Jessica Francis Kane does it again with This Close: Stories

I met Jessica Francis Kane a few months after the publication of her electrifying novel, The Report.  She was in town, having a book conversation.  We had a chance to talk.  We've stayed in touch and not long ago the galleys of hew new book, This Close: Stories (Graywolf, March 2013), arrived by mail.  I was ecstatic.

I read the first four of these dozen stories while on the train home from New York City this past Saturday night. There is, perhaps, no better reading zone—a dark night, a quiet train, the lull of forward motion. Jessica's stories do what excellent short stories must; they involve their readers at once.  They settle in as if the characters were always there, as if you have always been privy to their secrets, their flaws.  "Lucky Boy" is, at first, matter of fact:  "Something about New York City makes a lot of people understand you should try to look your best.  Tourists, for example, often wear brand-new shoes and socks."  Hmmm, you think, why this as a place to start not just a story but a collection, and then it's clear:  There is something deep and soul-agitating at work right here, something profound being telegraphed about relationships between those paid to take care and those who pay, about innocence and dependence.

Time is brilliantly managed in "Lucky Boy."  Things happen at a rapid clip and yet we never feel breathless, never feel excluded from the months and years in between scenes, when a friend becomes a girlfriend becomes a wife becomes a slate of opinions our narrator isn't quite sure he buys.  It's quite a trick.  No, it's quite a skill.  The laconic narrator is deeply observant.  He lets on and lets in, but sparely, almost non-judgmentally.  Almost.

There's a deli Christina and I patronize now on the corner of Lexington and Seventy-Seventh.  To some I saw we're friends with the owner, but I recognize the relationship for what it is.  We are the parents with a jog stroller who buy lox when friends are in town and many other specialty items on a regular basis.  He is the owner who makes us feel special....

The next three pieces in the book are equally unusual, engrossing, unexpected.  The stories aren't extreme in their limning of modern life, nor are they are stories we've read before.  They are interesting and well-metered, small jealousies, odd victories, exploded scenes.  I can't wait to read the rest of the stories (some interconnected, some not), but I did not want to wait any longer to tell you (and to tell Jessica, too) how happy I am for her new book.

Welcome home, JFK.

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An Afternoon with Jessica Francis Kane

Every now and then, an author whose book I loved emerges from her brilliant pages and becomes a correspondent, an email friend.  That has been the case with Jessica Francis Kane, whose The Report is an immaculate work of fiction—bright, sensitive, complex, provocative.  I found the book almost by accident at this year's BEA.  I read it in a matter of days.  I enthusiastically endorsed the novel here, and Jessica and I began a correspondence that I have treasured. 

Today, Jessica came to town—or to a town thirty minutes down the road—and kept an entire coffee shop in her thrall while she answered questions put forth by the proprietor of Wolfgang Books, the sort of innovative independent bookstore that makes me proud (once again) of the Independents.  It was, in all ways, a lovely afternoon—an affirmation of all the good that still percolates up and through fine books.

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Between Shades of Gray/Ruta Sepetys: Reflections

If I brought just one ARC home from the BEA—the glorious The Report (Jessica Francis Kane)—I was to have traveled home with two ARCs from the ALA convention.  The first, Caroline Leavitt's Pictures of You, did in fact make it into my bag.  The second, Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys, was delivered to me at the Egmont USA booth by a fashion-runway-worthy Jill Santopolo, only to be snatched by an eager reader when I oh-so-briefly turned my head.  I had to wait until yesterday, when another copy of the ARCs arrived by mail, to read this book that Jill had loved so much.  It had made her cry on the train, she said.  She had thought that I might like it.

She was right, as Jill so often is.  Between Shades of Gray is an important book—a story that captures the terrifying deportation of a Lithuanian family by the Soviet secret police.  Along with tens of thousands of others, 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother, and her educated, lovely mother are packed onto trains and sent toward the bitter cold of Siberia; their father, meanwhile, is sentenced to a prison-camp death. What will survival look like?  What will kindness look like?  Who is to be trusted?  The losses will be great; in an author's note, we learn that more than a third of all Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were killed during Stalin's ruthless genocide.  Goodness, however, also prevails, for Lina is strong and she is faithful—losing and gaining, falling in love, making a record of the life she is living through drawings and words.

Simply and compellingly told, endowed with an honorable and serious purpose, Between Shades of Gray is the sort of book that wakens new knowledge in its readers.  Knowledge of a terrible time, absolutely.  Knowledge about the great capacity of the human heart:  that, too.  

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The Report/Jessica Francis Kane: Reflections

I took just one book home with me from this year's BEA, Jessica Francis Kane's first novel, The Report.  It's a Graywolf Press title—Graywolf, a first-rate house responsible for such first-class books as Alyson Hagy's latest, Ghosts of Wyoming.  I don't think you can go wrong with a Graywolf book, and I can say, with absolute confidence, that you will not go wrong with The Report.  Smart, compelling, riveting, whole, The Report is a book about history and those who write it, about blame and the consequences of diffusing it.  It is a novel based on the real-life horror of a night in March, in London, in 1943, when 173 people seeking protection from a possible air raid, died on the steps of the shelter that was supposed to protect them.  No bomb had gone off.  No bones were broken.  All of those who died died from asphyxiation—from an inexplicable pile-up on the stairs.

How in the world had it happened?

Laurence Dunne, a magistrate, is asked to find out.  Systematically, he interviews 80 survivors.  He listens to those who blame themselves and those who cannot be honest and writes a report so novelistic, so empathetic, that it haunts him and others for a long time hence.  In Kane's perfectly well-imagined novel, that event, those survivors, and Dunne himself materialize, devastate, haunt.  I was a most captivated reader, a reader Kane kept wholly spellbound from the first sentence to the very last.

Kane notes that she got the idea for this book some ten years ago, and that her two children were born during its creation.  I believe that.  There's so much wisdom here, so many important thoughts quietly but compellingly collected.  Kane is a transparent writer, working with absolute clarity, allowing her reader to see straight through to the complicated heart of things.

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