When the days get shorter and the nights a bit more chilly, it seems readers turn to stories that stay with you long after the last page. Two such titles headline this September’s new releases, both tackling difficult subjects with respect, subtlety and unexpected intimacy. One narrates the tale of a dog who has seen war first hand. The other takes Hollywood at face value, exploring the residue of glamorous make believe. Paul Yoon’s slender novel Etna follows a battle-scarred military dog of the same name in the aftermath of an unspecified war. Rescued from a seaside poultry farm and bred as a search-and-destroy machine, Etna escapes before his orders can be carried out. From the moment he flees he begins a grueling journey homeor more precisely, the only home he’s ever known.
Under Yoon’s hand, the novel’s language is sparse luminous poetic. Numberless unnamed soldiers and strategists have no part in the story as the dog’s nose, ears and brain are the guide. A vague smell of sugar signifies the vapors of the explosives. The sound of the tide resembles a gentle hand wandering through coat-furred coat. The result is not sentimentality but a quiet study of loyalty and loss. Ultimately: the hope of reintegration into what already is. Yoon credits the voice to years of silent watching of a yellow Labrador, Oscar, and this silent, living presence gives the novel strange verisimilitude.
In 180 pages, Etna is both a work of the heroic and a muted rebuke to war. Alongside this canine journey we have another about Rachel Cusk’s Life of M, which has already sparked more conversation than most book launches. The novel involves a famous actress, known only as M, and her biographer, a writer trying to figure out just who the woman behind the perpetually reprinted visage is. Cusk has always been interested in the disparity between performance and concealment; here that distance is literalized as M’s face is present in every conceivable forum and yet she seems less real than she has ever been. The novel denies the pleasures of speculation that have characterized the celebrity texts and awaits instead a more probing and uncomfortable discussion of the toll of large-scale fame on those who bear it. The prose is matter-of-fact, slick and painful, like all Cusk’s finest work. Scandal seekers may walk away contemplating their own role in the propagation of celebrity and storytelling.
These are two mainly timely books. One an outsider’s view of the world, that is not based on ideas of nation or victory. The other a scrutiny of the apparatus by which human faces become commodities. They are a warning to fiction that it can do all of these things and still confound us in a wonderful way. Yoon’s dog trudging though the blasted land makes the toll of war visible in a new way. Cusk’s actress gliding through crowded rooms pulled by the lurker inside her image.
