Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan

This book combines my love of domestic fiction with my love of reading about unfamiliar places. I heard about it from Nancy Pearl who included it in her list of 10 Terrific Summer Reads back in June. Several books on her list appealed to me but this was the only one the library had in, so it’s the only one I’ve read so far.

Set in Malaysia in the 1980’s this book is the story of an affluent Indian family: father, mother, grandmother, three children, and several servants. Uma, the oldest girl, is leaving for Columbia University in New York as the book opens. Samarasan uses a mostly backwards-running story line to tell the family’s history, focusing especially closely on Uma, her little sister Aasha, and a servant girl called Chellam (without neglecting the rest of the family, the neighbors, the distant relatives….it’s a long book).

Like all families, these people have agendas, secrets, and hidden loyalties. Are theirs any worse than anyone else’s? Samarasan focuses her camera so closely on each character that their foibles sometimes seem magnified into something larger than they really are. Uma spends the months before she leaves for New York in a period of what seems like melancholy, pushing her parents and siblings away, spending hours alone in her room. While the family and Samarasan make much of her gloominess, to me she just seemed like a typical teen girl dealing with her fears of impending adulthood.

But this is a minor complaint. Samarasan has a lovely original voice, and much of this book is quite funny. Aasha is especially delightful – her best friend is the ghost of a 19th century child who was the daughter of their house’s original owner. Can Aasha really see ghosts? Or does she just have a good imagination? Aasha’s grandmother Paati and mother Vasanthi relish their decades-long toxic feud, complete with vendettas, sabotage, and character assassination. The father Raju has a mistress, the neighbors have a soothsayer in their family: what more could a reader want?

(Book 24, 2011)

The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

This book is about three sisters in New Jersey and their parents. No, not really. This book is really about how you can be isolated and disconnected even while surrounded by people, how you can be the same as everyone else but be so different, how you can think you know everything but really know nothing, or, think you know nothing but really know everything.

The orphan sister is Clementine. Born as one of a set of triplets, her sisters are identical but she is fraternal. The three sisters share a strong bond, but the connection between the twins far outweighs anything they share with Clementine. Clementine’s parents’ relationship is also impenetrable to Clementine; it’s based mostly on lies and mutual avoidance of reality, and the dissolution of their marriage provides some of the only action in the book.

Clementine is the odd girl out, in so many ways, and Gross explores all of them. She writes beautifully of Clementine’s loneliness and confusion about where she fits and how she should live her life. Sometimes I wished that more things would happen in this book, but mostly I liked hanging around inside Clementine’s head as she explores her inner landscape and makes her own map of where she belongs.

(Book 21, 2011)

Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman

Alexandra Jacobs, who reviewed Red Hook Road in the New York Times, described it as “Victorian in tone” and I agree. In fact, the book that I was most reminded of when reading this was Morningside Heights, by Cheryl Mendelsohn, which I described as a Victorian novel when I wrote about it in this post. The two books have other similarities as well: both are about a certain kind of educated Jewish New Yorker, rich in culture if not in dollars, sure that their way is the best way. 

Becca (from Manhattan) spends every summer at her family’s vacation home in Maine. There she meets and falls in love with John, native Mainer, ship builder, whose mother cleans Becca’s family’s house. But alas, on the way to their wedding reception, Becca and John are killed in a freak car accident. We are left with Iris and Jane, the respective mothers, who circle each other warily across the vast lake of their class differences. The car accident happens right at the beginning of the book; most of the novel concerns the efforts of Iris and Jane (and their other children and spouses) to heal, to connect, to move on from this tragedy.

I didn’t like either Iris or Jane. Iris is smugly superior, manipulative, and a really bad listener. Jane is cold, repressed, and closed-minded. The rest of the characters run the gamut from unique to predictable – the same goes for the action that shores up the remainder of the story.

A lot of people don’t like Ayelet Waldman, though she must sell a lot of books to get a nice hardcover treatment and a review in the Times. I would try another book by her; this was sufficiently entertaining and well-written to keep me occupied, despite my complaints. 

