Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder

In the early 1990s, when I first discovered Tracy Kidder, I inhaled The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, and Old Friends. While I was spending months reading Kidder, Deogratias, the young Burundian man who is the subject of Kidder's newest book, was spending months trying escape genocide and civil war in his home country and neighboring Rwanda. Deo eventually found his way to the United States, and the first half of Strength in What Remains intercuts Deo's memories of his youth, his flight, and his early years in New York.

Deo's youth in a cowherding Tutsi family was certainly challenging, but he pursued an education and was a medical student interning in a rural hospital when the killing began. The story of what happened to Deo during the months he was fleeing is harrowing, perhaps only bearable because Kidder presents the events in a matter-of-fact tone. When Deo happens upon a baby clinging to the breast of its dead mother (one of many dead bodies at the site) and must leave the baby because he cannot help it, the horror is overwhelming. It is not surprising to learn that this is one of the incidents that haunts Deo a decade later, when he is still struggling to reconcile what he experienced with the possibility of living some kind of normal life.

Even when he reached the United States, Deo faced years of struggle--he slept in Central Park for some months; worked delivering groceries for a pittance, many days barely eating; and spent hours in the library and Barnes and Noble, surrounded by books he couldn't read but that still provided comfort. Despite the truly awful things he experienced, Deo was in some ways lucky. He survived an attack on the hospital where he was working because he forgot to shut and lock the door when he hid under the bed--the open door convinced the militia that he had fled. Other people repeatedly reached out to help him, both in Burundi and New York. Indeed, a former nun named Sharon found a couple, the Wolfs, who took Deo in and became his de facto parents, helping him enter Columbia University.

The first half of the book is written as though Kidder simply took the story as Deo told it to him and reframed it in third person, without interpretation. In the second half of the book, Tracy Kidder enters the story as an authorial presence. In 2003, Kidder met Deo in Boston, where he was studying public health and working for Paul Farmer at Partners in Health (the person and organization who were the subject of Kidder's Mountains Beyond Mountains). In this section, Kidder, writing in the first person, describes visiting significant sites in New York with Deo and then spends an extended period on a trip to Africa that he took with Deo in 2006. Deo was by then a medical student at Dartmouth but was also trying to build a clinic in the small community in Burundi where his parents were living. Here, Kidder shares his own interpretation of Deo's actions and explores the conflicting needs to forget and to remember.

Strength in What Remains (the title is from a Wordsworth poem) is a powerful work. The first part of the book becomes more and more difficult to read as we learn more about what Deo endured. I was grateful for Kidder's presence in the second half , helping me make sense of Deo's experiences and, perhaps, protecting me from their weight. And Deo himself is an inspiration, scarred but not broken, able to move to what Kidder calls "that place beyond horror," a place that few of us can imagine.

Favorite passages:

Deo looked forward to those times after sunset, when, all the chores done, his grandfather would tell stories, out in the mountains and especially back in Butanza. Children were warned not to traffic in made-up stories during daylight hours. If you did, you'd never grow up, the adults said. But fictions were permitted at nighttime, especially stories told by elders.

Nothing had come of the threat. It was like the noise one hears lying in bed at night, a noise outside the house. As time goes by you doubt the noise was real, and then again you don't.

I imagined him sitting late at night in one of Butler Library's twenty-four-hour study rooms, poring over the likes of Kant and Hume and Plato, his favorite of all the philosophers he read, looking for a means to close the gap between what he'd experienced and what he was able to say, looking for something reliable in a world that had become untrustworthy, looking for some sort of structured belief, some grand encyclopedia with an index in which he could look up "genocide" and learn where it fit in the universe. He was, I imagined, looking for an antidote to loneliness, both cosmic and personal. And needless to say, he hadn't quite found it.

