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Just Checking: Scenes from the life of an obsessive-compulsive by Emily Colas

From Booklist
Colas worries a lot. She fears that the baby-sitter is using the family's toothbrushes. She suspects someone has tampered with her Cap'n Crunch. An obsessive-compulsive mother of two, Colas makes worry an art. This anecdotal, first-person account of Colas' illness is highly readable and funny. It also benefits from one of the symptoms of the illness (which affects 2.5 percent of Americans over the life course): a vague awareness that something is awry. At its best, Just Checking is a lighthearted glimpse of a treatable illness. But it's not the whole story. After she runs over a chipmunk, Colas repeatedly returns to the scene to verify that she has not killed a child. Behind the comic behaviors that Colas emphasizes is a gnawing disorder that is often painful and frightening. One hopes that Colas will take up her pen again, explore this part of her experience, and risk the darkness.

Slapboxing with Jesus by Victor LaValle
Amazon.com
Victor D. LaValle grew up in Queens, New York, an African American male in a city and a country where guys who look like him are made to feel like interlopers. His debut collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, is hard-edged, violent, poetic. As in Junot Diaz's Drown, the prose is a series of choppy, precise sentences, like jabs ("The NYU banners flapped with the wind, loud enough to sound like teeth cracking in your head"), and the stories take place in small stuffy apartments where walls are inadequate shields against the loud and inescapable neighborhood.

Like Diaz, LaValle is pretty merciless when it comes to the subject of women. As the title suggests, this is a macho book. The opening sentence of the first story begins, "The next morning I was still scratching my nuts." Readers without nuts might be a little put off. The love that occurs in these pages is between brothers, between guys who have known each other since they were kids and who have tried to bail each other out, set each other up, find a whore they can both share. In the powerful three-page story "Chuckie," even boyhood bonds break apart in the face of a violent Italian gang. When the title character is beat up, the narrator realizes that he can only protect himself: "The blood started coming. I didn't know a face had so much. Helping was still an option for the others, but not me..."

The highlight of the book is "Ghost Story." Like Denis Johnson's famous "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," it renders paranoid delusions from the first person--and bit by bit the prose collapses as the narrator's medication wears off. Here he recalls a stint in a mental hospital:

"Just the hours that were eons sitting on a couch, a row of ten of you, ten or twenty, no books, magazines too simple for the mildly retarded and your active mind leaps further and further over an empty cosmos, as lonely as the satellites sent to find life in the universe. But in there, at least, was when I'd realized how they waged their war, my enemies: through sockets and plugs, through a current."

Such passages establish LaValle as a writer to be reckoned with, one capable of transporting the reader to a strange and terrible interior.