December 5, 2011
Struggling artist Margaret, living a Spartan existence in New York for two decades, decides to start a new life in (presumably) idyllic Albuquerque, a city she’s never visited. Once there, she hires welder Rico Garcia to teach her metal sculpting, and Rico views her request as a come-on even though he’s married. He makes a move, Margaret coolly shoots him down, and his shame is so genuine that she forgives him and they set to work. The path of this unusual, incongruous friendship forms the bulk of Mars’s novel, accompanied by lengthy interior monologues. A dissonant thread runs through the book, focusing on an imprisoned soldier whose relationship to the other characters is revealed incrementally through very short chapters. Mars (Anybody Any Minute) taps a potent fantasy and writes prose that captures moments observed in closeup; she turns a smile into a reverie and then a kind of celebration. This makes her writing very poetic, and readers who favor plot may lose patience. The writing can also be pretentious; a character declares, “Margaret, please let me help unravel the wad you use to get through life.” But Mars makes insightful observations on the nature of friendship and intimacy.