Library Limelights 213

Tarryn Fisher. The Wives. USA: GraydonHouseBooks.com, 2019.

Polygamy in the modern developed world, apart from tiny cults, may be infrequent but then again who knows what people get up to in private. It’s a rather original concept for a suspense novel (and I thought I was moving past Karin Slaughter’s The Last Wife – LL212!) The narrator, unnamed for approximately the book’s first half, tells us how she adores her husband Seth so much, she knowingly became his second wife and later agreed he should have a third. All living, none of whom has met the others. Each woman receives his full attention on a specific day of the week. After all, this busy guy also has a demanding business to run. Wife no. 3 is Monday; wife no. 1 is Tuesday; our narrator is Thursday. How Seth spends the remaining four days/nights is unclear, other than commuting between business offices in Seattle and Portland.

Eventually “Thursday” feels too much like a competitor, that she has to try hardest to make him love her the most, because she can’t give him a child. This strange arrangement has been hidden from her family and friends. Insecurities flaring, her curiosity point of needing to see who the others are comes to the fore. You can imagine the consequences ... perhaps. Who is fabricating and who is in denial? A few oddities jar (such as “Here! Here!” for “Hear! Hear!”). Fisher has a clever psychological plot but the aftermath doesn’t quite satisfy. Looks like Harlequin (GraydonHouseBooks is a subsidiary) has expanded its reach beyond conventional romance format.

One-liners:

▪ Imagining what the future holds proves difficult when factoring in two other women who share your husband. (11)

▪ Yet here she is with a house right out of Design and Home while I wilt away in a high-rise. (46)

▪ “It’s even better when you spy on them in person, by the way.” (99)

▪ I hadn’t thrown anything at him, but throwing it on the floor had felt like enough—a childish display of acting out. (181)

▪ My empty womb has made me feel like I’m not a real woman, not worthy of my husband’s love. (192)

Multi-liners:

▪ This is why Seth keeps us apart—so we won’t focus on jealousy and each other, but rather on our relationship with him. I bite back my feelings. (55)

▪ My body betraying my mind, typical of me; I have no discipline. Not when it comes to Seth. (57)

▪ “Monday hasn’t replaced you,” he says after some time. “I want you to believe that my commitment to you is real.” (81)

Wires crossed:

But when I open my phone, it’s not the message I was expecting to see. My mouth goes dry as I squint at the screen. 

I picked some up. I’ll make an excuse and get out of it. Love you. 

I stare at the words, trying to make sense of them and then it hits me: this text wasn’t meant for me. Seth made a mistake, typed his message to the wrong name. It’s a painful thing when you realize you’ve received a text your husband meant for another woman. It’s even more painful when you gave him permission to do so. Which one is it? I think bitterly. (95)

Dinosaur mother:

“Where’s Seth?” she asks. “We haven’t seen him in weeks.” 

My husband is being someone else’s husband tonight. 

“He’s in Portland till Thursday.” 

She knows this, I told her yesterday when she called, asking about his whereabouts. She likes to rub in the fact that he puts work before me. I take a sip of my drink, the bubbles fizzing close to my nose. In her mind, it is because I don’t wife hard enough. She once told me that the fact that I had a job was probably driving Seth to be away more. 

“How do you figure that?” I’d asked her. 

“He feels like he needs to compete with you, work more. A woman’s place is in her home. And your father never let a business meeting keep him from being home for dinner on time,” she’d said. 

My father doesn’t even know where the bottle opener is, I want to say to her. (113)

Unspoken, treasured loss:

He’s right. I’ve always refused to talk about what happened. It’s too painful. I haven’t wanted to relive those feelings, drag them over and over again in some shrink’s office. My hurt is a living thing—sick and swollen, still festering under the surface of my calm. It’s personal: I don’t want to show anyone else. I nurture it on my own, keep it alive. Because as long as my hurt is still there, the memory of my son is, as well. They have to co-exist. (179)

Téa Obreht. Inland. USA: Random House, 2019.

