My Picks for the Best of 2000                          2000 by Month
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith                                      January 2000
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee                                         February 2000
Blue Angel, by Francine Prose                                   March 2000
Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg                                   April 2000
Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter                                May 2000
Horse Heaven, by Jane Smiley                                  June 2000
A Hole in the Earth, by Robert Bausch                      July 2000
Hummingbird House, by Patrica Henley                    August 2000
Everything You Know, by Zoe Heller                         September 2000
City of God, by E. L. Doctorow                                  October 2000
                                                                                                     November 2000
                                                                                                     December 2000
 

January 2000
The Last Life
Losing Nelson
Waiting
The Book Borrower
Harm Done

February
The Catastrophist
Having Everything
Everytbing You Know
In the Family Way
Fortune's Rock

The Catastrophist
          by Ronan Bennet

    From this novel's book jacket, we learn that Ronan Bennet was born in 1956 and brought up in Belfast, and that he was a youthful demonstrator in the Irish political upheavals in the late 1960's.  In 1974 he was arrested and incarcerated in the notorious Long Kesh prison camp.
    The political tone of this novel, and the views expressed by James Gillespie, the protagonist, undoubtedly reflect some of the author's experiences.  Gillespie, a writer of novels and sometime journalist, is determinedly apolitical.  He views the factions in his native Ireland as made up of fools who refuse to see the world as it is, as battling adolescents who care nothing for life.  He is so alienated he has changed his name from Seamus to James, and doesn't communicate with his mother and sister.  His is a studied and ingrained irony, a refusal to feel, until he meets Ines Sabiani, a beautiful and passionate communist who writes doggedly partisan articles for an Italian communist newspaper.  Ines awakens hin him passion, ardor and true commitment, and when her enthusiasm begins to wane, he becomes obsessed with re-capturing the early days of their affair.
    In late 1959, Ines travels to the Belgian Congo, a veritable hotbed of change and incipient revolution, and James follows, not because he shares her commitment to the revolution, but because he must try whatever he can to hold on to her.  He realizes, as she does not, that trouble lies ahead, and he wants to protect her.  This leads her to call him a "catastrophiste", someone for whom no problem is small.  Unfortunately Ines, a person who sees the world in black and white and who disdains objectivity or balance, is more infatuated with the idea of revolution in the Congo, and with Patrice Lumumba, than with the rational vision of James.  When an enigmatic American named Stipe befriends James and feeds him confidential information about the abdication of the Belgians which he says will occur within six months, Ines and James grow futher apart because of her contempt for the American.  Deserted by Ines for a young Congolese man, James still desperately tries to protect her, even to the point of being tortured by officials after Lumumba is overthrown, because he will not reveal the whereabouts of  Ines and her lover. We are helpless along with him as the CIA, the colonialists, and the many factions of Congolese plunge the country into chaos, with Ines willingly going along for the ride.
    This book is full of hard truths -- about love, about obsessions, about politics, about human beings.  Ronan Bennett is reminiscent of Graham Greene in point of view, time, and place, but there is a deeper and somehow more lyrical quality to his melancholy prose, something that seems to characterize so many of the finest Irish writers.

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Having Everything
          by John L'Heureux

    We meet Philip Tate and his wife Maggie on the night he is being feted for his appointment to the Goldman Chair in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.  On this night it certainly would seem that Philip does indeed "have everything", including the inside track on the Deanship of the Medical School, but he finds himself contemplating the meaning of the phrase as he realizes that his beautiful wife does not see herself as so blessed.  She is struggling with pills, alcohol, an empty nest and a stalled career, and her despair is almost complete.  Philip is powerless to help her unless she helps herself, but this type of situation is not easily resolved at any level of success or prosperity.
    Meanwhile, Philip has a few secrets of his own, involving strange compulsions that have the potential to knock him off the career catbird seat he occupies.  Unfortunately, on the evening he decides to indulge himself in his voyeuristic urges, he stumbles into an unfortunate encounter with a colleague's young, beautiful, and disturbed wife.  Sticky situations ensue.
    This novel of the roiling beneath the surface of academic waters has a familiar theme, but John L'Heureux, a college professor himself, not only skewers his characters and their all-too-obvious faults, he shows you their hearts as well.  Philip genuinely loves Maggie, and despite his foolishness, will do anything to save her and his marriage.  Most of the characters grow and change, albeit painfully, and of course the rest of us are reminded of the lesson we would usually like to learn for ourselves, i.e., money and success do not guarantee, or even mildly indicate, happiness.
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Everything You Know
          by Zoe Heller

        Zoe Heller brings her considerable journalistic talent to this novel, an observation of character and family that is oh-so-contemporary.  Willy Muller is the ghost-writer of half-baked celebrity biographies.  He knows that what he writes is pure schlock, and his bad opinion of himself is only outdone by his contempt for everyone else.  Years ago, he went to jail for the accidental killing of his wife in London, and after being released on appeal, he wrote a self-serving book about his marriage, called "To Have and to Hold", the result of which he began his new career, moved to Hollywood, and earned the lifelong enmity of his two daughters, Sophie and Sadie.
       Now the unhappy Willy is 50, and is discomfited when he receives a bundle of his daughter Sadie's diaries, four months after her suicide.  He attempts to ignore these sordid documents until he is suddenly felled by a heart attack and finds himself in the hospital and oddly compelled to read them.  From that first step Willy begins the arduous process of coming out of denial and into change.  We accompany him on this spiritual odyssey, as he leaves the hospital and encounters profound writer's block, erectile dysfunction and malaise in the face of his life as it is now, complete with bimbo girlfriend, alcoholic compadres, old-time Hollywood agents, and the 'hip' German director who wants to direct the movie of his book.  Eventually his horror at his circumstances, his life, and himself leads Willy back to England and to the attempt to do something good.
        Zoe Heller's eye might seem jaded, but it is actually exceptionally clear.

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In the Family Way
         by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

    Roy, a psychotherapist, lives with his third wife Lisa in an apartment owned by Bea, his first wife.  Serena, his second wife, lives upstairs with May, Bea's lesbian sister.  Bea lives with "Shimmer" and Danny, her children with Roy, and she is also the adopted mother of Tony and Jane, Roy's grown twins, fathered while he was in Vietnam, and brought to the United States as young orphans.  In addition, Bea's mother lives in the same building, along with the Russian immigrant who is the maintenance man for the building and Bea's new love.
    To complicate matters, both Serena and Lisa are pregnant with Roy's baby, Serena because she and May wanted a child and wanted to know what they were getting, and Lisa because she is young and wants her own family.
    Tony's wife has one baby and another on the way, but Tony is in the midst of a cultural identity crisis that makes him impossible, so his wife finds herself turning to Danny, Tony's half-brother, for comfort.
    Holding this remarkable scenario all together is Bea, who believes that all of this proximity is the practical way to keep them all linked as a family.  Bea believes that divorce does not remove someone from a family, and that they should remain this way for the benefit of all concerned, and for the most part, they all are forced to agree.  Roy's second and third wives, at first hesitant, are won over and converted by Bea's vision, sometimes making Roy seem like the odd man out.
    I found this book delightful, and extremely life-affirming.  I am a fan of Lynn Sharon Schwartz, and I feel that she is able to convey some very deep insights about family through the seemingly absurd situation of this group.  I wish we could all live with the pragmatic outlook these characters come to in order to sustain love.  I wonder if it would be possible.  It works for me.
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Fortune's Rocks
        by Anita Shreve

        This novel begins at the turn of the last century, in the summer of 1899, when its heroine, Olympia Biddeford, is fifteen. Olympia and her parents have arrived at Fortune's Rocks an enclave on the coast of New Hampshire, to stay in their summer home, a remodeled convent.
    The only daughter of wealthy and intellectual parents, Oliva has been schooled at home by her publisher father, and is knowledgeable beyond her years intellectually. But when she encounters Dr. John Haskell, a weekend guest of her parents', she is ill-prepared for the passionate attraction that flares up between them.  Dr. Haskell, a progressive man who treats the poor millworkers in the nearby mill town, is married and has three children.  The inexorable progression of their affair, and the scandal that ensues, while it takes place in the new 20th century, is very much dictated by the mores of the 19th, until Olivia decides to take control of her own life and become truly modern.  After four years of solitude and misery, she decides to try and find the baby boy she had after that summer, defying her parents and facing extreme social ostracism.
    Anita Shreve has obviously done much historical research for this book and it shows. Detail, fashion, personalities, politics and customs all ring true.  If there is a fault in the book it is in the language, which, while obviously intended to accurately represent speech patterns of the time, seems stilted at times.  But as the story builds, it is so engrossing that this obstacle is soon forgotten.
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Disgrace
   by J. M. Coetzee
    David Lurie, South African literary scholar, has been reduced to an "instructor of communications" in the new political era.  Unenthusiastic about his work or his students, finding himself at rather loose ends romantically since Soroya, his weekly prostitute, left her work, he casually initiates a sexual affair with a girl in one of his literature classes.  This type of liaison has long been his custom, but in this case he has seriously miscalculated.  He realizes that his advances are unwanted for the most part, but persists in his own self-indulgent arrogance, believe that his own feeling of passion justification enough for the pursuit of its fulfillment.  The girl drops out of school and her parents file charges.  David is brought up on harrassment charges, but while admitting what he has done, he refuses to apologize.  This is unacceptable in the new South Africa, and he loses both job and pension in 'disgrace.'  He travels to the country to the small farm where his daughter Lucy runs a dog kennel and grows vegetables on a smallholding alongside a newly emancipated Black family.  When Lucy's home is invaded by three black men who rape her and torture David, stealing his car and killing her dogs, the horrific events that unfold bring David to a new level of introspection and self-knowledge, while illuminating the bitter fact that the political past of his country will be brought to bear savagely on all of their futures.
    This is a devastating book -- it won Mr. Coetzee an unprecedented second Booker Prize, and it is truly heartbreaking.  David is brought to realizations about everything he has ever believed about himself, about his daughter, about his country, about women, and even about the consciousness of animals.  The tragedy that has been South Africa is shown to be anything but resolved in the lives of its citizens, and the dilemmas the characters in this book are not given any easy answers.
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Remember Me
             By Laura Hendrie

