A Review of Jon Pineda’s Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)

[xiomara]

A Review of Jon Pineda’s Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).
by Stephen Hong Sohn



It’s always a moment of celebration when a poet delves further into narrative territory. There’s something incandescent about a poet’s prose, even if the words don’t necessarily meld into a coherent, flowing plot; one is always adrift in a beautiful current of language. Such is the case with Jon Pineda’s latest fictional offering Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). Pineda is also author of a number of poetry collections (Plyduck reviewed Birthmark this-a-way); the devastating memoir Sleep in Me (earlier reviewed on AALF also by Pylduck); and the novel Apology. So let’s let B&N take it away:

“With the cinematic and terrifying beauty of the American South humming behind each line, Jon Pineda’s Let’s No One Get Hurt is a coming-of-age story set equally between real-world issues of race and socioeconomics, and a magical, Huck Finn-esque universe of community and exploration. Fifteen-year-old Pearl is squatting in an abandoned boathouse with her father, a disgraced college professor, and two other grown men, deep in the swamps of the American South. All four live on the fringe, scavenging what they can—catfish, lumber, scraps for their ailing dog. Despite the isolation, Pearl feels at home with her makeshift family: the three men care for Pearl and teach her what they know of the world. Mason Boyd, aka “Main Boy,” is from a nearby affluent neighborhood where he and his raucous friends ride around in tricked-out golf carts, shoot their fathers’ shotguns, and aspire to make Internet pranking videos. While Pearl is out scavenging in the woods, she meets Main Boy, who eventually reveals that his father has purchased the property on which Pearl and the others are squatting. With all the power in Main Boy’s hands, a very unbalanced relationship forms between the two kids, culminating in a devastating scene of violence and humiliation.”

I appreciate this description, as there is a very Carrie-like scene that occurs in this novel. Fortunately, the ragtag alternative kinship that Pearl and her father have made (with two friends, Dox and Fritters) provides her with much needed support. The emotional heart of this novel is actually in the problem of Pearl’s relationship with her mother, who by the point the novel opens, had been institutionalized for suicide. Though the mother presumably recovers, she never actually returns to the family. She doesn’t finish her dissertation, while Pearl’s father, a college professor who somehow has lost tenure (not sure exactly what happened there) has become an alcoholic, lost his aforementioned job, and is basically squatting on land. Pearl allows us into this complicated and checkered past, giving us a strong indication as to why she and her father are just trying to make ends meet. They literally live off the land, so when any emergencies come up, they present real issues for the foursome. At one point, when Pearl’s father suffers some sort of injury, the car needed to retrieve him from the hospital breaks down. Thus Pearl and Fritter (I think it was; and excuse me if this plot point is incorrect, as I’ve been sometimes slow to write up my reviews following the completion of a novel) have to make their way to that location via raft. These scenes are the ones that most evoke the comparisons to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, at least revised for the 21^st century. What is always evident in this novel is Pearl’s indomitable spirit: she is wise enough to understand that her value is beyond her earnings. Pineda’s luminous prose will always keep you as buoyed as ever, even when the novel itself does not necessarily contain cataclysmic plot elements or some deliberately crafted mystery. Readers may precisely criticize this work for its more dream-like qualities, but this aspect is perhaps a trademark of Pineda’s entire oeuvre, a style in which he excels and which, I believe, is absolutely ideal with the southern gothic mode through which the narrative propels itself ever forward.

Buy the book here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

 

A Review of Jeanette M. Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun (Angry Robot, 2017)

[xiomara]

A Review of Jeanette M. Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun (Angry Robot, 2017).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



Well, Jeanette M. Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun (Angry Robot, 2017) has, at least for me, one of the more intriguing premises for new reads I’ve encountered this year. This rather anemic description over at B&N doesn’t give too much away:

“Catherine Helstone’s brother, Laon, has disappeared in Arcadia, legendary land of the magical fae. Desperate for news of him, she makes the perilous journey, but once there, she finds herself alone and isolated in the sinister house of Gethsemane. At last there comes news: her beloved brother is riding to be reunited with her soon – but the Queen of the Fae and her insane court are hard on his heels.”

