Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty

This is a sneaky book—but I mean that as a compliment. It’s got a girly cover and a breezy tone, and it purports to be about yummy mummies whose children attend the same elementary school in an affluent Australian suburb. It looks like a light fun read, and it is, until you realize that it’s also about domestic violence, and how it crops up where you never expect it and how easy it is for the abuse (and the abuser) to hide in plain sight. It’s also a very funny book, except when it makes you cry.

I have already said too much about the plot so I won’t go on. I do want to say that I really was impressed by Moriarty’s ability to hit the right note every single time. She could have gone wrong so many places, veering off into movie-of-the-week territory, or worse, trivializing the issues, but she avoided all these obstacles perfectly. Moriarty is often mentioned in the same breath as Jojo Moyes, another author who excels at giving us a fresh look at the lives of ordinary women, and for tackling difficult subjects with humor.

(Book 2, 2015)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

An Americanah is a Nigerian person who has lived abroad and has adopted American habits. Americanah, by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who moves to the U.S. to attend college, and Obinze, Ifemelu’s friend who stays behind in Nigeria.

When Americanah opens, Ifemelu has been in the U.S. for more than ten years. She has made a career as a social critic: She writes a popular blog, gives lectures, and leads university seminars on race relations in America, as seen through the lens of a black African person. But she is restless and wants to return to Nigeria. Obinze, too, is emotionally adrift; after a brief stint living illegally in London, he has become a successful businessman in Lagos, but something is missing from his life.

The book moves back and forth between the past and the present as we watch Ifemelu and Obinze grow up together and fall in love, spend their years apart, then gradually become reunited upon Ifemelu’s return to Nigeria. Contrasts abound in this book: Life in Nigeria vs. life in the U.S. Ifemelu’s success in the U.S. vs. Obinze’s troubles in London. And most interesting of all, the experience of being a black African in the U.S. vs. the experience of being an African American.

Ifemelu provides a unique perspective on this last issue, especially. Her blog is called Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Author Adichie sprinkles Ifemelu’s blog posts throughout the novel. It’s a clever device that lets us learn from Ifemelu without feeling like the book is too didactic. Ifemelu’s voice is strong, and her warmth and humor belie her sometimes pointed indictments of white privilege. It was interesting to read this book now. As conversations about race swirl around me I keep wanting to respond “So Ifemelu says…” before remembering that she is just a character in a novel.

Sometimes a book is so good that you stay up all night reading because you can’t put it down. The corollary to this is a book that is so good that you ration it out in tiny bites so that it lasts as long as possible. Americanah falls into the second category; I started reading this in September and made it last three months. Even now I’m sorry that it’s over.

(Book 25, 2014)

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

To describe this book is to make it sound awful and off-putting. As Michiko Kakutani pointed out in the New York Times, it’s kind of a Young Adult/Historical Romance mashup. It’s also a coming-of-age novel with an (at times) unsympathetic teenage protagonist and features some disturbing sexual shenanigans between a boarding school headmaster and that teenager. Nevertheless this book is more than just what these descriptions imply, and it’s a very good read.

Thea Atwell has been sent, at age 15, to the Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, a year-round boarding school in North Carolina. In the 1930’s at the height of the Depression, the camp is a place where well-heeled southern girls ride horses, practice their social skills, and wait to get married. Thea’s parents have installed her at the school against her will, for some transgression that the author spends the rest of the novel slowly revealing, generating at times almost unbearable tension and anxiety.

Thea’s crime, of course, has to do with sex, and a boy. But it’s a lot more complicated than that: The boy in question is her cousin, and an act of violence has left this boy injured to an extent that isn’t fully revealed until quite late in the book. Thus DiSclafani neatly sidesteps the double standard issue of the boy’s culpability and possible consequences, while saddling Thea with some real guilt in addition to the feelings of shame imposed by her family and society for breaking the conduct codes of the time.

Thea is not always likeable, but she is very authentic. Her intelligence and sexual energy (and that of all the girls at the school) cannot be contained or managed in the way the adults in charge think it can and should be. The whole school simmers with hormones and repression. Readers can get kinda sweaty and uncomfortable reading this book, but will also be caught up in the drama.

Is this a Young Adult novel? I don’t think so. Adult readers will be very interested in DiSclafani’s portrayal of Thea’s parents and their motivations, and to the behaviors of all the adults. Despite the heat and the suspense, this is very much a character-driven story, one that moves beyond obvious emotions and easy answers.

(Book 22, 2014)

The Liar's Wife by Mary Gordon

The Liar’s Wife is a collection of four novellas by Mary Gordon. The novellas are thematically linked in that in each one someone revisits an important past relationship. Sometimes it’s by examining a memory, but in other cases the protagonist is faced with the actual person, as in the story “Simone Weil in New York,” where a young woman encounters her old teacher, Simone Weil, in Central Park.