It’s the old Wild West as you never knew it. Obreht reaches deep into forgotten voices and landscapes. Nora Lark is a cynical housewife and mother on a parched 1893 Arizona homestead; her husband Emmett and older sons are away from home. She journeys the neighbourhood, desperate to replenish their water supply, each stop dredging up events that shaped their life to a point of friction the night before. Emmett runs the town (Amargo) newspaper, not always to the liking of local authorities. The second story in the novel—and the two threads predictably, ultimately entwine―involves the U.S. Army Camel Corps. Obreht’s handling of that little-known historical drama is truly magnificent; she’s filled the story with memorable characters, real and fictional.

Hi Jolly (Haji Ali) is a name familiar, perhaps, only to cameleers; Obreht deftly melds the legends about him. The man was hired in 1856 as a camel handler in the army’s Middle East search for camels; over eighty animals were imported as pack animals in opening a road across the American Southwest. Lurie, a fictional lad, joins the westward train, having become enamoured of a camel he calls Burke; he carries on long mental discussions with Burke. Among all these individuals, the dead are still present and moving. A very brief review can barely suggest the breadth and depth of Obreht’s characterizations, as well as the growing pains of a raw, sometimes unforgiving, country. Inland is a unique treat written by an author of mounting acclaim.

One-liners:

▪ Emmett had failed utterly in his efforts to redirect the hatred of Cheyenne’s schoolchildren from the Indians to the British; and from luckless settlers to cattle barons. (69)

▪ “That beard really does make you look awful mangy, Harlan.” (260)

▪ “I learnt that a man must always be a little discontent,” Jolly finally said. (338)

▪ Only the Arabs called him Turk, and not for very long—for then he came here to be called Arab by everybody, and resign himself to life as Hi Jolly, a name that meant nothing to anyone he’d ever known. (342)

Multi-liners:

▪ Beale had thick, bushy brows. One couldn’t help but think they bespoke supernatural powers of observation. (105-6)

▪ Desma opened the coffeepot and made a face and began looking around. Nora allowed herself to hope that a water bucket might appear from someplace. (119)

▪ For nothing injures the soul quite like infidelity. Even the unconsummated kind. Perhaps especially so. (322)

▪ “Too much contentment is apt to make you think you can have more. And worse, make you wonder: when will it be taken away?” (339)

Strange tracks:

Passing Toby in the corridor, the girl grazed a hand over his bristly head. He seized at her and said in what he thought was a whisper: “Mama don’t think the tracks are cloven. They don’t strike her as tracks at all.” 

Josie stooped down to him. Dark lines laddered the back of her dress—a rare sign of mortality, Josie sweating. Born of woman after all. “How do they strike you?” she said. She, too, thought she was whispering. She thought Nora couldn’t see the small shrug of Toby’s shoulders, or the way Josie’s hair met his stubbled little forehead. 

“They’re tracks,” said Toby. 

“Well, then, that’s so. What we see with our hearts is often far truer than what we see with our eyes.” (30)

Lurie is hired:

The night before you were set to depart, Jolly found me. There was a strange thrill to him: what I hoped was a reluctance to bid me farewell. I remember fearing that he would embrace me, and that I would shame myself by weeping. But I needn’t have worried. He was all flint: “The lieutenant has need of you.” (105)

Unfortunate friend:

We wrapped Mico in blankets and buried him under the floor of that little depot, and that is where he still sleeps to this day. We got back there once—remember?―in the years afterwards, and stood listening for him, but he did not appear. It made me glad his rest was not interrupted. (166)

Nora’s marriage reality:

He not only failed to see her as a lady—he wouldn’t even trouble himself with the comparison. She was a tough, opinionated, rangy, sweating mule of a thing, and the sum total of her life’s work was her husband of twenty years enumerating what he desired for his sons—which did not include a companion with her qualities, but did include moving to a more favorable clime to secure the affections of a person with not one-half of Nora’s merits. 

Of course it did. All difficulties, in Emmett’s view, could be solved by pulling up stakes. Any failing could be got away from. Failing in Baltimore, a man might move to Iowa. Failing there, he might move to Wyoming, and then to the southwest Territories. Start a flock. Start a paper. 