A lot of Western thought and psychological advice assume that it is is healthy to flush out and dissect one's memories, and maybe this is true. And yet for all that, I began to have a simultaneous and opposite feeling: that there was such a thing as too much remembering, that too much of it could suffocate a person, and indeed a culture. Our tour of sites began to seem relentless. Observing Deo's endlessly renewed sorrow, I found myself thinking that there was something also to be said for a culture with a word like gusimbura.

No Time to Wave Goodbye, by Jacquelyn Mitchard

In 1996, Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean leapt onto the bestseller list when Oprah picked it as the first selection in her book club. The book chronicled the troubles of the Cappadora family, whose son Ben was kidnapped at age 3. Father Pat throws himself into work, mother Beth (mad with grief) becomes essentially a zombie, and older son Vinnie blames himself and eventually slides into trouble. Only baby Kerry seems to have a chance to be happy/normal despite the horrendous parenting she receives. When Ben is found nine years later, the initial joy is quickly replaced by new conflicts (e.g., Ben, who prefers to be called Sam, loves the father who raised him [unaware that his wife had kidnapped her son] and cannot relate to his biological parents), many left unresolved at the end of the book.

Thirteen years later, Mitchard has written a sequel, and it starts promisingly. The Cappadora family is at the premiere of Vinnie's second documentary film; Beth and Pat do not know that kidnapped children are the subject of the film, on which Vinnie, Ben, and Kerry all collaborated. Beth's shock when she realizes what the film is about is understandable, but she quickly decides to put her own feelings aside and support Vinnie, who has struggled to emerge from his troubled youth. We also get glimpses of five other families whose children have been kidnapped and who are still living in the agony of not knowing what happened to the kids. These snapshots of the families are also compelling.

Soon, however, the book descends into soap opera territory--Vinnie is nominated for an Oscar, another child in the family is kidnapped, police from so many jurisdictions get involved that you can barely keep track of who they are, and Vinnie, Ben, and a professional tracker head off into a mountain snowstorm looking for the missing child (what happens to them is utterly predictable). The final chapter feels like a piling-on of happy endings.

Having liked The Deep End of the Ocean, I was sorry this book fell apart after the first 50 pages.

Favorite passage:
(Finding my favorite passage in the last paragraph of the Acknowledgments says something about the writing of the book itself, I'm afraid.)
This is a work of fiction, set in an imagined Chicago and an imagined California, where the real and the fictional slip over each other like plates of the earth. The choices I made were composed of the geography of fact and the geography of dreams. All the events are products of the author's imagination, and any similarity to actual localities and events is both the result of coincidence and the sum of my own experience.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, by Zadie Smith

I've been an avid reader since I learned to read (with a few "lost years" while my children were young). When I consider the essays of literary criticism in this collection by Zadie Smith, however, I wonder if what I do even qualifies as reading. She brings to the task knowledge of literary history and theory, analysis tools, and a willingness to read, reread, and read again in the pursuit of the "difficult gift" of understanding. Indeed, she advocates for that kind of close reading--and yet, I know that, while I may try to become a more careful reader, I will never construct sentences resembling this one (and dozens if not hundreds of others): "It's a little perverse, in fact, how profoundly he was attracted, as a fiction writer, to exactly those forms of linguistic specialization he philosophically abhorred."

So it may not be surprising that I preferred the essays in the volume that are not literary criticism. "That Crafty Feeling" explores how Smith approaches the work of writing a novel--something that is always interesting to the members of our book group. She categorizes writers as Macro Planners (who have the structure, characters, and plot of their book worked out before they start writing) and Micro Managers (who don't know what they are going to write until they start writing) and describes how she, as a micro manager, works.

In "Speaking in Tongues" Smith reflects on voice, examining what adopting a certain accent means in class-conscious England (Smith herself is a biracial Brit from a working class family who reports that she now speaks in the posh tones of someone educated at Cambridge--but regrets the loss of her other voice) and on what it may mean for the American president to be someone raised "between cultures, between voices." These two essays appear in a section titled "Being," which also recounts a trip to Liberia.