In this story, Genevieve, the student, is a grown woman with a husband and a baby. As they become reacquainted, she finds Mlle. Weil’s anxieties and eccentricities disturbing, and as evidence of her instability, instead of awe-inspiring signs of her brilliance. Yet ultimately she is not surprised by her own change in perception. I identified with Genevieve’s experience of reexamining her impressions and drawing different conclusions. It’s a universal experience, no?

Two of the novellas feature real-life characters as well as fictional ones: Simone Weil and Thomas Mann, who appears in “Thomas Mann in Gary, Indiana.” That story highlights Mann's speaking tour of the U.S. in the late 1930’s, where he tried to call attention to the horrors of Nazi Germany to a mostly uninterested U.S. public.

Incorporating a real person into a fictional world introduces a whole subtext that may or may not be accessible to the reader. Note the parallel titles of the two novellas. Would either of these stories have worked the same way if Gordon replaced Weil or Mann with fictional versions of their characters? I wonder. In truth, I preferred the two novellas that had only fictional characters, especially the title story, "The Liar’s Wife," about a woman who receives a midnight visit from her first husband, a man she hasn’t seen in many many years.

Mary Gordon is a Serious Writer. I’ve read most of her earlier novels but have found her more recent stuff harder to get into, as she has turned to nonfiction to explore her relationships with her family and with Catholicism. I was happy to have something new from her that was more like the older stuff I remember reading. But that reflects more on me as a reader than on Gordon as a writer.

(Book 21, 2014)

Alena by Rachel Pastan

This book is a contemporary retelling of the classic Daphne DuMaurier book Rebecca. I read it because I love Rebecca, and because the author was coming to the Wisconsin Book Festival and I wanted to attend her reading. I also read it because I’m interested in modern retellings of classic novels. Pastan isn't the first to tackle Rebecca; a few years ago I read a book called Daphne, by Justine Picardie, which was a mashup of Rebecca and elements from duMaurier’s life.

The plots of Alena and Rebecca overlap considerably. Rebecca was written in the 1930’s and made into a popular movie starring Lawrence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. In that novel, a nameless young narrator tells of her marriage to a much older man, Max de Winter, and her life at his home, Manderley, where she lives in the shadow of his first wife, Rebecca, who died under mysterious circumstances. Life at Manderley is fraught with anxiety. The servants, especially the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers, adored Rebecca and view the narrator’s arrival with suspicion and hostility. Her attempts to run Manderley are undermined, she is filled with self-doubt, and duMaurier cleverly ratchets ups the tension with each chapter. In a dramatic conclusion, the details of Rebecca’s death emerge and the reader discovers that all is not as it seemed.

In Alena, author Rachel Pastan moves the setting from Cornwall to Cape Cod, thereby retaining the windswept isolation of the original novel. She moves the action to the present day, and gives the unnamed narrator a career – she is now a museum curator, hired by Bernard Augustin, an art collector, to run his contemporary art museum after the mysterious death of the previous curator, Alena. Like Max deWinter, Bernard is alternatingly attentive and remote. The narrator is inexperienced and in over her head. Agnes, the museum’s administrator, stands in for Mrs. Danvers.

I loved the choices Pastan made when she transformed the book to a contemporary setting. It was essential to give the narrator a career, and making her a curator gives Pastan (who works in a museum) a chance to populate the background with contemporary artists both real and imagined. Bernard Augustin is gay; this enables him to have an emotionally intimate relationship with the narrator while removing the marriage element from the story. I didn’t find Agnes to be as menacing as Mrs. Danvers. In Alena she is more of a caricature, in her black dresses and red nail polish – a kind of Cruella De Vil of the art world. My perception of all the characters was of course colored by what I know about Rebecca, and Pastan relies on this to a certain extent, especially when it comes to conjuring up the late Alena.

But do you have to have read Rebecca to read this novel? Absolutely not. It stands alone perfectly. It works as a mystery, as a coming-of-age novel, and as a commentary on the world of contemporary art. Pastan writes elegant prose that honors duMaurier’s work but which also envelops the reader in atmosphere and art.

(Book 20, 2014)

The Abundance by Amit Majmudar

This book held my interest while I was reading it, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked it.

It’s about an Indian family in the U.S. The matriarch is dying. Her relationships with her adult children are tenuous, conflicted. It’s old country vs. new country; she is still rooted in India while her children and grandchildren are firmly American. The conflicts play out in food, in approaches to childrearing, and in expectations of attention. The daughter, Mala, a doctor, is an anorexic control freak. The son Ronak works in finance--his most successful relationship is with his iPhone. No one can meet anyone else’s minimal expectations, let alone make anyone else happy.

For a while the mother and daughter attempt to use cooking as a means to connect to one another, as the mother teachers her daughter the family recipes. But even that doesn't really work. While the mother revels in the creativity of cooking, of using food to express love, to evoke memories, and to create sensory experience, Mala treats the whole activity like a science experiment, reducing each recipe to a series of unconnected ingredients and precise measurements, completely missing the point. And her eating disorder provides further subtext throughout the activity--Mala restricts herself to tiny portions of what they make together (insert interpretation of food=love symbolism here). It was all just sad. Is that what the author intended?

