Novel Conversations

Quicksand, by Junichiro Tanizaki

2012-02-13T17:43:00.001-08:00

Several years ago, my younger son, who is working on a doctorate in Japanese literature, made me a list (at my request) of Japanese works that I should read. I read several titles and then, for quite some time, ignored the list. He even added some books a couple of years ago, and I still managed not to read any of them. Recently, however, I decided to restart my education in Japanese literature and chose to start with Quicksand, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Quicksand is narrated by Sonoko Kakiuchi, a young housewife living near Osaka in the late 1920s. Her lawyer husband bores her and a recent love affair has ended, so she starts taking classes at an art school. There, she meets the beautiful Mitsuko, with whom she is soon involved in an intense love affair. Over time, she learns that Mitsuko also has a male lover, Watanuki, and this discovery leads to increasingly strange complications. Mrs. Kakiuchi is clearly being manipulated--but by whom and for what purpose is less clear. Then her husband is drawn into the love ... square? rectangle? manji (a four-spoked Buddhist symbol and evidently the title of the book in Japanese)? From there, this story of obsessive love, deception, manipulation, and love suicide becomes even more surreal.

Mrs. Kakiuchi is telling her story to an unnamed "author" after a scandal has erupted and at least some of the other central characters are dead. Exactly why she is telling her story to this person is unclear to me--but it's hardly the only facet of the novel that I don't entirely understand. "The author" to whom Mrs. Kakiuchi is telling her story occasionally inserts explanatory notes--usually snide asides about the lack of taste among Osaka women. Because these notes are fairly frequent early in the book, I found it odd when they disappeared after the first few chapters. The book was originally serialized in 1928-1930, and I can see how the plot twists--and the somewhat lurid content for that time--would keep people reading. As a novel, however, I found Quicksand exasperating. Perhaps I am just not interested enough in obsessive love--but I see five more Tanizaki novels on that list, so I'll have more options to explore what is evidently one of this author's recurring themes!

Of interest:

According to Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/13/books/fatal-attractions.html), the book's "unique tone," which was written in upper-class Osaka dialect as it would be spoken by a woman, simply cannot be conveyed in English.

The Grief of Others, by Leah Hager Cohen

2012-02-09T10:27:00.000-08:00

The prologue of The Grief of Others, titled "Last Year," is an elegiac recounting of an anencephalic baby's 57-hour life, as seen through the eyes of his mother, for whom we instantly feel great sympathy. Then Leah Hager Cohen moves us forward to "This Year," in which mother Ricky is considering driving into the Hudson River every time she crosses the river on her way home from work. But we begin to lose our sympathy for her when we realize her children, fifth-grader Biscuit (one of those nicknames acquired through a sibling's mispronunciation of a given name, in this case Elizabeth) and seventh-grader Paul are in deep trouble and her husband John is still reeling from the fact that Ricky did not tell him about the baby's difficulties when they were diagnosed midway through the pregnancy. Thus, he built the crib and otherwise prepared for the baby, while she knew the baby would die within hours of its birth.

The family is in deep trouble when Jess arrives. Jess is John's daughter from a college relationship, who has spent only one two-week vacation with them in her entire life. She is now a pregnant college grad, who lies and tells them her parents kicked her out of the house. The Ryries welcome her--indeed, Ricky hopes that her willingness to let Jess stay with them and the kindness she shows the young mom-to-be will somehow convince John of her goodness.

Cohen tells the story from the perspectives of all five family members, plus a young man, Gordie, who came to the rescue when Biscuit fell into the Hudson. The family members' perspectives both in the present, last year, and eight years ago (the time when Jess vacationed with them) all contribute to an understanding of how the members of the family have lost contact with each other, a process exacerbated but not caused by the loss of the baby. While Gordie theoretically adds to the examination of grief, since he recently lost his father, I found his perspective and the subplot involving him unnecessary.

Yesterday, I read an article by Time magazine's book critic, Lev Grossman, on why endings of books are overrated (http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/04/the-nonsense-of-an-ending-in-defense-of-the-middles-of-books/); a book with a good beginning and middle, he says, is still a good book even if it has a bad ending. He might have had The Grief of Others in mind, as the ending is pretty bad. Not only does Cohen tie things up to neatly, in the last chapter she strangely begins to address the reader directly in a way that she hasn't before ("What else is there to tell? What else ought to be, must be, said?"). It's bizarre, as are a few other things I'll let you discover for yourself if you decide to read The Grief of Others because it is still a decent read, even with, to quote from Grossman, a "nonsense of an ending."

Favorite passage:

She was here on the spit because of them, because of the way her mother and her father had fallen down behind themselves. She thought of it like this, like the way a book can fall down behind all the others on a shelf, and in this way it's missing, only you don't know it to look at the shelf: all that you see looks orderly and complete. Her parents seemed like the books you could see: they smiled and spoke and dressed and made supper and went off to work and all the other things they were supposed to do, but something, a crucial volume, had slipped down in back and couldn't be reached.

What Is Novel Conversations Reading?

2012-02-07T07:29:00.000-08:00

Here is what Novel Conversations is reading for the next few months:

March: The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein

April: Zietoun, by Dave Eggers

May: The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown

June: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

July: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

2012-02-02T18:03:00.000-08:00

Because we had a problem with the book we had picked for February and only three weeks in which to read, Noel Conversations decided to try something different this month: each of us is choosing a book written by an author the group has previously read and we'll see what kind of discussion we can generate.

So, because (as I've mentioned more than once on this blog) I absolutely loved Little Bee, I picked Chris Cleave's first novel, Incendiary. Incendiary is structured as a long letter written to Osama bin Laden by a young working class British woman whose husband and four-year-old son were killed in a terrorist bombing at a soccer match. Even before the bombing, the unnamed narrator was a nervous woman (in part because she spends many hours waiting for her "copper" husband to come home from defusing bombs), who calms herself with such activities as alphabetizing the food in her freezer and having sex with men she meets in bars. In fact, when the fatal bomb goes off, she is watching the soccer match on television while having sex with Jasper, a journalist who lives in an upscale development across the street from her block of flats.

In a panic, the narrator convinces Jasper to drive her to the stadium, where she is seriously injured trying to run into the stadium to search for "her chaps." After two months in the hospital, she returns to her flat and manages to get a job working for the anti-terrorism task force at Scotland Yard (making tea and filing). She becomes involved in an affair with her married supervisor, but Jasper and his "posh" and annoying girlfriend Petra, a style editor at his newspaper, continue to come in and out of her life as well. Both Jasper and the narrator are having serious post-traumatic stress, as is the narrator's lover. When her lover makes a startling revelation, both the narrator and Jasper spiral out of control. I won't say more about the plot because the spiral of surprising and horrifying events is an essential part of the reading experience. I will note, however, that while the book is very dark, there is also humor, as in a scene when the narrator pukes on Prince William's shoes during a hospital visit.

Cleave's novel is certainly a dark exploration of the effects of violence and tragedy on individual lives, but it is also a commentary on class and on how the UK (and by extension the US) response to terrorism has undercut the foundations of our democracies. While not as beautifully written as Little Bee (this narrator lacks Little Bee's lyricism) or as complexly structured, Incendiary is an equally troubling and thought-provoking work. I know I will not soon forget the narrator's pain, even though I don't know her name.

Favorite passages:

I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind.

Boy is a good smell it is a cross between angels and tigers.

London is a city built on the wreckage of itself Osama. It's had more comebacks that The Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners just took a deep breath and put the kettle on. . . .London's like me it's too piss poor and ignorant to know when it's finished. That morning when I looked down at the sun rising through the docklands I knew it for sure. I am London Osama I am the whole world. Murder me with bombs you poor lonely and I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better. I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.

I know you are a clever man Osama much brighter than me and I know you have a lot of things to get done but you ought to be able to get it done with love that's my whole point. Love is not surrender Osama love is furious and brave and loud you can hear it in the noise my boy is making right now while he plays.

Two of the Deadliest, edited by Elizabeth George

2012-01-29T19:22:00.000-08:00

Award-winning mystery writer Elizabeth George tasked an impressive roster of female authors--Nancy Pickard, Linda Barnes, Laura Lippmann, Marcia Muller, Carolyn Hart, and Wendy Hornsby, among others--with writing short stories about people motivated by lust and/or greed to nefarious deeds.

The first three two stories are effectively creepy. In "Dark Chocolate," by Nancy Pickard, a woman frosts and eats an entire cake as she waits for her husband to come home; as she eats her way through the cake, the reader becomes aware of the horror within her house. "The Offer," by Patricia Smiley, is the story of a young woman in LA for a job interview; she accepts a limo ride intended for another person with a similar name who is also in town interviewing for a job. She intends to head for her own hotel once they get downtown, but she allows herself to assume the other applicant's at the fancier hotel...with bizarre results. Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes about an electronic stalker in "E-Male." When the stalker discovers that the object of his intrusions is in danger, he must find a way to help her without revealing his own guilt. These are just three of the stories in the collection that really work--they build suspense (or horror), they develop interesting characters, and they do reveal the workings of greed and/or lust, all within just a few pages.

Of course, some stories are less effective. A few have rather silly romantic twists. Others are too obvious or simply not engaging. At the end of the book, George presents stories by five writers who "are either largely unknown or who have not been published before." Unfortunately, I didn't find any of these stories very effective. But they're short--and you can always skip ahead to the next story.

Favorite passage:

. . . Brad really harshed on my mellow. ("Can You Hear Me Now?" by Marcia Talley, who introduced me to this phrase I may just have to work into conversation.)

The Story of Beautiful Girl, by Rachel Simon

2012-01-24T19:03:00.000-08:00

Rachel Simon (author of Riding the Bus with My Sister) has personal experience with a family member who has an intellectual disability. She brings that knowledge to The Story of Beautiful Girl, along with a sense of horror about the ways in which the disabled were treated in institutional settings little more than 30 years ago.

The book opens on a rainy night in 1968, when an odd couple shows up at the door of retired teacher Martha Zimmer--an African American man who is deaf and a younger white woman who is beautiful but seems unable to speak. Mrs. Zimmer provides dry clothes for the couple, who are obviously in love; as they emerge from the layers of wet clothing, she sees that the young woman is carrying a newborn baby. Within minutes, however, the police and officials from the "Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded" show up. The man escapes, but the woman is put in a straightjacket and hauled away. As she is dragged from the house, she manages to whisper to Martha Zimmer, "Hide her."

Martha takes the charge from this stranger to heart and immediately makes plans to leave her home with the baby. Drawing on a network of former students with whom she stays in touch, Martha sets out to keep the child, whom she names Julia, from being captured by men from the school. At this point, the story is told on three parallel tracks--Martha and Julia's life on the lam; life at the school, told from the perspective of both the young mother Lynnie and a good-hearted employee named Kate; and the cross-country adventures of the deaf man Homan, who is trying to get back to the school but keeps getting sidetracked.

Homan is bright but cannot communicate except in a sign language that no one else knows. He ended up confined at the School after a period he called "The Running," when he was fleeing from people who killed his brother. After his escape from the school, he has another long spell of running, with many frightening experiences; yet he also meets a number of people who treat him kindly. The same is true for Martha and Julia; while their lives are not totally easy, they are helped by and encounter many lovely people. And through one of her former students, Martha is able to start the process that brings sorely-needed reform to the school. The depiction of life at the school is grim--yet even here, Lynnie was able to fall in love with Homan, whom she thinks of as Buddy; make a good friend in Doreen, the child of a famous playwright and actress (perhaps based on the story of Arthur Miller and his son); and develop her skill as an artist with the help of Kate. Yet she yearns for both Buddy and her child and must still deal with the two sadistic guards who repeatedly intimidate her, the filth of the facility, and the fear of knowing what can happen if you don't go along.

Simon does a good job of helping readers understand the thought processes of two people who cannot communicate with others and don't always understand what is going on around them--and she imbues them with great dignity. She also casts light on a disturbing and too-little-known aspect of our recent history, the treatment of the disabled in state-sponsored institutions. Given that context, the book could be extremely dark, Simon manages to make the story one of redemption and the power of the human spirit. While I was reading the ending, I was thinking to myself, "This is a bit hokey,"--and yet I was moved (in fact, I shed a tear or two on the plane where I was reading the book--kind of an embarrassing moment).

Favorite passages:

Learning to speak again had been a long process made up of many tiny steps, each taking endless afternoons of frustration. Luckily, everyone who mattered to Lynnie had grown used to what Doreen had dubbed "Lynnie-talk" . . . the reactions of others were actually another lesson she'd learned about change. When change happened to an individual, it happened to everyone around her--sometimes in ways she wished for, though sometimes in ways she wished against.

The sky was crying outside, and as she watched the drops come down, she thought: A rainy day can actually be a very important day. And a small hope isn't really small if it makes a lost hope less sad.

Wingshooters, by Nina Revoyr

2012-01-21T20:34:00.000-08:00

Michelle LeBeau was born and spent her first eight years in Japan. Then her Japanese mother left her and her American father and they eventually follow her to the United States. Heading off in search of his wife, Michelle's father leaves her with his parents in small-town Deerhorn, Wisconsin, where she is even less accepted than she was in Japan. Despite being aware that her grandfather Charlie shares some of the bigotry of the community, she adores him and loves nothing better than the activities she does with him, whether going to the coffee shop, playing baseball, hunting, or walking in the woods.

Michelle, or Mike as Charlie calls her, struggles to find her place in the insular community of Deerhorn, where children feel free to, at worst, physically attack her and, at best, ignore her. When a black couple (a schoolteacher and nurse) move to Deerhorn, the racist attitudes of many of the townspeople are further revealed. Entangled with the town's reaction to this couple is the revelation that one of Charlie's friends is abusing his son. As Michelle struggles to understand what is happening to the town and her grandfather, the town spirals toward violence.

Nina Revoyr's book has received accolades from Independent Booksellers, among others, but I had issues. The book feels like it is set in the 1950s rather than 1974. As a white Midwestern farm girl (born and raised in northern Illinois) who married an African American man in 1973, I know there was and is racism in small-town America (as in urban America). But for me the events depicted are too extreme for the time and place in which the author has placed them. (And I recognize that my tendency to defend the Midwest from the literati may be based on misapprehensions of my own.)

A second problem has to do with the narrative voice. It's difficult for an adult to write in the voice of a child. Writing about childhood as recollected by an adult narrator (as Revoyr does) might seem easier--after all, it certainly expands the vocabulary available and allows for insight gained through adult reflection. Yet there are also challenges, chief among them maintaining the authenticity of the child's experience. Revoyr does this best when she's describing Michelle's school experiences or her adventures in the countryside around Deerhorn. She's less successful in other instances. For example, when Michelle describes the child abuser's wife, she says, "She was still a pretty woman, or you could see that she had been, but the years of worry and silence had worn her away, like a house grayed by the buffeting winds." Really? That's what a third-grader thought? Hmmm.

And, on a minor note, I don't understand the title of the book. Wingshooters refers to bird hunters. We learn at some point in the book that Charlie had given up hunting for birds, so I'm sure the title has some symbolic meaning. But I don't get it!

Favorite passage: None

Sister, by Rosamund Lupton

2012-01-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

At last, an excellent mystery--well-written, interestingly structured, scary, and yet moving.

The book is written as a letter to younger, flightier, sometimes annoying sister Tess (who we quickly learn is dead), from older, more settled sister Bee. Bee is recounting what happened from the time she learned that her sister was missing and boarded a flight from New York to London through the unraveling of the mystery of Tess's death. The police rule Tess a suicide, but Bee is sure that she would not have killed herself even though she was grieving the death of her newborn son. As girls, Bee and Tess lived through their brother's death from cystic fibrosis, and Bee knows that this experience gave Tess an appreciation for life that would have made suicide unthinkable. Because Bee did not know that Tess had already had the baby, however, the police discount her claims that they were close and thus reject any insight into Tess that she might offer.

Because the police won't investigate, Bee begins digging into her sister's life, and there is much to be discovered--the married professor who fathered her child, the obsessed photography student who was stalking her, the pregnant Polish friend with the abusive boyfriend, the experimental genetic engineering treatment administered to her baby prenatally to cure cystic fibrosis, the money Tess suddenly had to spend on an expensive layette. Bee buzzes from suspecting one person to another as her own life falls apart--she is fired from her job, breaks up with her boyfriend, and seems to be ill.

As she investigates and grieves, Bee learns not only what happened to Tess and why, but gains insight into how she, her sister, and their mother dealt with the losses of their childhood. Through it all, Bee returns to her love for Tess to sustain her, even when she must face how sorely she failed the younger woman.

Favorite passage:

I used to think "stillborn" sounded peaceful. Still waters. Be still my beating heart. Still, small voice of calm. Now I think it's desperate in its lack of life, a cruel euphemism packing nails around the fact it's trying to cloak.

The Condition, by Jennifer Haigh

2012-01-09T18:33:00.000-08:00

The title of this book and its structure--it starts with a "prologue" set in 1976 just before the McKotch family discovers that young Gwen has a genetic condition (Turner's syndrome) that will prevent her from physically maturing normally--suggest that Gwen's condition is the root of the family's many difficulties. But this is certainly not the case, as the members of the family all have "conditions" that keep them from happiness and fully functional lives.

The parents--who are long-divorced by the late 1990s, when the real action of the book begins--seem to have been badly matched to begin with. Father Frank, who came from a working class family in Pennsylvania, is a scientist obsessed with achieving success; at the same time, his libido sometimes obscures his judgement. These factors combine in bad ways to sabotage his chances for the recognition he longs for. Mother Paulette is a New England patrician, who believes beige should be every woman's favorite color and is embarrassed to discuss her daughter's medical issues. Older brother Billy is a successful cardiologist in New York City, but he has distanced himself from his family because he is hiding the fact that he is gay from them. Gwen is underemployed in a museum and has limited social contacts. Younger brother Scott, a pothead who teaches at a mediocre private school, is struggling to find something meaningful about his life. As he deals with his son's constant problems in school, he realizes that he is probably ADHD himself.

When Gwen goes on a dive trip, falls in love, and decides to quit her job and live in the Caribbean, Paulette freaks out and tries to get each of the men to take action. Billy and Frank, both embroiled in problems of their own, refuse, but Scott is delighted by the idea that his mother is trusting him to act for the family and heads south to "handle" the situation. By the end of the book, all three children emerge changed--although not necessarily in ways that seem realistic.

I didn't actively dislike The Condition (although I despised the gratuitous 9/11 reference at the end), but I think I would have liked it more had it been more focused on Gwen and her challenges, as I thought it would be. The other members of the McKotch family were less interesting and their issues more mundane and self-inflicted (in Billy's case, I'm referring not to his sexuality but his choice not to tell his family about it). Perhaps if they were a bit less stereotypical, they might have been more sympathetic. But Gwen is the star of the book--and could have had an even bigger part.

Favorite passage:

Like everything else, maturity had disappointed Paulette.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson

2012-01-09T16:45:00.000-08:00

My son Kevin recently gave me a gift subscription to Audible, and I used my first credit to buy The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, which turned out to be a less-than-stellar choice. Why? First, it's too long for a novice novel listener. Second, there are too many characters with Swedish names (oh, what a surprise!) that sound alike, causing me considerable confusion. Third, the plot seems to involve various groups of police, journalists, lawyers, and bad people talking about their plans and investigations--which tends to lull one (especially one who spent four days sick last week) into a trance, if not to sleep. Consequently, I often found myself starting a section over because I had no idea what had happened.

I will give Audible another chance. Luckily, there are no more Lisbeth Salander/Mikael Blomkvist books left to read or listen to (I know, that's an extraordinarily mean thing to say since the poor author died). While the first two books in the series were incredibly violent, this one is just dull. Plus, Larsson once again gives us a climax followed by pages and pages and pages (or minutes and minutes and minutes) to resolve a few remaining plot points. Do I care who is managing the money Lisbeth stole, how her relationships with Miriam Wu or Mikael work out, or even what happens to her nefarious half-brother? I do not!

Underground Time, by Delphine de Vigan

2012-01-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

Underground Time focuses on one day--May 20--in the lives of two Parisians. Mathilde is a single mother of three boys, who pulled herself out of the abyss following her husband's death by building a career as the deputy to the marketing director at an international consulting firm. Eight months ago, however, she dared to disagree with her boss, who has gradually isolated her, stripping her of responsibility and using his power to make her a "nonperson" in their department. Mathilde is breaking down under the pressure, but she clings to the irrational hope that something good will happen on May 20, as predicted by a psychic.

Thibault is a doctor who works for an emergency service. That morning, he has broken up with his lover, Lila, who "just isn't programmed to fall in love with him." As Thibault drives his car through the morass of traffic in Paris, tending to the sick and lonely, he, too feels his isolation as nearly unbearable.

As the two go through their days, feeling ever more alienation, the reader's sense of dread builds. You begin to wonder if their paths will cross and hope that they might somehow save each other.

Underground Time is a moving exploration of how a person's sense of self can be eroded. It is beautifully written; I often find translated works to have an emotional flatness, but that is certainly not the case with this fine book translated by George Miller.

Favorite passages:

She's often thought that shes' passed on to her children a kind of gaiety, a talent for joy. She's often thought that she has nothing more important to offer them than her laugh, beyond the infinite chaos of the world.

She strokes their sleep-crumpled faces and breathes in their smell. In the creases of their necks the arrangement of her own life seems simple to her.

His life is here. Even though none of it fools him. Not the music that comes through windows, nor the illuminated signs, nor the bursts of voices around television sets on evenings when there's football on. Even if he has known for a long time that the singular trumps the plural and how fragile conjunctions are.

What kind of adult do you become if you have discovered at such an early age that life can collapse? What kind of person? What does it equip you with? What are you missing?

The Sweet Life in Paris, by David Lebovitz

2012-01-07T08:29:00.000-08:00

My quasi-daughter-in-law Leigh gave me this book for Christmas, in anticipation of a summer trip to Paris. Author David Lebovitz, dessert cookbook author and former chef at Chez Panisse, decided to move to Paris after his partner died, leaving him feeling unmoored in his life in San Francisco. The book is a light-hearted look at how Lebovitz learned to deal with various aspects of life in Paris--from dressing, to waiting in line, to shopping and dining. While the book is funny and the author clearly loves Paris, he paints a picture of an unwelcoming, if not somewhat frightening place.

Lebovitz describes walking the streets as "an annoying game of people-pinball" while avoiding copious amounts of dog poop, waiting in line as an opportunity to experience line-jumping and unwanted intimacy with the person standing behind you. Shopping is an experience constrained by numerous rules--you must say Bonjour to store personnel when you enter if you hope to receive any sort of service; on the other hand, you must not touch anything unless you are sure you want to buy it, as clerks will snatch up anything you touch and begin wrapping it for you. The chocolates, breads, and cheeses of Paris are divine--should personnel at the shops not take an unexplained dislike to you (Lebovitz greased many a wheel by taking brownies to people in the various businesses he patronizes). If you go into certain restaurants dressed like an American, you will be relegated to the back room and may be served bad fish. I am definitely going to have to read some more romanticized descriptions of Paris to get my courage back.

Lebovitz includes recipes at the end of each brief chapter of the book, many but by no means all desserts. He also lists sources in the U.S. for French foodstuffs and some of his favorite cafes, bakeries, cheese shops, and the like in Paris.

Favorite passage:

When they say, "The cheeses in France are the best in the world, they mean, "We are indeed a superior culture."

When they say, "We are tired of American culture," they mean, "Please don't show us Sharon Stone's vagina again."