(Book 18, 2011)

The Other Mother by Gwendolen Gross

I loved how honest this book was. It reminded me a lot of Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, though those mothers are less sympathetic. The two mothers in this book (each narrates alternating chapters, thus each is the “other mother”) are more likable than Cusk’s women. They live on either side of a high fence, both literally and figuratively. They are neighbors in New Jersey and sometimes they are friends. One stays home full time with her three children (ages 13 and under) and the other goes to work as an editor at a New York publishing firm, leaving her infant daughter with a series of caregivers. Each envies the other’s life but believes her own choice is the best one (usually).

Gross is a lovely writer and, like Cusk, captures the minutiae of suburban life with young children in all its sticky wonder. But it's a dangerous topic for a writer who wants to be taken seriously. Just yesterday in the New York Times Book Review I read this review of My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer, which is a memoir of motherhood and family life. The reviewer, Dani Shapiro, feels compelled to remark that “it is heartening to see a serious female writer take such a risky step into territory where writers of literary ambition fear to tread, lest they be dismissed as trivial.” Shapiro goes to great lengths in her review to justify why she actually liked a book about motherhood and child rearing. Must I make similar excuses for myself? Well I’m not going to. This was an interesting book: well written, observant, and moving.

(Book 54, 2010)

Sima’s Undergarments for Women by Ilana Stanger-Ross

This book (as you would expect) is the story of Sima, a 60-ish woman who owns a lingerie shop in Brooklyn in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Her shop is a gathering place for neighborhood women who are making transitions, because, if you think about it, female transitions are often accompanied by the need for new underwear: adolescence, a wedding, pregnancy, divorce, weight gain or loss. Sima is herself in transition to retirement and she is knocked off her stride by the entrance of another transitional figure, a young Israeli woman Timna, who takes a job in the shop. The relationship between Sima and Timna is really complex and painful. Sima has never come to terms with her failure to have children, and the confusingly maternal urges that Timna stirs up in Sima bring on a personal crisis for Sima. Timna, meanwhile, has no desire to be mothered by Sima, yet she clearly forms an attachment to Sima, despite her efforts not to.

Ilana Stanger-Ross is a good, careful writer and everything in the story (neighborhood, relationships, character development) is well done, but I still had a hard time enjoying it. Both Sima and Timna are difficult to like, for different reasons, and I often grew impatient with Sima, especially. The claustrophobic atmosphere of Sima’s basement shop (where everyone knows everyone else’s business and feels free to comment on it) gave me the heebie jeebies. I prefer to buy my underwear in the anonymity of a department store and now I know why.

(Book 44, 2010)

The Good People of New York by Thisbe Nissen

I usually avoid coming-of-age stories. I had my own coming-of-age and as a mother I’ve been intimately involved in the comings-of-age of other people too. Enough is enough, thank you very much. The only reason I read this book was because I thought it was a story of married life in New York city – the familiar domestic fiction landscape that I like to inhabit. The blurb on the back certainly makes you think that! But it’s a bait and switch. After a few chapters of the courtship and early married life of Roz (Jewish, from Brooklyn) and Edwin (upstanding Nebraskan) we quickly abandon them and focus on their daughter Miranda. I missed Roz and Edwin! Edwin, especially, gets the short shrift, after he and Roz divorce and he’s banished back to the wilds of Omaha.

But by then I was invested enough in Miranda to stay with her, from her days at summer camp all the way through her first year of college. She’s a good little proto-feminist and I enjoyed her story. It was set in the 1980’s which was after my own adolescence but before that of my children, so it offered a different view. Dare we ask if Miranda’s story has anything in common with that of her creator, Thisbe Nissen, born in 1972? Oh who cares. It’s still entertaining and well written, so it makes for a good read.

This book came from a stack that I grabbed from the free book exchange located in the pool house of my mother-in-law’s condominium complex in West Orange, New Jersey. It’s amazing what you can find there! Future blog posts will feature some of my other discoveries.