He had made a grand adventure of his failings, and could make another when Amargo went bust. (201)

Lurie’s best friend:

Above all, true to your nature, you have carried water to those furthest from it. How strange that your lack for want of it should make you so perfectly suited to bring it to others. You have carried barrels full of life for prospectors and miners, for small townships whose wells had gone alkaline, for lost wagon trains and thirsty desperadoes. Men half-hung in trees wanted our water, and even the ghosts hoving after us did, as though they knew they’d died an inch from relief. Up and down the Mojave, the Chihuahuan, the Colorado, they knew us. 

“Here comes the Camel Man,” they said. “Here comes the great red horse to water us.” (223)

Chris Pavone. The Paris Diversion. USA: Crown Publishing Group, 2019.

A new thriller with CIA agent Kate Moore and her e-trader husband Dexter (The Expats). Dexter does not know, nor does he want to know, that Kate runs a secret Paris Substation. Early one morning, news of bombs placed around the city, and a man with a suicide vest standing in front of the Louvre, raises pandemonium. Only when Kate learns that billionaire CEO Hunter Forsythe has disappeared at the same time, she’s on it in a flash. Someone is preventing Hunter from showing up for an important business announcement to the press and his company’s shares are dropping dramatically. Kate suspects that somehow Dexter is into this, big time; he has secrets too, from her.

The suspense and surprises unfold all in one day; Kate is a whirlwind getting around troubled Paris on a Vespa, in a car, on a bicycle. We get updates of Hunter’s predicament, of Mahmoud the stoic suicide volunteer, of the accomplice who delivered him to the Louvre, and of the sniper prepared to kill him. Not to mention a mystery woman in Venice who may be masterminding the entire plan. The action is salted with expository passages of the Moores’ recent history, helpful for those who’ve not read The Expats. While Kate and Dexter are flesh and blood, Hunter, at least to me, is not exactly convincing as a global financier. Yet no doubt: Pavone proves himself among the top drawer thriller writers.

Words:

ouroboros – snake swallowing its tail, ancient symbol of infinity

chyron – text-based video graphics used by television news as “crawlers”

One-liners:

▪ Mahmoud will also carry a second device, not as easily recognizable. (7)

▪ The irony was not lost on Kate: she had traded her husband’s secret criminal enterprise for her own. (100)

▪ She has no one to blame but herself, not even her husband, and she has come to understand that being able to easily assign blame is one of the chief advantages of having a husband. (208)

▪ It was much easier to be an intelligence operative when it wasn’t her husband in her crosshairs. (248)

▪ It was more than one narrative that they constructed: one to implicate the target, another to exonerate him. (281)

Multi-liners:

▪ Kate is the boots on the ground. If she’s still a useful intelligence resource, she needs to prove it today. (99)

▪ But she doesn’t want to share her suspicions with Dexter, at least not yet. She doesn’t want him to flip out. (142)

▪ “I’ll take that gun now.” Hunter needs to pry Colette’s fingers off the weapon, then fills her empty palm with the keys. (228)

▪ Dexter steps out into the world, in search of Lego and lunch and sanity. He needs to calm the fuck down or he’s going to have a stroke. (244)

Working the stocks:

But that’s the nature of risk, isn’t it? That’s when risk is most worthwhile, most profitable: when the outcome is least certain. 

This was what Dexter had been working toward for years, this type of move based on this type of info, betting against this particular person. A perfect storm. It was irresistible. 

He took a deep breath, then executed the trade. Twice. (77)

On her tail:

Kate is no longer concerned merely with being tailed by counterespionage, by intelligence, by a curious husband. Now she also has to worry about counterterrorism, about French police, Interpol, anyone, everyone. The stakes have become much higher than the security of her legend, than the secrecy of the Paris Substation. It was just a couple of hours ago when those were her primary concern. (247)

Kate creates a diversion:

She doesn’t want to say more than necessary, doesn’t want her accent to betray her. She’s wearing a VDM shirt and riding a Vespa, she might very well be French, nothing whatsoever to do with any American man the police are questioning here. 

“Restez ici,” one of the cops says to the civilian, who answers immediately, “Bien sûr.” 

Both police jump in the car, and the driver starts reversing before the passenger has closed his door, backs up violently to the end of the block. The car fishtails to a stop, then shifts, and speeds through the intersection— 

“Get on,” says Kate to her husband. Saving him, yet again, from his own stupidity. “Let’s go.” (269)