Review: Steve Yarbrough's "The Unmade World" Races at Thriller Speed

“The Unmade World.” By Steve Yarbrough. Unbridled Press. 384 pages. $18.
Editor’s Note: Steve Yarbrough will read and sign copies of “The Unmade World” at 5 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 31, at Off Square Books.
“The Unmade World,” by Steve Yarbrough, is a novel for readers who know the fiction of John Le Carré and Raymond Chandler, books in which landscape and plot twists say as much as characters and conclusions. “The Unmade World” is not a conventional thriller, but it races at thriller speed, features ruined businessmen and troubled reporters, deals with crime and betrayal, and proves as dark and quick-witted as Le Carré or Chandler.
The book unfolds in recent time: a freezing night in 2006, the bone-dry summer of 2009, and a college semester in 2016. It has two plot strands, cutting between Poland and California. One protagonist is Bodgan Baranowski, a battered Polish businessman. After Communism collapsed, he ran a chain of grocery stores, until larger chains drove him out of business. Bogdan must decide whether to struggle or drift in the emerging economy, a world of fierce rivals and new humiliations (his wife has left him for a younger woman). The other protagonist is Richard Brennan, a reporter in Fresno, hit just as hard by personal tragedy, who has to tackle a scoop that could change his career.

Fleeing the scene of a bungled burglary, Bogdan spun his car on an icy road, wrecking a car in which Richard and his family were driving. Richard’s wife and daughter died. Bogdan knows that the man he saw in the wrecked car was a journalist from California; he can track Richard on the Internet. Richard knows Bogdan only as a face seen through a shattered window: “A receding hairline, graying eyebrows, a chipped tooth. Smallish eyes. To the left of an unremarkable nose, a large mole cleft in the middle, as if two separate growths have tried and failed to merge. A face destined to be forgotten by everyone, except the man who’s seeing it right now.”
More than Bogdan or Richard, the reader knows what connects them. When Richard returns to Krakow and heads for a café where Bogdan is sitting, only the reader will sense what may happen when their paths converge.
The book is kaleidoscopic, in a loud, grim way. The narrative pulses like a CNN newsfeed, leaping from man-in-the-street views of Poland to a grisly crime scene in Fresno, while TV anchormen patter away and factoids scroll across the bottom of the screen. The fall of Communism and the rise of the Internet have opened up the world, but people have not grown wiser. (If a teenager is in trouble with drugs in Warsaw, will it help to ship him to a California suburb?) When characters lie, they reveal more than when they try to tell the truth. Bogdan is hired to drive elderly tenants out of apartments by vandalizing their buildings. Caught and questioned by the police, he explains that he is “drawn to old buildings that remind him of himself.”
“The Unmade World” is a strong book by a capable and talented author. Yarbrough has written before of Mississippi, in novels that span the years from the Jim Crow era (“Visible Spirits”) to the Second World War (“Prisoners of War”) to the Delta catfish boom of the 1980’s (“The Oxygen Man”). Mississippi readers will recognize him as a native of Indianola.  They will not be surprised to learn, in light of the vitality of this book’s Polish settings and characters, that the author’s wife, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, is a native of Krakow.

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Allen Boyer is the Book Editor of HottyToddy.com.