(Book 41, 2010)

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

I thought this book was unremarkable. Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, did not agree. I wish I had enjoyed it as much as she did. Maslin said, “Ms. Haigh has a great gift for telling interwoven family stories and doing justice to all the different perspectives they present.” In this book we follow an affluent family in New England from the 1960’s through several decades as they come to terms with changes in themselves and in society. It’s a similar premise to Baker Towers, but the family in Baker Towers is working class and their troubles just seem more genuine and less TV-movie-ish than the ones the McKotches face in The Condition.

I will agree with Maslin, though, that Haigh does a good job of balancing a family saga with an unfolding medical drama without turning the book into a “tragic family secret” story. Gwen, whose condition is Turner syndrome, is just one character out of many in this book, and everyone gets his or her turn in the spotlight. So why did Haigh title the book the way she did? She could just as easily have called it Frank and Paulette Get a Divorce or The Gay Older Brother, two plot strands that get just as much ink as Gwen’s medical condition.

Meh. Read Baker Towers, or Haigh’s first book, Mrs. Kimble. Both of those were more original and more compelling than this one.

(Book 23, 2010)

The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther

Someone recommended this to me as a good follow-up to Bitter Sweets, which I read a few weeks ago. It’s another immigrant story; Maryam moves from Iran to London as a young woman, marries an Englishman, and has a child. Eventually she feels an overwhelming urge to return to Iran to rediscover her girlhood and to reconnect with people she has lost.

Bitter Sweets was much more light-hearted than The Saffron Kitchen, which I thought was a bit overdone. Maryam is a drama queen, and takes herself very seriously. She is all scarves and jewelry and perfume and temper tantrums—I don’t usually like this kind of woman in real life, and I didn’t take to her in a book, either. At times the action is hard to follow. It shifts back and forth between third and first person, depending on who is narrating: Maryam, or her much more grounded daughter Sara. The story also shifts between the past and the present, and between London and Iran. It felt very choppy to me, like Crowther was too lazy to impose some kind of organizational structure on her work, and just wrote passages as they occurred to her.

Nevertheless, there were a lot of aspects of this book that I liked, including Maryam’s family dynamics, her interesting relationship with Fatima, a kind of nanny/housekeeper/mother figure, and an easy-to-grasp overview of Iranian politics in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Also the descriptions of the houses and the food, which everyone knows is why I really read these kinds of book.

(Book 4, 2010)

Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki

I followed up a book about Pakistan with one about India—more specifically, a multigenerational story about an Indian family in both India and in Britain. It’s one of those sprawling family sagas that are often labeled “women’s fiction” but with a South Asian flavor. I really enjoyed it. Farooki’s writing isn’t the most polished but she makes up for it in humor and realism.

Bitter Sweets follows a mother, Henna, and her daughter Shona, and their husbands, siblings, friends, lovers, and children. Henna’s story begins with a lie perpetrated by her father, who arranges Henna’s marriage to the son of a wealthy Calcutta family by passing Henna off as an educated, English-speaking 19-year-old when really she is an illiterate 15-year-old with nothing but good looks and moxie to recommend her. Lies lead to more lies and it all gets a little soap opera-ish, but in a good way. Shona, living in London many years later with her Pakistani husband and twin sons finally manages to end the cycle of lies, but the gods have other plans, and a surprise ending stirs everything up again. This book would make a good fun movie. It’s got love, betrayal, affairs, secret identities, humor, good food, and beautiful women in saris.

I see from Amazon.co.uk that Roopa Farooki has published several books in the U.K. that have not been released in the U.S. It does look like the U.S. Amazon site has a few of them, though my library only seems to have one other title besides this one. I am looking forward to reading more of Farooki's books; they take some of my favorite elements of domestic fiction (relationships, food) and move them to a more exotic setting.

(Book 46, 2009)

The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller

I once called Beth Gutcheon the “queen of domestic fiction” but when I wrote that I must have temporarily forgotten about Sue Miller. Perhaps we don’t need a queen and can instead elect a triumvirate or some kind of ruling senate with lots of members. In any case, Sue Miller should be right up there at the top of the heap.

