The Scheme for Full Employment

In The Scheme for Full Employment, Magnus Mills imagines a world where everyone is employed. You might think everyone would be happy in such a world, given the security of a regular income, the routine of daily work, community with colleagues and the like. But not everyone wants the kind of job that is so routine that it doesn’t allow for individuality. And such a set up inevitably becomes an inefficient, unwieldy way of doing things.

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

How to review Percival Everett by Virgil Russell? It’s a novel that confounds. On the face of it, it’s a conversation between an aging father and his son. Or perhaps it’s an aging father saying the things he wished he’d said to his now-dead son. Or perhaps, as claimed by the father, it’s a novel written by him in the style he thinks his son would use if his son was a writer. Or maybe it’s the son imagining a conversation with his now dead father.

It’s a book about loss, regret, grief and letting go. It is dedicated to Percival Everett’s father, also Percival Everett, who died three years before its publication. It questions reality and examines writing as an act of creation, taking ideas and spinning them into something more, something that allows both author and reader to change, to also become more. Or less, depending on the context.

Verdigris

Like a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris takes place over a single summer; the summer of 1969. Unlike a Bryan Adams song, Verdigris squirms with horror and questions what makes reality. In that summer of ’69, the novel’s narrator Michelino is 13 and a half years old (the half year is important to him) and spending the holiday with his grandparents in Nasca, Italy. Neither grandparent takes an interest in the boy, and he is left to entertain himself. That entertainment doesn’t include buying a guitar and starting a band. Michelino is far too esoteric for that.