My Korean Deli: Risking Everything for a Convenience Store, by Ben Ryder Howe

2012-01-05T09:56:00.000-08:00

Ben Ryder Howe's family came to the "New World" on the Mayflower. He is an editor at the Paris Review, the literary magazine founded by George Plimpton. His wife Gab's Korean-American family came to the United States just a few decades ago. Gab is a corporate lawyer who has burned out and wants to help her parents by putting the money she and Ben have saved to buy an apartment of their own (they live in her parents' basement) into buying a convenience store. Does this seem like a good idea? Well....

Howe weaves together the story of their deli ownership--the search for a suitable store to buy, the process of learning how to run the store, the oddball customers and employees, the struggle between he and his mother-in-law Kay about what inventory to stock, the horrendous fines levied by New York City for infractions of various kinds--with the story of his work at the Review (Plimpton dies during the two years covered in the book) and reflections on marriage, family, and the immigrant experience.

The parts of the book on both aspects of Howe's work life are funny--in surprisingly similar ways. Although Howe portrays himself as something of a dufus, he endeared himself to me through the respect he developed for the work of convenience store owners and employees and his struggles to understand his wife's family. I did wish, however, that he had given Gab and Kay--both fascinating characters--a chance to tell us their stories themselves.

Favorite passages:

Forgetting what it's like to suffer can be a good thing, since suffering can make people too cut-throat for society's good. But suffering also breeds certain capacities that are easily lost, such as the ability to focus and a willingness to engage with conflict. These are things that I believe Kay thinks I'm incapable of.

My mother-in-law . . . [is] the archetype of a certain New Yorker who, whatever her actual story, is assumed to have sacrificed so much and worked so hard just to be here that it almost makes you defensive. Why are YOU here? What's YOUR story? It's not only people like Gab who struggle to live up to their parents' example, in other words; it's all of us. New York never let syou just sit there and relax. So many people are dying to get in, and willing to do almost anything to stay once they get here.

. . . self-reliance is a compulsion, not a skill you acquire because you or your parents thought it would be good for character development. You acquire it by becoming scarred, and becoming incurably suspicious that if you don't take care of a job yourself, no one will.

Blue Nights, by Joan Didion

2011-12-31T13:19:00.000-08:00

So the real last book of 2011 is Joan Didion's Blue Nights, a slim melancholy volume that matches my mood of a New Year's Eve. ("What? The year is over and I didn't accomplish anything? Alus I'm getting so old.". . . You get the drift.) If you read Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, you know that in the year after her husband died suddenly, she was also dealing with her daughter Quintana's illness. Quintana died a year and a half after her father. This slim volume is a moving meditation on the loss of a child, parenting, and aging.

Didion describes memories of Quintana's life--both pleasant and troubling--and castigates herself for not understanding the emotional issues that her daughter struggled with. Quintana was adopted as an infant, and her parents followed the recommended method of telling their daughter that she was a chosen child, but this approach did little to assuage Quintana's fear of abandonment (she often asked her parents what would have happened if they hadn't been home to answer the phone when the doctor called to say a baby was available). Didion also wonders if she and husband John Gregory Dunne placed their daughter in adult situations too early

At the same time that Didion is dealing with her daughter's death and self-doubt about her parenting, she is facing nagging health problems of her own and sometimes-crippling fear that she will fall and be injured, that her legs simply will not hold her when she tries to stand. She has, in her words, lost her "sense of the possible." As she grapples with the problem of having no one to list as an emergency contact when she checks into the hospital, she realizes that her fear is really the fear of losing her memories of her daughter.

I find it difficult to describe how Didion has constructed the book--she dips back and forth in time, returning to certain scenes, stories, and especially quotes from Quintana as touchstones in her reflections. She occasionally addresses the reader directly, particularly as she worries about her ability to think and write as she once did ("Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.") The construction nonetheless conveys well the thoughts that torture Didion as she grieves her daughter, regrets he failures as a parent, and experiences the difficulties of aging.

Favorite passage:

In certain latitudes, there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. . . . Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning.

[The sentences above are the first and last sentences of the book's first chapter, one long paragraph that explains the title and beautifully sets a tone for the book.]

. . . when we talk about our children what are we saying? Are we saying what it meant to us to have them? What it meant to us not to have them? What it meant to let them go? Are we talking about the enigma of pledging ourselves to protect the unprotectable? About the whole puzzle of being a parent? Time passes.

Addendum to Best of 2011

2011-12-30T06:01:00.000-08:00

I love magazines, and every year read lots of good essays and articles in magazines that I don't make note of and (because I have the memory of a 61-year-old) cannot remember specifics about when I do my "Best of" post. This year, I want to recommend two recent David Brooks' columns from the NYT, in which he highlights some of the best magazine essays of the year. The two columns can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/opinion/brooks-the-sidney-awards-part-i.html and http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/brooks-the-sidney-awards-part-ii.html. I am working my way through the essays right now and, while I expect to disagree with Brooks on some of his selections (I certainly disagree with him on plenty of other things), I join him in celebrating long-form journalism. Let's not let great magazines die in 2012!

Best of 2011

2011-12-29T13:31:00.007-08:00

This year began with a mystery, The Last Lie by Stephen White, and included several somewhat unsatisfying mystery-reading binges. Although the year isn't yet over, I'm willing to say it has ended with The Astral, a look at marriage too negative even for me--and I thought I had a jaded view of the institution. Here are the best books I read between the two:

Best Novel: The Submission, by Amy Waldman

The Submission is a complex look at the tragic effects of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001--both impacts on individuals, on the Muslim and non-Muslim communities of New York City, and even on the national psyche. Two characters are central to the book-- Claire Burwell, a 9/11 widow who is representing families on the jury choosing a design for the memorial to built at Ground Zero, and Mohammad ("Mo") Khan, the Muslim-American architect who submitted the winning plan. This choice is, not surprisingly, controversial, and that controversy gives first-time novelist Amy Waldman an opportunity to explore ideas about right and wrong, ambiguity, and the ways in which people deal with powerful emotions--and she takes up the challenge with grace and insight. The Submission is not a perfect novel, but it's a very good one that raises issues all of us should spend time thinking about.

Honorable Mention: Private Life, by Jane Smiley

Best Mystery: The Girl in the Green Raincoat, by Laura Lippman

For the second year in a row, a mystery by Laura Lippman tops this category. The fact that this was a very slim book, originally written to be published as a serial in The New York Times Magazine, indicates something about the quality of many of the mysteries being published (and read by me). Its origin as a serial story is one of its interesting features, as Lippman has structured it so that each chapter contributes to the overall story (which pays homage to Rear Window and The Daughter of Time) while presenting a mini-mystery of its own. The story also marks a major turning point in the life of Lippman's character, Tess Monaghan. While Tess made a brief appearance in Lippman's The Most Dangerous Thing (which I did not like), we are still waiting to see how Tess will cope with parenthood. Hopefully, we will not have to wait too long--it's one of the few things in series mystery that I am still interested in!

Best Short Stories: Swim Back to Me, by Ann Packer

I often find short stories a bit too opaque for my rather literal and logical-sequential mind. In reviewing this year's reading, however, I notice that I read a lot of short story collections and enjoyed quite a few of them. Swim Back to Me, by Ann Packer, includes six stories. The first and last are linked by characters who appear in both; the four in the middle are stand-alone stories. I found all but one moving examinations of how people deal with pain and loss. In a relatively small number of pages, Packer creates multidimensional characters and places them in authentic relationships and places.

Honorable Mention: You Are Free, by Denzy Senna, and You Know When the Men Are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon

Best Nonfiction: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks was a young African-American mother with cancer. The cells taken from the tumor on her cervix lived much longer than she did--becoming the first ever to live and reproduce in lab cultures. Rebecca Skloot weaves together the stories of Henrietta and her children with an examination of how the HeLa cells, as they became known, were used and the controversies that arose around them. Through these narratives, she explores issues of poverty, race and medicine, and the ethics of research that uses tissue taken from human beings. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a good story that also raises important sociocultural and ethical issues.

Honorable Mention: The Long Good-Bye, by Meghan O'Rourke

Best Poetry

Once again, I have read precious little poetry this year. I do read the poem that comes out every day in Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/) and enjoy the poetry posted on FB by Wisconsin poet (and old friend) Norma Gay Prewett. Gay is an early riser, and her FB friends are happy on those mornings when she crafts an early morning poem and drops it on FB for us to savor.

Resolution for 2012: Make more of an effort to read poetry (perhaps making time for poetry by reading fewer mysteries)!

Odd Stylistic "Trend" of the Year: First-Person Plural Narration

I read three books that were written in the first-person plural this year. Each author used this rather odd device for a different purpose. In The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown used first-person plural to show how closely bound the three sisters were, even though they appeared to have taken very different paths in life. In The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard used first- person plural to heighten the mystery around the disappearance at the heart of the novel. The only use of this technique that I found to be effective was in The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka. Because she does not create individual characters, Otsuka's book is truly the story of a group--Japanese picture brides who came to the United States in the early 20th century. By not individuating, the author gives the story of the struggles of these women a power that the stories of a few individuals would not have had.

The Astral, by Kate Christensen

2011-12-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

Harry Quirk is a poet--one who cleaves to traditional notions of rhyme and meter--translated from his native Iowa to New York City. For more than 30 years, he has been married to Luz, a Mexican-American nurse whose work has supported him in his poetic efforts. In the apartment building known as The Astral, they raised two children, both of whom have taken unusual paths as adults: Karina is a lesbian freegan, who forages for food and consumer goods to give to the poor people she lives among, while Hector has joined a cult on Long Island, where he is being groomed as the Second Coming.

As the book opens, Luz has thrown Harry out because she found(and destroyed) his latest book--a collection of sonnets she believes Harry wrote to his long-time friend Marion. Although Harry denies that he ever slept with Marion, he did have an affair 12 years earlier, an affair Luz has never forgiven him for. Harry is desperate to get back together with Luz--despite the fact that he and others often refer to her as "crazy"--and thinks and worries the problem while he walks and, later, bikes around Brooklyn. He lodges in five different places over the course of the few weeks in which the book takes place, drinks in at least as many local dives, has endless conversations about marriage in general and his marriage in particular (sometimes internal dialogues, sometimes engaged in with other people), and manages to get two friends to give him jobs (having spent most of his life writing poetry, his work experience is extremely limited).

With a couple of exceptions (Harry and Marion's friendship, his relationship with Karina), marriage, family relationships, therapeutic relationships, and friendship all come off badly in The Astral. People are either untrusting or untrustworthy, they gossip and take sides, they betray and take advantage of one another. In many of the relationships depicted, women are portrayed as manipulating bitches, men as pawns who allow themselves to be manipulated to meet other needs. Very little happens in the book--perhaps because Christensen sees people as doing very little that is proactive, including Harry and other artists among his friends, who are not producing very much art. (The exceptions are Karina and her freegan friends.) It's a depressing depiction and not one that I felt added to my understanding of the human condition.

While I give Christensen kudos for creating a middle-aged male character who seems (to this slightly-past-middle-aged woman) authentic, I have to admit that, were the author of this book a man, I'd probably be calling him misogynistic. I had read several positive reviews of The Astral, but I cannot recommend it.

Favorite passage:

Back in the cold, bright day, I made my way to Marion's empty house, where I lay in lordly supine bliss like an emperor on the couch and surfed a fresh wave of hope and joy into a long, restorative nap.

V Is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton

2011-12-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

A recent Princeton graduate borrows money from mobster Lorenzo Dante, blows it all in Las Vegas, and is thrown to his death from the top of a parking garage. Kinsey Milhone sees two women shoplifting in Nordstrom's, turns one of them in, and is almost run down by the other. Days later, the shoplifter who was apprehended jumps from a railroad bridge. Kinsey attends her wake and is hired by her fiance to find out the truth about her death. Meanwhile Nora, the wife of a wealthy attorney learns her husband is having an affair. Building up her cash reserves, Nora tries to sell some jewelry to Dante, who is immediately attracted to her. But he is also dealing with problems in his business: the shoplifters worked for him and his brother made the decision to eliminate one of them--just as he decided to eliminate the Princeton graduate. If all this were not enough, Kinsey is called on to help a small-time crook who once hired her from prison; neighbor/landlord Henry is in Michigan caring for his older sister, who was injured in a fall; and a copy from Kinsey's past is dogging her.

Does this sound like a well-plotted mystery or an overly complicated series of coincidences and subplots? I vote for the latter. I was also surprised--after the questions raised in the U volume in the series--that this book completely ignored Kinsey's attempts to learn more about her family history, which I thought would play a major role in V-Z.

Favorite passage: None

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, by Caroline Preston

2011-12-22T11:05:00.000-08:00

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is a graphic novel--but not in the comic book/manga sense. Rather, it is constructed as a scrapbook kept by a recent high school graduate. Each full-color page is decorated with memorabilia, clippings, letters, and notes from Frankie Pratt, a small town New Hampshire girl with dreams of becoming a writer. The scrapbook covers eight years in Frankie's life, in which she goes to Vassar, gets a job writing at True Story, works as an editor at a literary magazine in Paris, and returns to New Hampshire to care for her mother. Despite being a feminist (her hair is bobbed after all), Frankie has a penchant for falling in love with the wrong man and then running away. Yes the plot is straight from the chick-lit supply of story lines--with a dash of history and social commentary.

But this book is not about the thin plot--it's about the way Preston tells the story and develops Frankie's character through the scrapbook technique. While it takes little time to "read" this book, you could spend hours looking closely at the memorabilia. For example, on the first page after Frankie enrolls at Vassar are pictures of the campus overlaid with the rules at Vassar, definitions of Vassar slang, a Vassar joke, and a Vassar song; the facing page shows her class schedule, three pictures of stylish girls cut from magazines, and Frankie's assessment of the "pecking order of freshman girls" (public school scholarship students like her are the lowest level). When, in her New York phase, the magazine her friend Oliver is working for publishes its first issue, there are clips from that first New Yorker, as well as a list of reasons Frankie finds the issue a bore (starting with "British fop on cover"). From her time in Paris, there is a page of wine labels, partially visible under a list of the topics expats talk about when drinking in bars.

I don't think the scrapbook format will become as ubiquitous as the comic book style of graphic novel; nonetheless, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt is an entertainment worth checking out.

Favorite passage:

Commenting on her love of This Side of Paradise: I take it as a zoological study of how rich college boys think and talk. (And more useful than my zoology text, which I am 2 chapters behind in already!)

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Restaurant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton

2011-12-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

Despite its subtitle and chapters on the author's cooking at a summer camp, for catering companies, and finally in her own restaurant, Blood, Bones and Butter seems to be more about Hamilton's search for family than her development as a chef. Hamilton was the youngest of five children born to somewhat bohemian parents. Life in the family was, for her, best captured in the huge annual party they threw--the mix of people who attended, the teamwork required to prepare and roast five lambs and create numerous side dishes, the beauty of the evening in rural Pennsylvania.

But then, when Hamilton was 12, her parents divorced and essentially left the children to finish raising themselves. At age 13, Hamilton realized she needed a job to sustain herself and began working in restaurants. She also began smoking, stealing cars, breaking into houses, and...well, you get the picture. As a 16-year-old high school graduate, she moved to New York City with $235 and began working at a restaurant where the staff did copious amounts of cocaine and stole from their employers.

It is something of a relief when Hamilton jumps forward a few years and the reader learns that she has managed to graduate from college and forge a relationship with another woman. She is working in what she calls "the most unsavory corner of the food industry, except for maybe poultry processing"--catering. Her description of this work, as well as her summer job cooking at a camp, is both hilarious and somewhat frightening (thinking about the catered meals I've eaten).

After getting an MFA in creative writing, Hamilton has an opportunity to open her own restaurant, and she jumps at the chance. Surprisingly, the chapters devoted to the restaurant are fairly thin, although it is clear that the restaurant crew is becoming her family (her girlfriend is the bartender).

Enter her future husband Michele, an Italian medical researcher who has worked in the United States for more than a decade. They have an affair and he courts her; when he suddenly has green card problems, they marry although the marriage is far from traditional. They do not live together (although Hamilton's girlfriend has moved out!), and Michele seems to lose interest in any real interaction with his wife, even after they have two sons. Hamilton, for her part, refers to the marriage as "performance art" but also talks about her dream of a "real" marriage. And clearly, she yearns to be enfolded into Michele's Italian family, which they visit every year. While they are welcoming, she realizes in the final chapter that she will never truly be part of the clan.

I'm not a big fan of memoirs, but felt drawn to this one because the reviews I had read suggested it was a book about eating and cooking. Certainly, a chef cannot write about her life without writing about food, but that hardly seems the primary focus of the book and, in the search for family that actually dominates, there are many questions about why Hamilton does what she does that remain unanswered.

Favorite passage:

She [Michele's mother Alda] and I do not speak the same language, and because of that our relationship really thrives. . . . we just hug and cook a lot. Which can seem, at times, like a greater intimacy than the one I have with her son, and a very compelling reason to stay married to him.

Blueprints for Building Better Girls, by Elissa Schappell

2011-12-13T22:17:00.000-08:00

Ironically titled after an etiquette book of decades past, Blueprints for Building Better Girls is a collection of short stories, some linked, about young women with wide ranging problems. One is a high school student with an undeserved reputation as a slut, an alcoholic father, and a depressed mother; she forges a relationship with a formerly fat wrestler and is devastated when he ignores her in order to impress some of the "mean girls" who make her life miserable. In a later story, we learn that she has married and has a son, who she is now trying to dissuade from a romance with an older woman by telling him about a tragic event in her college years (although she pretends it happened to a friend rather than to her). Another character is suffering a nervous breakdown after being raped; her mother delegates her the responsibility for checking in with her grandfather, who has dementia, and the results are darkly humorous...but not good. Yet another character is a college student whose out-of-control drinking, drug use, and sexual behavior cause increasing isolation.

Short stories are not my favorite genre. While Schappell's characters are well-drawn, I think I am too old to gain much from these stories except a deep sense of sadness. If I'm going to get depressed about the state of young women, I guess I'd rather do it via a novel.

Favorite passage:

Then I forgot about it. I rarely ever dreamed about Ray. When I did, the dreams felt like gifts. I wasn't sad or angry anymore; what I felt was tenderness for the girl I'd been in the dream, the first self I'd ever really liked.

The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

2011-12-06T13:38:00.000-08:00

I started to write a summary of this book's plot, but I think I'll just say...it's a very long book about multiple generations of a British and Australian family with an unusual number of dysfunctions. The book jumps from time to time and character to character, interspersing the narrative with examples of "fairy tales" written by one of the characters. There's a mystery to be solved, but most people in our book group had figured out the solution well before the end...or simply didn't care anymore by the time they got to the denouement.

A couple of people in our group enjoyed the book...but mostly not so much. And this time, I wasn't the only person to say it should have been shorter, much shorter.

Not recommended.

84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

2011-12-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

84, Charing Cross Road is a charming but slight book that presents the correspondence between New York writer Helene Hanff and a rare book store in London. In 1949, Hanff saw an ad for Marks & Co. in the Saturday Review and sent off an inquiry regarding several books she had been unable to find in New York. Frank Doel, who handled her request, became a regular correspondent and long-distance friend. With Britons still subject to rationing, Hanff felt moved to send "care" packages to the employees of Marks & Co., many of whom responded with their own letters, sparking additional friendships.

The letters trace Hanff's search for books, as well as the general outlines of her writing career (she wrote for the Ellery Queen television series, among other jobs), British and American politics, and her long-postponed plan to visit London and her friends at the bookstore. Unfortunately, Doel died before Hanff made the trip: the last letter in the book is from one of his daughters, agreeing to publication of the letters.

I have to admit that I thought 84, Charing Cross Road was an epistolary novel--and I liked it better when I was suffering under that delusion. Helene is charming as a fictional character; oddly, as an author publishing her own letters, for me she becomes somewhat too self-consciously clever and kind. Still, the book only takes about an hour to read and it's definitely worth that.

Favorite passage:

i go through life watching the english language being raped before me face. like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.

and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.

The Year We Left Home, by Jean Thompson

2011-11-26T07:58:00.000-08:00

Jean Thompson's The Year We Left Home follows members of the Erickson family for 30 years, from 1973 to 2003. Their lives reflect societal upheavals--feminism, wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the farm crisis of the 1980s--as well as personal struggles. The story unfolds in a series of what are almost vignettes, each focusing primarily on one family member; the vignettes jump ahead in time irregularly--some chapters take place only a month after the events of the previous chapter, some as much as three years later.

Among the book's multiple narrators, Ryan Erickson feels like the central character. This may be because he is the narrator of the first chapter, which takes place at his sister Anita's wedding, or because he is the character who seems to most fully leave his hometown and thus serves as a foil for the family members who stay in small-town Iowa. Ryan is eager to get away from that milieu, and he does so, going to college and then settling down in Chicago, where he eventually achieves financial success in the high-tech world. His personal life is more problematic, and his separation from his Iowa roots is incomplete, as he invests in various properties in his home town in ways that seem designed to rescue family members in trouble.

Older sister Anita is the beautiful girl who always dreamed of being married. But she finds motherhood challenging, and her husband is a bit of a lout--a banker with a drinking problem. While she breaks out of the housewife mold, that break is as incomplete as Ryan's with his hometown.

The youngest sibling, Torrie, has one of the most interesting stories in the book. When her older siblings have all left home and she feels herself to be a victim of her over-involved mother, Torrie mounts some minor rebellions, one of which has disastrous effects. Yet Torrie is able to rise above her circumstances and achieves the most thorough intellectual break from her childhood (not without some irony, however).

Blake is the sibling who plays the smallest part in the story, overshadowed by cousin Ray (known to the family as Chip). Ray was an outsider as a child, joined the military to become "a man," and spends his years after Vietnam floating from place to place, engaging with a variety of shady people and activities.

The book's multiple narrators allow Thompson to explore a variety of social concerns, and the irregular way in which the story lurches forward reinforces the notion that change was occurring in a similarly irregular yet inexorable fashion. The downside of this structure is that the "plot" does not develop in a traditional sense: I was not surprised to learn that Thompson is known as a short story writer, as the book resembles a series of linked short stories. As a transplanted Midwesterner who was, like Ryan, a political science major who took some abuse for that choice and, like Anita, got married in 1973, much in the story resonated for me. Occasionally snarkiness about the Midwest and Midwesterners did manage to annoy me (it's okay for me to be snarky about the region but not novelists), but Thompson's empathy for her characters overrides that bias. While not a great novel, The Year We Left Home is a rewarding read.

Favorite passage:

It filled him with holy dread to stand in this place that testified to their grinding, incessant labor. How hard they had worked, and how stubbornly, every day of their lives, for their little bit of ease, little bit of pride. They had done so much. They had meant to do so much more. Imagine them slipping off to death regretting the task unfinished, the field unplowed, the child unloved. It could break your heart.

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta

2011-11-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

How would the people left behind respond if a Rapture-like event occurred? That is the question Tom Perrotta takes on in The Leftovers, which follows the effects of the "Sudden Departure" (the event is not considered by most to be the Rapture because it did not exclusively sweep up Christians or even believers) on the people of a suburb with the idyllic name of Mapleton.

Perrotta makes an interesting choice in focusing primarily on the Garvey family, all of whose members survived the Sudden Departure. One might surmise that their survival intact would mean the effects on them were less severe--but such is not the case. Mother Laurie, after spending months commiserating with a friend whose daughter was taken in the event, joins a cult called the Guilty Remnant. Its members dress in white, smoke constantly, follow people around town as they go about their daily activities, and do not speak--their motto is "Stop Wasting Your Breath." Son Tom, a college student, also falls into one of the many cults that spring up after the event, the Healing Hug Movement headed by Holy Wayne, whose pregnant teenage "wife" Tom ends up taking on a cross-country trip after Holy Wayne's arrest.

