Eugene weekly., December 13, 2018, Page 10, Image 10

Winter
Reading
fiction
k All Coyote’s Children by Bette Lynch
Husted. Oregon State University Press, $18.95.
The road less traveled is one of forgiveness and
acceptance. It is hard work and a lonely walk, but Bette
Lynch Husted’s intimate story of characters who choose
this path makes her debut novel
spiritually uplifting and well worth
a winter’s read. Husted touches all
the bases. There are the characters
(Annie, Riley, Leona, Alex, Mattie
and others), ordinary people on the
mend after horrific setbacks. There
are the Native Americans in the
area, children and adults, who
must navigate the institutional
racism that was generations in
the making and seemingly never-
ending. There is, too, the rugged
and unforgiving (yet beautiful)
landscape of Oregon’s Umatilla
County, a place that absorbs the
characters and forges the road
of forgiveness and acceptance
where the characters walk.
This is a touching novel full of
reconciliation and hope at the end.
— Dan Buckwalter
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by
Ottessa Moshfegh. Penguin Press, $26.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest book is a deliciously
rancid tale about the emptiness of modern life. If you
read Moshfegh’s acclaimed Elaine, you know her
style: Moshfegh lets her greasy prose drip down her
chin. She chews on all the things we dare not say —
those things we think in the darkest recesses of our
brains. And somehow she manages to make it funny
(sort of). Funny like a guillotine. Funny like a noose.
In the book, set in the year 2000, only just pre-9/11,
Moshfegh’s main character remains unnamed. She’s
beautiful, living in the middle of the New York art
world. She has hot sex with her ex-boyfriend. She
seems to have it all. That is, until she dupes her
absurd New York therapist into giving her just enough
imaginatively named, and completely made up,
prescription medication to stay (mostly) asleep for the
better part of a year. And that’s just what she does.
She watches movies on VHS, but only on the rare
occasion when she emerges from her drug-induced
stupor — times when she also manages to tolerate her
vapid best friend with an eating disorder. If this all
sounds like the making for some kind of high-concept
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December 13, 2018 • eugeneweekly.com
art piece, you already have a sense
of how
the book ends. While the end doesn’t exactly
end with
a twist, the conclusion does force you to go back through
what you’ve just read and reconsider it all in a new color.
With My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh asks one
of life’s most profound questions: Is it possible to be well-
adjusted to a profoundly sick society? And now more than
ever, checking out never sounded so good. — Will Kennedy
k Native by Rick Sterry. Bearpaw
Press, $12.
Native is one of those books that
once you pick up, you cannot put it
back down. I ravaged this novel page
by page one rainy night, refusing
to sleep until I came to the end. The
story covers several characters, whose
lives collide over a spring and summer
due to a merciless murder in a sleepy
Oregon coast town. Rick Sterry’s main
characters shine, each having their own
unique voice and authentic identity.
The story is masterfully presented
with surprising twists and turns along
the way. As each page unfolds, the
depth of the story increases and one
will find themselves getting further
lost in the lives of a teenage runaway, a
struggling waitress, an ambitious local
deputy and the town renegade. This novel is an artfully
written tale of finding oneself, vengeance, and of love and
loss — that will leave you begging for more. — Elisha
Young
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. Catapult, $16.95.
British novelist Jon McGregor has invented a new
species of literature with Reservoir 13. On its surface, the
novel is a missing-person thriller about a teenage girl who
mysteriously disappears while her family is visiting an
English village. This rather hackneyed conceit, however,
becomes a cosmic fillip in McGregor’s expert hands, as
he telescopes out over the course of 13 years, keeping a
god-like but intimate eye on a village haunted by the
receding echo of the girl’s disappearance. The book zooms
in and out on the various tangled lives of the villagers,
treating their dramas with the same curious detachment
by which it peruses the seasons of nature and the mating
of woodland animals. It’s as though McGregor wraps the
high modernism of Virginia Woolf into a ball of yarn that
he then drops it into the middle of the vastest ocean. The
results are dizzying, in a way that is at once deeply human
and cosmically humbling. Reservoir 13 is breathtaking,
hallucinatory stuff, a haunting of ghosts living and dead.
— Rick Levin