Richard Melo’s novel Happy Talk begins deceptively, with a group of American nurses-in-training living in relative isolation in Haiti. It is through them that the reader first encounters the novel’s globetrotting central character, the distinctively named Culprit Clutch, and it’s through Clutch that the novel’s larger canvas emerges, involving Cold War-era government plots, car crashes, supernatural curses, and more. Did I mention that the novel is told largely through dialogue? Or that Melo’s free-associative approach incorporates everything from documentary filmmaking to radical […]