Practically by design, novelists are people who honor the feelings and behaviors that connect us. But few things make them more skeptical than a community. The just-so surfaces of suburbia were a favorite target in postwar American fiction, from Peyton Place to “The Lottery” to the Rabbit novels. A small castle can be constructed out of novels satirizing the degradations of Marxist central planning. Postapocalyptic novels from YA (The Hunger Games) to literary fiction (Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea) reveal the folly of attempts to maintain order amid social chaos. Utopian societies? The only way those succeed is as a story prompt. T. C. Boyle (Drop City) and Lauren Groff (Arcadia) have set novels in such places only to collapse them, turn them into hubristic symbols of our inability to keep our reckless selves in check.

Adam Sternbergh feels no differently. But the neat trick of his third novel, The Blinds, is that he builds a smart, pulpy crime novel out of that material — it’s a critique of our best-intentioned it-takes-a-village sentiments that’s both more realistic and more weaponized than similar treatments. Calvin Cooper is the ad hoc sheriff in a West Texas community called the Blinds, founded by a well-funded institute that’s experimenting in erasing memories. Criminals and those who’ve suffered traumas have the uglier proteins in their brains zapped; in exchange for not being stalked by their memories of the havoc they wreaked (or experienced) in the outside world, the seventy-odd residents must stay within the town limits. “You are not in jail. You are not in hell,” a deputy explains to some new arrivals. “You are in Texas.”

The premise of the Blinds is so intriguing that you don’t dwell too much on that erasing-memories business, even though it’s the most volatile material you can pick up at the Hubristic Tropes Store. Sternbergh helps his cause by treating the matter gently, at least at first. The people responsible for doing the erasing are at a distance, genially described as “head scrubbers,” and the official name for the Blinds is Caesura — just a short pause, a tiny gap. Caesura is framed as an advanced version of the federal witness program, “a way to deal with . . . the killers, the serial rapists, the child predators, the ones who had knowledge and leverage.” Besides, too much else is going on with the plot to consider ethical consequences too closely. The supposedly gun-free town has experienced two gun deaths in a matter of weeks; residents are chafing against the lack of information in their Internet-free haven; and one resident, Fran, has become understandably concerned for the safety of her eight-year-old son — the only child in the Blinds.

“This is a fragile ecosystem we live in here,” Calvin informs the town, and there’s no clearer symbol of that fragility than Calvin himself, a lawman with no true authority except the trust he’s been given, and which is rapidly eroding. That fragility is also clear in the fake names that residents are forced to take as soon as they arrive, pulling one name from a list of old-school movie stars and another from a list of vice presidents. This gives reading The Blinds the pleasurable sense that its characters are populating a Turner Classic Movies marathon — Spiro Mitchum, Fran Adams, Hubert Gable, Hannibal Cagney. But the names are veneers. In time, it’s clear that the stories the residents are hiding are so brutal that they can’t help but force themselves to the surface. And Sternbergh isn’t polite about shocking us out of our hope for the community. How do you feel about animals set on fire? Or mass murder? (One resident, it turns out, was a gangster nicknamed “Costco,” because “he liked to kill in bulk.”)

Grand Guignol gestures like those are easier to swallow than the convoluted path Fran takes to learn the truth about the Blinds and her son. (It involves a tattoo and likely the only time in fiction or real life that a Susan Sontag book will be used to help solve a crime.) And the implications of the concept get a little messy in the telling in the closing chapters. Erasing memories: bad. OK. But recovering from that erasure, in The Blinds, can alternately endow you with newfound moral strength, resurface your old malevolence, or flood you with guilt. This range of behaviors might seem to speak to our messy humanity, too, if they didn’t seem like matters of plot mechanics, a way to ensure the appropriate person gets saved and/or gets a claw hammer lodged in their noggin.

But Sternbergh sells the basic point: We mess with our psyches at our peril, and one way we mess with our psyches is persuading ourselves that we’re just a few regulations away from maintaining order. “The minds of the guilty . . . are endlessly fascinating, once you really roll up your sleeves,” Sternbergh writes. Guilty of crimes, he means, but there are so many other kinds of guilt a novelist can play with, so many ways for a community to interestingly fail. Sternbergh may not even have to leave West Texas to keep exploring that idea. Every dystopian story, Margaret Atwood once wrote, ends with the suggestion of a possible utopia, and The Blinds closes with a reminder that the planned-community dream hasn’t die. “They only face the same challenges of every new hopeful settlement that’s ever been established in human history,” he writes. It’s a cautionary message. But it’s a pretty good setup for a sequel, too.