Daughter Jill and father Kevin, meanwhile, are struggling to maintain a normal life in the family home--and it is their struggles that provide the novel's emotional core. Kevin becomes involved with Nora, a woman whose husband and two children were both taken in the Sudden Departure. Nora is dealing with the range of profound emotions one would expect in such a situation and none of her coping strategies have proven particularly successful--including her decision to become involved with Kevin. Jill and her friend Aimee, who is crashing at the Garveys' house, are involved in group sex games, drinking, and skipping school--a fact that the dazed Kevin (who is also the mayor of Mapleton) is aware of but can't seem to cope with.

Perrotta's customary satirical humor and rather dark view of humanity are certainly on display, particularly in his depiction of the cults (not to mention Reverend Matt, who is so incensed that he was not taken in the Rapture--"I should have been first"--that he devotes his life to uncovering the sins of those who disappeared). But I found The Leftovers to be more compassionate than his earlier works (namely Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher). While Kevin, Jill, and Nora have their flaws, we empathize with them and hope that they will be able to remember "what it feels like to be happy."

Favorite passage:

The Garvey clan was like the old Soviet Union, a once mighty power that had dissolved into a bunch of weak and cranky units.

This must be Kyrgyzstan, he thought.

The Language of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

2011-11-19T07:42:00.000-08:00

Vanessa Diffenbaugh has been a foster mother to teenagers, which makes her depiction of the emotional life of Victoria Jones, a girl who has recently "aged out" of the foster care system all the more believable. Victoria has been deeply scarred; after not paying her rent in the transitional house she was taken to by her social worker, she ends up living in a San Francisco park, where she tends a garden of plants she has stolen from people's yards. The plants she picks for their meanings (e.g., helenium means tears) rather than their beauty.

One day she happens upon a florist unloading her van and earns some money by carrying things for her. When the florist, Renata, discovers that Victoria can create beautiful arrangements, she gives her a job and finds her a peculiar room (essentially a closet in Renata's sister's apartment) down the street from her shop. Interspersed with stories of Victoria's present are recollections of the year that she spent in the home of foster mother and vineyard owner Elizabeth when she was 8. Clearly, this is the place that should have but didn't become Victoria's home. Meanwhile, back in the present, Victoria meets Grant, Elizabeth's nephew, at the flower market, and they become involved. He, too, is interested in the meaning of flowers--but, shockingly to Victoria, he knows an entirely different set of meanings, learned from his mother, Elizabeth's estranged sister. The two engage in a long process of research and debate to arrive at a set of shared meanings. There is also an element of what is almost magical realism, as Victoria becomes known as a florist whose can choose a bloom that will reshape lives and relationships.

As the stories of Victoria past and present unfold, Diffenbaugh explores the damage done by betrayal, loss, and a life lived without love or tenderness. I hope it is not giving too much away to say that the ending is more positive, focusing on the healing power of love and meaningful work. Perhaps it's a reflection on my cynicism that the damage seems more believable than the redemption. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book, particularly the role that flowers and their meanings played in Victoria's life.

Favorite passage:

Chamomile. . . energy in adversity.

Turn of Mind, by Alice LaPlante

2011-11-18T18:22:00.000-08:00

Dr. Jennifer White is a renowned orthopedic surgeon, a specialist in delicate hand surgery. She has been forced into retirement because she has Alzheimer's. As the book opens, she is also the prime suspect in the murder of her neighbor and best friend Amanda, who was found dead from a blow to the head, with the fingers on one hand neatly amputated.

The book is told from Jennifer's perspective, and LaPlante does a wonderful job of conveying what might be happening in the mind of someone with advanced Alzheimer's. Sometimes she recognizes her children, Mark and Fiona, sometimes she doesn't. She has to be told over and over that Amanda is dead. She often remembers events from her past--sometimes believing them to have only recently happened. These recollections make clear that her relationship with Amanda was not complicated, at least in part by the fact that Amanda knew too much about Jennifer's marriage to James, long since dead.

The idea of a mystery in which a person with Alzheimer's is either the perpetrator or a key witness is an intriguing one. Unfortunately, I didn't find this particular mystery--who killed Amanda and why--very interesting. Nonetheless, the look into Jennifer's mind makes the book well worth reading whether the mystery works or not.

Favorite passages:

To love and to grieve and to be unable to confide that grief. It is a lonely place to reside.

Even now, one is leaning over my chair, hand outstretched, trying to pat me on the head. Pet me. No. Stop. I am not a wild thing to be soothed by touch. I will not be soothed.

The room is full of faces I recognize, and if I don't love them, at least I know their names, and that is more than enough. perhaps this is my revelation? Perhaps this is heaven? To wander among a multitude and have a name for each.

This Beautiful Life, by Helen Schulman

2011-11-09T17:47:00.000-08:00

It's hard to see a novel titled This Beautiful Life without thinking the title must be ironic. And, indeed, while the Bergamot family enjoys many advantages, the first member we meet--mother Lizzie--seems to be having difficulty finding a place for herself since the family relocated to Manhattan from Ithaca. Driven to succeed in his new job--a high-level administrative position at a New York university (modeled on Columbia, I think)--father Richard has drifted away from the family. The children--teenager Jake and kindergartener Coco--have both found friends for themselves at their private school. Early in the book, both are at parties--Coco at a sleepover at the Plaza for a friend's birthday and Jake at the home of a girl whose parents are out of town.

Making out with the 14-year-old who hosted the party leads to the events that cause the nearly complete unraveling of the family. The morning after the party, the girl, Daisy Cavanaugh, sends Jake a pornographic video of herself. Shocked, he forwards the message to a friend. The inevitable happens--the video goes viral. By Monday morning, the proverbial shit has hit the fan. The head of school calls Jake's parents--Richard is in an important meeting and cannot/will not leave, so Lizzie goes in alone. The headmaster requires Lizzie and Jake to watch the video in his presence--an indicator of how badly everyone involved handles the problem.

While there are some small surprises as the family deals with the fallout, most of the consequences are predictable. By telling us at the end of the book that Jake's young adult life does not go well, Schulman does not even let readers consider the possible outcomes and how they might be achieved.

This Beautiful Life is certainly a cautionary tale for parents (talk to your kids about privacy and appropriate responses to unwanted sexting), but as a novel, I didn't find it compelling.

Favorite passage:

Sex as a wild and wooly continent, there to be navigated and explored, had been usurped by her son's contemporaries, just as she supposed she and her cohort had once done to their parents--although perhaps a tad less dramatically. Liz thought. Generation after generation of teenagers invading this mysterious and previously "adults only" floating island, laying down the flag of ownership and declaring the previous inhabitants obsolete.

The Most Dangerous Thing, by Laura Lippman

2011-11-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

I am a fan of Laura Lippman. I love her Tess Monaghan series and have enjoyed several of her stand-alone mystery-thrillers. Unfortunately, The Most Dangerous Thing doesn't live up to her usual standard. My first problem with the book was that it uses a tired literary device--the group of adults who, as children, did something terrible that has haunted them and which they now must work through or face dire consequences (in this case, prompted by the literal death of one of the group members in the first chapter). Lippman adds a twist to the story--the children's parents also have a shared secret, and about half of the book is told from their perspective. She also uses a stylistic twist, one that seems to be gaining popularity--the use of first person plural for some of the book.

Despite these twists, the book just isn't very suspenseful or interesting--I simply didn't care what the real story was concerning what happened on the night of the hurricane. And by the time I got to the book-ending revelation of "the most dangerous thing"--I had forgotten that was the title and found Lippman's ominous sounding declaration almost laughable.

Not recommended.

Favorite passage:

Allowing one's self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving. Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one has to first admit to being at fault.

Where the God of Love Hangs Out, by Amy Bloom

2011-10-22T17:08:00.000-07:00

In reviewing Where the God of Love Hangs Out for The New York Times, novelist Francine du Plessix Gray describes the book has having an "upbeat sassiness" and "saucy vitality"--what? While Bloom certainly infuses humor into the stories, individually and collectively they left me feeling melancholy. The God of love evidently hangs out with some very sad and deeply conflicted people.

The book includes two four-story cycles, as well as four stand-alone stories. One cycle is about Claire and William, two professors married to other people. In the first story, they begin an affair (with their spouses in the same house with them), which languishes in stories two and three as both have health problems (William is obese, and Bloom gives a not-entirely-appetizing description of the challenges of sex with a very heavy man); in story four, they are married--happily--but William soon dies, leaving Clare bereft. The second cycle has many characters but is essentially about Julia and her stepson Lionel, who have sex the night after his father/her husband's funeral. This disastrous event scars both of them, but they eventually find their way back to a familial relationship--and then Julia is hit by a car and dies. Yes, so saucy!

The four stand-alone stories are also sad. "Between Here and Here" begins with the sentence "I had always planned to kill my father"--and you can understand why, when that father is so unmoved by his wife of many year's death that he doesn't think a memorial service is even worth discussing with his children. "Permafrost" may be the saddest story of all. Hospital social worker Frances is working with the family of Beth, a 13-year-old who has contracted necrotizing fasciitis. The parents are not doing well, and Frances is worried that Beth's will be Googling forms of suicide before she even gets home--and yet it is Frances whose life seems to shrivel over the course of the next decade, while Beth rises above her circumstances and her family. Perhaps I need not synopsize the remaining two stories (although the favorite passage is from one of them and I think you'll get the drift).

Bloom is a talented writer, the characters she creates are three-dimensional, and the situations she put them in are just unusual enough to capture your interest. So it's not that the stories aren't good. They're just so damn sad.

Favorite passage:

I don't miss the dead less, I miss them more. I miss the tall pines around Lake Pleasant, I miss the brown-and-gray cobblestones on West Cedar Street, I miss the red-tailed hawks that fly so often in pairs. I miss the cheap red wine in a box and I miss the rum and Coke. I miss Anne's wet gold hair drying as we sat on the fire escape. I miss the hot-dog luau and driving to dance lessons after breakfast at Bruegger's Bagels. I miss the cold mornings on the farm, when the handle of the bucket bit into my small hands and my feet slid over the frozen dew. I miss the hot grease spattering around the felafel balls and the urgent clicking of Hebrow. I miss the new green leaves shaking in the June rain. . . . I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary.

The Submission, by Amy Waldman

2011-10-20T13:10:00.000-07:00

Amy Waldman's first novel, The Submission, is a complex and tragic story about the American psyche post-9/11. As the book opens, the jury named to choose a design for the memorial to be built at Ground Zero is debating the two final designs. Claire Burwell, who is representing 9/11 families, advocates for The Garden, a design where, she believes, the bereaved can "stumble on joy." She eventually prevails, and the jury eagerly awaits the revelation of who designed The Garden. To their astonishment and chagrin, the designer is a Muslim-American architect Mohammad ("Mo") Khan.

The news of this development leaks out, and the response is predictable--but the paths traveled by the numerous characters with which Waldman populates the book are not. Claire is one of the central characters--as a wealthy widow who lives in Chappaqua, she is hardly representative of many of the bereaved families. Nowhere is this clearer than through the character of Sean Gallagher, the ne'er-do-well brother of a fallen New York firefighter, who has found his metier leading a survivors' group; he is dead set against a memorial designed by a Muslim and organizes a variety of protests against The Garden. Claire's life is also far from that of another widow, Asma Anwar; she and her husband, a janitor in the World Trade Center, were unauthorized Bangladeshi migrants. Left with a baby born after her husband was killed and unable to speak English, Asma refuses to return to Bangladesh, still clinging to the American Dream. Living in a single room in another couple's apartment, while hiding the fact that she received a $1 million settlement from the government, Asma follows the controversy over the memorial with interest,

As the controversy grows, Claire is frustrated that Mo will not answer any of the questions that begin to arise, many prompted by a series of inflammatory columns by journalist Alyssa Spier: Was the inspiration for his design an Islamic garden? Did he intend the garden as a paradise for martyrs? As her support wavers, Mo, a secular Muslim whose personality is not well suited for the public eye, is stunned by the response. He struggles to deal with the fallout, becoming something of a nomad in his efforts to avoid the press.

These characters are deeply flawed, and yet none is completely without redeeming qualities (on the other hand, there are minor characters who do lack any redeeming qualities). Their struggles reflect how difficult it is to deal with powerful emotions, ideas about right and wrong, and ambiguity. Occasionally, scenes involving debates/meetings go on a bit too long, but the ideas under discussion are worth our consideration. And the story captures a moment in time that we have not yet, unfortunately, left behind.

While I have read a number of novels that deal with 9/11, Amy Waldman's is, for me, by far the most successful.

Favorite passages:

In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air. Silence that sucked at your will until you came spluttering to the surface confessing your sins or inventing them.

She had been shaped, was being shaped, not only by those she met on her journey but also by how she lost them.

The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai

2011-10-09T14:07:00.000-07:00

Lucy Hull is a children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri. Ian Drake is one of her best customers, a ten-year-old boy who loves to read. When his mother limits his reading to books "with the breath of God in them," Lucy helps Ian smuggle other books out of the library, checking them out on her own card after he hides them in his clothing. When she learns that his parents have enrolled Ian in a youth group run by Glad Heart Ministries, an organization "dedicated to the rehabilitation of sexually confused brothers and sisters in Christ," she becomes deeply concerned, remembering a high school friend who committed suicide over gender identity issues. When she discovers that Ian has slept in the library after running away from home the previous evening, she somewhat inexplicably loads him in her car and starts driving.

Their days on the road take them to Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Vermont; along the way, they stay with Lucy's Russian immigrant parents, as well as an associate of her somewhat shady father. As Lucy tries to figure out what exactly she is going to do with Ian, she is also grappling with understanding her family's history of rebellion and retreat. While she was always suspicious of her father's stories of his life in Russia, she is stunned when his associate Leo gives her a radically different version of the story, one that calls into question the family mythology.

The Borrower is full of allusions to both adult and children's literature. Some are subtle (I'm sure I missed many), but others are obvious. For example, Makkai several times presents passages written in the style of a well-known children's book (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Goodnight Moon, Alice in Wonderland, etc.). She also references such classics as The Great Gatsby, Lolita, the Oz series, Huckleberry Finn, and many more. Deciphering these references is one of the most enjoyable parts of reading the book.

The Borrower clearly has a message about acceptance, tolerance, and the power of reading. What Makkai is saying through Lucy's ongoing ruminations about her family history and her own ill-advised decisions is less obvious. Because both Lucy and her father chose to act out their protests in ineffectual if not counterproductive ways, does it mean that Lucy should simply give up the idea of helping others/changing the world to simply "stamp and scan"? I think not, and I can't really believe that Makkai does either. But the book might lead you to think she does.

Favorite passage:

It was the universal revelation of adolescence, that the adults around you do not have all the answers--and like all children growing slowly and painfully into their mature selves, he'd realize it again and again over the next few years.

It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.

What Alice Forgot, by Liane Moriarty

2011-10-08T08:51:00.000-07:00

One day, Alice Love falls off her bike in spin class, hitting her head hard on her way to the floor. When she comes to, she has forgotten the past ten years of her life. Instead of the 29-year-old happily married and newly pregnant, slightly flaky and sedentary but fun-loving young woman she thinks she is, she is a 39-year-old separated mother of three, thin, driven, uptight, and at odds with her sister Elisabeth, who is struggling with infertility. She doesn't know why she is getting a divorce or why her sister (and a few other old acquaintances) don't seem to like her anymore. She doesn't recognize her children and has no idea what they like to do or eat, when they go to bed, etc. Nor does she know whether she has slept with the man who appears to be her new boyfriend, the principal of her children's school. She knows that someone named Gina had an important role in the ten lost years, but she doesn't know what that role was.

Alice's story unfolds in a third-person narrative from Alice's perspective, but also includes two first-person elements that provide other views on Alice's predicament and introduce subplots of their own. One of these elements is a series of diary-style entries written by Elisabeth and addressed to her therapist, who is helping her with the psychological toll that infertility has taken on her. The other is a series of letters written by Alice and Elisabeth's adoptive grandmother Frannie to her long-dead fiance. Frannie is first irritated by and then falls in love with a new resident at her assisted living facility.

I liked the premise of the book, which sparks reflection: What about your current life would be surprising if you suddenly woke up with no memory of the past ten years? Would you like yourself? How would you feel about having certain people falling out of your life? Might you recognize influences that shaped where you are today, without your perceiving those influences as they occurred?

Moriarty has packed the book with quirky characters, and some provide genuinely funny moments. The book seems long, however, and perhaps a good editor might have encouraged some judicious trimming of characters and scenes (perhaps Frannie's subplot could have gone entirely, as it is not as compelling as the two sisters' stories). Moriarity's choice of a happy ending for everyone seems a bit contrived, although perhaps she intends to convey a message that no matter the challenges faced and missteps made, you can build the life you want. Despite these quibbles, I enjoyed What Alice Forgot.

Favorite passage: None (this book is really about the premise and the plot--the writing itself is competent but not memorable)

The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka

2011-10-02T20:45:00.000-07:00

The Buddha in the Attic is the story of Japanese picture brides who came to California in the early years of the twentieth century. But forget whatever image of a novel that sentence conjures up for you. Otsuka's book is unlike any other novel I can recollect.

What makes the book so unusual? Otsuka made the unusual choice of first person plural as the voice. While this is the third book I've read this year that employed first person plural, this is the first case in which it felt like the right choice. The way in which Otsuka uses first person plural also means that there is no individual character development; rather, we learn about the group. Similarly, while Otsuka arranges the book in chronological order, it does not have a plot in the traditional sense. In each of eight sections, Otsuka presents what I can only describe as a rush of sentences about how various women experienced the topic of the section. For example, the chapter "Babies" begins with the following passage:

We gave birth under oak trees, in summer, in 113-degree heat. We gave birth beside woodstoves in one-room shacks on the coldest nights of the year. We gave birth on windy islands in the Delta, six months after we arrived, and the babies were tiny, and translucent, and after three days they died. We gave birth nine months after we arrived to perfect babies with full heads of black hair. We gave birth in dusty vineyard camps in Elk Grove and Florin.

Otsuka ends the section titled "Whites" with a torrent of questions that begins:

. . . without us, what would they do? Who would pick the strawberries from their fields? Who would get the fruit down from their trees? Who would wash their carrots? Who would scrub their toilets? Who would mend their garments? Who would iron their shirts? Who would fluff their pillows?

It is a measure of the hardships these women experienced that the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes during World War II seems not so much a separate tragedy as a piece with the rest of their lives. However, Otsuka also turns our perception of that event on its head by writing the final section of the book from the perspective of white residents of the West Coast communities whose Japanese residents were interned.

I doubt I would enjoy reading too many books written in the style Otsuka uses here, but I admire her innovation in writing a novel about a group of women and their experiences as immigrants to the United States.

Favorite passage:

. . . the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.

The School of Essential Ingredients, by Erica Bauermeister

2011-10-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

In The School of Essential Ingredients, Erica Bauermeister uses a somewhat overworked structure--she creates a group of people, in this case a cooking class, and devotes a chapter to each person, exploring the person's issues/problems and then revealing how being part of the group helps them resolve those issues. Here, the group includes chef Lillian, who found comfort in food when her father left her mother and her mother lost herself in reading; Tom, who is recovering from his wife's death from breast cancer; Claire, who has lost her identity in the daily demands of caring for two small children; Antonia, a kitchen designer faced with recalcitrant clients; Chloe, a young woman so clumsy and uncertain she cannot keep a job or sustain a relationship; Ian, the nerd who yearns for love; Carl and Helen, whose "perfect" marriage was damaged by Helen's affair; and Isabelle, an elderly woman in the early stages of dementia.

The book is predictable, and yet I enjoyed it. Perhaps it's because I like reading about (and eating and preparing) food; perhaps it's because Bauermeister writes so gracefully; perhaps I was simply ready for a sweet story with a positive view of humanity. Whatever the reason, I liked The School of Essential Ingredients and I am taking to heart the notion that "we're all just ingredients . . . What matters is the grace with which you cook the meal."

Favorite passages:

Lillian loved best the moment before she turned on the lights. She would stand in the restaurant kitchen doorway, rain-soaked air behind her, and let the smells come to her--ripe sourdough yeast, sweet-dirt coffee, and garlic, mellowing as it lingered. Under them, more elusive, stirred the faint essence of fresh meat, raw tomatoes, cantaloupe, water on lettuce. Lillian breathed in, feeling the smells move about and through her . . .

How strange, she thought. These people here, they looked at her and thought she was alone, she whose children were with her even in her dreams.

"Our bodies carry our memories of them [loved ones], in our muscles, in our skin, in our bones. My children are right here." She pointed to the inside curve of her elbow. "Where I held them when they were babies. Even if there comes a time when I don't know who they are anymore, I believe I will feel them here."

Mentors, Muses, and Monsters, edited by Elizabeth Benedict

2011-09-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

The subtitle of this book, 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, describes well its content--except that some of the chapters are about books or places rather than people. Still, most of the authors--some extremely well known (Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gordon, Michael Cunningham, Denis Johnson, Anita Shreve, Julia Glass), others less so--do write about the people who most influenced them as writers.

Many of the authors write about teachers. For example, Alexander Chee writes about Annie Dillard, who taught him that "while I had spoken English all my life, there was actually very little I knew about it." He recounts her "fugues" on writing, as well as some of the exercises she assigned, the clothes she wore, and the way she smoked a cigarette and drank coffee from a thermos. By the time he had finished studying with Dillard, Chee "wanted to be her."

Julia Glass describes how she yearned for an editor who would be a taskmaster, someone along the lines of Maxwell Perkins. Yet, when her actual editor turns out to be a thoroughly nice poet named Deb, who "resists the easy cynicism that preys on most people involved in 'creative' pursuits" and is, in fact, the perfect collaborator for Glass.

Other writers pay tribute to writers or books who inspired them. Cheryl Strayed reflects on the importance Alice Munro held for her; Strayed studied "how she moved her characters in and out of a room, how she conveyed an emotion or a moment just so." When Strayed finally has the opportunity to meet Munro, she is unable to speak to her. Some inspirations are unexpected: Martha Southgate cites Harriet the Spy and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay as books that shaped her work.

Of course, not every influence was entirely positive. Lily Tuck's description of the tutelage of Gordon Lish puts him squarely in the monster category (at least in my view), where I also regretfully place Susan Sontag on the basis of Sigrid Nunez's essay. Even from "monsters," however, much was learned.

I found this a fascinating look into the sources of inspiration and the way in which writers read. After reading how these writers dissect a passage from a favorite writer makes me all too aware of how blind I generally am to the subtleties of the writing in the books I read. I'm inspired to read more closely (although perhaps lacking the skill to do so), be more aware of the author's work as I read.

Favorite passages:

You could think that your voice as a writer would just emerge naturally, all on its own, with no help whatsoever, but you'd be wrong. What I saw on the page was that hte voice is in fact trapped, nervous, lazy. Even, and in my case most especially, amnesiac. And that it had to be cut free.

Go up to the place in the bookstore where your books will go, she said. Walk right up and find your place on the shelf. Put your finger there, and then go every time.

Alexander Chee, "Annie Dillard and the Writing Life"

...in the world's grays and sepias, in its shadows and lonely nights, a fine beauty is visible to the eye that stays open.

