Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

Zeitoun is the true story of Kathy and Abdulrahman Zeitoun, parents of four and owners of a successful contracting business in New Orleans. Both are Muslim--Kathy, a native Louisianan converted as a young adult, while Abdulrahman immigrated from Syria in his 30s, when he tired of life at sea. With Hurricane Katrina rushing toward the city, Kathy loads up the children to evacuate to Baton Rouge, but she is unable to convince her husband to accompany them. He "never" leaves the city during a storm, and he wants to be able to keep an eye on their properties, as well as the projects they are working on for clients.

In the first few days after the storm, Zeitoun (as Abdulrahman is commonly called) is happier than Kathy, who is trying to put up with relatives who insist on serving pork, urge her to take off her hijab since her husband isn't there, and generally show no respect for her religion. Zeitoun, meanwhile, is paddling his canoe around the city, checking on their properties, helping as many people as he can, feeding abandoned dogs, and generally making himself useful. Indeed, he felt a divine purpose in his daily efforts to help, feeling Allah had wanted him to stay in the city to help others.

Kathy escapes her relatives, taking the children to Phoenix to stay with close friends who are also Muslims. Kathy and Zeitoun talk daily--a phone in one of their properties is still working, and Zeitoun calls from there each day. Then the calls stop, and Kathy has no idea what has happened. As days pass with no word from her husband, she becomes more and more convinced he is dead. He isn't--instead, he and three friends have been arrested, and the ensuing events are nightmarish.

Without revealing too much of the story, let me just say that it is both terribly sad and absolutely infuriating. That the government (it matters not whether you talk about city, state, or federal--all were worse than useless) could erect a temporary jail in the city within a couple of days of the storm but could not rescue people from a variety of terrible situations is beyond comprehension. That police officers who were looting stores and siphoning gas were arresting people for allegedly doing similar things--and putting those people in prison without phone calls or access to legal assistance--is despicable. And, as you read Zeitoun and Kathy's story, you know it is just one of thousands of tales of injustice and pain.

Having read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and not enjoyed the overly self-conscious irony Dave Eggers practiced in this book, I was surprised to find this an entirely different work. Eggers as the author is virtually invisible; the writing is so spare it is nearly terse. He lets the story carry itself--and it does so exceedingly well.

Favorite passages:
The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned. Even if in New Orleans this machines was sometimes slow, or poorly engineered, generally it functioned. But now nothing worked. Or rather, every piece of machinery--the policy, the military, the prisons--that was meant to protect people like him was devouring anyone who got close.

She finds herself wondering, early in the morning and late at night and sometimes just while sitting with little Ahmad sleeping on her lap: Did all that really happen? Did it happen in the United States? To us? It could have been avoided, she thinks. So many little things could have been done. So many people let it happen. So many looked away. And it only takes one person, one small act of stepping from the dark to the light.

American Son, by Brian Ascalon Roley

The immigrant experience provides rich material for the novelist, including tales of struggle and triumph. American Son features no triumph, however. It is the profoundly sad story of two Filipino-American teenage brothers; their mother is Filipino, their absent father Anglo-American. Tomas, the older of the two, has been kicked out of their Catholic high school in Los Angeles, dresses like a Latino gang member, and breeds and trains attack dogs to sell to nervous celebrities. Gabe, the younger son and narrator, is "the son who is quiet and no trouble"; but Gabe is struggling--he feels out of place with at school and in the neighborhood, he's afraid of his own brother, and he loves but is ashamed of his mother.

The book has three sections, each beginning with a letter from the boys' Uncle Betino, who chastises their mother for the way she is raising the boys and urging her to send them to live with him in the Philippines. The first section focuses on Tomas, his dogs, and the multiple ways in which he embarrasses and abuses Gabe and their mother. In the second section, Gabe has sold one of Tomas's dogs, stolen his car, and taken off driving north; when the car breaks down, he ends up riding for hours with a tow truck driver whose bigoted commentary plays into Gabe's myriad insecurities. In the final section, Gabe is back home, forced into various criminal activities by Tomas to compensate for stealing his dog and car. When Tomas decides they need to take revenge on a woman who is hounding their mother about paying for minor damages to her Land Rover, Gabe's descent into Tomas's world seems complete.

