Licks of Love, Prodigal Summer, Someone Else's Child ,Grasshopper,Winter Range,I Loved You All

Licks of Love
       by John Updike
        For me, it's hard to imagine a world where John Updike would be writing no more.  Alas, that day will come, and being aware of that I have come to treasure each new book of his that comes out.  In this case, I was particularly excited to read Licks of Love because along with the usual short story fare of suburban angst and musings on marital woes and infidelities, Updike has included the novella "Rabbit Revisited."  I was and am a huge fan of the Rabbit books, which came out roughly every ten years or so to have Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, their hero, muse about, reflect and experience life in contemporary America, from the late fifties to the early nineties when he died at a relatively young 56 in Rabbit at Rest.  "Rabbit at Rest" is told mostly from his son Nelson's point of view.  Nelson, a hopeless coke addict for most of the eighties is now 42, working in rehab for dysfunctional people,  and separated from his wife and two children.  He is still living at home with his mother Janice and her new husband Ronnie Harrison, one of the living Rabbit's least favorite people.  Rabbit had an affair with Ronnie's wife, and it is never quite clear if Ronnie has married Janice and moved into her house just to get revenge, but Janice is happy with Ronnie anyway, as he is steady and more predictable than Harry.
    Into the mix comes Annabelle, the product of an adulterous affair Rabbit conducted while separated from Janice almost 40 years earlier.  Rabbit never met this "love child", and Janice never knew she existed, but Annabelle has decided that now that her own mother is gone, she would like to know more about her father. Janice is at first appalled, but Nelson is intrigued and even eager to know his newfound half-sister.  But when he brings Annabelle to Thanksgiving dinner with his mother and Ronnie and Ronnie's sons and their families, things run amok.  I just loved this story.  Updike has a way of expressing the ordinary in an extraordinary way, and he has known these characters  well for over 40 years.

Prodigal Summer
       by Barbara Kingsolver
      It would be unreasonable to expect Barbara Kingsolver to follow The Poisonwood Bible with a work of that magnitude, and she hasn't. Prodigal Summer is really more of an ecological treatise in the form of a novel.  It is set in the Appalachian mountains and valleys of Zebulon County, and concerns its residents, their farms, and their relationships, but more importantly, it addresses ecological and environmental concerns regarding the entire habitat, from the smallest species and plant genus, to the humans trying to survive and make a living when farming depends so much on big business and lots of pesticides.
      Reclusive naturalist Deanne Wolf works for the Forest Service and never comes down off the mountain, until a mountain man and hunter many years her junior crashes his way into her territory and her house.  Lusa Landowski is a natural scientist interested primarily in moths, who has been transplanted from her city environs to the family farm of her husband, the result of a hasty marriage that doesn't seem to please anyone in his large family of sisters.  And finally Garnett Walker, a man in his 80's, a lifelong resident who is trying to resurrect the extinct chestnut trees of the area but is opposed to his neighbor -- an elderly woman who grows pesticide-free apples and refuses to use chemicals.
      All of these characters are interconnected not only by their environment and their concerns, we come to discover the family and human connections between them as the novel unfolds and their paths begin to cross.  If I would criticize one thing about the novel, it would be that it takes so long for these actual meetings to take place.

Someone Else's Child
      by Nancy Woodruff
        Jenny Breeze is having her second child, while her first-born, 16-year old Tara, is not happy about being at the hospital and missing an outing with her friends, especially since Matt, the cute new boy in town, will be out with Rachel and Erica, her two best friends.  But just as Tara's new little sister Allison is being born, Rachel and Erica are killed in a tragic car accident, with Matt at the wheel, and everything is turned upside down.
        Jenny is torn apart, between coping with a new baby and her grief-stricken daughter, and soon she finds herself thinking about Matt and how he is coping.  She surprises everyone by offering Matt a summer job in her own small business, angering some, and mystifying others, including her husband and the still devastated Tara.
        This novel is full of insight.  The character of Jenny is not perfect, but it is her own life mistakes and regrets, along with a tendency to engage in constant introspection, that provide the filter through which we see these traumatic event and their aftermath take place.  In an impossible situation, there are no easy choices, and this novel takes its time to show how real people would deal with such things and still manage to grow.
 

Grasshopper
      by Barbara Vine
       Eleven years after the fact, Clodagh Brown narrates the story of the year that changed her life.  At the age of 19 she was shipped to London to live with her scholarly Uncle Max and his wife TV personality wife Selina, having been disgraced in her own home town.  Clodagh is claustrophobic in the extreme and addicted to heights, a compulsion that resulted in her boyfriend's fall to his death from a pylon the year before.  She is meant to attend a business course at a local college but spends her days in Maida Vale until her life is changed by meeting a boy her age named Silver who introduces her to a group of other young people who spend their nights traversing the rooftops of the city.  Silver also has a trauma in his past -- the fact that he was abducted when he was small and still has no clear memory of what happened during the days he was missing.  Oddly enough, these connections cause them and others to get involved in some very serious and possibly criminal activity.
        Ruth Rendell writes as Barbara Vine when she wants to write mysteries and tales that are more psychological in nature and this one is certainly no exception.  The plot of this novel is exceedingly complex, with more threads than could be described in a small review like this.  Each of the main, as well as the secondary characters in this book have complex histories and complicated lives and motives.  Extremely engrossing.

Winter Range
       by Claire Davis
        Ike Parsons, sheriff of a small town in Montana, has come a long way since his policing days in Milwaukee.  Pattiann, his wife, was a student in a class of his in Wisconsin, and he went against everything in his nature when he followed her to Montana to beg her to marry him.  After he becomes sheriff, however, he discovers that the law is not administered in quite the same way as it is in the big city.  Property rights are everything here, and when he confronts a local rancher who is starving his cattle to death because he is going broke, Ike finds it hard to get the support or the cooperation he needs from the rancher, his wife, or the rest of the locals to help the cattle or the rancher.
        This is a vivid portrait of what Montana life is like.  Montana has played a larger role in the popular imagination in recent years, because of the Unabomber, the Freedmen, and, of course, Ted Turner.  But the underlying spirit of independence and respect for individual rights, as well as a rugged ability to cope with a tough climate and the tough business of ranching, is what these people are really about -- and Claire Davis does much to make that clear.

I Loved You All
       by Paula Sharp
        Penny Daigle is just 8 years old when her widowed mother Marguerite begins to fall apart because of her drinking.  Penny's older sister Mahalia is enraged at their mother, and soon begins to seek companionship and solace in the company of Isabel Flood, a single Evangelical woman who devotes her days and nights to combatting abortion rights.  The time is 1977, and these issues, just as today, were front and center, and Mahalia is soon leafletting and marching with a group of zealots.  When Marguerite's brother arrives from New Orleans, he and Marguerite's husband-to-be take her to a rehab in the South because they know she won't go in the North, and they leave Isabel in charge of Mahalia and Penny for the summer.
        While Mahalia clearly idolizes Isabel and the seeming order of her existence, Penny is a wild child who chafes at being taken around town with Isabel on her "missions" -- helping people in hopes of converting them to her own narrow way of thinking.  When the sober Marguerite returns, Mahalia refuses to live with her family and stays with Isabel, until things take a drastic turn.
        Paula Sharp, as in her book Crows over a Wheatfield  , does a good job of novelizing around a social issue and the individuals it affects.  Penny is an absolutely delightful creation, and the novel is well worth reading.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
Off Keck Road, by Mona Simpson
Lost Geography, by Charlotte Bacon
Diamond Dogs, by Alan Watt
The Mineral Palace, by Heidi Julavits

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

    I have been a big fan of Michael Chabon's since Wonder Boys, and this novel only increases his stature in my mind.  This is a broad and colorful history of the confluence of cultural elements leading to the rise of the comic book as a force in popular culture, and more specifically, the rise of the super-hero as a cultural icon, which as we know, persists mightily to the present day.  I'm sure that modern young fans of Spiderman (soon to be a major motion picture), Batman (hero of too many major motion pictures), and even Superman (icon of icons), would be surprised to learn that the super-hero had his genesis in the minds of young Jewish men in America during the rise of Hitler and the Nazis through the late 1930's and the Second World War, partly as a way to deal with the frustration and powerlessness they felt in response to events in Germany and Europe.  These are the young men brought to life by Michael Chabon in this book, and it is a life worth reading about.
    Josef Kavalier, a young Jew in Czechoslavakia in 1939, is an artist, a budding magician, and an admirer of Harry Houdini.  With Nazi persecution closing in on his prominent family, it is decided that Josef will escape to America and then try and bring the others over, especially his younger brother Thomas.  Engaging the innovative help of his magic teacher, Josef makes it to New York in a coffin, by way of Lithuania and Japan, and moves in with his cousin Sam Clayman, Sam's mother, and his Bubbe.  Sam, the son of the only Jewish circus strongman (absent from the home Sam's entire life) , is also a budding artist, and has dreams of starting his own comic book, getting in on the new phenomenon.  When he discovers Joe's artistry, they create "The Escapist" a super-hero who helps people who are imprisoned by villains who are at first thinly veiled Nazis, and later, after the war begins, the Nazis themselves.  As years go by, and the Empire Comics they have created become extremely successful, Joe is still tormented by thoughts about his family and how to save them.  When he finances an entire ship carrying young Jews allowed to leave Europe and it is sunk by a German U-Boat, Joe abandons New York and decides to fight Hitler in the flesh rather than on the pages of his comic book.  The events that follow are heart-rending, imaginative and entertaining, while retaining a profound sense of historical accuracy.
    Michael Chabon has done an incredible amount of research and it shows on the page.  This is a remarkable novel, because it contains all the usual humor and intelligence of his other works, while portraying a subject with an enormous amount of pathos and tragedy.  This one is worth the effort.
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Off Keck Road, by Mona Simpson

    Mona Simpson's latest novel brings us the story of one woman's life in the last half of the twentieth century, as well as the evolution and life of the city in which she lives -- Green Bay, Wisconsin.  We first meet Bea Maxwell, the daughter of a prominent local doctor, when she is home for Christmas break from college in 1956, driving to pick up June Umberhum, the only other local college girl she knows.  June's home is off Keck Road on the outskirts of Green Bay, in a neighborhood of mostly poor, shack-like houses where Bea has never ventured.  Over the next 40-plus years, Bea and her friend June stay in touch, and Keck Road and its inhabitants grow more prosperous and developed.  One of these Keck Road residents, Shelley, is famous for being Green Bay's only polio victim in the 50's, and another, June's brother, is the first Green Bay resident to build his own swimming pool (aided by Shelley).  Bea goes into real estate, and while her mother frets silently her whole life about Bea's unmarried state, we watch Bea slip peacefully through the years, happy in her well-organized solitude.  Eventually, all the characters' lives intersect at one point or another, as would be possible in a small city over a long period of time.  There really is no drama to speak of in this novel, and it seems to be an attempt to chronicle a particular life in a particular place, as it actually would unfold over 50 years.  While Simpson does not quite achieve the "extraordinary in the ordinary" effect that writers like Carol Shields or Alice Munro excel at, this is nonetheless a good, engrossing rainy-day read.
 

