SAAFF’s 2024 ‘Have You Eaten Yet?’ shorts program tells the magical stories of food

In some Asian households, the phrase “Have you eaten yet?” is how you tell someone you love them. Seattle Asian American Film Festival’s 2024 collection of eight shorts about food reminds us how these expressions of identity, culture and love can connect generations, preserve history and conjure loved ones beyond distance and death. These stories showcase the transformative power of food:

• Serving a spicy Korean tofu soup is the potion that bonds a Korean American mother and daughter who don’t always understand each other as seen in Gbenga Komolafe’s heartwarming 14-minute short “100% USDA Certified Organic Homemade Tofu” (2022).
• Tea and an Indian dish resurrects memories of a dead relative a girl (Raya Dasgupta) discovers in Amit Kaur’s mystical 10-minute narrative short “Cuppa Chai“ (2023).
• The familiar ritual of filling plastic shopping bins with meats and produce from a Chinatown grocery store binds together the Mandarin-speaking voices interviewed for Chyan Lo’s 4-minute documentary, “Women in Markets” (2023).
• Justin Hiromi Pascua’s 13-minute documentary “Homestead” about a cucumber farm in Hawaii offers a grandmother from Lao an opportunity to connect with her grandson.
• The 12-minute documentary “my mom (mẹ con)” connects three generations of women: Growing food in Jacksonville, Fla., reminds documentary filmmaker Melanie Dang Ho’s mother of eating sugar cane and other early memories with her mom in Vietnam.

• Theodore Caleb Haas’ 10-minute documentary “Matsutake” remembers the lively 98-year-old Homer Yasui, who led generations of his Japanese American family on many well-documented mushroom hunts through old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.
• Tadashi Nakamura and Akira Boch’s 15-minute short “Benkyodo: The Last Manju Shop in J-Town” (2023) documents the closure of one of San Francisco’s oldest and most beloved Japanese family businesses after three generations and 115 years.
• Kyle Finnegan’s 13-minute documentary “MSG: Mysterious Savory Grains” (2023) depicts how D.C. Chinese restaurant Lucky Danger reclaimed the salty and umami flavor in monosodium glutamate.

The Seattle Asian American Film Festival runs virtually until March 3.

When ‘The Air You Breathe’ is a sin

Frances de Pontes Peebles’ lyrical novel “The Air You Breathe” is a great and tragic love story — one that rivals films like “The Notebook” or “Titanic.”

Only this isn’t a story between almost forgotten lovers like Noah and Allie or Jack and Rose. This is a story about inseparable friends and confidants, deeply jealous rivals and almost sisters, Maria das Graca and Maria das Dores — two Brazilian girls who shared a name, partner, band, kiss and love for music, later becoming instrumental in redefining and popularizing the genre of 1940s samba.

Graca and Dores, Portuguese translations for “grace” and “pain,” relied, depended and stole from each other, but it was a chance that they even met and bonded at all. Dores, the book’s retrospective narrator, was a skinny dark-skinned orphan working as the help at the Brazilian sugarcane plantation that took her in. Graca was the only daughter to the Pimentels, the wealthy family that owned the plantation and recently moved back in. Since Graca and Dores were the same age, Dores was singled out and ordered to become Graca’s only playmate and schoolmate. In exchange, the Pimentels offered Dores an education in words and music. The latter, heard on a fado stage and radio broadcasts, captivated the young Graca and Dores, who shared a dream of becoming like the singers and musicians that stole their hearts.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Graca and Dores eventually achieve that childhood dream with Faustian bargains, traveling to Rio de Janeiro and Hollywood. But as much as the devil gives, the devil takes. And hellhounds can come in lust, envy, pride, wrath and fear.

In “The Air You Breathe,” de Pontes Peebles skillfully writes a sexy, sinful and cinematic book of intense ambition, regret, jealousy, guilt and longing while examining race, class and impenetrable limits to one’s unlimited dreams of defying gravity.

“The Air You Breathe”
By Frances de Pontes Peebles
449 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.
2018.

Kevin Wilson’s ‘Tunneling to the Center of the Earth’ is a master class in how to write short stories

Kevin Wilson‘s debut collection of 11 short stories, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” (originally published in 2009 but to be back in print this September), is a master class on how to write short stories.

Wilson, who teaches English and creative writing at Sewanee: The University of the South, is an expert at the form.