What is remarkable about the situation that Brian Roley depicts is how little adults do to help Gabe, even though the signals are so loud as to be deafening (stealing from your gangster brother and driving to Oregon is a pretty big hint that something is wrong). His mother, while caring, has no clue how to handle her sons. Other relatives do little but preach at Gabe or his mother, and school officials totally drop the ball. The tragedy is not that Gabe's downfall was inevitable, but that it was so avoidable.

Favorite passage:

The way she [Gabe's mother] looked at that moment--it haunts me--and I go over it in my head, trying to figure out what she was feeling. At times she looks mad but at others she seems hurt, and I cannot tell which look is my memory and which is my imagination.

Falling Together, by Marisa de los Santos

I'm on a string of not-so-good books (in addition to the books I've posted negative comments about, I have read a few not-so-great mysteries I didn't bother to include here!), and Falling Together is another in that sad series. Marisa de los Santos has opted to use a tired convention that many (including some much better writers) have used before her--old friends meet at a reunion and must work out their differences. While she gives the convention a very modest twist, that twist fails to bring the story of college friends Pen, Will, and Cat any freshness. Not recommended!

Now You See Her, by Joy Fielding

Joy Fielding has written some interesting psychological thrillers--ones with premises that actually make you think. Unfortunately, this is not one of them. Marcy Taggart is a fiftyish Canadian, on a trip to Ireland that had been planned as a second honeymoon until her husband left her. In a pub in Cork, she sees a girl who looks like her daughter Devon, a presumed suicide whose body was never found. Marcy spends the next few days sleuthing through Cork, trying to find the girl. The events become less and less believable and, at the same time, utterly predictable.

I listened to this book from Audible. The reader is Justine Eyre, and I found her voice generally unpleasant; when she whined as the voice of Marcy, it became almost unbearable. I'm not sure why I even finished the book. The only thing I liked about Now You See Her was when Marcy heard the voice of her former husband, an orthodonist, commenting on the teeth of the people she met. For some reason, this amused me--but not enough to redeem the book.

Breaking and Entering, by Eileen Pollack

Louise is a school social worker, her husband Richard is a psychologist. Along with their five-year-old-daughter Molly, they live a happy and prosperous life in California. Then a patient of Richard's commits suicide and, on a camping trip designed to get away from his problems, he accidentally sets fire to a Colorado forest. Responding to this "avalanche of woes," Richard finds a job at a prison in Michigan, and the rest of the family moves along with him.

Far from the liberal bastions of northern California, the family is living in the heart of militia country in 1995. As their marriage falls apart, Richard, who is Jewish, finds himself learning to shoot guns in the company of what might be termed conservative wing-nuts, while Louise has found the town's small cadre of liberals, including the Unitarian minister, with whom she starts an affair. Pollack manages to convey a feeling of dread, and I was sure that the story's climax was going to involve a bloodbath of some kind. However, only a minor character and pet are sacrificed, and the book limps along to a

Pollack sums up the gist of her novel near the end, when she says ". . . America is a lot more countries than she thought it was. An even within those countries, there are other, smaller counties, some of which are so tiny and isolated they appear to be inhabited by only one or two citizens, although those few citizens are so heavily armed as to pose a threat to the larger countries that surround them." I won't argue with her point, but I think a better novel would have conveyed the idea more subtly and with greater depth.

Favorite passage:

A person never outgrows his younger self. He only accretes older selves around it.

