Leigh Newman finds in her native Alaska all that she needs to survey themes of betrayal and isolation, of desertion and disintegration (physical, psychological, spiritual). In her story collection NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE (Scribner, 278 pp., $26), the heroic loom of the mountains — “contented giants, their faces slashed with ice and moonlight” — gives way to the splintered souls — “ailing, bewildered, clouded with regret” — who prowl the foothills below. A pair of sisters, crushed by their parents’ divorce and alcoholism, turn their pain on each other, riding a “diseased seesaw” of commitment and rejection. In “Slide and Glide,” a man attempts to save his marriage by compelling his family to undertake a risky wilderness trek, seeking “something more than love — trust.” And a California newcomer, convinced of the palliative “dazzle of Alaska,” discovers that “nothing here is fixed, nothing is any better. Where is there left to go, except out of your mind?”
Newman centers much of the action on a man-made lake near Anchorage, and her characters move between stories like pieces in a sliding puzzle, their trauma in one tale repositioning itself in another. Their backcountry bravado — shooting wolves from turboprops, using float planes like taxis, plucking mastodon fossils from melting glaciers — is animated by Newman’s flair for description. A wealthy cad, ensconced in “a log palace with one too many antler chandeliers,” has “a kind of farm potato in the middle of his face.” One adventurer pins secrets “to the inside of his mind like a catalog of crumbling butterflies.” Many of these lives might have uncoiled onto a promising frontier if only they weren’t checked by the same deadening forces — opioids, Reddit, Costco — as those in the lower 48.
We are all marching toward our demise, the title of Newman’s collection reminds us. But, as these vivid tales make clear, it is our “flinty, fearsome resolve” for survival that gives us life.
The 13 stories in Ladee Hubbard’s new collection, THE LAST SUSPICIOUS HOLDOUT (Amistad, 207 pp., $24.99), chart, with wisdom and sensitivity, nearly two decades of life in a Southern Black community, from the days of Bill Clinton’s punitive crime bill to those of George W. Bush’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina and the moments of “hope and renewal” in Barack Obama’s first presidential run. Characters are beset by trauma both personal (drug addiction, suicide, chronic unemployment) and political (police brutality, gentrification, structural racism), and dazed by the apprehension that the two are inextricable. In “Crack Babies!” a high school teacher impresses upon his charges, “Every day of your life is open combat against the lies that have been told about you.”
The shifting battlefield insists that tactics vary. The title character in “Henry,” struggling to free a sibling from an unjust prison sentence, resolves not to demolish the system but to exploit it — “stop trying to turn my brother into a symbol” and “see if we can’t slip him out the back door.” The young girl in “There He Go” rewrites her family’s sour history with “lies as sweet as she could make them.” One young man knows to treat death with the blitheness of waiting-room chitchat: “Anyhow, she dead now.”
Hubbard’s narration pulses with poeticism — bullets tumble “onto the floor like spare change”; an E.R.’s fluorescent lights hover “like depression” — although in its efforts to inform it can slip into the flat parlance of public-policy briefs. Still, the collection burns with unassailable truths, and many tales are less a lament than a roguish tribute to spirit and ingenuity. “Bitch: An Etymology of Family Values” revels in a word that can be “hissed in absolute scorn and whispered in absolute tenderness.” When the uncle in “Yams” pedantically credits his family’s love of sweet potatoes to the plant’s central role in slave diets, his sister quips, “Sure it’s not the sugar?”
Parental anxiety, spousal distress, familial obligations, ancestral debts: What might seem the merely unpleasant conventions of domestic life torment the women and men of Alexander MacLeod’s ANIMAL PERSON (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 243 pp., $27) with hushed ferocity. As relatives die, babies are conceived and lovers settle into chaste routines, any reliable understanding of who these characters are and where they belong escapes them. They are estranged from one another and themselves. The grown brothers in “The Dead Want” return home for a funeral to discover that they “had the same fading hairline and the same dark eyes, the same patterns in their chromosomes, whatever — none of it enough.”
The tales in this exquisite collection, set largely in Canada, are expertly paced and finely observed. The fundamentally decent couple in “Lagomorph” bruise each other reflexively: “We’d never really known how anybody was supposed to go around being a wife or a husband all the time.” Indistinct disappointment saturates another couple living together but alone: “When I come upon her in bed, I try not to disturb her, or even touch her body, as I take my place beside her. We both have to be ready to go in the morning.”
Many of MacLeod’s stories turn on a volcanic moment — a family’s brush with a serial killer or a boy’s sexual assault. But the author places much of his trust in the value of detail divorced from plot. Medical oxygen tanks have “clear tubes, very thin, that run up from the canister, then behind the ears, over the top lips and into little pokers for each nostril.” His eye is severe but not unfair, venerating the mingled beauty and horror of entangled existences. “Led only by what we desire, we go out into the world, and we make our way,” the narrator of “The Closing Date” says. “And then we sleep, each of us in temporary bedrooms that will one day be occupied by other people.”
Mike Peed is an editor at The Times.
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