“With my students, when I talk about novels and short stories, I tell them that writing a novel is like buying a car, thanks to a very reasonable loan, and taking that car on a long trip and feeling this sense of peace that you’re heading somewhere, but you’re not there yet,” Wilson writes in the book’s introduction. “But short stories, for me, are like stealing a car, driving it as fast as you can, and crashing it into a tree, knowing you were always going to that very thing. And then you crawl out of that car, which is now mangled and smoking, and you realize that you aren’t dead, that you’re still alive. And you look at the car, and it’s beautiful. And you walk away.”

Wilson makes crashing a car look very easy — like it’s something anyone can do. As if anyone can be that deliberately fearless — recording one’s darkest flaws on paper and presenting them in such a way that everyone can see.

“Tunneling to the center of the earth”
By Kevin Wilson
224 pp. Ecco. $16.99.
Sept. 1, 2020.

If you follow the Kevin Wilson formula for short story writing, start with a weird, quirky character. Like the sensitive boy in Wilson’s short story “The Dead Sister Handbook: A Guide for Sensitive Boys.”

Or Penny — the quiet, pretty blonde 16-year-old cheerleader who would prefer to build toy model cars and to kiss a 12-year-old boy than to hang out with football players and cheerleaders her own age — the heroine in the short story “Go, Fight, Win.”

Or Wynn and Scotty of the story “Mortal Kombat” (titled after the gruesome fighting game). The boys are social outcasts who spend every lunch of high school together studying potential quiz bowl questions until an awkward kiss between the best friends changes things.

If you have trouble dreaming up a character, start with a job that defines the character.

Perhaps she’s a woman who gets paid to pretend to be a grandmother to multiple families like the woman who answers to Gammy, MeeMaw, Grandma Helen and Mimi in the story “Grand Stand-In.”

Or maybe she’s the curator to a museum of junk like the thirty-something in the story “The Museum of Whatnot.”

Or perhaps he’s the guy who gets paid to predict the bad things that could possible happen like the dude in the story “Worst-Case Scenario.”

Or maybe the guy’s job is to shoot himself in the face at a traveling carnival like in “The Shooting Man.”

Or his job could be sorting and count tiles in a Scrabble factory, like the guy in “Blowing Up on the Spot.”

If you can’t think of a job, what happens when a character doesn’t have a job? That’s the premise to the short story, “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth,” which is what happens the summer after three friends with meaningless college degrees graduate.

Now that you have selected your driver, crash the car. Think of a situation. Create tension and conflict. Spontaneously combust. Shoot yourself in the face. Kiss your best friend. Or kiss the much younger kid next door. Get away with murder.

And then leave.

You just changed a character’s life. And don’t have to deal with the consequences.

That’s the beauty in writing fiction and “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth.” And that’s why this delightfully charming collection of short stories is so fun to read.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” from NetGalley and Ecco in exchange for this honest review.

‘Recursion’ is a repeat of ‘Dark Matter’

Barry Sutton is a New York cop whose marriage dissolves after the tragic death of his 16-year-old daughter Meghan about a decade ago. In 2018, he’s investigating False Memory Syndrome, a relatively new illness where the patient vividly remembers multiple drastically different outcomes (one real and one false) of a given moment in time.

In 2008, Helena Smith is a researcher — with an aging mother with dementia — on the cusp of a major breakthrough on memory. She’ll go on to invent a chair that gives people the power to travel back in time to a vivid memory, allowing them to potentially change the outcomes.

Blake Crouch is the author, intent on tying these two stories together in the sci-fi/thriller “Recursion.”

Like in his earlier novel “Dark Matter,” the page-turner “Recursion” also delves into the fascinating realm of quantum mechanics and alternate realities. In the universe of “Recursion,” humans, with Helena’s invention, have the power to change their past; however, they don’t just forget the past that didn’t end up happening. They, and those involved, collectively remember it. And this has its consequences.

In 2018, Barry is investigating a string of suicides connected to False Memory Syndrome. Meanwhile, in 2008, Helena is trying to undo her legacy, which eventually leads to nuclear warfare as countries try to crack the code to how to rewrite history.

Crouch is very intent on Barry and Helena meeting, which they do on multiple confusing occasions throughout their given timelines. But the reader doesn’t follow each character’s journey into manipulating their pasts.

In “Recursion,” Crouch melds memory of the past, present and future so the reader experiences them simultaneously; however, the construction of time and memory on the same plane makes “Recursion’s” brand of déjà vu disorienting and ultimately unsatisfying.