Denis Johnson, "On Fat City"

Long Drive Home, by Will Allison

2011-09-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

Driving home with his daughter in the back seat, Glen Bauer flips off a cop, has a confrontation with an armed man in an SUV, is nearly hit by a teenager in a Jaguar convertible, and then in a snit causes an accident that kills that same teenager and might well have killed himself and his daughter. Is it any wonder that he lies about the circumstances of the accident? Not at all.

Given Glen's impulsiveness, perhaps some of the ways in which his life steadily deteriorates after the accident are also not surprising. Yet they are painful, not only because they hurt him and his daughter, but because they are self-inflicted (with help from his wife).

Long Drive Home is a sad commentary on human nature. Unfortunately, the writing is not good enough or the insights compelling enough to make it worth subjecting yourself to this story.

End of the Mystery Binge

2011-09-20T16:10:00.000-07:00

So I've finished the stack of mysteries on my nightstand and am moving on to more serious reading (maybe). The last three in the stack were all decent reads:

Betrayal of Trust, by J.A. Jance. Jance writes four different series (note to James Patterson: she writes them herself!), which seems to keep each series fresh. Betrayal of Trust is the latest entry in the J.P. Beaumont series, her first (and still my favorite). J.P. and his wife Mel are called in to investigate when the governor finds what appears to be a snuff film on her step-grandson's phone--and things quickly go from bad to worse in a story of cyberbullying, sexual abuse, and amorality.

The Silent Girl, by Tess Gerritsen. Gerritsen has a vivid and dark imagination, and in this entry in the Rizzoli and Isles series (which bears little resemblance to the tv series it has spawned), she gives that imagination full rein. The case opens with a Chinatown tour group's discovery of a severed hand. Soon Jane and Maura are investigating not only this murder but a 19-year-old murder-suicide (or so it appeared) at a restaurant in Chinatown. Chinese folk tales, a mysterious monkey-like being, and an martial arts master all play into the case.

Broken Prey, by John Sandford. Like J.A. Jance, Sandford writes more than one series and an occasional stand-alone book. Here, he returns to the Lucas Davenport series but with a twist. The bodies of two girls are found by a construction crew; the girls' disappearance was the first case Lucas investigated as a plainclothes cop (not officially promoted to detective yet). Half the book provides background on the investigation in the 1980s, introducing us to a younger and much less experienced Lucas than we have met before. The second half of the book describes the investigation following discovery of the girl's body--an investigation that proves deadly for one of Lucas's long-time friends. It's a sad story, with some foreshadowing that makes me wonder when Lucas's daughter Letty will implode!

Flash and Bones, by Kathy Reichs

2011-09-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

Flash and Bones is something of a comeback for the Temperance Brennan series--a straightforward mystery with just one setting, Tempe's hometown of Charlotte, NC. In a Q&A at the end of the book, author Kathy Reichs talks about having an A story line, a B story line, and a C story line in her books. The A story line here is a body discovered at the landfill next to the NASCAR racetrack, covered in asphalt and sealed in a rusted barrel. The B story is a decade-old missing persons case that Tempe gets drawn into when the brother of one of the missing people comes into the medical examiner's office to ask if the victim found in the landfill might be his sister. The C story, according to Reichs, is Tempe's love life--while there's a new man (disgraced cop and head of racetrack security Cotton Galimore) to whom she's attracted in this book, not much really happens on that front, and her old love interests are mostly missing from the book. However, there is also a story line revolving around Tempe's almost-ex-husband Pete and his impending marriage to the ditzy Summer, which adds comic relief.

Another way of identifying the A, B, and C stories in Flash and Bones would be to look not at the cases, but the topics that are central to the story--here they are NASCAR, domestic extremism (in the form of militias), and biotoxins. As usual, Reichs weaves a lot of information into the narrative.

One of the things that distinguishes Reichs's books from some other mysteries is that the reader can actually figure out who the villain is; occasionally, this makes one wonder why Tempe has to be nearly killed before she figures it out, but at least there is no need for a long explanation of why the solution to the mystery came totally out of left field.

Overall, Flash and Bones is an enjoyable mystery.

Favorite passage:

"Ever hear of alienation of affectation?"

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese

2011-09-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

Many reviews of Cutting for Stone have described it as "sprawling," and it is certainly is a very long book with subject matter that covers a great deal of space and time. Action occurs in India, Ethiopia, and the United States and covers many decades.

The first 100+ pages of the book center on the day in 1954 when twins Marion and Shiva Stone are born in Ethiopia to an Indian nun and a British doctor. Their mother dies in childbirth and their father immediately disappears. The boys have the good fortune to be adopted by two loving doctors at the mission hospital (known as Missing, a mispronunciation of Mission), ob-gyn Hema and internist turned surgeon Ghosh. They are raised alongside Genet, the daughter of one of the household workers. Marion, who is the book's narrator, is from an early age enamored with Genet, an attraction that will cause him major problems over the course of his life.

Growing up essentially in a hospital, the twins see early on the fragility of life, the power of both medical knowledge and emotional support for the afflicted and their families. Ghosh begins teaching Marion his diagnostic skills from an early age, while Shiva takes a particular interest in the gynecological problem of fistulas, common in Africa. These interests shape their futures, as Marion goes to medical school, while Shiva, who is brilliant but not academically oriented, becomes something of an apprentice to Hema. When Genet is involved in a hijacking, her roommate implicates Marion (who is innocent), and he must flee the country. He ends up at a hospital in New York that serves the poor, where he eventually meets his father and learns the history that caused his father to abandon the twins. More ominously, Marion once again encounters Genet, who has just been released from prison and is suffering from tuberculosis. Marion finally loses his virginity (well into his 30s) to Genet, and a family crisis ensues.

This is the first time I have written about a book after we discussed it at Novel Conversations, and I must report that everyone in the group liked the book better than I did. While everyone reported having trouble getting into the book for the first 100 or more pages and found some of the details of medical procedures and conditions difficult to read, they all eventually came to appreciate the character development, the details about life in Ethiopia and the counterpoint of life in New York City, and the insight into Ethiopian history and politics. While these were strengths of the book, I felt it was too long, with too many details about the boys' childhood in Ethiopia; the themes of loss and exile could have been more powerfully conveyed if the book had "sprawled" less. Had I not been reading the book for book group, I'm not sure I would have finished it. But I didn't hate it--when we graded the book at the end of our discussion, I gave it a B- (it also got two As and three Bs).

Favorite passage:

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our giant African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration, of the superorganism. It's a sound I believe that only the new immigrant hears, but not for long. By the time I learned to say "Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism.

(I like the idea conveyed in this passage, which also illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of the writing. Measuring time in terms of how long it takes to learn to order at a deli--brilliant. Switching from first person to second in the last sentence--not so much.)

The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2011-09-07T20:03:00.001-07:00

The Left Hand of Darkness was recommended by my son who is currently working on a Ph.D. in Japanese literature. Although I rarely read science fiction, I took up his challenge and read this winner of multiple prizes, in which Le Guin asks readers to consider how culture and personal relations might be different if people were androgynous, sexually active for only a few days per month, and capable of both siring and bearing children.

Genly Ai is a native of earth serving as an envoy to the planet Gethen for the interplanetary coalition known as the Ekumen. Following a team of scouts who landed on the planet (known in the Ekumen as Winter due to its frigid climate) incognito, Ai is trying to convince the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen. He begins his work in the nation Karhide, where shifgrethor (the quality of face or pride) underlies all social authority. He has been working with the Prime Minister, Estraven, who is soon banished from the kingdom by the monarch Argaven. The book traces the journeys of Ai and Estraven to the neighboring (and unfriendly) nation of Orgoreyn, with a markedly different structure of government and culture (bearing some resemblance to a socialist or communist state--the book was written in 1969), and back to Karhide. Orgoreyn's politics are equally treacherous, however, and Ai finds himself in serious difficulties, which only Estraven can help him understand and escape. As they travel the treacherous ice fields of Gethen, Ai explores the developing understanding between the androgynous Gethen and the male native of Earth.

While Ai's voice is dominant, the book also includes chapters from Estraven's perspective, as well as "ethnographic reports" from the scouts who studied Gethen before Ai's arrival. These reports do add to the reader's understanding of the cultures of Gethen. On the other hand, the chapters from Estraven's perspective, while providing insight not available elsewhere, undercut the conceit that the book is a report from Ai to the Ekumen.

On the positive side, Le Guin creates two complex Gethenian cultures and does cause readers to reflect on the role of gender and sexual desire/gamesmanship on culture and on personal relationships--worthwhile reflections. On the other hand, I found the section describing the journey across the ice to be too long and tedious. The book itself is a reasonable length, but I could have done with less of this trek.

For me, reading a novel set in a totally imagined world was challenging--I found myself spending so much time/energy trying to figure out the geography, the power relations, the language, etc., that I was not focusing on the ideas LeGuin was dealing with. While I tried to "let go" and read for the big picture rather than the small one, I was only partially successful. The book begins with a very interesting (and much cited, according to the aforementioned son) introduction in which Le Guin discusses her view of science fiction, stressing that it is descriptive rather than predictive, that the future in science fiction is a metaphor. Since I have never thought much about science fiction (other than to think it would never be my favorite genre), I feel challenged to test my understanding of her ideas by reading some other scifi.

Favorite passages:

I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end. (Okay, it's a bit aphoristic, but I still like it.)

Light is the left hand of darkness . . . how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.

Tallgrass, by Sandra Dallas

2011-08-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

Tallgrass is narrated by adolescent Rennie Stroud, who finds herself the only child left at home on her family's southeastern Colorado sugar beet farm. Her brother Buddy has enlisted to fight in World War II, and her sister has moved to Denver to work in the defense industry. Meanwhile, Japanese Americans are being brought to live at the Tallgrass internment camp (a fictionalized version of the Amache camp) just down the road from the Stroud farm.

The community of Ellis, Colorado, does not show its best side as the Japanese Americans arrive. Many businesses put up signs saying they will not serve Japanese, people harass the new residents as they get off the train, and a trio of loathsome lay-abouts go farther than mere harassment. The situation gets even worse when one of Rennie's friends is raped and murder, with many in the community suspecting someone from Tallgrass must be responsible.

In contrast to many others in the community, Rennie's father chooses to treat the Japanese Americans as he would any other neighbors. While Rennie and her mother experience some conflict about the family's relationship with the camp, they eventually come around. The family dynamic is one of the book's strongest points.

Tallgrass is a well-intentioned book--Dallas wrote it out of concern that (1) people did not know enough about this chapter in U.S. history and (2) events at Guantanamo Bay forced her to consider that we might be repeating past mistakes. Unfortunately, it is not very effective as a novel--the characters are too clearly "good" or "evil," and the plot is predictable. The novel begins "The summer I was thirteen, the Japanese came to Ellis," suggesting that events are being remembered by Rennie as an adult--but that retrospective view is not used to any advantage. In fact, we are reminded of it so sparingly that when we read a sentence like "Some would live there for three years, until V-J day," it seems out of place.

There are much better books--fiction and nonfiction--about the internment (When the Emperor Was Divine and A Fence Away from Freedom to name just two). I would recommend reading them and skipping Tallgrass.

Favorite passage:

When I was little, I'd told Mom that if there were a fire, I wasn't sure whether Granny would save me or the quilts. Mom had warned me to be careful with matches.

The Mystery Binge Continues

2011-08-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

I've been continuing my mystery binge, but I thought I had nothing to say about the recent titles until I realized today that the last three books I've read had something odd in common. All feature mystery-solving women who are not police officers, private investigators, lawyers, or pathologists but are married to lawmen. Jan Burke's Irene Kelly (Disturbance) is a reporter; her husband is a police detective. Earlene Fowler's Benni Ortiz (Spider Web) is a museum curator; her husband is the chief of police. Susan Wittig Albert's China Bayles (Mourning Gloria) owns an herb store (although she is a retired lawyer); her husband is a PI and college professor teaching criminal justice. All of the women do things that might be described as, well, stupid, putting themselves in danger before solving the crime at hand (although in this particular title in Fowler's series, Benni is more concerned with a personal mystery than the sniper case plaguing her husband's department--but she unwittingly solves the case anyway).

I can see why a mystery author gives her protagonist a career that is not traditional for sleuths (although I guess an argument could be made for a journalist being a crime-solver)--making China the owner of an herb store, for example, allows Albert to share a lot of information about herbs, in which she is clearly very interested. But why do they give their characters husbands in law enforcement? Is it just to provide a source of conflict? Or is there a more insidious underlying message--an untrained woman is a better crime-solver than a top-notch male investigator? Or are they trying to write an updated "damsel-in-distress" tale? I'm looking for answers!

Bright Before Us, by Katie ARnold-Ratliff

2011-08-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to find that Bright Before Us is something of a mirror image of To Be Sung Underwater, which I wrote about in my last entry. Bright Before Us is written by a woman, from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, a man who is caught between his present life as a teacher and husband and his memories of an earlier love. Hmmm.

There are some significant differences, however. Francis Mason is only 23, and he was married to the past love he's pining for only a year or so before the events described in the book. And Francis's issues make Judith Whitman seem like a model of mental health.

As the book opens, Francis, two parent chaperones, and his second-graders are doing a field study at the beach on a Friday afternoon. Then some of the students stumble on a body, and Francis completely loses his composure, screaming and sobbing as the children watch in horror. When Francis gets home that night, he lies to his wife Greta, telling her that the students saw the woman jump from the Golden Gate Bridge; the next day, he tells her the woman was his former girlfriend (Greta doesn't know they were married), Nora. He medicates himself and sleeps through Sunday; Monday, he returns to school, still over-medicated and clearly not long for the classroom--though he manages to do some further damage to the children in his care before he takes his leave.

As Francis drives his present life into the ditch, we also read his recollections of his relationship with Nora, which he managed to destroy just hours after they married. While his childhood was clearly difficult and shaped his adult persona, it's difficult to have sympathy for Francis, who makes bad decision followed by bad decision, often fueled by alcohol or medication. Though on the book's last page Francis claims, "I will change," it's difficult to believe his destructive personality and inability to maintain a relationship will truly change. In fact, one feels dread for his unborn child, who seems almost assured of become yet another generation damaged by his parents.

Arnold-Ratliff writes beautifully. Perhaps I enjoyed To Be Sung Underwater more because the main character was more relatable to me (female, not fresh out of college). Perhaps had Francis been less callow, he would have evoked more (well, any) sympathy from me. I'd be interested to hear if this book resonates more with readers not eligible for AARP membership. Still, I'll definitely read Arnold-Ratliff's next book to see how she follows this debut novel.

Favorite passages:

I secured a job in the struggling district with unsettling ease, and began looking for holes in the prescribed curriculum that I could fill with art, the People's History, the teaching of tolerance. At home, I practiced finger painting, free-association writing, explosive science experiments, a segment on cooking. I swore I would take my students outside no matter the season; we would do a unit on international sports, like jai alai and cricket. I would teach them the silly camp songs of my young--Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar. I stood in front of the medicine cabinet mirror and practiced my enthusiastic lectures, my voice low so Greta wouldn't hear me from the bedroom. I perfected faces to use when they spoke, so they would know that I was really, truly listening to them.

The story for me to know is the one I made, crafted from the raw materials of failure. I pulled at the tethers of my life, resisting them like a child. I built that story with every word I used to wound, every lie I erected.

To Be Sung Underwater, by Tom McNeal

2011-08-12T20:22:00.000-07:00

Your first love can have a strong hold on your imagination. And when things go badly in "real life," that first love can start to exert a pull that becomes irresistible. That is the situation in which Judith Whitman finds herself. As a teenager in Nebraska, living with her father after her parents have separated, she fell in love with local boy Willy Blunt in the summer after her senior year in high school. Willy was funny and passionate and introduced Judith to the pleasures of the Midwestern landscape and making love. She even agreed to marry him...but then she went off to Stanford and began to enjoy a different life. Soon enough, she's marrying preppy Malcolm.

Now it's 25 years later. Judith has had a successful job as a film editor, though things are not going particularly well with her current job. She suspects her banker husband is having an affair with his assistant. And she admits that she's never felt as close to her only daughter, Camille, as she thinks she should; now that Camille is a teenager, their relationship is even more troubled. Rather than engaging with these problems, Judith instead starts to think obsessively about Willy. She moves her old bedroom set where they first made love to a storage unit, where she spends more and more time sleeping and rereading the books she enjoyed as a teen (somewhat reminiscent of the crazy mother's retreat to a storage unit in Bee Season).

Finally, Judith reaches out to Willy. Since the Prologue makes it clear that they do meet again, it's not revealing anything to say that she returns to Nebraska to see him. What happen there should be discovered as you read.

As I was reading, I kept thinking "I can't believe this was written by a man," both because Judith is so well drawn in both her teen years and as she approaches middle age (sympathetic without being entirely likable) and because the story is so essentially romantic. Willy and Judith's father are also fully realized characters, though Judith's husband Malcolm is a bit of a cardboard cutout, more foil for Willy than real person.

Can you redeem your life by returning to a simpler--perhaps purer--version of yourself? Tom McNeal invites you to reflect on that question in this well-written and -plotted novel.

Favorite passage:

On these occasions Judith would always wonder whether Patrick Guest had found a place in the world that honored his ability to do things carefully and well, and whether, too, he'd found a marriage that hadn't depleted that secret cache of hopefulness he'd been accruing all the way from adolescence and probably before, Judith guessed, if he was anything like the rest of us.

. . . now, stopped in the center of Main Street, it was deeply quiet, and for that long moment Judith had the sensation of standing within an unshaken snow globe. For the rest of her life, whenever in some thrift shop or somebody's home she would come upon a broken snow globe, one where the snowflakes no longer swirled, she would be reminded of these moments standing in the stillness, staring at the thrift shop, and holding her father's hand.

In Zanesville, by Jo Ann Beard

2011-08-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

"We can't believe the house is on fire. It's so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we're supposed to be in charge here, so there's a sense of somebody not doing their job."

This opening paragraph of In Zanesville sets the town for this very funny coming-of-age story set in small-town Illinois (as an Illinois native, I'm thinking Zanesville is modeled on Moline). The narrator is a 14-year-old girl with a family that has serious problems (they're broke, the father is a drunk who disappears regularly) and a best friend named Felicia. It's the summer before ninth-grade, and the girls are babysitting a passel of kids to earn money to buy new clothes for fall. It is the home of their clients that is on fire--although the damage to the house is minimal, the boy who started the fire is severely punished by his father, hinting that the book is not just going to be a comic story.

As the two girls start the school year, they become interested in boys, which leads to some amusing episodes. Trouble comes, however, when they suddenly take a step up socially, being invited to a slumber party at a cheerleader's house. Ten boys show up to hang out with the 11 girls, and when Felicia goes off with a hunk, our heroine feels abandoned. While the description of her experience at the slumber party is funny, it's also poignant, reminding you of how serious everything feels in those early teen years. Following the party, matters get worse when, for some inexplicable reason, the cheerleaders want to hang out with the narrator (her name is never actually stated, although there are hints that made me think it's Jo Ann) but not Felicia. Without their friendship to sustain them, school is painful and the social scene seems surreal (Jo Ann has been hanging out in the artroom, picking up new vocabulary and avoiding the awkwardness of not having a crowd to sit with in the cafeteria).

While the book's undercurrent of sadness makes you think that it's going to have a very serious outcome, in fact the ending is lighthearted. Still, In Zanesville has made me start worrying about my granddaughter's teen years (and she's only 4).

Favorite passage:

I wish my mother wouldn't mention bras in front of my father; I don't know how much he knows or doesn't know about certain matters. My mother's own bras are large quilted things that I used to think were funny. Now when I see them on the laundry table, one cup folded into the other, I have a sense of impending doom. It's like being on your way to the Alps and knowing that when you get there you'll have to wear lederhosen.

History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life, by Jill Bialosky

2011-08-04T14:08:00.000-07:00

In April 1990, Jill Bialosky's younger sister Kim committed suicide. For the 20 years between that event and the publication of this book, Bialosky has tried to make sense of this tragedy, by reading, attending meetings of those affected by suicide, talking with experts, reflecting on her sister's life, and perhaps most importantly by writing. In History of a Suicide, she recounts this struggle.

One of the underlying questions for Bialosky is whether she could have helped her sister; if, had she known the degree of pain her sister was in, she could have reached out and made a difference. Even those who have not had this terrible experience can imagine the toll that thinking about that question for 20 years would take. Clearly, no matter how much she reads, thinks, and talks, Bialosky cannot escape a sense of responsibility--even when experts and loved ones tell her that she is not in any way culpable.

As Bialosky describes Kim's childhood and their shared family life, events that caused Kim pain and undercut her belief in her "lovability" are evident. But others have the same experiences and do not kill themselves--something that makes the decision to die even more unfathomable for the survivors.

Bialosky writes well and I feel sympathy for the ongoing pain she has experienced (although I do admit to a bit of impatience as well). One piece that I found unfathomable--and which may account for my overall cool reaction to the book--relates to two other losses she experienced shortly after Kim's death. When Kim committed suicide, Bialosky was four months pregnant. That baby was born prematurely and died shortly after birth. A year later, Bialosky got pregnant again; that baby lived only a few hours. She says that the "trauma of losing my firstborn and the loss of Kim to suicide have forever become tangled like threads in a rope." But she virtually never mentions the two babies again. I find this incomprehensible--and, for me, it also calls into question any psychological insights Bialosky offers. If she doesn't see that her sense of responsibility for her sister (for whom she claimed to be a second mother) might be linked to the devastation of not being able to carry a baby to term, then I have serious doubts about everything she writes.

Favorite passage:

I now lived in two realms: the realm of the ordinary world of getting up in the morning and making coffee, answering the phone, and going to work, the world of traffic and noise and obligations; and the realm of stopped time where my sister was dead and I was shrouded in the confusion of her loss.

What Novel Conversations Is Reading

2011-08-04T14:04:00.001-07:00

Here's what Novel Conversations is reading for the next several months:

Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese (September)

One Book, One Broomfield Selection (t0 be announced soon--October)

The Borrower, by Rebecca Makkai (November)

The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton (December)

The Paris Wife, by Paula McClain (January)

A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan (February)

The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean

2011-07-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

The Madonnas of Leningrad is the story of a woman named Marina, both early in her life and near the end. The narrative toggles back and forth between 1941, when Marina is a young woman working at The Hermitage in Leningrad, and the present, when she is an elderly American suffering from Alzheimer's.

The story set in 1941 covers the first months of the siege of Leningrad--at first, Marina is working to help pack the museum's art so it can be trucked to a safer location and seeing her friend--soon fiance--Dmitri, who is about to leave for the front. But the situation rapidly deteriorates, as the Germans cut off the city. As the bitterly cold winter progresses, the depravations are shocking. For protection from the bombs, Marina, her aunt, and uncle move into the basement of the Hermitage with hundreds of others. They survive on a few scraps of bread a day, also eating wood, glue, and whatever else they can find that might have some nutritive value. Her aunt and uncle succumb, but Marina survives. An elderly woman who works in the museum helps Marina retain her sanity by teaching her how to build a memory palace--a method for remembering the details of all the artworks now missing from the hermitage's walls.

Those memories are more real to the elderly Marina than her granddaughter's wedding, the setting for the contemporary sections of the book. Much of the time, she does not recognize her daughter and she cannot remember where she is. Faithful Dmitri is still with her, protecting her and hiding her condition from her son and daughter. When she goes missing in the middle of the night, however, the children understand the full extent of her illness.

