3 New Books About Confronting Desires
Apr 09, 2017
Desire is a funny thing. At its best, it can inspire us to achieve the seemingly impossible. We become better people, do important things, and create awesome beauty. At its worst, though, desire, love, and need can take over our lives, becoming obsessions that we find very difficult to surmount. This week’s book club features three new novels that deal with the highs and lows of wanting and having. Build up your own reading wish list by reading on.
<em>The Half Wives</em>
Many people’s greatest desire is to have a child, continuing their line to the next generation and creating an unbreakable bond. Thwarted, this desire can lead to depression and obsession. Even worse, though, is getting what you want, only to have it snatched away. Pelletier’s sophomore effort takes place over the course of one dramatic day, May 22, 1897, the 16th anniversary of the birth and 14th anniversary of the death of Henry and Marilyn Plageman’s child, Jack, a tragedy that occurred while the then-happy couple was making love. Since the tragic loss, Marilyn wraps herself up in volunteering for the local orphanage, and Henry distracts himself from their lack of intimacy by spending his time with another woman, Lucy, and their now eight-year-old child, Blue.
<em>The Absence of Evelyn</em>
Forty-seven-year-old Rhonda and her adopted college-aged daughter Olivia, “the last of her three children to need her, even if she didn’t know it,” are both sublimating their passions. While Rhonda has an Olympic gold medal in volleyball and a supposedly fulfilling job running a charitable foundation, her children have left home (now a “tomb of silence”), her estranged sister Evelyn is dead, and her divorce has just been finalized. The latter is something of a relief, but it just confirms Rhonda’s suspicions that true love is something that happens to other people.
<em>No One Is Coming to Save Us</em>
“Not much happens here but the same, same […] But this thing is strange. The boy we all saw grow up came back to us slim and hungry-gaunt like a coal miner. With money. JJ Ferguson made it.” A story of longing and American determination, No One Is Coming to Save Us both twists and echoes The Great Gatsby’s familiar refrain. Set in a small town in North Carolina propped up by the furniture industry, the novel shows us that industry’s decline and the mass layoffs that follow. Sylvia and her daughter Ava have jobs, but they don’t consider this the success they seek. Sylvia is still in mourning for her dead son, and Ava is married but seems unable to have children. They are both surprised by the abrupt return of JJ Ferguson after 15 years, who left town, as Sylvia puts it, “someone like her, someone black, someone once poor,” and comes back to show the town his success.