I never know what to say about books that are well written but unpleasant. Or, for that matter, how to recommend them. Do you want to read a book about some miserable people who really don't get one another and can't connect at all? Here you go.   

(Book 17, 2014)

One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

I’ve come to regard books by Jojo Moyes as little treasures, to be indulged in when I need a special treat. When I get a new one I hang on to it for a while before reading it, enjoying the anticipation. (The same is true for J. K. Rowling’s mysteries that she writes under the pen name Robert Galbraith; I'm reading The Silkworm now.) My only problem is that neither writer is cranking out books fast enough to satisfy me. Maybe I could stick them both into a parallel universe where there are more hours in a day, enabling them to produce more books, faster. I’ll have to get right on that.

In One Plus One, Jess is a single mother who is just barely getting by, working as a cleaner and barmaid in a resort community in southern England. She lives in a crappy apartment in public housing, her kids are being bullied at school, and her ex-husband hasn’t sent her a penny in years. In the face of these problems, Jess remains unrelentingly cheerful, buoying everyone along through creative budgeting, hard work, and unflagging optimism.

On the other side of town, where the rich folks have their beach houses, we find software entrepreneur Ed Nicholls, who is hiding out from, well, from everyone. Under investigation for insider trading, Ed is dodging phone calls from his ex-wife, his ex-business partner, his lawyer, and his sister, and sinking further and further into self pity.

Jess cleans Ed’s house, and she waits on him at the bar. She finds him arrogant and rude; he barely registers her existence. But through a series of events too complicated to get into here, Ed ends up driving Jess and her kids to Scotland so that Jess’s daughter Tanzie can compete in a math competition. It’s Jess’s last desperate attempt to get Tanzie, a math whiz, out of the local school and into a safer place where her skills can be nurtured. It’s this road trip (complete with a huge flatulent dog) that takes up the lion’s share of the book, and where of course, Jess and Ed fall in love.

Nothing in this book is as simple as it sounds here though. Moyes can sketch out a character in a few telling lines, and provide unexpected richness and depth to simple situations. She’s really a great writer and this book works on a lot of different levels: as a love story, a modern family drama, and an investigation of entrenched class differences in modern Britain.

The trickiest thing she does is to make Ed sympathetic. He transitions from a clueless self-absorbed whiner into a man who takes responsibility for his poor decisions and moves forward with insight and compassion. My favorite part of the book is where Ed dismisses £50 as “nothing” and Tanzie schools him on all the things that her family can buy with that amount of nothing (the school lunches, bus fare, and other expenses that Jess sweats every day). A lazier novelist would have been content to make Ed the knight in shining armor who rescues Jess from poverty. In this book the person who really gets rescued is Ed.

(Book 16, 2014)

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is a big sprawling book that reads like classic literature. In fact, maybe someday it will be classic literature. Elizabeth Gilbert has written an old-fashioned historical novel that has more in common with works by Rebecca Stott (Ghostwalk) and Andrea Barrett (The Voyage of the Narwhal) than it does with Gilbert’s most famous work to date, her memoir Eat, Pray, Love.

The title refers to German mystic Jakob Bohme’s belief that every object in the natural world contains some hidden meaning, put there by God to help people make sense of the universe. And indeed, this book’s protagonist Alma Whittaker, is searching for meaning. But she’s not waiting to hear it from God; she’s going to try to figure it out for herself. Alma has very little time for God and a lot of time for scientific analysis, specifically botany. And human nature. And world exploration. All of which she engages in over the course of her long life.

Alma is the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia botanist and plant collector Henry Whittaker, who makes his fortune developing a method for manufacturing quinine, and whose story takes up the first quarter of the book. Henry and his Dutch wife have unorthodox ideas about women’s education (the book is set in the late 18th and early-mid 19th centuries) and they train Alma to manage their vast pharmaceutical empire, botanical collections, and gardens.

Considered physically unattractive (tall, big-boned, with unmanageable hair), Alma eschews traditional women’s pursuits and spends her time at her parents’ sides learning both business and science. She devotes years to studying various plants before happily settling on mosses (bryology) and becomes the world’s leading expert in this field. (Note: historians tell us that botany was actually rife with women scientists in the 19th century as it required little more than a notebook, pencil, magnifying glass, and long walks in the woods, all of which were more available to women than, say, a laboratory filled with chemicals or a surgery for dissecting things.)

Tragic events, including a failed love affair and her father’s death, upend Alma and force her to step outside her tiny moss world and embark on her quest for meaning in the universe. This section of the book (especially the long middle section about her voyage to Tahiti) reminded me of those books by Victorian women travel writers like Isabella Bird, who stoically endured shockingly harsh conditions aboard 19th century sailing vessels and lived rough among the natives. Alma’s journey echoes her father’s earlier explorations, but while he was singled-mindedly focused on plants, Alma remains open to discoveries about all aspects of the world and about herself. And it’s while she’s in Tahiti that she hits upon her own theory of the signature of all things, the pursuit of which takes up the final part of the book.