In one such example, we’re told that in past timelines, Barry and Helena had time to meet in their twenties and fall in love; however, the reader doesn’t see this relationship develop — doesn’t live the painful intricacies of what it might be like to intimately know everything about a person you remember from the future while they’re meeting you for the first time. That latter emotional character drama is the story I wish Crouch would have explored. Instead, that story is deeply buried somewhere underneath saving the world and the science of explaining time travel.

“Recursion”
By Blake Crouch
329 pp. Crown. $27
2019.

‘An American Marriage’ is the story of a dream deferred

First and foremost, Tayari Jones’ book “An American Marriage” is a love letter — a series of beautiful, tragic and heartbreaking love letters between two flawed and perfectly imperfect humans: Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr., a married and college-educated Black man wrongly incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, and Celestial Gloriana Davenport, his wife and alibi.

Time stands between them. Roy was sentenced for 10 years for allegedly raping a woman in a motel. (He didn’t. Celestial would know since she spent that night with Roy in an adjacent room.)

But time’s a cruel and hungry mistress, stealing years, intimacy, touch, children and shared experiences from a young Black married couple in their early thirties who were on the cusp of beginning the rest of their lives together.

How would their marriage have been different if Roy hadn’t been imprisoned? Who knows.

“But now,” writes Roy from prison, “all I have is this pen and raggedy ink pen. It’s a ballpoint, but they take away the casing so you just have the nib and this plastic tube of ink. I’m looking at it, thinking, ‘This’ is all I have to be a husband with?”

Jones’ gorgeous partly epistolary novel is an examination of love, sacrifice, injustice, family, communication, race and marriage, posing existential questions about what it means to be a spouse: How much of ourselves do we owe a significant other?

From Roy to Celestial: “Everything I do is a love letter addressed to you.”

From Celestial to Roy: “A marriage is more than your heart, it’s your life. And we are not sharing ours.”

Celestial and Roy’s involuntary divorce isn’t easy. The couple had only been married about a year and a half before the incident. It gets lonely at night. And Roy’s best man and Celestial’s childhood friend Andre is there while Roy isn’t, to no fault of his own. Being Black isn’t easy.  

Roy had a clean record, graduated from college, got a white collar job as a traveling salesman and married. Still, the courts convicted him and labeled him “a victim of America,” believing — beyond a reasonable doubt — the word of another woman over the word of his wife, an articulate Black woman.  

Celestial, a master at code-switching, doesn’t tell the world that she’s the wife of an incarcerated Black man when interviewed about her art project — a Black baby doll in a prison outfit — for a magazine.  

Roy doesn’t like this. But as his prison roommate, who Roy refers to as “Ghetto Yoda” in letters, explains: “She is a black woman and everybody already thinks she got fifty-eleven babies with fifty-eleven daddies; that she got welfare checks coming in fifty-eleven people’s names. She got that already to deal with, but she got the white folks to believe that she is some Houdini doll maker and she even got them thinking that this is an actual job. … You think she supposed to get up there talking about her man is in the hoosegow? Soon as she say that, everybody will start looking at her and thinking about the fifty-eleven everything and she might as well go on back home and work for the phone company.”

Jones is an extremely perceptive and compassionate writer, balancing a book told in three parts on three legs: the voices of Roy, Celestial and later, Andre. You root for all of them equally (even when they want different and very conflicting things).

“An American Marriage” is a gripping emotional book that you’d be apt to finish in one sitting, but it isn’t a book about happily ever afters. It’s a book that makes your bones ache, mourning what could have been if the raisin didn’t see the sun.

“An American Marriage”
By Tayari Jones.
308 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $26.95.
2018.

David Mitchell’s ‘Utopia Avenue’ is a record you’ll want to play over and over

“Utopia Avenue” is a paradox, a contradictory phrase containing a place that does not exist and a road that does. It’s the perfect name for the fabulous quartet that make up the greatest fictional, genre-defying, late 1960s-era, British band ever; and also the title to a surreal book penned by a British author known for his genre-defying meta postmodern works like the magnum opus “Cloud Atlas.”

In “Utopia Avenue” — the coda to “Cloud Atlas” (2004), “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (2011) and “The Bone Clocks” (2014), David Mitchell chronicles the formation and meteoric rise of an eclectic “schizophrenic” band (Is it folk? Or R&B? Or psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll? Or jazz? Or pop?) that can count Pink Floyd, Cream, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bob Dylan and the Beatles among their contemporaries, but whom no one has ever heard of until now.

At the helm is Canadian manager Levon Frankland, who cobbled the group together from pieces of different puzzles.

