American Fiction

Rafael Yglesias has written a novel based on his wife’s death from bladder cancer. In A Happy Marriage (Scribner, $26) he has fashioned a truthful and touching portrait of their marriage, as he alternates between the awkward courtship of Enrique Saba and Margaret Cohen and her dying twenty-some years later over a period of a few weeks. After three years, Margaret has asked to be allowed to die rather than continue the pain and misery of treatment for incurable and invasive cancer. While Enrique remembers the sweetness of their first few months, he says goodbye and helps Margaret say her goodbyes to her parents Dorothy and Leonard, the Sabas’ sons, and her best friend Lily. There is something endearing and absolutely true here about the relationship of husband and wife and adult children and parents. This is the kind of book that when you finish you want to go back and read it all over again. Carla Cohen

Nicholson Baker’s zany new novel, The Anthologist (Simon & Schuster, $25), is a beguiling love story about poets that everyone who writes or reads lyrical verse will savor.  Narrator Paul Chowder, a published poet, struggles against his writer’s block to compose a preface to a poetry anthology. In the process, he obsesses over poetry and life with humor and pathos:  “Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing….The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication.…Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next.”  Chowder instructs his readers to write down and recite aloud every poem they encounter.  I found in my reading that I was so enchanted with some of Chowder’s aphorisms that I was writing those down as well. Barbara Meade

Guarding the Washington side of the U.S.-Canadian border, Brandon Vanderkool is an original and unlikely hero. A gentle giant (he’s six-foot-eight), Brandon is more at home with birds and forest fauna than he is with his fellow immigration officials and townspeople, but his affinity with nature makes him an exceptional sentinel, and he has a high arrest rate of drug smugglers and illegal aliens. Mostly, though, this is a story about a community, best evoked by the experiences of Brandon’s father, a dairy farmer, working against all odds to make a living and take care of Brandon’s mother, who’s disappearing into dementia. With Border Songs (Knopf, $25.95), Jim Lynch tells the story of a once tranquil border grown tense after the events of 9/11. Mark LaFramboise