What a great novel! Carefully researched, ranging among a huge variety of historical and scientific topics, and intensely personal, this book is unique and delightful.

(Book 15, 2014)

Wake by Anna Hope

Wake tells several stories at once, some very personal, and some public. Set in England in the years immediately following World War I, it follows several characters whose worlds intersect, and uses a real-life event as an anchoring device to bring the stories together.

Running throughout Wake is an account of the 1920 state funeral of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey in London. Author Anna Hope follows the anonymous soldier’s body from its exhumation from an unmarked grave in France, to its burial alongside kings on November 11, 1920. Hope’s report is well researched and well told. As we know, the British excel at pageantry and they pulled out all the stops for this event, providing the poor unknown soldier with a battleship escort on the journey from France, and a Field Marshall’s funeral, complete with a 19 gun salute.

Intertwined with this narrative are several fictional stories of women who could be the wives, mothers, or sisters of the unknown warrior, and the men who escaped that fate, but whose lives were nevertheless ruined by their experiences in the war. Their tales are dark and brutal and the women, especially, rail against the futility of their losses. The funeral of the unknown warrior was in part designed to help British citizens start to heal; this book shows how impossible that process was for many people, and how little the men in charge understood that. This book is extremely sad, but it's beautifully written and very moving. Don't be put off by the topic--Hope's characters are compelling and I love how she mixed the fiction with the nonfiction.

I’ve read a lot of Second World War fiction, but not as much about the First World War. A lot of World War II fiction focuses on the victims of the war—on those oppressed by the Nazis or on the civilians who were collateral damage. But it seems to me like World War I fiction often focuses more on the soldiers themselves. Wake joins books like My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, by Louisa Young, the Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker, and even the Ian Rutledge mysteries by Charles Todd in identifying the soldiers themselves as primary victims. Wake especially continues this approach.

(Book 14, 2014)

We are all Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

It’s hard to write about this book without revealing spoilers. If you are considering reading it, I recommend you stop reading this post and go get the book right away, before you accidentally discover the secret. Diving into it without knowing the central conceit will be a good adventure and I envy you the pleasure. I promise you won’t be disappointed. Okay, off you go… bye!

Everyone else—In We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, Rosemary and Fern are adopted sisters, raised together from infancy through age 5, when they are suddenly irrevocably separated. Rosemary spends the rest of her childhood mourning Fern’s loss and her young adult years tracking Fern down. She struggles to adapt to life without Fern and rails against her parents whose involvement in Fern’s disappearance baffles, then haunts Rosemary.

Here’s the thing: Rosemary is a girl but Fern is a chimpanzee, a fact that Fowler doesn’t reveal until about a third of the way through the book. Both Rosemary and Fern are test subjects in an experiment run by Rosemary’s father, a behavioral scientist. For their first five years, Rosemary and Fern are happily cared for by their parents and a slew of graduate students, their every move documented, their development celebrated and recorded at every turn. However, for reasons that unfold in the story, the experiment goes awry and Fern must be sent away, leaving the research project in shambles, and the entire family far more damaged than anyone thought possible. Rosemary’s mother retreats into serious depression, her father into alcohol, her brother becomes a fugitive animal rights activist, and Rosemary herself must navigate through life never sure whether her instincts are human or chimpanzee.

The novel’s complex structure of present-day narration combined with flashbacks adds suspense and makes the big reveal very satisfying, even if you already know it in advance, which I did. It was hard to avoid--this book got a lot of press when it came out last year and recently won the 2014 Pen/Faulkner award.

While it has a political subtext, the book is, at heart, a very personal story about relationships, loss, love, and what it means to be human. Fowler was inspired by several well-known cases of chimps raised in human families but has added her own spin. Politically, she walks a fine line, managing to avoid vilifying Rosemary’s father while still coming down firmly on the side of the animal rights folks. She has clearly done her research. It’s tricky subject matter and Fowler never puts a foot wrong. I was really delighted by this book, even when it was sad and heartbreaking.

(Book 9, 2014)

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Reading this book was like going to a big loud party that lasted way too late. Some of the time it was fun and really astonishing, but a lot of the time I just wished I were doing something else. Notice I’m not saying that this was a bad book. It was, objectively speaking, a good book, with great characters and good plotting, though it was way too long. But like that loud party, it just wasn’t for me. It made me feel exhausted and kind of irritable; also intermittently bored.

