A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall
WILL CHANCELLOR

Fiction | Novel
400 pages
5.313” x 8” Hardcover
Also available in ebook and paperback formats
ISBN 9780062280022
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback
Harper Perennial
New York, New York, USA
Available HERE
$8.99-25.99
Review by Eric Shonkwiler

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall starts out—and continues for some time—to be a novel meant to plumb the depths of its characters. Touted as a novel of ideas—capital A art chief among them—one might be surprised to find that, around the halfway mark, the story grows a plot and starts flying along. This is not, thankfully, jarring, nor is it inorganic to the book itself. One of the best things about Chancellor’s writing is his ability to sink a reader into whatever he’s covering. In Brave Man, we get a few water polo matches, RC-boat experiments, page on page of a thick academic speech—and yet, it’s readable, wanted.

Brave Man is the story of Owen Burr, an Olympic-level athlete whose career is met with a swift end when a feisty water polo opponent digs his thumb into Owen’s eye. Suddenly absolved of what seemed his only choice for the future, Owen sets out for Europe, intent on asking himself, “Which half of my life will I waste? Would I have wasted?”

Owen quickly sinks into the art world of Berlin, finding a cast of characters both depraved and enigmatic, empathetic and cloistered. Out of his depth, he unwittingly becomes both artist and art, nearly dying in the process. His father, Joseph Burr, is a middling Classicist professor struggling in many ways to do exactly what Owen is doing: make some permanent and worthwhile mark in people’s lives, and his own. When Owen disappears, Burr finds his purpose, following after him on bad leads and ending up involved with a meeting of academics and anarchists in 2004 Athens, Greece, while Owen is pulling himself back together in Germany. These two narratives, set a little ways apart, race ahead, stumble, and struggle to meet.

The plot of Brave Man isn’t exactly secondary, nor is it the main event. The book is at its best when Chancellor is giving over to Owen, in particular, and Owen himself is confessing in a peculiar, braggartly-but-embarrassed manner about himself. As a child, Owen developed a “religion,” an unusual schema based on a sort of synesthesia that would overcome him from time to time, relying on four very particular colors:

A flash of peridot at sunset means that Hermes is there. The other colors happen gradually, like the shadow on a sundial. Hermes is like a bomb blast…

And later,

…Ultramarine is this crushed mineral blue that goes with Athene. I went entire months seeing white as a light blue. Ultramarine has been the dominant mood of my life… without that blue I have no claim on perspective…

Beyond the fact that Chancellor writes these passages with a mesmerizing depth of character, they’re also just damn interesting in their portrayal of the unique territories of the mind.

Owen ends up on the run, aided by Stevie, a DJ with great taste, who sends him to Iceland to escape the authorities, just as Burr comes athwart them himself. Both wind up north, where Owen has begun to haunt the far reaches of the country, and the two sides of the story dovetail beautifully and inevitably. A big book in every way, Brave Man may not suit those with little patience, but those with it will be rewarded.

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Eric Shonkwiler is the author of the novel, Above All Men, chosen as a Midwest Connections 2014 Pick by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. He received his MFA in Fiction from University of California​-​Riverside as a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow and ​was recently selected as a New River Gorge Winter Writer-in-Residence.

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• This book was sent to Alternating Current from the author at the request of the reviewer, who saw the author at AWP and expressed interest in reviewing the book. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

Orhan’s Inheritance
ALINE OHANESIAN

Fiction | Historical | Armenian Genocide
352 pages
5 ½” x 8 ¼” Hardcover
Also available in ebook, paperback, and audiobook formats
ISBN 978-1-61620-374-0
First Edition
Review Copy: Paperback ARC
Algonquin Books
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Available HERE
$25.95
Review by Eric Shonkwiler

In the early days of World War I, the Ottoman Empire sought about to systematically exterminate its Armenian populace, located primarily in present-day Turkey. It is estimated that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in this act of genocide, and despite this, it is not a well-known or acknowledged fact. The language associated with this event is politically charged to this day, and the author of this review wishes to make it clear that at no point in this review will the use of synonyms for genocide mean anything other than that very word.

Orhan’s Inheritance is a twofold narrative, split across the present day of Orhan Türkoglu, and the memories of Seda Melkonian, beginning in 1915. What sets the story in motion is the death of Orhan’s grandfather, Kemal, who submerges himself in a vat of dye at the Türkoglu residence in provincial Turkey. Orhan stands to inherit a textile empire from his grandfather, but the inclusion of another beneficiary in the will, Seda—a complete unknown to the family—threatens to throw its legality into contest under sharia law. In order to prevent the will being made void, Orhan must travel to a Los Angeles home for the elderly to meet Seda, and convince her to take a large sum of money over a house that, he presumes, she has no connection to or desire for. What Orhan doesn’t realize, however, is that his grandfather and Seda are tied together by a complex and painful history, one that is shared by his whole nation.

