Shelter in Place

July 25, 2016
Finding peace and learning to deal with the consequences of one’s actions are just two of the many thematic currents pulsing through Maksik’s scorching third novel (after A Marker to Measure Drift). Set in various towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and hurtling back and forth in time from the early 1990s to the present, the bleak story is narrated by Joe March, whose mother, Anne-Marie, is sent to jail in 1991 when Joe is 20. Around the same time, Joe meets Tess—the love of his life—and after a period of brief separation, the two move to White Pine, Wash., where the prison is located. Anne-Marie’s crime—hammering a man to death in a grocery store parking for abusing his wife—soon attracts the admiration of female followers (including Tess) who have “run out of patience” and “have reached their limit” of what they’ll accept from men. In the second half of the book, Tess hatches a plot to punish a wife-beating neighbor and involves Joe, allowing Maksik to deliver a portrait of Joe’s bipolar disorder—which he describes as a “creeping tar” and “a blue-black bird, its talons piercing my lung”—that is honest and devastating. Both the meandering story and the way Joe expresses his thoughts feel accurately claustrophobic. Where Maksik really excels is in his unrestrained depiction of a perpetually broken man who can’t help loving volatile, vulnerable Tess, all the while desperately figuring out how to forgive the woman who raised him. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment.

July 1, 2016
Maksik firmly creates the "place" as the Pacific Northwest, though his characters have a difficult time finding any kind of "shelter"--from place or from each other.After graduating from an undemanding college, Joe March finds himself a bit lost. He works part time as a bartender and meets Tess Wolff, a free-spirited young woman with something of a wild streak. Besides developing a relationship with Tess, two things haunt Joe's life. First, he starts to feel the beginnings of bipolar disorder, a disease he characterizes with the metaphors of "tar" and "a bird" whose talons grip him fiercely. Second, Joe's mother, Anne-Marie, witnesses an act of bullying in a grocery store parking lot, and she takes action by seizing a framing hammer and killing the perpetrator of the violence. (Her defense is weakened by the fact that she delivers seven blows with the hammer, which suggests the level of her rage.) She's tried, found guilty, and given five-to-25 years. Maksik offers up all of this plot in a chronologically convoluted narrative, moving back and forth to various fragments of his characters' complicated histories. This strategy serves the narrative well, for it emphasizes the recurring significance of family ties and obligations. After an initial separation, Tess eventually finds Joe and visits Anne-Marie in prison. Along with a number of other women, Tess finds herself admiring Anne-Marie for taking a definitive stand against domestic violence, and she persuades Joe and Seymour, a bouncer at a local bar as well as a prison guard, to get involved in a wacko plot to take revenge on a local college professor who's physically abusing his wife. On every page we're reminded of the paradox of how mysterious, thorny, and delicate family relationships can be.

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November 15, 2016

In the 1990s Pacific Northwest, Joseph March is a happy-go-lucky guy fresh out of college and uninterested in following snooty older sister Claire's quest for a better, more cultured life when he's hit by an overwhelming sense of inertness, as if he were drowning in tar. He's suffering from the onset of bipolar disorder, something he soon realizes that he shares with his mother, who's always been rather wayward but has now been convicted of beating a man to death with a hammer. Joe's father sells his business and moves near the prison where his wife is confined. Joe eventually follows, reluctantly leaving behind the passionate, electric Tess, with whom he's deeply in love. But Tess comes after him, and what unfolds is an exacting tale of desperate people taking desperate measures as they crash up against the enduring rock of love. VERDICT Maksik (A Marker To Measure Drift) perfectly captures the weight of mental illness, the ache of longing and uncertainty, and the complexity of human relationships. Highly recommended.

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