John Freeman of NPR compiled a list of The Best Debut Fiction of 2009 and guess what? Two out of his five authors have read here at Newtonville Books!
The eight stories of Yoon’s debut form a kind of floating city in which water is the essential element of everyone’s lives. The sea brings travelers and part-time waiters to the South Korean island where the tales unfold. Water supplies fishermen and gift-shop owners their livelihood. It even becomes the metaphor for a widower’s emotional reverie. “In the heat of the remaining sun,” she thinks of her late husband, “she swore you could see a curtain of mist rising from the peak of his thin head.”
For Yoon’s cast, resilience is not just a stance but an aesthetic. Women grow old and do not marry. Young men are lost at sea. All the while, they soldier unfussily on. Thus, in the rare moments when the men and the women in this book yearn for more, their resolve feels all the more poignant. We know, instinctively, that Yoon’s lush sentences will end in heartache. (Read from Yoon’s story “The Hanging Lanterns of Ido,” about a young married couple who meet a stranger with an unexpected connection.)
There are few perfect debut American novels. Walter Percy’s The Moviegoer and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird come to mind. So does Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. To this list ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers, the story of a dying man drifting back in time to his hardscrabble New England childhood, growing up the son of his clock-making father.
The mystery and machinery of these ticking timepieces appear and reappear throughout this beautiful book, which cycles backward and forward in time, capturing with awful grace the unwinding of a life. George Washington Crosby, the book’s dying hero, awakens out of delirium into the terror of his body’s revolt. His loved ones, sitting nearby, might as well be in another country: that of the living, the healthy. Harding has written a masterpiece around the truism that all of us, even surrounded by family, die alone. (Read about the hallucinations that fill George Washington Crosby’s final days.)
Click here to view the rest of the picks.