His first recruit: the talented bassist/singer/songwriter Dean Moss, the band’s 23-year-old pretty boy heartthrob from Gravesend (where “The Bone Clocks” was set), who — in the course of 24 hours and the first chapter of this novel — gets mugged, evicted, fired, and told that his greatest dream may come true after he meets and plays with future Utopia Avenue bandmates: former jazz drummer Peter “Griff” Griffin and esoteric Dutch guitar god/singer/songwriter Jasper de Zoet. (Yes, Jasper’s a direct and illegitimate descendant to that de Zoet; his great-great-great grandfather, Jacob, was the titular character of an earlier David Mitchell book, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.”)

Levon’s last recruit: folk singer/pianist/songwriter prodigy Elf (short for Elizabeth Frances) Holloway — the future trans-Atlantic penpal to “Cloud Atlas’s” Luisa Rey. Elf finds out her boyfriend cheated on her and her sister’s engaged on the same day she meets the boys of Utopia Avenue.

“Utopia Avenue”
By David Mitchell
592 pp. Random House. $30
July 14, 2020.

“Utopia Avenue” is the answer to how to write and where ideas come from. Sometimes they’re semi-quasi-autobiographical, says Elf. Sometimes they write themselves, says Jasper and Dean. Always they’re anchored by a pretty great percussionist and bettered, sharpened and tuned by each other’s criticisms.

Between Dean, Jasper and Elf, Utopia Avenue writes more than two dozen songs compiled in three glorious albums, describing the death of dreams, dead babies, abusive alcoholic fathers, living with schizophrenia, fame, addiction, borrowed time, love, war, apologies, freedom, acid trips, hellhounds, heartbreak and fate. Each chapter, distinctly different in voice as the song’s writers, comes from song titles and describes the song’s birth.

The band’s first radio single “Darkroom,” penned by Jasper, was inspired by a girl and a lost recording by “Cloud Atlas’s” Robert Frobisher. Dean’s “Roll Away the Stone” was written after Dean was detained in an Italian prison. Elf’s “Prove It” was her rebuttal and account of when her cheater boyfriend stole one of her songs and sold it for money. You think each song and chapter is your favorite only until you hear the next track. 

But Utopia Avenue is a paradox — an ageless band you can’t really listen to. So you compile a playlist of those who advised, partied and inspired Utopia Avenue, and wish it into being, imagining the records of Utopia Avenue spinning over and over in our axis.

David Mitchell’s “Utopia Avenue” will be published on July 14, 2020. I received a free eARC of “Utopia Avenue” from NetGalley and Random House in exchange for this honest review.

‘The Library of Legends’ is a story about hope

Four years ago, my brother introduced me to the world of “Fox Spirit Matchmaker,” a Chinese anime about star-crossed immortal and mortal companions, reincarnation and a young fox spirit and human Taoist tasked with helping lovers reconnect and remember each other in a next life.

With a very limited knowledge of Chinese language and literature and without new English subtitled episodes to binge, our haphazard quest to find another book or anime that resembles the magic of that show has often been unsuccessful.

But Janie Chang’s newest xuanhuan novel “The Library of Legends” fulfills that niche we’ve been privately seeking as Chinese Americans.

“The Library of Legends”
By Janie Chang
400 pp. William Morrow Paperbacks. $16.99.
May 12, 2020.

Chang’s “The Library of Legends” is like if Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust” and “American Gods” were steeped in Chinese mythology and folklore, rather than Western or Norse ones, and then mixed with a bit of largely forgotten Chinese wartime history.

In Chang’s richly immersive book, China’s spirits, gods and guardians quietly coincide with humans on earth, answering people’s prayers. Their brilliant, hopeful and sometimes tragic stories were inscribed and collected as part of the Jingtai Encyclopedia in 147 volumes known as the “Library of Legends.” (I’d like to think the love stories of “Fox Spirit Matchmaker” were documented in this fictional “Library of Legends.”)

