Homeland Insecurity
April Fool's Day, by Josip Novakovich (HarperCollins, $23.95), is an ambitious first novel. It tracks a Croatian man from birth to death -- and beyond -- as he endures Tito's capricious dictatorship and the subsequent Balkan wars. His personal life is as messy as his homeland's. Realism, magic realism, political satire and bedroom farce jostle one another; the overall effect is raw and unfinished.
When Ivan Dolinar is born in Nizograd, Croatia, on April 1, 1948, Yugoslavia is intact. He is attracted to power but shows poor judgment; his over-the-top schoolboy letter praising Tito infuriates his teacher. With girls, he is similarly needy but awkward. At medical school, he pals around with Aldo, an engaging loudmouth whose threats against Tito get them both sent to a labor camp. Tito visits the camp and offers his cigar to Ivan, who can't smoke it right; the despot increases his sentence.
The absurdist humor vanishes when Ivan is drafted into the pro-Serb federal army after Tito's death. The ethnic wars begin, and Ivan is forced to fight his fellow Croats. But when he finds a Serb captain raping Selma, the girl he pined for back in medical school, Ivan bludgeons him to death. What should have been a vision of hell is more a lurid cartoon.
After the wars, Ivan marries Selma, who gives birth to a daughter; in time, she realizes the father is Ivan, who had raped her while she was unconscious after killing the captain. ("I felt entitled," he says.) In a dizzying soap opera, she stabs Ivan, then saves him with a blood transfusion. Wait: There's more. Much later, their love life over, Ivan finds himself inexplicably paralyzed. A doctor signs his death certificate and seduces Selma over Ivan's apparently dead body. Ivan witnesses his own funeral and proves a delightfully sympathetic ghost. The magic realism of the final sections is exemplary; Novakovich has found his groove.
Never Such Devoted Sisters
Why is an attractive young woman, a college graduate and accomplished pianist, working as a cocktail waitress? And why, in anything-goes New Orleans, is she not even dating? These initial questions loom over Amanda Eyre Ward's second novel, How To Be Lost (MacAdam/Cage, $24).
Caroline Winters, the waitress, is the oldest of three daughters from an affluent but unhappy family in suburban New York. Sixteen years before, their parents' fights had led the girls to plan an escape, but 5-year-old Ellie went missing on their departure date and never resurfaced; Caroline and her middle sister, Madeline, blame themselves for her disappearance. Now Caroline returns home for Christmas to find Madeline pressing for "closure"; there's a chance they can pin Ellie's death on a local serial killer. But Caroline and her alcoholic mother, Isabelle (the father has died), are still unwilling to concede that Ellie is dead, especially since Isabelle has seen a magazine photo that she believes shows Ellie alive and well . . . in Montana. When Caroline loses her waitressing job (and her mother dies in a car accident), she decides to drive to Montana and do some sleuthing.
Ward's plot is a mess of flashbacks and contrivances. Then there are curious e-mail messages from Agnes, a librarian with a dark, sequestered childhood in Missoula, Mont. This must be Ellie, right? Case closed? Not quite. There are two dead ringers for Ellie in Missoula, and Caroline will focus on the wrong one.
Her plot is convoluted and silly, but Ward is not a bad writer. She knows how to move a story along and has a good eye for detail. The New Orleans scenes are lively and fun, and Caroline's story is appealing. What a shame it has been hijacked by a hokey melodrama, denying us full answers to those original questions.
Have You Seen My Childhood?
A middle-aged woman is stabbed to death by her gardener, who then severs her head: This is both the bloody climax and the opening of Neil Jordan's fourth novel, Shade (Bloomsbury, $24.95). Jordan (also the noted film director of "Mona Lisa" and "The Crying Game," among others) is executing a high-risk narrative strategy; the twist is that it is the woman's ghost describing her own murder.
The woman is Nina Hardy, the gardener is George, the time is 1950, and the place is Nina's country house, near Drogheda and the Irish Sea. Most of the action occurs between 1900 and 1918. Nina, the only child of an English father and an Irish mother, finds her loneliness eased by two local children, the dirt-poor "ragamuffins" George and his sister Janie. It is further eased by the arrival from England of her half-brother Gregory. The adventures of this quartet are the novel's high point. Jordan has a feel for childhood and its secret language, flavored here with scraps of Dickens and Shakespeare.