        Rose Devonic is an outcast in her small home town of Quedero, New Mexico, if only because  the tragedy that took her entire family from her at the age of 15 is too difficult for others to think about.  Most of the residents in the town make their living from what is called "inheritance embroidery", fine stitching that is learned from youth and sold to tourists in the summer. The details about this subculture are one very interesting aspect of this novel.  Rose, however, didn't start embroidery until too late to make a success of it, and she remains largely homeless and alienated from the rest of the townfolk, who think of her as tainted.  Her only refuge has been at the Ten Tribes Motel in the winter, where Birdie, the old proprietor, lets her stay in the deserted rooms.  In the summer she usually lives in her car.  But this winter things are really desperate.  Rose walks into town in the middle of a blizzard, having left a Texan she had gone off with, and Birdie tries to keep her out because his sister Alice, the motel's true owner, hates Rose and wants to sell the place.  When Birdie agrees to hide her anyway, Rose settles in to try and produce some real embroidery,  When Birdie has a stroke, Alice shows up, and even Frank Doby, the sheriff of Quedero and her childhood friend for life, advises her to leave town.  Frank has his own problems, including a drug-addicted wife and an insubordinate deputy, and he seems to have lost sight of the single most  important thing about Rose -- she's a survivor.
     How Rose manages to survive against all odds, and refuses to give up when faced with insurmountable obstacles, is the core of this novel.  She is a great character, tenacious and determined to belong to someone or something.  Along with this, the depiction of the life style of this small town's inhabitants, is fascinating.
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The Summer after June
    by Ashley Warlick
        This novel is about profound grief and the internal journey one must take to get out of it.  Lindy Jaine, an emergency-room nurse, is about to be married when her older sister June is murdered, presumably by someone attempting to rob her husband, who is a shady character himself.  Lindy prepares her sister's body for burial, a task she has often performed, but soon finds her own grip on life and its meaning coming loose.  While never really articulating her motives or her plan even to herself, Lindy takes June's infant son and leaves town without telling her parent's, the baby's father, or her fiance.  She goes by train, bus and car as far as her grandmother's house in Galveston, where she remains in hiding for the summer.  Lindy's state of mind is masterfully drawn.  She reacts to events and people, develops her deepening wordless communication with the baby, and gradually begins a slow and painful transformation out of her unbearable grief.  When she re-connects with Orrin, a childhood friend of her and June, tand she finds that he and June also shared something deeper, things begin to fall into place and she feels that perhaps she can go on living, by first tying up the loose ends of the life she has so desperately abandoned.
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Siam:  or the Woman who shot a Man
    by Lily Tuck
        This is the story of the beautiful blonde Claire, who met her husband Jim on an airplane and married him soon after.  Then she is on another plane -- to Thailand, where Jim, a captain in the American military, is supervising the building of airstrips from which the Americans will carry on the bombing of the North Vietnamese.  In fact, they arrive in Bangkok on March 9, 1967, the day the bombing of North Vietnam commences.  Claire spends her days in Bangkok trying to learn the language, reading Thai history, and seeing the sights with other American military wives.  But her real fascination is for Jim Thompson, a colorful American who started the silk industry in Thailand.  He had charmed Claire at a cocktail party at his splendid home, full of Buddhist artifacts, and promised to teach her all about the local culture.  But when he disappears suddenly, and while it is all over the papers, her husband and his friends are strangely reticent.  What is unsaid and misunderstood between Claire and her husband, and between the Americans and their Thai servants, gradually becomes much more important than what is expressed, with shocking consequences.
    This is a brilliant book, both in the way it evokes the climate and atmosphere of Thailand in that political period, and how it portrays the relationship between this military husband and his confused wife against the backdrop of lies and obfuscation that characterized all of the American involvement in the region.
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Make Believe
        by Joanna Scott

    Many recent novels have been written from the point of view of a child.  Books such as Fleur de Leigh's Life of Crime, and By the Shore,(click here for earlier review) by Galaxy Craze, have effectively used the voice of young girls to tell poignant stories of adult relationships and emerging adolescence.  But in this book, Joanna Scott has captured the narrative point of view of a three-year-old boy, and, more remarkably, has done it in an affecting and profound way.  Bo Templin is the child of a mixed-race couple, but when we meet him both his mother Jenny and his father Kamon are dead. In fact, our first glimpse inside his world occurs as he hangs upside down from his car seat in a tree, next to the wreckage of his mother's car.  It is here that he grabs our heart, because in his little mind all he can think is that he must have done something really bad to have his mother go away and leave him like this.
    Bo's African-American Gran and Pop come to claim him at the hospital after a horrifying interval for him, all related in the same imaginative stream of consciousness used to describe his childlike thoughts and perceptions. It is assumed that Gran and Pop will keep custody of him, and we get to know them, along with Jenny's parents as subsequent chapters are told from their points of view.  Jenny's white mother Marge and step-father Eddie had kicked her out of their home when she became pregnant.  They have never even tried to see Bo, but suddenly Eddie, a rigid man who believes his religious faith makes him holier than just about everyone else, decides that they should get custody of Bo and raise him "right". In yet another sad and predictable testimony to our justice system, the judge in their case gives Bo to the white folks, and things take many unexpected and unfortunate turns.
    I can't say enough about the voice of this author, Joanna Scott.  I was charmed and captivated by her ability to visualize a three-year old's irrepressible spirit, even in the midst of such calamity and pain, and I loved this book.
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Why She Left Us
       by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
        The painful subject of the Japanese internment camps during World War II is a scar on the underbelly of American culture that we hear very little about.  David Guterson explored it in some depth in Snow Falling on Cedars , but this novel by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto illuminates the tragedy on a multi-generational scale over a span of 50 years, thus revealing that the legacy of such a trauma does not stop with the generation that suffered it.
       Emi Okada, the daughter of two poor Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles, is forced by her mother to go out to work cleaning houses in Los Angeles just prior to World War II, when she is fourteen years old.  Two years later, Emi shows up at her parents doorstep, pregnant and wanting to stay.  Her mother knows that Emi has given birth once before, and over her daughter's protests, finds the baby Eric at his adoptive home and brings him home to be with the rest of the family.  For reasons never articulated, Emi does not want her son.  When the entire Okada family is put in the camps, losing all they possess, one of their sons decides to join the army to fight against the Germans and Japanese, while the other becomes violently anti-American, further splitting the fractured family.  Emi gives birth to a girl, but when they are released from the camps she disappears, leaving her children with her mother and father, who has now gone mad.  One day Emi returns, but only to take her young daughter, leaving Eric behind.  This rejection, and the heartbreak surrounding it, are at this novel's core, along with the profound weight of years and years of suffering and injustice.
    Told alternately from the point of view of Emi's now-grown daughter, her son Eric, and her now-dead mother, the tale of the Okada family reveals a pain that lingers and somehow can never be explained, even as they try to heal so many years later.
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Gap Creek
        by Robert Morgan
        Fans of On Cold Mountain will find much to like in this novel, set at the turn of the century in the Appalachian Mountains.  Seventeen-year old Julie is the hardest working member of her family, because she is the strongest.  Her ailing father and her three sisters are unable to do man's work such as cutting wood and running their small farm, so she is forced to take on the entire burden.  When her beloved young brother dies in her arms and her father dies soon after, she does not know if she will be able to go on in the role that has been forced upon her, so when nineteen-year old Hank Richards shows up and asks her to marry him, she accepts eagerly, perhaps hoping that her life will become just a bit easier.
    Julie and Hank move down the mountain to board with an old man while Hank works at a sawmill, and soon Julie realizes that her life will be anything but easier.  Hank loses his job and the old man dies in a grease fire that starts in the kitchen after Julie has butchered their only pig.  They are literally penniless and starving, and soon Julie finds she is pregnant.
    What saves this catalog of extreme woe from becoming maudlin and melodramatic is that Robert Morgan is a poet who renders both the character of Julie and her constant struggle to survive and understand married life in a beautiful way.  Her problems seem insurmountable, but we are brought along by the words describing her simple daily efforts to go on living.  What is made clear is just how strong the will to survive had to have been for people like this, and this alone is uplifting.
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With Your Crooked Heart
       by Helen Dunmore
        As in her previous novel, Talking with the Dead, Helen Dunmore plumbs the murky depths of sibling relationships here, only this time the relationship is between brothers Paul and Johnnie, born twelve years apart to parents who seem to have had little influence on either of them.  Paul is determined to make his mark at a young age, and does so using questionable methods which continue to enrich him into adulthood.  Very early on he takes complete responsibility for Johnnie and his welfare, lavishing everything on him.  Their bond is extremely close, if not suffocating, something Louise, Paul's beautiful young wife finds out early in her marriage.  We meet Louise first at 30, pregnant and smug in her lovely London garden.  Johnnie is the father of her child, but she does not believe Paul knows this.  In fact, Paul does know this, because he knows he is incapable of fathering a child, but never reveals this, for his own inexplicable purposes.
    We next meet Louise at 40, being turned down for liposuction because of her extreme alcoholism.  She has lost custody of her daughter Anna to Paul because of her drinking, and is surprised when Johnnie, desperate and on the run, re-enters her life.  The novel is told from the point of view of Anna, Louise, and Paul, and we watch as the weight of all their secrets, and the burden of dysfunction in their relationships, culminates in a tragedy that is both inevitable and shocking.
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The Houseguest
     by Agnes Rossi
        As Agnes Rossi tells us in the forward to her novel The Houseguest, this story grew out of events in her mother's life.  Edward Devlin, former member of the IRA, now an American citizen, brings his wife Agnes home to Ireland to die of tuberculosis.  After she dies, he returns to America, leaving his 6-year old daughter Maura with his bitter, spinstered sisters who don't want her.  Back in America, Edward re-establishes his life through the help he receives from a successful Irishman in Paterson, New Jersey, a man he had barely known before.  Not only does Jimmy get him a job, he installs him in his palatial home as a houseguest.  Meanwhile, Maura has been placed in a strict Catholic boarding school and is virtually abandoned by all.  How Edward's life unfolds, including the love affair that develops between himself and the Jewish wife of his mentor, and how he is eventually forced to accept his parental responsibility, makes up the bulk of this novel.  What makes the novel most interesting is the depiction of life in the boarding school as seen through the eyes of young Maura, and the evolution of the young Jewish wife as she wakes up to her own independence.  It is she who forces Edward to be truthful about his past, and in doing so moves toward fulfillment herself.
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Survival Rates
    by Mary Clyde
        This delightful collection of stories was one of those great surprises you have when you start reading something that is in a voice you experience with great joy -- bright, original, poignant, and funny.  Like Lorrie Moore, who is to me the goddess of short stories, Mary Clyde reaches inside the most tragic of circumstances and finds the humor that makes it easier for you to look at what she is trying to show you about these people.  In many of these stories, the characters are suffering from or dealing with cancer or many other very serious physical or emotional problems, many of them are Mormon, and all of them live in the Southwest, which is also an important character in their world.  A plastic surgeon who lives in a house built by the son of the original Howard Johnson takes great pride in his motel-like house with the orange roof, but can't deal with his feelings about his mother, whom he finds it impossible to love, telling him proudly she will die soon of some unspecified illness (later revealed to be leukemia).  Two teenaged girls who have just received colostomy bags go on a post-hospital shopping trip and discuss buying cotillion dresses, while one reveals that she controls her younger brother by threatening to show her bag to him.  And more.  This collection won the Flannery O'Connor award for short fiction, and deservedly so.
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Back Roads
    by Tawni O'Dell
        Harley Altmyer, 19, is the legal guardian of his three sisters Amber, Misty, and Jody, ages 16, 12, and 8.  This is because his mother is in prison for killing his father.  He works two full-time jobs and is carrying a load far too heavy for someone his age, and this burden, along with repressed memories, intense arguments with his sister Amber, and family secrets he is only beginning to discover, have brought him to the breaking point.  When he starts an affair with the much older mother of his sister Jody's playmate, Harley's anguish and confusion spins out of control.
    This novel is brilliant in its portrayal of the quiet desperation, anger, and confusion running rampant through Harley's brain as he tries to cope.  His life is one of ceaseless activity, trying to hold something together that is only barely covering the horror underneath.  Harley doesn't want to remember, he doesn't want to know why, he just wants to stop feeling the way he does.  When clues present themselves to him about the mystery behind the tragedy that has occured in his family, he does not want to think about them.  As memories crowd their way one at a time to his consciousness, he runs faster and tries harder to believe that loving his older mistress will cure him of  the pain he doesn't even know how to describe to himself.  This is a heartbreaking novel, so skillfully written that Harley's final awakening to the whole truth becomes our own.
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The Tiny One
    by Eliza Minot
    This first novel by Eliza Minot, daughter of the fine novelist Susan Minot, makes a case for genetically pre-determined talent.  Little Via Revere, the novel's narrator, is nine years old, the youngest of four siblings, and she has lost her beloved mother in a car accident.  Because she can't quite grasp what has happened to her, she tries carefully to remember every minute of the day that it happened, from the time she woke up, until the time her father came to get her at school.  In the process of reconstructing that terrible day, she remembers and recounts all kinds of events from her little life, mostly involving herself and her mom.
    There are many fine books being written from the point of view of a child these days, or at least I seem to be reading a lot of them (and putting them on this page). This is indeed a fine book.  The book is filled with vivid sense impressions colorfully described, stories of sibling rivalry, and even details of the relationship between Via's parents, filtered exquisitely through a child's sensibility.  Most touching is Via's description of her experiences with her mother.  She doesn't tell us she loves her mom, she conveys an even greater presence, and while she understands that nothing now will ever be the same, she knows that if she tries very hard, she can somehow keep the past by preserving her memories.
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City of God          The Orphan Game     Leading the Cheers    Storm RidersUnhallowed Ground    Plan B
City of God
        by E. L. Doctorow

