other reviews

• Hannah Stone
• Tim Murphy (Both ‘Alphabets of the Human Heart in Languages of the World’ and ‘A Short Glossary to Russian Code Words Found in Ukraine’ are somewhat technical list poems that include translations in the footnotes. Each seems to be something of an academic exercise and this makes them feel out of place. The same goes for ‘#1984’, which lists more or less title-related hashtags ... ‘Then’ is a particularly strong closing piece ... Overall, while it sometimes feels uneven and is unlikely to be popular with everyone, this is an inventive and challenging debut.)

"Arcadia" by Lauren Groff

An audio book.

In the 1970s a group of people are trying to get Arcadia House ready, having lived in buses and lean-tos. When Handy leaves for a 3-month concert tour, Abe takes control and gets the big house finished. Bit, now 6, his son, was the first child born in the group. He's the main PoV. Hanna is Bit's mother. She gets depressed in the winter. There's no private ownership, more nudity and disability (mental because of drug abuse) than in society as a whole, and more tears. Survival is such a struggle that some people want to leave.

Bit roams and has lyrical insights. He watches his mother being washed by the other women and taken away to the house where she's talked to honestly until she's better. He can see her dreams. "lyrics stretched towards something fleeting". He slips into bed beside a woman giving birth. When he sees his parents cuddling he sees "the empty space that keeps the one from the other, the thing the size of a fist, a heart, a loaf, a rose, the size of his sister he'll never see" and starts crying silently.

By the time he's 14 his father is in a wheelchair (an accident when dealing with the sanitation), and isn't getting on well with Hanna (who's permanently on meds. An artist, Simon, says Hannah is his muse). Helicopters fly overheard. The commune decide to burn the hemp they've been growing and selling. Abe and Hanna have a hidden, secret field of it. Bit hasn't left the grounds - "the world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment." He's heard of televisions, "like tiny Plato's Caves".

The community has nudists, runaways, freeloaders, a tent for swingers, and trippers (people who've damaged themselves with drugs).

He fancies Hella, daughter of Handy (who's always had a soft spot for Bit). Abe allows the class he teaches to question Handy's authority - there's a "Council of 9" so why is Handy needed? On a night of celebrations there's a raid. About 200 people are arrested, a boy dies, and Handy's arrested for having sex with under-age girls. The commune falls apart. Bit and his family leave. Arcadia's converted to a mansion with tennis courts.

There's a jump of a few years. Bit got a Cornell degree, spent a year in Paris, had a few shows of his photographs, taught photography. He's anti-tech. At 35 he meets Hella again. They have a child, Greta. When Greta's 3, Hella disappears. His parents, separated, get together again, living near Arcadia. When Greta's 14. Hanna's 68 and dying. She and Abe have a suicide pact. Hanna survives. Bid looks after her. She refuses treatment. Covid arrives. Hanna tells Bid he's wasted his life helping people. He starts dating Hanna's doctor. Hanna dies, Astrid giving her a morphene overdose.

At one point the reader says "not even looking at the fraycas". My guess is that in the printed book the last word was "fracas".

Other reviews

• Kapka Kassabova (The requited maternal ecstasy the author feels for Bit, combined with turgid storytelling results in a novel that could be a one-page love poem, and in that sense feels 288 pages too long. I became incredulous after I'd heard 100 times that for little Bit, "everything is rich with the incredible" and "his heart is so loud it overwhelms the day". In the end, I felt as though I'd been on a numbing acid trip.)

"Mary; or, the Birth of Frankenstein" by Anne Eekhout

An audio book.

We learn about Mary when she's at Geneva in 1816 with Shelley, Byron, Dr John Polidori and her stepsister Claire. Shelley's into free love. She isn't. Her daughter died. She now has a little boy, William, still breast-feeding. Byron challenges them to write a ghost story.

We also see her at Scotland in 1812 when she was in her mid-teens, staying with the Baxter family. She has a skin condition. She's friendly (intimate) with Isabella, whose mother has died. Isabella's into witches, ghosts and sea monsters. While they're out together they see a humanoid beast (or was it a shared hallucination?). It's rumoured that the local brewer, Mr Booth (who'd been married to Isabella's sister, who died) conducts experiments on life. Mary's warned about Isabella - is she a witch?

She's familiar with Gothic horror stories and Galvani's frog experiments. Mary's famous mother died days after Mary was born. At the end she leave Scotland in one time-line (her skin better, Isabella planning to marry Mr Booth, abandoning Mary) and leaves Geneva in the other timeline (Shelley's father will provide support only if she returns). Claire is pregnant. Byron's likely to be the father but maybe Shelley could be. Her Frankenstein story has barely been started.

Lots of sections seem slow to me. It feels like the majority of the text is involved with the Scotland scenario. I don't mind the lack of action, it's the psychological/character development that stalls.

Other reviews

• Isabela Torezan (What I found most beautiful in this story, though, was not the delicate description of Mary’s love life, from Isabella to Percy, or the sad but surely moving portrait of motherhood. For me, it is Mary’s salvation through writing, the way she realises that her story, her monster, her writing powers were what made her who she was and nobody could take that from her. Writing, alone, makes her a woman, a mother, and a living being)
• theresasmithwrites (The scenes at Geneva read almost like a fever dream, an immersion into the way in which they were all drinking heavily, laudanum mixed with wine, the consequential heightening of everyone’s faculties, and the raging storms all converging into a highly charged atmosphere. )
• Liesbeth D’Hoker (Unfortunately, her straightforward style leaves too little of Mary’s complex mind unturned. ... Her superficial dialogues and explanatory one-liners render a reductive image of a woman who is a victim of her time, of her context, and of the men who surround her. Eekhout’s poor style also prevents the creation of a layered and intellectual character. At times the syntax is of toe-curling simplicity ... Eekhout deviates from the biographical facts on several important points ... It is also quite clever how Eekhout plays with different genres. She mixes coming-of-age passages with horror stories and folk legends and concocts strange scenes that soar with tension. Much less successful are the passages that she overwhelms with psychological platitudes)
• Ray Palen