 

 

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“Well before I began writing about Vikings in The Half-Drowned King and its sequels, I had already fallen in love with books about ships and the sea. Beauty and hardship, grace and horror exist side-by-side in these narratives. They illuminate the heights and depths of what humanity is capable of while reminding us how small we are compared to the endless ocean. Here are a few of my very favorite books about ships and the sea.” — Linnea Hartsuker

 

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
By Susan Casey

To write The Wave, Susan Casey spent years with legendary surfer Laird Hamilton while he chased giant waves all over the globe. She experienced nearly 100-foot waves from the back of his Jet Ski and heard the surfers’ horrific wipeout stories told around the beach bonfires at night. Interspersed with Hamilton’s quest for the largest waves, Casey explores other facets of waves and discovers little we know about them. Freak waves, whose physics is still not understood, rise to three times the height those surrounding. At least two container ships sink or go missing with all hands every month. Lloyd’s of London got its start insuring shipping, a task that gets harder every year, while salvage operators descend on sinking ships to save their crew and cargo — for a price. Casey weaves all of these threads together into a narrative that is both gripping and informative.

The Horatio Hornblower Books
By C. S. Forester

You could start at the beginning of the story, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, or with the first books that Forester wrote: Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line, and Flying Colours (my preferred reading order), but either way, you will meet and be both charmed and exasperated by Horatio Hornblower, an officer in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Hornblower rises from modest origins, through the ranks, to become a very able seaman but is always tormented by his self-doubt and perfectionism. Forester’s ability to draw readers into the arcane world of a nineteenth-century warship is without parallel, and the action scenes will leave you breathless.

The Master and Commander Books
By Patrick O’Brian

O’Brian’s twenty-book series about Captain Jack Aubrey and amateur naturalist Stephen Maturin creates one of the great friendships in English literature. With O’Brian’s ear for nineteenth-century language, even though he was writing in the twentieth, these books make a wonderful parallel to Jane Austen’s novels. This is what Persuasion‘s Captain Wentworth was doing while Anne Elliot was regretting their parting. The first book is a bit heavy with nautical terms, even for someone who has read all of Hornblower, but worth it for the story, and all of those terms are well explained in Book 2 and beyond. Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship grows and changes, affecting both men, who are as different from one another as the cello and violin they play together.

The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition
By Caroline Alexander

Ernest Shackleton’s best-known voyage is remarkable as a successful failure. His ship was trapped in pack ice and crushed, leaving him and his twenty-seven men stranded on the ice floes. They made two attempts to escape in open ships in the treacherous Southern Atlantic before finally being rescued. Alexander’s narrative brings to life the varied personalities in the expedition, and Shackleton’s extraordinary leadership that brought them all to safety. This book also contains the photographs of Frank Hurley, the voyage’s photographer, here together for the first time.

The Terror
By Dan Simmons

If a book has hypothermia, cannibalism, or sailing in it, I’m probably going to be interested — combine all three, and I will read a 600-page book in one sitting, as I did with The Terror. The novel recreates Captain Franklin’s lost expedition in 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. Both of his ships, The Terror and The Erebus, are trapped in ice and eventually sink, while the captain and crew have to survive the cold, botulism from cheap canned food, and a mystical polar bear that stalks them. Simmons smoothly interweaves a historical recreation with memorable details and characters, while building a supernatural menace that lurks out on the ice. In the end, though, the threat that the men pose each other is as great as that of the cold spirits of the North.

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle
By Avi

This was probably the first novel I ever read about ships and the sea, and I read it until it fell apart. Geared toward eight-to-twelve-year-olds, this book is still wonderful for all ages, telling the story of the young Charlotte Doyle, sent from England in 1832 to rejoin her family in the United States. She is meant to travel with a family that will chaperon her but finds herself the only passenger on a ship captained by a man whose mistreatment of his crew soon sparks a mutiny. Charlotte must make herself into a sailor and clear herself of a murder charge before the voyage is over. Charlotte is a wonderful protagonist, with a good heart but much to learn. If you ever fantasized about running away to sea, this is the book for you.

 

The Scar
By China Miéville

In China Miéville’s strange world of Bas Lag, Bellis Coldwine is a linguist whose part in a revolutionary plot condemns her to transportation to a prison colony. But her ship is captured by the Armada, a floating pirate city. As the Armada chases the Godwhale, an enormous creature that will give them speed, Bellis must understand their true goals and navigate the strange world of the Armada. Miéville’s fantasy is like no other, bringing the reader into a world of horrifying grotesqueries and astonishing beauty.

 

 

Colony
By Anne Rivers Siddons

No list of books about the sea is complete without a beach read and Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons is the type of long book you can get lost in. Spanning nearly seventy years, it tells the story of Maude Chambliss, a wild southern girl who marries into a blue-blooded New England family and spends her summers at Retreat vacation colony on Cape Rosier in northern Maine. While fighting for her family’s survival against the mental illness that runs in their blood, she learns to love the rugged Maine landscape. The sea takes her loved ones from her and gives her back herself. The descriptions of harsh and beautiful landscapes make this a book you’ll want to move into.

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Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

You never know where the idea for a great story is going to come from. For the writer Imbolo Mbue, a scene glimpsed as she strolled through a bustling New York City neighborhood offered the inspiration for her first novel. Six years later, her novel Behold the Dreamers was tapped as the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick. In this episode the Cameroonian-American author talks with Bill Tipper about how her moving, timely tale of two very different families was born.

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A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream—the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy.

Find out more about Imbolo Mbue here.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

 

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