Not to encourage any stereotypes or anything, but I can’t imagine that a man would like this book. It has the most graphic description of childbirth I’ve ever encountered and pages and pages about pregnancy and breastfeeding and other events that involve female bodily fluids. I’m not squeamish about these kinds of thing but even I felt a little overburdened by this level of realism.

This book really ought to be called The Senator’s Wife’s Next-Door Neighbor but that doesn’t sound as good. The only fully developed character is Meri, the neighbor to Delia; Delia is the estranged wife of a philandering Kennedy-esque 1970’s-era U.S. senator. Meri develops an unhealthy obsession with Delia and her life. Delia meanwhile stays at arm’s length (from both Meri and from us, the readers) and the two husbands (Meri’s husband Nathan and the ex-senator Tom) are even less accessible as characters. We follow Meri for a while in the early 1990’s as she gets to know Delia, and we also follow Delia for a while, both in the 1990’s and the 1960’s when she was still living with Tom (that is, before he left her for a woman half his age). The book doesn’t flow particularly well and I didn’t like Meri very much. In the end everyone gets what they deserve which is kind of satisfying in a perverse way.

Despite my complaints I liked this book. It was kind of like anchovy pizza—better to consider the whole thing rather than focus on the individual ingredients.

(Book 10, 2009)

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

It’s difficult to read a Persephone book and not view it through a 21st century lens. As I read The Priory I kept thinking things like “The reason Penelope has to make this choice is because she has no education, so no other options are available to her” and “if Christine had her own money she wouldn’t have to leave her baby with her sister.” Of course these reasons are still the reasons if you know what I mean – I am not ascribing motivations inaccurately. But I wonder if I were reading this book in the late 1930’s (when it was originally published) whether I would be as sensitive to them, or would feel as bothered by them.

This is a story of a family of mostly women: two sisters, their aunt and their stepmother; also various women servants. The few male characters are ineffectual and mostly just cause problems for the women. Major Marwood, the father, is a retired army man. His estate is mortgaged, he owes thousands of pounds to his creditors, his house is crumbling around him, yet he stages exorbitant cricket tournaments each summer that put him further and further into debt. The women in his family see his foolish ways but are powerless to stop him. His daughters, Penelope and Christine, are forced to marry men to whom they are ill-suited, and in the case of Christine, whom she barely knows, to escape from the poverty and to have some opportunity for a life. His second wife Anthea sequesters herself in the nursery with her young twins and refuses to acknowledge the state of their finances. She willfully ignores all evidence of it, and forges ahead with an expensive nursemaid and redecorating projects that compound the family’s financial woes. The tragedy of the story is that all three women (and several other women characters also) are intelligent, resourceful, creative people who are given no education and no opportunities to be of any use to society. Anthea’s anger is most clearly drawn through her passive aggressive money battles with the major, but the daughters too (especially Penelope) seethe with suppressed rage.

As with every other Persephone book I’ve read, this book is filled with tiny telling moments that add up to a perfectly rendered world. I do have one small complaint: it’s very long, around 500 pages. I got about 9/10ths of the way through and ran out of gas. (Astute observers of my Shelfari sidebar will know that it’s been stuck there for weeks.) I finally finished it last night.

(Book 17, 2008)

Icebergs by Rebecca Johns

This is beautifully written and very moving but I couldn't finish it. I got too upset by the two WWII airmen who were stranded in Labrador in a snowstorm after their plane crashed. I just didn't want to read about their deaths (or rather the death of one of them, given what I managed to glean from the blurb). Alternating with the story of the two lost airmen is the story of Dottie, one of their wives, who is home on her family's farm in southern Ontario. I really liked her story, but again, I couldn't figure out how to read just those parts. I can usually read about unpleasant things but this time it was too raw. It was almost like I thought maybe I could keep the airman alive if I didn't read the part where he dies. I may try this book again when I am in a different mood.

This book reminds me of another wonderful book about a Canadian family in the years after World War II. That book is A Good House by Bonnie Burnard. I never have met anyone who has read this, but I thought it was extremely good. I don't know why it didn't get any press.