Both pieces of the book are interesting/informative--shedding light on a historic event I knew little about, providing a glimpse into what it might be like to have Alzheimer's, and provoking reflection on art's power. But the two pieces really don't seem to fit together, there are a lot of loose ends that never get resolved, and the characters other than Marina are not well-realized. So I liked the book--but it could have been so much more.

And BTW, the mystery binge continues: I also read Silent Mercy by Linda Fairstein while reading Madonnas. However, I have nothing to say about it.

Favorite passages:

In the half-light, their eyes meet. What he finds there is her, but also not her. Her eyes are like the bright surface of shallow water, reflecting back his own gaze. Something flutters and darts under the surface, but it might be his own desire, his own memory. He is, he realizes, probably alone.

No one weeps anymore, or if they do, it is over small things, inconsequential moments that catch them unprepared. What is left that is heartbreaking? Not death: death is ordinary. What is heartbreaking is the sight of a single gull lifting effortlessly from a street lamp. Its wings unfurl like silk scarves against the mauve sky, and Marina hears the rustle of its feathers. What is heartbreaking is that there is still beauty in the world.

The slow erosion of self has its compensations. having forgotten whatever associations might dull her vision, she can look at a leaf and see it as if for the first time. Though reason suggests otherwise, she has never seen the green before. It is wondrous. Each day, the world is made fresh again, holy, and she takes it in, in all its raw intensity, like a young child. She feels something bloom in her chest--joy or grief, eventually they are inseparable. The world is so acutely beautiful, for all its horrors, that she will be sorry to leave it.

Fatal Error, by J.A. Jance

2011-07-26T22:12:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the mystery binge didn't quite end. Instead, I read the latest installment in J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds series (one of four series that Jance has going--and not my favorite). Ali is a former TV anchor who returned to her hometown of Sedona, Arizona, after being fired from her job. After a series of traumas and some good luck (she keeps inheriting things, a nice trick if you can manage it), she has settled into a relationship with B. Simpson, the head of a computer security firm populated by some top-notch hackers, and is at the police academy, training so she can become the PR officer for the local sheriff's department. Unfortunately, she is laid off the day she returns from the academy.

Unemployment doesn't suit her, and she eventually is drawn into a case involving a former colleague in the news business, Brenda Riley. Brenda, too, was fired, but she hasn't fared so well post-stardom; she has been dumped by her online boyfriend and problems with alcohol have led to a series of arrests. When she discovers the erstwhile boyfriend is not who he says he is, she finds a new purpose and a lot of trouble, trouble she eventually draws Ali into.

The story is fast-paced and switches perspectives often enough to keep you interested--even though the case itself and the fact that Ali is able to crack it (mostly because of those hackers I mentioned) both seem utterly unbelievable. Jance also seems to repeat some elements of the back story of various characters unnecessarily. I don't know whether she forgot what she'd already told us (shouldn't her editor catch that?) or she thinks her readers aren't too bright and can't keep up (which would be pretty annoying)--but either way, I wish she'd cleaned that up.

Fatal Error isn't a great mystery, but it's not a terrible one either and it's a fast read, so . . . it's sideways thumb on this one.

Favorite passage: None

Breaking Silence, by Linda Castillo

2011-07-24T19:29:00.000-07:00

Book two in my mystery binge was a step up from Crunch Time, perhaps because it is only the third book in Linda Castillo's Kate Burkholder series. The small-town sheriff and her boyfriend--John Tomasetti of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation--are relatively fresh characters, as is the setting, a small town in Amish country.

Kate, who was raised in an Amish family, is working two cases that are bringing back a host of troubling memories. One is an escalating series of hate crimes directed against the Amish. The other is what at first appears to be an accident--a couple and the husband's brother dead in the manure pit of their pig farm (described in nearly nauseating detail)--but is later revealed to be triple murder that leaves four children orphans. John comes to town to help with the investigation of the hate crimes. The stress of the two cases, her memories, persistent insomnia, and her shooting of a suspect escalate Kate's drinking. With John's help (readers of the earlier books in the series know he has his own demons to deal with), she manages to hold things together and solve both cases, but a total meltdown seems sure to ensue in a later title.

It's odd to me that the Amish are currently such a popular topic in reading material. I don't find the group inherently fascinating, but the situation of a woman who was formerly Amish serving as the sheriff in the "English" community near where her family lived is rife with dramatic possibilities, which Castillo exploits. I'm still looking forward to another Kate Burkholder mystery (and, lately, that's saying something).

But now, the binge goes on hold while I read The Madonnas of Leningrad, Novel Conversation's next book.

Favorite passage:

The rain started at midnight. The wind began short time later, yanking the last of the leaves from the maple and sycamore trees and sending them skittering along Main Street . . . (unfortunately, she takes the sentence in a bad direction with the last phrase: like dry, frightened crustaceans).

Crunch Time, by Diane Mott Davidson

2011-07-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

I was feeling so ready for a mystery binge--but I started with a bad one. Diane Mott Davidson's series featuring sleuthing caterer Goldy Schulz has totally jumped the shark. Not only is Crunch Time silly and unbelievable--it's boring!! But maybe some of the recipes are good!

The First Husband, by Laura Dave

2011-07-22T19:26:00.000-07:00

I guess I should have known from the title and the fact that Amazon offered The First Husband in a package with a Jennifer Weiner that this book would be a quintessential "chick lit" story, but somehow I allowed a brief synopsis to convince me it might be more. It's not. I also thought that the main character's career as a travel writer might be interesting to learn more about. It wasn't. Don't bother!

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

2011-07-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

Ann Patchett returns to South America in State of Wonder and, while not as compelling as her masterpiece, Bel Canto, it is well worth reading. The book's central character is Dr. Marina Singh, a 43-year-old pharmacologist for a company in the Twin Cities; she is having an affair with her boss, Mr. Fox, a man who is little more than a cipher. Much more real is Dr. Annick Swenson, Singh's mentor when she was training to be an ob-gyn (she quit medicine when she accidentally blinded a baby during a caesarean). Swenson is now in the Amazon jungle, using funding from Singh's company to research why women of the Lakashi tribe remain fertile into their 70s. Swenson is not keeping the company up-to-date on her progress--they don't even know exactly where she is--and Marina's lab mate, Dr. Anders Eckman, has gone to South America to find her.

When a letter arrives from Swenson, reporting Dr. Eckman's death, both his widow and Mr. Fox want Marina to go to Manaus to find out what happened and ascertain the status of Swenson's research. Marina does not want to go, but she succumbs to the pressure and heads out on her journey. She spends several weeks in Manaus--sans luggage--trying to make contact with the young couple who are the gatekeepers to Dr. Swenson and wandering through the city, reflecting on her earlier life. While Marina's back story is interesting, she still somehow fails to come completely alive as a character, and the section of the book set in Manaus drags.

Dr. Swenson finally makes her appearance, however, and Swenson agrees to take Marina to her research station. From here, the pace of the story picks up, with a number of intriguing developments. Marina learns new and startling information about Swenson's research, is forced into providing medical services to the Lakashi (and into reexamining why one bad outcome caused her to leave the practice of medicine), and tries to find out exactly what happened to Anders. The ending is both startling and somewhat unsatisfying, as I still felt unsure about what path Marina will follow when she returns to Minnesota.

Favorite passages:

At that moment, she understood why people say You might want to sit down. There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.

Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green. . . . Instead of growing up inquisitive and restless, she had developed a profound desire to stay, as if her center of gravity was so low it connected her directly to this particular patch of earth.

Room, by Emma Donoghue

2011-07-09T20:21:00.000-07:00

By a strange coincidence, Novel Conversations will be discussing Room the night after the heavily promoted Diane Sawyer interview with Jaycee Dugard airs. Room tells a story that seems to have a number of similarities with the real-life Dugard story, but it is told from the story of five-year-old Jack, who lives in a 11 x 11 room with his "Ma." In fact, Jack was born in the room, the product of his mother's repeated rapes by their captor, whom they call "Old Nick."

Jack is happy in Room (he names most objects, not using articles...it's "Plant" not "the plant"). His mother has created a life that, though severely restricted by their circumstances, is rich with love. They share music and stories, have "Phys Ed" for exercise, play games, and create crafts from the meager supplies available (they blow out eggs and use the shells to create a snake that Jack stores under Bed). They have a television, but Ma limits Jack's viewing time. To Jack every channel is a different planet, and only what happens inside Room is real.

While Jack is happy, Ma is not doing so well. Some days she is "Gone"--sleeping and unresponsive. Her teeth cause her constant pain. And Old Nick is still raping her several nights a week. After Jack's fifth birthday, Ma begins to "unlie"--to begin helping construct a more accurate view of the world outside Room. She also hatches an extremely dangerous escape plan. It is, I suppose, a "spoiler" to say the plan succeeds--but I'm not sure anyone would want to read the book if Jack and Ma never got out of Room. Indeed, their experiences trying to understand and cope with "Outer Space" and reintegrate with Ma's family are by far the most interesting and thought-provoking parts of the book. The post-Room period also offers Donoghue a chance to satirize the media, who go crazy when the story of Jack and Ma's escape becomes public.

The author has done a marvelous job getting into the mind of five-year-old Jack (or at least it seems like she has--what do I know about the mind of a five-year-old?), and I admire the skill and humor with which she has drawn her unusual narrator. On the other hand, I think I would have enjoyed the book more if we had gotten the story from both Jack and Ma's perspectives. Although I think the device of multiple narrators is over-used, this might be a case in which it would have worked. Nonetheless, Room is worth reading, both to experience Jack's mind and to think about the philosophical questions it poses.

Favorite passage:

When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything.

The Long Good-bye, by Meghan O'Rourke

2011-06-29T05:36:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years, I have read several memoirs of grieving, but The Long Good-Bye resonates in a way the others haven't. Perhaps that is because O'Rourke is writing about her mother's death, and I have a mother (still very much alive, thank goodness), whereas the other works are all about husbands, and I haven't had one of those for years. Or perhaps it's because O'Rourke is about the same age as I was when I experienced a devastating loss (I do suspect that grieving changes with the age of the mourner). For whatever reason, I found The Long Good-Bye moving in a way that encouraged reflection.

O'Rourke's mother, Barbara Kelly O'Rourke, was in her early fifties when she was diagnosed with cancer. O'Rourke is unflinching in describing her responses to her mother's illness, the realization that she is probably going to die, and her actual death. (O'Rourke decides to get married while her mother is in treatment--and then to get divorced just months later, adding to the unbelievable layers of stress she was feeling.) When Barbara dies, O'Rourke is devastated by how much she misses her mother, how "unmoored" she feels.

As she struggles with her grief, she reads prodigiously about mourning, and she shares insights and excerpts from her reading. This choice is not only instructive--we learn as she learns--it also helps to ground her pain in the experiences and wisdom of others.

O'Rourke writes about this difficult subject with great grace. I highly recommend this book for anyone seeking to understand more about how people deal with loss and grief.

Favorite passages:

Other people--friends, colleagues--got used to my mother dying of cancer. But I did not. Each day, sunlight came like a knife to a wound that was not healed.

The desert was dry and majestic and it calmed me; I was empty and it was, too. The open sky over the land, the juxtaposition of the minute and the majestic--it all expressed the dissonance I felt, and having my sense of smallness reflected back at me put me strangely at ease. How could my loss matter in the midst of all this? Yet it did matter to me, and in this setting that felt natural, the way the needle on the cactus in the huge desert is natural.

It's not a question of getting over it or healing. No, it's a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools. It is too central for that. It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction.

Sing You Home, by Jodi Picoult

2011-06-28T21:26:00.000-07:00

Jodi Picoult is an adventurous author--a few years ago, she incorporated a comic book into one of her novels. With Sing You Home, she (lyrics) and collaborator Ellen Wilber (music) have written a soundtrack for the book. The 10 songs, performed by Wilber (provided on CD with print copies of the book, available online to those who read an ebook), are each connected to a chapter in the novel. Since one of the central characters in Sing You Home, Zoe, is a music therapist, this ancillary could be a good idea--but the songs I listened to were mediocre and did nothing to enhance the reading experience. Top-notch recordings of the songs that Zoe used in therapy or listened to herself would perhaps have been more effective.

Aside from the addition of the soundtrack, Sing You Home follows Picoult's successful formula. It features multiple narrators--in this case music therapist Zoe, her husband Max, and friend Vanessa--each with a distinctive voice. The story rests on current "hot topics"--gay marriage, infertility, and evangelical Christianity. Many of the story's conflicts are played out in the familiar setting of the courtroom--and there's a Picoultian twist at the end.

To avoid being a "spoiler" (I'm feeling sensitive about what I write because a review of another Picoult title is by far the most viewed page on my blog), I won't say more about the plot, other than to say that some of the crucial developments in the story weren't believable to me. They certainly could happen, but I didn't feel Picoult provided the context we needed to believe that they would happen.

The parts of the books that I most enjoyed were the scenes in which Zoe was practicing her profession of music therapy. These scenes gave me insight not only into how music therapy can work but an appreciation for how a therapist changes e course during a therapy session to meet the client's needs. I didn't hate the rest of the book--and at least no children died tragically as a plot device (only pre-born children). Still, Picoult's innovations have not prevented her books from becoming predictable--even the supposed "twists" no longer really surprise.

Favorite passage: None

The Kitchen Daughter, by Jael McHenry

2011-06-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

The first chapter of The Kitchen Daughter is a gem. Ginny Selvaggio is at her parents' funeral, and she's having difficulty dealing with all the people--looking to her sister for cues, as well as rescue, she also uses what are clearly long-term coping strategies--thinking about cooking, cooking, and shutting herself in the closet with her hands shoved into one or another pair of her parents' shoes. McHenry describes Ginny's responses so well that we immediately grasp that Ginny has some kind of social disorder (which turns out to be undiagnosed Asperger's--probably) and how she copes with it; we also like her, want to cook with her, and understand quite a bit about her family situation.

Ginny's married sister Amanda is well-intentioned but a bit too "take charge," and much of the story is about their conflicts--about whether they should sell the family home (where Ginny still lives), whether Ginny should move in with Amanda's family, and whether Amanda's daughter Shannon might have the same problem that Ginny has. There's also a magical realism element--starting at the funeral, when Ginny cooks something exactly as specified on a hand-written recipe card, the ghost of the person who wrote the recipe appears. Through these appearances, Ginny learns more about her family history and is warned against letting Amanda do something...what neither we nor Ginny know. In another subplot, the family's cleaning lady plots to get Ginny out of the house, and Ginny becomes friendly with her grief-stricken son.

Reading this book is not about the plot--it's about the window into Ginny's mind and her coping strategies (I absolutely love her 'Normal Book" and the way she thinks about cooking and food to calm herself). And it's about pondering what it means to be normal, to help someone you don't really understand, to grieve.

Recommended.

Favorite passage:

I lose myself in food. The rich wet texture of melting chocolate. The way good aged goat cheese coats your tongue. The silky feel of pasta dough when it's been rested and rested just enough. How the scent of onions changes, over an hour, from raw to mellow, sharp to sweet, and all that even without tasting. The simplest magic: how heat transforms.

Faithful Place, by Tana French

2011-06-13T20:46:00.000-07:00

In Tana French's third mystery novel set in Dublin, she once again takes a character from her previous book--this time Cassie's boss in Undercover, Frank Mackey--and makes him the center of the story. The divorced Frank has just picked up his nine-year-old daughter for the weekend when he gets a frantic call from his sister Jackie, the only member of his family he has talked to in 22 years. The night he left the family apartment on Faithful Place 22 years ago, he was planning to elope to London with his girlfriend Rosie Daly . . . but Rosie apparently stood him up. Now, however, her suitcase has been discovered in the abandoned building where teenagers used to hang out. When her body is found in the basement of the building, Frank must not only try to figure out who killed her--and it seems highly likely that it was someone in his family--but rethink the meaning of his past and the ways in which viewing himself as the jilted lover shaped his life.

The Mackey family is ferociously dysfunctional. Frank's efforts to untangle the mystery of Rosie's death are complicated by the fact that his sister and ex-wife have secretly been taking his daughter Holly to visit the Mackeys so she can "get to know her family" and Holly is drawn in to the family's craziness.

French continues to explore the meaning of family and the construction of memory within the mystery/thriller genre. This third novel has a more believable plot line than her two earlier works and in that sense is more enjoyable than the others. The language is not, however, as lovely as in the previous two novels (especially In the Woods)--perhaps this is an indicator of French's skill in creating different voices for the characters who narrate the novels. Perhaps we'll learn more in novel four (I'm predicting the narrator will be Detective Stephen Moran, whose dark side is as yet unrevealed to us).

Favorite passage:

She [Frank's ex-wife Olivia] looked so lovely, and so tired. Her skin was starting to turn worn and fragile, and the sickly kitchen light picked out crow's feet around her eyes. I thought of Rosie, round and firm and bloomed like ripe peaches, and how she never got the chance to be any other kind of lovely except perfect. I hoped Dermot realized just how beautiful Olivia's wrinkles were.

Swim Back to Me, by Ann Packer

2011-06-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

In Swim Back to Me, Ann Packer presents six stories (one technically a novella), with the first and last effectively linked by shared characters. The book opens with "Walk for Mankind," a novella set among faculty children in 1970s Palo Alto. The story is narrated by an adult Richard Appleby, who was an eighth-grader living with his professor father at the time of the story. Professor Appleby seems to have little notion of what a 14-year-old's needs might be; meanwhile, when Richard visits his mother once a month in Oakland, she tries to expose him to "the real world" by taking him for walks in the ghetto. At school, Richard is intrigued by the new girl, Sasha Horowitz, who not only befriends him but invites him into her family, which to Richard seems like the ideal two-parent, two-child lively unit. As the year progresses, however, Richard's feelings toward Sasha become romantic; meanwhile, she has become involved with a 25-year-old drug dealer. This relationship interferes with Richard and Sasha's friendship, but he is nonetheless devastated when Stanford does not ask Mr. Horowitz to stay on for the next school year. Clearly, this year in his life has shaped Richard's life.

The book's final story takes us into Sasha's family more than 30 years later. The family--parents long since divorced and Sasha herself married and divorced--has gathered for her brother's late-in-life wedding to a much younger woman. Sasha has become the caretaker for her difficult father, a fact that grieves her mother Joanie but that Sasha accepts. When Joanie mentions that Richard's sadness that year in Palo Alto prevented her from leaving her husband sooner, Sasha remembers her wildness that year--totally out of character for her either before or after--but she has forgotten Richard. Given the obvious importance she played in Richard's memory, this is a shocking reminder that even a close relationship may mean totally different things to the people involved.

I was also moved by three of the four self-contained stories. "Molten" is the story of a bereaved mother's attempt to connect with her dead son through his favorite music. In "Dwell Time," a woman happily muses about her new marriage and blended family--until her new husband does not come home. As she learns what has happened, she ponders what to do when he does return. "Her Firstborn" is told from the perspective of an expectant first-time father, whose wife (in a previous marriage) had a baby boy who died at five months. As he tries to protect her from the questions and comments he thinks would wound her, he worries about why she wants their new baby to wear the dead baby's clothes.

Although I found the story "Jump Time" less effective, I highly recommend this collection. Packer's characters are multidimensional; they inhabit families, relationships, and places with absolute authenticity; and they deal with pain and loss in ways as variable as we ourselves might.

Favorite passages:

Just two weeks and he's an expert on Danny, on his Dannyness, each day placing into an infinitely expandable container every new thing he knows to be true about his baby. He thinks of what he knows about the dead baby--about Jasper--and it's next to nothing: he liked to be flown through the air like an airplane, he loved to have his father tickle his toes. Dean's had it all wrong: it isn't that Lise had a baby who died, but rather that she had a baby, who died. He looks at her, creases around her eyes as she smiles at Danny, and he feels a little space open up in his mind, for all she can tell him about her first son.

"We're so glad you're here," he says, and I think I'm not losing a brother, he's losing a personal pronoun.

Once Upon a Time There Was You, by Elizabeth Berg

2011-06-07T20:23:00.001-07:00

In the prologue to Once Upon a Time There Was You, Elizabeth Berg lets us know that both John and Irene Marsh had serious doubts on their wedding day. So perhaps it is no surprise that, as the book proper starts, they are divorced, with John living in St. Paul, MN, and Irene in Northern California.

The couple's 18-year-old daughter Sadie is returning to California from a week spent with John. with whom she has a close relationship despite not living in the same state with him. She is planning a weekend getaway with her boyfriend Ron, which she is covering up by telling her somewhat smothering mother that she is going rock-climbing. The weekend turns into a disaster, and John must fly to California to help Irene deal with the crisis.

While Berg's intent, according to a piece I read, was to explore whether two people who had gotten divorced could love each other again, I never really felt that there was a snowball's chance that Irene and John would get back together. Whether they would be able to get along well enough to work through the family crisis seemed a more realistic question. I don't want to do the spoiler thing, so I'm not going say more about the plot, but suffice it to say, while this is an easy read, it's not particularly rewarding. Berg's earlier works are much better.

Favorite passage:

You're a Minnesotan. Your people just discovered that lemon juice doesn't have to come from a green bottle. But that doesn't mean everyone's so benighted!

A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

2011-06-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

Where to start with A Reliable Wife? Perhaps I ought just to say that, despite the novel's strong reviews, I did not like it.

The dislike started early. I don't think I had gotten past the first page when I had thought, "Oh, geez, another author who thinks that, if you write in short sentences, you're Hemingway." (Example" The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late.") These choppy sentences are interspersed with sentences that seem to be trying to hard for both style and depth. ("But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives he light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began."--This monster of a sentence appears right before the four quoted above.)

Then there are the three despicable characters at the heart of the story--Ralph, the wealthy Wisconsin industrialist; Catherine, his mail-order bride; and Antonio, who may or may not be Ralph's son. Not only are all three unlikeable, they were for me totally unbelievable. All have sad back stories (Ralph's mother stabbed a needle into his hand and ground it against the bone to show him what hell was like--a place she fully expected him to end up from birth), a dysfunctional obsession with sex, and no idea how to have a real relationship with another human being. While Goolrick may intend to redeem two of the three through love and forgiveness at the end of the book, I simply didn't believe they were doing anything other than adopting new masks.

Finally, the author says he was inspired by a book of photographs and news clippings showing the dark side of the end of the nineteenth century among poor people in rural America. Yet, he does little more than allude to the stories of the poor people who die, go mad, or suffer terrible losses; they are simply sources of entertainment and surprise to Ralph and Catherine, who are wealthy and urban, respectively.

Not recommended.

Favorite passage:

In the country, there was insanity. There were fires and burnings and murders and rapes, unthinkable cruelties, usually committed by people against people they knew. It was at least personal.

Give Me Your Heart, by Joyce Carol Oates

2011-06-02T18:06:00.000-07:00

I am currently trying to slog through Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (not my first attempt). In a chapter titled "Who Is a Novelist?"she talks about the difference between the author and the literary persona in a way that captured the struggle I had recently while reading Oates's book about being widowed (Oates herself seemed to find that persona burdensome). Smiley says: "As the author gets older and publishes more work, his or her literary persona grows larger, stronger, and more out of control. . . . The literary persona is a verbal construct but it speaks with a human voice, and to those who don't actually know the author, it seems to be the author." The Oates I encountered writing about herself was not the Oates I expected based on her literary persona.