    From the initial reviews of E. L. Doctorow's new book, City of God, I had the impression that it was going to be a somewhat disjointed and/or difficult read.  Instead, when I picked up this book and started reading, I found a master writer working at the top of his form, creating a tour de force written about the deepest themes any writer or thinker could explore.  The subject of this novel is nothing less than the relevance of existing religions to modern human life, given the evil that has taken place both because and in spite of them.  The amount of scholarship that is contained in the explication of this issue through the thoughts and words of the book's characters is astounding.  The title, "City of God" is taken from St. Augustine's work of the same name, all-important to Catholic theology.  The unifying plot device, if one can be said to exist, is the disappearance of the crucifix from an Episcopal church in Manhattan at the end of the 1990's.  All of Doctorow's works have been set in New York City at different historical times, exploring different historical issues, and here we have a priest in an extreme crisis of faith at the dawn of the new millennium, looking around the city for the stolen religious artifacts of his church, and agonizing over his own crumbling allegiance to the principles of the church he is bound to uphold.
    Soon, the priest is contacted by Sarah and Joshua Blumenthal, the married rabbis of the Evolutionary Judaism Synagogue.  They have found the crucifix on the roof of their church.  Sarah and Joseph have a new way of practicing Judaism, also based on the examination of what, if any, of the ancient Jewish traditions are relevant today.  Much of the narrative is the story of Sarah's father, who grew up in a Lithuanian pogrom, and who maintains that a record exists of all who were sent to the camps and died from that city.  The priest becomes fascinated by the Evolutionary Judaism Synagogue, and begins attending services there.
    Finally, in the midst of all the layers in this narrative, Doctorow goes completely post-modern and introduces himself as another character in the book.  The writer Everett has become fascinated with the priest and the story of the missing crucifix and is writing about them.  We are treated to parts of the book he is working on about these characters, as well as his own ruminations on the creative process.  It is impossible to categorize or summarize this book.  The sheer profundity contained in its beautiful prose is reason enough to read it, but to my mind Doctorow has topped off his series of New York novels in a big way.
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The Orphan Game
        by Ann Darby
    It is the late 1960's in Southern California, and while the world's eyes might be focused on Vietnam, 16-year old Maggie Harris's mind is only on her older boyfriend Bruce, who is about to enlist.  Maggie's father is a contractor with "get-rich-quick" dreams of investing and selling property in the suburbs, while her clear-eyed seamstress mother waxes cynical about almost everything with pins in her mouth -- her husband's dreams, her daughter's romance, love, marriage, and the future.  Most of her mother's predictions come true.  Maggie gets pregnant, her father goes broke, and the family shatters painfully against the background of fire in the foothills of Los Angeles, but there will be no satisfaction for her mother in the correctness of her predictions.
    I like this book because it tells the story of an unhappy family in a tone that is almost as flat and disaffected as the mentality of the family it portrays.  Maggie is looking back at this period in her family's life from more than 20 years in the future, and yet she does not romanticize it in any way. She is not telling the story of a happy girl or a happy family. The banal details of an unhappy household (bickering parents, suffocating daily chores, children sneaking out to avoid the fighting) are described perfectly.  There does not need to be domestic violence in a home to create lasting scars in the lives of its inhabitants.  The greatest scars can be created by an environment in which two married people simply refuse to love each other, thereby robbing the entire family of its future or the possibility of individual happiness for its members.  But this point is not made by Ann Darby creating these parents as monsters.  They are each genuinely sympathetic in some ways, entirely human, as are we all, which makes the story so much more sad.
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Leading the Cheers
      by Justin Cartwright
       Dan Silas, a successful British adman, has been cut loose from his firm after a Japanese takeover at about the same time his girlfriend departs because he won't marry her.  At loose ends, he is surprised when he receives an invitation to his 30-year high school reunion in Hollybush, Michigan, where he spent his teenage years.  He decides to attend and give the keynote speech as requested, partly because he receives a note from the class president that another of their high school friends, Gary Beaner, wants to see him.  Gary has been in and out of mental institutions since suffering his first mental breakdown at Harvard many years before, and Dan is intrigued by the request.
    When Dan arrives in Michigan, he finds that he is in for much more than he had bargained for.  At the reunion itself, he is shocked when his old sweetheart Gloria Swarthout, informs him that she had a daughter that was his, and that said daughter was murdered by a serial killer.  Before he has time to fully digest this morbid piece of information, he is taken to visit Gary in Holland, Michigan, and Gary, who now believes himself to be the reincarnation of a Chippewa Indian Spiritual Guide, asks him to steal important Indian artifacts from the British museum.  After smoking some sort of ritualistic pipe with Gary, Dan returns to Hollybush for another rendezvous with Gloria, who asks him to visit the serial killer who murdered "their daughter" in prison.  The decisions that Dan makes, and the actions which make up the rest of the novel, bring about resolutions on many levels, but mostly within Dan himself.
     What I enjoyed about this interesting novel was the mordant wit and accuracy of the British character Dan's observations about America, and especially the Midwest.  I am from Michigan and am intimately acquainted with the quotidian details of Midwestern life and character that he brings so accurately to life, and I liked seeing it through his eyes.  His comments on everything from Rush Limbaugh to the American presidential election are delightful, but what is even better is that, sophisticated Brit that he is, he is not laughing at the country or the friends from his past, or their predicaments.
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Storm Riders
     by Craig Lesley

    Clark Woods, a native of Oregon, has taken his ex-wife's young cousin Wade as his foster child.  A member of the Tinglit tribe from Alaska, Wade suffers from some form of retardation that can't be accurately or completely diagnosed, probably as the result of fetal alchohol syndrome.  Wade's behavior problems surface early, and as Clark's academic career takes him to different locations around the country, Wade sees many specialists, to no avail.  Later, Clark's new wife Natalie fears for the safety of their new baby, prompting Clark to take more drastic action.
    This book is written as a kind of diary of Clark's relationship with Wade, over a ten year period.  There are no easy answers, and the problem is realistically portrayed, as Clark confronts situations that only become more difficult.  The problems for children like Wade are bigger than any institution or well-intentioned family can solve.  Finally, Clark seeks a partial solution by taking the teenaged Wade back to Alaska, to the small fishing village where he was born.  At least he can be among those practicing the traditions of his people, and perhaps find an existence with some meaning.  We, and Craig, can only hope.  This story is a very effective portrayal of a set of issues which are foreign to most of us.  For that reason I recommend it highly.
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Unhallowed Ground
         by Gillian White
        This book would fall into the category of "guilty pleasure".  The flyleaf describes Unhallowed Ground as a combination of "Psycho" and "Cold Comfort Farm", and that is absolutely true.  Georgie is a London social worker whose life is devastated when a young girl who is under her auspices is murdered by a parent.  Public hue and cry and personal angst drive her to take up residence in the little hamlet of Wooton-Cooney, population 10-12.  It seems that her long-lost brother Stephen has committed suicide in the midst of drinking himself to death and she has inherited his cottage.
    As she goes about moving and setting up her new life in Wooton-Cooney, we learn a little more about Georgie's past.  Her childhood seems to have contained much that is repressed and secret, beginning with the fact that she didn't know of her brother's existence until she was 12 years old.  Looking through his things at the cottage, and discovering his paintings, Georgie begins to doubt that Stephen's death was really a suicide.  Not only that, she begins to find out disturbing things about her neighbors, and to see a strange apparition appearing again and again on the hillside.
    Gillian White is a good enough writer to keep the reader rapidly turning the pages of this novel to find out its secrets.  But like so many others with this skill, the way the answers are given might leave one wishing for a little more exposition.  Nonetheless, this is a fun read.
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Plan B
  by Jonathan Tropper
    There was so much about this book that irritated me, but I'm recommending it anyway because it's a fun, fast read.  This "Big Chill for the 90's"  story is about Ben, Chuck, Lindsey, Allison and Jack, a group of privileged college students who have grown up to be a group of privileged yuppies.  Except for Jack, that is, who has become a world famous movie star.  That's their problem.  Jack is slipping away from them, and Allison, who has been in love with him for 10 years, wants them to take drastic action.  Jack has become a coke-head, and his behavior while under the influence has begun to attract public attention.  After a failed intervention, from which Jack fled angrily and unceremoniously, they decide to try "Plan B".  Plan B involves an elaborate ruse to lure Jack to the hospital where Chuck is a surgeon, inject him with Thorazine, and transport him to Allison's parents' vacation home in the Catskills.  They will lock him up until he cleans up and comes to his senses.  His captors of course, indulge in much drinking while ill this is going on, and havoc, disarray, wrecked BMW's, and police visits ensue.
    Along the way of course, each of the privileged but troubled yuppies has a chance to articulate his/her angst over turning thirty, confronting life's meaninglessness, being married, being divorced, and so on. Brand names and pop culture tidbits are liberally sprinkled everywhere, with lightweight philosophical points being made about such staples as "Gilligan's Island", "Baywatch" and the Discovery Channel. Ben, the primary narrator of this book is particularly whiny.  Turning thirty and getting divorced, being employed as a lowly list-maker at Esquire magazine, and still pining over Lindsey, the one he really loves, Ben is a perfect pain in the ass.  The irony of this novel is that the flyleaf of the book proudly states that Mr. Tropper studied writing with E. L. Doctorow before publishing this book.  Well, in short, Mr. Tropper's New York is no City of God.  I am not a particularly big fan of Jay McInerney, but these characters make those from Bright Lights, Big City seem almost complex and deep. Nonetheless, I must admit that this book is also a guilty pleasure, and I read it straight through.

