Chevy in the Hole

October 1, 2021

Following some attention-getting short stories, Ali's Good Intentions features a young British Pakistani man named Nur who must break it to his family on New Year's Eve that the woman he truly loves isn't Pakistani but Black (60,000-copy first printing). Set in Trinidad and Tobago, Banwo's When We Were Birds brings together Yejide, raised in a Port Angeles house built on the remains of a plantation whose owners enslaved her ancestors and left unprepared by her mother for her task in life--ferrying the city's souls into the afterlife--and Darwin, who must disregard the religious commandments of his true-believing Rastafarian mother and accept the only job he can find: that of grave digger. Stuck on her dissertation about the late canonical poet Xiao-Wen Chou, Taiwanese American Ingrid Yang follows down a mysterious archival reference in Chou's Disorientation and ends up acknowledging her anger with academia and white institutions generally. Following up Clark's own questions about the children of victims of Argentina's Dirty War in the 1970s, On a Night of a Thousand Stars features Paloma, an Argentine diplomat's college-age daughter, whose probing questions about her father's involvement in the military dictatorship put her family, her sense of self, and her very life in danger (30,000-copy first printing). In Friedman's Here Lies, climate change-mauled 2040s Louisiana requires cremation rather than burial at death, and Alma fights to reclaim her mother's ashes for a final journey. Cofounder of the Lit Camp Writers Conference, Kravetz reimagines events surrounding the composition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., which are related from the perspectives of Plath's psychiatrist, a nasty rival poet, and a curator years later (100,000-copy first printing). A Canadian film and television producer (she's responsible for the hit CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie), Nawaz crafts the story of a feckless young woman whose new imam expects better of her, and though there's the risk that Jameela Green Ruins Everything, she is on the case in an absurdist sort of way when he disappears. In Ronan's Chevy's in the Hole, a white man struggling to kick his drug habit and a Black woman working as an urban farmer try to make a go of it together in Flint, MI, as the water is becoming poisoned, with family histories woven in (50,000-copy first printing). In Stringfellow's Memphis, ten-year-old Joan flees her father's violence with her mother and sister to the house built in the historic Black district of Memphis by her grandfather, who was lynched only days after becoming the city's first Black detective.

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January 15, 2022
An unlikely romance develops in the shadows of post-industrial Flint, Michigan. After a near-fatal drug overdose in 2014, August Molloy moves from Detroit back to his hometown of Flint. There, he picks up work at a nonprofit community garden, where he meets Monae Livingston. The two are alert to their differences in terms of race (he's White, she's Black) and class (August's family is perpetually down-at-the-heels, Monae is the niece of a civic leader). But as the novel alternates between 2014 and signature moments over the decades prior, more common ground emerges: They're both products of Flint's once-mighty economy (the title refers to the former site of a Chevrolet assembly plant) and a host of family secrets, from quiet affairs to mob killings. The connection between the two is symbolized by a modest-selling 1960s R&B single August inherited from his grandmother that's become a high-ticket collectors' item--the proceeds of which August is eager to use to purchase a cheap new home and reboot. Monae is skeptical, and the tone of Ronan's debut echoes that feeling: At every point in time the author finds a city that feels entropic, prone to deceit, collapse, and pollution. (The city's water crisis plays a key role in the plot.) Individual chapters make for some fine set pieces, like a tryst undone by a tornado, Monae's uncles witnessing the Detroit riots, and a 1967 incident in which Who drummer Keith Moon drives a car into a Flint hotel swimming pool. Ronan takes on a lot of themes, symbols, and history, which makes the overall time-hopping narrative feel clunky at times. But she has ambition to spare and an engaging melancholic style, especially when she's in August's head. ("He thought moving to Detroit established a sixty-mile-long no-man's-land between him and his mistakes.") A smart Rust Belt love story informed by its location's complex history.

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January 17, 2022
Ronan debuts with a tender and hardscrabble story of love and pain. After 26-year-old Gus Molloy is saved from an opioid overdose in 2014, he drifts through the factory ruins of Flint, Mich., with an aimless and heavy heart. Intrigued by a new project in town called Frontier Farms, he volunteers and meets Monae, who studies environmental science and dreams of making Flint better by turning empty lots into gardens. Braided with Gus and Monae’s burgeoning love story is the rough and tumble history of the city (a worker strike in 1937, the rise of the local music scene in 1953, Keith Moon crashing a car into the Holiday Inn in 1967) as told through the experiences of their ancestors—and the secrets they kept. As the couple dreams of a future together, the water crisis looms on the horizon. Ronan’s characters brim with resilience, and their survival reflects the highs and lows of the site referenced in the title, a Chevrolet factory left to ruin and later reclaimed as a park. Ronan ably humanizes a city known for the pity it’s elicited for many decades.

Starred review from February 15, 2022
Just as Flint itself is a city under attack by the forces of industry, politics, and the environment, the central characters in Ronan's first novel are besieged by the traumas they've inherited from the generations who preceded them. Gus, a white man recovering from drug addiction, volunteers at an urban gardening project run by Monae, a Black grad student. Their tentative relationship doesn't so much blossom from friendship to romance but rather emerges much as a wildflower will rise through a crack in a slab of concrete. They are haunted by ghosts of absent and errant fathers, of ailing grandmothers with secret pasts, of mothers who either care too much or not enough. When Gus and Monae finally marry and have a child, their dreams of joining Flint's urban revolution are hampered by the city's water crisis and its potential effect on their daughter. As Flint native Ronan's rich and unflinching saga sways through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, it reveals a decaying city once at the heart of America's industrial and cultural identity. The intimate histories in this stunning and masterful debut reveal universal truths of renewal and redemption at individual and societal levels.

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