I was more comfortable with this collection of short stories, subtitled Tales of Mystery and Suspense, which took me back to the literary Oates, though the creepier side of that persona. Still, imagine my surprise to come across the following in the very first story: ". . . you, Dr. K--, the man, are not the individual who appears in your books; the books are clever pretenses, artificial structures you've created to inhabit temporarily, as a crippled, deformed individual might inhabit a structure of surpassing beauty, gazing out its windows, taking pride in posing as its owner, but only temporarily." Oates does indeed seem to struggle with the conflict between self and literary persona.

Although Give Me Your Heart contains only ten stories, their conceptions of the human heart are so dark that they wear you down as you read. In "Split/Brain," a woman returns home unexpectedly from the rehab center where her husband is recovering; she notices her sister-in-law's car parked some distance from her driveway. Knowing that her ne'er-do-well nephew often drives the car, she enters the house calling his name. The resulting confrontation is predictable, but Oates gives the story another spin by returning to the thoughts in the woman's mind as she enters the house.

Several stories--"Strip Poker," "Bleeed," and "Nowhere"--involve girls (teenagers or younger) in dangerous situations with older males. In "The Spill," Lizabeta is the younger second wife of a man whose household includes various family members that no one else will take in. One of these relatives is John Henry, a mentally disabled nephew. Lizabeta fears that John Henry will harm one of her young children, telling herself over and over, "He would never hurt them. He would never." In the 1950s, however, Lizabeta cannot even dare to ask her husband to get rid of John Henry. So what can she do besides wait and watch? Perhaps the most disturbing story is "Vena Cava," which takes place entirely in the brain of a severely wounded soldier who has returned to North Dakota from the War on Terror. His wife is not the woman he wanted to marry, and he does not recognize his son as his own. Of course, he also believes that an actor is playing him. Oates describes his confused thoughts so masterfully that his story would be heart-breaking, even if it didn't end as badly as it does.

I recommend this collection, as long as you're not in a depressed state and don't read too many of the stories all at once!

Favorite passage:

. . . it was then that Jess's mother uttered the astonishing words Jess would never forget: "I wish I could believe you."

Not accusing so much as yearning, wistful. And her mouth strained, ugly. And it was the final moment of Jess's childhood, as it was, for Jess's mother, the final moment of a phase of her motherhood. Though neither could have said. Though neither would have possessed the words to speak of their loss.

Ape House, by Sara Gruen

2011-05-28T18:11:00.001-07:00

Early in Sara Gruen's latest novel, reporter John Thigpen muses about his experience communicating with a group of six bononos (a species of apes), feeling that something "massive had shifted" in his view of the world. We then meet Dr. Isabel Duncan, who not only works with the bonono but clearly sees them as colleagues and family. These chapters raise the reader's expectations, suggesting that exploring the world of interspecies communication may be an experience that changes how you think about being human, about language.

But then all hell breaks loose--the lab where the bononos live is bombed and Isabel is severely hurt. John's wife Amanda moves to LA, leaving him in Philly, where an evil colleague steals his story. He quits his job and follows Amanda to LA, getting a job at a sleazy tabloid. Meanwhile, a reality show starring the bononos has become a sensation. Amanda and John both head to the small town in New Mexico where Ape House is filmed. Also flocking there are a variety of strange protestors, one of whom John comes to think may be his son, the product of a youthful and drunken sexual encounter. John joins ranks with several strippers who are staying in the room above his in the hotel, saves a meth-cooker and adopts his dog when the meth lab explodes, and . . . well, essentially the book becomes a romp.

Ape House is fun and, for someone who doesn't think a lot about communicating with animals, presents some interesting information about the bononos. It does not, however, fulfill that early promise of profoundly changing the reader's view of humanity or language.

Favorite passage (it's the epigraph, so Gruen didn't really write it, but it made me laugh out loud):

Give orange give me eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. -- Nim Chimpsky, 1970s

Gimme gimme more, gimme more, gimme gimme more. -- Britney Spears, 2007

The Uncoupling, by Meg Woliter

2011-05-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

Dory and Robby Lang are English teachers at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Stellar Plains, New Jersey, where their daughter Willa is a sophomore. The Langs, though married for more than 15 years, still have a rollicking sex life--until a cold wind carrying a spell wraps itself around Dory one night, effectively killing her interest in sex within minutes.

As the Lang's marriage suffers in the new no-sex regime (Robby tries various ridiculous strategies for reviving Dory's interest, including a sex-related board game, a shared candle-lit bath, and snuggling under a "Cumfy" two-person blanket/wrap), their daughter is discovering her sexuality with Eli, the son of the new drama teacher who lives down the street from the Langs.

Meanwhile, the drama teacher is preparing to stage Lysistrata at Elro High--Lysistrata is the Greek comedy in which the women stage a sex strike as an anti-war protest. The parallels between the play and the spell sweeping through the women of Stellar Plains start to seem more than coincidental--even Willa is eventually affected, breaking Eli's heart. Events reach a humorous climax at the performance of Lysistrata.

The Uncoupling is an amusing book--despite not being a fan of "magical realism," I enjoyed reading it. Unfortunately, however, while Wolitzer makes various pronouncements about sexuality, marriage, gender differences, and aging, none of them are enlightening. So read The Uncoupling for fun--but not to learn anything about relationships.

Favorite passage:

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness. The bright points of silver. The butter in its oblong dish. The corpse of a chocolate cake. The leaning back on a chair at the end, slugged on the head and overcome.

A Widow's Story, by Joyce Carol Oates

2011-05-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

Last year, in reviewing Kay Redfield Jamison's book about her husband's death, I suggested that she might have been better off distilling the best of her book into an article, holding up the piece by Joyce Carol Oates that had recently appeared in The Atlantic as an exemplar. Sadly, I would now like to give the same advice to Oates herself, as her book A Widow's Story is less effective as a whole than were the parts previously read.

Oates and her husband Raymond Smith, editor of the Ontario Review, had been happily married for nearly 50 years when he died suddenly in February 2008. The book describes her response to his brief illness and death. Certainly, the time was hideously painful for her--she writes at length about the attraction of suicide--and one cannot but feel compassion for her as she struggles to sleep, to deal with the "widow's death duties," to survive this cataclysm in her life. The book describes a very harrowing four months in Oates's life.

While it is taken as a given that writing about one's life at some moment of terrible personal crisis is brave, I'm not sure it is always well-advised. Some of what emerges about Oates is not flattering. While in sections of the book (including, if memory serves, in parts reproduced in The Atlantic) she writes about how the support of friends was important to her, she also critiques friends in unattractive ways. While out to dinner with friends, she wonders why they must discuss Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama incessantly--really, what does she expect them to talk about? She says in other places that she does not want to talk on and on about Ray's death. So??? Her friends are there for her--perhaps she should give them a break. She refers to Joan Didion as a friend (without naming her), but is rather snide about Didion's book Year of Magical Thinking. Why would she call it narcissistic for Didion to write about her husband's death when she herself is writing a similar book? She refers several times--with irritation--to the frequent description of her as "prolific"--given the context, why does this matter to her or to readers?

The portrayal of her marriage is also somewhat troubling. While she talks of how happy they were, Ray had not read her fiction--they worked side by side in the evenings but did not talk about the novels she was writing. Indeed, she talks about her persona as Joyce Carol Oates as somehow extraneous to her life as Joyce Smith. For two people wrapped up in work and literature, this seems like a severe limitation on their intimacy. Neither had Ray told her much about his childhood, although she clearly recognized that it had marked him in ways she did not understand. What is perhaps most disturbing is that, when she finally makes herself read the notes and drafts for a novel he had set aside years ago, she shares information about his family and past that one can only surmise he wanted to remain private.

And, finally, I could not abide one of the "writerly" touches Oates inserted. At the end of many chapters were paragraphs, set in italics and referring to herself as "the Widow-to-Be" or "the Widow."

One thing that I tried not to let influence me was the fact that Oates remarried scarcely a year after Ray's death--but I fear I may not have been successful. While I do not begrudge her a second marriage, I wonder why this book seemed necessary, especially given her comments about Didion's book.

Favorite passage:

Being a writer is like being one of those riskily overbred pedigree dogs--a French bulldog, for instance--poorly suited for survival despite their very special attributes.

Being a writer is in defiance of Darwin's observation that the more highly specialized a species, the more likelihood of extinction.

Teaching--even the teaching of writing--is altogether different. Teaching is an act of communication, sympathy--a reaching-out--a wish to share knowledge, skills; a rapport with others, who are students, a way of allowing others into the solitariness of one's soul.

Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche--so Chaucer says of his young scholar in the Canterbury Tales. When teachers feel good about teaching, this is how we feel.

You Are Free, by Denzy Senna

2011-05-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

The female protagonists in Denzy Senna's new story collection, You Are Free, are struggling with questions of identity--questions that emerge from their racial backgrounds (nearly all are biracial) as well as their relationships. Many of the characters are adjusting to the transition from financially struggling single New York artist to solidly middle class married mother living in the West.

In the first story, "Admission," Cassie and her husband Duncan attend an interview at an exclusive preschool in LA as research for a play she is writing. But when their son is admitted to the school, Cassie is tempted to enroll him, even though they had already selected a preschool they could afford. Duncan, however, remains scornful of the overpriced "Institute," telling Cassie she sounds like a New Yorker cartoon. When Cassie tells the admissions officer that they have decided not to enroll Cody, the story takes a turn for the creepy, as the admissions officer then becomes something of a stalker, calling Cassie over and over to try to change her mind.

In "The Land of Beulah," Jackie has been dumped by her boyfriend because she is not black enough for him. She adopts a stray dog, which changes her life. She makes new friends at the dog park, stops attending to her own hygiene, and abuses the dog. Things seem to come to a head when she sees the ex-boyfriend with a white woman, but the dog escapes and the story ends with Jackie at the spa.

Another character, Lara, is confronted by a woman who thinks Lara is her birthmother. A "Triptych" of stories place three young women in identical situations--their mothers having just died of breast cancer and their abusive fathers presiding over a family meal. Rachel and her husband Hewitt--both biracial but often mistaken for an interracial couple--find themselves living in an apartment building populated by an oddly large number of interracial couples. Rachel and Hewitt have a baby, as do their neighbors Dave and Helga. Rachel finds Helga and her parenting ideas bizarre and is thus stunned when a number of people mistake her for Helga and when Hewitt starts to show some interest in the neighbor.

My descriptions of the stories don't do them justice--Senna has created three-dimensional characters struggling with who they are on several fronts. In addition, she has done it with insight, a touch of humor (while up with their baby, Rachel and Hewitt comment sarcastically on Nick at Nite's Huxtapalooza), and a soupcon of creepiness.

Favorite passages:

Livy recalled all the evenings she'd spent in her old life, bonding with her other single women friends. It was like some ancient ritual, the way they offered each other their tales of love lives gone wrong, men behaving badly, how they offered up their dissatisfaction and ambivalence like pieces of fruit at the feet of the Buddha.

It was over. She knew, sitting on the slim modern sofa in her Brooklyn walk-up, that it was over, this romance with herself. A love affair was ending. And she felt a new affection for her solitary life, the same affection that sometimes arises for the person you are about to leave.

They talked about milestones and nursing difficulties and those last ten pounds they couldn't lose and peanut allergies and diaper rashes, and yet beneath the pedestrian chatter Livy felt overtaken with love of a religious magnitude for all of them,. She felt the duaghter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.

(All of these passages are from the story "The Care of the Self," which, despite the fact that I didn't mention it above, must have been one of my favorites!)

My Hollywood, by Mona Simpson

2011-05-07T19:57:00.001-07:00

My Hollywood is a story of mothers and nannies but it's no The Nanny Diaries. Narrated by Claire, a composer, and Lola, a Filipina nanny who cares for Claire's son Will, Mona Simpson's book is a serious (though sometimes humorous) look at the interrelationships among nannies, their employers, and the children they care for.

Claire is married to Paul, a writer for a sitcom who is never home at their rented Santa Monica house. Claire, who not only needs time to write in her upstairs studio but also questions her own parenting skills, hires Lola as a live-in caregiver for Will. Both Claire and Will grow to depend on Lola's calm competence; Lola, in turn, loves Will dearly. Meanwhile, Lola is sending money home to the Philippines, where her husband and five grown children live; she came to LA to work because the family needed money for her youngest daughter's medical school tuition.

At the urging of her friend Helen Grant (whose husband is more successful than Paul), Claire attends a parenting class to increase Will's chances of getting into the desired preschool. When Will has trouble making and keeping friends at the preschool, the counselor suggests that Lola is the problem, and Claire and Paul "chop" (fire) Lola. Lola then gets a job caring for baby Laura, whose single mother Judith is, like Paul, never home. Laura has some problems due to oxygen deprivation at birth. Lola quickly grows to love Laura and takes her to her many appointments with therapists, does exercises with her, and essentially wills her to full health by the time Laura is 5--just as Judith acquires a live-in boyfriend who wants Lola to do his ironing. This time, when Lola is "chopped," she returns to the Philippines, but she quickly realizes that she is more at home with other people's children in LA than at home.

This synopsis does not do justice to the complexity of the two characters Simpson has created nor the insight she provides into their thoughts and feelings (the two do not seem typical, although their situations seem emblematic of what many women face in our class-conscious country). On the other hand, a confusion of other mothers, children, and nannies clutter the story; although the accumulation of caregiver-comings and goings, divorces, illnesses, and loneliness adds weight, the story would have been sharper with some judicious editing. Still worth reading.

Favorite passages:

Maybe there was an essential agreement at the bottom of every marriage. I supposed it was time I read the fine print of my own.

Helen had gone to a two-day gingerbread workshop. Her house alluded to children, but if a real child had worked on it, it couldn't have looked like this. it would have been smeared with frosting, lopsided, the roof laden with candy. No, this wasn't authentic or even useful. Only beautiful. What her life now allowed her to make.

The Light of Evening, by Edna O'Brien

2011-05-02T20:11:00.001-07:00

I had so little to say about The Light of Evening that I waited to write about it until after we discussed it in our book group, hoping my friends would have some good insights I could share (with attribution, of course). Unfortunately, we all felt pretty much the same about the book--it was disjointed and confusing (to no evident purpose), the characters were less than engaging, the writing was rather pedestrian, and the treatment of mother-daughter relations was neither moving nor enlightening.

The story: Dilly is an older Irish woman heading to the hospital with an undiagnosed health problem. She dearly hopes that her daughter Eleanora will come to visit her. Her first night in the hospital, a cruel nurse gives her a sedative that causes her to freak out and then to dream about her trip to the United States 50 years ago (a vivid description of steerage) and her time working in Brooklyn, where she fell in love and had her heart broken. She returned to Ireland, married a hard-drinking and abusive farmer, and had a son and daughter. Her son cares only about inheriting the farm, her daughter eloped and then became a writer--writing books that have turned her home town against her. Her daughter makes a brief visit to her hospital room, leaving behind her diary when she dashes out to yet another affair. Dilly reads the diary and is shocked--but still determines to return home and change her will so her daughter will inherit.

The letters O'Brien intersperses through the text--letters from Dilly's mother to Dilly and then from Dilly to Eleanora--are marvelous examples of motherly guilt-mongering, but when she devotes an entire section to letters at the end of the book, their effectiveness is sapped.

Not recommended.

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children, by Sarah Braunstein

2011-04-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

One of the blurbs on this book's dust jacket says that the multiple characters created by author Braunstein "come together like pieces of broken glass from an object that can never be reconstructed." That lovely bit of description seems to suggest a book about broken lives touching each other tangentially in a way that has some beauty, albeit a fractured beauty. Well...there are certainly many broken lives--and numerous missing children--in the book, and to some extent their lives do touch, though not in a way that seems particularly meaningful. Unfortunately, there is no beauty to be found.

The book's first chapter introduces us to Leonora, a young girl we are told will disappear. Braunstein then introduces legions of other characters, and we wonder what their significance is in the story of Leonora. But the opening chapter about Leonora is in many ways a distraction. Although Leonora reappears periodically and she does, in fact, disappear, the book isn't really about Leonora. It's about children disappearing physically--more often by running or simply wandering away than by being snatched--but it's also about children who disappear emotionally, by getting pregnant too young, marrying the wrong person, and losing faith in their dreams.

The book's structure is disjointed, moving from character to character and across decades with no discernible pattern. Some characters assume importance for one or two chapters and are never heard from again, while others thread their way through the book. All, we can be confident, are disappointed in life, distanced from those closest to them, and afraid or shamed. While certain events and scenes are painted in excruciating detail, other large questions raised in the story are left unanswered. Together, the stories seem to tell us that life is meaningless, hope is an illusion, and shame and fear are the most salient emotions.

Does Sarah Braunstein illuminate the human condition or express herself in a way that compensates for reading 360 profoundly depressing pages? Sadly, for me she does not.

Favorite passage:

Age certainly doesn't predict self-knowledge, but it usually predicts some awareness of lack of self-knowledge.

(This is a clever sentence--but I think it is utterly untrue; perhaps choosing it as a favorite passage is emblematic of how I feel about this book.)

Three Stages of Amazement, by Carol Edgarian

2011-04-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

Lena Rusch's life is so stressful--and Carol Edgarian describes it so well--that reading about it is painful. With her husband Charlie Pepper, she has recently relocated from Boston to the Bay Area, a move that meant leaving behind a much-loved job at WGBH. She has a five-year-old son Theo and an infant daughter, whose twin died at birth; the grief of losing Sylvie and the frightening medical challenges faced by Willa are debilitating. Meanwhile, Charlie works all the time, trying to get his start-up off the ground. He has a potential investor in the business, but has not told Lena that the investor is her uncle Cal, whom she despises. Nor has he mentioned that Lena's former lover Alessandro works for Cal.

While Lena is at the heart of the novel, Edgarian uses multiple narrators, including Cal, his wife Ivy, Alessandro, Charlie, and Theo. Cal and Ivy are wealthy beyond imagining (the engagement party they give for their daughter costs more than a million dollars), and Cal seems to enjoy his work as a venture capitalist, but their relationships--even with their daughter--are shallow. As the economy tanks (the book is set in 2009), the lives of Cal, Ivy, Charlie, and Lena all take turns for the worse as well, some expected, some surprising.

One of Edgarian's greatest achievements is her limning of Theo who--despite being only five--is a fully realized character. Quirky, bright, and hurting, Theo charms while breaking your heart as he pays the emotional price for the high-stress existence that Lena and Charlie live.

The first half of this book is emotionally wrenching; it also offers a view of wealth that was interesting (although somewhat repugnant). As Cal and Ivy's story gets more attention, however, I grew less interested. And Edgarian stumbled a bit as she tried to bring all the book's threads to a close that reflects Charlie and Lena's maturation. Nonetheless, I think Three Stages of Amazement is worth reading for its portrayal of family life in the twenty-first century and for Edgarian's lovely prose.

By the way, the three stages of amazement are silence, disbelief, and talk.

Favorite passages:

Grief was a stalker. It lurked in the china cabinet and in the waiting room at the dentist's and behind the switch on the hall light. it wined itself inside the tongue of sneakers and the click of pens and the heels of socks. Tea bags were infused with it, as were cereal boxes, board games, and the mail as it passed through the slot. Contrary to reputation, it never looked drab; it didn't care a whit about time. . . . it wasn't elegant. It wasn't easy or smooth. It rose with the sun and hid in the corners of fog. Surprisingly, it preferred hello to good-bye. It showed up on the beach and acted churlish in the park.

Theo refused. He'd been tugged at enough. He was tired. He had been "the best boy" in the hospital and, later, at that school. he thought , at the very least, he had a different kind of morning coming to him. He wanted to run tucked inside the flap of his mother's raincoat with them both pretending he was a baby bat. He wanted to tell her a story and have her listen carefully--a story that had no beginning or end.

Forgetting means remembering at an inconvenient time.

South of the Border, West of the Sun, by Haruki Murakami

2011-04-21T21:10:00.000-07:00

South of the Border, West of the Sun is the most straight-forward of the Murakami books I have read (this is number five, I think)--it features no surreal elements or multiple narrators. At the heart of the book is the first-person narrator, Hajime. The book opens with Hajime describing two of his early relationships. At 12, he and Shimamoto, both only children, are inseparable; after school, they walk home (slowed by Shimamoto's bad leg) and then sit together and listen to music. When they go to different junior highs, however, they lose touch, and Hajime moves on to his high school girlfriend, Izumi, whom he betrays with her own cousin.

After eight years of a mind-numbing job with a textbook publisher, Hajime meets and marries Yukiko. Her father loans Hajime the money to open two jazz bars, which he enjoys running. Hajime and Yukiko have two children, and he is happy...or at least content.

Then Shimamoto comes into his bar, the Robin's Nest, and his childhood love for her blossoms into an adult obsession. Her appearances at the bar are sporadic and she will tell him little about her life in the 25 years since their childhood friendship ended. But his interest in her intensifies, fed in part by memories of a closeness Hajime has not felt with anyone else. When they finally spend a passionate night together, Hajime is ready to leave his wife and children for Shimamoto....but she clearly has other ideas. Hajime struggles to define who he is in the aftermath of their "affair."

While I appreciate the pull that an old love can exert, especially when one is at a phase of life when there seem to be more questions than answers, South of the Border, West of the Sun fell flat for me. Though sometimes frustrated by them, I missed the mysterious elements of Murakami's other works (the mysteries here--why Hajime's father-in-law seems to be setting him up for a fall [nothing ever comes of it] and where, with whom, and how Shimamoto lives--don't seem to matter very much), as well as the complexity of not only the plot lines but also the novels' constructions.

Favorite passage:

. . . probably is a word who weight is incalculable.

The Creative Life: True Tales of Inspiration, by Julia Cameron

2011-04-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

Julia Cameron is the author of the well-known The Artist's Way and its many spin-offs, none of which I have ever read. Perhaps I made a mistake by picking up The Creative Life without having read her first 30 or 31 books. The Creative Life is essentially a diary, intended (judging by the subtitle) to help readers learn how to find inspiration in their lives. But the book is actually quite dull--we read innumerable vignettes about dinner with a particular friend, being reminded that they always order the same dish and, at some point in the course of the meal, remind each other that writing "is a process." We read about her piano lessons--but without any in-depth discussion of the music or her struggles to play it. Ditto the classes she teaches, the run-throughs of plays she attends, and a variety of her other experiences.

Not recommended.

Favorite passage: None

Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

2011-04-16T12:51:00.001-07:00

Ambitiously subtitled A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Freakonomics was a big hit when it was published in the mid 2000s. Among its devotees were my younger son, who frequently referenced its unusual analyses of such diverse topics as the link between abortion and crime rates, cheating by public school teachers and sumo wrestlers, and bias among contestants on The Weakest Link. I recently got around to reading the book, which has been on my "to read" shelf for years.

Author Levitt, a University of Chicago economist, loves nothing more than an unusual question and a data set that will help him answer it. And, with the help of journalist Dubner, he has produced an interesting look at such questions as "Why do drug dealers live with their parents?" and "What makes a perfect parent?" While I am deeply suspicious about some of the causal links Levitt posits (I lack the statistical skills to even consider trying to "disprove" them), his analyses are thought-provoking and engagingly presented.

In one of the blog posts appended to this "revised and expanded edition," the authors defend the book against the criticism that the book has no unifying theme (they actually agree that it has no theme and suggest a theme is not necessary). Yet, early on, they lay out several "fundamental ideas": (1) incentives are the cornerstone of modern life, (2) the conventional wisdom is often wrong, (3) dramatic effects often have distant causes, (4) experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda, and (5) knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. All of the cases that Levitt and Dubner present do support one or more of these ideas--in my view, that's a theme (or set of themes).