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    Jane Smiley has written a kaleidoscopic wonderland of a novel here, about  the universe of throughbred breeding, training, and racing. I am not what could be called a 'horse person', but nonetheless I loved this novel so much that I will never look at a horse in the same way again.  Indeed, it is a few individual and special horses who are the book's most remarkable characters, and we are made to see the world through their eyes without the prose becoming gimmicky or trite.
    On another level, Smiley accomplishes something that Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full failed to do, i.e., portray the super-wealthy and often nouveau riche with all their foibles ripe for satire, while at the same time rendering them human and not altogether unsympathetic.  Wolfe's characters were one-dimensional and almost hideous, and his account of a rich man forcing his guests to watch a mare breeding from one of his studs was grotesque.  In this book, everything is viewed with an eye to something deeper.  If a trainer takes shortcuts to make a horse win a race, we also see the kind of pressurized lifestyle that might cause this to take place, even among horse-lovers.  But most of all, in all the characters, rich or poor, there is love and appreciation for the magnificent animal that is the horse.
    The novel gives us a glimpse into the lives of all types of people involved with racing, from the jockies, owners, breeders, and trainers, to a little boy taken out of school to go to the races with his gambler father who sees the lessons of the track as the most profound life lessons, a little girl who has lost her own father except in the love of horses and racing he has instilled in her, and an animal psychic who successfully bets on the tips given to her by a horse.  In creating such a broad canvas, Jane Smiley brings to life a world whose atmosphere is so rarified that few of us will ever glimpse it.  Great, great book.
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Hummingbird House, by Patricia Henley

    This novel, written by poet Patricia Henley as she traveled through Central America, is wrenching, beautiful, shocking, and extremely profound.  We meet Kate Banner, a midwife, in Nicaragua, helping a young woman give birth in the middle of a flood.  The mother dies, and Kate's feeling of wanting to leave this chaotic world are brought to a head.  Kate initially came to Central America to visit her best friend from childhood who was working in the Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico.  Once there, she was swept off her feet by Deaver, a left-wing journalist, who took her to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas.  Now she just wants for all three of them to go back to Wisconsin and have a peaceful life after nearly ten years of ceaseless activism.  The amount of suffering she has witnessed at the hands of corrupt governments is astounding, and she feels she has seen enough.  She tries to persuade them to leave with her, but Deaver, ever-scornful of her lack of political commitment, refuses, while her best friend promises to join her in Antigua, at the home of their other American friends.
    Longing for ease, Kate arrives in Antigua to find that the friends who had invited her there to rest are gone from their house.  In their place is Dixie, a priest on leave for reasons similar to her own, Dixie's sister, a nun working with the Guatemalan resistance, and a mysterious lack of information about where her friends are.  Needless to say, nothing turns out as expected.
    There is tremendous emotional weight in this novel.  It opens a window on an ongoing reality that we do not hear about in our news.  Just over our borders is ongoing tyranny, poverty, and killing.  Dictatorships continue without comment from our leaders or our media, because there is no economic stake in it for us.  Patricia Henley gives us a glimpse at countries which, while so physically beautiful, are still astonishingly poor, backward, diseased, and repressed.  Because Kate is not necessarily a political being, her compulsion to go on helping and the circumstances which necessitate it become so much more compelling.  Read this book.
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The Missing World, by Margot Livesey

    Jonathan Littleton is not altogether unhappy when Hazel Ransome, his estranged girlfriend, has an accident and develops seizures and amnesia.  Hazel can't remember the last three years, a jolly stroke of luck for Jonathan, because that covers most of the period during which their relationship fell apart.  In fact, she doesn't even remember that she has moved out, taken a flat, and told him not to ever call her again, for reasons Jonathan terms, his little "slip-ups", i.e., that he had neglected to tell her that he had a daughter, among other things.  She moves back into his house, and under his obsessive and watchful eye, soon agrees to marry him.  Jonathan is living in a shaky world, however, because his neighbor, Hazel's friends, and many others might begin to spill the beans.  He hovers over her, eavesdropping on her conversations, and even refusing to return to work.  On her part, Hazel seems to surrender passively enough to Jonathan's version of their past together, while subconsciously she cannot bear to have him touch her.
    Soon, Jonathan's fragile new world begins to show the strain of his deception, when a meddling roofer, Freddie Adams, and an out-of-work actress, Charlotte Granger, whom he has hired to read to Hazel, begin to suspect that Hazel is literally being held prisoner.
    This novel is brilliant in its characterizations.  Jonathan represents the sort of sociopathic narcissist that occasionally breaks into the news for murdering a lover or spouse who doesn't understand that she is his property. But in his own mind, he is completely rational, and his desire to own Hazel is perfectly normal, justifying all manner of appalling and deplorable behavior.  Charlotte, a free-loading drunk, is also recognizable, but not altogether unlikeable, despite her total lack of self-control.  Her thought processes, while excruciating, also seem to progress normally out of her character.  And Freddie, a strapping American black man who went from carrying bodies on stretchers at Lourdes, to contemplating the purpose of his life in London, is a compulsive do-gooder who ultimately crosses borders he probably shouldn't, but we're glad he does.
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Some Things that  Stay, by Sarah Willis

    It is the early 1950's, and Tamara Anderson is tired of her unconventional parents and their unconventional lifestyle.  Every year at about the same time, the whole family packs up and moves to a new location so that her landscape-painter father can find new subject matter.  And her outspoken atheist mother is no help at all.  Her beauty, her sacrilegious views, and her controversial politics make it even more impossible for Tamara, her brother, and her little sister, to "belong" anywhere.  But things change the year Tamara is to turn fifteen, when they land in a small Western New York farming community.  Tamara's mother comes down with tuberculosis and is hospitalized locally, and they are forced to outstay their usual year's sojourn.  Added to that, they are befriended by their devoutly Christian neighbors across the road, who take them to church for the first time.  Tamara is not sure about Jesus, so she begins to measure him by the events in her life, which, though adding much work to her load, she welcomes as a chance to finally live someplace for good.
    This is yet another in what seems to be an abundance of well-written "coming-of-age" stories by young women writers.  I would say it almost seems too many, at least that cross my path, but each of them, like this poignant story, has its own distinctive merits.  In this one, it's Tamara's objective take on religion, beset on one side by her mother's dogmatic scorn and on the other by her neighbor's unwavering and unquestioning faith, and on her growing realizations about her parents' individual natures and the strange quality of their marriage.
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Half a Heart, by Rosellen Brown

    Rosellen Brown's other novel, Before and After, was about identifiable and not altogether sympathetic characters in a family thrust into a tragic and impossible situation when a teenage boy is responsible for his girlfriend's accidental death and tried for murder.  It was not a comfortable read, as this novel is not, but it becomes so much more effective as we see flawed characters confronting the consequences of actions taken because of those flaws.
    In this case, the focus is on the actions taken by Miriam Vener in the late Sixties.  Young, Jewish, idealistic, Miriam tried to support the Civil Rights Movement by teaching history at all-black Parnassus University in Rowan, Mississippi.  Soon after her arrival, Miriam, a fish who could not have been further out of the water, fell in love with Eljay Reece, a brilliant black music professor responsible for the staging of beautiful operas.  Jumping in with both feet, Miriam became pregnant at just about the time Eljay began his own radicalization process, being recruited by militant black organizers, and beginnning to realize the "error" of his moderate politics.  In a brutal and Solomon-like bargaining process, Eljay convinced Miriam to let him keep the baby, Veronica, and raise her with 'her own people', the logic being that she would have a better and truer life with him than with her mother.  Miriam agreed,  feeling herself with no other options, having been rejected by her own family as well.  She carried the pain of her loss back to Houston where she proceeded to marry a successful opthalmologist, create a showplace home, and have three other children over the next 19 years.
    We meet Miriam for the first time at this juncture, having packed her perfect children off to summer camp, and deciding to try and cure her depression by finding her daughter.  She succeeds, with decidedly mixed results, because Veronica, now "Ronnee", has an agenda of her own, one which neither her black father nor her white, privileged mother, is prepared for.
    This is not an easy book, and for me, Miriam was an almost impossible person.  Her motives and her weaknesses were so questionable and so pronounced, respectively, that at times I found her infuriating.  But at the root of it, the characterization is the book's strength.  There would be no easy or happy ending for Miriam or for any of the book's characters, and there is none offered.  The characters and the political representations are authentic, and for that reason will keep you thinking long after the book is finished.
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JULY 2000

Anil's Ghost  Plain Truth    Fiona RangeHarbor Lights  Living to Tell

Anil's Ghost
          by Michael Ondaatje
        When I read Michael Ondaatje's book "Running in the Family" fifteen years ago, about his family's forebears in Sri Lanka , I was hooked.  First a poet, his writing is thus a combination of poetry, stream of consciousness, historical detail, and other devices that are so original and beautiful as to be indescribable.  It is the gift of the poet to use a perfect economy of words and images to create a larger and more universal picture.   The "English Patient" did that, and so does this novel. Ondaatje s returns to modern Sri Lanka in this book, and while illuminating the amazing beauty of a country that was civilized 2-3,000 years before our "Western civilization" was born, he also tells the tale of a post-colonial country destroying itself in a brutal and civil war.  While our news media occasionally carries a tale of a suicide bomber or two, few of us are even aware of what is at stake and what are the issues involved for the Tamils and other groups in what was once Ceylon.
    Anil Tissera, Sri Lankan ex-patriate and forensic specialist, has been chosen by the Centre for Human Rights in Geneva to travel to her country and investigate whether or not the government has engaged in human rights violations in the ongoing civil war, and specifically if the government is responsible for the organized campaigns of murder which fill the many mass graves being uncovered.  Anil has not been back to Sri Lanka since she left for college many years ago.  Her parents are dead, and she has adopted America as her country, trying not to look back.  But she is at a crossroads herself when she leaves for Sri Lanka, and the circumstances she walks into cause realizations and a transformation on a deeper level than she might have desired.  She has been teamed with Sarath Diyasena, a Sri Lankan archaeologist, for the seven-week project, but she is suspicious about his objectivity because he works for the government.  It is through Sarath's character that Ondaatje brings to life the rich history of Sri Lanka.  He takes her to meet his mentor, an archaeologist who has gone blind, discredited by the government and living in an old Buddhist monastery in the jungle with his niece, who is speechless and traumatized by her own rape and the murder of her family at the hands of the rebels. His knowledge and insight into the religious and political history of Sri Lanka is arcane and encyclopedic.
        When Anil and Sarath uncover skeletons in an area where only government employees are permitted, Anil thinks they have found proof of the government's abuses.  To reconstruct the head, and perhaps the identity, of one of the skeletons, they employ a drunken native who used to be employed in the most esoteric of jobs -- painting the eyes on the statues of Buddha, something which must be done facing away from the statue with a mirror, so as not to stare directly into the Buddha's eyes.  Anil is offended by his drunkenness until she learns the story behind his own tragedy and the loss of his wife.
    Perhaps the most vivid character in the contemporary Sri Lankan drama is Sarath's brother, a doctor running on drugs and sleeping in fits on hospital beds because the casualties are so extreme and so constant.  When he is kidnapped by the rebels to work on their injured, his life remains the same as it was on the other side.  Meanwhile, the tragedy continues.
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Plain Truth:  a novel
        by Jodi Picoult
        Elli Hathaway is a high-powered, ruthless defense attorney who needs a break, both from her sleaze-bag clients and her boyfriend, an older lawyer with his own grown daughters, and who refuses to hear the ticking of Elli's biological clock. She decides to visit her aunt in bucolic Paradise, Pennsylvania, where she spent her childhood summers.  Paradise is the home of a large local Amish community, from which her aunt was ex-communicated for marrying outside the church.  When she arrives in Paradise, however, Elli gets a vacation that is far different than the relaxing time she had anticipated.
        18-year old Katie Fisher, a sheltered Amish girl in Paradise, has been accused of giving birth to a baby in her father's dairy barn, suffocating the baby and hiding the dead body in the hay.  At first, Katie adamantly denies giving birth, but in the Amish way, refuses to defend herself in court.  Elli is persuaded by her aunt to take Katie's case, even as Katie wants to refuse help.  Because the Amish cannot afford bail for a first-degree murder charge, Elli persuades the judge to release Katie into her own personal custody, meaning that she will have to live at the farm and accompany Katie everywhere in the period before the trial.  Thus Elli, along with the reader, finds herself immersed in Amish life, doing chores, attending church, and living without electricity, appliances, computers, or automobiles.
        It is the details of the Amish lifestyle that are so fascinating in this book, along with the explication of the religious beliefs and social customs that have given rise to this way of life.  We meet Katie's brother, who has been ex-communicated and disowned because of his longing for higher education, and Katie's betrothed, who, shockingly, reveals to Elli that he and Katie have never had sex. The research done by Elli through doctors and psychiatrists of the phenomenon of neo-naticide is also detailed and interesting.  Like Jodi Picoult's other novels, this one is a page-turner, dealing with explosive and volatile issues while avoiding stereotypes, bombast, or cliches.  I could nitpick a bit about Elli's romantic sub-plot, but I suppose for all her hard work she deserved some type of reward.
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Fiona Range
       by Mary McGarry Morris
        Fiona Range, beautiful, rebellious, promiscuous, and sharp-tongued, is everything the Black Sheep of a respectable family should be.  We meet her just as she wakes up, hung-over and next to a strange man after a party, only to find that the strange man is actually the husband of her friend who just had a baby.  She rolls out of bed, miserable and choking on self-loathing, to stumble into her dead-end job waitressing at a diner.  Fiona was raised by her Aunt Arlene and her Uncle Charles, a respected and socially prominent judge, after her mother deserted her as a small child.  Or at least that's what people think happened to her mother.  It is widely believed that Patrick Grady, a deranged local Vietnam Vet, is her father, but she has had no contact with him.  Except for her cousin Elizabeth, Fiona's cousins also look askance at her wild lifestyle and behavior.  Elizabeth is Fiona's age and has always been her staunchest supporter, while cowering under her father's iron-willed rule of the household herself.  Uncle Charles is continually exasperated by Fiona, who fights him at every turn.
        Things begin to change when Elizabeth, a teacher returns to Dearborn from Boston, followed by her fiance Rudy, a doctor.  Fiona has been dating George, Elizabeth's high-school sweetheart, and unforeseen complications ensue.  After Elizabeth discovers her in bed with George and George breaks up with her, Fiona decides to shake things up even further by getting to know her father, despite the warnings of her uncle and others.  Then, when Elizabeth's fiance Rudy announces he's in love with Fiona, she begins to careen from one confrontation to another, trying to find herself and get her footing, until things take a truly tragic turn and the mysterious truths underlying the calm surface of the family are finally revealed.
       Fiona is a very vivid character, infuriating and exciting at the same time.  That someone could be simultaneously so compulsively honest and yet so completely out of control keeps the action around her moving and intriguing.  This is a good, satisfying read.
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Harbor Lights
     by Theodore Weesner
        This a small book that packs a huge punch after meticulously setting up its stage and characters.   Warren Hudon, lifelong Maine lobsterman, is dying of cancer.  We meet him as he is bringing in his boat, contemplating the beauty of his surroundings and reflecting on when and how to announce his condition to his wife Beatrice, a woman who has made him a cuckold for 30 years by sleeping with her boss, Virgil Pound, a state senator, now retired.  The story of how he comes to let her know about his illness is told from alternate points of view -- his own, Beatrice's, his daughter Marian's and Virgil's.  In this way, Weesner reveals himself to be a master of characterization.  Beatrice is a smug, vain woman who has become a successful businesswoman herself under Virgil's auspices.  She sees Warren as a pathetic weakling, her thought process one constant flow of self-justification, denial of responsibility, and self-congratulation, while revealing her to be completely blind to her husband's true nature and intentions.  Marian, who has accepted her mother's affair and the gifts and attentions of Virgil as those of a second father, is trapped in a marriage she dislikes with someone she considers shallow and immature.  She doesn't even want to tell her husband she's pregnant.  In short, her thoughts reveal her to be a Beatrice-in-the-making, although she doesn't at first appear to aspire to be like her mother.  Virgil, a man who has had virtually two families for 30 years, is pompous and arrogant, taking pleasure in his continual humiliation of Warren, someone whose silence he interprets as weakness.
        The poignancy and pathos of this story is that it reveals how great the chasm of misunderstanding can be between beings who have known each other and co-habited for a lifetime.  The tragedy underlying all of these characters' lives has been largely unacknowledged for so long that it doesn't even seem like a tragedy to any of them until it comes exploding to the surface in Warren's final actions, even as he strives to keep it from turning out as it does in a truly "ripped-from-the-headlines" manner.
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Living to Tell
    by Antonya Nelson
        Our first introduction to the Mabie family is through Winston, just released from prison after five years.  He is returning to his home in Wichita, a big sprawling house under whose roof reside three generations -- his parents, his sisters, and his sister Emily's children.  Winston spent this time in prison because he was driving his grandmother's car drunk, with her in it.  They had an accident and she died.  But while we might think that Winston's story is the heart of this novel, this is really the story of the family itself, a full-blown character in its own right.
        Winston's father, a retired college professor who is always called Professor Mabie is enraged by his handsome son Winston and what he has done, even as he knows rationally he will have to accept Winston back into the family.  He is even irrationally angry that Winston refused to take the $250,000.00 left to him in his grandmother's will.  Professor Mabie also grimly watches over his younger brother Billy and his ne-er do well teen-age daughter Sheila, and grieves as his best friend Betty, another college professor, dies of lung cancer.   Winston's mother is a life-long homemaker who is going blind, and who laments somehow that he is coming home, because in the midst of the voluble and constant family activity her voice is seldom heard.  The letters she exchanged with Winston in prison were the only intimacy they had shared, and she misses that.  Winston's sister Emily, an over-acheiving Ph.D with a successful business has problems of her own.  She has two small children whose father was a drug dealer and who doesn't even know about their second child, a daughter.  And Mona, the youngest, adrift in a sea of alcohol, pills, thrift-shop fashion, pets, and unsuitable realtionships with married men (one of whom was Emily's husband), is perhaps the most vivid of all these characters.  She is the one who expresses the family's emotions, while the rest keep their feelings to themselves.  She is the heart of them all.
        This story, while beginning with Winston's arrival home, becomes then the portrait of passing time for each of the family members, with meals, drinks, shared insomnia, unresolved issues, secrets, jokes, and unspoken thoughts filling their days, much as in any family's life.  What is most beautiful about it is that for all their flaws, the Mabies care about their family first, and thus have created an imperfect and yet indestructible foundation for continuing to survive.  I loved this book.
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August 2000