Jenniemae and James: A Memoir in Black and White, by Brooke Newman

I'm not overly fond of memoirs. Or of stories that feature African-American maids who "become part of the family" without acknowledging the families that those women could not be with because they were working to provide care for a white family. Since both of those descriptors fit this book, a sensible person might ask why I read it. And I am asking myself the same thing. I can only say I got it free at a Boulder Bookstore event a couple of years ago and it was the book that popped into my hand when I was looking for something to read over the weekend.

I don't recommend Jenniemae and James--it's not well written and the relationship the book purports to be about--between the author's brilliant but eccentric mathematician father and the African-American maid with an interest in numbers--is not depicted in a way that allows us to understand it in any depth. I feel sure the author achieved some therapeutic benefit from writing the book, but reading it is another story.

The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

The History of Love is my second venture into the world of audiobooks. This turned out to be an interesting choice because the book has multiple narrators--each voiced by a different "actor." We first meet Leo Gursky, an elderly Polish Jew who fell in love with a girl named Alma when he was ten. He wrote a book (in Yiddish) for her--The History of Love--in which every female character is named Alma. He gave the book to a friend for safe-keeping during the war years, which turned out to be a bad idea--his friend, who immigrated to South America, published the book in Spanish under his own name (a fact that Leo discovers about midway through this book). Meanwhile, Leo moved to New York and tracked down Alma. To his surprise, he learns she had their son--but then married someone else. He follows his son's progress as a student and, eventually, as a writer, but the two do not meet.

The second narrator, Alma Singer, was named after the character in The History of Love. Her late father fell in love with the book and owned one of the few extant copies of the Spanish edition. His widow, Charlotte, is asked by a mysterious stranger to translate the Spanish version into English. Alma becomes interested in who this mystery man is--thinking that he might be a match for her lonely mother--and begins investigating both him and the book he and her parents all are fascinated with.

Alma and Leo are both lonely, though their loneliness plays itself out in ways shaped by their ages and life circumstances. Leo occasionally makes a nuisance of himself in Starbucks, Walgreens, and other local haunts because he does not want to die on a day when no one sees him; he tries his hand (so to speak) at nude modeling, and still writes and occasionally practices his trade of locksmithing. Alma compiles notebooks of information about surviving in the woods (her father liked to camp), plays matchmaker for her mother, becomes pen pals (and eventually real friends) with a Russian boy who lives in Brighton Beach, and watches out for her brother Bird, who believes he is a lamed vovnik (a holy man) and may even be the Messiah. He is building an ark for the family from scrap materials he scavenges around the city.

If all of this sounds incredibly complex and quirky, consider that I haven't mentioned the third point of view--that of Zvi Litvinoff, the friend who stole Leo's book, and his wife Rosa. Nor have I mentioned that Krauss includes many of the chapters from that book--which appears to be a collection of varied vignettes, some telling almost mythic stories, others sounding like anthropological explorations of the languages of love, others providing straightforward narratives from the early life of Leo and his Alma. As the book progresses, you wonder if Leo and young Alma will somehow cross paths and whether either will find the antidote to their loneliness.

When Bird enters the picture as the fourth narrator, I was actually somewhat irritated. I did not want a fourth narrator--nor did I appreciate the comedic aspects of his misinterpretation of almost every piece of evidence he comes across. This misinterpretation proves to be key to the climactic event that draws the threads of the story together. While that event is satisfying, I would have preferred that Krauss find a way to make it happen without cluttering up the book with a fourth point of view. Given the skill with which she balanced the strands of the story up to that point, she is more than capable.

My reservations about the set-up to the ending notwithstanding, I recommend this book. Krauss has created a complex and intricate work about two deeply human characters at very different moments in their lives--yet experiencing the same loneliness and need to be seen.

Favorite passages:

The book is beautifully written--but I can't figure out how to bookmark the audio files and since I'm mostly listening while walking, can't take notes. Consequently, I can only remember the last lines of the book, which did bring tears to my eyes. They are from Leo's obituary--written by himself as a young man.

He was a great writer. He fell in love. It was his life.