After This, by Alice McDermott

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).