Eden by Yael Hedaya

Eden was written originally in Hebrew by a contemporary Israeli writer and translated into English. I thought it sounded like something really different from my usual fare and my book club was reading it, so I dove right in. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

Eden is the name of a (fictional) moshav, a type of cooperative agricultural community in Israel similar to a kibbutz. Like many of these communities, Eden has had to struggle to find a new mission for itself in contemporary Israel, where the economic realities mean that most residents work outside the moshav. Fortuitously, Eden is located within easy driving distance of Tel Aviv, so it has reinvented itself as a suburb undergoing gentrification. The simple old moshav houses are being remodeled into McMansions and the community pays Thai immigrants to work in its fruit orchards. This leaves the children and grandchildren of the moshav’s founders free to engage in all manner of first world activities: we have disaffected teenagers, couples who are cheating on each other, and nasty neighbors with secret lives. Most of the book’s action could have been set in the San Fernando Valley, or the Long Island suburbs. Blech. I really don’t like books about suburban ennui, whether the suburbs are in the U.S. or, it turns out, in modern day Israel.

I never ended up going to the book club meeting because it was the same time as my last-ever back-to-school night, so I don't know what anyone else thought of this. Did people like it?

(Book 28, 2011)

Montana 1948 by Larry Watson

I needed something short, after months of reading these doorstopper books. Montana 1948 fit the bill, lengthwise. It tells the story of one seminal event in the life of a young man, and the ways in which that event changed him and his worldview forever. It also evokes a vanished world of 60 years ago: small town life in the western U.S. At the center of the story is the affluent Hayden family: Julian (a rancher and retired sheriff), and his two sons, current sheriff Wesley and the war hero and town doctor Frank, and their wives and children.

The first person narrator, David Hayden (son of the sheriff), is 12 years old at the time of the events he describes, but the book is written from the point of view of an adult David, who looks back on the events from many years later. So the author gives us two vantage points simultaneously. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I liked this approach; the elder David provides a fair amount of post hoc interpretation that I found unnecessary, and which dilutes a little of the story’s power. I kept wanting to say “yes, I know that your father’s reaction here shocked you, I can tell, you don’t need to tell me it shocked you.” On the other hand, reading the words is kind of like being inside David’s head, and sometimes his interpretations are not what you expect.

What are the events that bring on such a seismic shift? A Sioux Indian woman who works for David’s family accuses Frank Hayden of sexually assaulting his female patients. Frank’s brother Wesley, as the sole law enforcement officer, must investigate this charge against his brother. The story rapidly unfolds into a firestorm of racism, sexism, violence, sibling rivalry, family bullying, and possibly murder. David listens at doors and from under porches, his innocence and childhood adoration of his uncle the war hero shattering before our eyes. It’s very powerful. And at 168 pages, the perfect length.

(Book 27, 2011)

Faithful Place by Tana French

I'm finally admitting defeat. I cannot finish this. I so wanted to, having loved loved loved French's earlier novel The Likeness, which I blogged about here. I stuck with this one way longer than I would have otherwise, but still, I can't make it through.

French is notoriously long-winded. That was a big complaint about The Likeness, and I even referred to it in my own post: "French often uses three sentences when one would do." But while I enjoyed her style in that book, in Faithful Place her excess verbiage did me in. Usually it took the form of maudlin multipage conversations among a dysfunctional family of alcoholics and layabouts who pass their days accusing one another of historic betrayals and acts of violence, or convoluted theories about whodunit put forth by hostile law enforcement officers with competing agendas. Did I mention that this is a mystery? Who actually killed Rose is about 47th on the list of French's interests, it seems, well behind Dublin in the 1980's and the Irish economy, to name just two.

(Book 26, 2011)

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

I liked this more than I implied in my last post. It’s true what I said, that it isn’t a very good book, but it’s an interesting read. It’s just badly organized, meandering, and ultimately unfulfilling. (What is it about? Methamphetamine abuse, the scourge of the rural Midwestern U.S. Why did I read it? Because my fellow blogger Citizen Reader wrote about it a while ago and her blog post stuck with me. She and I share an interest in reading about issues specific to the Midwest; see her recent post here about Detroit.)

Reding pinballs between the personal and the political as he searches for an overarching theme for this book. Some chapters feature interviews with meth addicts, law enforcement officers, and social workers. Other chapters try to link the rise of meth to the disintegration of the Midwest’s rural economy. The loss of union-wage jobs, the rise of factory farms, and the globalization of the food industry are all factors he cites. A third set of chapters detail the rise of the Mexican cartels that supply most of the meth that is now available in the Midwest. All these chapters are interesting, but the parts are greater than the sum. Reding tries to use meth’s effects on the small town of Oelwein , Iowa, as a unifying theme but he never quite makes it work. It’s like he gathered all these interesting stories, which he tells in a compelling way, but in the end he couldn’t seem to turn the material into a coherent book. Nevertheless, if you like this kind of thing, this is a good effort and worth your time.

(Book 25, 2011)