A mystery that flows as smoothly as the river it evokes

We see the body of Jimmy Quinn on page 15 of The River We Remember, William Kent Krueger's twenty-third novel. Quinn has taken a shotgun blast in the chest and dumped in the Alabaster River where vicious channel catfish fed on him.

It's 1958. No cell phones, no DNA, no internet and WWII and Korea memories are fresh. We're in the fictional Black Earth County, MN, just north of the Iowa line where Sheriff Brody Dorn lives above the jailhouse in Jewel, population 4,000. The Alabaster, the river we remember, flows through Jewel and is almost as much a character as the residents.

The area is rich in history. The Sioux massacred white settlers and the whites massacred the Sioux. That may have been after the Civil War, but some Black Earth locals keep the rage fresh, as they do toward blacks and Japanese. The last is particularly sensitive because Kyoko, whose family was vaporized by the Nagasaki A-bomb, is married to an Indian, a former Marine, who farms his family's land.

Jimmy Quinn was the biggest landowner in Black Earth County, a bully, a drinker, and, as we gradually learn, a serial pedophile. Few citizens are sorry he's dead. Indeed Sheriff Brody himself attempts to make Quinn's death look like an accident. But it wasn't.

I've just begun to hint at the novel's complexities, which involve the Quinn family, Brody and his family and his history, Angie Madison who is attracted to Brody and her son and her history, a middle-age lawyer, the newspaper editor, the town drunk, and the Creasy clan of reprobates. 

But for all the characters, for all the complexities, for all the individual stories, for all the shifts in point of view Krueger is able to keep the action moving clearly as surely as the Alabaster flows. He is able to evoke the natural world. From the Prologue: "On quiet nights when the moon is full or nearly so and the surface of the Alabaster is mirror smooth and glows pure white in the dark bottomland, to stand on a hillside and look down at this river is to fall in love."

He's also able to introduce a tincture of philosophy. From the Epilogue: "Our lives and the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end."

A superior mystery.

A smorgasbord of engaging thoughts and ideas

Zadie Smith writes in the Forward to Dead and Alive, her third collection of essays, that you "might start from the first page and just plough through. Or look for a subject that interests you in the Contents, and begin there . . .   Whichever route you choose, you are welcome. Feel free."

I do. And did. Smith doesn't give the option skipping essays entirely (what writer is going to suggest that?) but you can and I did and still found the book stimulating and valuable.

She is a marvelous writer (i.e., filled with marvels) who has published eight novels and a play. She was was born in October 1975 in Willesden, north-west London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father. She attended the University of Cambridge where she studied English literature as an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge. She published her first novel, White Teeth, in 2000. She taught fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts and joined New York University as a tenured professor of fiction in 2010.

Smith regularly publishes essays and commentary. The essays in Dead and Alive appeared mostly in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and she has published in Kenyon Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere and several appear in the book for the first time.

I am afraid I skipped the book's first five essays which are about art which doubtless reflects my limitation. On the other hand, I was held and fascinated by her comments on five dead writers: Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, and Hilary Mantel.

I didn't expect to enjoy her review of a book that I'd never head of and is not a topic that affects me directly: Black England. But it's a world and a history I know little about and was pleased to learn more.

And her essays on fiction and writing are worth the price of the book if you write or if you are interested in the craft. Indeed, one of the works is called "Consciousness and Consciousness: A Craft Talk for the People and the Person." She has an informative essay "On Writing The Fraud," her most recent novel which I have added to my "To Read" list.

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer with interesting things to say on a variety of topics and she says them clearly and entertainingly. I'm delighted I read as much as I read of Dead and Alive. 

A useful word—but not in English

In the Japanese short story I'm currently translating, one of the sentences contained a word that I don't believe English contains, for all the words it does have—腐れ縁, pronounced kusare-en.

The first characters by themselves, 腐 れ / kusare, can be a derogatory term meaning rotting, spoiling, decaying, corroding and it can be a verb: to rot, to spoil, etc.

The second character, 縁 / en, can mean (as one of its six meanings} relationship between two people, bond, link connection.

Put them together as a single word and my dictionary says it means "an undesirable but inseparable relationship/" Who'd a guessed?​