So, while I wouldn't count myself a devotee of the book, I did enjoy being challenged by the counterintuitive findings that Levitt and Dubner explore in Freakonomics.

Favorite passage:

If I got to make three wishes, perhaps one of them would be that I might turn into a truly interdisciplinary social scientist who uses data to inform human behavior in ways that both shed light on and draw upon not only economics, but sociology, political science, and psychology as well. But let's be realistic. I'm having trouble even mastering the tools of my own discipline. (This passage is reflective of Levitt's self-deprecating approach.)

The Likeness, by Tana French

2011-04-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

In The Likeness, Irish author Tana French picks up the sidekick character from her first book, In the Woods, and makes her the narrator of a highly improbable story. Cassie Maddox was seriously damaged--professionally and psychologically--from the fallout of the mistakes she and former partner/best friend Rob Ryan made in investigating the murder of a 12-year-old girl. She has transferred to Domestic Violence, where she is miserable but pretending not to be.

Then Cassie's boyfriend Sam catches the case of a murder victim who looks exactly like Cassie and is using the fake name Cassie used in her years doing undercover work. Cassie's former boss in Undercover convinces her and Sam that they should tell people the victim (Lexie Madison) is not dead and have Cassie assume her identity, moving in with the four grad students Lexie lived with. What? The idea strains credulity, as does much of the plot that follows.

Not surprisingly, Cassie (orphaned as a child and brought up by a loving but rather uninvolved aunt and uncle) finds the excessively close-knit, family-like bond that the five friends have created attractive--she actually enjoys spending all her time in the group, despite the fact there's a good chance one of them killed her doppelganger. When the mystery finally unfolds, French once again leaves several threads hanging.

French clearly has an interest in how broken people find relationships that make them feel whole, as well as in how people deal with their darker impulses. She also can put words and sentences together beautifully. These are serious and interesting subjects; since (in my view--obviously, since her books are bestsellers, many disagree), however, she doesn't have the gift of plotting a good mystery/thriller, I wish she'd try her hand at a serious novel that deals with those subjects.

Favorite passages:

If I had ever wanted a house, though, it would have been a lot like this one. This had nothing in common with the characterless pseudohouses all my friends were buying, shrunken middle-of-nowhere shoeboxes that come with great spurts of sticky euphemisms ("architect-designed bijou residence in brand-new luxury community") and sell for twenty times your income and are built to last just till the developer can get them off his hands. This was the real thing, one serious do-not-fuck-with-me house with the strength and pride and grace to outlast everyone who saw it. Tiny swirling flecks of snow blurred the ivy and hung in the dark windows, and the silence of it was so huge that I felt like I could put my hand straight through the glossy surface of the photo and down into its cool depths.

The Fates Will Find Their Way, by Hannah Pittard

2011-04-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

Sixteen-year-old Nora Lindell, who looked good in her private school uniform with the knee socks sagging, disappears on Halloween, leaving behind a father and sister, plus a pack of teenage boys who seem unable to recover from the excitement of her disappearance. What actually happened to Nora remains a mystery, but the boys--based on various sightings over the years--create a variety of possible explanations. Perhaps she got into a Catalina with a strange man, who drove her into the woods, where she died trying to escape. Perhaps, having learned she was pregnant after a brief coupling with a public-school boy, she ran away to Arizona, where she married an older Mexican man, gave birth to twin girls, and eventually ran away yet again. Perhaps she was in Mumbai when the bombings occurred, involved in a love affair with a female henna tattoo artist.

Meanwhile, the boys grow up and build ostensibly adult lives. Their fantasies about Nora are intertwined with stories of their "real" lives, from the disastrous mass masturbatory event at the movie night they hosted as seniors in high school, to the sad breakdown of one marriage after three miscarriages. When one of their group dies in prison (where he was confined after molesting another's 13-year-old daughter) and another leaves town to be with Nora's younger sister, the men come to a realization that the lives they have built are their real lives and the day will come when they think of Nora for the last time.

Pittard does what seems to me (a 60-year-old woman) a remarkable job of inhabiting the minds of 16-year-old boys. At times she is so grossly on target that I had to remind myself, as I cringed, that the author was a woman. On the less positive side, the chronological randomness in describing the boys' real lives is confusing (the imagined futures for Nora are much easier to track), and I found the first person plural narrator as ineffective here as in The Weird Sisters. A month ago, I could not have named a novel written from a first person plural perspective, and now I have read two...but hope not to read another any time soon.

Favorite passages:

Often it would take a wife's hand on the shoulder to pull us away from these reveries. "Honey," she might say, "the coals. Are they ready? The kids are hungry." And they would always be tender at these moments, always impossibly understanding, as though they could see our thoughts, read our fears, our worries. Sometimes, it's like they almost understand how overwhelming it all is--to be a man, to be a father, a husband, a human being, responsible for the lives of others.

At the end of the day, we find ourselves somewhat unprepared, standing for a final moment at our bedroom windows, for the obvious realization that this--this, all around us--is our life.

The Girl in the Green Raincoat, by Laura Lippman

2011-04-05T19:48:00.000-07:00

The title character in this novella catches the eye of Laura Lippman's intrepid detective Tess Monaghan, who is on bedrest while awaiting the birth of her first child (yes, Tess and Crow are having a baby--who would have predicted that?). Each day, the girl walks her similarly attired miniature greyhound in the park across from Tess' home; one day, the little dog dashes out of the park by itself. The girl in the green raincoat does not reappear.

In homage to Rear Window and The Daughter of Time (which I am unfamiliar with), Tess applies her considerable detecting skills to find out what happened to the missing woman, using her best friend Whitney and her colleague Mrs. Blossom to do the field work. They discover that the missing woman was the third wife of a man whose first two wives died suspiciously, as did a one-time fiancee (who turns out to be the third wife's older sister).

Hormones, inactivity, and worry may be having an effect on Tess' reasoning skills, as she gets a few things wrong in the course of this short, but amusing book. Nonetheless, the mystery is eventually solved, Tess' daughter is born, and we can look forward to what learning what happens when Tess becomes a working mom in the next title in Lippman's series.

One interesting thing about the book is that it was first published in serial form in The New York Times Magazine, and Lippman worked to structure each chapter to not only contribute to the unraveling of the central mystery but also to tell a "mini-story" of its own. It's cleverly done and reinforces my belief that Lippman is one of the best writers working in the mystery genre.

Favorite passage:

Also, there was a monkey. This struck Tess as the most trenchant bit of film criticism that she had ever heard from her father, something that could equal Andrew Sarris's auteur theory. She would run this past Lloyd, the film student, the Tess Monaghan theory of awfulness in movies, summed up by one line: Also, there was a monkey.

The Last Secret, by Mary McGarry Morris

2011-03-26T18:21:00.000-07:00

Years ago, Mary McGarry Morris's Songs in Ordinary Time was chosen for Oprah's book club; I saw it at my mom's house and snagged it...but I never could read it. I would open it, read the first few pages, and quit. It sat on a stack by my bed for years. And then it disappeared (I think I may have sold it at a garage sale).

Recently, my friend Lynn handed me The Last Secret with a comment along the lines of "This isn't very good, but..." Because it was a lot shorter than Songs in Ordinary Time, I decided to long beyond her less than ringing endorsement and read it. She was right. The Last Secret isn't very good.

The story of a woman (Nora Hammond) under extreme stress because she has just learned her husband has had a four-year affair with one of her best friends and because a man she ran away with when she was 17 (the tawdry escapade ended with violence) has shown up at her home, The Last Secret is a book that you know can only end badly. While plenty of other books have a similar trajectory, the authors write the story with great insight or graceful writing or a character about whom we care or an unexpected ending that flattens us with its horror (Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag comes to mind as a book whose author does all of these). While Morris does provide some insight into how the stressors Nora experiences affect her emotionally and intellectually, I found I didn't care much about Nora or her family members. The ending is predictable (the "last surprise" is not surprising at all), and the writing is pedestrian.

Will I now try to find and read Songs in Ordinary Time? No way!

Favorite passages: None

Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell

2011-03-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

How could I have wasted my time reading another Patricia Cornwell book? The last one was a hot mess, and Port Mortuary is no better. Written in the first person from the perspective of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, most of the book takes place over a period of about 36 hours as Kay returns from a six-month sojourn with the military to her lab in Massachusetts, where all hell has broken loose. I do not like Scarpetta better as a result of being in her head for 300-some pages; indeed, her constant assessing of her relationships with Lucy, Benton, and Marino is beyond annoying. Further, her sudden guilt over something that happened when her career was first beginning seems ridiculously contrived. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown

2011-03-17T17:56:00.001-07:00

The Weird Sisters are actually the thirty-something Andreas sisters--Rosalind, Bianca, and Cordelia, named for characters in Shakespeare's plays. Not coincidentally, their father is a Shakespeare scholar at a liberal arts college in small-town Ohio. Rosalind, a math professor, has never really left Barnwell. When her fiance leaves for a one-year appointment at Oxford and her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer, she moves in with her parents to help them and comfort herself.

Meanwhile, the two younger sisters are having serious crises of their own. Bianca (known as Bean) has been living the high life in New York City--financed by stealing from her employers and using her wiles to seduce men who will pay for drinks, dinner, or more. When her crimes are discovered, she escapes to her parents' home. Initially, she tells no one of her difficulties. Also secretive is Cordelia (Cordy) who has been living a nomadic "hippy-style" life but heads for home when she learns she is pregnant.

As the sisters deal with once again living under the same roof and coping with the stress of their mother's illness, they must figure out how their complicated relationships with each other and their parents have both sustained and limited them. Each sister must work through questions about who and what they want to be and where they want to do it. The direction ultimately taken by each sister is signaled fairly early in the book, making the ending rather predictable.

Two aspects of the writing are noteworthy. First, the family often communicates through Shakespeare quotes. While Brown's command of Shakespeare is impressive, the habit becomes a bit annoying (perhaps it is supposed to, as it certainly exemplifies a frustrating opaqueness in the family's communication). Second, the book is written in the first person plural from the perspective of all three sisters. This technique is interesting but ultimately I did not care for it; perhaps if the author had separated the perspectives near the end of the book when the sisters began to find themselves, the technique might have aligned better with what I take to be the book's theme.

Favorite passages:

We came home because we were failures. (The first sentence--and I like it.)

Perhaps you never liked your name. Perhaps you took every opportunity to change it: a new school, for example, where you would test out life with some pale echo of your real name--Elizabeth to Bitsy, wouldn't that be cute? A whole new you. You tried your middle name, provided it was suitable and not embarrassing, as middle names are wont to be. Or perhaps you were one of those poor souls whose well-meaning parents, in honor of some long-dead ancestor, gave you a name no contemporary soul should have to bear. Like Evelyn or Leslie or Laurie for a boy. Or Florence or Mildred or Doris for a girl--not bad names, you understood, just woefully dated, guaranteeing years of playground torture or a feeling you were destined for a rocking chair and an old folks' home long before your time.

Another family might have made preparations. Another mother might have cooked casseroles in Corningware and frozen them, labeled with instructions. Another trio of daughters might have embroidered a hospital gown, written a song in her honor, brought along massage oils and aromatherapy candles to ease her transition. For all Rose's talk, we brought only us. Unsure of what to ask, uncomfortable with the illness of a woman who had nursed us through all of ours, armed with only the books we were reading, and not entirely undamaged and unbruised ourselves. Our mother was inches away from us, but we hardly knew how she was feeling--scared? Sad? Resigned?

Long ago, she had thought bravery equaled wandering, the power was in the journey. Now she knew that, for her, it took no courage to leave, strength came from returning. Strength lay in staying.

Bad Blood, by John Sandford

2011-03-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Bad Blood is the fourth title in John Sandford's Virgil Flowers series. I've enjoyed the earlier titles, but the crimes that Virgil is called in to help solve lead to the discovery of widespread sexual abuse against children of families in a bizarre cult-like religion. The crimes are so disturbing that it is difficult to read about Virgil's escapades with the local sheriff. An unpleasant read.

After This, by Alice McDermott

2011-03-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

Alice McDermott's territory is Irish-American family life on Long Island, and that is the territory that After This explores. The book opens with the details of a day in the life of Mary, a 30-year-old office worker who is worried that her prospects for marriage seem so bleak. But those prospects are about to change, as she meets her future husband, World War II veteran John Keane, at the Schrafft's lunch counter.

McDermott then jumps ahead to the day on which the Keanes' first child is conceived. From there, we leap to a day at the beach with their three children, Mary heavily pregnant with the fourth and John having premonitions of his death. The pattern continues, as McDermott skips months and years and changes narrators--both of the Keanes, their four children (Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Clare) get their moments in the spotlight, as do Pauline, Mary's gossipy and virginal work colleague who becomes a virtual family member, and other characters who cross the Keans' path. Sometimes the vignettes deal directly with a major family event, such as Clare's home birth, assisted by a neighbor who works as a nurse in a mental hospital; others glance off those events, such as Jacob's death in Vietnam.

McDermott has said that the book is about the "pain and sweetness of life," but the vignettes that comprise the book contain far more pain than sweetness: John wakes up one morning with a sore leg and directs his son to construct a traction device rather than going to the doctor. (In describing his response to this sudden ailment, McDermott tosses in, almost as an aside, that he "will die alone"; although, in fact, he won't die for many years, this kind of foreshadowing is a tool McDermott uses quite often.) Annie accompanies her friend to an abortion clinic and breaks down because the book she is reading--A Farewell to Arms--is so sad. Pauline falls off a bus and ends up in a mental hospital; when released, she comes to live with the Keanes "for a few weeks"--and never leaves. Clare becomes pregnant as a teenager.

McDermott writes beautifully, and the characters and the Keanes' marriage are well-drawn. I am not, however, a fan of the way she has constructed the novel as a series of vignettes in the lives of the characters. Some of the vignettes are lovely--the story of Mary and Annie waiting in line at the World's Fair to see the Pieta is my favorite--and together they do create a kaleidoscopic view of the Keane family's life. Despite a love of kaleidoscopes, however, I prefer another form for a novel.

Favorite passages:

In her laugh was every confidence Mary had ever shared with Pauline about her husband's failings, every unguarded criticism, every angry, impromptu, frustrated critique of his personality, his manners, his sometimes morbid, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes impatient ways. a repository, Pauline and her laugh, for every moment in their marriage when Mary Keane had not loved her husband, when love itself had seemed a misapprehension, a delusion (a stranger standing outside of Schrafft's transformed into an answered prayer), and marriage--which Pauline had had sense enough to spurn--simply an awkward pact with a stranger, any stranger, John or George, Tom, Dick, or Harry.

Her silence was a remarkable concoction: hurt, impatience, recrimination, blood-red anger, fear, worry--the kind of concoction only a long marriage can brew.

You Know When the Men Are Gone

2011-03-01T16:38:00.001-08:00

You Know When the Men Are Gone is a series of linked short stories set at Fort Hood, Texas, among the soldiers deployed (many for the second or third time) in Iraq or Afghanistan and their wives. In the title story, Meg Brady becomes obsessed with her new neighbor--a Serbian woman with toddler twins and a large dog that barks loudly. The only food Natalya seems able to cook is cabbage, and her parenting skills seem a bit lacking. Meg agrees to babysit the twins the night before the husbands are due home, and what Natalya does next is a surprise.

Two stories deal with infidelity. In "Inside the Break," Kailani hacks into her husband's email and finds reason to suspect that he is sleeping with a female soldier while deployed. "Leave" presents the opposite case--Chief Warrant Officer Nick Cash suspects his wife is cheating while he is deployed. He pretends that he has given up his leave, but comes home and camps out in the basement, waiting for evidence that he is wrong--or right.

Other stories focus on the process of reintegrating when the deployment ends. In "The Last Stand," Kit Murphy has returned home with a severe foot injury, only to discover that his wife just wants to go home to her parents (where she has lived during his deployment) and "start all over again. . . . Alone." Carla Wolenski and her husband, a company commander, struggle to understand what each has gone through while apart--she has given birth, he has seen unthinkable pain. Their story is titled "You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming."

The collection ends with "Gold Star," in which Josie Schaeffer is trying to cope with her husband's death and the gradual loss of her sensory memories of his physical presence.

Siobhan Fallon knows the territory she is writing about--she is an Army wife who lived at Fort Hood while her husband was deployed twice to Iraq. The stories are brutally honest and are both moving and troubling. As the United States approaches ten years at war, anyone who wants to understand how serving in the military affects families should read this book. . . . and wait for a similar book about the experiences of women soldiers and their spouses. I only wish Fallon had devoted a bit more attention to the children of soldiers.

Favorite passage:

She kissed his forehead, leaving her lips pressed near his hairline until he moved away, nestling deep under his covers. Ellen knew that soon he wouldn't let her kiss him goodnight anymore, that there was a time limit on a child's affection, that each year, month, week, day, whittled away at it until he, too, would stretch and grow out of childhood and into something prickly and strange.

He would put his big hands around her back, and she felt enclose din his strength and knew he was hers again, at least for a little while. But now she had forgotten the texture of his uniform under her cheek, the sound of his boots slipping off his feet and hitting the floor, the feel of his fingertips on her back. She was losing him all over again.

Blame: A Novel, by Michelle Huneven

2011-02-28T20:09:00.000-08:00

Patsy MacLemoore is a young history professor and an alcoholic. One morning she wakes up in jail to learn that she has run over and killed two Jehovah's Witnesses in her own driveway. Because the accident occurred on her property, the charges are less severe than they might have been, and she serves a relatively short (though still difficult) prison sentence. The husband and father of her victims forgives her, and the two enter an awkward friendship.

Patsy gets out of prison, sober and determined to create a new life for herself. She returns to teaching, becomes friends with the young male lover of her former boyfriend, and meets and eventually marries his charismatic uncle Cal--despite Cal's sister Audrey warning Patsy that the May-December nature of their relationship will end up causing problems. Cal is already an AA star, and as his wife, Patsy is also frequently asked to speak at meetings around California and submit to interviews, sometimes with the husband/father of her victims.

Years pass, and it turns out Audrey had a point. Still, Patsy is committed to staying on the path she created for herself when she first left prison. Then something extraordinary happens that releases Patsy from the guilt she has carried; Cal's inability to respond enthusiastically to this event frees Patsy to create another way of living her life, one that offers her more satisfaction.

Blame is an interesting read, offering insight into the workings of AA and the potential downside of being the younger wife of a man approaching 80. Given the centrality of Patsy's guilt to the story, I expected a depthier exploration of guilt, shame, and blame--but it is not until Patsy's guilt is lifted that we begin to understand its effects--and perhaps that's the point.

Favorite passage:

Cal's kids always mattered in ways that she--the third, childless wife--could never hope to eclipse. she'd known her status when she married him. It was the sham of her marriage, really, the don't-look-too-close fine print of their agreement. A healthier, more self-respecting woman--Audrey, for example, would never have signed on.

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

2011-02-28T19:03:00.000-08:00

Sense and Sensibility is the story of the Dashwood sisters and their romantic misadventures. Of genteel birth but with little fortune and only middling connections, sisters Elinor and Marianne both fall in love with men who need to make better matches. Both endure heartache and humiliation before Austen provides her usual happy ending.

For some reason, I had never read Sense and Sensibility, and I have to say I found it rather tedious. I tried to blame it on reading the book on Kindle . . . but Elinor is too perfect, Marianne too much of a whiner, and the characters Austen uses as foils for the two heroines are so predictable and presented with so little humor that they don't enliven the story in the same way that characters in, say, Pride and Prejudice, do. When Emma Thompson won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, I thought she must have had a pretty easy task, but I now think she did, in fact, deserve the award.

Favorite passages:

There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanor, and a general want of understanding.

Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical; perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but THAT did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily given.

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

Hangman, by Faye Kellerman

2011-02-21T23:24:00.000-08:00

Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus's daughter--the fourth of their "combined" brood--is about to leave home. So, in Hangman, Faye Kellerman decides to give them a "new" child, Gabe--the 14-year-old son of two characters from a previous installment in the series. The disappearance of Gabe's mother is one of two major subplots in this mystery. The second is the murder of a young woman with a night life at odds with her work as a dedicated nurse in the neonatal unit of St. Tim's hospital. That murder eventually leads the homicide squad to two serial killers.

Hangman is a decent mystery--not terribly suspenseful, but interesting enough to keep me reading.

The False Friend, by Myla Goldberg

2011-02-21T09:26:00.000-08:00

Myla Goldberg wrote one of my favorite books, Bee Season, which is complex, original, and beautifully written. So it's hard to judge her new book, The False Friend, on its own merits, rather than comparing it to the Bee Season standard (which it does not come close to meeting).

The False Friend opens with 31-year-old Celia Durst having a flashback on the street in Chicago. She sees a VW bug and is reminded of her childhood friend Djuna Pearson, who disappeared 20 years ago. She suddenly has a flash of "memory"--Djuna did not get in a stranger's car, as Celia had told police, but had fallen into a hole in the woods by the road. Celia had seen her fall and, because they had been fighting, left her there and lied about what happened.

Celia tells her partner Huck, a high school history teacher with a marijuana habit, who supports her decision to return to her home in upstate New York to set things straight. Her visit to her depressed hometown is not what she expected, as her parents don't believe her new "memory" but do share some thoughts of their own--a rare occurrence in the Durst household. The three girlfriends who survived the day confront her with other recollections--about the ways in which she and Djuna bullied the other girls. At first, Celia seems not to believe them, but gradually her memory of the bullying returns. When Celia visits Djuna's mother, she is confronted with another view of herself--as the special girl who should have "amounted to" something to make up for the loss of Djuna. What Celia will do with all of these new views of herself remains unclear.

In the end, The False Friend doesn't seem to add up to much. There's no real suspense, although you might expect some due to the device of the "unsolved mystery" around which Goldberg constructs the story. While she does provide a frightening glimpse into bullying and its impact on the victims, I was left wondering whether self-knowledge would result in any change in the surviving perpetrator, Celia. And maybe that's Goldberg's point.

On the nitpicking side, Goldberg makes a few references to Celia's life as an employee of the Illinois Auditor General's office that weren't quite right. She refers to the Illinois General Assembly as the "state assembly," a term used in New York and California but not (as far as I know--and I once worked in the Illinois legislature) in Illinois. I know it's picky, but a state employee would not refer to the legislature in that way--nor would she say, as Celia does when explaining what she does to people in New York, "I work for the city." No Illinois state employee would say they worked for the city of Chicago!

Favorite passage:

The experience had reinforced his notion that adulthood didn't change people so much as smooth their edges, but now he wondered if there wasn't a chrysalis model of maturity. Perhaps the child transformed itself into an entirely different organism, its remnants discarded with the ruptured cocoon. Huck wondered if the Celia he knew was recognizable to friends who had only known her earlier incarnation, or if they were as baffled by her now as he was by the girl she claimed to have once been.

Christmas Mourning, by Margaret Maron

2011-02-18T12:07:00.000-08:00

Christmas Mourning is the 16th title in Margaret Maron's Deborah Knott series. Set in North Carolina, the series focuses on Knott, who is a district judge, and her husband Dwight Bryant, a sheriff's deputy. When Maron started the series, more attention was given to the possible conflicts that arose between Deborah's legal career and her father's long tenure as a bootlegger, but Deborah's large and complicated family has faded into the background, where they provide local color and humor.

Two cases are at the heart of Christmas Mourning--the death of a popular teenager in a one-car accident on a straight stretch of road and the murders of two brothers likely to become career criminals. While the two events do not seem to be related, this is mystery fiction after all, so of course they are. And of course there are red herrings, obvious clues that Deborah and Dwight miss, and a neatly tied-up solution. My sarcasm notwithstanding, the book is a fairly fun read--especially when you're sick in bed (as I am at the moment).

