Everything that Rises Must Converge, by Flannery O'Connor

I tried to read Flannery O'Connor about ten years ago (Wise Blood) and failed. I know the literati (English majors and such) love O'Connor, but I couldn't get into it. I did manage to finish Everything that Rises Must Converge--perhaps because it's a short story collection and didn't require the same degree of commitment. But what a collection of dismal and depressing stories populated by grotesque racist ne'er-do-well misanthropes, many of whom meet a violent death, few of whom experience any sort of redemption/growth. O'Connor certainly captures a certain Southern gothic flavor and is occasionally quite funny. But after the violent endings of the first two stories, I found it difficult to enjoy the humor.  Perhaps if I had majored in English . . . 

Favorite passages: 

. . . the more education they got, the less they could do. 

Thomas had inherited his father's reason without his ruthlessness and his mother's love of good without her tendency to pursue it. His plan for all practical action was to wait and see what developed.

Home Front, by Kristin Hannah

Home Front is the story of Jolene Zarkades, wife to attorney Mike, mother to 12-year-old Betsy and 4-year-old Lulu, and a Blackhawk pilot in the National Guard. Jolene, who had a tremendously difficult childhood with alcoholic parents, believes that being happy is a choice, an attitude that has become annoying to Mike, who has slid into depression after the death of his father (and law partner). Mike has never supported Jolene's military career, and when her unit is deployed, their marriage is in serious trouble. Mike is in trouble at home as well, since he has no idea how to deal with his two daughters' feelings about their mother's absence. Luckily, his mother lives nearby and is willing to help.

Meanwhile, the experience in Iraq is much more grueling and dangerous than Jolene, and she and her flying partner and best friend Tami are in constant peril. When their helicopter is shot down, Jolene must cope depression, PTSD, and constant physical pain from her injuries--all while observing that her family members who do not understand the person she has become. In what turns out to be a fortuitous coincidence, Mike is, at the same time, defending a veteran accused of murdering his wife; Mike sets out to prove that the killing took place while Mike was suffering a psychotic break as a result of PTSD. The case therefore provides a perspective on Jolene's experiences that helps Mike provide support for Jolene.

I know that Kristin Hannah is a very popular writer;  a friend of mine who likes her work recommended this book. I was not overly impressed with Home Front and doubt I'll try another of her books. She seems to be trying too hard--to educate the reader about the challenges facing veterans, especially returning female soldiers, and to create metaphors and other descriptive language that will move the reader. I'm not sure how to define the difference between an effective metaphor and one that feels overwritten, but for me, Kristin Hannah's writing falls on the overwritten side.

Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf

Imagine that you are 70-year-old widowed Louis Waters; one evening Addie Waters, a widow of a similiar age whom you do not know well, despite having lived in the same small town for years, comes  over to ask  if you would be interested in sleeping with her. She's not asking for a sexual relationship--she wants someone to talk to and provide company in the lonely hours of the night. Would you agree?  Kent Haruf's Louis does agree, and he starts strolling over to Addie's home nearly every evening, setting tongues wagging in Holt.

The two share with each other the sadness and failures of their pasts (he had an affair, one of her children died, essentially killing her marriage) and begin to develop a deep friendship. Then Addie's daughter-in-law leaves Addie's son Gene, who decides their son should spend the summer with his grandmother. Jamie is a sad little boy, but Louis seems to understand what the boy needs, and he becomes a surrogate grandfather, bringing Jamie out of his shell. Gene, however, is not happy about his mother's relationship with Louis and makes his displeasure known in several unpleasant ways.  

There's a funny conversation in which Addie and Louis discuss the Denver Center's productions of  Haruf's novels about Holt--they are not overly impressed, but still buy tickets to attend Benediction.

This novella was written as Kent Haruf was dying, a fact that provided a melancholy subtext as I read the book, despite most of it being an affirmation of our shared humanity and the sustaining power of friendship. When the story became sad near the end, I was weeping (on a plane--embarrassing).  Somehow, with his spare prose, Haruf still manages to make you feel deeply what the characters are experiencing--and what they're experiencing feels very close to home. I will miss Holt, Colorado, and its residents, and I will miss Kent Haruf.

Favorite passages:

I got up and left the house and drove out in the country, the stars were all shining and there were the  farmlights and yardlights all looking blue in the dark. Everything looked normal, except nothing was normal anymore, everything was at some kind of cliff's edge . . .