Both Icebergs and A Good House are examples of how a skilled author can turn domestic fiction into art. Both feature measured prose, a lack of sentimentality, and very realistic characters.

The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

After I wrote about Love, Work, Children, by Cheryl Mendelson, a friend said to me “Well, if you hated that one, you will really hate The Emperor’s Children.” Never one to just take advice unquestioningly, I had to see for myself. I’m glad to say that I didn’t hate this book. Yes, it has a lot of privileged people who sit around alternately thinking about how special they are, or feeling sorry for themselves, but that’s balanced by some more outward-looking characters who can see that the emperor has no clothes, as it were.

I do like a book with a lot of interconnected characters, and story lines that weave around each other, and this book has that. Most of the characters are likable, and even the unlikable ones are fully formed, not paper cutouts. At times I even managed to feel sorry for Marina, who is, with the exception of her father Murray, the most unlikable character in the book.

This is the first novel I’ve read that includes the events of September 11, 2001, though I know others have been written in the last few years. I was a little nervous about how this would play out, but Messud handles it well. The event proves a catalyst for great changes in the characters’ lives (as it did in real life) but everything is believable, and not overdone.

I looked at reviews on Amazon just now and it seems that a lot of people think this book is overrated or overhyped. I mostly agree with them, though I don’t think it’s as bad as some say it is. Several people complained about Messud’s habit of writing really long sentences. Yes, sometimes I had to look back at the beginning of the sentence to remember what she was talking about at the end. It didn’t bother me; in fact, I found it endearing.

If I had had really high hopes for this book this would be a nastier post. But having begun reading with the expectation of hating it, I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe that should be my new approach.

(Book 6, 2008)

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk

In 2001 Rachel Cusk wrote a memoir called A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother. When this first came out I thought I might like it, an intelligent, educated woman’s take on the transition to motherhood. Then I read more reviews that put me off: who wants to read about colic, I thought, so I gave that one a pass.

In 2006 Cusk wrote Arlington Park, a novel about suburban motherhood, and I was interested to see what she might do with the same subject, but in another vein. Arlington Park is a suburb of London, and for Cusk it operates like a little laboratory where all these mothers are penned up together, and Cusk is the mad scientist who observes them for one day in their lives. It rains, and the children are cranky. The mothers pass the time with coffee and shopping. They are bored, angry, hostile. Their husbands are distant, and disconnected. By the end of the book I couldn’t tell one mother from another, but I think Cusk does that on purpose.

This is a depressing book, but also fascinating, especially if you are a mother. She captures so perfectly the madness that sometimes accompanies motherhood: the claustrophia, the impotence, the tiny rages, the paralysis, the feeling of isolation, the sense that nothing matters but everything matters, and she does so in perfectly wrought, microscopically detailed prose. A trip to the shopping mall is described in faultless detail, down to the plants that surround the fountain and the sound of the air filtration system. This might sound boring, but it isn’t, thought it also isn’t always pleasant to read. The women’s ambivalence toward their children is presented with shocking honesty. But I know that I am not the only mother who read this and remembered the days that I used to fantasize about just getting in my car and driving away.

Here are reviews from the Guardian of both A Life’s Work and Arlington Park. James Lasdan, writing about Arlington Park, takes a more dispassionate approach than I was able to: Cusk’s scenes evoked feelings for me that were too raw and fresh to enable to me to think critically about the book as a whole.

(Book 3, 2008)

Mariana by Monica Dickens

I started off my reading year with another Persephone book. This was a really good one and I enjoyed it a lot, though I’m wondering if it’s destined to be forgotten soon. As I said in my end-of-2007 post, I really want to get away from the “more of the same” feeling that most of 2007’s reading choices evoked in me. While this was a fun, satisfying read, it was a very predictable choice for me.