Bee Season
      by Myla Goldberg
    This unusual and delightful novel manages to combine Jewish mysticism, the Hare Krishna cult,  kleptomania, and the politics of spelling bees, and somehow make them seem all about the same central theme -- finding escape from the external world into internal bliss and peace.
    The four members of the Naumann family are each very unusual, but in their daily wanderings they remain largely mysterious to each other.  Saul Naumann is a cantor in the local synagogue, a house-husband to his busy lawyer wife Miriam, and serious student of the Kabbalah and other forms of Jewish mysticism.  Nine-year-old Eliza disappointed her father by not making it into advanced placement classes in second grade, so his attention focuses on Aaron, his teenage son.  Aaron, while a misfit at school, seems the model child, always in advanced placement, so perfectly schooled in Hebrew that it seems almost a foregone conclusion that he will become a rabbi or a cantor like his father.  Miriam, a whirlwind of energy, is never home, supports the family, and sleeps only 3 hours per night.
    Eliza is content to remain unremarkable and ordinary until something happens one day that no one, least of all herself, ever would have expected.  She wins the school spelling bee.  When she goes on to win the state bee, Saul has a revelation.  Eliza is the prodigy he has been waiting for.  Suddenly it is Eliza, not Aaron, who is locked with her father in his study every evening.  This change in the Naumann family dynamic is nothing less than a polar shift.  Eliza's transformation and her growing closeness with her father causes Aaron to derail and Miriam's long-held secrets to come to the surface, as the delicate balance of their daily routines begins to change.
    I loved this book.  It contains a depth of scholarship in Jewish mysticism that is remarkable, and the insight into the fact that it is some kind of internal transcendence at which even the most perverse or radical behaviors is aimed, is profound.  And little Eliza, meek, unassuming, and carrying the responsibility for her family's happiness inside her, is indeed a wise and knowing child, but her precocity is not really in her spelling abilities.
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Motherkind
    by Jayne Anne Phillips
    Poet Kate Tateman is beginning to lose her mother Katherine to lung cancer just as she becomes pregnant with her own first child.  Kate has been living with her dog Luna and her husband-to-be Matt, who shares custody of his two small, barely manageable boys three days a week with his hostile first wife.  Kate decides to bring her mother, Katherine, and her blind and ancient French poodle Katrina to live with them, thus experiencing the growing new life of her son Alexander, and the waning of her mother's, at the same time.  Kate has an interesting perspective and copes with this impossible situation by observing each detail of this entire process completely and thoughtfully.  We do it with her.  This is a life and death story in the most real sense.  Jayne Anne Phillips has a wonderful voice, and brings the complex emotional web surrounding this group of people to the reader with astonishing depth. Katherine and Kate approach Katherine's death together, and while the account is painful, it is entirely real and beautiful.
    Each of these individuals is flawed and conflicted, but committed to the effort it takes to love.  It is  their ability to accommodate these events, and to understand, appreciate, and articulate them, that makes the reader believe in the possibility of completion in life's relationships without resorting to fairy tales.
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Big City Eyes
    by Delia Ephron
    All of the Ephron sisters have a smooth, often glib, way with words.  This novel, like Delia Ephron's last outing "Hanging Up", which was poorly translated into screenplay and film co-produced with sister Nora, "Big City Eyes" is a clever, amusing, and often perceptive take on modern life, including single motherhood, adolescent offspring in the modern age, relationships past the age of 35, and friendship between women.
    When Lily Davis, free-lance writer and lover of Manhattan, finds a knife in 15-year old Sam's drawer, she decides that this, plus his sullen and determined refusal to communicate, is the last straw.  They are going to move out of the city, she decides, and as quick as you can say, "easy plot device", she gets in her car and finds a bucolic East Hampton-like suburb, obtains a home and a new best friend in the form of the realtor who finds the home for her, and lands a job on the local weekly paper.  Sam reacts to this move by shaving large sections of his hair and starting to have loud sex with an androgynous girl who speaks in Klingon.  Despairing over her relationship with her son, Lily nevertheless stirs up the local citizenry with her weekly column, usually gleaned from the police blotter that describes such events as a dog getting caught in a vase at the local gift shop.  It is through this blotter that Lily somehow stumbles upon a murder, and finds more adultery, drug abuse and corruption than she would have believed possible in her peaceful new home town.  This is a good, fun, fast read.
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The Binding Chair, or a visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
    by Kathryn Harrison
    From Shanghai to Nice, between the late 1880's and 1927, this novel tells the story of May Lin, born Chu'en, whose feet were bound at the age of five to make her more suitable to a future Chinese husband.  After enduring unspeakable pain throughout this process, she is then wed in an arranged marriage and encounters even more unspeakable pain and abuse at the hands of her husband.  She flees to Shanghai carried on the back of a male servant.  Chu'en changes her name and becomes an expensive prostitute who will only sleep with non-Chinese men.  Soon she is Mrs. Arthur Cohen, married into a wealthy Australian Jewish family, living with Arthur's sister Dolly, her husband, and their two daughters, Alice and Cecily.  The entire family is transformed in one way or another by her presence, but it is the spirited and rebellious Alice who is most influenced by May's mysteries, and who later becomes like a daughter to her.  When May and Arthur's own daughter dies, the tragedy-prone May takes to the opium pipe to forget.  When Dolly and Arthur die during the influenza epidemic, the family moves to France, where May is criticized for her bound feet and the two servants who carry her from place to place.
    Kathryn Harrison has dealt with some perverse subject material in the past, both in her memoir "The Kiss" about her incestuous relationship with her father, and in the novel "Exposed" which contained similar autobiographical detail.  This novel graphically describes the ordeal of foot-binding, a horrifying process I had never fully understood before.  The practice of foot-binding is a symbol of the ultimate subjugation of women, and the role of women in China during this period, along with the smells, sights, colors, and events of Shanghai are vividly brought to life.  This is a novel that is simultaneously disturbing, entertaining, and incomplete.
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Marrying the Mistress
    by Joanna Trollope
    Guy Stockdale, 62, respected judge, husband of 40 years, father of two, and grandfather of 3, reaches a momentous decision that changes the lives of many, many people.  He is going to leave his wife Laura for his much-younger mistress of seven years, Merrion Palmer.  His older son, Simon, never close to his father, reacts with bitterness, and soon finds himself hopelessly embroiled witht his mother, who wants him to be his attorney.  Simon's wife Carrie and his younger brother Alan further infuriate Simon by actually approving of their father's move.  Both see Laura as a passive-aggressive, controlling figure who never actually loved Guy, but built her rigid and well-kept domestic life around him anyway.
    Trollope is masterful at this type of novel.  This situation is described from the point of view of everyone involved -- Guy, Laura, Merrion, Carrie, Simon, and Alan, as well as Simon's three adolescent children and Merrion's mother Gwen.  The fact that one individual's action can impact an entire family so much is brought vividly to life.
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  September 2000

Blue Angel, White Teeth, Shadow Baby, Ray in Reverse, The Cabal, The Inland Sea
 

Blue Angel
          by Francine Prose
        This novel was one of my favorites this summer.  It is worth reading if only for the stunning architecture of the plot.  The title, "Blue Angel" is rooted in the movie of the same name starring Marlene Dietrich and Walter Slezak, wherein a professor is destroyed by his obsession with a showgirl.  In the book Ted Swenson, a creative writing professor and novelist, who earlier wrote his own novel entitled "Blue Angel" based on a similar theme using a doctor and a drug-addicted blues singer, finds himself in the middle of his own Blue Angel scenario with one of his students.
       Angela, his student, a much-pierced and sullen fixture in one of his seminars, surprises him with a sample of a novel she is writing.  He is stunned at how good it is, because her appearance and the writing submitted by the rest of the class would not indicate that such quality could be found anywhere on their campus.  Suffering from writer's block himself, he is intrigued and even obsessed by the girl and her novel.  Ironically, Angela's novel is about a high school teacher who has an affair with a student, and soon it eerily parallels what Ted is experiencing with Angela.  This book would seem to be a satire on the sexual harrassment paranoia pervading academia and society, except that its structure is so compelling.  Stories within stories, and books inside of books.  Beautiful.

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White Teeth
       by Zadie Smith
        This novel has received a great deal of attention worldwide, not only because it is so well-written, but because its author, Zadie Smith, is only 23 years old, inviting comparisons to other 'wunderkind' like Tiger Woods or Kobe Bryant.  I'm not sure if Ms. Smith is the literary Tiger Woods (we have to see what follows), but her ability to portray the ordinary lives of London's East Enders is delightful.
        The end result of the British Empire may well be the ultimate melting pot and mixture of races, cultures, and genes in the working class neighborhoods of London.  Englishman Archie Jones and Bengali Samad Iqbal first met during World War II, but their friendship has continued over a lifetime.  The novel begins on New Years Day of 1975, when Archie, having failed at suicide, stumbles into a party and meets Clara, a Jamaican woman half his age and whom he promptly marries.  Samad enters into an arranged marriage with another Bengali named Asana, and Clara and Alsana give birth at the same time, producing Irie, Archie's girl, and Millat and Magid, Igbal's identical twin boys.  The story of these two families plays out over the next twenty-odd years, with Millat and Magid, identical twins, turning out completely different.  Neither twin fulfills the hope of Iqbal, an engineer forced to work as a waiter for his entire life, recalling his famous ancestors and rigidly practicing his Islamic faith.  Precocious Irie nurses an unrequited passion for Magid and even renews ties to Clara's disapproving mother, a Jehovah's Witness who disowned Clara many years before.  These scenarios, along with the quirks and misadventures of the neighborhood itself extend outward and make up the rest of the novel's content.
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Shadow Baby
      by Alison McGhee
        In 11-year old Clara Winter, and her mother Tamar, Alison McGhee has created two wonderful characters.  Clara is very good at making up stories, and because her mother refuses to tell her about her own background, she makes that up too. Tamar is a stoic of few words, and dismisses Clara's queries and stories every time she creates a new one. But when Clara finds out by accident that she had a twin sister who died at birth, and that her grandfather is actually livingin the next town, she becomes more serious about finding out the truth.  She befriends and old man named Georg Kominsky in a local trailer park and decides to use him for her 'oral history' project at school.  Georg is an immigrant who is also very reticent to reveal his past, so Clara makes that up for him too.  Over the course of one year, Clara's friendship with Georg grows over the cups of cocoa they share each week at his trailer, and she begins to find a way to learn the truth about her own life, and what happened to her mother that made her keep it all so secret.
      In this book, enjoyment of the plot was secondary to the originality and humor in the prose itself.  It seems that I am always promoting a new female author with a young female protagonist, but it is simply true that so many of the best new novels right now are by young women with fresh voices.
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Ray in Reverse
     by Dan Wallace
        This humorous and poignant short novel finds Ray Williams arriving in heaven.  Unfortunately, upon his arrival, he finds himself in the Last Words group, where each person must reveal his or her final words on Earth.  Ray is embarrased by the inadequacy of his mortal exit and tries to make up something, a gambit the group's members recognize right away.  Upset, Ray leaves the group and begins to re-live his life in reverse, re-visiting all of the most significant events in his unremarkable life, from his clumsy marriage proposal to his grandfather's funeral when he was eight years old.
       Ray is not really a loser, he's a modern Everyman who more often than not comes up short.  Like all of us.  When Ray finally returns to the group and reveals his real Last Words, we, if not the group, understand that they are actually very profound in the context of Ray's life.
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The Cabal, and other stories
    by Ellen Gilchrist
        I think I have read every word written by Ellen Gilchrist, and over the last few years I have been somewhat disappointed in her stories and novels.  But I was overjoyed with this book, a novella with stories connected to the novella, because she seems to have regained the perfect pitch which always characterized her early work.  In The Cabal, the novella, a group of people, really the cream of society in Jackson, Mississippi are alarmed by the fact that Jim Jaspers, a psychiatrist they all have shared, has started injecting drugs and behaving erratically.  We see the events through the eyes of Caroline Jones, a poet who has come to teach writing at Millsap College.  She is a newcomer here and is introduced to the locals by Augustus Hanley, another professor and her long-time friend.  While the cast of characters is her usual bunch of attractive and rich Southern whites, Gilchrist always manages to make them entirely charming and likable, but not so eccentric as to become one-dimensional.  These are not the racist Southerners of the stereotype, they are the real people that live in Ellen Gilchrist's world.  Throughout her career, she has chronicled the lives of a few unforgettable characters and brought them back through short stories published at different times.  The book's final story is one of these, where Miss Crystal, now a rich New Orleans matron, is once again described to us by Traceleen, her Black housekeeper who is now simply her best friend.  In this story Crystal and Traceleen, both in their fifties and feeling old and surrounded by memories, decide to get over this feeling by going to a day spa and increasing their number of yoga classes.
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The Inland Sea
    by Steven Varni
        Vincent Torno is the youngest child of an Italiam-American family in the San Joaguin Valley.  The story is told in vignettes between his 7th and 30th year.  Vincent's mother is in and out of mental hospitals, and it is her tremendous mood swings and behavioral extremes that structure the life of the family, and eventually shape Vincent's character and beliefs about life.  His father is a hard, and hard-working man who first bullies Vincent's older brother Paul into joining the family business, and then berates Vincent for choosing another career.  Always on the lookout for the next domestic catastrophe, Vincent learns to be very observant of everything and everyone in his surroundings.  As a result, he becomes a man who finds it difficult to love, trust, or believe in anything, often recognizing pretense and superficiality even as he begins a new friendship or relationship.  And it all begins and ends with his mother, as does the book.
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Iron Shoes, The Feast of Love, The Daughters of Simon Lamoreaux, Like Normal People, The Gravity of Sunlight, The Toughest Indian in the World