I like the friendship of it. I like the time together. Being here in the dark of the night. The talking. Hearing you breathe next to me if I wake up.

I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

Sisterland, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Daisy and Violet Schramm are twin sisters who had a difficult adolescence, in part because their mother rarely got out of bed after they turned 11 and in part because they were mocked by classmates for having "senses" (essentially ESP). The two reacted differently to these experiences--Violet became a professional psychic while Daisy changed her name to Kate and attempted to "destroy" her powers and disappear into a conventional life with her perfect husband Jeremy and their two toddlers.

As the book opens, a small earthquake has hit St. Louis, where both twins still live as adults. Violet soon thereafter predicts that a major earthquake will hit the city on October 16, and her prediction becomes the talk of the nation. Jeremy, who is a geoscientist, believes Violet is wrong but seems to tolerate his sister-in-law's foolishness, in part because he doesn't think Kate believes Violet's prediction. The first two-thirds or so of the book is about how Kate tries to "help" Violet (always as a way of controlling her) and their widowed father. This part of the book, despite the more boring twin getting most of the attention, is somewhat interesting--I enjoyed the exploration of the twins' relationship and the media response to a sensational story. But then the book suddenly shifts and becomes about something else entirely--I won't say what happens to change the focus so as not to be a "spoiler." Suffice it to say that the last third of the book is ridiculous and predictable and ruins any enjoyment one might have found in the book.

Not recommended!

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

Wrapping up World War II week at my house is All the Light We Cannot See, the book Novel Conversations will be discussing on Monday. This book is the story of two children, one French and one German. Marie-Laure is a blind child who goes to work every day with her father, the head locksmith at the National History Museum in Paris. Her father has constructed a tiny model of the city to help his daughter find her way around the neighborhood. When the Allies begin bombing Paris, Marie-Laure and her father flee to his uncle's home in Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure feels entirely cut off from the world. Her uncle, damaged from his experiences in World War I, never leaves the house and her father is preoccupied with matters she does not understand (and he soon disappears), so she finds herself under the wing of the housekeeper, who eventually becomes involved in the Resistance.

Meanwhile, Werner and his sister Jutta live in a German orphanage. He faces a life consigned to the coal mines, but then his gift for building and repairing radios brings him to the attention of officials, who send him to a military training school with a brutal regimen. He eventually ends up in Saint-Malo looking for a radio that has been sending messages from the Resistance. Werner and Marie-Laure's lives briefly but significantly cross, and the two then go on to their own fates. 

Marie-Laure and Werner are well-drawn characters, and the book's depictions of their war time experiences are grueling--yet somehow Doerr didn't quite succeed in making me care very much about them. And it isn't just me--two other members of Novel Conversations shared a similar response with me. In addition, there is an entire subplot about a huge blue diamond that; while it seems Doerr intends the diamond and the myths surrounding it to be symbolic of something, this subplot left me completely cold. All the Light We Cannot See recently won the Pulitzer, so obviously those in the know disagree with me, but overall I found the book a disappointment.

Favorite passage:

When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson

A God in Ruins is a "companion" work to Atkinson's wonderful Life After Life, picking up the story of Teddy Todd, the lovable brother of Life After Life's protagonist, Ursula. A God in Ruins does not adopt the same conceit as Life After Life, but it does play with time, moving from Teddy's wartime experiences as an RAF bomber pilot to childhood experiences and his post-war life. (Since my dad was a bomber pilot in the Pacific Theater, I found the descriptions of bombing runs both fascinating and harrowing.) We also see some events from the perspectives of Nancy, Teddy's wife (and "childhood sweetheart"--a descriptor he despises), their execrable daughter Viola (an author described as "almost as good as Jodi Picoult"), and their two damaged grandchildren Sunny and Bertie.

The war years were central to Teddy's life, and Atkinson manages to laud the courage of the bomber crews (a large percentage of whom did not survive the war) while raising questions about the brutality of the RAF bombing attacks on civilian targets in German cities. While Teddy was a leader who won numerous medals for bravery in his military career, his post-war life is small. He marries Nancy, whom he loves but is not in love with, never experiencing great passion. He retreats to York and has a quiet life as a journalist, writing a homey nature column. When Nancy dies, he struggles to be a good father to Viola, though the two are never close and Viola is more of a trial than a blessing. Her own children, especially her son Sunny, are damaged in ways so incredibly sad as to be nearly unbearable. That Teddy might have been a different person had the war not intervened seems both obvious and unclear.

Atkinson refers often to events in Life After Life in ways that are sometimes funny, sometimes perplexing. At various points throughout the book, I tried to figure out which of Ursula's many lives was reflected in this narrative, but in her Author's Note, Atkinson describes it as an "unwritten" life, which relieved my anxiety (while simultaneously somehow irking me--with all those lives, you had to create still another?). The Author's Note, by the way, is the most interesting such appendage I can remember reading, with Atkinson talking about the writing of this book and about fiction broadly (not everyone agrees: New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called the note "churlish"). I've already listened to it twice and am thinking about giving it another go before taking the book off my iPod.

A God in Ruins has a surprise ending that will likely enrage some readers; however, it allows Atkinson to nudge readers into questioning their assumptions about fiction, which is her intent (I think). Although I didn't love the surprise, the ending was still redeemed by the book's last line: "But please stop reading now" (Teddy to Ursula, who is reading aloud from one of their Aunt Izzy's Augustus books, in which the main character is based on Teddy). I could quibble about a few things in this book, but overall I enjoyed it immensely.

Favorite passage:
There was a hand-written sign attached to the shelf that said, "Please, dear friend, leave these books in the condition that you found them," which was ridiculous as no book could ever be left in the condition that you found it in because it was changed every time it was read by someone.

Literature had fuelled her childhood fantasies and convinced her that one day she would be the heroine of her own narrative.

Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America, by Helen Thorpe

When Just Like Us opens, the four girls of the title--Marisela, Yadira, Clara, and Elissa--are seniors at a Denver high school. The four have been friends for years, but now their friendship is being tested by the fact that Clara and Elissa are applying for scholarships and their preferred colleges while Marisela and Yadira, because they are unauthorized immigrants and lack papers needed for many aspects of the college and financial aid application process, are struggling to figure out what they are going to do after graduation. The two are fortunate to be helped by a number of people who manage to get the money together for them to attend the University of Denver, along with Clara; Elissa heads off to Regis University, also in Denver, where she mostly falls out of contact with the other girls.

Thorpe follows the four (with more attention to the three at DU than to Elissa),  from the end of their senior year until nearly a year after their college graduation, going to classes and clubs with them, spending long hours hanging out in their dorms with them, getting to know their parents, siblings, and boyfriends. The girls are smart, hard-working, motivated, silly (they're teenagers after all), politically active, social--everything wonderful young college women are. But the two without documents are also subjected to unbelievable stress. In part, the stress stems from the fact that their families are constantly facing financial and legal problems. Yadira's mother, for example, returns to Mexico to escape prosecution for using a stolen Social Security number, leaving Yadira with huge responsibilities for her teenage sisters. The girls keep their status secret from most of the people they know at college, another stressor, since they have to make up excuses for why they can't study abroad, do work-study, and take part in countless other activities people take for granted. They also know that, when they finish college, they may not be able to get jobs suitable for educated young women.

Thorpe intertwines the girls' stories with the larger narrative about immigration occurring in Colorado, focusing on Tom Tancredo's abortive run for the presidency in 2008 and the killing of police officer Donnie Young by an unauthorized immigrant who happened to work in one of her husband's restaurants (at the time she was married to John Hickenlooper, then-mayor of Denver). She weaves these narrative threads together skilfully, depicting a systemic problem that is negatively affecting many lives--a problem recognized by virtually all policymakers, who are incapable of finding a solution.

The wisdom of hindsight (Thorpe and Hickenlooper are separated--perhaps divorced, I'm not sure) makes the discomfort Thorpe clearly felt in the role of political wife seem like foreshadowing--and makes me almost as sad as the challenges faced by the young women Thorpe writes about.

Just Like Us is a very good book; the girls' stories aren't resolved at the end and, of course, neither is the immigration question. Like life, things could go any way.

Favorite passage:
Did the idea of a country--an abstract concept, really--truly matter more than the sum happiness of all the individuals living within its boundaries? No, I thought. People mattered more than governments. In fat, this country was founded on that very idea.