Taste, Mad Honey, and We All Want Impossible Things Redeem January

There's nothing like an excellent food memoir to redeem a month of reading--thank you, Stanley Tucci! A couple of novels also "came through"--though there were also lots of disappointments. More below.

Fiction

Less Is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer, picks up several years after the events of Less. Our hero's former boyfriend whose marriage to a younger man sent Less off on his worldwide journey, has divorced and returned to his relationship with Less. This time, the impetus setting Less off on a trek across the U.S. is the need to make money fast to pay years of back rent he didn't know he owed. The book is occasionally funny and maybe has something to say about love and literature, but mostly it felt unnecessary. Didn't hate it but won't read another sequel should Greer be tempted to churn out Less Is More (or whatever).

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O'Farrell, is the reimagined story of Lucrezia, the daughter of a nobleman in 16th-century Italy, who is married off to a duke at 14. Inspired by the famous Browning poem "My Last Duchess," O'Farrell opens the book with a scene in which Lucrezia is convinced that her husband is going to kill her (reason not provided); as a result of that set-up and some rather florid writing, the backstory we then proceed through comes across as overwrought. While portraiture and artists are a part of the story, O'Farrell doesn't give us anything approaching the moving demonstration of the power of art that she created in Hamnet. A disappointment.

In Mad Honey, written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, Jodi Picoult returns to the formula that she has gotten away from recently: a hot topic (challenges faced by transgender teens), a teenage protagonist (or two), and a court case. The book has two narrators--Olivia Levy, the mother of Asher, who is accused of killing his girlfriend when he learned she was transgender; and Lily Campanello, Asher's girlfriend. Obviously, the two narrators tell their stories on different timelines, which adds some suspense to a story in which we already know one character is dead. Although occasionally the book feels a little bit like a nonfiction work on transitioning, I enjoyed it. In an author's note, Picoult says that she had wanted to write a book about transgender rights for some time but knew that she would likely not have the insight of a person who is transgender. She also noted that transgender authors can still have difficulty getting their work published, so her writing on this issue might keep a transgender author from being published. Thus, she ended up co-writing the book with Boylan who is a transwoman (a published author so not unknown--but still probably benefitting from the marketing and buzz that accompanies a Picoult book). Picoult wrote the Olivia chapters, Boylan the Lily chapters. I thought it was an interesting approach.  

I generally like Elizabeth Strout, but her Lucy by the Sea is a totally unnecessary "what I did during the pandemic" story that offers no insight into the pandemic, human relationships, or, well, anything. We all lived through the pandemic and know what the isolation was like; unless you have something to offer that will help us understand what we experienced, don't write about it! ,BTW:  Lucy Barton spent the pandemic in Maine with her ex-husband William, who has been conveniently emasculated by a botched prostate surgery and become the saint who puts up with her! Please, Ms. Strout, no more Lucy books!

We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman, explores the process of dying, friendship, and grief--but it's not entirely sad. Edi, dying of cancer, is discharged from the hospital--but all the hospices near her are full, so she says good-bye to her husband and son and goes to a hospice near her best friend Ash's home (this seems unlikely for multiple reasons). They reminisce, Edi deteriorates, and Ash cares for her and her own family while having sex with Edi's brother and her hospice doctor (and possibly others--I lost track). Yeah, it's a little bit crazy and unlikely but still manages to be life-affirming. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Too many free listens from Audible this month (free for a reason) -- The Couple on Cedar Close and The Stranger's Wife, by Anna-Lou Weatherly; The Killing Time, by T.J. Brearton; and Immoral, by Brian Freeman. But they're good for falling asleep to and my expectations are generally low.

I had much higher expectations for The Heights, by Louise Candlish, whose books I've enjoyed in the past--this one not so much. Very short summary: it's about a woman who wants to wreak vengeance on the boy who was driving the car when her son was killed. She's unlikable (as is her target) and the other people in her life are not well developed as characters. There's an unnecessarily complicated structure in which the woman is writing her own story, which is then being written about by a journalist. Not recommended.

In The Deepest of Secrets, Kelley Armstrong finally finishes off Rockton in the midst of murders involving the revelation of secrets from the residents' pasts. I found it curious that, as a reader, I knew a lot about the characters that others in their fictional town did not and thus did not find the various revelations shocking. Must work on empathy.  Armstrong will be launching (or perhaps already has) a series based in the new town Casey and Eric are going to start.

