THE VILLAGE IDIOT by Steve Stern

Riley, Gwendoline New York Review Books (208 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-68137-681-3

Short and sour (and grimly comic), this is a portrait of toxic parents, the mother in particular, as narrated by their daughter, a woman inevitably shaped by lifelong proximity to manipulative elders. In her seventh book, noted British writer Riley once again applies her meticulous method to intimate relationships, working with pinpoint precise dialogue and close focus to convey an immersive, intense sense of character (generally flawed). In this new book, the territory is a family foursome: father Lee Grant, his wife, Helen, and their two daughters, Michelle and Bridget. Bridget narrates, dwelling first on weekends spent with her father, whom Helen left after seven years of marriage. A vainglorious, unpleasant bully—mocking, cruel, infantile—Lee is a father whose presence is at best to be endured, as both girls learn. Helen’s self-absorption is based on a different, less boastful, but equally problematic presentation: a kind of indignant, disappointed expectation that life has not delivered the normality she deserved. Her exhausting world of self-delusion is sad and false, and adult Bridget makes it her business to stay away from it. But the novel’s larger part is devoted to interactions between Helen and Bridget, at dreadful annual meals and then a longer visit Bridget must make to her mother’s apartment while Helen recuperates from an operation. Constant humoring is Bridget’s preferred mode, interspersed with occasional teasing, hedged in by high barriers, like never introducing her mother to her flat or her live-in boyfriend. “Do you want me to tell you why, Mum? Why I have to keep things separate? How many sentences do you think you can take on that subject?” This unspeakable, unbreakable connection continues even as circumstances change and worsen, and Riley tracks matters to their quietly lacerating conclusion.

Sampson, Freya Berkley (336 pp.) $27.00 | Aug. 30, 2022 978-0-593-20140-4

Three intertwined stories—one set in 1962 and two in 2022—are linked to rides on London’s bus route 88. In 1962, 22-year-old Frank’s life changed forever. He met a woman on the bus, she sketched a picture of him, wrote her phone number on her bus ticket, and advised him to go for his dream of being an actor. But their prospective date at the National Gallery was never to be, because he lost the ticket on his way home. Now in his 80s, Frank has been diagnosed with dementia after a 50-year career in the theater, and he rides the same route searching for the lost woman, chatting with strangers, and learning about everyone around him. Libby is turning 30 and has recently been unceremoniously dumped by Simon, her partner of 8 years. Without a home or a job—she did accounting work for Simon’s gardening business—she lands at her sister Rebecca’s London home and begins looking after her 4-yearold nephew, whose nanny had a family emergency. Libby meets Frank on the bus on the way to Rebecca’s house and decides to begin helping him track down his long-lost girl. Frank’s carer— a mohawked punk named Dylan—joins her efforts. Someone named Peggy (could she be Frank’s girl?) narrates the third story, describing what she sees on the same route. Author Sampson has done a masterful job of misdirection, offering tidbits of information that seem to lead one way but then are shown to have been leading somewhere else altogether. This is an engaging read that touches on aging and the physical incapacities it brings, lost and misplaced love, the power of accepting people as they truly are, finding the reliance to build a life on one’s own, and the family that can be forged in friendships.

Stern, Steve Melville House (368 pp.) $27.99 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-1-61219-982-5

This poignant, richly colorful novel is based on the life of artist Chaim Soutine. Soutine (1893-1943) first appears in a diving suit, walking along the riverbed of the Seine in 1917. He’s part of a scheme concocted by his friend Modigliani, who has organized a race of makeshift boats, including Modi’s own bathtub, which Soutine is secretly towing to victory. Stern uses the episode as a quasi-mystical, somewhat forced device in which Soutine is able to “[walk] through the years at the bottom of the Seine,” seeing both his past and future. His childhood in a Russian shtetl is marked by terrible beatings brought on by his compulsion to sketch human figures, contrary to orthodox Jewish law. Drawn, like so many artists of the time, to Paris, Soutine does day labor and paints, eventually gaining financial support from American collector Albert C. Barnes. He abandons a wife and child, loses another partner to the antisemitism of occupied France, and then navigates wartime years of struggle, hiding, and flight with MarieBerthe Aurenche, ex-wife of Max Ernst. Soutine’s is a nasty, brutish 50 years of life in which Stern focuses on the genius and drive of creativity, the strange force that is touched by and persists through years of trials and pain. He adds the historical context, the artists and musicians and patrons, as necessary and deftly, with writing that is by turns lush, almost magical, or starkly realistic. Known for his many novels on Jewish culture,

Stern chooses here to depict Soutine as a man who fled his grim shtetl life, remained nonobservant for decades, but in Vichy Paris realizes, “I’m a Yid again. The tribe he thought he’d left so far behind has caught up with him once more”— something as inescapable as genius.

LUCY BY THE SEA

Strout, Elizabeth Random House (272 pp.) $24.99 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-0-593-44606-5

Lucy Barton flees pandemic-stricken New York City for Maine with ex-husband William.

This is the third time Lucy has chronicled the events and emotions that shape her life, and the voice that was so fresh and specific in My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), already sounding rather tired in Oh, William! (2021), is positively worn out here. Fatigue and disorientation are natural responses to a cataclysmic upheaval like the coronavirus, but unfortunately, it’s Strout’s imagination that seems exhausted in this meandering tale, which follows Lucy and William to Maine, relates their experiences there in haphazard fashion, and closes with their return to New York. Within this broad story arc, Lucy’s narration rambles from topic to topic: her newfound closeness with William; his unfaithfulness when they were married; their two daughters’ marital and health issues; her growing friendship with Bob Burgess; the surprise reappearance of William’s half sister, Lois; and memories of Lucy’s impoverished childhood, troubled relations with her parents, and ongoing difficulties with her sister, Vicky. To readers of Strout’s previous books, it’s all unduly familiar, indeed stale, an impression reinforced when the author takes a searing emotional turning point from The Burgess Boys (2013) and a painful refusal of connection in Oh William! and recycles them as peripheral plot points. The novel’s early pages do nicely capture the sense of disbelief so many felt