A Brief History of Yes

Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, "A Brief History of Yes"--her first since 2008's scathing and erotic "The Mirror in the Well"--as a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of "saudade"--meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irreparably lost. "A Brief History of Yes" tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American literature has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.