Lost Geography, by Charlotte Bacon

    Margaret Evans, a young nurse in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1933, is rather taken by the good-looking young Scotsman who comes to her clinic delirious with fever.  When he awakens, Davis Campbell, who really hadn't planned on settling in this austere and isolated land, finds that he is quite taken with the pretty Margaret as well.  Twenty years and three children later, their eldest daughter Hilda, who is not suited for farm life, travels to Toronto to make her own fortune.  19 years later, her daughter Danielle settles in Paris and marries a man who is half-Turk, half-British.  If nothing else, the peregrinatios of these three generations of women would justify books title, but there is more than just physical geography involved in the evolution of these characters.
    One excellent quality of Charlotte Bacon's writing is the evocation of place.  The cold solitude of  Saskatchewan, the organized hustle and bustle of Toronto, and especially the unmistakable atmosphere of Paris are brought vividly to life.  From the early wanderings of Davis, who left his fishing family in Scotland and traveled all the way to Western Canada to make his fortune, to Danielle's Turkish mother-in-law, married to a staid British antique dealer and longing for her homeland, we feel both the displacement of leaving one's homeland behind and the universal human ability to adapt and create a home where there was none.  The roads we take to get to the lives and companions we have are often circuitous and always remarkable, as this novel illustrates perfectly.
 

Diamond Dogs, by Alan Watt

    Neil Garven, a good-looking senior football star with lots of potential on the field, is a bomb ready to explode.  He lives with his father Chester, the sheriff of their Nevada town, just outside of Las Vegas.  Neil doesn't know what happened to his mother, who disappeared when he was 3 years old, and his hard-drinking, cruel father never says.  To make matters worse, Chester is obsessed with Neil Diamond (hence his son's name), and makes ritualized trips to Vegas, often with his son, to worship his cheesy idol.  Years of repressed anger and hidden truths begin to take their toll, however, and one night Neil ends up taking his anger and frustration out on his peers, losing it so badly that he commits a terrible crime that his father chooses to cover up, again for reasons he doesn't reveal to Neil.  Nothing is said, and Neil knows his father is aware of what he has done, and still there is no explanation.  Finally it is Neil himself who brings about his own arrest, and as a result, the terrible secrets his father has kept from him for his entire life are revealed.
    This is a fast-paced novel, the story pouring forth almost torrentially, catastrophe upon catastrophe until it is almost unbearable to keep reading.  But because of Alan Watt's masterful pacing, wit, and powers of observation (especially of the high school football/college scout mentality), we are unable to stop watching this human train wreck until all the truths are told.
 

The Mineral Palace, by Heidi Julavits

    Everyone knows that many of the best plots, whether for novels, movies, or soap operas, revolve around secrets and lies.  This novel by Heidi Julavits is a veritable smorgasborg of both, with virtually every character or circumstance layered with hidden meaning, clouds of past history, and foreboding.
    It is 1934 and Bena Jonssen, the wife of a midwestern doctor is driving herself, her husband Ted, and their newborn, Little Ted, to Colorado.  Because of a scandal with an aura of sex around it involving her husband, but of which Bena believes him innocent, they are forced to move to Pueblo, Colorado -- the only community which will offer him a physician's position at the height of the Depression.  Bena is a moody creature, haunted by memories of the traumatic death of her brother (the details of which are gradually revealed), a domineering father,  and a lonely, motherless childhood.  As the dusty days go by in their new home, she begins to fear that Little Ted is failing to thrive and that there is something wrong with him, although her husband scornfully discounts her fears.  Taking a part-time job at the local paper, she encounters hints of the corrupt power structure of the town and the sexual secrets of its most powerful citizens, including the newspaper's owner, while at the same time beginning to see through her own husband's pattern of philandering and lies, even about the health of his son.
    Heidi Julavits does an excellent job of unfolding the events in this story, as she reveals the events in Bena's past that have led her to this point.  Bena is uncovering secrets about the town of Pueblo, layer by layer, but at the same time, through her reactions to these secrets, we learn that her own secrets are perhaps every bit as dark, and which lead to the book's final dramatic events.
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The Twins, The Hiding Place,A Spell of Winter, What Remains, Ella in Bloom, Skateaway

The Twins, by Tessa  De Loo
    Lotte Goudriaan, an elderly Dutch visitor to a health spa in Belgium, is irritated by the woman speaking German next to her until they both realize that the woman is Anna, Lotte's twin sister, from whom she was separated 70 years before.  The two young German girls lost her parents by the age of 4, and Lotte was taken to the Netherlands to live with a distant relative, having been deemed too unhealthy to stay in Germany.  Anna was sent to  her uncle Heinrich's farm in a rural German village, where she grew up a virtual slave until her teenage years, when she became a household servant of a wealthy and privileged family.  Lotte lived with a Socialist family and had a flourishing singing career until World War II started and they had to shelter Jews who were in fear for their lives.  Being raised Dutch, Lotte still has a distinct hatred for what was perpetrated by the Germans during the war, and her hostility extends to her new-found sister.  Anna is forced to explain to Lotte about her own circumstances and how it would have been impossible for her to resist what had happened.
    The book is told in the form of each sister taking turns telling the other their life's progress over the course of their stay at the Spa.  Especially haunting are their individual stories of  wartime, and although Lotte finds it hard to accept her sister's justification for supporting Hitler, each develops empathy for the immense suffering endured by the other.  This book was actually published in the Netherlands in 1992 and has just been published in English, in an excellent translation.
 

The Hiding Place, by Trezza Azzopardi
    The Gauci family in Cardiff, Wales, is known to be nothing but touble, mostly due to the reckless gambling ways of Frankie Gauci, Maltese immigrant, father to six daughters, and husband to Mary.  Frankie gambles them out of a home and out of his own business, and even begins to make deals using his daughters as bargaining chips.  In the midst of almost unbelievable and unrelenting poverty, and often violent abuse, Dolores, the youngest, becomes the narrator of their history, looking back over thirty years to the point where the family was irrevocably split.  Dolores herself was disfigured in a horrible house fire at only one month old, losing her hand and becoming what Frankie termed "sinistre", or cursed.  From the young Dolores's point of view there is much that is misunderstood, but what she remembers most is being hidden from her father, and witnessing the horrible beatings of her mother and sisters, until the day of her oldest sister's wedding -- the day her father disappeared forever and her mother went mad.  After 30 years, all but two of the sisters are reunited in their old house in Cardiff for their mother's funeral, but their reunion does not necessarily mean reconciliation.  The scars are too deep for that.
    This book was a finalist for the Booker Prize this year, and it's easy to understand why.  What many found puzzling, however, was how this book was chosen over Zadie Smith's White Teeth, (click here for earlier review) an astonishing debut novel with a much broader scope and perspective.  But these two novels really cannot be compared.  Trezza Azzopardi has painted a portrait of life in Cardiff for poor immigrants 30 years ago that focuses on just one family and its voice is much sharper and more disturbing.  I found myself thinking about this story a great deal after finishing the novel, whereas in Zadie Smith's book, I wass left with a sense of wonder that a woman so young could write such a book, while not necessarily pondering the characters or the story.
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A Spell of Winter, by Helen Dunmore
    Helen Dunmore is an English novelist who has had some success with her last two books in America, so now this earlier work, her first novel, has been released here.  She has been compared to the Bronte's, and it's true that her other works, while modern, have a certain Gothic darkness and psychology to them, especially in the area of family secrets.  A Spell of Winter is indeed Gothic in tone, and is set on an old English estate during the first twenty years of this century.  Its theme is, once again, deep and dark family secrets which are gradually and ominously revealed.  Catherine and her brother Rob live on their grandfather's estate, in a big, cold house.  Their father suffers from mental illness and tuberculosis and is in a hospital, and their mother has disapeared, supossedly for health reasons, but the children do not know where she is or why she has left them.  Kate, the Irish housekeeper, is their main caretaker, along with the horrible Miss Gallagher, their tutor.  In such a situation, Catherine and Rob develop an uncommonly close relationship, and as they move into adolescence, it becomes ever more intense, leading to a deadly situation.
    Ms. Dunmore writes beautifully, and her way of rendering this cold environment through the eyes of a child is poetic and masterful, as is life in a world rapidly changing as World War I arrives.
 

What Remains, by Nicholas Delbanco
    A cultured and wealthy German family whose heritage in Venice, and then Germany, goes back centuries, is forced to flee, first to England, and then after the war, some choose to emigrate to New York.  We see their family and their plight over 50 years, first through the eyes of Karl, in 1964, in New York.  He is the second generation of the family, now settled in Long Island with his wife and two sons.  Then we travel back to 1944 and see through the eyes of Benjamin, Katrl's younger son, as they live through the air raids and bombings in England.  We also see life through the eyes of Elsa, Karl's mother, in 1944, and Jacob, Karl's older son, in 1946.  There is Gustav, Karl's brother, in 1946, and Julia, Karl's beautiful wife, in 1964.
    This book is the semi-autobiographical tale of Nicholas Delbanco's own family, and it is rendered lovingly and delicately, a collection of short vignettes that are so poignant and sensitive that they bring an entire panorama of history, as lived by this family, to life within relatively few words.  A beautiful family undone by Anti-Semitism, forced to acclimate to new countries and cultures against their will, these people offer a glimpse into the terrible forces that would literally dismantle civilization, and the powerful spirit that allow people in these conditions to persist, and even prevail, albeit carrying a layer of pain underneath the surface that will never be forgotten.
 