Nonfiction

If you saw his film Big Night or his CNN series on the food of Italy, you already know Stanley Tucci  likes food, especially Italian food. This is confirmed in his memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, a book that delighted me. He starts with memories of his mother's spectacular Italian cooking and proceeds through wonderful meals he has eaten and prepared. He shares anecdotes from his professional life (he once ate sausage that tasted like poop . . . with Meryl Streep), as well his family cooking adventures/ misadventures.  And somehow, I am touched to read about the help of his famous friends when he had cancer (Colin Firth and Ryan Reynolds and Oliver Platt held him up in a terrible time). But most of all, Tucci describes food and meals and the company enjoyed around the table so lovingly, that it makes me want to write a memoir. Just kidding--but I did really love this book!

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners, by Margaret A. Burnham, is basically a litany of African Americans killed in racially motivated homicides in the South during the Jim Crow era. Some of the homicides were killed by law enforcement officers, others were essentially sanctioned by the justice system because no one was held responsible. It's a difficult accounting, but a necessary one that gave me a new understanding of why many African Americans have a different view of the law that those of us with the privilege of believing that justice is possible, if not likely. 

Favorite Passages

Losing a beloved family heirloom is a very real personal loss; they're things that cannot ever be replaced or re-created. But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes. Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time. Yet unlike a lost physical heirloom, recipes are a part of our history that can be re-created over and over again. The only way they can be lost is if we choose to lose them. 

    --Stanley Tucci, Taste

Life is messy. I certainly don't expect tidiness from yours or anybody else's. 

    --Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

Early January Disappointments: Demon Copperhead and Horse

 It's sad when you get excited about a favored author's new book and then you really don't enjoy the book. Topping off the the two books that fit that description were two that I honestly did not understand at any meaningful level (and they made it onto multiple "best of 2022" lists). Yeah, that makes you feel stupid. So here they are.

Fiction

As someone who never really cared for Dickens, I guess I should have realized I wasn't going to love Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead as soon as I learned it was David Copperfield reimagined in contemporary Appalachia.  The inspiration is clear--Damon Fields, whose nickname is Demon Copperhead, is being raised by a young, single drug-addicted mother in rural Virginia. When she dies of an overdose, he enters the foster care system at age 11. At his first placement, where the children are unpaid workers for a tobacco farmer, he meets his own Fagin, the charming and immoral older boy known as Fast Forward. Damon has another bad foster placement, which he escapes by running off to find his grandmother, who cannot or will not let him stay. However, Damon is not without skills, both artistic and athletic, and  goes to live with the local football coach. When he is injured in a game and does not have the treatment he needs, he becomes addicted to opioids and enters a downward spiral. There's a somewhat surprising ending on the happy end of the spectrum for a book about a young drug addict, but it does not redeem the story for me. This summary skips over other bad experiences--the book is entirely depressing, perhaps particularly because there were so many instances in which adults could have made a difference in this young man's life. I recognize that Kingsolver is dealing with a very real problem or constellation of problems, but I didn't feel like she took me anywhere that I hadn't already been through news stories and Empire of Pain.

My second disappointment of the month was Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, who has written some fabulous novels (March, The Year of Wonder, People of the Book). I wasn't too enthusiastic about reading the book (two book clubs I'm in chose it as a selection) because I'm not that interested in horses, but I finally jumped in. The book is well constructed, intercutting three (at least three) stories. The first is the story of the enslaved trainer Jarret Lewis who had a special connection with the great race horse Lexington (a real horse in the 1850s); it was interesting to learn about the important role of enslaved people in horse-racing, which was an immensely popular entertainment in the years leading up to the Civil War, although I always cringe when a white author writes their take on African American dialect (and I remained mostly uninterested in the details of horse racing). The second story is that of the artist Thomas Scott, an artist who specialized in horse paintings, which were evidently very popular in the era (although another topic I'm not that interested in--perhaps I am just very close-minded). Scott is also a real person, to whom Brooks gave a male lover, something she admits in the endnotes is not based on historical fact; I found this an annoying attempt to give the story some modernity. But the worst example of that comes in the third story, set in 2019 and involving two young scholars: Jess works at the Smithsonian and is reconstructing Lexington's skeleton that had languished in a storeroom for decades and Theo is an art history graduate student  trying to find out more about a Scott painting of Lexington he found in his neighbor's trash. I was interested in the give and take in the relationship between Jess (a white woman) and Theo (a black man), which highlighted the truth that black people must think about race all the time while white people have the luxury of not thinking about it. SPOILER: However, when Brooks has Theo killed by cops, I about lost it. It was a totally gratuitous plot twist that was inadequately dealt with, leading me to conclude it too was added just to add currency to the story and was disrespectful to the people who have experienced this type of violence. Not everyone will agree with me on this (although my sister does!), but this event took me from being neutral about the book to being rather negative. 

