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Contemporary Fiction Views: When disbelief won't stay suspended [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-03
Note: This includes possible spoilers for Allegra Goodman's Isola.
While there are many ways in which a work of fiction is abandoned by a reader, the one that does it most often for me is when disbelief is no longer suspended.
All fiction requires the reader to suspend belief in some element. Sometimes it's the world-building, sometimes it's the premise, sometimes it's the characters. If the reader doesn't accept that while it's not real, it still works for the story, the disbelief remains suspended.
But sometimes that disbelief comes crashing down faster than Wiley E. Coyote riding an Acme rocket over the edge of the Grand Canyon.
This was the case for me in Allegra Goodman's Isola. The novel is her imagining what life was like for Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval. She was marooned by her guardian, Jean-Francois de la Rocque de Roberval, during an expedition to New France in 1542. She was left on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for two years before returning to France.
While that may seem unlikely, the historical record says it did happen. And it's not unlikely that guardians who steal everything from their charges also would be cruel to them in other ways.
In the novel, it makes sense that the controlling Roberval would punish Marguerite and his secretary for daring to fall in love, especially when it is apparent Roberval means to keep the sheltered young noblewoman for himself. More than any feelings he may have for her, what Roberval desires most is power. Power over his young charge is at least as important to her as the money he can raise from stealing her property.
It is while Marguerite, her lover and her nurse are marooned on a small island near the edge of what will become Canada that the disbelief drops. They are clever in ways that even Robinson Crusoe would have envied when it comes to setting up their home. That works, even if it's unlikely. But it moves the story along so it's acceptable.
But when Marguerite is pregnant, this formerly sheltered young woman who never knew work or want is able to kill a deer and drag it up a hill in the snow. A young pregnant woman of noble birth who has always had servants. Including her aging nurse on this desolate island.
This disbelief was useful while it lasted. But now it’s gone.
I did keep reading, however, because I wanted to see what the novel would encompass concerning its young heroine's lesson. Since she survived, any reader knows there is going to be a lesson.
Here, it's basically what doesn't kill you makes you stronger (thanks, Kelly Clarkson!).
Religious faith plays a prominent role in what the characters believe. But the low-key narrative doesn't seem to serve its importance. Roberval forces Marguerite to read, memorize and make rote responses to what Psalms mean. Her nurse is a fervent believer. Marguerite talks the talk but never walks the walk.
So her loss of faith is not a surprise. But because of her culture, it is not something she makes a stand about. The best that can be said is that she uses the knowledge that she was responsible for her own survival to deal with whatever happens. That's no small thing, but it does not seem to be jubilantly empowering. Perhaps the idea that the notion occurred to her at all is enough, considering her era and culture.
The final sentence does express a lovely sentiment. No one, not even Marguerite, is an island (thanks, John Donne!).
So now I am wondering if my objections to this novel are not a matter of disbelief not remaining suspended. Are they instead more rooted in seeing what conclusions the author made about her heroine's inner journey, but not thinking she made her case?
Perhaps my problem with Isola is not that my disbelief was suspended. Perhaps it is more that the author did not sufficiently make her case. It's nearly the same, but not quite. When disbelief no longer is suspended, that's it. The curtain has come down. But there is nuance in an author not thoroughly making her case. It is an opportunity to think about what does and doesn't work in the story. Which can lead to a more thoughtful consideration of what the author may have been trying to accomplish. The difference is something I have not articulated to myself before, but it seems fitting for this novel.
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The brutal murder of Jonathan Joss makes this year's Pride Month more important than ever. No matter how a person identifies, being human with the right to live and love is essential. Some of the works available to celebrate and explore that essentiality follow.
From 2020, a list of classic queer novels curated by thoughtful author, reader and art lover Rabih Alameddine
And, a few other classic titles. (You know if a list mentions Virginia Woolf, I'm all for it.)
Among more recent titles I'm hoping to read sooner rather than later are The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong and Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle.
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Some of the new fiction titles coming out this week. Links are to The Literate Lizard and descriptions are by the publishers. Find something that nurtures you.
Paradise Once by Olive Senior
Paradise Once is a sweeping historical novel that brings to life the resiliency of the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean, whose culture was virtually destroyed within two generations of their “discovery” by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
In 1513 in Cuba, an entire village is wiped out by Spanish forces for no discernible reason. Had the villagers offended their spiritual guides—the cemíes—as one faction claimed, by incorporating foreign practices?
Four youthful survivors escape the massacre—three indigenous and one African runaway. They start off on separate perilous paths, not knowing they have been chosen by the cemíes to carry out a sacred mission—to ensure the survival of a Sacred Bundle that will enable a Taíno revival in future generations. But first, an epic spiritual battle must be played out.
Parallel Lines by Edward St. Aubyn
It’s the summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him grappling with his fragile grip on reality and his persistent hunger to connect with the biological mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is facing challenges of his own, including his adopted daughter’s tenuous relationship with her own biological mother—a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily proximate to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on catastrophic natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend, Lucy, faces a grave diagnosis, and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of re-wilding the world. Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvelous new light.
Cat Fight by Kit Conway
Former zoologist Coralie King now reigns over a different sort of animal kingdom as Queen Bee of Sevenoaks, a wealthy suburb of London. When her husband Adam spots a panther on the hood of his car at one of her exclusive dinner parties, Coralie is quick to reassure her guests that they’re in no real danger. She sees the sighting as the perfect opportunity to revive her career and promote her own ecological endeavors.
New neighbor Emma Brooks doesn’t believe for a second that there’s a big cat in their midst but is all too willing to use the concern as a distraction from her home remodel application that’s been facing scrutiny. Meanwhile, former punk musician Twig Dorsett doesn’t know what to believe. She never thought she’d return to Sevenoaks and be living in her childhood home, but after her daughter became sick, she and her wife traded their Bohemian life in Bali for the security of London suburbia.
As the summer heats up, the frenzy around the big cat sighting reaches a fever pitch when gnawed bones, pawprints, and scratches are discovered. But is the real predator a big cat on the prowl or is the true threat more of the domestic variety? Filled with gasp-worthy twists and turns, Cat Fight is a wickedly entertaining novel of suspense that examines the lengths to which some women will go when they feel caged.
Endling by Maria Reva
Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab. She scours the country’s forests and valleys, trying and failing to breed rare snails, while her relatives urge her to settle down and finally start a family of her own. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.
Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother, who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.
Together they embark across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species. But their plans come to a screeching halt when Russia invades.
The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
In the 1990s, deep in the Maiella mountains of Central Italy, a brutal crime shatters the peace of the local community. Two young women are murdered, a third left for dead. Lucia is twenty years old back, and the only survivor is her best friend.
Now, Lucia is a physiotherapist, separating from her husband, her daughter Amanda studying in Milan. When the pandemic forces Amanda to return to the family’s home near Pescara, Lucia’s memories are reawakened, and with them the impact of past trauma.
Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings
On an ordinary summer morning, the world is changed by the appearance of seven mysterious doors that seemingly lead to another world. People are, of course, mesmerized and intrigued: A new dimension filled with beauty and resources beckons them to step into an adventure. But, perhaps inevitably, people soon learn that what looks like paradise may very well be filled with danger.
Ayanna and Olivia, two Black Midwestern teens—and twin sisters—have different ideas of what may lie in the world beyond. But will their personal bond endure such wanton exploration? And when one of them goes missing, will the other find solace of her own? And will she uncover the circumstances of what truly happened to her once constant companion and best friend?
In the Absence of Men by Philippe Besson
Summer, 1916. With German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, sixteen and still too young to fight, this moment of dread is also a moment of possibility. An electrifying encounter with Marcel, an enigmatic middle-aged writer, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light. As he’s taken under Marcel’s wing, Vincent begins a dangerous affair with Arthur, the son of his governess and a young soldier on leave. Together, they share a secret that everyone seems to know and yet everyone remains silent about.
In this stunning portrait of young love, Philippe Besson depicts a young man who plays by his own rules and is not afraid of who he is. In the afternoons, Vincent is mentored by Marcel, the great novelist, in the city’s opulent cafés as they draw the judgment of society. And at night, he hides Arthur in his bedroom as the two risk everything to be together. Their affair initiates them into a world of pleasure and shields them from the encroaching war. During this magical week away from the trenches, Vincent shelters Arthur with happiness, reassuring him, “Nothing will happen to you.”
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.
Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.
Be Gay, Do Crime edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley
A follow-up to their runaway success Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, editors Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley return with Be Gay, Do Crime, a celebration of queer chaos from an all-queer author lineup featuring Myriam Gurba, Emily Austin, Alissa Nutting, and Francesca Ekwuyasi.
A trans woman makes increasingly frequent hoax calls to a business where she's had a negative experience, watching the consequences with perverse joy. A group of aging queers turns to bank robbery to stop the sale of their bungalow complex to a development company. As the president prepares to give a speech, two women lurk among the journalists, ready to shoot him. And an aspiring author takes to stealing items from strangers’ homes in a kind of cosmic redistribution each time one of her relationships fail.
The Slip by Lucas Schaefer
Austin, Texas: It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident — tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.
Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.
More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.
There Are Reasons For This by Nini Berndt
Lucy’s brother, Mikey, is dead. Two years ago, when he left their small Eastern Colorado town and moved west to Denver, he’d intended to bring Lucy along. But Lucy has only just arrived, and too late. She arrives in search of Helen, a woman Mikey loved. But when Lucy moves in across the hall, she finds nothing is as she expected: the city is crumbling; the weather is tempestuous; a predator is on the loose; the old woman in the attic needs company; desire is being compressed into pills and distributed like candy; and, most distressing of all, she finds herself becoming obsessed with Helen, who is nothing like she expected—and who has no idea who Lucy really is.
As Helen’s and Lucy’s lives become more entwined, Lucy begins to realize the real reasons she came to Denver are deeper and stranger than a simple desire to understand what happened to her brother. As a storm builds and the city falls apart, Lucy finds herself drawn further to Helen, and farther from her brother, questioning what makes a family and if love can ever really be found.
In the Family Way by Laney Katz Becker
In 1965 America, women can’t have their own bank accounts, credit cards, or sign their own leases; divorce is scandalous and difficult; and abortion is illegal.
Every week, a group of suburban housewives meet for their Tuesday canasta game. As cards are drawn and discarded, the women share advice and confidences. When prim and proper Lily Berg, a doctor’s wife, discovers she’s pregnant with their second child, she follows her friend Becca’s suggestion and takes in Betsy, a pregnant teen from the local home for unwed mothers. Betsy, who’s never met anyone Jewish before, is to live with the Bergs for six months, help with babysitting and housekeeping, have her own baby, and agree never to contact the family again.
But things quickly get complicated. Lily, who’s opened her home to the teenager, never planned on opening her heart, yet that’s exactly what happens. Meanwhile, Becca is pregnant with her fourth, and comes up with a scheme to get a legal, therapeutic abortion, and Lily’s sister, Rose, discovers the man she married isn’t who he purported to be, and turns to Lily and her husband for help.
What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother's death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling Internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.
The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King
Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.
Though Yun rarely speaks of her past, Monica is determined to find the long-lost cousin she was separated from years ago. One day, the very program Monica is helping to build connects her to a young woman, whose gift of a single pencil holds a surprising clue. Monica’s discovery of a hidden family history is exquisitely braided with Yun’s own memories as she writes of her years in Shanghai, working at the Phoenix Pencil Company. As WWII rages outside their door, Yun and her cousin, Meng, learn of a special power the women in their family possess: the ability to Reforge a pencil’s words. But when the government uncovers their secret, they are forced into a life of espionage, betraying other people’s stories to survive.
Flashlight by Susan Choi
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.
2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.
Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor
A singular, extraordinary debut about Zoe and Jack, Harvard students who find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they’ve discovered the cure for aging. A different kind of love story where the thirst for achievement consumes and the stakes are forever.
