SIXTY SECONDS

In Mayfield’s historical novel, as World War II comes to a close, nine people with intersecting lives come to grips with their fates.

On May 7, 1945, the end of the war is celebrated in Times Square in New York City; it’s a huge event covered by Farley Sackstead, a legendary broadcaster and the “wartime voice of CBS Radio in Europe.” This voice serves as connective tissue in the author’s tangled skein of a plot, which chronicles the troubled lives of nine characters in both America and Europe. Farley is unaware of a mentally ill young man, Riley Blaine, who is on his way to Farley’s broadcasting booth to assassinate him; both the plan and the gun have been provided by the widow Selma Filbert, the “Cat Woman,” a profoundly disturbed person who finds Farley’s voice “very upsetting.” Riley, exasperated at being called an “imbecile” all of his life, is on a second mission, as well—he can’t wait to see Jenny Doyle, a 15-year-old from Queens, picked to sing the national anthem at the grand affair. Riley meets her when he is deemed mentally unfit and dismissed from the military after briefly serving with her brother Jimmy, a B-17 gunner still stationed in Germany. The author cleverly tracks the threads connecting each character with such deftness that the text, which initially reads like a collection of stand-alone short stories, is finally embroidered into a coherent whole. In one of the subplots, a Polish Jew, Antoni Pietkowski, is given the opportunity to interrogate Franz Stangl, an SS officer who presided over his captivity at the concentration camp in Sobibor; the emotionally wrenching experience is powerfully portrayed by Mayfield. The work can feel overstuffed at times—there are many subplots crammed into this short novel, which is less than 200 pages in length. Selma and Riley are the least developed characters, both little more than literary types. However, the other plotlines, despite their relative brevity, are surprisingly substantive, animated by an impressive psychological subtlety.

An artfully composed latticework of stories that captures the moral chaos of war.