Ella in Bloom, by Shelby Hearon
    Ella Hopkins, single mother and professional plant-sitter, has always lived in the shadow of her beautiful older sister Terrell.  Terrell is her mother's clear favorite and has lived the life expected of the Southern debutante -- married to a lawyer, with two sons, a house on the lake in Austin, Texas -- all the social accoutrements her mother would desire and expect.  Ella, on the other hand, has been a profound disappointment -- brown-haired, impetuous, and wild.  Ella dropped out of college to run off with her daughter's handsome father, who then ran off from her and died.  Now Ella, who enjoys a much better relationship with her preternaturally wise daughter Birdy than she does with her own mother, writes letters to Austin from her run-down duplex in Metaire, Louisiana, describing for her mother her own non-existent pink cottage, rose garden, and teas at the country club in lovely linen dresses, all in an effort to please her impossible-to-please mother.  But when Terrell contacts Ella and tells her about an affair she's having, and wants Ella to cover for her trip out of town to see her lover, everything starts to change.  Terrell is killed in a small plane crash, and when she goes to Austin for the funeral, Ella discovers the truth about her sister's perfect life, and a few truths about her own mother, that eventually begin to set her free from the role and image of 'second-best' daughter forever.
    Shelby Hearon always writes expertly about marriage and families, and in particular, relationships between mothers and daughters and womens' friendships.  While this book is rather more slight than some of the others, it's worth reading.

Skateaway, by Michael Grant Jaffe
    During the 1970's the Boone family of Lukin, Ohio, is very different fromt he rest of the town's largely blue-collar and ice-hockey obsessed residents.  Mercer, the mother of Clementine, Garrett, and Samantha is an OB/GYN who performs abortions in her clinic amidst constant protests, controversy, and gossip.  Their home is regularly picketed, and the childrens' classmates hurl insults.  Each adapts in a different way -- Clementine by being obsessively neat, Garrett by developing an elaborate fantasy world, and Samantha by becoming a better hockey player than the boys.  Kendall, Mercer's husband and the children's father, is an eccentric artist who flirts with, and then descends fully into, mental illness.  Over the course of 22 years, at three different intervals, we see into the lives of these people, especially the children, who would like nothing more than a normal life -- something that will never be possible for Mercer and Kendall, but which each child in their own way continues to try and establish, even into adulthood.
    Michael Grant Jaffe does a good job of depicting the abortion controversy and what havoc it could wreak in the family of an abortion doctor, and he is especially good at portraying the life of the children, surrounded by an emotional hurricane  they at first don't understand, and then can't avoid.
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Death of Vishnu, The Bone-setter's Daughter, Mystic River, Elizabeth and After, The Night Listener

The Death of Vishnu, by Manil Suri
    This novel captures the many layers of  Indian social and spiritual culture in the microcosm of one Bombay apartment building.  Vishnu is the errand-running, odd-job man in this building, and in return for his work, he has been allowed to sleep on the landing between the apartments of the Asrani and Pathak families, whose wives share a kitchen and continuously squabble over petty theivery and the real or imagined misdeeds of the other.  When the often drunken Vishnu actually appears to be dying on the landing, the argument erupts over who will pay for Vishnu's ambulance or treatment.  Meanwhile, Kavita, the Asrani's nubil young daugter, is carrying on with Salam, the upstairs neighbor boy.  This, if her parents knew about it (although her mother suspects), would be disastrous, as Salam's parents, the Jalals, are Muslim, while the rest of the building's inhabitants are Hindu.  The Jalals, meanwhile, have problems of their own.  Mr. Jalal, who has always been critical of his devoutly Muslim wife's faith, has decided to embark on his own search for enlightenment, by sleeping on the floor and depriving himself of material comforts.  When he goes so far as to lay down on the landing with the dying Vishnu, and has a vision that Vishnu is actually "the" Lord Vishnu, his wife and his neighbors declare him completely berserk.
    Against this quotidian backdrop of Indian daily life, we visit again and again Vishnu's consciousness as he goes through the process of dying, a visionary journey during which he visits the happiest moments of his life -- as a child with his mother, and as an adult in love with a beautiful prostitute.   At the same time he experiences himself ascending the stairways of the apartment building, something which may or may not mirror the karmic ascent of the human soul, as taught in Hindu cosmology.
    As someone who has spent much time in India, and associated with Indian people, I will have to admit that I find them the most petty, venal, and materialistic group of people on the planet.  Nonetheless, there is a humor and beauty in this heavily class and religion conscious society, and it seems that the great surge in Indian contemporary writers has done much to render these qualities, albeit lovingly.  Manil Suri is no exception.  His characters are shallow, bigoted, greedy, cowardly, dishonest, and superstitious, but we are happy to spend time with them in this beautifully written novel.
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The Bonesetter's Daughter, by Amy Tan
    Amy Tan revisits the fictional world that she has single-handedly created in her three previous novels, i.e., the dysfunctional relationships between mothers and daughters, and sisters, Chinese-style.  While one could argue that this book is just the same novel in a little-changed form, with the clash of generations and cultures rendered more mysterious and painful because of the exotic ethnicity of these people, it is still worth reading, because Amy Tan tells the story so well.  Ruth Young, a ghost-writer for self-help authors, is worried that her mother LuLing, who has always been difficult, is losing her memory.  After LuLing is diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Ruth, who as an only child of an unhappy widowed mother has always had to take responsibility, moves in with LuLing and begins trying to understand her mother's painful past.  Years ago LuLing had given her a sheaf of papers, written in her own hand, telling her that it was the story of her life, but until now Ruth has had no interest in pursuing something so difficult as translating this document.  But when she hires a translator and this story is told in its entirety in the book, Ruth, and we as readers, begin to understand something about LuLing's difficult behavior, her irrational fears, and her obsession and constant references to the ghost of "Precious Auntie" and the curse she believes has hung over her entire life.  When Ruth reaches this understanding of her own roots and history, which are very different than she believed they were, she becomes reconciled on a deep level with her mother, and this heals the relationships in her own life.

Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane
    This is a mystery novel that is as satisfying as both novel and mystery.  Growing up, Sean Devine lived in the respectable Point area of Boston, while Jimmy Marcus and Danny Boyle lived in the Flats, a blue-collar, high-crime area.  But for a short time in 1975, when Jimmy's father worked with Sean's dad at the chocolate factory, they were Saturday playmates, until  one strange day when two bad guys pretending to be cops took Danny with them and he disappeared for 4 days.  Danny escaped, but 25 years later, when Sean is a homicide detective, and Jimmy is a reformed ex-con with a corner store, Danny's demons are barely held at bay.  When Jimmy's beloved and beautiful daugher is murdered, the Flats neighborhood erupts with violence, old memories, and the desire for revenge, and Sean and Jimmy find themselves on the opposite sides of solving the crime.  The bad blood and calamity that ensues is gripping, with lifelong effects on everyone concerned.
    The characterization in this novel is superb, even to the minor characters surrounding the main events.  Jimmy's family and neighborhood have always been, and still are, on the wrong side of the law, and when his carefully constructed stability is threatened by this tragedy, it doesn't take much for him to cross over once again.  Meanwhile, the character of Danny, who has never even talked to his wife about the abuse that took place 25 years ago, is a train wreck in the making,and Sean, coming back into their lives after so long, can do nothing to stop it.
 

Elizabeth and After, by Matt Cohen
    This novel won Canada's highest prize for fiction in 1999, but was only released recently in the US.  The 'Elizabeth' in the title is Elizabeth McKelvey, mother of Carl, wife of William, killed in a tragic car accident.  Carl, who like his father plunged into a life of drinking and fighting after Elizabeth's death, has been living on the West Coast of Canada, far away from his small home town of West Gull, Ontario.  When his ex-wife Christine calls him about William driving his car into a lake, Carl comes home determined to mend fences, get to know his daughter, and try to construct a life in the community that has rejectedhim.  West Gull, like most small towns, has more than its share of secrets, and Carl is soon affected and drawn into most of them.
    This is a good, solid, interesting read. The Canadian countryside is rendered beautifully, and all the facets of small town politics and conspiracies ring especially true. From the flyleaf I learned that Matt Cohen died shortly after writing this novel, which is a great loss.
 

The Night Listener, by Amistead Maupin
    This is Amistead Maupin's first novel in a long time, which is something that makes this novel seem even more autobiographical.  Protagonist Gabriel Noone is somewhat of a cult figure on the radio, reading little stories and vignettes about a group of people approximating himself and his friends.  While he is still reeling from the break-up of a long-term committed relationship, he is sent a book written by a 12-year old boy, Pete Lomax.  After a long history of horrific sexual abuse by his parents and many others, Pete has been adoted by a woman and is telling his story -- but tragically he is now dying of AIDS.  It seems that Pete is a big fan of Gabriel's and has asked that his book be sent to the star of "Noone at Night" for a jacket blurb.  Gabriel is so taken by the book and its young subject that he begins a telephone relationship with Pete that quickly takes on an almost father-son quality.  But when Gabriel's ex-boyfriend Jess talks to both Pete and his mother, he is convinced that they are the same person and that Gabriel, in his emotional devastation over the break-up and his own inability to write, has become involved in a dangerous delusion. Gabriel in turn believes that Jess just doesn't want him to have any solace. What makes matters worse is that the book's publisher, who is also Gabriel's publisher, hasn't met Pete either.  As the plot turns this way and that, Gabriel goes through an intense emotional process that culminates in his own flight to Wisconsin to find Pete, and his own death-bed reconciliation with his emotionally distant father.
    I'm not crazy about the writing in this novel, but I must say that it is nothing short of an absolute page-turner.  I defy anyone who starts this book to put it down until they have finished it.
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Border Crossing, That Summer's Trance, My Dream of You, Loving Graham Greene, Mummy's Legs,Life isn't all Ha Ha Hee Hee

Border Crossing, by Pat Barker
   Pat Barker has written great novels about war, especially those in "The Border Trilogy", about World War I.  The "border crossing" in the title of this book, however, refers to borders of quite another sort -- the mental and emotional borders between psychiatrist and patient.  Tom Seymour, a psychiatrist who is considered something of an expert on child violence, rescues a young man from drowning in the river close to his home.  Later, as he visits the young man in the hospital to retrieve his jacket, he realizes that he has rescued Danny Miller who was convicted of murder as an adult at age 10. Ironically, it was Tom's testimony that led to the decision that Danny be tried as an adult, and he soon begins to suspect that the drowning incident had been staged just to effect this meeting. Danny is now out of prison, living with a state-supplied alias, and he swears he just wants to "talk" to Tom about what happened all those years ago.  Tom agrees reluctantly, but as things progress, the strange pathology of this attractive, intelligent youngman becomes more and more disturbing.  It seems that Danny has survived all of this time through an uncanny ability to seduce those charged with supervising him, with results that have produced damage to many.
    Pat Barker tells a suspenseful and involving story without skimping on the finer details of character.  This is a great read.
 