In "Seeing," Smith includes movie reviews, paeans to two of her favorite actresses (Katherine Hepburn and Greta Garbo), and an amusing essay entitled "Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend." The section "Feeling" includes three essays about her family.

Smith writes beautifully and I enjoyed many of the essays; the literary criticism was a tough slog and made me feel inadequate to boot. So my recommendation would be to be selective in approaching this volume unless you love literary theory and/or have no self-esteem issues!

Favorite passages:

The novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera.

It's oddly oppressive to set off on a journey into a place so thoroughly imagined by other people.

Best Friends Forever, by Jennifer Weiner

I heard Maureen Corrigan give this book a favorable review on NPR, so I decided to give Weiner, one of the most successful "chick lit" writers, another chance. The story is set on the weekend of a class reunion, when Valerie, a TV weather woman, decides to take her revenge on Dan, who raped her in high school. After leaving him nude in the parking lot, she accidentally hits him with her car. Fearing she has killed him, she seeks out her old friend Addie, a greeting card illustrator who has recently lost a lot of weight. Jordan, the chief of police in the town, immediately falls for Addie when he comes to her house to question her about the blood and belt found in the parking lot after the reunion. The two women then take off on a cross-country trip to evade the police, but Jordan has a hunch that they are headed for Key West and follows. Meanwhile Dan has been picked up by an evangelical classmate, Merry, who tends to him while trying to convince him to repent for his sins (Kathy Bates's character in Mercy is referenced).

We get glimpses into the difficulties in Valerie and Addie's childhoods and Addie's sad romantic life through first-person chapters narrated by Addie; the trials of Jordan's marriage and the police investigation into the crime are told through third-person chapters from his viewpoint. Occasional chapters describe Dan's nearly hallucinogenic experience of the weekend. Of course, all ends well.

I don't know what Maureen Corrigan was thinking: this book is idiotic. Jennifer Weiner is once again off my list!

Favorite passage: None

The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff

Ebershoff has crafted a very interesting novel, combining the stories of Ann Eliza Young, Brigham Young's 19th wife, who became a crusader to end polygamy, and Jordan Scott, a modern-day "lost boy" from a polygamist cult. Young's story is told through fictionalized historical documents, including her memoir (she actually wrote a memoir that sold widely in the late 1800s, but Ebershoff has re-created the document to meet his purposes), letters from one of her sons to a researcher, excerpts from Brigham's diaries, newspaper articles, LDS church documents, and a modern-day senior thesis by a budding feminist LDS scholar. While almost all of these documents were written by Ebershoff, they give readers a sense of constructing the story themselves as they sift through the documents. And Ebershoff does a good job of giving the supposed creators of the documents individual voices.

The contemporary story--which involves Jordan in trying to solve the mystery of his father's murder, for which his mother (also a 19th wife) has been arrested--is told in a more traditional first-person narrative. The mystery is wrapped up a bit too conveniently, but Jordan and the friends he makes in the process of exonerating his mother are endearing. For a considerable number of pages, the parallel stories seem only to be connected by the common subject--polygamy and the 19th wife--but another more direct link appears later. The way that link plays into the ending of the book actually caused me to rethink how I read the earlier sections, which was an enjoyable twist.

The book is much more than the two stories, however; it is also a look at the history of the Mormons, the practice of polygamy, and whether the modern-day church bears any responsibility for the treatment of women and children in the polygamist cults that have been much in the news in the past few years. While many events in the story as told by Ebershoff cast a negative light on the early LDS church, the author also shows respect for the power of faith.

While I didn't love this book, I found it very interesting and I am really looking forward to discussing it Monday night when Novel Conversations meets. I think it's an excellent book group selection--much to discuss about the writing, the construction of the text, and the ideas Ebershoff presents.

Favorite passage:
To me, this younger Brigham looks a lot like Russell Crowe.

(This is a footnote in the women's studies senior thesis written by character Kelly Dee--and it cracked me up. Though I'm not sure a young scholar would include such a footnote in her paper, she definitely would have had the thought. And to give her more respect, below is her [and Ebershoff's, we presume] take on the church's responsibility for modern-day polygamists.)