Too soon, their childhood is over. They tumble, headlong and unprepared, into a world where folks make babies and nations make wars. One fateful night, Nina makes love, consecutively, to the hopelessly smitten George and then to Gregory; they have both volunteered to fight in the Great War. As Nina grapples with an abortion, eviction by her scandalized mother and her newfound acting career, George and Gregory survive -- barely -- the slaughterhouse of Gallipoli.
Shade has an erratic pace but a consistent mood, suffused in melancholy. Even the sunlit childhood scenes underscore the fragility of happiness. It is scarcely a surprise that George, traumatized by the war, will enter an insane asylum, or that Nina, by now a famous actress, may never know true love. For all its elegance and inventiveness, however, the novel ultimately fails: Its characters lose their vitality as their creator hustles them toward their doom.
The Good Sister
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there/ They have to take you in." Robert Frost's lines take on a special poignancy when the "you" is not just an addict but a young mother with small children. Such is the case in Heather Barbieri's good-hearted if slow-moving first novel, Snow in July (Soho, $24).
Eighteen-year-old Erin Mulcahy lives with her mother (they're Irish Catholics) in the old mining town of Butte, Mont. The early death of her alcoholic father was a terrible shock to Erin and her older sister, Meghan, who left home at 16 in a wild search for men, booze and drugs. Now Meghan has a 5-year-old daughter and a baby girl, fathers unknown. She also has the mother of all drug habits, and the author just won't let us forget it. (Indeed, the story opens with Erin and her mother retrieving the little ones from Meghan's latest flophouse.)
The novel attempts to show the corrosive effects of addiction on family life, and Erin's dilemma is front and center. Should she leave her family to study at an East Coast art school? Erin wants out, but she also feels tethered to her saintly mother, her still lovable sister and Meghan's vulnerable kids. As a diversion, Barbieri whips up a love interest for Erin in the form of an older guy, new in town; they quickly become an item.
Retribution has been threatening Meghan all along. It doesn't explode until the end, when violent big-time dealers come to collect. On their heels comes a second climax, when Meghan pleads to be let into the family home, the kind of situation Frost described so pithily. In this under-plotted novel, Barbieri's picture of the drug world may be fuzzy, but her insights into family dynamics are solid and true.
The Ravages of War
Easily the best of the bunch here is Nella Bielski's The Year is '42 (Pantheon, $18.95), a fine, oblique short novel about three individuals caught up in history's whirlwinds during 1942. Bielski is a Ukrainian who lives in Paris and writes in French; the wonderfully fluid translation is by John Berger and Lisa Appignanesi.
The three sections of the book become progressively more somber. The mostly buoyant first section, "The Seine," set in occupied Paris, reflects the mood of Karl Bazinger, a cultured Wehrmacht officer (more patriot than Nazi), who relishes the discourse of Parisian salons as much as the city's erotic treats. A darker note is struck with the arrival of Luftwaffe officer Hans Bielenberg, Karl's friend and neighbor in Saxony. Unbeknownst to Karl, Hans is working for a network supplying information to the Soviets; he has a personal vendetta against the Gestapo. Bielski expertly ratchets up the tension when Hans's Parisian contact goes missing, then steers Hans to the safe harbor of a welcoming bistro, where Karl and his charmed circle are gathered.
A short bridging section, "The Elba," shows Karl before his transfer to the eastern front, back on his farm in Saxony with his wife. His son, Peter, has been ostracized for befriending a half-Jewish boy. The police visit. They have questions about Hans (dead in a car explosion) and his wife, who has disappeared.
The final section, "The Dnieper," is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev and revolves around Katia, a Ukrainian doctor caring for her violinist father, who has gone mad. Her professor husband is in a labor camp. Katia's Jewish neighbors ignore her warnings of a roundup of Jews and pay with their lives in the notorious Babi Yar massacre. The following year, Karl arrives; he is a force for good in the town and will become Katia's lover. Bielski's triumph is to demonstrate anew the sustaining power of art and personal relationships during Europe's darkest hours. •
Peter Franck is a writer living in New York City.
