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Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Rogan's second novel (after The Lifeboat) begins with a middle-aged woman's moral awakening, when she discovers that the radioactive weaponry her employer produces can injure soldiers using it and damage unborn children. While working as an administrative assistant at a munitions plant in Red Bud, Okla., Maggie Rayburn reads a top-secret report (left unattended on her boss's desk) detailing how to discredit evidence that the weapons are poisonous and unreliable. Maggie quits her job and goes to work for Red Bud's only other employer: the prison. After learning about the incarceration of innocent men and the economics of prison labor, she leaves that job, as well as her husband and high school-age son, to assist a civil rights attorney in Phoenix. Meanwhile, back in Red Bud, her family needs her and authorities pursue her. Paralleling Maggie's story is that of a group of soldiers serving in Iraq before returning home and unable to resume their former lives. They too undertake a project fueled by good intentions, fraught with unintended consequences. Linking Maggie and the veterans is a midwife- a soldier's girlfriend-who notices an increase in birth defects. Rogan delineates the journey from outrage to action to doubt, contrasting mundane routines with the philosophical dilemmas of ordinary people. Vested interests, including those of threatening policemen and a consoling pastor, make it difficult to do the right thing, as do complications resulting from every choice. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique du Guardian
Which all makes Now & Again sound like a boring philosophical treatise. It isn't at all (though it is, possibly, a little too long). As in The Lifeboat, [Charlotte Rogan] has an excellent grip of the necessary satisfactions of plot, and of both structure and character. (An architect by training, she worked in construction for years, then wrote in secret for decades while bringing up triplets.) She confidently and swiftly builds a complex, three-dimensional lattice of allegiance and affect that stretches from the US to Iraq, working across a far greater area than in The Lifeboat, where the setting was the boat, a prison cell, and, briefly, a city street or two. Again, she sets her characters up with economy and particularity, creating contrasting voices, educations and families with ease. Though the cast is large, she never steps back into an obvious authorial omniscience; rather, she moves from interiority to interiority, further complicated by a Greek chorus of townspeople and experts quoted -- presumably from a later court case or inquiry -- at the beginning of each chapter. "Everyone assumed Lyle [[Maggie Rayburn]'s husband] and I were having an affair. That's how it is in Red Bud." "It was like trying to put out a brush fire. You'd stamp it out in one place, only to turn around and find some other parent using her as an example to their kids." No one has a picture of the whole; they come to partial, sometimes inaccurate conclusions, though many begin, as events unfurl, to become "newly aware of a great web of networked futures" of which they are a part. A woman glimpses secret documents at a munitions plant and is faced with a profound moral quandary in this confident followup to The Lifeboat American author Charlotte Rogan's widely praised first novel, The Lifeboat, took a bare minimum of pages to wreck a passenger liner, set 39 people adrift in an overfilled lifeboat on the Atlantic ocean, and force them to ask the big questions. What to do if the choice is between one's own survival or the survival of the majority? Who lives and who dies? Her second novel takes an even shorter time to set the questions running. We meet Maggie Rayburn at the same moment in which she sees a secret document on her boss's desk; she works at a munitions plant that, among other things, makes shells containing depleted uranium. "Discredit the doctors," she reads. "Flood the system with contradictory reports." What should she do? Initially the answer seems simple: take the document as evidence and quit her job. Quite quickly, however, things don't seem so straightforward. If, like the Good Samaritan, you leave your side of the street -- your family, your community -- how does it affect them? The munitions plant, and then the prison, where Maggie finds another job, unsurprisingly discovering calumny there, too, are the only big employers in town. Take them on, and what are the ramifications for those closest to you? How much (action being an implicit criticism of inaction) will you upset the people who didn't cross the street? And once you try to salve one hurt, where do you stop? Maggie, waking to action at 39, begins to realise that goodness is not the simple thing she once thought it to be. How, for instance, does one disentangle ego from moral action? When does kindness shade into selfishness, and does it matter if it does? At what point does thinking you know what to do become arrogance, or hubris? Rogan has an excellent grip of the necessary satisfactions of plot, and of both structure and character Which all makes Now & Again sound like a boring philosophical treatise. It isn't at all (though it is, possibly, a little too long). As in The Lifeboat, Rogan has an excellent grip of the necessary satisfactions of plot, and of both structure and character. (An architect by training, she worked in construction for years, then wrote in secret for decades while bringing up triplets.) She confidently and swiftly builds a complex, three-dimensional lattice of allegiance and affect that stretches from the US to Iraq, working across a far greater area than in The Lifeboat, where the setting was the boat, a prison cell, and, briefly, a city street or two. Again, she sets her characters up with economy and particularity, creating contrasting voices, educations and families with ease. Though the cast is large, she never steps back into an obvious authorial omniscience; rather, she moves from interiority to interiority, further complicated by a Greek chorus of townspeople and experts quoted -- presumably from a later court case or inquiry -- at the beginning of each chapter. "Everyone assumed Lyle [Maggie's husband] and I were having an affair. That's how it is in Red Bud." "It was like trying to put out a brush fire. You'd stamp it out in one place, only to turn around and find some other parent using her as an example to their kids." No one has a picture of the whole; they come to partial, sometimes inaccurate conclusions, though many begin, as events unfurl, to become "newly aware of a great web of networked futures" of which they are a part. Rogan's language is clear and clean, though where in The Lifeboat it was almost remorseless, like the water, in Now & Again she has given herself more latitude for embellishment. Occasionally, she can't help but clean things up, square off corners, spell things out. Some well-drawn characters are not developed, and one sometimes misses the subtle open-ended complexities of the woman who narrates The Lifeboat. Rogan is clearly angry about things, and sometimes authorial anger bleeds through -- at the establishment (army generals, munitions manufacturers, private prison management) whose nest-feathering so clearly harms those unlucky enough to work for them/fight for them/be incarcerated by them. But in the main, Now & Again is persuasive in its unpicking of assumptions both large-scale and supposedly small. "And anyway, who really knows who they are?" asks Maggie's son, left by his mother to the limbo between high school and the rest of his life. "I do," his girlfriend replies. "At least I used to know." * To order Now & Again for [pound]12.99 (RRP [pound]16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Aida Edemariam.