At some point, I saw the connection between Ann Eliza Young, nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy, and the polygamists of today. Polygamists like the Firsts in Mesadale are not Mormons; we are not of the same Church. This is not in dispute. Yet they are the unintended consequences of Joseph and Brigham's polygamous policies. To deny this is to deny the cold facts of history. To ignore their stories is to abandon Christian principles. And so I could not look away.

Labor Day, by Joyce Maynard

It's a brutally hot Labor Day weekend in New Hampshire. Henry, the 13-year-old narrator of the book, has convinced his mother to take him to the discount store for some new school clothes; the fact that this trip is highly unusual is one of the early clues that his mother has some serious problems that circumscribe Henry's life.

In the store, Henry is approached by a man who is bleeding from the head and leg. The man asks Frank and then his mother Adele to take him home with them. Somewhat inexplicably, they do. Soon, they learn that Frank is an escaped convict; the first night in their home, he ties up Adele (with silk scarves) so, if necessary, she can say she was coerced and pass a lie detector test.

As the long weekend progresses, both Adele and Henry fall in love with Frank--Adele in the expected way, Henry in the way of a boy who needs a male anchor. Frank shows him how to make a peach pie and how to throw a baseball--and relieves him of the burden of making Adele happy. Meanwhile, as Frank gradually reveals his story to Adele and Henry, Henry also reveals his family's backstory to the reader, and we begin to understand his mother's pain.

Meanwhile, Henry meets a girl on a foray to the library to get books on the Maritime Provinces, where Frank and Adele are considering escaping to. Unsure whether they plan to take him with them, Henry is feeling resentful and tells the girl about Frank...and we begin to anticipate the story's climax although not, perhaps, the happier ending that comes in the denouement.

While the premise is somewhat unbelievable (who would take a bleeding man home from Pricemart and how is that he is exactly the man to bring Adele out of her shell and help Henry come of age?), Henry's voice is a winning one. Maynard portrays him as a combination of the innocent and the damaged old soul--a believable mix for a child who has been raised as he has. Certainly, a book group could find much to discuss in this book.

Favorite passage:
No doubt Richard's father, like my mother, had once held his infant son in his arms, looked into the eyes of his child's mother, and believed they would move into the future together with love. The fact that they didn't was a weight each of us carried, as every child does, probably, whose parents no longer live under the same roof. Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.

The Scarpetta Factor, by Patricia Cornwell

I've been reading mysteries series, particularly series written by American women, for probably 20 years. Recently, I've been wondering how many titles an author can write about one character before "jumping the shark" (to borrow a phrase from television).

Several years ago, when Patricia Cornwell brought FBI Special Agent Benton Wesley back from the dead, I thought she had gone off the rails. But I gave her another chance and she seemed to be back on track. Unfortunately, The Scarpetta Factor is a full-scale train wreck.

At the beginning of the book, three of the four main characters--medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, her husband Benton Wesley, and her niece Lucy Farinelli--all seem as if they're about to have breakdowns. (When police officer Pete Marino is the sanest of Scarpetta's characters, you know something is wrong.) Meanwhile, they are working the disappearance of a tycoon's daughter (who is the cause of Lucy losing her fortune), the murder of a jogger, and what appears to be a stalking of Benton and Kay. After nearly 500 pages, everything leads back to a psychotic killer from one of the earlier Scarpetta books, Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. Cornwell has always been good at creating truly creepy characters, but here Chandonne's creepiness is talked about but not experienced.

The bulk of the story revolves around computerized data analysis in one form or another--yawn! Kay spends almost no time in the autopsy room --instead, she's searching an apartment with Lucy and analyzing documents. By the end of the book, everyone seems to have regained their equilibrium for no apparent reason (except for Wesley, who is rid of a couple of his archnemeses and thus could be expected to be in a somewhat better mood).

Not recommended!

Favorite passage: None