That Summer's Trance, by J. B. Salamanca
    Although he was born dirt-poor to strawberry farmers in Florida, Ben Oakshaw nevertheless has a gift which eventually liberates him from his roots -- he is a gifted actor.  After serving in Vietnam, he auditions for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he is accepted and where he goes on to garner much acclaim.  When he meets and marries Priscilla Wallace, a wealthy American girl, his social ascent seems guaranteed.  When he fails to make it on the American stage, however, Ben turns to television advertising, and within 15-20 years he has the cultured, well-oiled, artfully-constructed life of a modern captain of industry.  When he and Priscilla attend a play at the Kennedy Center written and performed by Gillian Davenport, one of his old colleagues at RADA, Ben's world is turned upside-down.  Priscilla does not know that Jill was his jilted lover when he hurried to marry her, and he is shocked to see that his final encounter with Jill in London is acted out and quoted verbatim in the play.  When the unknowing Priscilla invites Jill and her husband to join them for a week at their summer home in Cape Hatteras, Ben does not know what to expect.
    J. B. Salamanca has written a lush, full-blown, almost old-fashioned novel here.  The rise and possible fall of Ben Oakshaw is played out against a beautiful background, full of wonderful descriptions of place, feelings, beautiful meals, art and theater.  Somehow we know that Ben's elaborately fabricated life is bound to come apart somewhere, but we are never clear about what is going to happen, and we enjoy all the details in the process.
 

My Dream of You, by Nuala O'Faolain
    Sophisticated travel writer Kathleen de Burca has come a long way from Kilcrennan, Ireland, and the unhappy home and family she left thirty years ago.  But as she approaches fifty, her best friend and colleague dies suddenly of a heart attack, and she is thrown into a state of intense grief and re-evaluation, and she decides to take a long leave.  She returns to Ireland to investigate and perhaps write about a story she had first encountered twenty years earlier, about an alleged passionate affair between an English landowner's wife and the Irish groom on a large estate just after the Great Famine. Having read only the documents regarding the English divorce petition at the time, Kathleen decides to uncover the truth about this unlikely tale of passion by traveling to Ballygall, the place the incidents took place.  In the process, she re-connects with her homeland, the painful memories of her family, and her own capacity for passion.
    This, like Salamanca's book, is a lush, full-blown novel.  Nuala O'Faolain's character Kathleen is enormously observant, and her honest self-examination is deep and resonant.  The details of Irish history, especially concerning the Great Famine and the lives of the Irish under English rule, are both fascinating and devastating, and the description of the Irish coastal countryside and its climate is beautiful.
 

Loving Graham Greene, by Gloria Emerson
    Molly Benson, a wealthy, idealistic, and eccentric resident of Princeton, New Jersey, has had a lifelong passion for the works of Graham Greene.  When asked her reason for this, her answer is "He took sides. . .he stood for something."  The single most important event in her life was the one day she spent in his company, and she has corresponded with him ever since.  After receiving one last letter, Molly learns of his death in 1991, and she determines to mark this sad occasion by making some useful effort to help somewhere.  She decides to travel to Algeria and attempt to save some writers and/or journalists who may be caught or suffering in the escalating civil war.   But while Molly is well-intentioned and full of zeal, she is also a rather silly person, and her world-saving efforts usually consist of throwing money in one direction or another, to the dismay of her family and friends.  This situation is no different.  The mounting tensions in Algeria are much more complex and dangerous than Molly and her traveling companions could have anticipated, and her naive efforts to help end up causing unforeseen trouble and danger for all they encounter.
    This is a novel that is both entertaining and serious.  Molly's love of Graham Greene, and her ability to quote directly from his works apropos of every situation is amazing, and makes one want to go back and.  Emerson's portraits of Molly's sophisticated mother and friends are dead-on, and her description of  the overwhelming hopelessness of the Algerian political situation are subtle and devastating, illustrated with nuance and detail.
 

Mummy's Legs, by Kate Bingham
    This brilliant first novel by the English poet Kate Bingham alternates in time between the year the girl Sarah was ten years old and the present, when she is twenty-one and her mother Catherine is turning fifty, and it tells the tale of how one narcissistic personality can dominate and devastate the lives of everyone surrounding it.  Catherine, a talented writer, is the possessor in the extreme of said personality, and thinks nothing of exposing her young daughter to her blatant adultery and self-destruction, even attempting suicide and then having her young daughter call the ambulance (be "mummy's legs") when she changes her mind. The entire world walks on eggs around Catherine, even her estranged husband, who volunteers to move back in to help Catherine after her lover leaves her and she refuses to leave her bedroom.  We are given some insight into Catherine in a few flashbacks to a childhood spent with a deranged stepfather, but it is still difficult to imagine a woman so self-absorbed that she forces her cousin Marion to tend to her mother's funeral even though Marion has recently buried a young child and had a miscarriage.  It is a miracle that Sarah survives until the age of twenty-one, but she has become emotionally numb, hard-pressed to form any close relationships except the sick one she has with her mother.
    As do many poets who become novelists, Kate Bingham gets tremendous emotional impact and psychological insight out of a few carefully chosen details and incidents.  It is a short novel, but its portraits are complete and devastatingly recognizable.  The sad thing is that we all know people like Catherine, and they do tremendous damage to all they touch, especially their children.

Life isn't all Ha Ha Hee Hee, by Meera Syal
    Tania, Chila, and Sunita are London-born Punjabi Indian women who have been best friends since childhood, even though their present lives are very different.  Tania lives with a white man and is a cutting-edge maker of documentaries for the BBC.  Sunita, once an ambitious and feministic law student, is now an overweight and depressedmother of two, married to Ashak, a therapist.  And Chila, the simplest and most traditional of them, has just made an unlikely marriage to Deepak, the handsome and urbane businessman who actually used to date Tania.  When Tania makes a documentary about her own kind, i.e., Indian women bound by centuries of tradition at home but trying to live in the modern world, she uses interviews with her best friends as her meatiest material.  Truths are exposed that create a chasm in the friendships, and a volatile situation in Chila's marriage.  In the end, each woman evolves and changes, being forced to both accept and reject tradition in favor of self-esteem and awareness.
    It tells us on the bookjacket that Meera Syal is a writer and actress who is a familiar face on British television.  I saw the movie "Bhaji on the Beach" that she wrote and starred in, and it was brilliant. The material about Tania's work in television is dead-on, and her portrait of the traditional Indian families placed in modern London is both humorous and lacerating. Much has been made of how Zadie Smith's novel "White Teeth" captured the ethnic atmosphere of London, but after reading this I would say that Ms. Smith has nothing on Meera Syal.
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The Last Report on Miracles at Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich
    Louise Erdrich's novels about the Ojibwe of North Dakota, beginning with Love Medicine,have each provided a window into the Native American culture, most especially the extended Kashpaw family, that is informative, beautiful, and enchanting.  But while her earlier novels were reportedly written in collaboration with her then-husband Michael Dorris, this new book was not, and it shows -- to the benefit of the novel, in my opinion.  It seems to me that we are now getting the "real" Louise Erdrich, without an attempt to make the Native American language and lore more easily understandable to the "white mind", and as a result the book is actually quite exotic, lush, and extremely magical.  This novel is about faith, legend, the relationship between man and the Earth, secrets, love both sacred and profrane, and of course, miracles, and I don't believe anyone could read it without having their ideas about all of these things altered in some way.
    Father Damien Modeste, the parish priest for the Native American community of Little No Horse in North Dakota is 112 years old when we meet him, and as he nears the end of his life, he faces a dilemma.  The Vatican is sending a priest to investigate the possibility that Sister Leopolda, a deceased nun from his parish around whom miracles were said to occur, should be sainted.  Father Damien knows for certain that Sister Leopolda should not be made a saint, but to reveal the entire story about why she shouldn't would expose his own secret -- that he is actually a woman.  We are told the entire story of  how the woman Agnes, a 28-year old former nun, became Father Modeste in 1912, and of all the members of the interconnected Native American families, including the Kashpaws, in a narrative that skips between years and decades from 1912-1996.  This is an amazing, wonderful book.
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Kinship Theory, by Hester Kaplan
    A while back I reviewed a collection of short stories by Hester Kaplan called The Edge of Marriage .   Her ability to portray relationships in various states of flux, dysfunction, and just plain messiness without judging her characters is masterful, and in this novel her abilities are stretched over much broader and very interesting terrain.  We have all seen the nauseating news stories and daytime talk show puff pieces about mothers who have babies for their daughters, or have new babies to save their living children, but this novel goes inside that situation and makes us see what those rosy-colored people might really be experiencing and feeling.
    Maggie Crown is a divorced scientist, fiercely independent, and 47 years old.  Her relationship with her daughter Dale, however, is extremely close, despite the fact that Dale seems to have turned out much more buttoned-down and conventional than Maggie would have liked.  In fact, outside of her work, the central fact of Maggie's existence since Dale turned 14 has been the discovery that Dale was born without a uterus.  Maggie's guilt, partly over the fact that she had never really wanted children and then that Dale seemed to become harshly promiscuous at a young age, has clouded the edge of their relationship ever since.  Now that Dale is 25 and married, becoming a mother has taken on the characteristics of an unhealthy obsession for her, and after failed attempts at adoption, she persuades Maggie to carry a child for her and her husband Nate.  The emotional terrain of such a decision is fraught with psychological land mines, and they seem to stumble upon just about every one of them.
    Maggie, while going through all of the physical and hormonal changes of a mother-to-be, albeit an older one, cannot understand why Dale seems so oddly removed now that her wish is being fulfilled.  Dale, on the other hand, cannot understand her mother's outbursts and erratic behavior, and seems to lose her own moorings completely after the baby is born.  Nothing is resolved cleanly in this novel, and both Maggie and Dale, along with some of the other characters in the book, leave a lot of devastation in their wake, but this is an extremely penetrating study of an actual real-life situation made possible by ethically debatable technology and the human considerations that must be made once the television cameras are off.
 

Singing Boy, by Dennis McFarland
    Dennis McFarland writes novels that are quiet in tone but very, very deep, with subtle layers of texture as light as tissue paper permeating the simplest interactions and his characters' responses to them.  On the way home from a dinner at which he was being honored for his architectural restoration of a building, Malcolm Vaughn is shot to death in front of his wife Sarah and their 8-year old son Henry.  Sarah, a rational cientist by profession, is nonetheless thrown into a tailspin of grief so overwhelming that for weeks she is simply paralyzed, unable to even properly relate to her son.  Henry on the other hand copes by becoming almost too perfect, refusing to create problems while his mother seems unwilling to stop making it harder for everyone.  Complicating things is Malcolm's best friend Deckard Jones, a former drug addict/alcoholic who finds himself thrust by his friend's death into PTSD-like hallucinations about his time in Vietnam.
    This is the story of how these three people who loved a man so completely, and who lost so much in his senseless murder, begin again to rise and walk.  Sarah's slow, painful, and even irritating inability to cope seems much more real than the shiny kind of pluckiness with which so many modern heroines are endowed.  She does not rise above her plight to accomplish great things.  She slowly and painfully begins to realize that it just might be possible for herself, her son, and her friend to be okay.  This is a beautifully written novel.
 

