FICTION: THE LONG VIEW
The Girl in the Blue Beret by Bobbie Ann Mason (Random House)
Bobbie Ann Mason has long been considered one of the finest writers of regional fiction — Kentucky is her home and inspiration — but her affecting new novel takes place in France, and she’s just as comfortable and insightful there. Based on the experiences of her late father-in-law, “The Girl in the Blue Beret” describes the tense adventures of a U.S. airman shot down over Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944. What distinguishes the novel, though, is how tenderly Mason nests that World War II escape within the story of an airline pilot forced to retire in 1980.
After decades of flying jetliners, Marshall Stone finds himself widowed, grounded and unemployed, a stark break that blows him back to consider the crash landing of his B-17 bomber that effectively ended his military career when he was just 23. “In the years after,” Mason writes, “he didn’t probe into the aftermath. He lived another life.”
But when airline regulations and his wife’s death bring that long domestic chapter to a close, Marshall decides to visit the scarred field in Belgium and “confront his past failure,” back when he was a young lieutenant with a clear and noble purpose. What follows is the profound story of an emotionally aloof retiree who must finally learn to stop flying above everything and embrace the people on the ground who saved his life.
NONFICTION: IT’S RAINING MEN
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs)
In “Unnatural Selection,” Mara Hvistendahl, a Beijing-based journalist specializing in science, warns of an impending hormonal tsunami of surplus Asian men, deprived of their demographic mates by sex-selective abortions, and creating a world of male violence and sexual predation. In this world, “roid rage” from extra testosterone and the decline in the calming power of marriage could lead to an epidemic of young men driven to delinquency, crime and murder — and that’s just the beginning.
As Hvistendahl reports in her massively well-documented book, male births are far outnumbering female births in East Asia, South Asia and West Asia, all the way to Albania. While the normal sex ratio at birth is about 105 males to 100 females, in the county of Suining, China, for example, 152 boys are born for every 100 girls. These surplus boys may feel happy when they are small, but they will grow up condemned to singlehood. According to French demographer Christophe Guilmoto, we are facing an epidemic of “rampant demographic masculinization” which will have “grave effects for future generations.”
Feminists blame the gender imbalance on patriarchal cultural prejudice against girls and daughters. But Hvistendahl, who has not only done her research but also carried out extensive investigative journalism in several countries, blames much more complex geopolitical and economic forces, including imperialist political decisions, American medical technology and the drive for population control. She traces the development and marketing of amniocentesis and American ultrasound machinery, the rise of genetic counseling, and drastic government policies to curb population, like China’s one- baby policy, instituted in 1980. The international availability of prenatal screening in the 1980s and government tolerance or support of abortion as a means of birth control made it possible for parents to choose the sex of their children.
In the last section of her book, “The Womanless World,” Hvistendahl examines the dire costs of such a gender imbalance: the traffic in foreign brides and rises in polyandry, child marriage, prostitution, sex tourism, sexually transmitted disease and social violence. Is Hvsitendahl a whistle-blower, warning us of a terrible disaster we must take action to avert, and if so, what kind of action would that be? Or is she a Cassandra, describing an unavoidable destiny for humankind, which we cannot prevent? In either case, she has written a disturbing, engrossing book that we can add to the tottering shelf of problems that keep us up at night.
FICTION: GENRE BENDER
The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma, translated from Spanish by Nick Caistor (Atria)
The idea of sending H.G. Wells, the father of science fiction, to catch the most notorious killer of the Victorian Age is so delicious it’s surprising that nobody has come up with it before — except that they have.
Before Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time” was a sci-fi mystery by Karl Alexander in which the “Time Machine” author chases Jack the Ripper all the way to the 1970s.
But Spanish writer Felix J. Palma’s first novel published in the United States, “The Map of Time,” is such a big, genre-bending delight — and his sly execution is so different from Alexander’s plot — that I can’t imagine anyone crying foul. And, besides, Wells and the Ripper are just one story line in this science-fiction, historical, fantasy doorstopper. In addition to Wells, Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man), Henry James and Bram Stoker all make appearances by the end of the three-part novel.
When “The Map of Time” opens in London in 1896, a rich young man named Andrew Harrington is contemplating suicide. His true love, the prostitute Marie Kelly, was Jack the Ripper’s fifth victim. Eight years after her murder, Harrington is pretty much the reason why the words “namby” and “pamby” were coined. The novel picks up considerably once his cousin, fresh from visiting the apocalypse in 2000 courtesy of an outfit called Murray’s Time Travel, shows up with a scheme to go back and save Marie.
Harrington’s story is the first of three linked tales, all of which combine Wells, Murray’s Time Travel and some truly sneaky surprises. Fans of serious science fiction may find the story too metafictional. But Palma writes with such shrewdness and glee that I enjoyed “The Map of Time” more than any time-travel novel since Connie Willis’ “To Say Nothing of the Dog.”
Ron Charles is The Washington Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles. Elaine Showalter, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, has written extensively about gender and science. Yvonne Zipp frequently reviews books for The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.
