Review by New York Times Review
THE NARRATOROF Alexander Maksik's new novel, "Shelter in Place," asks for our help. Joe March is in his 40s, alone in a house in the woods of rural Washington, waiting for the return of the great love of his life, Tess Wolff. He believes that if he tells us the full story, she will return: "If I can just finish this, whatever it is, I believe Tess will be there on the other side." He talks to us, his readers, often, and in this case becomes quite insistent. "I wish you'd answer me." As the end of the novel approaches and Tess still hasn't returned, he becomes even more distraught: "What should I do? Tell me." I won't reveal whether Tess finally appears, but whatever happens it won't be because of our intervention. We're not reading the memoir of Alexander Maksik here, so when Joe claims he will tell no lies, make nothing up, because of "honor," this can only be posturing. When he asks, "Or is it me you're sick of?" I wonder which theory head - those destroyers of English departments across the country - persuaded Maksik this would be interesting. Joe wants to get the details right in case we might visit: "If you ever come by here. In case you ever ask." At this moment in the story, his mother has just died, so I should be immersed in that, but instead I'm thinking, Well, I am planning to visit the San Juans next summer, so I'll be in the neighborhood and - Maksik is a good writer. His characters are credible, he excels at evoking the mood of a particular time and place, and there's an impressive range of material across his three novels. So it's a shame he has drunk the postmodernist Kool-Aid. That tendency was mostly suppressed in Maksik's first novel, "You Deserve Nothing" (2011), in which the protagonist teaches postmodernism by way of relativism to international high school students in Paris. Against the backdrop of demonstrations protesting George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq, the teacher (like Joe March, a loner prone to depression and romance) sleeps with an exuberant and busty student who comes from old French money. The plot is predictable and any supporting character could be erased without changing the story, but still the novel is a fast read, structurally tighter than "Shelter in Place." Maksik's 2013 follow-up, "A Marker to Measure Drift," is my favorite of his novels. A young Liberian woman whose father was loyal to the dictator Charles Taylor has escaped to Spain and then the Greek island of Santorini after her family is slaughtered in front of her. The opening scenes are tense with risk. She has no money, no food, no shelter, no friends, and she must survive and also come to terms with this violent past and keep her sanity. There are a few weak points - a running conversation with her dead mother and distracting metafictional asides, akin to those throughout "Shelter in Place," discussing memory and narrative - but overall it's a powerful and affecting work. While Maksik tries in his new novel to evoke moments of euphoria as well as despair, no scene from "Shelter in Place" can match the vividness found in "A Marker to Measure Drift," in actions as simple as going for a swim, eating eggs and toast or saying a few honest words to another person. Maksik creates a living intensity here that cannot be refused. That's not to say "Shelter in Place" lacks intensity. It is, indeed, built around three different kinds of intensity, each with high stakes. The first is bipolar disorder, which attacks Joe suddenly enough to knock a paperback from his hand. A life without any hint of depression or other mental illness and then suddenly, in one moment, "thick tar inching through my body ... a blue-black bird, its talons piercing my lungs." Joe compares the disease's arrival to a sucker punch or a spiked drink or a needle pressed into his vein: "Look, one moment I was a strong, happy kid reading a book," he tells us. "And then out of thin air it arrived." My own father died of suicide because of bipolar disorder, so I have trouble believing in its sudden onset without any previous cause or symptom - but this is what the novel insists on (Joe's theory is that he has inherited his mother's mental illness), so I tried to accept it. Yet the tar and bird metaphors are reductive, labored and repetitive. Always the tar and bird, offset by euphoria, and the only real sign that the disorder is progressing is something Joe refers to as "failing filters," in which fight and sound seem increasingly harsh. The book's second intensity is its true inciting incident: We learn in the opening pages that Joe's mother has killed a man with a hammer. Seven blows to the head in a hardware store parking lot after watching him berate and abuse his wife and kids. While in prison afterward, Anne-Marie March gains a kind of power, inspiring others who would fight back against male violence, and the book acquires a measured, righteous outrage as it considers the unpunished, tolerated and even celebrated drumbeat of daily violence toward women. Those seven hammer blows drive Joe's sister away from the family forever, change his father's fife into something smaller but ultimately more spiritual, and push Joe and Tess and a friend into a plot of revenge against a professor who regularly beats his wife. This revenge leaves Joe and Tess and their friend disappointed, ashamed and enervated, and it is among the strongest and most interesting discoveries of the