This is a coming of age story that begins when the protagonist, Maria, is about 11 and continues through the early days of her marriage. Set in the 1920’s and ‘30s, the story doesn’t sound like much, but the beauty is in the details. Dickens captures what it’s like to be a girl at age 11, 13, 17, etc. so perfectly, without sentimentality or over reliance on emotion, and she does so in a way that is perfectly timeless.

Maria is an average girl, and her life is mundane and predictable. Yet this book is filled with moments when an adult (female) reader thinks “Yes, that’s how it is! That happened to me, too!” Dickens manages to make the situations fresh, even while they are completely familiar. Yes, most girls are more assertive now, and have more choices. But what it feels like to be a girl obviously hasn’t changed much. On the Persephone Web site is a quote from Dickens about her work: “My aim is to entertain rather than instruct. I want readers to recognize life in my books.” That readers can still recognize it sixty years on is a tribute to her skills as an observer and a writer.

(Book 1, 2008)

Love, Work, Children by Cheryl Mendelson

I like books that are character-driven, but this book was so focused on characters that the plot disappeared. Really, nothing happens in this book, except a few people date and get married. Someone has a car accident at the beginning, but she spends almost the rest of the book in a coma, so that kind of cancels out the drama of the accident. This is the talkiest book I've ever read. In addition to chatting, people read the newspaper a lot, and sit around and listen to NPR.

Mendelson's first book in this series is Morningside Heights. I read that earlier this year and loved it. Love, Work, Children is also set in Morningside Heights, and includes some of the characters from the previous book (including the delightful Braithwaite family) but mostly focuses on a different set of people who are not nearly as enjoyable. These new characters do a lot of congratulating themselves on how special they are, and it's clear that they don't really want to be around anyone who isn't just like them (that is, privileged, white, educated, rich). Is this supposed to be a farce? Is Mendelson making fun of these people? If so, she does it so subtly that I wasn't sure. I couldn't decide if I was supposed to laugh at these characters or just hate them. They are the most smug, self-absorbed group of people I've encountered in a while. Mendelson should just ditch these folks and bring back the Braithwaites and their delightfully quirky friends.

(Book 38, 2007)

My Latest Grievance by Elinor Lipman

Elinor Lipman writes really well about human relationships, especially male/female ones. Many of her books could be called intelligent romance novels because they feature "girl meets boy" scenarios that are quirky, original, and sexy (Isabel's Bed, The Inn at Lake Devine, The Way Men Act). But she also writes well about families: mother-daughter relationships (Then She Found Me), sibling relationships (The Ladies' Man). This book doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories.

My Latest Grievance unfolds from the point of view of 16-year-old Frederica, a girl who seems (to me) to be inordinately interested in the lives of her parents and the adults around her. Raised on a college campus because her faculty parents are dorm parents, Frederica has a unique window into the lives of the other faculty members and the administration. She uses this window to follow an affair between another dorm parent and the college president, which results in the disintegration of the president's marriage.

Let me count the ways this book didn't work for me:

1. I never heard of a 16-yr-old who cared so much about which middle-aged woman was sleeping with which middle-aged man. Teenagers are self-absorbed, or at most, are absorbed with the relationships within their own circle. Affairs among adults are gross and are best ignored. I just didn't buy Frederica’s fascination with all the shenanigans.

2. Filtering the affair (which could have been interesting) through the eyes of Frederica removed it to a far enough distance from the reader that the impact was deadened. I might have been interested to read the POV of the college president, and why he was so attracted to this other woman that he risked his marriage and career, but we get none of this. We only get Frederica's viewpoint, which is mostly gossip and speculation.

3. Most of the characters were annoying. Frederica's parents are weird. Lipman does a good job of developing them and their off-putting personalities, but I didn't really like reading about them. Frederica herself is a smart-aleck. The “other woman” is dippy. The president is predatory. The abandoned wife is pathetic.

4. Lipman adds a bizarre complication to the plot: the "other woman" used to be married to Frederica's father. This adds to Frederica's fascination with the whole thing. But why? Isn't that just another level of yuckiness?

