LEMON by Cordelia Strube (Coach House), 274 pages, $19.95 paper. Rating: NN
Cordelia Strube just keeps getting angrier.
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Fury can make for powerful fiction, but not if rage is the only operative emotion. That’s the problem with Strube’s new novel. It features one voice in an unrelenting rant that gives the work no texture.
It’s told from the point of view of Lemon, a brilliant high schooler coping with abandonment issues – she’s an adopted child. School is one big drag. She’s better read than most of her teachers and has been targeted in nasty ways by members of the football team and the popular girls.
Strube can be astonishingly good. Her prose is at times incendiary, and the aptly named Lemon’s bitter riffs on the various ways the world is going straight to hell show an impressive awareness.
But these extended raps work better as part of a dialogue with someone else – her lectures on the Holocaust to her classmates or the school librarian work really well – than as detours within the narration.
In Strube’s previous book, Planet Reese, the freaked-out, eco-obsessed hero was balanced by his wife, who was equally distressed because Reese was terrifying the kids.
Here there are some interesting characters: Rossi, Lemon’s self-hating best friend and school ex-principal Drew, Lemon’s step-mother, who’s recovering from a stabbing wound.
But Lemon sets the tone, and it’s way too sour.
Strube’s Lemon is part of Coach House’s fall launch tonight (Thursday, October 15). See Readings.
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