In The Goldfinch, a terrorist attack on the Metropolitan Museum of Art injures Theo, an adolescent boy, and kills his mother. In the ensuing confusion, Theo appropriates a famous painting by a Dutch artist (The Goldfinch), which becomes a kind of talisman for him, a last link to his mother, but also a repository for his survivor’s guilt. Unable to part with the painting, he hides it, taking it with him as he goes to Nevada to live with his estranged father, a gambler, and then later when he returns to New York to make his way as an adult. Eventually, the pressure to return the painting increases Theo’s propensity for self-destructive behavior, resulting in a series of disasters, though Tartt does offer some resolution at the end.

The Goldfinch just won the Pultizer Prize, which doesn’t surprise me because I never really like the books that win that award. It’s also on the shortlist for the Bailey’s Prize (formerly the Orange Prize), the winners of which I usually do like (The Tiger’s Wife, The Lacuna, Property) so I guess that’s the part of the party where I was having fun. Yes, I get the appeal of the Dickensian characters and structure, and the homage to Manhattan that makes all the New York book reviewers squeal with glee. Tartt made me love Theo and then she put him through hell, which doesn’t usually put me off a book but did in this case, maybe because he was just a kid. The whole middle section, where Theo and his friend Boris are marooned in Las Vegas and live off vodka and leftover bar snacks just went (painfully) on and on and on, and then when Theo returns to New York it’s just bad choices leading to worse ones. I also have to complain briefly about the book’s classist depiction of Theo’s father and his girlfriend, and the way Tartt sets up their slovenly habits and low-brow aspirations in opposition to those of the cultured New Yorkers that Theo left behind. Really?

You can find plenty of plot summaries and glowing reviews of The Goldfinch all over the Internet, though a quick search finds that not everyone liked it. I did think about the general call to good manners: “if you can’t say anything nice….” But that has never stopped me before (see my cantankerous assessments of books by Philip Roth and Jeffrey Eugenides, for example). At least I bothered to write a post. Most of the time when I dislike a book this much I just toss it in the library return bin without even a mention. So there's that.

(Book 7, 2014) (edited to add the plot summary and make a few refinements)

The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway

World building is one of the trickiest aspects of writing fantasy and science fiction. Books are often front-loaded with detail—sometimes this detail is essential for understanding later plot developments but sometimes it’s just there because the writer was so enamored of her own creativity that she wasn’t a good judge of which elements were ornamental rather than strictly necessary. It’s no wonder that some readers find navigating a fantasy world off-putting or not worth the trouble.

Bee Ridgway, in The River of No Return, walks a fine line between these two extremes but in the end succeeds nicely. The book (a literary time travel feminist romance mashup) throws a lot of detail at you right out of the gate and I found myself, in the first 50 pages or so, thinking “Do I have to remember all this?” (Kind of the reader’s version of “Is this going to be on the test?”) The answer is yes, but it’s worth it: Ridgway’s details are all crucial to understanding what happens to Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown, when, just as he is about to die in the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, he jumps forward in time to 2003 where, with the help of a mysterious organization called the Guild, he lives for the next ten years as Nick Davenant, a hipster organic farmer in Vermont. It turns out Nick has a special ability that enables him to swim around in the river of time (while the rest of us idiots are just carried along in the current). This skill qualifies him for admission to the Guild, a super-secret club for time travelers.

Threaded throughout Nick’s story is that of another time traveler from Regency England: Julia Percy, ward of the recently deceased fifth Earl of Darchester. Julia’s powers exceed those of all but the most practiced Guild members. Not only can she swim around in the river, she can stop it from flowing all together. But in the beginning of the story Julia is untrained; she uses her nascent skills mostly to fend off the unwelcome attentions of her new guardian, the Earl’s foul and abusive nephew. Julia and Nick meet when Nick is drafted by the Guild for an undercover operation wherein he must return to his old life as the Marquess to discover who is threatening the Guild’s sovereignty. Romance ensues but with a twist: Nick is now a 21st century guy who finds the societal strictures on women to be degrading and counterproductive. When protofeminist Nick meets superpowerful Julia, sparks fly. I loved it.

Ridgway includes all sorts of wink-and-nod references to traditional Regency romance tropes while turning the whole genre on its head. If that isn’t enough, she also offers sly interstitial commentary on the time travel conceit. If you’ve read/watched anything else in the genre you’ll pick this up. She even takes on that well-worn cliché about using time travel to change the future (all discussions of which now include killing Hitler), in this delightful conversation between Nick and some Guild leaders, when they warn him that he won’t be able to alter anything important when he returns to his own time. Alice says: 

“You will only be able to change the smallest things, things that get subsumed back into the big push of the river without making a difference.”

“No killing Hitler,” Nick said.

“No killing Hitler. No giving Queen Liliuokalani back her Hawaii, no saving Malcolm X, or Joan of Arc, or the princes in the tower. But smaller things—things that are just normal, everyday stuff of life? Those things are perfectly possible.” …

Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. “Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.”

Ridgway has recently released a prequel to The River of No Return, available as an e-book from Penguin and Amazon. It's called The Time Tutor and is only 90 pages and costs $2.99. I'm definitely going to read this. I'm not surprised to find this—it was clear from the ending of The River of No Return that Ridgway was setting us up for a lot more to come. Which of course takes us back to the world-building discussion. After all, if you go to all the trouble to construct a world where the rules about time are all different, it seems wasteful not to keep using it, no?