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, by Yiyun Li

2011-02-18T06:31:00.000-08:00

Yiyun Li was born in Beijing in the early 70s and came to the United States in her 20s to study medicine....but somewhere alone the line, she decided to be a writer. Given her life story (I know, I know--fiction writers don't write only from their experiences), I expected Li's collection of stories to be about life in Beijing or the immigrant experience. Instead, the stories are primarily about people in rural China or in provincial cities.

In the book's longest story, "Kindness"--perhaps really a novella--a middle-aged woman reminisces about her childhood and her compulsory year of military service. In both phases of her life, an older woman tried to reach out to her--Professor Shan who read to her from English novels and an Army lieutenant who sees her unhappiness and wants to help--but the narrator resisted their efforts and has ended up a solitary math teacher with virtually no human connections. She remembers once feeling that she was in love with a man who lived downstairs from Professor Shan, but their relationship consisted only of chitchat spoken in the yard or on the stairs. When he moved away, she stopped visiting Professor Shan.

Loneliness and loss are themes throughout the stories, which feature male and female characters, from youth to old age. In the story "Prison" an immigrant couple's teenage daughter has been killed in a car accident. They decide to have another child, using a surrogate in their native China. The wife, Yilan chooses a woman who seems to have the spark the other women who applied for the "position" lacked; Yilan plans to live with the surrogate in China until the baby is born. In a matter of weeks, however, "the world of trust and love they had built together was crushed, and they would remain each other's prisoners for as long as they stayed under the same roof."

Teacher Fei, of "A Man Like Him," is also in a prison--he is caring for his aging, ill mother. He escapes to the nearby Internet cafe whenever he can. There, he becomes interested in a site posted by a girl who is trying to shame her unfaithful father into returning to her mother. Mr. Fei tracks down the father, with whom he feels a bond because he, too, had a brush with sexual infamy.

Li's stories are dark, and they are written in a rather flat tone. Thus, I found myself observing the characters rather than becoming engaged with them--and perhaps that is a good thing. As is often the case when I read short stories, I found myself saying "hunh?" at the end of several stories. Nonetheless, the stories did keep me reading,

Favorite passage:

They were lonely and sad people, all three of them, and they would not make one another less sad, but they could, with great care, make a world that would accommodate their loneliness.

(This is the last line of the last story, and I think it's lovely and summative.)

Down Came the Rain, by Brooke Shields

2011-02-13T21:06:00.000-08:00

The subtitle of this volume by the actor Brooke Shields describes well its content: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. Shields went through a grueling series of fertility treatments in order to get pregnant, had a difficult labor followed by a C-section, and nearly immediately after the birth felt detached and sad. Spending most of her time sobbing, Shields felt like she was in the Twilight Zone, "waiting for someone to turn off the TV."

Fairly quickly, family and friends recognized that something was wrong. They urged her to get help, in the form of a nanny and/or medical assistance. Shields, a perfectionist who believed in solving her own problems, resisted for a number of weeks, but finally agreed to get temporary help with the baby and take medication. When she felt better, she decided to stop taking the drugs and crashed again. She finally accepted that she was suffering from postpartum depression and that, not only did she need the medication, but therapy would also be beneficial. By daughter Rowan's first birthday, Shields had regained her equilibrium and had even begun thinking of a second child.

For a public figure and perfectionist like Shields, revealing her struggle with depression must have required great courage. Her honesty has undoubtedly helped other mothers suffering with depression and provided a tool for the people who love them. I admire her for taking that risk and shining a bright light on postpartum depression. On the other hand, there is something odd about the persona she presents--she seems not quite to inhabit her own life, observing herself rather than actually being. This may be an artifact of the memoir form in the hands of a non-professional writer, or a byproduct of having been looked at by people since she was just a baby herself. Or it may be my imagination (full disclosure: I came to the book with a bit of bias against Shields after reading Andre Agassi's book). That issue notwithstanding, Shields's book is worth reading.

What Is Novel Conversations Reading

2011-02-12T13:41:00.000-08:00

Here's what Novel Conversations is reading for the next few months:

March: After This, by Alice McDermott

April: The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman

May: The Light of Evening, by Edna O’Brien

June: A Reliable Wife, by Robert Goolrick

July: Room, by Emma Donohue

In the Woods, by Tana French

2011-02-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

When he was 12 years old, Adam Ryan and his two best friends, Peter and Jamie, disappeared in the woods near their homes; Adam was found after a few hours, covered with blood but generally unharmed. His friends were never found, and Adam had no memory of what happened.

Twenty-plus years later, Adam is an Irish homicide detective known as Rob Ryan. On the police force, only his partner Cassie Maddox knows his story. The two are close, verbally sparring at work, drinking together in the evenings, and often spending the night together on the same futon (but with no sexual activity). Then 12-year-old girl Katy Devlin is found murdered in the same woods where Adam/Rob's friends disappeared, and Rob and Cassie catch the case.

As they investigate , Rob and Cassie learn more about events around the disappearance of Peter and Jamie but at first make little progress in solving Katy's murder (they don't seem to be very good investigators). As the twin pressures of spending time in his home town and failing to solve Katy's case build, Rob starts to lose his grip. Because French foreshadows with an extremely heavy hand, we know things are going to end badly. In the end, however, they didn't end as badly as I expected (though readers who like everything to be wrapped up neatly may find the ending dissatisfying).

The writing at the beginning of the book is so lovely that I was disappointed as the book devolved into a rather average murder mystery. I'll read French's second book, but I can't help wondering whether mystery is really her genre.

Favorite passages:

Picture a summer stolen whole from some coming-of-age film set in small-town 1950s. This is none of Ireland's subtle seasons mixed for a connoisseur's palate, watercolor nuances within a pinch-sized range of cloud and soft rain; this is summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silkscreen blue. This summer explodes on your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat, Marie biscuits with butter squirting through the holes and shaken bottles of red lemonade picnicked in tree houses.

The wood is all flicker and murmur and illusion. Its silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises--rustles, flurries, nameless truncated shrieks; its emptiness teems with secret life, scurrying just beyond the corner of your eye. Careful: bees zip in and out of cracks in the leaning oak; stop to turn any stone and strange larvae will wriggle irritably, while an earnest thread of ants twines up your ankle.

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception.

For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs' hands away, shout at the hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals' rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live.

Strangers at the Feast, by Jennifer Vanderbes

2011-02-09T06:39:00.001-08:00

It is Thanksgiving, and the Olson family--one of those lovely-on-the-surface-but-deeply-dysfunctional suburban families--is getting together for the holiday meal. They are gathering at he house of Ginny, the scholar who has recently adopted a mute seven-year-old girl from India (illegally, we find out). Ginny's brother Doug, real estate mogul (failed, we find out), is horrified by the state of repair in Ginny's newly purchased home and dashes around pointing out potentially fatal flaws to her while his wife Denise and their three children mope. Even worse than the home's state of repair is the fact that Ginny doesn't have a television--unable to watch the game, what will they do?

Enter the patriarch and matriarch, who arrive in separate cars, emblematic of the state of their 39-year marriage. Eleanor is a housewife who seems to float on the edge of reality. Gavin is a reserved if not depressed insurance agent and Vietnam vet. While waiting for dinner, Gavin discovers a journal article Ginny wrote on the "Emasculation of the American Warrior" and pinches the journal for later reading.

While they wait for the dinner to cook, Kijo and Spider, African American teenagers, are in a van headed for Doug and Denise's McMansion. Armed with duffels full of spray paint, they aim to have a bit of vengeance--Doug forced Kijo and his grandmother out of their family home to make way for an office tower. When it turns out that Ginny's stove isn't working and the family loads all the food into cars to head for her brother's home, it's obvious confrontation lies ahead.

Author Vanderbes loads us up with additional backstory as we wait for the confrontation--the ill-fated opportunity Eleanor had to write an article about her life choices for Good Housekeeping, Gavin's teenage lover in Vietnam, the start of Doug's financial problems when the tech bubble of the 1990s burst, Denise's near affair with a Middle Eastern teacher who disappeared around the time of 9/11, the heroism of Kijo's grandmother as she fought to save her home. When the confrontation does occur, the chaos that ensues is shocking without being surprising.

Vanderbes makes her points--the damage done to economically struggling people by unthinking, greedy developers and white America's sense of entitlement, the scars that spiritual and emotional isolation leave on people no matter what their status--and she does it competently (although the prologue that lets us know something bad will happen really isn't necessary). But the book left me unmoved, perhaps because the characters, particularly Kijo and Spider, are more the author's tools than true inhabitants of their own stories.

Favorite passage:

Long ago he'd made a choice not to pity himself; a man owned his choices, his mistakes. And over time, a mistake of such magnitude hardened like a growth; misshapen flesh on his body that, in the depths of night, roused from sleep, Gavin probed with his fingertips: that is me. Over thirty-six years, his anger had amassed, like thickened issue, around the moment he stepped onto the army-transport plane for Vietnam. That wrong turn--it was him. His life was defined by that choice, how could he say he would have chosen differently? We were our mistakes; we breathed them daily. In summer, they seeped from our skin.

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson

2011-02-05T17:34:00.001-08:00

Out Stealing Horses is a book in which nearly everything seems to happen twice. In the present (fall and early winter 1999), the protagonist Trond Sander is living in a remote cabin in rural Norway, where he has retreated after the deaths of his wife and sister. In 1948, a period that Trond spends a great deal of time remembering, Trond and his father were spending the summer in another remote cabin in rural Norway. The summer of 1948 was significant for Trond for numerous reasons. He learned from a man living near the cabin why his father had been absent so much during the war years--he was a courier for the Resistance. He discovered that his father was having an affair with his friend Jon's mother, who awakens 15-year-old Trond's own sexual longings. (Trond and his father do not discuss either of these discoveries.) He loses Jon, when Jon is sent away after leaving his loaded rifle on the table where his younger brother Lars could pick it up and accidentally shoot his twin Odd (mirroring the war-time killing of one of the twin brothers of Trond's mother). By the end of the summer, Trond has also lost his father, who does not rejoin the family in Oslo and is never heard from again.

Trond's abandonment by his father clearly had an enormous effect on him, but it was still shocking to learn well into the book that Trond has children that he has also abandoned--much later in life, but an abandonment nonetheless. He moved to the country without telling his daughters--when one of them tracks him down eight months later, she has had to call officials in communities within an 80-mile radius to find him.

Even the title makes two appearances in the story--on the last day they spend together, Jon wakes Trond by saying, "Let's go out stealing horses"; in fact, they merely steal rides on the neighbor's horses. But it turns out that the same phrase was a code among members of the resistance in the area.

The writing is lovely. I don't know whether Petterson is simply a wonderful translatable author (an interview I read said he had done a lot of rewriting during the translation process, which is quite interesting and something I'd like to know more about), Anne Born is a marvelous translator, or both, but the result is readable, evocative prose.

I'm still grappling with Trond's story--Petterson does have me thinking about to what extent we repeat our parents' lives and whether we can, as Trond says at the end of the book, "decide for ourselves when it will hurt." I'm eager to hear what others in Novel Conversations have to say about the book.

Favorite passages:

Maybe in those days I lacked a certain type of imagination, and possibly I still do, but what I saw happening on the other side of the river came upon me so unexpectedly that I sat there staring, with my mouth open, not cold, not hot, not even lukewarm, but with my head almost bursting with emptiness, and if anyone had caught sight of me just then, they may well have thought I had run away from a home for backward children.

. . . I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the sky, and there was nothing coming down that I could feel. Only cool air on my skin and the scent of resin and timber, and the scent of earth, and a bird whose name I did not know hopping around in a thicket rustling and crackling and sending out a steady stream of thin piping sounds from the dense foliage a few paces from my foot. It was a strange, lonely sound out there in the night, but I did not know whether it was the bird I thought was lonely or if it was me.

Queen of the Night, by J.A. Jance

2011-02-01T18:13:00.000-08:00

J.A. Jance has four different mystery series going, each with its own "star": J.P. Beaumont (my favorite), Joanna Brady, Ali Reynolds, and the Walker Family. Queen of the Night is one of the latter series, although Dr. Lani Walker and her adoptive parents, retired detective Brandon Walker and his wife Diana Ladd, are only three of more than a dozen important characters in the book.

Jance presents the story in brief sections, each prefaced with the location, date, time, and temperature; the first three sections describe three murders, one in 1959, one in 1978, and one in 2009. How the three might be linked is totally unclear. She then continues with short narratives involving a multitude of apparently unrelated characters. As the connections start to develop, it's soon apparent that some of the very likable people she has introduced are going to be victims. There's not a tremendous amount of mystery for the reader in terms of "whodunit," as we know who the killers were in two of the cases and the third is not a major focus. More interesting are developments among the characters: the mental problems that Diana is having but that she and Brandon are not talking about, the connections that begin to develop between Lani, Dan Pardee (a member of a special Native American Border Patrol unit), and the four-year-old daughter of one of the murder victims.

Jance weaves Native American stories into the narrative (the book is dedicated to Tony Hillerman), which ought to add another layer to the story but instead seems like a bit of a gimmick that adds to the book's overall "jumpiness." Queen of the Night is fine for a "light" read--Jance does bring the disparate elements of the story together into a happy ending (perhaps overly happy, given how many people died in the course of the book). It is not, however, one of her best.

Favorite passage: None

Extraordinary, Ordinary People, by Condoleezza Rice

2011-01-29T17:42:00.000-08:00

I am no fan of Condoleezza Rice, but I found her book Extraordinary, Ordinary People interesting on several levels. First, her story of growing up in segregated Birmingham is eye-opening for someone who grew up in the rural Midwest. The ways that middle class black parents sought to insulate their children from the most damaging aspects of segregation and prejudice and give them an excellent education and happy childhood are truly both extraordinarily ordinary. At the same time, the black community had its own class and color prejudices, which Rice discusses unflinchingly. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Birmingham, Rice's father--an educator and minister--declined to take part in the King-led marches, a fact that Rice devotes considerable time to justifying.

Rice revered her parents. Again, for someone with a very different personal story--I'm one of five children--her depiction of being an only child is fascinating. To me, she seems overly entangled with her parents as an adult--but perhaps to another only child, that entanglement would seem totally normal.

Rice ends the book with George W. Bush's being declared the winner of the 2000 election, so her next book is likely to be more political. From this volume, however, I get the impression that she is far from being an idealogue. She explains that she became a Republican because she believed Jimmy Carter handled foreign policy in general and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan so badly. Of course, her beloved father was also a Republican, so that was likely influential as well. She argues more than once for affirmative action and says that she opposes overturning Roe v. Wade--not the views one might expect from Rice.

While I wished for a bit more reflection (much of the book is a straightforward recounting of events) and a heavier hand in the editing (Rice uses the phrase "to this day" so often I wanted to scream), Extraordinary, Ordinary People is a worthwhile read that reminded me how easy it is to judge someone without knowing a great deal about them.

Favorite passage:

All of these elements--extended family, community, schools, and churches--conspired together to convince me and my peers that racism was "their" problem, not ours. Whatever feelings of insecurity or inadequacy black adults felt in the appalling and depressing circumstances of Jim Crow Birmingham, they did not transfer it to us. For the children of our little enclave, Titusville, the message was crystal clear. We love you and will give you everything we can to help you succeed. But there are no excuses and there is no place for victims.

Bound, by Antonya Nelson

2011-01-28T20:55:00.000-08:00

Bound begins with a woman and her dog, driving cross country. She has already had two accidents that day--she's about to have her third (and final) accident. When she dies, her dog takes off and we spend considerable time with him until he is found by an unhappy couple camping. Why Antonya Nelson spent so much time on the dog (to whom she finally returns in the last couple pages of the book) is unclear, as is the reason the woman is on the road trip.

We do, however, learn that the woman, whose name is Misty, has a daughter Cattie, who has been sent from her home in Houston to a boarding school in the Northeast, where she has only one friend, Ito. We also learn that Misty has left a will naming her best friend from high school, Catherine, to be Misty's guardian. Since Misty and Catherine have not seen each other in 20 years, Catherine is surprised, to say the least. She is also surprised to learn that Cattie has gone missing from the boarding school. Readers know that she is hiding out in a house also occupied by Ito's cousin Joanne and a bizarre AWOL serviceman named Randall, with whom she will save a dog and her pups and head out on a road trip to Houston. We also know that Catherine's husband, who has a habit of abandoning his wives for younger models (Catherine is his third wife) is having an affair with one of his employees and is thinking of leaving Catherine. And the BTK killer has reemerged in Wichita, where Catherine lives and where she and Misty grew up.

Does this sound jumbled? For me, that's exactly how reading Bound felt, and I never really found any coherence, even when the stories of Catherine and Cattie came together.

Favorite passages:

She sat wedged in a wing chair, her brow creased, her heavy lips down-turned, looking for all the world like the chastising high priestess of a disappointing African tribe.

People of their generation, people who'd been raised on the prairie or in the Dust Bowl, who'd performed their jobs in service of the greater good, did not require a public airing off, or praise for, their feelings. A lot could be said for not saying anything.

The Widower's Tale, by Julia Glass

2011-01-25T19:49:00.000-08:00

The widower Percy Darling is at the center of Julia Glass's fine fourth novel, which opens just as the barn on Percy's property, which has stood empty since his wife's accidental drowning more than 20 years ago, is about to become the home of the Elves and Fairies preschool in his suburban Boston community. The transformation of the barn marks the beginning of an awakening for the recently retired librarian. He falls in love with a younger woman named Sarah, agrees to take part in a house tour (something that would have anathema to him just months before), and becomes more engaged with his daughters, the overachieving Trudy and the drastically underachieving Clover. But the story is, of course, not as light as this synopsis might suggest--Sarah is diagnosed with breast cancer, Clover has left her children and husband and is miserable, the house tour leads to unwanted visitors and buyers, and grandson Robert is in deep trouble.

Robert, a premed student at Harvard, gets sucked into a campaign of environmental terrorism by his mysterious and charismatic roommate Turo. We also learn the "tales" of Celestino, an immigrant whose story has hidden complexities that those who see him tending gardens in Matlock would never guess, and Ira, who has come to teach at Elves and Fairies after being forced out at the last school where he taught when parents learned he was gay. Intertwined with the stories of these four central characters are a variety of contemporary issues--immigration law, environmental problems, loss of the historical village's character, the blindness of the privileged to the poverty in their midst. But as the story reaches its climax, what matters are the connections among people.

Glass is a master of weaving together the stories of characters whose stories begin tangentially and end up as elements of a beautifully designed tapestry. She does a superb job of drawing the four main characters, an interesting achievement given that they are all male. While not as complex (or dark) as Three Junes, The Widower's Tale is a rewarding read.

Favorite passages:

Some might have referred to Vince, Buck, and Calvin as "ordinary fellows" or "salt of the earth." Such terms are merely code for men who've led lives in which boyhood dreams become a luxury, a whim, before boyhood even comes to an end.

It was straightforward, then, the path I followed; I see it as proof of a happy childhood. Take that, Dr. Freud (Philip Larkin, too).

(Larkin's poem about how your parents ruin you is one of my son's favorites, so I couldn't resist the latter quote!)

The Good Daughters, by Joyce Maynard

2011-01-17T19:25:00.000-08:00

The messages of Joyce Maynard's latest novel seem to be threefold: (1) genetics are everything, (2) women in the 1950s did what their husbands and/or lovers told them to--even when it involved raising the wrong child, and (3) if we didn't know they were our brothers, our brothers would be our soul mates. Unfortunately, all three are a little hard to take (sorry to my three bros, but as to number 3--ugh!).

The book is about two families--the farming Planks, who have five daughters, and the nomadic Dickersons, who have a son and a daughter. Dana Dickerson and Ruth Plank were born on the same day, and for many years that fact seems to provide a weird link between two families that otherwise have nothing in common. Both girls, who narrate the book in alternating chapters (their voices unfortunately don't sound very different), feel out of place in their families. Short, stocky Dana is uninterested in art or the succession of Barbies that her tall, slender artist mother gets her; instead, she loves to talk to Mr. Plank about plant propagation. Tall, slender Ruth loves to draw but feels no closeness with her short, stocky mother and sisters. Is it a little obvious what the "twist" is going to be?

Dana grows up to be a happy lesbian farmer (although her partner fails to get tenure in the 1980s when she is outed). Meanwhile Ruth has an ill-fated relationship with Dana's brother Ray, which her mother breaks up when Ruth reveals she is pregnant; she then marries a man for whom she feels the most tepid of emotions. By the end of the book, Dana has been widowed and Ruth is divorced; together, they buy the other Plank sisters out and run the family farm together, surviving "against all odds."

I'm sure Maynard was going for a deeply meaningful exploration of family issues, but the book is predictable and simplistic. Not recommended.

Favorite passage:

I loved manure . . . A lot of people don't appreciate good manure, no doubt. Sometimes, on walks, if we were going through a pasture where cattle grazed, I'd bend over and pick up a clod of the stuff an work it over in my hand, scattering the bits as I went. I liked to think about all the things that went into this particular piece of manure: grass, grain, seeds of other plants, chewed up and passed out through the cow's intestine, to start the process going all over again. When you think about this, it's a beautiful thing . . .

(Oh, please--I grew up on a farm and I've never heard anyone wax poetic about manure. It is what it is.)

An Old-Fashioned Girl, by Louisa May Alcott

2011-01-15T15:49:00.000-08:00

While other girls of my generation were reading and rereading Alcott's Little Women (my sister read it so many times that my parents hid it from her, fearing she was identifying with the sickly/dead Beth), I was reading An Old-Fashioned Girl over and over. Since classics for the Kindle are only 99 cents, I recently decided to reread this childhood favorite for the first time in 40 years.

Polly Milton, the title character, is nearly perfect. The daughter of a country pastor with a large family, Polly comes to visit her friend Fanny Shaw in the first chapters of the book. Polly is put in stark contrast to Fanny and her friends, who are privileged, shallow, fashion-obsessed gossips. All of the members of the Shaw family--including neglected Grandma, sickly Mother, remote Father, hell-raising brother Tom, and obnoxious little sister Maud--come to love Polly. And who wouldn't? She's a sweet ray of sunshine who gives them all the attention they don't get from their own kin--even though occasionally feeling condescended to by Fanny and her friends.

When we skip ahead six years, Polly is returning to the city to make her way as a music teacher. Having Polly travel between the worlds of her wealthy friends and the working women and impoverished families she encounters in her rooming house allows Alcott to provide considerable social commentary (see Favorite Passage below for an example). With echoes of Jane Austen Alcott, despite her apparent admiration for working girls, still ensures that Polly and Fanny are happily engaged by the end of the book.

So, why did I like this book so much as a preteen? In part, I think it was simply having a romantic view of the world (I still enjoy a good rom-com) strong enough to see poverty as somehow romantic (the part of the book I remembered most vividly, aside from Polly's learning that Tom loved her, was the "adventure" when the Shaws lost their money and had to learn how to live more modestly). Less positively, as the middle child of five, I think I may have identified with the somewhat put-upon Polly--though I certainly was never as cheerful as she. While I don't think I'll feel the need to reread this book again, I am wondering about a few of the other books I loved as a girl--I may have to do some more revisiting of my youthful obsessions.

Favorite passage:

. . . the most utterly fashionable life does not kill the heart out of women, till years of selfish pleasure have passed over their heads.