The Maris Review, vol 120

The theme of the week is intergenerational trauma, unreliable narrators, and the malleability of memory

What I read this week

"History was chaos, top to bottom, front to back, and a human life was no different. Any attempt to decipher a lucid course would always be thwarted by the thrust of happenstance." Oh how I love a novel about the unwieldy narrative structure of a person's life.

Awake Awake is the story of a writer-slash-bartender named Mary Mooney, who's thirtyish and has published one successful novel and who may or may not be having a psychotic break. In therapy Mary talks about having false memories that feel so real that she's unable to distinguish which is which. The memories revolve around three different London literary events where she met a bunch of people who may or may not exist, and during which they tell her something (I'm not gonna spoil it for you) that rocks her world.

In order to provide more context, Mary also tells her therapist some classic therapy stuff about her childhood in the city of York, to which she has returned after a few years in London. She recalls the friends she made, the troubles her family faced, her father's crisis of faith, and the political unrest and anti-war protests that underscored the rest of her experiences. In the process author Fiona Mozley turns us all into little therapists – readers and fictional characters alike – trying to decode what Mary is saying as she's saying it, hoping to unravel where the delusions began.

Her little brother Jos, who is also on anti-psychotic medication, still thinks Nazis are spying on him, so that probably factors in. One of her friends died in a tragic, violent way. That might have done it. And her friend Eric reminds Mary that the subject of her false memories was the topic of a popular Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that she had probably watched: "Mary, your psychosis was triggered by Larry fucking David."

The novel's premise could have made for a super heavy read, or it could have gone the opposite way and been too zany and eccentric to elicit real feeling. What impressed me most was how the novel found a middle ground: it's poignant yet charming, sweet and tragic and silly all at the same time. And even if Mozley resists giving us solid, concrete answers to what's happening in Mary's mind, who hasn't experienced the strangeness of uncertainty, of both knowing and not knowing who you are?

The Responsible Party by Claire Carusillo

I don't use the word "rollicking" very often, but here is the exact right moment for it. Claire Carusillo's debut. I also realize that the adjective appears front and center in the marketing copy for this novel, so well done, Henry Holt.

The Responsible Party is narrated by a character named Claire Carusillo (if this is autofiction it is the wildest autofiction I've ever read) who grows up with the weight of history behind her. She is a descendant of not one, but two shipwreck survivors (by coincidence I saw Titanique this past week, and the book and the musical have a similar tone – nautical disaster can be fun!). Her mother Kath was raised by her older relatives, survivors Fanny and Sarah, who became vaudeville performers after they made their triumphant return to the Midwest after proving themselves unsinkable in international waters. Claire has moved back home with her parents following a terrible skin care influencer mishap, so she's present when one morning, a DNA expert and a cop from the Cook County Criminal Investigations division, who Claire recognizes from junior high D.A.R.E. assemblies, come to her family home.

They tell Claire and her mother Kath that a body has been discovered in a nearby creak, that the man had apparently been strangled to death some time in the 1970s, and that a piece of hair was found on him that might match Kath's DNA. Once they leave, Kath tells Claire more about her family history than she's ever heard before, starting with the recounting of a fateful closing shift at McDonald's in 1971. Kath tells Claire the story in bits and pieces, all while Claire is deciding whether or not to provide a spit sample to confirm whether the DNA on hair found on the dead man is a match.

The Responsible Party features maybe the best non sequiturs I'ver read in fiction, the kind that make it so you have no idea where a paragraph or even a sentence will end. Here's an example where Claire is considering what her mother has told her while looking out onto the creak: "All she's told me is she went to a party. I want the next part. I look out. Two cicadas fuck in the air, and when they land on my knee, I am permissive and shield my eyes while they finish."

In a voice that's often reminiscent of a fast-talking dame out of The Hudsucker Proxy (very high compliment) Carusillo takes us on a wild romp through history and reveals some truly shocking family secrets in the process.

Other novels I'd consider to be "rollicking"

Lots of hijinks here, if you're looking for some hijinks.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

The Wangs vs the World by Jade Chang

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

The Hitch by Sara Levine

Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour

Grifters gonna grift

Okay, I realize that if you read the article, to which I didn't link, it appears that Kiyosaki himself doesn't owe a billion to anyone — he has debt, he isn't in debt. But honestly, I haven't had many wins lately and I need to be able to enjoy the headline; maybe you do too.

Anyway, if you want to learn all of the ways that the book is full of shit, you should definitely listen to If Books Could Kill. Here's just a sampling:

Michael: Yeah. I also think this whole thing that there's something rich people know that you don't. I think that's also a very tempting message, because yeah, you look around America at how unequal things are and you're like, “There must be some secret to this.” I struggle to convey how much contempt I have for the people that do this.