(Book 6, 2013)

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin

Is this genre-bending book a ghost story? (There are lots of ghosts.) Is it an investigation of a real historical mystery? (What happened aboard the brigantine Mary Celeste in 1872, and why was it found floating derelict near Gibraltar, its crew and captain missing, but with no signs of a struggle and all the cargo intact?) Further mixing fact with fiction, it’s also the story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s sensational account of the Mary Celeste that he wrote anonymously for a British literary journal, and a straight historical novel about a female journalist who investigates the Spiritualist movement in upstate New York (hence the ghosts). And I’m omitting a few other threads that wind their way through this intricately plotted, beautifully written novel.

Sometimes books like this, that lack a defined main character, can be difficult to connect with, and a reader can find herself trying to pin that role on someone specific. John Vernon, writing about this book in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, assigns that role to Phoebe Grant, the journalist, whom he says is “at the novel’s heart.” I disagree. Grant may be the intellectual center, but the woman at the heart of the book is Sarah Briggs, the wife of the Mary Celeste’s captain, whose story opens and closes the book. She may get less ink than Phoebe Grant but her bittersweet tale (and her links to many of the other characters) help bind everything together into a coherent whole.

Confused yet? Don’t be. Martin is in complete control of all this material. She never loses her forward momentum, and never derails us with too much emphasis on one thing or another. It’s really brilliant and we all know how geekishly enthusiastic I get over complicated books that don’t disintegrate under their own weight. I don’t really understand why Valerie Martin isn’t more famous. Her book Property won the 2003 Orange Prize and her subsequent books have been positively reviewed, but I don’t see her name come up in the discussions where I’d expect to see it. Perhaps it’s because Martin never writes the same book twice--maybe it’s her versatility that makes her difficult to track.

(Book 5, 2013)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Who can keep up with Neil Gaiman? He writes fiction (for adults and children), screenplays (for film and television), comics, and graphic novels. He seems to always be popping up here and there, speaking, teaching, blogging…the man is busy. I am not into everything he does, but I like some of what he does very much, so I try to look out for his new adult fiction, which has been scarce in the last few years. (I also love his episodes of Doctor Who.)

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is Gaiman’s return to adult magical realism. In this novel, a man looks back on events that occurred when he was 7 years old, when he comes, for a time, under the protection of the mysterious family who live down a dirt road not far from his house. When a sudden death unleashes an old elemental evil, the boy is caught up in the battle to subdue it, a battle waged by his friend Lettie Hempstock and her mother and grandmother, who look harmless, but whom we soon find out are practitioners of powerful ancient magic.

Like all good magical realists, Gaiman expertly mixes the mundane with the fantastic. Thus our 7-year-old is worried about his birthday party and loves his kitten, but he unquestionably accepts that Lettie’s grandmother can change past events with her needle and thread, and that Lettie keeps a jar of shadows dissolved in vinegar. For a time the malevolent force takes on the shape of something that terrifies all children: an evil nanny. Gaiman says that this book is partly about the ways in which children are wiser than adults--the boy can sense the nanny’s true nature right away, but his father cannot. Her powerful sexual hold on the father is rendered in a few quick, disturbing scenes that are brilliantly written. Adult readers can tell exactly what is going on, but the boy only knows that something is horribly amiss and he cannot understand why his father can't see it.

Gaiman has written about Lettie Hempstock’s family before, most recently in The Graveyard Book. I would love to see a whole novel about the Hempstock women, especially one that focused on the grandmother, who says she remembers the Big Bang. This is clever, original stuff and I wish that Gaiman would spread himself a bit less thinly so he could give me more of what I want.

(Book 4, 2013)

The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is a “writer of a certain age” (according to Fay Weldon, more of which later). She’s also a leading lady of British letters, author of 17 novels (most of which I’ve read), and she’s got some of those letters after her name (DBE) which mean that the Queen likes her. Her latest novel is The Pure Gold Baby, about an anthropologist called Jess who raises her mentally handicapped daughter Anna as a single mother in North London in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.

The story of Jess and Anna is related by Jess’s longtime neighbor Eleanor, a dispassionate observer of human nature and changing neighborhoods. Eleanor looks back on Jess and Anna’s life from such a distance that at times it isn’t clear whether she’s talking about Jess’s life or her own. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are Eleanor/Jess’s observations about the state of the British National Health Service, as it relates to the changing attitudes towards care for the mentally challenged. These parts were a snoozer, though the rest of the story is classic Drabble, about how a woman can live a life of the mind amid the myriad restrictions placed on her by society; especially how a woman like Jess can do this alone, with a needy child. I didn’t love this book. Drabble has gone over this territory before and done it better. Yet even mediocre Drabble can still be lovely--her observations are acute and she has a gift for the wry understatement.