Critique de Kirkus
After The Lifeboat (2012), a tightly focused first novel with a morally ambiguous narrator, Rogan takes an opposite approach in this outraged tale of a number of characters impacted by America's military-industrial juggernaut. In Oklahoma, 39-year-old Maggie Rayburn quits her secretarial job at a munitions plant after swiping a disturbing document she found on her boss's desk, which said, "Discredit the doctors. Flood the system with contradictory reports." She hides the folder in her house alongside a letter she'd received from local midwife Dolly Jackson that implied the factory is causing health problems in the community. Maggie takes up more causes at her next job, at the local prison: an inmate railroaded by the legal system and the prison's conspiracy to provide slave labor to the munitions factory. Maggie finds herself at cloak-and-dagger cross-purposes with a cartoonishly evil triumvirate of local power brokersher former boss at the factory, the head of the prison, and her own minister. More believably, her new sense of purpose endangers her marriage to likable husband Lyle and sets their teenage son, Will, on an unexpected course of self-discovery. Meanwhile, in Iraq, a convoy of soldiers is attacked the same day their tours have been automatically extended for the "surge." The surviving soldiers return home emotionally wounded. A head injury leaves angry Le Roy Jones able to see life only in binary terms; doctors change the diagnosis of Dolly's boyfriend, bookish Danny Joiner, from post-traumatic stress disorder to personality disordera pre-existing conditionto save the Army money. Capt. Penn Sinclair, feeling guilty that he led them into danger, brings the men back together to create an anti-war website that becomes a magnet for righteous anger. Soon the site broadens its targets to include munitions factories and prisons, and thus is manufactured a tangential connection between the soldiers and Maggie. A complex bundle of motives, Maggie raises provocative questions about the value and cost of moral empathy, but the soldiers' stories remain schematic at best. Rogan ends up trumpeting her politics so loudly that she drowns out the emotional response from readers, even those sharing her views. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
Maggie Rayburn, an administrative assistant at a munitions plant in Red Bud, Oklahoma, just wants to do what's right. So she takes a top-secret report about a cover-up of the plant's chemicals' effects on its workers and community from her boss' desk, then quits her job, but continues to buck the system. Her story is interspersed with that of an army forward-support battalion in Iraq, whose members (including the boyfriend of a Red Bud midwife who is delivering babies with birth defects) just had their tours extended by a stop loss order. When a supply convoy is ambushed with five men killed, Captain Penn Sinclair is ordered to destroy his report and do a whitewash, an action that continues to weigh on him. The two story lines coalesce with the start of a truth-telling website by Sinclair and former members of his unit that soon captures public interest. Finding mendacity in both public and private sectors, Rogan (The Lifeboat, 2012), whose army-based sections are the strongest in the book, offers a heartfelt exploration of doing right and its consequences.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2016 Booklist
Critique du Library Journal
Maggie Rayburn works in a munitions plant. After she snags a confidential report from her boss's desk and learns that the munitions she is helping to produce are likely causing cancer in those who have close contact with them, she changes jobs to work in a high-security prison, only to find that some of the prisoners there have been wrongly convicted. She collects evidence at this job as well. She escapes arrest only by leaving town. Meanwhile, a group of Iraq War vets set up a website on which they disclose information about the war and other issues, including the classified documents that Maggie collected, and are pressured by the government to take down the site. Rogan (The Lifeboat) captures the difficulty of choosing one cause among many and sticking with that cause for long enough to make a difference. This work is well read by Christine Lakin, Ade M'Cormack, Aaron Landon, Kiff VandenHeuvel, John Glouchevitch, and Kathleen McInerney. VERDICT Readers of general fiction, especially those with an interest in social justice, will enjoy this book. ["Seemingly unrelated story threads are ingeniously woven into an explosive whole": LJ 5/15/16 starred review of the Little, Brown hc.]-Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
