Can the literary novel ever really get its arms around the problem of human evil? It keeps trying — a difficult assignment for the poor beast. In any case, an undaunted Alexander Maksik has brought his skills to this very problem. His second novel, A Marker to Measure Drift, recounts a season of homeless exile in the life of a 24-year-old Liberian woman fleeing an episode of gruesome violence incidental to the overthrow of the tyrant Charles Ghankay Taylor, in 2003. Maksik has produced a bold book, and an instructive one.
James Ellroy’s astonishing Underworld USA Trilogy … is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.