As I was thinking about what I wanted to say in this post, I happened upon an article by Fay Weldon, in the January 24, 2014 New York Times Sunday Book Review (Note: Fay Weldon also has letters after her name: CBE). In this article, Weldon (herself a writer of a certain age) talks about the reading public’s (and the publishing industry’s) lack of interest in the voices of women over age 50. Weldon doesn’t waste time bemoaning this but instead treats it as a given, and in the article she relates her conversation with a student in her writing class. 

…older women make up the bulk of the fiction market,” my student will protest. “How odd that they don’t want to read about themselves!” “They do,” I will answer. “But they like to identify with themselves when young and beautiful, when sexual power and adventures were for the taking and life was fun — not as they are now, with bulging hips and crepey necks.

Weldon says that literary agents will advise a writer to age an older (female) character down by 20 or 30 years. And indeed Drabble does this, by setting a lot of the action in The Pure Gold Baby when Jess was a young mother. And just as Weldon observes, I liked those parts better, and I was bored by the parts where Eleanor and Jess were older. Does that mean I am now a statistic? A reader who can be quantified by literary agents and publishers? That gives me pause but I also think it might be true.

Though I am also considering whether my boredom with this book is a symptom of my increasing impatience with literary fiction in general. I am having difficulty summoning up interest in any of the new works by authors who have been my long-time favorites (Alice McDermott, Ann Patchett). I’ve been belligerently refusing to start The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (the latest must-read, according to everyone) and instead I’ve been flirting with nonfiction and obsessing over Battlestar Galactica (2003). We’ll see what develops.

(Book 2, 2014)

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

Sisterland is a country inhabited by two people only: a set of twins, Daisy and Violet. As children, the Sisterland geography was their shared bedroom, but it was also the inside of their heads. Daisy and Violet are psychic twins with the ability to see other people’s secrets and destinies. This ability becomes Violet’s raison d’etre, and as an adult she makes her living as a medium, but it freaks Daisy out so much that she changes her name, renounces her skills, and anesthetizes herself in the role of suburban housewife. She tries to be everything that Vi is not: thin, heterosexual, almost invisible. Or as she thinks of it, “normal.”

In present day St. Louis, Daisy, now called Kate, is married to a sweet guy named Jeremy and has two small children. While they no longer live in Sisterland, Kate and Vi are still connected both psychically and emotionally. When Vi makes a public prediction that an earthquake is imminent, Kate is horrified and humiliated, and yet cannot prevent herself from getting drawn into the controversy.

Kate’s got other problems, too, including a long-simmering attraction to a stay-at-home dad from the neighborhood, a nursing baby and a needy toddler, the laundry, the grocery shopping, the bad wardrobe, and a father who develops angina while visiting a prostitute. This book exhausted me, and I’m not even mentioning the abortion subplot(s).* But life is like that – the clothes still need to be washed, even when your sister is generating widespread panic in the city where you live.

Sittenfeld tells a good story but I’m not in love with her writing style in this book. Her prose is sometimes inelegant and repetitive; why is that? But she also makes profound, elemental observations about families, fate, and destinies; here she just serves them up on paper plates rather than fine china. If you liked Prep (Sittenfeld’s first breakout book) you will probably like this, though it’s not nearly as good as American Wife, which is a more sophisticated and polished book in every way.

*Abortion subplots (or plots) are a rare thing indeed in 21st century fiction and television. I think writers avoid this most polarizing topic out of fear and I congratulate Sittenfeld for even attempting it. Two different pregnant women contemplate abortion; one chooses it and the other doesn't. I tried not to read any kind of moral judgment into the characters' choices, and I don't think Sittenfeld was ascribing any, but it's hard not to think about it.

(Book 1, 2014)

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Jojo Moyes was in Madison a few months ago for the opening of the new Central Library. At that event she read from her latest book The Girl You Left Behind. I read that book in advance of her visit – here is my post about it. But most people who came to hear Moyes read that day were fans of her previous book, Me Before You, which was a big seller. Maybe you’ve already read it, but I hadn’t until now. I bought a copy of it at the library event and got around to reading it in late December.

Some reviewers try to pigeonhole Moyes as a romance writer. It’s true that both these books have elements of romance but neither really fits into that category, as they both lack the traditional happy ending that is mandatory for the romance genre. Instead Moyes cleverly combines elements of romance novels with more contemporary motifs to make a kind of hybrid novel that delivers both an emotionally satisfying read, and a story that incorporates some of the moral ambiguity that you see in literary fiction.

In Me Before You, Moyes delves into what it’s like to live with a serious disability – quadriplegia – and what it’s like to care about someone with this disability. Will Traynor is a former master of the universe who has been laid low by a traffic accident. He’s lost his high-powered job, his supermodel girlfriend, and his autonomy and is now confined to a motorized wheelchair under the care of a full time nurse and his parents. Lou, short on education but long on compassion, has been hired as his personal assistant. Lou has empathy to spare and it doesn’t take long for her to figure out what’s really going on. Will has made a perverse bargain with his mother – he’ll refrain from suicide attempts for six months, at the end of which she will take him to Switzerland to an assisted suicide center. Lou will keep him company during those six months, in essence holding him to his bargain.