Death in Holy Orders, by P. D. James
    Each time P. D. James trots Adam Dalgliesh out for a spin, I am just so glad that she is still writing.  Her mysteries, unlike the most popular American pseudo-mysteries written by James Patterson, the Kellermans, Patricia Cornwell, or the endless cast competing for mega-bucks book contracts rather than quality, continue to be intelligent, elaborately plotted and researched, and enjoyable without becoming trite or predictable.  In this book, Commander Dalgliesh is asked by Sir Alred Treeves, a sort of Murdoch-like British captain of industry, to investigate the death of Treeves' adopted son Ronald, an ordinate at a small Church of England theological college.  His death has been ruled a suicide, but Sir Alred has received an anonymous note encouraging further investigation, and his power gives him the ability to send the best of New Scotland Yard to East Anglia to do just that.  As it happens, Dalgliesh, the son of a vicar, spent some pleasurable time at the college in his teens, and is more than willing to visit the old monks there.  But when he arrives at the college, a place which holds fond memories for him, he discovers much more than a controversial suicide.  Soon there are two more deaths -- one of which is perhaps too quickly ruled as death by natural causes, and one which is very clearly a murder.  In such small and isolated quarters, it has to be an inside job, and in the process of finding out who has done these terrible deeds, we learn much about the older tradition of the Anglican Church, the politics of the modern Church of England, the geography of East Anglia, and all the twists and turns of human nature that Dame James explores so expertly.
 

The Last Time They Met, by Anita Shreve
    Anita Shreve is one of my favorite female writers, but this time, although I read the book straight through on a Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed.  It starts intriguingly enough -- 52-year old poet Linda Fallon is surprised to encounter her former lover, poet Thomas Janes, at a literary festival.  It has been 26 years since they were last together in Africa, when she was in the Peace Corps and married to a British banker, and he was with his wife, a student.  But Thomas had been in love with Linda since they were in high school, and the affair they began in Africa was brief, passionate, and ended badly.  Thomas then went on to marry a photographer who was the main character in another of Shreve's books, The Weight of Water ,(he was a minor character in that book) and Linda had a long and happy marriage and family life with her husband who is now dead.  Thomas is now divorced from the wife he had in the earlier book, and has been silenced as a poet since the tragic death of his daughter at the end of that story.  This is to be his re-emergence, but when he and Linda see each other, it becomes a revisitation of much more than his career as a poet.  Gradually we are told the long story of Thomas's love for Linda that began when she came to live with her cousins at 15, was re-kindled in Africa, and is here now once again, and while we wait for something truly profound to come from this interesting history, it never really does.  The secrets of their high school break-up, and of the end of their African passion are really not very deep or interesting at all, and Shreve renders the emotions of these two late middle-agers in an over-wrought style that would not seem to fit the life experiences of either.   Still, as in the lukewarm response I had to both Barbara Kingsolver's latest and to Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's daughter, I have to say that a disappointing Anita Shreve beats the best of most others.
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July 2001

Empire Falls, Back When We Were Grown-ups, Thinks. . ., Good in Bed, Female Ruins

Empire Falls, by Robert Russo
    Miles Roby runs the Empire Grill in Empire Falls, Maine, a formerly robust textile manufacturing city ruled over by the Whitehead family and now on the "free trade" skids.  Miles is such a nice guy that his ex-wife Janine asks him to give her away in her new marriage to a local blowhard who owns the health club where she lost weight, and after work he is re-painting the Catholic Church for free.  But through the lives of Miles and his family, including his drunken father Max, his formerly drunken brother David, and his daughter Tick, among others, an undercurrent of mystery and untold secrets is threatening to wash up to the surface, and it has a lot to do with his dead mother Grace, who worked her entire life to make sure Miles got educated and got out of Empire Falls.  Francine Whitehead, the widow of the last remaining Whitehead scion employed Grace until her tragic death, and then hired Miles to run the Grill, promising to leave it to him in her will.  But Francine's motives, while never clear, are now becoming more and more suspect, and Miles moves toward realizations that will change the lives of everyone important to him.
    Most of the critics reviewing this great novel have focused on Russo as the chronicler of the run-down or dying small towns, mostly on the East Coast.  This is true, but there is so much more in this novel, in its precise and insightful individual characterizations, humor, and especially in its plotting, that takes it out of a specific genre.  This novel entertains, disturbs, provokes and satifies all at the same time.  I have found myself thinking about it again and again.  Read it.
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Back When We Were Grownups, by Anne Tyler
    Rebecca "Beck" Davitch, 53-year old mother, grandmother, and party planner, begins to feel that she has lived her entire life as a person nothing like her real self.  Studious, quiet, solitary, and mature as a young girl, she was swept off her feet by the colorful Joe Davitch when she was 21 and he was 33, marrying him and his entire family, including his three young daughters, at the same time deserting her lifelong sweetheart, the equally studious and quiet Will Allenby.  Party planning was the family business, and soon she was its heart and soul.  It seems that the Davitch family fell into the party planning business mostly because they were possessed of a grand old Baltimore mansion whose grandeur lent itself to parties and other occasions, not because the Davitches were particularly organized or festive, and when Joe died only six years into her marriage, Beck was forced to helm the Davitch ship, which included Joe's widower Uncle Poppy along with her own daughter with Joe and the three she acquired upon her marriage.  Now, almost 30 years later, Poppy is nearing his 100th birthday, and Beck is prompted by a dream and other circumstances to wonder "what if?" to the point that she even calls Will Allenby and begins to explore what might have been her other "real" life, had it proceeded as planned all those years ago.
    As a huge Anne Tyler fan, I was somewhat disappointed  by her last two novels, but this book, to me, is Tyler at the height of her evocative, warm, empathetic powers.  There is heartfelt universality at the heart of her quirky, messy characters in the shabby city of Baltimore, and it was not lost on me.
 

Thinks. . ., by David Lodge
    Ralph Messenger, director of a prestigious Center for Cognitive Studies at the fictional Gloucester University in England, is an alpha male and knows it.  While studying the "problem" of consciousness and structure of thought which is Cognitive Science (the latest and most stylish of sciences), he ruminates into a tape recorder about the women he's had and the women he wants, just to see how his mind works.  Despite his relatively happy marriage and family life, (interpreted by him to mean that, it's okay if he's unfaithful if he's away from home) when writer Helen Reed, newly widowed, comes to lead a Creative Writing Course for a term, Ralph decides that she has to be his next target.  Helen, however is not interested, and her journal becomes, besides the transcriptions of Ralph's thoughts, our other point of view in the story.  But Helen, still very much missing her husband, is soon to have some unwelcome awakenings that eventually send her into Ralph's bed.  One of her Creative Writing students has created a character in her fiction very much like the main character in one of Helen's books, who in turn had been modeled on Helen's husband.  When she rules out plagiarism, it becomes obvious that this student has had an affair with her husband, and one revelation leads to another.  Helen's grief is over, and Ralph gets his chance.  But in this complicated world of academia, twists and turns abound, and Helen is not the only one who is in for some surprises.
    David Lodge is a master at satire, and this is no exception.  What I found particularly fascinating about this book, however, is the interesting detail about the Cognitive Science, its progress and its perspectives on the human mind, albeit uttered, explained, and speculated upon by the cad (who is really not so bad after all) Ralph.
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Good in Bed, by Jennifer Weiner
    Our society is beset with many contradictions, one of the greatest being that a majority of Americans are overweight while sharing a national, or at least a media, obsession with body image.  Daytime television is full of ads for weight loss programs, while nighttime TV watchers are bombarded with one fast food franchise pitch after the other.  The ultimate merging of these two has been accomplished by the Subway Sandwich Company, who has started pitching their fast food as a weight loss program because of a guy named Jared who lost over 200 pounds eating only Subway sandwiches.  Health be damned, it is size that matters, we are all being told, at least subliminally, every day.  And of course there is Oprah, everyone's friend, making her own weight not just her own obsession.  She believes, and apparently millions of others do too, that we all care very much about her, loss, and realization about her size.
    In "Good in Bed" Jennifer Weiner has synthesized all of this into a hugely funny, poignant, and entertaining novel.  Canny Shapiro, an entertainment reporter/reviewer for a large Philadelphia newspaper, is also a large woman.  She has reached an uneasey peace with her size, that is until her ex-boyfriend writes a column for a glossy Cosmopolitan-style magazine, the title of which is "Good in Bed -- Loving a Larger Woman", and it's all about her.
Suddenly the issue of her size overwhelms her, along with doubts about whether or not she should have broken up with this guy, since as others keep reminding her "he really understands."  Canny's life then seems to take some really crazy twists and turns, as she signs up for a weight loss study at a local university, suddenly becomes best friends with a movie star, deals with her mother's newfound lesbianism, and revisits the painful facts about her relationship with her father, a plastic surgeon who left the family years before and has completely lost contact with her.  Throughout the story, however, it is Canny's mordant humor and brilliant wit that makes this entire painful process of self-realization and acceptance so highly enjoyable.