Blech. What a disappointment. In truth, I'm getting a little worried about MY relationship with Elinor Lipman. I really didn't like her last two offerings before this, either. The Pursuit of Alice Thrift annoyed me because I didn't like Alice Thrift, who was some kind of idiot savant.. The one before that, The Dearly Departed? I can't remember a thing about it, though I know I must have read it. Not a good sign.

Ms. Lipman, please, a good romance. Give us what we want!

(Book 22, 2007)

Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

This was published by Persephone Books, but unlike some Persephone titles, which are reprints of books published long ago, this is a new collection of previously uncollected short stories. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote for the New Yorker for many years and is better known in US literary circles than she is in Britain (though I was not familiar with her work). All these stories were originally published in the New Yorker magazine, and most have never been reprinted since their original publication during WWII.

The stories are tiny gems. Each is no more than a few pages long, and all of them are funny, sharp, and entertaining. The stories progress chronologically through the war years, providing trenchant observations about domestic life, relationships and the increasing hardships faced by those on the home front. Panter-Downes was first and foremost a journalist; in addition to these stories she wrote (among other things) a series of Letters from London, reporting on the war, which were also published in the New Yorker and which I believe were collected into a volume published in the early 1970's, edited by William Shawn. The stories in Good Evening Mrs. Craven are just as legitimate a form of reportage as any non-fiction article and indeed they illuminate delicate issues that are harder to report upon in a non-fiction format, such as the subtle class conflicts that occur when a middle class matron must provide housing for working class evacuees. Panter-Downes is brilliant at satire, and can say so much in so few words. These stories would make wonderful examples for new writers about how to use language and description with economy and elegance.

Persephone has also collected Panter-Downes' peacetime stories which deal with the social changes that occurred in the postwar years. That collection is entitled Minnie's Room.

Persephone customers receive a free subscription to the Persephone Quarterly. I just received my first issue of this and it made wonderful bedtime reading. I'm longing to attend the upcoming Tea at Great Maytham Hall, near Rolvenden, Cranbrook, Kent to celebrate Persephone's release of The Shuttle, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Great Maytham Hall is the setting for The Shuttle, but it also is the home of the walled garden that features in The Secret Garden, one of Burnett's most famous books (and one of my favorites). This event will take place on June 20, alas, without me.

(Book 17, 2007)

Digging to America by Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler puts two families under the microscope in this book. Along the way she tackles themes such as adoption, identity, inclusion, immigration, loneliness, disease, death, and life in the suburbs.

Two families adopt girls from Korea. The families meet at the airport, as they await delivery of their babies. One family is large, loud, and American for many generations. The other family is small, quiet, first generation Iranian-Americans. The contrasts make for good story telling. But what I liked best was how Tyler can make the must mundane situations into good reads: a long description of Maryam's extremely uneventful day is just wonderful.

Interestingly, I have just discovered (via the Reading Matters blog) that this book has been shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, the UK's only book award for fiction written by women. Here's a link to the Orange Broadband site.

This was an audiobook, read by Blair Brown. She's the best reader I've ever encountered. This was a very soothing book to listen to – is that a compliment? I mean it as one.

(Book 16, 2007)

After This by Alice McDermott

I've been putting off writing about this book because it was so good. Everything I thought to say about it seemed trite, or over-simplified. This is a beautiful book. It has pure, elegant prose, a haunting story, powerful imagery and fully human characters.

Like many of McDermott's books, it take place in New York in the 1950's and 1960's and features a large Catholic family. McDermott captures the times and situations so well, and mixes the larger events and issues of the time (the New York World's Fair, the Vietnam war, the legalization of abortion, the role of the Church) with the tiny realities of family relationships.

McDermott uses a powerful "show, don't tell" approach. We move through various scenes in the life of this family with little background information to help us figure out where and what we're seeing. We must deduce from the surroundings and events when and where the scene is taking place. In the beginning of the book, a war has recently ended, and a couple meets. In the next chapter the couple has married, and in the next, has three children. Eventually we learn the fate of all the characters; some thrive and others do not. This book contains great sadness but also much hope. It's the best thing I've read so far this year.

(Book 13, 2007)