In the other half of the tale, near the beginning of the century, Seda is part of a well-off Armenian family who Kemal, a Turk, works for. Seda’s memories begin with the start of trouble, though it would appear that her life before the genocide was almost pastoral. The political climate has begun to shift, though, and Seda’s uncle, Nazareth, has been forcibly conscripted into the army. The author here does a fine job of playing out the tension of an event that, even if you don’t know, you can begin very swiftly to understand by context. The Melkonians’ world is about to change, and there is a terrible helplessness that accompanies the wonder at the otherwise beautiful world Ohanesian describes. When Seda’s father is taken, along with a number of local Armenian men, it’s not long before the rest of the Armenian population is rounded up and sent toward a remote stretch of Syrian desert. This long scene, evoking the marches in Elie Wiesel’s Night and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms at once, contains the worst of the tragedies visited upon Seda and her diminishing family. Among them, Seda’s sister is abducted in the middle of their march, in one of the most tense and beautiful parts of the book:

Anush’s shoes, in particular, are a lovely sight. She wears a brilliant pair of dark blue suede shoes with a large silver buckle that gleams in the sun. As she walks, the sunlight kisses the sweet little buckle now and then, shooting sparks of light into the dusty air. [… Seda’s] attention is so fixed that at first she does not hear the sound of galloping hooves […].

Ohanesian is at her best while navigating this thin line, showing us horror while evoking some kind of beauty. From here, the story moves as you might expect, though even your expectations become charged with a kind of morbid chill at what transpires.

Wrestling a book with this kind of subject matter can be difficult, but in a way, there’s no wrong move. If there’s any fault to Orhan’s Inheritance, it’s the rather predictable nature with which the book wraps up—somewhat neatly, somewhat nicely. I suspect that the author would be happy with knowing, though, that there is no mistaking the point to this novel. The spread of awareness of the crimes perpetrated against the Armenian people, versus a perfect story? Not such a loss. Most books do neither, and for Ohanesian, debut novelist or no, this is a powerful work of transmission.

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Eric Shonkwiler is the author of the novel, Above All Men, chosen as a Midwest Connections 2014 Pick by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. He received his MFA in Fiction from University of California​-​Riverside as a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow and ​was recently selected as a New River Gorge Winter Writer-in-Residence.

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• This book was sent to Alternating Current from the publisher at the request of the reviewer, who met the author in a workshop/class and expressed interest in reviewing the book. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •

The Hollow Ground
NATALIE S. HARNETT

Fiction
336 pages
5.74” x 8.52” Hardcover
Also available in ebook and audiobook formats
ISBN 9781250041982
First Edition
Review Copy: Hardcover
St. Martin’s Press
Thomas Dunne Books
New York City, New York
Available HERE
$24.99
Review by Eric Shonkwiler

The Hollow Ground tells the story of a family (and families) savaged by troubles big and small. The Howleys, mostly coal miners, are hounded by, they believe, a curse, cast upon them by a priest who was beaten by their Molly Maguire forefather. In truth, the Howleys are a typical family living in coal country: they’re poor, hungry, and beaten by their work. Put a few generations of any family through that same tumbler, and you come out with people who are hateful, spiteful, vengeful. The Howleys are no different. The narrator of the story is Brigid, at the outset a curious and intelligent twelve-year old, who bears witness to the mounting troubles of her mother and father, and his mother and father, as the family curse and the curses of others come down on them.

Set in Pennsylvania’s rich anthracite coal fields long after the boom years of the World Wars, The Hollow Ground shows the reader a proud region in decay. In addition to poverty and unemployment, the people of the book are continually at risk of losing their homes to the collapse of the very earth from below them—the hollow ground of the book’s title. Like the infamous Centralia, the coal fields in Hollow Ground are aflame, and the fires are spreading inexorably. Gases seep up from the earth, snow turns to fog before it lands, and basements become so hot they melt bootsoles. This setting gives the book a wonderfully original and interesting backdrop: from the edges of the pits themselves, to the distant fires that turn mountains red, to the abandoned buildings and lots inside the hazardous “fire zone,” these are locales you don’t see often in fiction—or anywhere else.

Despite the hellish setup, the book moves along at a decidedly human level. The Hollow Ground’s drama is composed of slights and grudges, and as they begin to pile up, the dynamic of the Howley family buckles until it finally snaps. To be too explicit gives away quite a lot—this is a book of little secrets, too, each held with the wonder and import of a child. The plot becomes rather delicate because of this, sometimes easy to predict and at others maddeningly fleeting. At times the story will veer, to the chagrin of the reader, to a new plot thread that slows the pace. Ultimately, this is true to the nature of the book—told by a young girl, following the troubles set right in front of her. And Hollow Ground’s characters are nothing if not real; they are difficult, complicated, and hard to root for. This makes the author’s job more difficult, but in the end, it also makes the story of The Hollow Ground all the more brave. The sagest advice from out of any character comes near the end, when Brigid’s grandmother tells her, regarding Brigid’s mother: “All she can do is love the best she can. That’s all you can ’spect from her, girl. For the rest of her life, for the rest of yours.” And this simple platitude, if digested properly, might have averted half the tragedies of the novel. But that’s life, whether you’re a coal miner or a child of. The Hollow Ground understands the distance a single turn, a single decision, can make from your life’s original course. That’s more than can be said for most fiction, and most people.

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Eric Shonkwiler is the author of the novel, Above All Men, chosen as a Midwest Connections 2014 Pick by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. He received his MFA in Fiction from University of California​-​Riverside as a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow and ​was recently selected as a New River Gorge Winter Writer-in-Residence.

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• This book was submitted to Alternating Current by the publisher. The reviewer does not know the author or the publisher personally and received the book from Alternating Current at random. • Permalink • Tag: The Volt •