Female Ruins, Geoff Nicholson
    Geoff Nicholson has written a book about architecture and human relationships that is both funny and profound.  Christopher Howell, now deceased, is considered "the greatest architect who never built a building", and is somewhat of a cult figure, especially for students of architecture, because of his criticism and writing about structures and buildings.  Kelly Howell, a Suffolk cab driver, is his 25-year old daughter, and easily tires of asking questions about him, while still missing him greatly herself.  When American Jack Dexter, walking with a cane and a limp, shows up in Suffolk and hires her to drive him around her part of England on day trips, she is at first suspicious but begins to warm up to him after awhile because he seems to enjoy the kind of kitschy architecture that she used to visit with her father as a child.  Imagine her surprise, then, when she finds out that not only does he not have a limp, he has come to England only to see her, and that her father may have indeed actually built something -- a house in the California for his father, many years ago.
    This is an interesting book stylistically, because interspersed with the novel's unfolding story are essays supposedly written and published by Christopher Howell which give insight into his cult-like status in the world of architecture as well as Kelly's own interests in such things as miniature golf courses, cheesy seaside resorts, and other modern structures that might otherwise be dismissed.
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Up in the Air; Juniper Tree Burning; A Traitor to Memory; Greetings from the Golden State;Girl Talk
 

Up in the Air, by Water Kirn
        This satirical novel by the author of "Thumbsucker", another book I featured on my page, is so right on and hip that it hurts.  Ryan Bingham is 35 years old and lives in the rarified atmosphere of consultants and other types of salesmen who spend most of their time in cyberspace, on airplanes, and in generic hotels, attending seminars, eating in chain restaurants, and making pseudo-meaningful connections with strangers on planes and in bars.  But Ryan seems to revel in this world of anomie, and is anxiously awaiting the climactic moment that he will attain one million frequent flier miles on Great West Airlines. In fact, he has orchestrated this event down to the minute he will cross that line, airborne of course, the toast of the airline's inflight magazine.  He is savvy in the most 21st century way.  He loves the predictable sameness of what he calls "Airworld", where USA Today is the daily newspaper and the Homestead Inn can be counted on to have precisely the same room configuration wherever he goes.   He has even gone so far as to move out of his apartment because it gets so little use.  He is the ultimate expert on the peripatetic world of digital commerce and corporate culture.
        Ryan criss-crosses the mid-section of American dealing in "CTC", or Career Transition Counseling.  In other words, he's paid to fire people in different failing companies, putting a positive spin on their situations with slogans and jargon designed  to help avoid lawsuits and/or suicides and worse.  But under Ryan's slick surface there are cracks, and it is the genius of this book that we see it as a wicked satire while at the same time we come to see that this guy definitely has a lot more happening inside him than the corporate-speak that comes out of his mouth as he does his job, and the cynical observations he shares with us.
        There are large sections of "Up in the Air" that could only be described by direct quotes, and much does deserve quoting, as  the reviewer in the New York Times chose to do, but suffice it to say that this is a brilliant book.
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Juniper Tree Burning, by Goldberry Long
        This is another book that blew me away.  Some other reviewers were less than kind about this novel, but I thought it packed a huge, unrelenting, emotional wallop.  Think "White Oleander" times ten.  Juniper Tree Burning is the name Jennie Davis's hippie parents gave her soon after she was born, but she always knew that wasn't her real name and couldn't wait to change it.  Raised in the desert outside Taos, New Mexico, Jennie left home and the terrible atmosphere that grew out of her parents' lifestyle at 15, determined to do whatever it took to have a "normal" life.  She soon fashioned a more mainstream life for herself, receiving scholarships and getting engaged in medical school.  But when she left home, she left her brother Sunny Boy Blue to endure alone the hardship, abuse and violence in her parents' home.
        When Sunny shows up at her wedding, drunk and seeming to want revenge, even going so far as to kidnap her and drive her 70 miles away from the reception, forcing her to look at old photos, Jenny writes him off for good.  She is so furious that when he calls up eight months later to apologize she won't listen, and then it's too late.  Sunny commits suicide and in the aftermath Jenny's carefully planned and controlled life falls apart, memories and grief overcoming her.
        Throughout the novel, time shifts from the world of the young Jenny from the ages of eight to fifteen, to Jenny in the present day.  There is so much plot here that it would be easy to criticize it as overwritten, but to me, it was the force within the character of Jenny that kept my attention throughout.  She is a person who has been desperately trying to escape her past for so long that she can't stop running until she finally hits a wall.
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A Traitor to Memory, by Elizabeth George
        Elizabeth George's new mystery has the main focus back on Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley as the primary investigator.  Her last novel, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner, focused on his partner Barbara Havers, and she is here also, but back in a secondary role.  We also have Lynley's wife Helen, his friends Simon and Deborah  St. James, and investigator Winston Nkata.  All these characters are joined by an interesting cast of almost double that number, and it is not hard to understand why this mystery novel weighs in at over 700 pages.  The joy of reading George's mysteries is that as she has progressed, the detailed and layered plots, along with the characters, have become more and more complex and sophisticated.  This is not Sue Grafton, and thank the Lord for that.
        This time Lynley and his team are called upon to investigate the murder of Eugenie Davies, a woman who was hit by a car and then run over again, making it an obvious murder.  What complicates this is that there was a famous murder case surrounding Eugenie twenty years earlier, when her 2-year old daughter Sonia was drowned in the bath, apparently by her German nanny, who mysteriously put up no defense at the time and who has recently been released from prison. Eugenie also had an address in her hand at the time belonging to a man who had been a lodger in her home at the time of her earlier murder and who now engages in anonymous sex with older women he meets on the Internet.  Interspersed with chapters about the investigation that really takes only a few days are journal entries of Eugenie's estranged youngson, Gideon Davies, a violin prodigy who is seeing a psychiatrist because he has lost the ability to play.  He soon feels that remembering what happened when his sister died will help him recover, an idea that his father, who has controlled his career for over twenty years, strongly rejects.   Along with this we have a character suffering from agoraphobia, some lesbians, some racism, and a bit of an eating disorder to complicate the lives of some of the minor characters, making for a very involving read.
 

Greetings from the Golden State, by Leslie Brenner
        This novel is told in a series of vignettes, beginning in 1960 and ending in the mid-1990's, about a Southern California family -- Fanny and Don Kelbow and their two sons, Andrew and Mike.  Their lives mirror the evolution of history, current events, and popular culture over the years, as well as their own trials and tribulations -- including divorce, addiction, failure and death.  Andrew, the oldest son, is simultaneously gifted and under-achieving, while Mike begins a life of drug addiction and gambling, lighthearted at first, at a very young age.  Don, a lawyer, leaves his family and goes through a number of changes and relationships, while Fanny remarries and serves both anchor and weight against change.  Andrew finally realizes that leaving Los Angeles is what he needs, for a number of reasons it takes him years to realize.
    The book is fun but also extremely insightful, and anyone from Southern California will enjoy it.  It describes a zeitgeist and contains stereotypes, but it still works as a good, light read.
 

Girl Talk, by Julia Baggott
        Lissy Jablonski's world is turned upside-down during her 16th summer when her mother Dotty reveals that (1)her father is sleeping with a red-haired bank teller, and (2) he isn't actually her real father.  When her father then leaves town, Lissy and Dotty travel to Bayonne, New Jersey, where Dotty grew up.  Dotty then begins to tell  Lissy the real story of her life, with all the omitted details finally included.  Told from Lissy's point of view at age 30, she tries to find some answers to her present problems in what was learned in that one year.  Lissy is now single and pregnant, and she revisits this pivotal year in her life to seek explanations for her own behavior.
        Because so many books these days are told from the point of view of the young adolescent or pre-adolescent girl viewing her parents, this could seem like a cliche.  But this book and its portrayal of Lissy's relationship with her mother, along with the character of Dotty herself, are truly memorable.
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A Student of Weather, The Shape of Snakes, Exile, Easy Silence, Blue Diary, Perfect Recall, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
 

A Student of Weather, by Elizabeth Hay
    It is the early 1930's and 8-year old Norma Joyce Hardy, her older sister Lucinda, and their father Ernest live a devastatingly hard life on a hardscrabble farm in Willow Bend, Saskatchewan, a place with weather so extreme that mere survival depends upon constant and unrelenting labor.  Norma Joyce is dark, homely, intelligent and difficult, while Lucinda is light, beautiful, and dutiful in the extreme, and by far their father's favorite.  Soon, however, their farm life is transformed by a visit from Maurice Dove, a handsome and wealthy young man from Ontario who has come West to study the Prairie Dust Bowl and its flora and fauna.  From that first visit, and throughout her life, Norma Joyce loves Maurice obsessively, and competes with Lucinda, who at first appears to be his favoritie.  The actions taken by Norma to thwart her sister, and what Lucinda does in return, play out over the course of 50 years, as the Hardys move to Ontario and Norma later to New York, and Maurice is involved at every twist and turn.
    This is a Canadian novel, and like so many other Canadian novels I have read, including "The Stone Diaries", it spans an entire lifetime -- in this case over 30 years.  It is both intense and quiet, linear and multi-layered, with the characters of the Hardy family -- Norma Joyce, Lucinda, and Ernest -- seared indelibly into the plot.
 

The Shape of Snakes, by Minette Walters
    This is a mystery whose solution also contains an amazing element about a woman's 20-year determination to get revenge while solving it.  In 1978, Madeleine Ranelagh stumbled upon the dying body of her African-American neighbor, called "Mad Annie."  Annie was believed to be crazy most of the time, and was tormented by many of her working class white neighbors, especially the young boys next door to her home.  When she is found in the street, most of the others in their London neighborhood, including Madeleine's husband believe that she was hit by a truck while drunk, and good riddance anyway.  Madeleine, however, is convinced that Annie was murdered and becomes obsessed with proving it.  When her husband, with her own mother's support, threatens to divorce her if she doesn't give up her investigation, Madeleine relents, and they leave England.  But when they return as a family with 2 sons 20 years later, Madeleine's husband, her old neighbors, and even the retired policeman in charge of the case are shocked to find that she has been conducting her investigation in secret for all the years they were gone, and is about to reveal the truth.  Everyone, including her best friend at the time and her husband is implicated in some way, and the answers to the riddle of Annie's seemingly crazy character, and what happened to her, are extremely complex.
    Minette Walters writes mysteries that are so much more.  As in "The Sculptress", there are many, many layers to eachof the plot's events.  The way the truth that Madeleine has uncovered is unfolded a bit at a time, through correspondence and other documents she has collected over the 20 year period, and how she chooses to assemble all those who were culpable and who also victimized her at the time, is brilliant.
 

Exile, by Denise Mina
    In Maureen O'Donnell, the main character of this and one previous mystery by Denise Mina, we find one of the most refreshing fictional voices in recent memory.  Maureen, a Glasgow woman who is an incest survivor, drinks too much, has a bad temper, and hides information from the police about crazy letters she is getting from an inmate she helped put away.  She is also a crusader for truth at any cost.  Struggling with the murder of her lover just six months ago, Maureen finds out that her father has returned to Glasgow.  This sends her reeling, and when one of the battered wives at the counseling center she works for is murdered, she plunges compulsively into the investigation of the woman's death, almost as a way of escaping her own demons.  The obvious suspect in the murder is the woman's husband, but when Maureen meets him, she finds a man who is a consummate loser, and concludes that he could not have possibly harmed anyone.  No one believes her, but she travels to London where the body was found, and gets into a very sticky situation with a group of violent drug users and dealers until her brother, himself a former drug dealer, intervenes to help.
    I loved this book and especially this character.  I would be hard-put to compare Maureen to any other character I've encountered to date.  Her character and the rough Scottish vernacular, climate, and atmosphere created by Denise Mina's prose, is truly exciting.
 