A group of 123 nomadic university students, professors and staff, including literature students Hu Lian and Liu Shaoming (the family surname comes first in Chinese), are tasked with studying, protecting, transporting and preserving these tomes of ancient Chinese history as they flee Japanese invasion, airstrikes and bombs in 1937, Nanking, to continue their studies in the much less coastal city of Chengtu. This historical fantasy was partly inspired by Chang’s father and uncle’s own journey across China as “refugees in their own country, walking more than a thousand miles to safety with their university” during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Chang’s book contains the horrors of war — like infant daughters abandoned by their parents or children who grew up too soon — but it also contains hope and magic, preserved in the stories in “The Library of Legends. ”

Lian’s tasked with studying the “Tales of Celestial Deities,” which contains the legend of Willow Star and the Prince. As the story goes, a star of a maidservant who fell in love with a human prince agrees to a Faustian bargain to reunite with each of the prince’s reincarnations on earth. The only catch: The prince can never remember anything from his past lives and she can never tell him. Still, each lifetime is another chance to defy the impossible odds. If the prince can ever romantically love the star, the two ill-fated lovers will be reunited for eternity in heaven. It hasn’t happened yet. But during her heroic journey to preserve literature, Lian realizes that she’s met the reincarnated prince in her handsome and wealthy classmate Shaoming, and the star in his maidservant Sparrow.

In “The Library of Legends,” Chang deftly weaves hope and horror, magical realism with research, and fiction with politics, creating a fantastical love story set in a backdrop of war.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “The Library of Legends” from NetGalley and William Morrow Paperbacks in exchange for this honest review.

Shubhangi Swarup’s ‘Latitudes of Longing’ shows how everything is connected

At one point in Shubhangi Swarup’s novel “Latitudes of Longing,” Thapa asks his friend Plato how stories are written.

“Change,” Plato answers. “Something needs to happen. Without it, a story is dead.”

“Latitudes of Longing”
By Shubhangi Swarup
320 pp. One World. $27.
May 19, 2020.

“Latitudes of Longing,” a sweeping and poetic debut, is about change — like how a supercontinent broke off into many tinier islands and continents, how the moon gave birth to the stars, how a mother abandoned her son, and how a man who studies trees married a woman who talked to them.

The latter story is how this novel begins. Newlyweds Girija Prasad Varma and Chanda Devi are the man and woman of this tale. Girija Prasad is a scientist who landed a post as a researcher on the Andaman Islands, a formerly British, now Indian settlement; Chanda is a clairvoyant, who talks to the platonic ghosts and ghosts of goats on their new island home.

The Varmas’ tale is told in “Islands,” the first part in Swarup’s four-part novel. Their tale is the “Pangaea” (Girija Prasad spends his life studying the phenomenon) of this book — the longest and earliest story from which the other interconnected and shorter stories break apart from.

The first piece to break off of Girija Prasad Varma and Chanda Devi’s island is Mary, a Karen woman from a faultline in Myanmar. She works as the Varmas’ maid, raising their one and only daughter, Devi. However, Mary leaves the Indian islands to return to Sagaing after her son’s friend Thapa visits to tell her that her estranged son, Plato, has been imprisoned for organizing protests. Mary and Plato’s story of reconciliation, love, sacrifice and redemption is told in “Faultline,” the second segment of Swarup’s book.

Years after Thapa arranges for Plato and Mary’s reunion, Thapa returns to his home in the valley of Thamel. This is where he, a man nearing 60, meets Bagmati, a bar dancer young enough to be his granddaughter. In “Valley” — a reverse retelling of “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights” — a girl with nothing to live for threatens a man with her personal execution if he cannot tell her a story, something that brings her out of her life in a valley of despair. That’s why Thapa, a smuggler by trade, seeks his friend Plato for advice. And that’s how the son of the sun and the daughter of a rain goddess came to live in a snow desert.

“Snow Desert” is “Latitudes of Longing’s” final destination, the fourth tale in this collection. Changthang, the snow desert in Tibet, is a where octogenarians Tashi Yeshe and Ghazala Mumtax Abdul Sheikh Begum fall in love. It’s also where Girija Rana meets the ghost of his grandfather, a man who was once married to a woman who could see ghosts.

In these four stories framed by their geographical names and elements, Swarup beautifully explains why the moon waxes and wanes, why one man became a vegetarian, and how all stories are formed, one on top of another.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “Latitudes of Longing” from NetGalley and One World in exchange for this honest review.

Kate Hope Day’s debut novel ‘If, Then’ might have worked better as a screenplay

Dr. Ginny McDonnell is a surgeon who, after 15 years of marriage, dreams her affair with her scrub nurse and co-worker Edith could be more permanent.

Ginny’s husband Mark McDonnell is a behavioral ecologist who, based on research studying animal behavior, thinks Broken Mountain, the volcano he lives on, is no longer dormant. His dreams — or rather, nightmares — contain his family of three (Ginny, himself and their pre-teen son, Noah) being in danger.