Iron Shoes, by Molly Giles

    This is a poignant and humorous novel about a character who is entirely recognizable, at least to me.  Kay Sorensen drinks too much, smokes too much, and, more than anything, enables too much, especially for her glamorous alcoholic mother Ida, who has just had her second leg amputated.  Even in this truncated condition, Ida manages to dominate her 40-year old daughter and her dutiful husband, just as she has always done, through illness, accident, and sheer force of will.  Kay feels like a failure because she abandoned Julliard and a possibly stellar music career, and her father, whose only continuing involvement in her life has been as the withholder of love, agrees.  Meanwhile, Kay's pony-tailed and under-achieving husband has become obsessed with his own health in the shadow of her mother's condition, and, like her father, is successful only at denying Kay any remedy for her almost non-existent self-esteem.  Her best friend is her 9-year old son Ricky, who actually seems to like her, and her only armor is her ability to joke, very often and very well.  Of course Kay only jokes about "things that are really serious"(her own words).  The one bright and shining star in Kay's dimly lit firmament is the handsome artist who seems to flirt with her at the local library where she works.  He enlivens her fantasy world until he invites her for a drink and of courseinforms her he's gay.
    When Ida is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Kay is expected to bear the burden.  She cooks for the entire family, even for her younger brother, an escapee into born-again Christianity.  Kay nurses her mother to the very end and shares some very deep and moving moments with the difficult Ida, only to have her father skip town and return a few weeks later with a new wife.  We begin to recognize ultimately that Kay, for all her warts, is a heroic character, much like so many others in the world forced to deal with reality, because it is only she who seems able to actually face the truth, albeit with a lot of jug wine and stolen cigarettes, which of course she gives up, again and again.
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Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter

    Charles Baxter is a novelist of wit and delicacy, and I always look forward to his next book with great anticipation.  Each new book arrives just about five years since the last, and never disappoints.  In this novel, set in his native Ann Arbor, a writer named Charlie wakes in the middle of the night to find himself experiencing what has become a recurring condition for him -- night-time amnesia.  On this night, he gets up and goes outside to escape his nightmare and encounters his neighbor, Bradley S. Miller, and his dog Bradley (aka Junior).  Bradley is Charlie's neighbor and is presently experiencing the end of his second marriage.  When he inquires as to the subject of Charlie's newest novel, Charlie refuses to tell, as is his custom.  Bradley then suggests that Charlie just write people's "stories", more specifically, the stories about the people that he, Bradley, knows.  Thus the episodic novel becomes the first-person accounts of Bradley's ex-wives, employees, and next-door neighbors, as their lives intersect and they struggle to find, know, keep, and understand love with their mates, their families, and the rest of the world.  The title, "Feast of Love" comes from one of Bradley's paintings.  This painting, in the midst of an otherwise mediocre group of works from an amateur painter, is actually brilliant, portraying a feast with such light and color that all who see it find it remarkable.  But for Bradley, the "Feast of Love" is a painting of the state of being which he will never be able to reach.
    This novel is humorous, poignant, and insightful.  One could only wish that Charles Baxter would publish more often, but when he does, it is memorable.
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The daughters of Simon Lamoreaux, by David Long

    Miles Fanning was only 17 when his girlfriend, Carly Lamoreaux, disappeared without a trace on the way to a meeting with him.  Now, 25 years later, he is living in Seattle, successful in the music business, separated from his wife, and numb -- that is, until he gets a surprise E-mail one night from Carly's younger sister Julia, asking if he is "the Miles Fanning who knew Carly Lamoreaux".  After being cleared of suspicion at the time of Carly's disappearance, Miles had somehow buried his memories and emotions about Carly and her family, members of an obscure religious sect in Vermont.  These memories had remained so buried that he had never even mentioned the incident of Carly's disappearance to his wife.
    Julia, a skittish, chain-smoking insomniac seems determined to find out what he really knows about the tragedy, but more than that, to just talk about the event that destroyed her family, most significantly her father Simon, a towering moral figure who had been particularly close to Carly.  Miles soon finds himself looking forward to the long, late-night conversations with Julia, as well as the rambling E-mails in which she explains her father, her mother, and the undead mystery of her sister, Carly.  As he participates in this correspondence and the attendant relationship that develops, Miles begins a process of self-examination that he has avoided for 25 years, finding that the source of his numbness might have been his inability to face what happened so long ago.
    This is a graceful novel that unfolds at a pace which allows for nuance and well-developed insights.  An added bonus is David Long's (and therefore Miles's) encyclopedic knowledge and love of music.
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Like Normal People, by Karen E. Bender

    Lena Rose is 48 years old, retarded, and living in a residential treatment center.  On the day during which this novel takes place, Ella, Lena's widowed mother, re-lives the past as she and her other daughter, Vivienne, search for Lena, who has set fire to her room and taken off with Vivienne's 12-year old daughter Shelley.
    We learn that from Lena's birth, Ella's entire life has been to take care of Lena, trying to afford her as normal a life as possible, even when she falls in love and marries the equally retarded Bob, whose recent death has traumatized both Lena and Shelley.  The intricacies of a life like Ella's are brought vividly to life by the author, making it so painfully real that taking care of a retarded child who is loved is a life-long process which goes on long after the Special Education classes are over.  Now Ella is old, and without her beloved husband, taking care of Lena is all she has of her identity, and she is reluctant to give it up.  Meanwhile, as the search for Lena and Shelley begins, Vivienne and Ella both begin to realize, almost simultaneously, that it is now Vivienne's duty to care for Lena, and soon for Ella herself.  This is a beautiful novel about family love among good people.
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The Gravity of Sunlight, by Rosa Shand

        This novel is set in Uganda on the eve of Idi Amin's rise to power.   Americans Agnes and John, and their three children -- Anne, Lucy, and Michael -- live in an international community of expatriates who teach at Kambala University.  Against a roiling political background, the tribal customs of the native Africans who work for them, and the lush and exotic African climate (almost a character in the novel), Agnes struggles within the confines of her marriage, finding herself strongly attracted to a new member of the community.  She thinks of him as "the Finn", until she meets him and finds out his name is Wulf and he's from Poland.  As the novel progresses, we find that the undercurrent of Agnes's compulsion to commit adultery is matched by tensions in the relationships of almost everyone else in their tight-knit group of families and their African servants.  There is far more going on than meets the eye, and the domestic turbulence comes to a head just as the political explosion of Amin's ascendance takes place.
        Rosa Shand, the author of this novel, is a poet who lived for many years in Africa. She knows its terrain and inhabitants, and the geography of human relationships, especially marriage, very well.
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The Toughest Indian in the World, by Sherman Alexie

    Sherman Alexie once again proves himself to be the clearest Native American literary voice, a pure distillation of the past, present, and especially contemporary reality for what he calls the Indians.  I have read all of his novels, and seen the one and only movie written, acted, and directed by Native Americans, "Smoke Signals", made by Sherman Alexie, and I can only hope that more and more people will find him.   This collection of short stories is just a continuation of his genius.  Underneath the mostly sad, always ironic, and sometimes humorous events in his characters' lives lies the lacerating truth of what has been done to the Indians over the last 200 years, and what the reservations upon which they were placed has done to them. This is a long way from the Hollywood-ized "Dances with Wolves" idea of the Native Americans and their history.  These stories are about a present reality that is directly connected with all that has gone before.   From the Indian woman who wants to sleep with a white stranger, any white stranger, to the Indian journalist who picks up a hitchhiker who says he is 'the toughest Indian in the world' and ends up being a homosexual rapist, these characters are mostly poor, mostly losers, always restless, and on fire with  righteous anger.
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Drowning Ruth, A Hole in the Earth, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, A Good House, 4 Blondes