Easy Silence, by Angela Huth
    William and Grace Handle have lived a perfect married life for 25 years.  William is the lead violinist in the Elmtree String Quartet, a group of some reknown, and Grace is an artist who paints wild flowers.  Their life, with its comfortable daily routines, and 'easy silence' has until now left nothing to be desired.  But when the male cello player in the quartet leaves and a young woman is hired to take his place, William's moorings come completely undone, and we discover that he is actually something of an obsessive-compulsive nut job.  Meanwhile, Grace has introduced a rogue element in to their life on her own.  Lucien, a young man in the neighborhood, has taken to visiting Grace evey morning.  He complains about his mother, a 'slut' who supposedly sleeps around and treats him badly, occasionally breaks her dishes, and is alternately sullen and charming. While his behavior is erratic and disturbing, Grace nonetheless looks forward to seeing him and misses him dearly when he doesn't come.  William has no idea about Lucien's increasingly strong effect on Grace, nor does Grace have any idea of William's growing obsession with the new cello player and his clumsy attempts to cope with it.  Little do they know what havoc these two ripples in their own private sea of tranquility will eventually wreak before this period in their lives is over.
    While this book starts slowly and quietly in the almost-stodgy British tradition of someone like Anita Brookner, it soon reveals a black sense of humor that makes it into a page-turner.  The character of William, and Angela Huth's descriptions of the fussy yet passionate preoccupations of his mind, is especially entertaining.
 

Blue Diary, by Alice Hoffman
    Jorie Ford thinks that it would be impossible for anyone to be happier than she is.  She has Ethan, her husband of 13 years, and her 12-year old son. Ethan is so perfect that just about everyone in their small Massachusetts town loves him almost as much as she does.  Fireman, carpenter, Little League coach, and good friend to all, Ethan is also handsome, kind, upstanding, and heroic.  They believe that their life is complete, and indeed it is, until their little idyll comes screeching to a halt when the local sheriff and some of Ethan's other good friends show up at the door to arrest him for a 15-year old rape and murder committed in Maryland.  It seems that 11-year old Katie, their next door neighbor and their son's best friend (and also about the only one in town who is not Ethan's fan for some intuitive reason) saw Ethan's photo on a show like "America's Most Wanted", and turned him in.  Jorie's, and the entire town's efforts to cope with this devastating news makes up the rest of the story.
    Alice Hoffman likes to borrow plots from classic novels and update them, and this is no exception.  While her novel "Here on Earth" was a modernized Wuthering Heights, revealing Heathcliff to be more stalker and domestic abuser than romantic hero, "Blue Diary" is a sort of "Les Miserables" for the 21st century.  Except that the reformed Ethan has a lot more than a stolen loaf of bread in his past.  The process that Jorie goes through to find out who her husband really was, and is, is very well-drawn, and by the end of the book we believe she has taken the right path.  While Hoffman's prose is a bit florid and overblown, this is a compelling read anyway.
 

Perfect Recall, by Ann Beattie, and The Unknown Errors of our Lives, by Chitra Divakaruni
    I'm including this book without describing the short stories in it, because each of them is so well-written, they are like jewels.  I'm a big fan of Ann Beattie, especially her short stories, and these are just wonderful.  Whether she is inhabiting the mind of a woman, a man, a Vietnam veteran, a cancer patient, or an AIDS victim, she is pitch perfect.  The same can be said for Chitra Divakaruni in her short story collection, "The  Unknown Errors of our Lives".  As in her earlier short story collection, "Arranged Marriage", she visits contemporary Indian families, particularly the women.  The clash between the old world and the new, and the old ways and the new, are brought to life in a deep, thoughtful, and haunting fashion.  Her Indian women characters are complex and often conflicted, trying to lead modern lives and have modern relationships that grow out of  the old customs, without losing anything.  This is very hard, and Divakaruni's stories make that very clear.
Back to March 2002
 
 

The Cold Six Thousand,How to be Good, The Corrections, While You Were Gone, What You Owe Me

The Cold Six Thousand, by James Ellroy
       I finished The Cold Six Thousand  just before the New York attacks, and it definitely affected the way I perceived what happened on September 11.  This is the second novel in Ellroy's second trilogy, the first trilogy describing the Los Angeles crime and political scene in the 50's (L.A. Confidential, White Jazz, etc.) and this one about the American political climate in the last half of the twentieth century.  American Tabloid, the first in this series, described the players and the political scene that led up to JFK's assasination, and I, for one, think Ellroy got it exactly right.  Utilizing his own inimitable and unique style, he portrayed the Cubans, the FBI agents, the politicos themselves, along with the CIA,  the Mob, Howard Hughes and the many extraneous criminals and hit men available for hire by all of them, aligning themselves after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and the refusal of Bobby Kennedy to lay off organized crime, to pull off what, for many of us, was the defining event of a lifetime on November 22, 1963.  The Cold Six Thousand picks up on that very day, immediately after the shooting in Dallas, and runs through the years leading up to and including the assasinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby himself.  Two recurring characters, Ward Littel, a former FBI agent now turned lawyer for Howard Hughes and the Mob, and Pete Bondurant, a hit man and rabid anti-communist, are embroiled in the Byzantine behind-the-scenes machinations of  so many intertwined elements that it takes a road map to keep track -- these being, among others, Jack Ruby's orders to off Lee Harvey Oswald and how that came to be, the drug trade in Las Vegas, the heroin being manufactured in Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, the arms and drugs sold to finance an uprising in Cuba, the buying of Las Vegas by Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with Martin Luther King's sex life, the financing of Richard Nixon's return to politics, and Jimmy Hoffa's lengthy appeal process and ultimate promise of a pardon by Nixon.   Along with this is the choosing and careful grooming and prodding of the "Patsies" who ultimately took the fall for MLK's and RFK's death, respectively.
        But  merely listing some of these elements does not do this book  justice.  Some critics have said of this book that it contains too much, tries too hard, or even overreaches itself.  I would say, as one who has read all of  Ellroy's works, that this is a tour-de-force, even a masterpiece, and one of the most incredible and intricately plotted books I have ever read. I found myself believing every bit of  it.  Knowing what we know now about these historical events, most significantly the perfidy of J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and the Mob's involvement with the Kennedy election, reading this is like following a sort of underworld historical timeline.  At first,  I put off reading this book because it just looked so big and seemed so daunting, and I knew it was going to be heavy, but once I took it up I literally could not put it down.  And when those planes hit the World Trade Center, I couldn't help but think of all that we are never told, and how convenient it was that just as the assassins in these books were caught so quickly after the acts, that the FBI knew exactly who these terrorists were within 24 hours.  (For the sake of political correctness, I am not implying anything unpatriotic -- one can't be too careful these days.)
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How to be Good, by Nick Hornby
        This is a thoroughly delightful and often hilarious book which nonetheless contains some serious reflection on what it is to be "good" and how we should live our lives if we are going to be thought of as "good."  Katie Carr, a GP living with her writer husband David and their two children in the Holloway area of London, is running on 'spiritual empty' even though she has consciously chosen her career to guarantee that she could at least think of herself as a 'good' person at least some of the time.  David, her husband, appears to have gone completely to the 'bad' side as far as she can see.  He writes a column called "The Angriest Man in Holloway", engaging in nasty rants about old people on buses and all the other things that make almost everyone, at least in his mind, idiotic.  The list of things and people he hates takes up at least two pages of text in this book.  He appears to despice everyone and everything, including Katie, and theirs is a relationship full of strife and sarcasm.  One morning Katie shocks herself by announcing that she no longer wants to be married, and then half-heartedly begins an illicit affair.  David's response, however, shocks her.  Instead of becoming angry, he at first simply ignores her proclamation, and then suddenly appears to undergo an extreme spiritual transformation at the hands of a chap called DJ GoodNews.  He completely changes his attitude toward everyone and starts being thoughtful, kind, helpful and supportive, while encouraging his children to give away most of their toys because they have so much and others have so little.  He and DJ plan to write a book called "How to be Good", full of life lessons based on their realizations, and even organize an effort to get each of their neighbors to take in a homeless teenager.  Suddenly Katie, for whom guilt has always been a huge problem, and who had so profoundly wished for David to change, is confronted with a nice person she doesn't recognize, and begins an even greater struggle with her guilt and 'goodness'.
        "How to be Good" is, as are Nick Hornby's other works, an extremely intelligent, and ultimately warm, book.  His ability to get into the female mind of Katie, and identify the thought processes and over-analyzing inherent in any relationship, whether between husband and wife or parent and child, is often brilliant and always entertaining.
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The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
        This novel has been so highly praised, and has made it into the Oprah Book Club (an unusually difficult and sophisticated choice for that group), so I won't bother to heap any more superlatives upon it here.  Suffice it to say that this is the book of the year, at least for me, much the way Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was last year.  This book is the bomb.  Great.  Brilliant.  Incredible.  You get my meaning.
        The Lambert family of St. Jude, Missouri, while seemingly the epitome of Midwest nuclear-ness, has layers of dysfunction that have cast a shadow over all their lives, even as the children have attained adulthood and the parents retirement.  Gary, the eldest, has married well and made a lot of money, and dwells in what might be a materialist's paradise except that he is clinically depressed and strives constantly to prove that he isn't.  Chip, the intellectual son, has lost his position at a prestigious university because of an affair with a student, and has been living off his sister Denise's money in New York while trying to write a screenplay about his academic tragedy.  Chip is a master of self-sabotage, his decline and fall playing out almost balletically.  And Denise, now a successful chef and restauranteur, has engaged in a lifelong pattern of unsuitable relationships with married or much older men.  Meanwhile, at the heart of all of this angst (which, becaue of Franzen's exquisite ear for dialogue and character, actually seems all-too-normal) are Enid and Alfred, their parents, at war for all of their married life, with Alfred now suffering from Parkinson's disease and incipient dementia, and Enid in eternal optimistic denial, maintaining that only if Alfred, and the rest of her family, would have always done things her way, everything could have been, and still would be, fine.
        These people are neurotic and unlikeable, and they are warm, human and lovable.  Besides the family drama, Franzen portrays the techno-modern society, its obsession with the stock market, and the inability to find happiness in abundance that afflicts our great nation, even as we try to struggle with a the new September 11th reality.
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While You Were Gone, by Maggie O'Farrell
        Alice Raikes has been in deep mourning for her husband John for one year, and finds it impossible to function.  On a whim one morning, she boards a train for Scotland to visit her family, but only a few minutes after arriving at the station in Edinburgh and being met by her two sisters, she sees something so shocking in the lavatory mirror that she immediately returns to London, where she steps off a curb in front of a car and goes into a coma.  As she lies in the hospital, we get her story, and that of her mother and her dead husband, in small bits.  The points of view , perspectives, and place in time shift constantly, almost as anyone's memory works, and Alice's history unfolds, as does the secret to the shocking sight she witnessed.
        This book is good for many reasons besides the plot.  The descriptions of life in Scotland are beautiful, and the characters of Alice, her mother Anne, her husband John, and all the other supporting cast are skilfully rendered.
 

