If there was ever such a thing as the Great American Novel, it seems to be on hiatus; few contemporary writers would claim to speak for everyone in this fractious nation. So where to turn if you want to honor the semiquincentennial by dipping into fiction? You could start at the White House with Ben Fountain’s Rasputin Swims the Potomac (Flatiron, June 9), a blistering satire of a third-term president whose name is redacted wherever it appears. Rasputin is a professional wrestler whose latest bout is interrupted by an outbreak of sobbing that sweeps through the crowd. When Rasputin hugs all the crying fans, he’s invited to the White House and asked to be the president’s running mate. “Fountain goes on to have about as much fun as you can have with the 26 letters of the alphabet,” says our starred review. “A comic masterpiece. The current administration is finally getting the book it deserves.”
Or maybe try a novel named after a state. Monica Datta’s Nebraska (Astra House, June 23) tells that most American of stories, about immigration and colonialism. Annakali Chatterjee and her son, Rabindra Lal, were both struck by a train in New York; Rabindra, who had cerebral palsy, died, and Annakali was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Was it an accident or did she do it on purpose? Nebraska comes into the picture later, when she gets out of prison and is taken in by a pair of evangelical Christians, not telling her remaining family where she’s gone. There’s also a pair of psychoanalysts, one French and one Bengali, creating the metanarrative of Anna’s story. “It’s a busy novel, but it’s all delivered with verve, humor, and a bone-deep comprehension of the immigrant experience, and of the ugliness and neglect that accompany traditional assimilation,” according to our starred review. “A sharp, cross-continental tale of heartbreak and identity.”
Tom Lin’s Babylon, South Dakota (Little, Brown, May 26) is an engaging speculative novel set during the Cold War. Hsiu Keng and Lee Mei have emigrated from China to an isolated farm in the titular state, where they want only to grow chrysanthemums—but the farm is suddenly not so isolated when the U.S. government takes a chunk of it for an intercontinental ballistic missile silo. In an effort to make its project invulnerable, the government is experimenting with immortality in various dimensions; the book takes an SF twist, and strange things start happening. “There are ghosts, or at least thermodynamic traces, and hidden chambers, and scheming warmongers and bureaucrats, and a mad Strangelovian colonel,” according to our review. “A thoughtfully written, genre-crossing novel of great ingenuity.”
There could be no better way to honor the nation’s 250th birthday than by reading Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, a brilliantly entertaining dive into a neighborhood central to American history. The ultimate installment, Cool Machine (Doubleday, July 21), follows Ray Carney—furniture salesman and reluctant criminal fence—into the 1980s, a time of stark wealth and poverty in New York, as Ray embarks on a near-impossible heist at the Waldorf Astoria. Our starred review says, “A master novelist in full command of his powers as a storyteller, prose stylist, and social observer.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