Cass is Mark and Ginny’s neighbor — the one with the large black dog and baby. She gave up her PhD in metaphysics to be the wife of Amar and mom to Leah. She could go back to school. Her philosophy professor and graduate advisor, Robert Kells, really wants her to come back and help him expand on his research on hypothetical parallel universes.

Samara, another one of Ginny, Mark and Cass’s neighbors, has moved back to her childhood home after her mother died following a procedure Dr. McDonnell personally oversaw. Her mom’s still alive in her hallucinations.

Together, these neighbors make up the threads of Kate Hope Day’s debut novel, “If, Then,” a confusing, forgettable and unsatisfying book that might have worked better in a parallel universe in another form.

“If, Then”
By Kate Hope Day
260 pp. Random House. $26.
2019.

As much as “If, Then” centers around Ginny, Mark, Cass and Samara, the reader never really gets to know them beyond the archetypes (doctor mom, scientist dad, neighbor, neighbor) they’re supposed to represent. You don’t come to care for them. You hardly remember them. It’s as if the characters themselves are placeholders — forgettable and undeveloped in favor of a plot where nothing really happens except characters seeing another version of themselves in their present timeline. (If “If, Then” were a movie, the viewer wouldn’t remember the characters names. When summarizing the plot, they’d probably refer to them by the much more famous actor portraying them.)

If “If, Then” were a movie, it wouldn’t be the main draw. It’d be released in the summer, paired with a summer blockbuster (maybe a superhero movie or a romantic comedy) at the drive-in. It’d be a filler, a bonus second or third act that you’re only staying to watch because it’s free with the price of admission and you can’t say no to free stuff.

If “If, Then” were a movie, it wouldn’t win any awards (except maybe a Razzie). It might be what you watch if there’s nothing on television or if you’re too stoned to care. It might be so bad that it’s good.

If “If, Then” shed some characters and focused on developing one (like in the animated film “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” or Blake Crouch’s novel “Dark Matter”), then it might have been better.

But we don’t live in a world of “if, then.” As it is in this universe, the fate of “If, Then” is as doomed as lifeforms living near an active volcano.

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “If, Then” from NetGalley and Random House in exchange for this honest review.

‘Montauk’ is a less marvelous version of ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’

I’m arriving to Nicola Harrison’s debut novel “Montauk” after bingeing three seasons of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Amazon Prime.

The two works share striking similarities, despite “Montauk” setting, which supposedly takes place two decades before Sherman-Palladino’s award-winning hit television series. (If you erase “Montauk’s” references to the 1938 New England hurricane, Roosevelt and his fireside chats, it’d be impossible to tell that “Montauk” takes place on the eve of World War II in the late 1930s, and not the late 1950s when “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” takes place.)

“Montauk”
By Nicola Harrison
388 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $27.99.
2019.

Both “Montauk” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s” protagonists are wealthy and married mid-twenty-something-year-old New Yorkers who spend summers in vacation resorts away from the city. In Mrs. Midge Maisel’s case, that’s the Steiner Resort up in the Catskills, where her Jewish family spend absolutely every summer. In Beatrice Bordeaux’s case, this is Long Island’s Montauk, a very new vacation resort for New York’s elite established by now-bankrupt financier Carl Fisher.

The bankruptcy is why Mrs. Bordeaux is at the Montauk Manor resort for the summer of 1938. Her husband Harry wants to invest in Fisher’s property and booked a room to scope it out. So Mrs. Bordeaux is a fish out of water among New York’s socialites, living her first summer in Montauk, where manor guests enjoy pig races, swimming, sailing, hunting, gambling, gossiping sunbathing and planning charity balls.

If reading about that sounds dull — it is. But Sherman-Palladino’s script and Harrison’s plot share other similarities: They blow up their female protagonists’ marriages. Mr. Joel Maisel’s affair becomes the catalyst for Mrs. Maisel’s burgeoning career as a stand-up comic. Mr. Harry Bordeaux’s affair propels his wife to criticize the wealthy and champion the poor in anonymous newspaper columns. It also leads Mrs. Bordeaux to have an affair of her own. 

Mrs. Bordeaux is less rebellious than Mrs. Maisel. Mrs. Bordeaux never gets arrested for public indecency. Women like Mrs. Bordeaux don’t get divorced. Mr. Harry Bordeaux is not as sympathetic as Mr. Joel Maisel. But fans of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” may still enjoy “Montauk” and Mrs. Bordeaux’s quiet rebellion. Just expect less comedy and more tragedy. 

Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of “Montauk” from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for this honest review.