What in the actual fuck. I thought journalists, even just culture journalists, were supposed to be brave. I thought they were supposed to risk their lives, even just psychologically. I thought they were supposed to shout and swear and beat their breasts — fuck everything else. At the very least I thought they were supposed to tell the truth. If any of that’s true, I don’t know what the hell all the people around me are doing. All the people who, I’ve been told again and again, don’t want to bite the hand that feeds, even though the food is shit and the hand is an asshole. I’m ashamed that I was tricked into believing they were better than so many of the people they report on, that their conspicuous support for unions and an industry full of undervalued workers was anything more than a performance. I didn’t think journalists, even just culture journalists, were supposed to be cowards.
The Mississippi Delta is one of the most beautiful regions of the U.S., but it's also historically been one of the most troubled. Residents of the area — the birthplace of the blues — have had to contend with deeply entrenched racism, poverty and the effects of climate change that have made farming difficult. As one character in Chanelle Benz's The Gone Dead explains, "This is all meant to be a flood plain. The Atchafalaya wants to swallow the Mississippi and the Mississippi wants to join it. So this place is all longing and water and ghosts."
It's the ghosts that interest Benz, the Memphis-based author of the acclaimed 2017 short story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead. Her debut novel is a powerful look at a region constantly haunted by its past, and the residents who are forced to choose whether to confront it or forget it.
Haddon is the author of several other novels and, among other things, a book of fantastical short stories and a collection of poems. With “The Porpoise,” he is attempting his most daring project yet: a retelling of “Pericles” — and thus a retelling of the retelling of the story of Apollonius — set in both the present and the past; in reality (so to speak) and in myth.
But it would be a mistake to think of this novel as simply a contemporary version of Shakespeare like, say, Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres,” which took “King Lear” and brought it to a 20th-century Iowa farm. Haddon is playing a longer, more complicated game. It takes time to see what it is.
And yet, “Very Nice” is not a text that reveals itself at the last minute as metafiction or parable, in the lazy manner of those “it was all just a dream” stories. It’s not a trick, with the reader as its patsy, and though very funny, it’s not a joke at the reader’s expense. Okay, one spoiler: The last word of the book is “laugh.” I bet you will.
As a writer, Keane reminds me a lot of Ann Patchett: Both have the magical ability to seem to be telling "only" a closely-observed domestic tale that transforms into something else deep and, yes, universal. In Keane's case, that "something else" is a story about forgiveness and acceptance — qualities that sound gooey, but are so hard to achieve in life.