From the Mojave Desert in 1957 to San Francisco in the 1980s, between Texas, Ohio and South America, the American Kathleen Alcott, born in 1988, traces the intimate and sinuous trajectory of her characters.
She gives them as a backdrop in America’s Other Discoveryhis first novel translated into French, a series of events that marked American history in the second half of the 20th century.and century: the explosion of consumerism, the first space missions, the Vietnam War and the opposition movements of a rebellious youth.
Born into a Californian family as rich as it is puritanical, Fay Fern, a 19-year-old bartender, will have an extramarital affair for two and a half years with a pilot from the Edwards base, Vincent Kahn. In 1960, she gave birth to a son, Wright, a few months after returning to live with her parents. Her lover will never know she was pregnant, and her son will never know the identity of his father.
Lucid and precocious, Fay had quickly understood “that there were women whom men loved, those whose voice, above the running water in the kitchen, was familiar, whose handwriting they could counterfeit if they were pushed there, and then there were women like her”.
After a stay in Ecuador to work with an NGO, the young woman will return to the United States to engage in violent actions against the Vietnam War, living in hiding with her son. His son who will later have to pick up the pieces of his identity as best he can.
Vincent, an astronaut who has become famous, the first man to have walked on the Moon, seems to have succeeded in his life without asking too many questions, while Fay will go from one failure to another, even sacrificing her son a little to the passage, carried by his revolt and his misunderstood desire to change things. What is a successful life? Is personal morality soluble in ideals?
With breath and fluidity, the novelist intertwines the destinies of the two protagonists of this abundant and ambitious novel. To write it, Kathleen Alcott was able to collect the memories of Alan Bean (1932-2018), one of the astronauts who walked on the ground of the Moon during the mission Apollo-12 of 1969. But in America’s Other Discoveryit was Vincent Kahn, rather than Neil Armstrong, who became the first man to walk on the Moon.
Beneath the brilliance, in the shadow of “heroes”, of exploits, in the wake of great causes and their activists, there is another country, perhaps truer than that of the legends, also tells us Kathleen Alcott. America’s Other Discovery also outlines an implicit criticism of the endless spectacle that the country gives of its own power.
America’s blind spot
With a more conventional narration, David Joy somehow explores the hidden side of his country, and what we discover there is nothing magical. Since Where the lights get lost (Sonatine, 2016), the novelist who lives in Appalachia, North Carolina, writes “stories full of drugs, violence, poverty, rooted in the atmosphere that goes with it”.
In David Joy’s novels in black and green, the Appalachians form a landscape made up of forests and mobile homes, pickups, drug addicts and poachers. It’s a kind of blind spot, a region that has been hit hard in recent years by the opioid crisis. Crack, heroin or OxyContin, it is nothing other than “the remedy that made it possible to escape from systemic poverty, the result of a policy that privileged profits at the expense of the population for 200 years”.
Born in 1983 in Charlotte, North Carolina, David Joy lives in the heart of the Blue Mountains, where he divides his time, writes his publisher, “between writing, hunting, fishing and manual work”. The opioid crisis forms the fabric of Our lives in flameshis fourth novel.
A sort of “giant with forearms as thick as fence posts”, with a ZZ Top beard, the character Raymond Mathis retired after 30 years in the Forest Service. His wife recently died of cancer and his son is a drug addict. Might as well say that he doesn’t have much left.
As wildfires rage across the region, Ray must resolve to once again help his son, perhaps in vain. Since then, Our lives in flames will take the form of a story of revenge against a local trafficker. Sensitive souls refrain.
Besieged by death, the old man cashes in without really understanding what is happening to him, seeing his world gradually disappear, go up in smoke. “The world he grew up in, where a man paid his debts and kept his word, was gone. He barely even recognized this place. Things had changed, and they continued to do so. »
A good portrait painter, David Joy brings life to everything he touches. From the little cameo thief to the gruff colossus who handles the cut-up twelve pump without flinching, he composes a heavy and twilight atmosphere.