There But For The / by Ali Smith

At a dinner party hosted by Eric and Genevieve Lee, a seemingly ordinary middle-aged man named Miles Garth gets up from his place at the table, leaves the room and locks himself inside the home's upstairs compartment. Speaking not a word over the next few days, only submitting written notes under the door for food and ignoring all pleas from both the home's owners and the other guests to come out, Garth seems content to simply stay put. When all of Miles' friends and existing family--he doesn't have much--try and talk him out of the room to no avail, a desperate but civil Genevieve begins contacting his acquaintances (found mostly from his cell phone and derived from clues inside his jacket pockets), ultimately finding only four willing individuals who graciously agree to lend assistance. The only problem is that the called-upon parties scarcely know Miles at all, many of them having only crossed paths with him at random and in some cases unable to remember the occasion in which they met. Gradually, however, the eclectic quartet--Anna, a forty-ish woman who met Miles on a school trip nearly three decades ago; Mark, a former colleague; May, an octogenarian; and a ten-year-old boy named Brooke--all recall their time spent with Miles and, through their efforts, steadily begin to shed some light on his peculiar predicament. 

Smith has a gift for writing puns, though actually it could be said that her overall wordplay is impressive for it's nuanced approach and subtle styling. It's not like she's new on the scene; her 2005 novel The Accidental won of the Whitbred and was nominated for the Man Booker. But her talent has had a hard time getting to the forefront, maybe because she's British, Scottish actually, and her stories aren't so comparatively original as to garner prominent notice. Which might be why this book, a novel set along similar lines as Jennifer Egan's Visit From The Goon Squad or even Bed by David Whitehouse, is a bit of a hard sell to traditionalists. For one thing, there's no direct quotes; the entire narrative flows within an oddly removed, stream-of-consciousness pattern, elucidating the characters through interior monologues and exterior exposition. Conversations happen, just not in front of the reader. They're sort of in the mind's eye of the author who monitors things with a omniscient, documentary-style voyeurism, usually irregardless of time or place ("Already Anna has been goosed, for the first time in her life, by a seventeen-year-old swot (who, in twenty years' time, will have become an internationally renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics). At the time of it happening she has no idea that this is what's happening . . ."). This isn't a particularly difficult thing to get used to, in fact it's usually nice to have a narration of the actual narration, a kind of voice-over to the action taking place. But the story's pretty non-linear and there's an odd blend of details and descriptions which may distort the reader's perspective. Even this, however, shouldn't detract from the book, or the writer's overall merit. (FIC SMITH)

Cry of the Owl / by Patricia Highsmith

Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, author Patricia Highsmith lived for much of her youth in New York City enduring the kind of emotionally unstable childhood which carries over into adulthood. Her parents divorced ten days after Highsmith was born and her mother, also named Mary, was someone Patricia would come to loathe, even penning a short story vaguely inferencing her murder. Though well-housed and cared for by her maternal grandmother, Highsmith never new her artist father and didn't get along with her stepfather. After graduating from Barnard with a degree in English, she scripted comic strips before becoming a full-time writer. Her debut novel Strangers On A Train was modest success upon its 1950 publication but became a blockbuster a year later with the release of Alfred Hitchcock's movie adaptation. Her newfound stardom allowed Highsmith to travel extensively in Europe throughout the 1950's and she permanently relocated to Switzerland in 1963. Though a well-published writer throughout her career, highly praised by all critics as a gifted psychological storyteller with a knack for portraying misfit protagonist and a skill as much for the macabre as satire, Patricia Highsmith was, by most accounts, a tortured soul. Difficult to be with, live with and work with, she's known as much for her cantankerousness and reclusive habits as for her literary achievements. Her 1962 book Cry of the Owl is a strange, disturbing tale of a recently divorced man's compulsion towards a voyeuristic relationship with his much younger neighbor.

"Want a nice piece of firewood as a bludgeon or something?"

In the small Pennsylvania town of Langley, Robert Forrester lives alone after having been through a particularly nasty divorce. Though his job as an aerospace engineer keeps him going, it's not enough to help recuperate him psychologically and leaves him restless most of the time. Driving home one night he spots a beguiling young woman outside her home. Drawn by her attractive features and placid demeanor, Robert begins to watch her nightly through her kitchen window from the relative safety of the nearby woods. When he's caught one night, the girl, Jenny Thierolf, is surprisingly friendly to him, accommodating his clumsy excuses and asking him inside. When her fiance Greg arrives, Robert politely excuses himself believing the dalliance to be over. But it isn't. Robert finds that he can't keep himself away. More peculiarly, Jenny seems to accessible to the idea of being close friends with Robert, even to the point of breaking off her engagement to Greg. Unsure of what to do, Robert finds himself confused and panicking, a condition leading ever more deeper into treacherous circumstances.

Highsmith wrote a lot of books, many along the same creepy lines as this one. There's a sense of familiarity about her characters which you don't get with other similar works of fiction, a connection to the deeper nature which can be a bit unsettling. To say that Cry of the Owl is a suspense would be correct but it's also something of an experimental piece, a novel about people, all of them a little creepy, who aren't so concerned with the moral compass in life as they are with the pathology of their own individual choices. French New Wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol made the first movie of the novel in 1967 and in 2009, a new adaptation starring Julia Stiles and Paddy Considine was released. Neither film really quite captures the eerie-ness factor which Highsmith was able to manifest with her cleverly plotted style. It wouldn't be to far off to say that the author herself more than resonated with these characters. She had enough of her own personally hindering psychosis, a reason her books were so strikingly brilliant and successful. Highsmith was named the greatest crime novelist of all time by The Times (UK) in 2008. (MYS HIGHSMIT)

In the Heart of the Canyon / by Elizabeth Hyde

River rafting tour guide J.T. Maroney is about to embark on his 125th Grand Canyon trip leading an adventure excursion down the Colorado River. Along for the ride are two other guides--free-spirited Abo and beautiful, passionate Dixie--and a quirky jumble of strangers from all over the country. There's Peter, a 20-something Ohio native; the Compsons, a Salt Lake City couple with two constantly bickering boys; elderly couple the Frankels; middle-agers the Boyer-Brandts; stressed-out Susan and her morbidly obese daughter Amy; and a lonely Harvard Biology professor, Evelyn. After introductions and the precursory safety orientation, subplots and attitudes begin to emerge as the trip gets underway. The visibly cranky Compsons argue about anything and everything, Peter likes what he sees in Dixie, and Evelyn's nursing a broken heart over her late husband even as Ruth Frankel sees her own husband Lloyd slowly descending into full-blown alzheimers. Susan battles inner demons just as daughter Amy, who knows all too well about her problem, merely tries to take it day by day.

Confrontations pop up as the sun bears down and stress levels near the boiling point, allowing personal grudges to emerge as bitter squabbles begin threatening the entire trip. Hyde, author of The Abortionist's Daughter, tells a good group-dynamics story under the guise of adventure fiction. The novel succeeds as both a study of strangers striving toward a common goal and as a suspenseful drama filled with angst and humanity as the reader is swept along with the characters through the canyon and down the frequently dangerous river. Great scenic description and fully believable characters as well as a take-you-by-surprise ending make this story well worth the ride. (FIC HYDE)