Blood & Whiskey #25
New books from Megan Abbott, R.F Kuang, Andre Dubus III, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Plus: guest cocktail from Michael Ruhlman and a "Yo, Canada" playlist.
Hello friends and readers,
Thanks for joining me for another month of crime fiction (and other) book reviews, book roundups, cocktails and music. Let’s jump right in…
Beware The Woman (Putnam), by Megan Abbott — My favorite book this month from a writer who seems to get better, on a sentence-by-sentence level, with each book. It’s a slow burn, almost brutally tense, as we follow Jacy and her new husband Jed to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (“up the great paw of Michigan, I-75 snaking up the state like a wriggly vein”), for a visit with Jed’s father, Dr. Ash — widowed, woodsy-flannel, jovial. Jacy is pregnant and as Jed wilts before his imperious father, Dr. Ash’s paternal interest in Jacy’s condition slowly tilts toward awkward, then creepy. Abbott is a master of the strange, sad smile, the hard-to-read smirk, the hitch in a voice, the brush of hand on hand. What the fuck’s going on here? I asked well into the book’s halfway point. I won’t give anything away, except to share a line I loved, a taste of the tone: “The flies had gone with the sun and now it was the eerie pagan rattle of the cicadas.”
* You can read my interview with Megan on my new Interrogations page. (Still under construction, with more interviews coming soon. See more below.)
Yellowface (William Morrow), by R.F Kuang — Midlist author June Hayward’s life is transformed when she steals a dead friend’s manuscript and publishes it as her own, under the vaguely Asian-sounding name, Juniper Song. (June is white; her friend, Athena Liu, whose death June witnessed, was Chinese American.) As June/Juniper’s star rises, earning the acclaim, book sales and royalties she’d always dreamed of — the successes her friend once enjoyed — she becomes snarkier, angrier, and less likeable by the page. Her lies pile up until the world she’s built on self-justified deceit begins to teeter and tilt and June realizes, “your time in the spotlight never lasts.” For me, the takedown of the publishing industry was (maddeningly) spot-on, though the pages devoted to the awful fake-world of Twitter dragged. Kuang is a razor-sharp writer, and often funny, even if this is ultimately a sad and tragic tale of jealousy, ambition, racism, and the powerful addictive pull of hate and vengeance on social media.
Such Kindness (Norton), by Andre Dubus III — Dubus clearly likes a challenge. How does a writer give us an alcoholic ex-Oxy addict, a divorced and deadbeat father living in Section 8 housing (“the 8,” he calls it), and coax us, every so slowly, into giving a shit? When we meet Tom Lowe, he’s teaming with his equally beaten-down neighbor Trina (27, three kids, rotten boyfriends) to steal garbage bags (and hopefully those credit card “convenience checks”) from the banker who’d talked him into an adjustable-rate mortgage, the man Tom blames for the loss of his home — and his family. I’ve known men like Tom — a scarred and wounded builder who eased his pain with pills and booze — so this was not an easy read at times. But there was something wonderful, even miraculous, to watch a terribly broken man heal by subtle degrees, and to cheer on someone who appears beyond redemption. It’s a beautiful book and it brought me to tears, bolstering my admiration for Dubus, author of House of Sand and Fog and the brilliant memoir, Townie, who also knows his way around builders and boozers.
* I recently zoom-interviewed Andre and will share that conversation soon as part of my new Interrogations series. (More on that below).
Chain-Gang All-Stars (Pantheon), by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah — I met Adjei-Brenyah a few years ago when his debut story collection, Friday Black, earned a 5-Under-35 award from the National Book Foundation and other accolades. But none of those stories prepared me for the world of Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, imprisoned fighters battling other prisoners — to the death — as stars of the popular TV show, Chain-Gang All-Stars. This is dystopian and satirical world-building at its most ambitious and adventurous. Adjei-Brenyah gives us an entire language of trademarked creations, from the Magrod™ magnets that control prisoners through surgically implanted steel in their wrists to the camera-microphone drones (Holo Microphone Camera™ EyeBalls) that capture their every move, on and off the bloody BattleGround. Characters are over the top and wildly entertaining, and the language, sentence upon sentence, is bold and bludgeoning and, at times, hard to keep up with. But the real story here is the author’s not-so-subtle takedown of the US prison system, supported by footnotes depicting true historical incidents of shocking injustice. The criminal-warriors, known as Links, are fighting for their possible freedom, “playing out some rich asshole’s fantasy” which attracted viewers “like an accident on the road.” It’s a riveting and horrifying read.