On to the books that made me feel stupid. First was The Furrows by Namwali Serpell.  The book started out as the story of a woman whose brother died when they were children; as she grows up, he dies over and over at different phases of her life. I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be an exploration of different futures in the metaverse or an indication that she was deranged by grief and guilt. Then abruptly, in the second part of the book, it became a story about a man who was trying to somehow scam her family by pretending to find her brother or be her brother or I don't know what. Honestly, I just have no idea what was happening or what the reader was supposed to take away from the book. I was happy to see that the NYT reviewer wasn't crazy about the book. She didn't feel stupid after reading it (as I did), but she did say "The book is so laden with odd convergences and there are so many brushes with demons that it does leave you feeling tiny and weird." 

The second stupid-making book was The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy. The book focuses on two characters, a brilliant brother and sister who were in love with each other. The sister Alice's sections are conversations between her and a set of imaginary beings that more or less harangue her (mostly a character referred to as The Thalidomide Kid--use your imagination). The sister committed suicide ten years before the parts of the book narrated by the brother, which also are primarily presented in dialogue. The brother is a salvage diver who finds a plane that there appears to be some mystery about--what the mystery is or how it relates to the federal agents that start following Billy is unclear. While not much really happens, Billy's conversations are wide-ranging, covering such topics as physics (Billy and Alice's father was involved in developing the atomic bomb), the Kennedy assassination, the existence of God and the possibility of an afterlife, and much more. Again, I have no idea what the point is or if there even is a point. However, McCarthy writes so beautifully I still might read the novel that he wrote as a pair with this one, which evidently focuses on Alice's treatment for schizophrenia.

Mysteries/Thrillers

I've mentioned numerous times before that I read too many bad mysteries, but I've decided that the serve some sort of mental health-preserving function so I'll undoubtedly keep reading them. None that I've read so far this month were worth saying much about (listed below),, but I  have a rant or two:

• Mystery writers should think twice before inserting a twist that has no real function in the story. To me, the purpose of a good twist is to make the reader rethink how the story is different now that they have this new information. There's one at the end of Blood Will Tell that really is just the author trying to surprise the reader for no reason. I felt the same way when, several books in the series ago, Louise Penny revealed that Jean-Guy's daughter has Down's Syndrome.  Of course, twists that you can tell the author thinks are major but in fact were predictable are also rather pointless (see The Perfect Marriage). 
• Some mystery authors do actually use the language very effectively. But others are just trying too darn hard. Example from The Murder of Sara Barton:  "Her celebrity hangs over the courtroom like the carcass of a dead animal." WHAT?  Just stop it. Mystery readers are generally looking for plot and character not the most beautiful language (for that we go to Cormac McCarthy).
• Some genre writers--especially those doing police procedurals or legal thrillers--need to try a LOT harder when it comes to getting legal matters right. In A Killer's Wife, for example, a prosecutor handles the case of her former boyfriend who allegedly killed using the same MO as that prosecutor's ex-husband. (Yes, you read that right.) No, that would not happen. 

Okay, probably more rants next time, but here are the mysteries read:

• Blood Will Tell, by Heather Chavez
• The Perfect Marriage, by Jeneva Rose
• The Murder of Sara Barton, by Lance McMillian
• A Killer's Wife, by Victor Methos
• Black Echo, by Michael Connolly (first Bosch book; audio book has an interesting interview with the author and Titus Welliver who narrates and portrays Bosch in the series)
• Anywhere You Run, by Wanda K. Morris (not sure this belongs in this category but that's how it's marketed--mostly it is just so sad)
• Black Heart, by Anna-Lou Weatherly

Nonfiction

My son Kevin reads lots of biographies, so I decided to give one that made a lot of "best of" lists a try: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff. So first, let me say, I found myself drifting off while listening to the book (and I'm a social studies person) so perhaps not 100 percent engaging. But my biggest question was whether this was really a biography of Adams or a history of the run-up to the American Revolution focusing on activities in Massachusetts. I learned some about Adams' contributions but didn't gain a lot of insight into Adams himself. It's also impossible to assess the author's research when you're listening to an audiobook because the footnotes aren't included. I'm not one to read every footnote, but I do find it informative to check what the author cites, where they cite, etc. So it may be awhile before I pick up another biography, but I'll probably go for print next time I do.  

Favorite Passages

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget. 

We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.

     --Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger