The Lake Shore Limited, by Sue Miller

At the heart of The Lake Shore Limited is a play of the same name. Its author, Billy, is annoyed that people think all plays are autobiographical--yet an important element of this play is. The man Billy was living with in 2001 was killed in one of the planes that hit the Twin Towers on 9/11. In Billy's play, the main character, Gabriel, is dealing with conflicting feelings about the possibility that his wife has been killed in a terrorist attack on a train station in Chicago. Gabriel, who has clearly moved on emotionally (he has a serious girlfriend), feels relief and perhaps even momentary joy at the prospect of being unencumbered; yet, at the same time, he feels sadness, regret for the love he and his wife once had, and guilt.

The novel is told from the perspectives of four characters. Leslie is the sister of Gus, Billy's late lover, who has come to the play's opening night with her husband Pierre and a friend she once felt more than friendship toward, Sam. She has invited Sam to the play with the idea of introducing him to Billy but is stunned by the play's suggestion that Billy did not love Gus.

Rafe is the actor who plays Gabriel. His wife is dying from ALS. One night after rehearsal, he sleeps with Billy, and their conversation and the panic his wife experienced when he was late coming home give him new insight into the play, and his portrayal of Gabriel becomes a revelation even to Billy.

Billy, the playwright, had been on the verge of breaking up with Gus when he was killed. The public role she had to play as the grieving girlfriend (Leslie insisted on calling her Gus's fiance) made her guilt even worse. By the time the play is produced, she has struggled with these feelings for six years and is having difficulty making new connections with anyone except her dog.

Like Rafe, Sam had experienced the protracted death of his wife, as well as the failure of a second marriage and a degree of distance from his three sons. Somewhat offended that Leslie, with whom he once fancied himself in love, has decided to introduce him to Billy as a romantic prospect, he nonetheless likes Billy. Their first "date" is, however, a disaster.

Each character has one long section devoted to him/her and centered around the play's debut, but with a great deal of back story included. Each also has a much shorter section that takes place around the time the play closes. In addition to providing considerable detail about the fictitious two-act play, the novel has other theatrical elements--several sections end in a way that evokes the moment the curtain comes down at the end of an act and Sam, when he gazes into Leslie's and Pierce's house one night when he has driven there with the intent of declaring himself, sees them as characters in a play, one on stage left, the other stage right. While the theatrical piece may sound contrived or dull, it is neither. The ways in which different people experienced the same event spark reflection on the ways relationships change, the futility of guilt, the difficulty of being the partner who lives, and the way in which art works.

As I reread my description of the book, I recognize that I have not done it justice. The Lake Shore Limited is a marvelous book, perhaps the best I have read this year.

Favorite passages:

It was so ordinary, so unremarkable, but for Sam it had the potency of a Vermeer. Something changed in him as he watched. he had a sense in himself, in his response, of mildness, of generosity, as though in some way he were responsible for what he was seeing . . .As though he were blessing it, its very ordinariness, by witnessing it.

All her life, she had tried not to want. To be content. To be at peace. Safety lay that way, she had thought. You couldn't be hurt. (Leslie)

Gabriel looks back at him from the mirror, the man he's made, and made his own, the man whose grief drinks from his own grief, whose joy eats his joy, but whom he uses, over and over, to escape his grief and joy, to make them commodity, currency. For better or for worse--he doesn't know--to make them art. (Rafe)

Storm Prey, by John Sandford

Lucas Davenport, the hero of John Sandford's Prey series, is something of a super-cop--brilliant, fearless, loved by his colleagues. But in Storm Prey, Lucas and his crack team are always one step behind the band of idiotic criminals they are pursuing. In fact, the criminals essentially kill themselves (and a number of others) off before Lucas et al. figure out exactly what is going on. Just about the only success they have in the book is protecting Lucas's wife Weather, who saw the criminals driving off after the heist that set the book's events in motion. Weather, meanwhile, is taking part in a complicated operation to separate conjoined twins, which provides a subplot that should be more engaging than it is.

Storm Prey is far from the best book in the series, but it did make me wonder how often the police really are a step behind the bad guys, who are causing more and more mayhem as they try to avoid being caught. I know it's fiction...but it could happen, right?

Favorite passage:

None

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

As the novel opens, recently widowed Henry Lee is standing outside Seattle's boarded up Panama Hotel in 1986. In the basement, the new owner has found the personal belongings of a number of Japanese-American families interned during World War II. Henry knows that among them are possessions of his sixth-grade sweetheart, Keiko Okabe. Throughout the rest of the book, the story unfolds in two time periods--1942 and 1986.

In 1942, the two young people are struggling to find their way as Asian-Americans, one of Chinese heritage, the other Japanese. Henry's father hates the Japanese and insists that Henry wear a button proclaiming "I am Chinese," while Keiko's parents want her to be an American. The two are the only nonwhite students at their elementary school, where their parents have sent them so they can excel in America, either unaware of the challenges the children face at school or believing those challenges will make them stronger. Keiko and Henry become fast friends, although Henry must keep the friendship secret from his parents. They struggle to keep their relationship alive after Keiko's family is evacuated, and they eventually fall out of touch.

In 1986, Henry is reconnecting in the first year after his wife Evelyn's death. The links he is rebuilding are to the past and to his son Marty, with whom he always had a somewhat difficult relationship, mediated by Evelyn (and echoing his own childhood relationships with his parents). Marty is engaged to an Anglo woman, and the two surprise Henry with their reactions to his story. The climax of the story is, unfortunately, not so surprising.

Ford's idea to tell the story of race relations and the Japanese-American internment through the lens of a Chinese American is engaging, as is the "hook" of the long-lost belongings in the hotel basement. Also interesting is the Seattle history, including the intertwined histories of Chinatown, Nihonmachi, and jazz. Ford's writing, however, lacks the depth and grace to maximize the story's impact.

Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet will be the One Book One Broomfield selection for 2010 (not sure if it's been officially announced, so I may be jumping the gun). While the history will provide grist for interesting conversations, it's too bad that the writing isn't up to the standard set last year by Kent Haruf's Eventide.

Favorite passage:

None really--I do think the title is evocative, so I guess that's my favorite "passage."

Too Much Happiness, by Alice Munro

You do not have to get very far into Alice Munro's latest collection of short stories to realize that there is no surfeit of happiness in the lives of her characters. Many have survived traumas or heartbreaks and are suffering from understandable depressions. In the collection's first story (and one of its most powerful), "Dimensions," Doree is working as a hotel maid, seeing a therapist and occasionally visiting her husband in the mental hospital where he has been confined since killing their three children. Doree is numb, but responding to another calamity witnessed on the bus traveling to the hospital re-awakens her.

"Deep-Holes" opens with a family on a picnic in a clearly dangerous land formation (the family was celebrating the geologist father's publication of an article about the very formation); when the two young boys run off to pee, the reader is certain one or both will fall in a crevasse. What you don't expect is that, while the child survives, that fall is only a foreshadowing of his complete falling away from the family as an adult.

The characters in these stories experience, observe, or cause pain, psychological and physical. In "Free Radicals," Nita is mourning the unexpected death of her husband and awaiting her own predicted death from cancer when a triple murderer talks his way into her house. The protagonist of "Face" was hated by his father because of the large port wine birthmark on his face, a birthmark that prompts a childhood friend to scar herself. "Child's Play" is the story of best camp friends Charlene and Marlene, who carry the guilt of one terrible action throughout their lives. Throughout the stories, we see characters struggling to deal with life's sadness and pain, a struggle they are often ill-equipped to handle (as are we all).

The title story is significantly different from the other stories in the collection, as it involves a real historical person (mathematician and novelist Sophia Kovalevsky) and is set in Europe in the 19th century rather than contemporary Canada. While it shares some themes with the other nine stories, it did not seem to fit the collection and I did not find it as compelling.

While short stories are not my favorite, Munro is a master, and the first nine stories draw you into their damaged worlds. Interestingly, the narrator of "Fiction" writes of a book, "How Are We to Live" is a collection of short stories. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on the gates of literature, rather than safely settled inside." While Munro might have heard such remarks in the early years of her career, after the success she has enjoyed--in terms of awards, rave reviews, and readership--I can only hope she is including this statement ironically and that she doesn't feel like she is just hanging on!

Favorite passages:

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

"Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind," her friend Maria Mendelson has told her. "When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her."

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, by Rebecca Miller

Pippa Lee is the 50-something third wife of 80-year-old publishing powerhouse Herb Lee. Herb has decided to sell their apartment in Manhattan and their Sag Harbor house and move to a retirement community, where Pippa is a youngster compared to her neighbors. On the surface, Pippa seems to be a serene woman dedicated to taking care of her family, but problems become apparent when she starts walking, eating, smoking, and driving in her sleep.

After 63 pages of third-person narrative that is, frankly, a bit dull, Miller changes gears, allowing Pippa to narrate her own back story, her private lives--her childhood with a smothering and speed-addicted mother; her seduction of a teacher at the local private school; her escape to New York, where she lived with her aunt, whose lesbian lover drew Pippa into the world of S&M clubs; and drug-addled years with three male artists and another woman, with the two women rotating as "girlfriends" of the three men. When she meets Herb, he pulls her out of that morass, though his life has its own complications that end up scarring Pippa. Still, she feels that marrying Herb is her "last chance at goodness," and she throws herself into acting the part of the good wife. Eventually. she and Herb have twins--Ben and Grace, who elicit perhaps Pippa's first true feelings. But her relationship with Grace is troubled, continuing a pattern of mother-daughter challenges that is generations old.

In the final section of the book, Miller returns to the present and the third-person. Without giving away any surprises, much happens, much of it not stretching credulity. I'm not sure whether Miller is suggesting at the end that Pippa is on her way to becoming an authentic person for the first time, but I do not believe it. Although she's been through new traumas and shrugged off some old guilt, she is still hollow and her strategy for finding something to fill herself up echoes too closely the teenage flight to New York to convince me of any growth.

The writing in the book is competent, although occasionally too contrived. Pippa's story also feels contrived--she does not read as a real person, and by the end of the book I really didn't care what happened to her. The portions of the book I found most interesting had to do with parent-child relationships; had Miller done more with those relationships, I might have found the book more rewarding. But as it is...not recommended.

Favorite passage:

It was so lonely, knowing things about her children that they no longer remembered. Layers of experience eroded from their minds but petrified in her own.

Of interest:

Miller is the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and is married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis. (I didn't know either of these things until I had finished the book.)

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, by Kazuo Ishiguro

To me, the title of this book suggests romance and melancholy, and Ishiguro delivers, particularly on the melancholy. For example, in the book's opening story, "Crooner," the narrator Jan, who plays guitar in a restaurant band in Venice, looks up to see legendary singer Tony Gardner at a table in the piazza. Gardner was Jan's mother's favorite singer, and when the band takes a break, he approaches Gardner. The two talk, and Gardner engages him to help serenade his wife, Lindy, that evening. After they perform, Jan hears Lindy sobbing in the palazzo above and Tony tells him the surprising reason for her tears.

But the stories also deliver humor. In "Come Rain or Come Shine," for example, a man visiting college friends reflexively crumples the page of a diary when he reads insulting descriptions of himself. In a vain attempt to pretend that a dog caused the damage, he is on all fours shaking magazines from his teeth when the diary's owner returns. In "Nocturne," the collection's longest piece, a jazz saxophonist whose wife has left him is recovering from plastic surgery in a luxury hotel; his manager and his soon-to-be-ex-wife have convinced him his looks are holding him back. In the room next door is Lindy Gardner. Both are wrapped in bandages, and Lindy takes advantage of the anonymity to roam the hotel at night, occasionally indulging in thievery. Suffice it to say that the two engage in some skulduggery involving stuffing a statuette in a turkey.

