Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Eleanor Catton’s title, Birman Wood, should immediately make the reader think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; however, Catton isn’t writing a contemporary retelling. That said, Catton’s characters have ambition and are willing to do what they need to do to achieve those ambitions, but the characters are more nuanced than in a typical tragedy. Mira has created Birnam Wood, a collective that legally (and not) plants crops in undeveloped areas, but is struggling to stay afloat and might suffer because of Mira’s ego. She meets Robert Lemoine—an American billionaire who has created the persona of a doomsday prepper to purchase land in New Zealand for which he has other, even-less-savory plans—and he agrees to help Mira fund a development on the land he has not quite purchased. Tony used to be a member of Birnam Wood, but he has been teaching overseas for the past several years and now wants a career in investigative journalism, so he sees a career-propelling story in Lemoine’s plans. Shelley has been working with Mira since Tony left, but she’s now considering leaving Birnam Wood, tired of Mira and of living on the margins. While the clearest tragedy in the novel is climate change—the moving of woods, in a different sense—there will be others, and, as in a Shakespearean drama, perhaps nobody is innocent.

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Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, March 2023.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.

Guest Post by Kevin Brown

Jem Calder’s collection of interlocking short stories in Reward System follows a group of British Millennials, focusing on Julia and Nick, as they try to navigate relationships, technology, and jobs during the approaching pandemic. Calder renders his characters with sympathy and compassion, even when they make poor decisions, given the challenges they face. Julia and Nick (and their friends) live with roommates or their parents, move from one job to the next—sometimes by choice, sometimes not—and try to find ways to truly connect with those around them. Society exacerbates all of these problems, whether the structural oppression women (especially) push against or the technology that more often separates than connects (though not always). This focus on technology works especially well in the stories “Distraction from Sadness Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness” and “The Foreseeable.” In “Distraction” a female user of a dating app connects with and meets a male user (Calder uses no names), exploring the new dating landscape, for good and ill. “The Foreseeable” ends the collection, as Julia and Nick are both sheltering with their parents during the pandemic—one more enjoyably than the other—while talking via FaceTime. The connection keeps breaking in and out, a metaphor for all of the relationships in this collection.

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Reward System by Jem Calder. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, July 2022.

Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.