novel that violence, even justified violence, is failure. NOTHING EVER OVERSHADOWS the inciting hammer attack in importance, though, which inevitably makes the reading experience a bit flat. This is compounded by the fact that the narrative unspools at a time of waiting. The novel is really a love story - the third intensity is Joe's unlimited, exuberant love for Tess, in all her wildness and flaws --but Maksik could not have picked a more static time frame, as Joe waits two years for her return. And the denouement takes 80 pages, which seem especially slow on a second reading: after the plotted revenge, 80 pages of just wrapping up and reflecting, with nothing more to look forward to except several deaths by old age and some curiosity about whether Tess will return. "It is," Joe admits, "an indistinct shape, a hum of years." Tess is fiery and strange, her love with Joe described in some very fine moments. And Joe's shifting relationship with his father is generous and unexpected; Maksik has an expansive and affecting vision of human capacity. He also evokes time and place particularly well - early 1990s Washington here is as vivid as Santorini or Paris in his other books. If the postmodernism could be stripped away, the origins of Joe's bipolar disorder examined more, the metaphors of bird and tar not relied on so heavily and the denouement cut down from 80 pages to 20, "Shelter in Place" could be a good novel instead of the merely interesting one it is now. DAVID VANN'S new novel, "Bright Air Black," about Medea, will be published in March. The novel gathers outrage as it considers the drumbeat of daily violence toward women.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 23, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
In 1991 Seattle, 21-year-old Joseph March finds himself defined by three women in his life: his mother, Anne-Marie, who feels a deep connection with her son based on her belief that they both suffer from a mental illness; Tess, with whom Joseph is desperately in love; and Joseph's sister, who has moved to England, never to be heard from again. On one fateful day, Anne-Marie beats a man to death with a hammer after witnessing him abusing his wife and daughter; she lands in prison, forever changing the trajectory of the family. Tess joins the throngs of women who see Anne-Marie as a heroine and plans her own violence, dragging Joseph with her. The novel takes the form of middle-age Joseph's confession to the reader, and the narrative lurches about in time, the past continually haunting the future. The intense and often mesmerizing prose will draw literary-fiction readers, even as the author conveys disturbing images of sex, violence, loneliness, and despair. Suggest Shelter in Place to those who admire Miriam Toews' All My Puny Sorrows (2014).--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Finding peace and learning to deal with the consequences of one's actions are just two of the many thematic currents pulsing through Maksik's scorching third novel (after A Marker to Measure Drift). Set in various towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and hurtling back and forth in time from the early 1990s to the present, the bleak story is narrated by Joe March, whose mother, Anne-Marie, is sent to jail in 1991 when Joe is 20. Around the same time, Joe meets Tess-the love of his life-and after a period of brief separation, the two move to White Pine, Wash., where the prison is located. Anne-Marie's crime-hammering a man to death in a grocery store parking for abusing his wife-soon attracts the admiration of female followers (including Tess) who have "run out of patience" and "have reached their limit" of what they'll accept from men. In the second half of the book, Tess hatches a plot to punish a wife-beating neighbor and involves Joe, allowing Maksik to deliver a portrait of Joe's bipolar disorder-which he describes as a "creeping tar" and "a blue-black bird, its talons piercing my lung"-that is honest and devastating. Both the meandering story and the way Joe expresses his thoughts feel accurately claustrophobic. Where Maksik really excels is in his unrestrained depiction of a perpetually broken man who can't help loving volatile, vulnerable Tess, all the while desperately figuring out how to forgive the woman who raised him. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In the 1990s Pacific Northwest, Joseph March is a happy-go-lucky guy fresh out of college and uninterested in following snooty older sister Claire's quest for a better, more cultured life when he's hit by an overwhelming sense of inertness, as if he were drowning in tar. He's suffering from the onset of bipolar disorder, something he soon realizes that he shares with his mother, who's always been rather wayward but has now been convicted of beating a man to death with a hammer. Joe's father sells his business and moves near the prison where his wife is confined. Joe eventually follows, reluctantly leaving behind the passionate, electric Tess, with whom he's deeply in love. But Tess comes after him, and what unfolds is an exacting tale of desperate people taking desperate measures as they crash up against the enduring rock of love. VERDICT Maksik (A Marker To Measure Drift) perfectly captures the weight of mental illness, the ache of longing and uncertainty, and the complexity of human relationships. Highly recommended. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