Drowning Ruth
        by Christine Schwarz
        Growing up, Ruth Neumann remembers her own drowning, but her Aunt Amanda repeatedly denies that it happened.  It was her mother Mattie who drowned, and the high-strung, nervous Amanda has spent her life caring for Ruth, who was just 3 years old when her mother died so mysteriously -- going out into the freezing Wisconsin winter and falling through the ice on the lake around their house.  Mattie's husband Carl, returning wounded from World War I, is also confused about the circumstances surrounding Mattie's death, but Amanda reveals nothing. For awhile it even seems as though the weight of secrets borne by Amanda will break her already fragile hold on reality.  She spends time in a mental hospital, but it is Ruth's need for her that brings her back to the farm.   As the years pass, however, buried secrets make their way to the surface, and we are given bits and pieces of the whole story by Amanda, Ruth, and Carl, until the extremely complex truths behind the tragedy and its aftermath are revealed, and the characters are somehow set free.
        This is a very engrossing novel, mostly because of the graceful way the story unfolds.
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A Hole in the Earth
        by Robert Bausch
        Henry Porter, high school history teacher, horse racing aficianado, and eternal adolescent, is looking forward to yet another summer of leisure and trips to the track.  That is, until his 18-year old daughter Nicole, whom he hasn't seen in 5 years, shows up unexpectedly at his door.  She has grown up, lost about 50 pounds, graduated from high school, and driven across country from California with a friend, to spend the summer with him.  Before he gets used to Nicole's rather sullen presence (so reminiscent of her mother), Henry's world is further rocked by the news that his easygoing and comfortable girlfriend of three years, Elizabeth, is pregnant.  Added to this mix is Henry's propensity to nearly always say the wrong thing, and the disastrous chain of events that follows is ready to roll.
        I loved this book because for Henry, there are no easy answers.  He sees clearly that his life as the youngest and under-achieving child of a powerful judge has made him the adult that he is, and he knows he must change. His lifelong struggle with his father is played out every day, in his mind and in his interactions with others. But change becomes very expensive for Henry, as he finds himself losing everything that has been offered to him by these two women, just as he finally decides that he wants this new life of possibilities.  Full of humor and insight, this is a great read.
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The Lost Legends of New Jersey
        by Frederick Reiken
        13-year old Anthony Rubin learns a little too much about his parents' marriage in the summer of 1979 when they rent a cottage on the Jersey shore with their neighbors, the Berkowitzes.  Anthony's father Michael, and Claudia Berkowitz, mother of Anthony's friend Jay and wife of his neighbor, are having an affair.  Anthony discovers this sad fact by encountering them in action even before his unhappy mother Jess, always beautiful, ever unpredictable, later breaks all of the Berkowitz's windows and leaves town.  Over the next three years, Anthony, his sister Dani, his father, and his mother, now a resident of Florida, all struggle to grow and change in the middle of pain, confusion, and loss.
        During this period, Anthony becomes more and more fascinated with his neighbor, Julia DiMiglio.  The same age as Anthony, she is nonetheless very precocious sexually, and possessed of a homelife just south of Jane Eyre's.  Her mother, a former exotic dancer has committed suicide, and her father, long rumored around the neighborhood to be a member of the Mafia, is actually a hopeless compulsive gambler and drunk.  Julia is also involved in an abusive relationship with a member of the football team, but she and Anthony strike up an unorthodox relationship that defies the categories that Anthony is always trying to put it in.  In the meantime he is re-establishing contact with his mother Jess, now a confident deep sea diver and bartender in Florida.
        This of course is another coming-of-age story, but all of the characterizations are both deep and profound -- from Anthony's doctor father, full of regrets and longing, to Anthony's old friend Jay Berkowitz, now lonely and climbing the walls of the zoo at night to observe the nocturnal creatures.  The "legends" of the title are the stories, almost mythological, that Anthony recalls about the making of the time and place that was Livingston, New Jersey during the years he will never forget.
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A Good House
        by Bonnie Burnard
        This is a novel about the life of one family in a small Canadian town, between the years of 1949 and 1997.  Bonnie Burnard creates a muted and suble tone in this story that is much like the other better-known Canadian writers Alice Munro and Carol Shields.  The Chambers family -- Bill, Sylvia, and their three children, Patrick, Daphne and Paul, and later Margaret (after Sylvia's death) and Sally, Bill and Margaret's child, lead ordinary lives that are chronicled in the novel.  At first it might seem that there is nothing in these lives that would warrant writing an entire novel, but it is the extraordinary that is in the ordinary that books such as this brings to the forefront.  The children grow up, have children of their own, succeed, fail, and endure and enjoy events that are much the same for all of us.  This is a beautiful portrait of a sort of "every-family" in the twentieth century.  We recognize the quotidian as well as the joyful and tragic details that are part of every family's life, as generations pass and time marches on.
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4 Blondes
        by Candace Bushnell
        In 4 novellas of varying length, Candace Bushnell, the writer of "Sex and the City" fame, dissects the high-fashion, Hamptons-inhabiting, trend-setting world of Manhattanites and other rich, and usually superficial residents of the rarified atmosphere of fame and its hangers-on.  Janey a beautiful and surgically enhanced blonde model (and sometime actress) picks a different man with a different house in the Hamptons every summer.  Her relationships with these men are about as deep as this goal would indicate.  James and Winnie dieke are successful magazine writers with all the accoutrements they should have -- except for real love, happiness, or peace of mind.  An American version of Princess Di marries a handsome prince and immediately becomes depressed and paranoid about her fame and the paparazzi.  A blonde writer ( perhaps Ms. Bushnell herself?) travels to England to find out if  Brit men are really so terrible in bed.  This is an entertaining nothing of a book, so-o-o-o new millennium, so-o-o- five minutes ago.
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The Golden Age, The Salesman, Thumbsucker: a novel, Disobedience, The Suburbs of Heaven

The Golden Age
        by Gore Vidal
            This is the final novel in Gore Vidal's "Empire" series, that began with "Burr" and "Lincoln", and has now ended up covering the period from 1939-1954, when FDR was powerful enough to gain re-election for a third and fourth term while orchestrating America's entrance into World War II.  He mixes the fictional characters of Caroline Sanford, her brother Blaise, and Senator James Burden Day, among others, all of whom have appeared in more than one of the previous novels, with the very real characters of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Senator Arthur VandenBerg, William Randolph Hearst, and even a very young Gore Vidal.
            In the novel's beginning, Caroline has now abandoned her film career and left her home in France because of Hitler's movements in Europe.  She has returned to Washington, D. C., and the "Washington Tribune", the newspaper she headed in the last century and then ceded to her brother.  Caroline is the novel's primary eyes and ears, and she immediately becomes the friend and confidante of Harry Hopkins, FDR's principal advisor, and thus finds herself often at the White House and always privy to the latest gossip and political rumblings as America's isolationists and interventionists trade arguments, while unbeknownst to most of them, FDR is easing them ever closer toward war by making sure America is attacked.
            I am a big fan of Gore Vidal's, and I love this series of novels.  He has a unique perspective on American history because his own family has been intimately involved in it, and he is enormously talented.  There is so much interesting historical detail in these novels, and they bring events to light in an extremely believable way.
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The Salesman
        by Joseph O'Connor
            Irish salesman Billy Sweeney sits in court, looking at the leader of a gang that robbed and raped his daughter Maeve, who now lies in a coma.  The next day in court it is revealed that Quinn, this same gang leader, has escaped through the window of a dentist's office where he had been allowed to have a toothache looked at.  Billy's rage and grief know no bounds, but when he accidentally runs across Quinn in another town, he decides to take matters into his own hands rather than tell the police.  He hires someone to beat Quinn up, with the condition that he can be there to watch.  But instead of stopping there, he carries his plan further, taking Quinn to his own home and locking him in a cage outside his house.  He plans to torture and then kill Quinn, but he underestimates the wily criminal and finds the tables turned on him once again, with Quinn having the upper hand.  What unfolds is not only not what he had planned, the two men begin to engage in a very strange and almost symbiotic dance with each other.
          The book is written in the form of an extended letter to Billy's comatose daughter, and in it we also learn of Billy's past -- his love for his dead wife, his failure as a husband and father, and the shock of finding out a lifelong secret held by his best friend who is a priest.  This novel is like so many of the best Irish novels -- beautiful and sweet, yet always containing a core of tragedy that lies in the heart of the country and seemingly all of its inhabitants.
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Thumbsucker:  a novel
        by Walter Kirn
        We meet Justin Cobb at 13, when the fact that he can't stop sucking his thumb has finally driven his father Mike over the edge.  Mike takes Justin to a dentist who hypnotizes Justin so that he no longer craves his thumb, but he is so empty inside that he doesn't want anything -- not even food.  When the same dentist then gives him Ritalin, Justin thinks he has finally discovered himself, only to find himself addicted.  Over the next few years, Justin navigates the full spectrum of cravings, from pot to liquor and sex, and finally even to Mormonism, at the same time watching his father, mother, and brother go through disintegrations and rebirths of their own.
        This novel is a delightful surprise.  While we see everything through the lens of Justin's dysfunctional adolescence, perhaps the most interesting character is his father Mike.  Mike was a college football star who didn't make the pros because of an injury, and who then married the beautiful daughter of his team's doctor.  He operates a sporting goods store and still idolizes his old coach, while constantly hectoring Justin to get involved in some kind of physical activity.  He struggles with enormous demons and ultimately it is Justin who is his best friend and savior.  Justin does his level best to keep his family together, feeling responsible as children do, monitoring everyone's behavior and trying to keep his finger in the dyke holding back the explosion that he is sure is going to occur, until he finally leaves home at 18 and relocates his thumb.
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Disobedience
        by Jane Hamilton
        This novel, like "Thumbsucker",  is another about the love of a teenage boy for a parent, this time his mother.  Henry Shaw, a high school senior, has a good home and a great family life, or so it would seem, until he starts checking the e-mail account that he created for his mother.  It seems that Elizabeth, known online as Liza38, is having an intense affair with Rpol (Richard Pollaco), a musician she played with at a wedding reception. Henry's father Kevin, an intellectual history teacher who operates in his own sphere of bemused detachment, seems to know nothing of this, nor does his younger sister Elvira, a Civil War history buff so fanatical that she is one of the most "hard-core" reenactors in the country.  What is Henry to do?  As he obsessively copies and prints out every single e-mail in his mother's correspondence, he lives his last yhear at home obsessed with understanding this secret of his mother's, and terrified that his family will fall apart because of it.
        This is a beautiful, funny, and tender story.  Jane Hamilton, as always, brings an extremely complicated family situation to life in an altogether believable and charming way.  When the events of the story finally gives Henry the deepest kind of insight into both of his parents and the nature of their bond, we are moved along with him as he closes this chapter of his life and moves on to his own.
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The Suburbs of Heaven
        by Merle Drown
        Jim Hutchins' run of bad luck just keeps getting worse.  His beautiful and beloved wife Pauline has never been the same since their youngest daughter Elizabeth drowned in the pond behind their trailer.  His daughter Lisa is in an abusive marriage witht the lazy and no-good Fesmire and his son Tommy is in and out of jail.  To make matters worse, his 'good' son Gregory is a paranoid schizophrenic who has gotten so bad that Jim knows he's going to have to be locked up.  Of course the strawberry on top of this miserable shortcake is that the IRS is getting ready to take Jim's little piece of land that their trailer is sitting on.  Jim is a good man who loves his wife and kids and yet can't seem to keep from sinking further and further in the quagmire of poverty.  When in addition to all of this he finds out that his wife is getting paid to dance naked for his arch-enemy, his dead sister's husband, Jim loses it.  On the novel's first page he finds himself standing in front of this man with a rifle in his hand, and we are told all the sordid details from the alternating points of view of Jim, Pauline, Tommy, and Gregory.
        This novel, much like those of Carolyn Chute ("The Beans of Egypt, Maine") shows the underbelly of life in New England, and how difficult it is for poor families to keep from becoming poorer.  Yet the character of Jim is a great one -- his simple nobility in the middle of chaos is the heart of the novel.
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