Ambiguous Attachments

I have followed Kanon’s successful career (he’s a former publishing executive) for decades. He just gets better and better, particularly at steamy, clever spy stories set abroad. This novel takes place in Cold War Berlin with a divorced couple reuniting during a precarious exchange of prisoners between Germany and Russia. The ex-husband, an American physicist, has questions about why and who arranged his passage. The perilous plan has surprising turns, while the underlying love story adds an urgent dimension to the moody atmosphere driving the suspense.

The locale is an underground swimming pool where a group of rather broken people come each day, doing laps, finding comfort, safety and camaraderie in a world where it is hard to have control. When cracks begin to appear in the bottom of the pool it mirrors the fissures in the characters’ stability, especially a woman whose memory is fading. In this way Otsuka builds a beautiful story of a mother and daughter as they attempt to rescue their relationship before it is too late. It is perhaps Otsuka’s (The Buddha in the Attic) most powerful and resonant work to date.

One of the great things about Higgins’s new book is reading about America from an outsider’s perspective. A comedienne and podcaster from a big Irish family and an observer of human behavior extraordinaire, she probes this country’s divergences—border crossings, Southern monuments, etc.—as she traipses across America to genuinely understand how one country can hold such diametrically opposed views. With the humor of a Sedaris, these essays combine both an earnestness and acerbic wit. The collection reveals our own complicated history to one another by a transplanted writer who as a child thought “No man is an island” was really, “No man is in Ireland.”