Other shoutouts — books I’m reading or plan to read…
All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (just started, and holy shit…)
The Lock-Up, by John Banville
Code of the Hills, by Chris Offutt
The Wager, by David Grann
Little Monsters, by Adrienne Brodeur (late June)
Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (late July)
Time’s Mouth, Edan Lepucki (early August)
I’m also re-reading James Ellroy’s Perfidia (2014). Better than I remember.
If you need more books, check out LitHub’s Summer Reading List; The New York Times’s summer list of crime fiction (via
); and Amazon’s Best Books of the Year So Far (whose top 20 includes S.A. Cosby, The Wager, Yellowface, and Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies, one of my faves).
Cocktail of the Month
This guest drink comes from
, whose new book — The Book of Cocktail Ratios: The Surprising Simplicity of Classic Cocktails — is a must have for those who want to up their mixology game by understanding the kinship between so many drinks, and how swapping one ingredient turns, for example, a Manhattan into a Rob Roy and a Negroni into a Boulevardier.Here’s Michael (who publishes the great
on food, cooking, books, cocktails, travel, movies, and more)…The Gimlet cocktail, a true classic, is emblematic of the way cocktails evolve. Just as the martini evolved from an equal-parts gin-vermouth cocktail to a drink with almost no vermouth, the gimlet too evolves.
“A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else,” says Raymond Chandler’s detective Christopher Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1953). “It beats martinis hollow.”
I’m not one to second guess the master, but the fact is, Rose’s Lime Juice, created in 1867 to preserve the lime juice that would prevent British sailors from developing scurvy, has become today lime flavored sugar water, making Marlowe’s cocktail today both too tart and too sweet. I argue for a fresh gimlet, a standard sour using fresh lime juice and simple syrup. An elegant, classic cocktail.
Gimlet Using Fresh Lime Juice
• 2 ounces gin
• 3/4 ounce lime juice
• 3/4 ounce simple syrup
• Lime disc or wedge
Combine the liquids in a cocktail shaker, add ice, shake till cold then strain into a chilled coupe. Garnish with the lime.
If you want the original Gimlet, and I encourage this as well, make your own cordial. This is is an excellent one from Portland bartender Jeffrey Morgenthaler. If you do, the drink comes together in a snap: 2 ounces gin, 1 ounce of lime cordial.
Cheers!
Playlist of the Month
Yo, Canada…
This goes out to my Portlandian/Canadian friend, Andrew P., a champion of the literary community who just finished radiation and the first phase of chemo and is on the path to recovery. I have no idea if he gives a shit about Canadian music.
(*no Neil Young — he’s anti-Spotify — so I included k.d. lang doing Neil. And sorry not sorry, no Rush, Celine, BTO, Shania or Byran Adams.)
* Last week I introduced a new off-cycle author interview feature called Interrogations. I’ll be sharing these roughly twice a month, in addition to the regular monthly Blood & Whiskey newsletter.
Launching these interviews and other occasional bonus posts prompted me to create a new subscription level for those interested in going deeper, learning more about writers, their process, their favorite books and cocktails. Free subscribers will still receive the regular monthly Blood & Whiskey newsletter.
Subscriptions help support my writing and the purchase of other writers’ books. If you’re able to help ($5 a month; $50 a year) I’d be super grateful. And a HUGE thank you to those who’ve already subscribed, including Laura L., Jonathan S., Ben F., Grant T., and especially Amy F. And thank you all for reading…
I haven’t been doing events lately, but if anyone happens to be on Nantucket I’ll be giving a talk at the Nantucket Yacht Club at 5p on June 21, then signing books on June 22, 10:30 a.m. to noon, at Mitchell’s Book Corner, 54 Main Street.
Until next month…
-Neal
Find me @ Instagram; sometimes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Goodreads
And it's a battered old suitcase To a hotel someplace And a wound that will never heal No prima donna, the perfume is on An old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey… -Tom Waits, “Tom Traubert’s Blues”
Just finished Age of Vice. It was nice to find a great (but short) interview with the author. It opens up the person to the public in a beautiful way to help understand her life and inspirations. Thanks for the article. Keep up the great work!
Currently reading Yellowface and it’s so amazing how Kuang can make me hate June so much