The Famished Road by Ben Okri, Seren of the Wildwood by Marly Youmans, and I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Before Easter, I picked up Nigerian writer Ben Okri’s 1991 Booker-Prize-winning novel, The Famished Road (Jonathan Cape), and was promptly drawn into a spellbinding world of spirits, family hardship, and tectonic social change. “There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer”—this line, with some variations, becomes the novel’s refrain.
Young Azaro, whose name is a variation of “Lazarus,” is an abiki child, a denizen of the spirit world destined to be born into humanity again and again. Most abiki children long to return to their spirit companions, little caring that they will break the hearts of their parents. But Azaro is different, because he wants to remain. The world of The Famished Road is a place full of midges and rats, of mudslides and fires—it is a world where children get drunk on palm-wine, where every grotesque is a spirit in human disguise. But it is a beautiful world, a world that commands our love.
A fire destroys the compound where the family lives, briefly separating Azaro from his parents and disrupting his father’s employment. The father, who is impulsive and frequently drunk, eventually turns to boxing, adopting the name “Black Tyger” and winning huge prizes against all odds. Despite intense political pressure, Black Tyger remains firmly on the side of the poor, vowing to build a school for beggars even if everyone thinks he is mad.
But when a party Black Tyger throws turns raucous and violent, it becomes clear that he has made some dangerous enemies. “I think most of our real troubles began that night,” Azaro says. “They began not with the devastation of voices and chairs and the car, but with the blood mingling with rain and flowing right into the mouth of the road. I heard the slaking of the road’s unquenchable thirst. And blood was a new kind of libation. The road was young but its hunger was old. And its hunger had been reopened.”
There is no shortage of suffering in Okri’s novel; but there is no shortage of tenderness, either. “We are the miracles that God made,” Black Tyger says, “to taste the bitter fruits of time. We are precious, and one day our suffering will turn into wonders of the earth. … We bless things even in our pain.” And in the words of a mysterious traveler, “time is not what you think it is.”
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Time is also elastic in Seren of the Wildwood by Marly Youmans (Wiseblood Books), a stunning narrative poem beautifully illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. If you enjoy sophisticated fairy tales and fantasy, Seren of the Wildwood–part Brothers Grimm, part Metamorphoses—is for you.
One day, when he is too close to the edge of the malevolent wildwood, a father incautiously wishes he had a daughter instead of his two rambunctious sons. His imprudent wish is promptly granted: “he shepherded/His sons toward home—but from that very day,/They changed, diminishing from what had been,/Their merriment at ebb, their features thin,/Their eyes the wisdom-wells of suffering…”
Soon the boys are dead, and a daughter, Seren, is born. But as she grows, she ventures into the dangerous wildwood. “At first, she tied a sort of maypole thread/Around a bole and wandered into shade/And napped on leaves and let the branch-combed wind/Lift the strands of hair and press against her, /As if it might be some invisible/Eros, lover from the Psyche story, /And she the princess to be sacrificed.”
Seren of the Wildwood reminds me how much I enjoyed reading illustrated books to my children when they were young. Even now, there is something authentic about holding a beautiful book in your hands: there is a shape to the words on the page, a bookmark to show steady progress. My heart lifted every time I saw it waiting for me on the kitchen table.
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I loved The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai’s 2019 Pulitzer-nominated book, and I was excited for the release of I Have Some Questions for You (Viking, 2023). And while I admire Makkai—her range, her impeccable craftsmanship, her unforgettable characters—this book suffers somewhat from its up-to-the-minute contemporary setting. As my friend Maureen put it, “I don’t want to read about Twitter and cancel culture. I want to escape from those things.” Still, if it’s escape that you seek, Makkai will take you quite credibly back to the 90s, a pre-internet time that I’m always happy to visit. That being said, it can be difficult to keep fictional high school students from sounding precocious.
Bodie Kane, a successful Los Angeles podcaster and film studies professor, returns to New Hampshire to teach a class at the boarding school she attended in the late 90s, where one of her classmates, Thalia Keith, was murdered their senior year. Bodie, a mother of two, is amicably separated from her artist husband Jerome, who becomes the target of a Twitter mob over a past relationship. Jerome, who still lives next door to Bodie, is always at home to take care of the children, who, in a novel of 400-plus pages, only ever appear over the phone. But Bodie is not immune to the Twitter trolls, and there is plenty at stake.
I toggled back and forth between the audio and print versions of this novel, and while this greatly enhanced my enjoyment of chores like cooking and laundry, it rather limited my collection of pithy quotes. Still, there are speeches that function almost like testimonies when you hear them aloud. And in a particularly moving and respectful choice, the podcast testimony of Omar Evans–who has spent twenty-three years in prison for Thalia’s murder–is the only part of the novel that’s read by a man. I Have Some Questions for You is a remarkable whodunit with cultural and emotional heft.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 