Scenes and motifs, like the character of Lindy Gardner, reappear in the stories. The final story takes place in the same Venetian piazza as the first. Several characters stand or sit at windows. And, of course, music plays a role in each story. For the hapless narrator of "Come Rain or Come Shine," American standards--and the memory of a shared passion for them--provide sustenance. For the puffed-up singer-songwriter who narrates "Malvern Hills," his talent sets him apart from the everyday labors of his sister and her husband, as well as the unappreciative bands for whom he auditioned unsuccessfully in London. In "Cellists," the mere idea of being a cello virtuoso has given an American woman her identity.

As I seem to say fairly often in these reviews, if a reader has not read some of Ishiguro's other works, I would recommend starting with one of his novels (e.g., The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go). Nonetheless, I enjoyed Nocturnes; I particularly appreciated use of music as a unifying motif.

Favorite passage:

There aren't many like us, Tibor, and we recognize each other. The fact that I've not yet learned to play the cello doesn't really change anything. You have to understand, I am a virtuoso. But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped.

. . . I was getting vaguely paranoid about running into any more of my former university friends. Wandering around Camden Town, or going through CDs I couldn't afford in West End megastores, I'd already had too many of them come up to me, asking how I was getting on since leaving the course to "seek fame and fortune." It's not that I was embarrassed to tell them what I'd been up to. It was just that--with a very few exceptions--none of them was capable of grasping what was or wasn't, for me at this particular point, a "successful" few months.

A Friend of the Family, by Lauren Grodstein

This novel's first sentence makes clear that narrator Pete Dizinoff is in trouble: "These days, when people ask how I'm doing--some of them still ask, you'd be surprised--I shrug and say, as manfully as I can, 'Much better than you'd think.'" He's living above the garage, and his son Alec is not speaking to him. Once part of a thriving medical practice in an upscale Jersey suburb, Dr. Pete, as he enjoys being called, has been forced into a much more modest office above a restaurant in Bergen. He is awaiting the outcome of a malpractice suit, but the primary causes of his difficulty revolve around his son.

Alec is 20 and has dropped out of college, working instead on his art. When the eldest daughter of Pete and wife Elaine's best friends Joe and Iris (not incidentally, Pete has had a thing for Iris since college, before he introduced her to Joe) returns home and Alec shows immediate interest, Pete is appalled. Laura is 30 and has been hopping from place to place since she was released from the mental hospital where she was confined after she, as a 17-year-old, bashed in her infant's skull and threw her in a Dumpster. To Pete, she is a threat to the dreams he has for Alec--"a slut with a criminal record." He wants Alec to return to school, find a career he enjoys, get married, and provide Pete and Elaine with grandchildren.

The narrative jumps around in time, filling us in on Pete's life from childhood to the present in bits and pieces. Grodstein skewers both immigrant and suburban aspirations, while exploring the lengths to which a parent will go to protect a child--or to guard his own reputation from the embarrassment of having a child who is a failure or involved in a relationship that would raise eyebrows. Because Pete is not the nice guy with a strong sense of wrong and right that he would have us believe. He loves his wife, he says, but we know his feelings for Iris were (and are) always stronger and he also feels a strange attraction to Laura. He enjoys making the difficult diagnosis, he tells us, but he misses what is wrong with a young patient, even after Joe quickly matches her symptoms with Addison's disease. He describes his son as a level-headed young man and says he was shocked when Alec dropped out of school, but Pete himself filled out his son's college application and refused to get him therapy when his mother had cancer. Is it any wonder that Pete's attempts to control his son are destined for failure?

To Pete, the tragedy of his story is that Alec might go to Paris with Laura and never fulfill his father's dreams; to me, the tragedy is the extent of self-delusion that Pete practices, even after experience might have prompted an only-moderately reflective person to have an a-ha moment (see first quote below).

A Friend of the Family would be an excellent book group choice.

Favorite passage:

Other fathers, I know, they get over their sons--they experience some profound moment of disappointment, catch the kid whacking off in a bathroom, realize he's a shit to his mother, or just slowly lose the romance they once had with him; let it curdle the way all romances can. But that had never happened to me.

Suburbs, man. I don't care what anybody says. It's the only civilized way to live.