Zoe, the daughter of an MIT professor who grew up in her brother’s shadow, can envision her future anew at Harvard. Jack, a boy in Zoe’s organic chemistry class with unruly hair and a gleam of competitiveness, matches her intellect and curiosity with every breath. When Jack refers Zoe for a position in a prestigious professor’s lab, the two become entwined as colleagues, staying up late to discuss scientific ideas. They find themselves on the cusp of a breakthrough: the promise of immortality through a novel antiaging drug.
Zoe and Jack set off on their new project in secret. Finding encouraging results, they bring their work to an investor, drop out of Harvard, and form a startup. But after the money, the magazine covers, and the national news stories detailing their success, Zoe and Jack receive a startling accusation that threatens to destroy both the company they built and their partnership.
Someone to Watch Over You by Kumi Kimura
It’s early 2020, and with the world in chaos as covid spreads, two lonely people, both seeking to break with their pasts, meet and start sharing a home.
One is a former security guard who was captured on video knocking down a protester who died soon afterward; the other, a former teacher accused of driving a student to suicide.
In an oppressive atmosphere of tension and fear, the pair avoid direct contact and communicate through notes and their shared presences, close yet distant. Their odd connection, with neither affection nor trust, brings them a kind of privacy and safety they both need – but at what cost?
Ten Incarnations of Rebellion by Vaishnavi Patel
Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston—a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have been lost to the brutal hunt for rebels. Young men are drafted to fight wars they will never return from. And the people of her city are more interested in fighting each other than facing their true oppressors.
When tragedy strikes close to home, Kalki begins to play a dangerous game with small acts of resistance, tempered by cautious, level-headed Yashu, and fortified by Fauzia, whose dreams of the future awaken Kalki’s heart. Together, they found Kingston’s new independence movement, obtaining jobs working for the British while secretly planning to destroy the empire from the inside out. But one wrong move means certain death, and when facing threats from all quarters, Kalki must decide whether it’s more important to be a hero or to survive.
Waterline by Aram Mrjoian
Outside Detroit on the island of Gross Ile, the Kurkjians learn that Mari, the eldest of their youngest generation, has swum into the depths of Lake Michigan—a suicide that reverberates throughout the family and lays bare the deeply rooted pain that is their legacy.
More than a century earlier, Gregor, the Kurkjian’s larger-than-life patriarch, survived the Armenian Genocide after fighting for his freedom atop Musa Dagh. Decades later and miles away, Gregor’s epic mythos looms large over his descendants’ lives. As these Kurkjians contend with Mari’s devastating loss, secrets and shortcomings rise to the surface, forcing each of them to decide where their own story fits in the narrative of the family’s fraught history.
For fans of Tommy Orange’s There, There, Thao Thai’s Banyan Moon, and Jeffrey Eugenides epic Middlesex, Waterline explores the complex, unexpected beauty of diaspora, the weight of inherited trauma, and the echoes of the genocide on contemporary Armenian life.
Disorderly Men by Edward Cahill
Roger Moorhouse is a Wall Street banker and Westchester family man with a preciously guarded secret. As the shouting begins and flashlights blaze in his face, the life he’s carefully curated over the years—a fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, a house in Beechmont Woods, his wife and children—is about to come crashing down around him.
Columbia literature professor Julian Prince lives a comparatively uncloseted life when he finds his first committed relationship tested to its limits. How could he explain to Gus, a fearless young artist, that he couldn’t stay with him that weekend because the woman who was still technically Julian’s fiancée would be visiting? But when Gus is struck unconscious by a police baton, Julian comes out of hiding to protect him, even if exposure means losing everything.
For Danny Duffy, an Irish kid from the Bronx with a sassy mouth and a diverse group of friends, the raid is a galvanizing, Spartacus moment. Danny doesn’t have too much left to lose; his family has just disowned him. But once his name appears in the newspaper, he’ll be fired from his job at Sloan’s Supermarket, where he’s risen to assistant manager of produce, and begin a journey that veers between political enlightenment and violent revenge.
The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: How much happiness is he allowed to have . . . and what share of it will he lay claim to?
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