I suppose this summary does a strong enough job of giving us the basics, but there are a couple of key individuals that Catherine Helstone meets, while living at Gethsemane. First, she arrives there alongside a changeling named Ariel Davenport. Ariel is gregarious and seemingly always hungry. They are attended to by a kind of butler, a gnome named Mr. Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin is key to this story because the reason why Laon is in Arcadia in the first place is that he is there to proselytize. Yes, he is seeking to establish Christianity in the land of the Fae. Finally, there is a mysterious manager to the house, a female fae named the Salamander, who occasionally makes her presence known, but otherwise sticks to the shadows. Ng adds some mystery into the equation because there was a previous missionary sent out to Arcadia (a man by the name of Roche) who disappears and whose whereabouts are unknown. While Catherine waits for Laon to arrive, she gets into some mischief leafing through Roche’s old journals, finding out that he was trying to discern fairy language, something he believed was called Enochian. His attitude was that he would be able to convert more fae if he could speak with them in a common language. In any case, Laon eventually returns, but his arrival only brings more questions: why is he so cold to Catherine? And what about all of the strange goings-on at Gethsemane, including the fact that she once bumped into a strange, seemingly mad woman in black? If you’re feeling shades of Jane Eyre, you’re not wrong at all, because Ng is obviously playing with a lot of these more gothic tropes. But, here is where I pause—and I am providing you with my spoiler warning here, so do not read on at this point unless you want to know all of the tricks that Ng has up her sleeve—because Ng stages at least two surprises in the back half of the book. The first is one that she telegraphs with too much information: Laon and Catherine are apparently in love with each other. The second is that Catherine discovers that she’s actually a changeling, a fact which seems to make it more acceptable (at least from what it seemed like in the text) that they were embarking in an incestuous relationship with each other. The “final” twist that Ng provides us is the fairylands may be some sort of variation on hell and that the fairies exist to create dilemmas for humans that ultimately lead them into sin. In this particular case, Catherine’s arrival into the land of the fae tempts Laon to the point where he gives in to his lust. Catherine thus becomes a pawn in a larger “game” in which the fae can cause Laon and Catherine’s collective fall. Finally, Catherine’s revelation that she is a changeling is discovered to be false. Indeed, when Ariel Davenport tells Catherine to kill her (instead of allowing Queen Mab to do so during a hunt), it’s because Ariel Davenport was led to believe that Catherine was a changeling, exactly so that Catherine would end up killing her and leading all the characters down their path of ruin. Queen Mab thus becomes the architect of many characters’ downfalls, but the conclusion sees Catherine and Laon realize that, though they have now sinned, their quests are ever more important. Why not try to do what they came there to do, they ask themselves, despite the fact that they may indeed be in hell. The novel is compelling and something more akin to a novel of ideas than a speculative fiction in many ways. But Ng takes a little bit too much time to get us to the “meat” of the matter. Indeed, Catherine isn’t left with much to do until Ariel mistakenly tells her that’s she’s a changeling and must murder Ariel (as a kind of mercy killing). From that point forward, the pacing finally moves at the speed it should have. Otherwise, Ng’s incredibly gifted at world-building. Gethsemane and the fairylands are otherworldly, simultaneously beautiful and menacing, with creatures and entities fit for Alex Garland’s filmic adaptation of Annihilation from the Southern Reach trilogy.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu

A Review of Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons (Autumn House Press, 2018)

[xiomara]

A Review of Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons (Autumn House Press, 2018).
By Stephen Hong Sohn



Well, for anybody who is interested in Asian American studies, a title like Paper Sons is going to land squarely in their wheelhouse. At the same time, Dickson Lam’s creative nonfiction work (and debut) Paper Sons doesn’t necessarily draw from a personal account of having been a titular fictive genealogical child. Rather, Lam comes to understand his place as a Chinese American through a complicated trajectory. We get a crystalline view of his impoverished childhood and, later, through his concerted efforts to reform his life, we get a stronger sense of his cultural history. The official website provides this overview:

“Dickson Lam’s Paper Sons combines memoir and cultural history, the quest for an absent father and the struggle for social justice, naming traditions in graffiti and in Chinese culture. Violence marks the story at every turn—from Mao to Malcolm X, from the projects in San Francisco to the lynching of Asians during the California Gold Rush. After one of his former students at the June Jordan School of Equity is gunned down on a street corner, Lam is compelled to tell a mosaic of stories. What does it take, in this social context, to become a person who respects himself and holds hope for those coming up through a culture of exclusion and violence? Lam writes with a depth of hard-won understandings both political and psychological. This is an important book, beautifully crafted, rich in poetic image and juxtapositions, that offers insight and compassion for a nation struggling to make sense of its immigrant nature. I congratulate Dickson Lam on this fine work.”

This description provides a very useful condensation of the text, which is largely structured through vignettes and doesn’t have a standard chronology. The work opens up with a compelling and tragic account of Lam’s experiences as an instructor at June Jordan School of Equity. The death of Lam’s former student is the occasion not only to think about the complicated challenges of teaching, but also to ponder his own bumpy road toward becoming a teacher, one littered with misadventures, buses (and graffiti), and family dysfunction. Here, I should provide a spoiler alert because one of the most critical narrative throughlines is Lam’s rocky relationship with his father. Indeed, the fraying between father and son occurs very early on, especially as Lam’s father moves to Minnesota in search of better job opportunities, but which not surprisingly begins to create marital strain. It also becomes evident that Lam must reconcile his melancholic attachment to his father with the violence that Lam’s father perpetrated on his sister. So toward the work’s conclusion Lam admits, “For my part, I’m not done yet with Bah Ba. Probably never will be. In writing this book, I’d hoped to be freed from my father, that I’d exhausted my obsession with him, but our bond has only strengthened. He’ll remain a permanent character in my story. We’ve become pieces on a board game that will never end” (232). What is intriguing about this perspective is that he begins to position his own father as part of a genealogy of the chess games that have obsessed him in his adulthood. He begins to see his life as one that, though seeming unchangeable, could at least be entertained in other iterations through the imagination. And this alternative timeline is where he leaves us, with a sense of other possibilities, the kinds which, no doubt, inspire his teaching and drive him to advocate for students who come from backgrounds not so unlike his own. In this way, I found this particular memoir to possess an organic grittiness that was lacking from Michelle Kuo’s Reading with Patrick. In that particular work, it was evident that Kuo’s transitory teaching gig and similarly unstable teaching program would undo the inroads she had made as an instructor. In Paper Sons, we see an instructor who is trying to reorient the chess pieces, to create games with better outcomes, and to prepare a future path with more avenues not only for himself but for others. Kuo’s participation in the so-called system of educational games is unlike Lam’s: Lam situates himself as part of the game itself, thus drawing upon a very personal motivation that strikes the fire and stokes it to burn throughout this memoir. The other intriguing element of Lam’s Paper Sons is the importance of black culture and history on Asian American identity. Here, Lam clarifies that this connection is not so much appropriative, as it is informed by an alignment of a class-based community that moves across racial lines. This interracial perspective is one again that I thought separated itself from Kuo’s, which seemed more distant. Ultimately, a compelling work!

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn

Review Editor: Xiomara Forbez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don't hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Xiomara Forbez, PhD Candidate in Critical Dance Studies, at xforb001@ucr.edu