As a reader I instinctively shared Lou’s revulsion at this deal and rooted for her efforts to convince Will to live. Their six months together is an exercise in opposites attract, class warfare, and last-ditch panic on Lou’s part. Will is, by turns lovable and monstrous to Lou, and Lou gives everything to Will. It’s deeply romantic, albeit futile, and a good cry is part of the deal.

Moyes is nothing if not prolific. Apparently she's got yet another book coming out in February called One Plus One. The other day she tweeted a link to a free download of the first chapter. I haven't tried downloading this yet, and I'm not sure how long the link will work, but here it is, if you want it.

(Book 36, 2013)

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard

In Zanesville, a fictional town in Illinois, we find Jo, a most appealing heroine, who manages to navigate the tricky emotional swells of adolescence with detached self-possession, humor, and a lot of courage. Beard takes the traditional role of the outsider/observer and fills it with this everygirl who faces the challenges posed by boys, cheerleaders, and her own mother with equanimity and good sense. And her mother! What a mid-century mother she has! Beset on all fronts by an alcoholic husband, low-wage work, and wayward children, she nevertheless supports our girl at every turn through a combination of backhanded compliments, cautionary tales, and too many cigarettes.

The book opens with a brilliant set piece that stands alone as a great bit of writing. “We can’t believe the house is on fire. It’s so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we’re supposed to be in charge here, so there’s a sense of somebody not doing their job.” Jo and her friend Felicia are babysitting a motley crew of children. The fire, followed by the arrival of Jo’s mother, the fire department, then finally by the return of the children’s unsavory parents is by turns funny, exhausting, and ultimately horrific. It exemplifies Beard’s narrative voice perfectly: deadpan, droll, devastating.

In Zanesville is set in the mid-1970’s and Beard captures the era perfectly. It was a sad time in suburbia. Immediately post-Vietnam, the energy of the 1960’s had dissipated but the glossy 1980’s hadn’t begun. No one really knew what to do with themselves. I was in high school then, too, and I remember that, and all the details that Beard so lovingly includes: the unflattering band uniforms, the reruns of Lassie, the canned corn. Beard has her characters experience both the mundane and the astonishing every day, which is a lot like what it is to be a teenager, both then and now. We don’t see the kind of adult that Jo turns into, but that’s okay, we have faith that she will do just fine.

One more odd thing: Two reviews of this book (New York Times, NPR*) mention the “nameless narrator” and Beard herself confirms this in the NPR interview. She says “I felt so close inside her head, that it really didn't occur to me to name her all the way through, because I felt in some way that I was her.” But Beard does give her a name: It’s Josephine, as evidenced in this paragraph where the narrator is talking about Amy March in the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott:

She was the one I most wanted to be, even though I had the same name as another. Little Amy March grew up while no one was looking, wandered away from wherever it was they lived, and become an artist, while the one named after me had to stay and be in a worse book later (p. 181). 

Of course “the one who had to stay and be in a worse book later” is Jo March (and the worse book later is Jo’s Boys). Why does Beard then claim in the interview that the character has no name? Did she forget that she actually gave this wonderful girl a name similar to her own? Perhaps it’s just a test of close reading. If so, did I pass?

(Book 33, 2013)

The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes

I did another fun review for Isthmus; here is the link. Click through and read it, then come back and read the rest of this post, because I have more to say than I had room for over there.


The aspect of this book that intrigued me most was Moyes's sensitive handling of the issue of wartime collaboration. Sophie's relationship with the Kommandant is complicated, in part because he is not entirely evil. Moyes expertly describes the connections that can be forged in difficult circumstances, sometimes even against our will. I have read the stories of what happened to female collaborators in France after World War II and I am horrified to think that most of them probably had very little choice about their actions. Like Sophie, they were most likely cornered, coerced by offers of food or shelter, and desperate to protect their families.

But wait, this is book is not sad! I just happened to latch on to this piece as a new way of thinking about an issue I took for granted. On a lighter note, I had the pleasure of meeting Jojo Moyes on Saturday evening when she read from this book at an event sponsored by Madison's new Central Library, in conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival. She was a wonderful speaker--warm, funny, and charming. Despite the fact that Madison was her last stop on a multiweek tour she was unflagging in her enthusiasm for the library and for the joy of reading. Here we are, enjoying the evening (Moyes on the left, me at right).

(Book 25, 2013)

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

I adored this book! It's the best thing I've read all year. Here's my review, which appeared in Isthmus, our local arts weekly.

It's books like this that spoil me for All the Other Books. Honestly, nothing is as good (except Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, okay, and a few others, no one says I have to have just one favorite...).

(Book 24, 2014)