The best two of the six novels I’ve read lately are right up Seattle’s alley when it comes to “beach reads.”
Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed weaves an intergenerational, inter-familial tapestry together with stops in Kabul, Paris, the Bay Area, and a Greek island. It’s like a pond with pebbles dropped into it — the ripples from different times and places spread wider and wider, encountering each other in glancing ways, and directly.
A very different book, Countdown City by Ben Winters, checks in with Detective Hank Palace of the Concord, NH, police department (now retired), otherwise known as “The Last Policeman.” A precise, calendar-driven doom casts a shadow over the series, a planet-killer asteroid that the Earth can’t duck, making this an existential policier.
At just over 400 pages, And the Mountains Echoed feels slim compared to what’s packed inside of it. It begins in 1952, with a father taking his two children on a trip. They’re poor, they’re walking, and he’s telling them a story, a parable, about a father who is robbed of his child by a djinn. It’s a test — pass and you’re granted forgetfulness.
The two children are named Abdullah and Pari. Only one returns home.
Hosseini’s whole novel is a bit of a parable, poring over the notion of adoption, in the forms of an adopted child or country; the suffering that accompanies both the failures and successes of parent- and childhood; the way history stumbles in to take a seat at the dinner table from time to time. Yet his people — sometimes they narrate, sometimes you hear about them in the third person — continually draw you, deeply, into their lives.
Like a child yourself, you are not always aware of the history. You read this:
Masooma fell from the tree. It seemed to take forever, the fall. Her torso slamming into branches on the way down, startling birds and shaking leaves free, her body spinning, bouncing, snapping smaller branches, until a low, thick branch, the one from which the swing was suspended, caught her lower back with a sick, audible crunch.
But first, uncomprehending, you watch as this happens:
One morning that winter, Father fetched his ax and cut down the giant oak tree. He had Mullah Shekib’s son, Baitullah, and a few other men help him. No one tried to intervene. Abdullah stood alongside other boys and watched the men. The very first thing Father did was take down the swing. He climbed the tree and cut the ropes with a knife. Then he and the other men hacked away at the thick trunk until late afternoon, when the old tree finally toppled with a massive groan. Father told Abdullah they needed the firewood for winter. But he had swung his ax at the old tree with violence, with his jaw firmly set and a cloud over his face like he couldn’t bear it any longer.
This is far, far from the expatriate literary scene in Paris, or the humanitarian doctor from the States drawn to help after a visit to Kabul, or the naive young son of a chieftain grown rich from the heroin trade, or the girl with the savaged face who teaches a friend compassion — all of which Hosseini handles with quiet aplomb.
Throughout the novel run fault lines, discontinuities, with people on one side or the other. For one character, the fault line runs through herself — she isn’t who she thinks she is. As the novel nears its end, the parable finds its tail and swallows. That djinn’s vial of forgetfulness, it’s both a youthful amnesia and an elderly man’s dementia. There’s no solution to it, to the very hard things in life, but in Hosseini’s telling, you also appreciate the way bonds tug at people, the possibility of coming together.
The deadpan with which Ben Winters recounts Countdown City is an achievement in itself. As the story (re)opens, Henry “Hank” Palace is reluctantly taking a missing persons case pressed upon his by his long-ago babysitter. It’s an absurd thing to do, given that the asteroid will hit Earth in a little over two months’ time, and most of humanity is likely to be eradicated, but that’s the point — Henry Palace finds meaning this way, and we all know what Viktor Frankl says about that.
With the asteroid of Damocles hanging above everyone’s head, things have changed. Daily life hasn’t completely broken down, but it’s in bad repair. Resources are growing scarce not because they are in themselves scarce, but because people can’t be bothered spending their last days shipping goods around the world. Refugees from the designated impact point are flooding into the U.S. in disregard of formal immigration procedures.
You hear these stories now, people trade them in stunned whispers, the tales of home invasion and physical assault. Leon James, up on Thayer, a former banker, beaten unconscious, the house stripped for copper. The two middle-aged women, old friends, who had moved in together after their husbands went Bucket List. For them it was a gang of teenagers in gorilla masks, both women sexually assaulted and beaten nearly to death.
But Palace has a missing husband to find, a formerly straight-arrow state trooper, who has scarpered for no good reason. The trail, of course, plunges him into an underworld that caters to asteroid survival, for a price, and in the best hard-boiled tradition, he’s told in not so many words, “It’s Chinatown, Jake,” when he starts poking into his old department and immigration policy.
Palace’s dogged search for his trooper is complicated, too, by the fact that he’s forced to turn to his estranged sister for help: “At six, she was a small, flickering gem of a child: agile minded, anxious, curious, quick witted, chameleonic. And here comes this great thundering wave and it knocked her over and dragged her around, filling her with pain like water in the lungs of a drowning man.”
What Winters is hiding beneath the wallpaper of anticipated-asteroid life is the difference between a slow-motion and a faster disaster, embodied here by a nice tangible asteroid that nonetheless will only arrive later on. This allows him to caricature our time, with its post-financial and preliminary-climate catastrophes, without fear that you’ll yawn at the doomsaying. (It also lets him sneak in a few jabs at an “Occupy University” atmosphere without it derailing his story.)
Slate called the first installment “sharp, funny, and deeply wise”; like his protagonist, Winters hasn’t let anything distract him from his original path. Part Two is terrifically satisfying read that grapples, in its off-kilter way, with the things that really matter in life.
