Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Dèy, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf). Set among Haitian Americans in Miami, this novel centers on Magnolia, a young mother who is at a mall when a mass shooter opens fire. She escapes and, because she does not want to be defined by the tragedy, decides not to tell anyone about it. In the weeks that follow, Magnolia plans her daughter’s birthday, negotiates her relationship with her daughter’s father, and coördinates medical care for her aging parents, who are living in Haiti amid growing violence. This fascinatingly banal aftermath forces the reader to confront the normalcy of such horror in a world where approximately seven per cent of American adults have been at the scene of a mass shooting. Danticat asks, Is gun violence newsworthy anymore? Or is it everyday life?

Etna, by Paul Yoon (Scribner). This novel’s narrator is a dog who lives on a farm in a nameless country that is descending into war. One day, a woman arrives who can speak with him telepathically; she names him Etna and takes him to be trained by American soldiers as a combat dog. After years of conflict, Etna is a grizzled veteran who knows how to search for explosives and how to kill. But, when the war ends, the world as he knew it has been destroyed. He abandons his handlers and wanders the wasted land, searching for any home that might be left. Yoon’s choice to plant his sparely written novel in a canine perspective reveals the devastation that human aggression can inflict on all creatures.

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Are They Dead Yet?, by Sam Roberts (Bloomsbury). “Writing obituaries is not a job for the faint of heart, nor the heartless,” Roberts announces early in this pithy and engaging survey of what he calls “the dead beat.” Roberts, who has written more than sixteen hundred obituaries, retraces the origins of the form (in ancient Rome) and the emergence of the modern newspaper obituary (in the eighteenth century). As he describes the process by which writers and editors decide who among the “more than 150,000 or so people who die each day around the world qualify to be immortalized in the Times,” he demonstrates how and why obituaries “demand a degree of empathy not required of, say, political reporting or restaurant reviews.”

Unbelonging, by Catherine Jagoe (Wisconsin). This sensitively observed essay collection, by a translator of Spanish literature, considers the elusive nature of home. “Defining home, identifying a homeland, feeling at home. I just can’t seem to manage it,” Jagoe writes. In trying, however, she ranges elegantly across experiences, from the ecstasy of swimming to the “deep, dark wintering” of depression. The act of patiently noticing the physical world runs through the book. In Madrid, she reëncounters the “upland light, landscape, and air” of Nigeria, where she lived as a small child; and though southern Wisconsin, where she lives today, lacks the “transparent, haunting fragrance” of wild bluebells in the woods of England, her country of birth, she discovers a place for herself there nonetheless, through close engagement with the landscape.

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