By Joseph Heller (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972)

Imagine a book densely packed with and surrounded by mathematics, and it’s unlikely you’ll have imagined a novel. But consider these early lines:

In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty people is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by at least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it.

Few in the world of fiction have tackled the concentrated calculations that inherently
saturate the life of the American working man as effectively, universally, humanely, and
timelessly as Joseph Heller did in his second book, Something Happened. The creative teams of The Office (both U.K. and U.S.) have a claim on the most recent attempts at this, but even they must pay some debt to Heller’s tight formula of corporate American anguish.

Known almost solely for Catch-22, his debut book dealing with somewhat similar desperate mathematics, but in a severely different tone — more experimental at best and more youthfully overwrought at worst — Heller took thirteen years to finish his sophomore book. Someone once argued that the only way to avoid the stress of writing your second book is by skipping it and immediately writing your third. Whether Heller considered Something Happened his second or third book, I consider it his finest and I seem to be in good company: Kurt Vonnegut considered it Heller’s finest, too.

There is a statistic out there that the average and, to some, ideal American family produces between 2.2 and 2.7 children. I imagine this would include one boy and one girl. What about the fraction? With such chapter subheadings as “I get the willies,” “My wife is unhappy,” “My daughter’s unhappy,” “My little boy is having difficulties,” “There’s no getting away from it,” and “My boy has stopped talking to me,” I think Heller might have had this absurd calculation in mind when he gave his sad sack hero, George Slocum, a third child (of sorts) who lives largely unseen on the top floor of the family home, a terrible manifestation of the lump every quietly desperate man has created for himself — through equal parts stubborn will, careless error, and, ultimately, lack of choice — and is forced to carry forever, caught firmly in his throat.

And that’s just the beginning. When something finally does happen in Something Happened, you may find that life’s sense of humor is one of the few fiercer than Joseph Heller’s.

Jakob Holder is an award-winning playwright who splits his time between Staten Island in New York and Ristisaari Island in Finland. It is, admittedly, an uneven split.

By Jeff VanderMeer (Tor Books, 2006)

Shriek: An Afterword is a book of books. In its setting and some elements of its plot, it is a work of fantasy about a surreal city called Ambergris. It is also a personal drama, as its literary narrative style mixes — sometimes sentence for sentence — the conflicting voices of two talented and argumentative siblings, Janice and Duncan Shriek. But Shriek also blends two nonfiction genres that, to my knowledge, have never before met: tell-all memoir and environmental history. The latter, less familiar than the former, is the scholarly study of the environment as an instrument, object, and agent of historical change. Environmental history is my field of study, and VanderMeer has taken it to the level of the fantastic.

Duncan Shriek is a historian whose intrepidness and iconoclasm both inspire and lead to his downfall. In Ambergris, historians hold powerful sway in public culture and discourse, in part because interpretations of history hold vital implications for the present and future. Duncan’s first books whet the public’s appetite for local history. But then he breaks Ambergris’s greatest taboo by delving too deeply into a chapter of the city’s past long buried in denial. Centuries ago, the founders of Ambergris ousted the Gray Caps, its “original inhabitants,” and most scholars gloss the incident as, well, ancient history. However, by scouring old texts and the city’s secret underground, Duncan discovers that a Gray Cap resistance has long been building just out of sight. This disturbing theory is most unwelcome and — combined with an affair with a student — it destroys Duncan’s credibility at the very moment when Ambergris needs to hear his message.

Although Duncan is the historian, VanderMeer tells most of the story in the voice of Janice, sometime art promoter, war correspondent, and defender of her younger brother. Years later, after Duncan has disappeared in pursuit of the truth, she sits down at a typewriter in a shell-shocked tavern to set the record straight about the parallel falls of the Shrieks and their beloved city. Janice is a quintessential unreliable narrator: Jealous and bitter, she spews bile at Mary Sabon, Duncan’s former student and lover who rejected his theories to become Ambergris’s new favorite historian. But we trust her when she describes the damp night when Duncan stumbled through her door with tangible evidence of the Gray Caps’ plans: a multicolored fungus that, in the course of his research, had colonized his entire body.

VanderMeer populates Ambergris’s environment with characters I would love to investigate: the Gray Caps; bizarre mushrooms evolving in an underground lair; the Shrieks themselves, with their friends and enemies; and most of all, the city’s damp, foreboding, and spore-filled air. My colleagues and I write about everything from the construction of New Orleans in a mosquito-laden wetland to conflicts over wildlife between Euro- and Native Americans. But we rarely have the opportunity to weave family scandal and melodrama into our histories, and our archival work seldom reveals a new environmental agent that poses such a direct threat to an unsuspecting city.

I don’t only love this book because it glorifies my profession, however; it is also an exploration of the role of history in our lives and our world, and the ways that denial, both personal and collective, can color the way we look at the past. At the level of memoir, VanderMeer shows us a brother and sister struggling with the truth of their own personal histories. At the level of environmental history, we see a city denying its own past despite the living clues in the landscape. But in VanderMeer’s world, history is denied at great peril, as it really can get under the skin — sometimes literally.

Dawn Biehler teaches in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is working on an environmental history of urban pests.

By Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Recently, more Americans than ever are getting to know Anne Enright, whose novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. But almost nobody here has read Making Babies, which has yet to find an American publisher. It’s hard to describe the fascination these spiky, lovely essays on motherhood have for me, a woman without a child or any particular wish for one. Like memoirs by mountain climbers or four-star chefs, these are dispatches from a world of exhilarating and frequently terrifying physicality, creativity, and endurance. “A child came out of me,” Enright writes. “I cannot understand this, or try to explain it. Except to say that my past life has become foreign to me. Except to say that I am prey, for the rest of my life, to every small thing.” This vulnerable, defiant voice marks each page: deft, exact, and deceptively casual, as in The Gathering, Enright’s style perfectly conveys the permeability of self to the world that motherhood — like writing — can heighten. The brain “tries to make you feed anything helpless, or wonderful, or small,” she explains. “So I have let down milk for Russian submariners and German tourists dying on Concorde. Loneliness and technology get me every time, get my milk every time.” Her ironic feminism, inflected by her Irish Catholic upbringing, animates descriptions of nurses’ reactions to male and female babies’ genitalia, divisions of household labor, and the body’s mattter-of-fact disorder: “Women leak so much,” she writes. “Perhaps this is why we clean — which is to say that a man who cleans is always ‘anal,’ a woman who cleans is just a woman.” These passionate dispatches from an ongoing mystery were as compelling to write as they are to read. “The reason I kept writing about my babies,” she tells us, “even when they were asleep in the room, was that I could not think about anything else… I wanted to say something about the anxiety of reproduction, the oddness of it, and how it feels like dying, pulled inside out.” Making Babies takes a reader inside the new world of motherhood — a stained, dark, complicated, and beautiful place — as few other writers are willing to do.

Amy Weldon teaches English at Luther College.

By Sarah Pemberton Strong (Alyson Books, 2002)

When I was a kid, my family used to go to the Caribbean for vacation in the summer. Once, on a beach in Barbados, I watched a conch fisherman in the rough surf right off shore, just a man with a set of fins, a long metal pole, and a knife, diving over and over again to the bottom about twelve feet below him. When he came to shore he had a shell in his hand that I coveted at once. I don’t remember how the exchange began, but I must have asked him for it, because I remember what happened next in great detail.

“You want this?” he said. I told him I did. He looked at my parents nearby and his expression changed, to something not altogether friendly. Without a word, he slid his knife into the shell and made a long incision. The shell began to bleed, much more than I thought it was going to. Then the man took the shell in one hand and the metal pole in the other, and began to beat the shell, hard, until the shell spat pieces of dead conch onto the sand. When the man was done, the shell was speckled with gore; he bent down, washed the shell in the water surging around his feet, and handed it to me.

“There,” he said. “There’s your shell.”

Later I learned a little bit more about the Caribbean and its history; the ways that crime, revolution, the legacies of colonialism and slavery, and the fact that it is a paradise occasionally visited by savage weather have given the region a distinct eeriness — a sense of beauty and threat — that I only caught glimpses of as a tourist. When I read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea a decade ago, it was a revelation, a book that had seemingly mined that eeriness deeply, and I wondered if I would ever come across its equal again.

Before I say what I am about to say, please know I am fully aware of Wide Sargasso Sea’s canonical status in both Caribbean and feminist literature, and that I dislike hyperbole when describing books. Now listen: Sarah Pemberton Strong’s Burning the Sea is the heir and equal — and possibly superior to — Wide Sargasso Sea. It is a book of such grace and terror that I despair of finding another book like it for a long time.

Burning the Sea is about Michelle, an American, and Tollomi, a Cruzan, who have both lost touch with their families and the places they’re from. Both also have unusual relationships with their pasts: Michelle has trouble remembering much of hers at all, while Tollomi remembers so much that he’s drowning in it. They meet by chance in the Dominican Republic, when Tollomi, a charming polyglot, bails Michelle out when she is detained at the airport; thrown together, they fall quickly into an intense friendship as Michelle searches for a plot of DR land bequeathed to her by her grandfather while Tollomi begins an affair with a young Dominican man. The people they meet along the way draw them into Dominican opposition politics, as they may or may not become connected to a rash of fires being started in the luxury hotels along the shore. Meanwhile, there are hints that Michelle’s past involves something she may not want to remember.

Strong brings in a lot of ideas at once, and for much of Burning the Sea all is exquisite tension, as the characters follow their desires and Strong elaborates upon and begins to connect her multiple themes. The first three quarters of the book have a dreamy, luxuriant menace to them; somehow, somewhere, on the next page, something is going to go terribly wrong. Then, in the final quarter, Burning the Sea becomes almost unbelievably good, though telling you how would ruin the book enough that I won’t say anything more about what happens. It doesn’t become merely a political screed, or soap opera, or melodrama, or horror story, as in lesser hands it very well might have. Instead, it becomes all these things at once, and also something transcendent: a rumination on identity, history, and memory; the violence shot through it all; and how to come to terms with them, nationally, personally, and politically.

The real reason I can’t get Burning the Sea out of my head over a year after reading it, however, is the writing. With sentences sharp, elliptical, gorgeous, and sinister, Strong finds the same vein that Rhys tapped into in Wide Sargasso Sea and tears it wide open. Burning the Sea’s ideas set the brain on fire, but Strong’s writing stops the heart.

Given how fickle the book world can be, that a book this good has gone unrecognized is perhaps understandable; that it is currently out of print, as Burning the Sea seems to be, is baffling. This should be fixed — now — so that this book has a chance to sit alongside the company it deserves.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.