What You Owe Me, by Bebe Moore Campbell
        I have to admit that I am surprised to be putting this book on my page.  Until now, I thought of Bebe Moore Campbell as sort of a Black woman's Barbara Taylor Bradford, just a bit too lightweight, simplistic, and feel-good for my taste.  But when the LA Times gave "What You Owe Me" a glowing review and praised its accurate portrayal of life in Los Angeles over the last 50 years, I thought I'd give it a try.  For the first 150 pages, I felt that my original and superficial appraisal of Moore Campbell's fictional niche was accurate, but then I found myself reading with more and more growing interest, as the characters became more complex and layered, and the plot really started moving along.
        In 1948 Hosanna Clark, a young Black woman recently arrived from Inez, Texas, and Gilda, a Holocaust survivor, meet as hotel maids in downtown Los Angeles.  Soon they become not only unlikely friends, but business partners, manufacturing cosmetics for Black women in their off hours, soon making enough to quit their day jobs and expand their operation.  But when Gilda apparently absconds with all their money, Hosanna has to fend for herself, and while moderately successful, she never achieves the bigger dream she and Gilda had shared -- of getting cosmetics for Black women into the larger market, the big department store chains.  Hosanna carries a life-long grudge against Gilda, and passes it along fully formed to her youngest daughter Matriece.  Gilda did become a hugely successful figure in the cosmetics world as Hosanna struggled, and now, in 1998, Matriece has gotten herself hired as the executive in charge of Gilda's new "Brown Sugar" line, aimed at young Black women, without Gilda knowing that she is Hosanna's daughter.  Hosanna is long dead, but it is her ghost who introduces us to the story's main players, and she appears intermittently to the major figures in the unfolding of her vendetta as time passes.
        There is a large cast of characters, including Vonette, Hosanna's older and unfavored daughter, who nonetheless has a happy home and family life with her Mexican husband and three children, Asia Pace, an Aliyah-like Black pop star who just happens to be a personal friend to Matriece, Mooney, Hosanna's former lover and hugely successful member of the Black business community, and Sam, an ex-con car detailer, among others. And yes, the plot wraps up a little too neatly, and the good people are a little too good, and the beautiful people are very, very beautiful, but What You Owe Me has enough depth, complexity, and accuracy of observation to provide both insight and entertainment.
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The Seventh Telling:  the Kabbalah of Moshe Katan, The Center of Things, An American Outrage:  a novel of Quillifarkeag, Maine,
The Other side of Mulholland, Look at Me

The Seventh Telling:  the Kabbalah of Moshe Katan, by Mitchell Chefitz
    The Kabbalah is something I have been interested in for a long time, and this is the first novel I have come across that attempts to explain it, at least somewhat, against a fictional background.  While Mitchell Chefits, himself a rabbi, is not the greatest prose stylist, he nevertheless unfolds a story about one man's lifelong spiritual study and how his study transformed the lives of others.  It also gives at least a beginning understanding as to why the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the structural underpinnings of the Kabbalah's mystical teachings.  While this discipline is thousands of years old, and infinitely complex, I came away from this novel with a much better grasp of the subject.  The novel begins with Stephanie and Sidney Lee, former students of Moshe's, conducting a 'telling' of a cycle of stories about Moshe and his wife Rivkah that help illustrate and explain the principles and reality of the Kabbalah.  The stories trace the spiritual evolution of Moshe, once Michael Kaytan, a rabbi, and that of his wife Rivkah, a social worker.  Michael began as a Jewish mathematics student at MIT, then became a air traffic controller on a US aircraft carrier in Vietnam, and then traveled to Israel to study to become a rabbi, where his name was changed and he met Rivkah, who loved Jewish dancing and tradition but not necessarily Jewish religion.  Installed as a young rabbi in San Francisco, Moshe decided to leave the hierarchy of the traditional temple for a more informal group called the Havurah, where he could study the mystical traditions of the Kabbalah without the portentous role of the temple rabbi.  His way of expressing this was that he was no longer a "Rabbi", but now a "rabbi", free to explore the spiritual depths alone and with others away from the strictures imposed by a spiritual ego.  Rivkah supported Moshe's work, while focusing on the more secular tasks of her job as social worker in the hospital's pediatrics ward, but when she relapses into the cancer she had earlier survived, Moshe is prompted to tell a cycle of stories to another group of students, to try and help her.  Rivkah reluctantly participates in the class, where they meet Stephanie and Sidney, who have their own history of problems and spiritual search.  After Rivkah's death, the Lees take on this, the seventh telling.

The Center of Things, by Jenny McPhee
    This novel is a magical combination of physics scholarship, tabloid reporting, old movie quotes, and family reconciliation.  Marie Brown is a tabloid reporter for the Gotham City Star in New York, but her first love is physics and the philosophy of science.  Although she never completed her advanced degree, she still spends her spare time at the New York Library working on her still unfinished opus on physics.  Marie is also a big-time movie buff, and as the novel starts, on of her early idols, Nora Mars, star of stage and screen in the Sixties, has slipped into a coma.  Marie begs her boss to let her do the story surrounding the obituary for Nora, should she die, and begins a strange odyssey into Nora's marriages and background, discovering some very strange things indeed.
  Between tracking down Nora's fourth ex-husband, a broken-down ex-rock star, and Nora's sister, who is not broken down at all, Marie engages in lively conversations about theoretical physics with a strange little man in the library who identifies himself only as a 'free lance intellectual.'  This is a great read.
 

An American Outrage:  a novel of Quillifarkeag, Maine, by G. K. Wuori
    This appears to be G. K. Wuori's second novel of Quillifarkeag, Maine, but it's not hard to jump right in to the mix of quirky Mainers who live there.  "Splotchy" Doll, self-described middle-aged carpenter, is telling the story of Ellen DeLay's death for his own daughter Wilma, who avenged it.  Ellen DeLay left her 25-year marriage to her husband Joe and moved deep into the woods where she started a new career dressing the game that hunters from other areas killed around her camp.  Before she left, however, her behavior had become more and more mysterious to her husband, who still loved her, but after she moved the stories about her became wild and crazy.  So when a minor hunting accident brought the 4 women who represented local legal authority out to her camp and she was shot dead with over 200 rounds of ammunition, it was chalked up to her own craziness, except for the fact that Wilma was a witness to what happened.
    I found Wuori's writing to be exctremely graceful--compassionate and kind to his flawed characters, most of whom were compassionate and kind to each other.  His descriptions of Maine and life therein, are charming.  The tragedy and the attempt by the authorities to cover it up could have, and does, happen anywhere.
 

The Other side of Mulholland, by Stephen Randall
    This is a smart, quick, lightweight satire of life in Los Angeles, with a tone that is soothing in this time of fear and sorrow.  Perry and Tim Newman are twenty-something twins born and raised in Los Angeles -- the important distinction being that they lived on the San Fernando Valley side of Mulholland.  Now, both are trying to make their way in Hollywood, and have relocated to the other side of Mulholland, striving amidst the throngs of others so much like themselves.  This novel looks at all aspects of life in Hollywood and Los Angeles, for both the Newman brothers and their parents, Syd and Ann.  Ann has drifted over the years from real estate to marriage counseling and is searching for a new outlet for her prodigious energies, which she finds temporarily in the movement to have the Valley secede from LA.  Syd is a Honda dealer set upon by his investors, who want to pull out and make a fortune in the dotcom world, where Tim has found a job as an on-line entertainment reporter.  Perry, ostensibly the more successful of the two brothers at the novel's beginning (he writes jokes for a cable quiz show, has a girlfriend who's the personal assistant to a famous young actress, and gets a DEVELOPMENT DEAL), is forced to undergo an intense re-evaluation when his deal goes South, and he becomes a teacher at a Crossroads-like school where the kids know more than he does about his chosen field.  Great fun.
 

Look at Me, by Jennifer Egan
    I enjoyed Jennifer Egan's first book, "The Invisible Circus", and even exchanged letters with her when I wrote to her about the fact that she had her characters listening to "Men at Work" in the Seventies, when they didn't record until the Eighties.  She wrote back, thanking me, and in my own little way I developed a proprietary interest in her.  When this book, "Look at Me" came out, I had planned to read it, but the reviews were mixed and I hesitated.  But when I read further that this novel is now a finalist for the National Book Award, I picked it up and, to its credit, did not put it down.  This is a very ambitious, if not always successful, book.  Jennifer Egan is addressing issues of being, image, time, progress, and most importantly, identity in this novel, and it is significant, at least to me, that I am still thinking about it after finishing it two weeks ago.
    Charlotte Swensen is a second-tier fashion model in her thirties (she admits to 28), and knows that she's out of the running for super-model, something which was almost hers in her twenties.  She lives the high life in New York, however, with a beautiful apartment, new BMW, plenty of catalog shoots and the occasional commercial.  She has developed a form of detachment and finely honed cynicism, however, that sees her club-hopping and casual sex as really all she wants in life, having failed at love at a very early age.  Then, on a trip home to Rockford, Illinois, she is in a devastating car crash that breaks every bone in her face, along with many more parts of her body.  Although the plastic surgeons do an incredible job of reconstructing her face, it's not her face any more, and she looks like a completely different person.  Upon returning to New York, she finds she cannot resume her old life, and struggling with the whole concept of identity, she goes into a downward spiral.
    Meanwhile, there are numerous subplots.  Charlotte's best friend from high school, and her older brother Moose, still live in Rockford.  Moose, rather than fill his high school hunk promise, has beomce a history professor obsessed with the concept that since humans became aware of their outward appearance, somewhere around the time windows began being made of glass and people could see each other, civilization has gone down hill.  It is in Moose's existential and philosophical pain that Egan seems to lose her way, almost as though she just bit off a little more than she could chew -- but the concept itself is extremely interesting.
    And then there is the 'other Charlotte', Ellen's plain 16-year old daughter, who is undergoing a metamorphosis of her own in Rockford, while Charlotte is busy changing and looking for a new life in New York.
    Anyway, what looked to be kind of a hipster novel about New York insted comes across as a deeply thoughtful meditation on our time, our obsession with image over substance, and how that affects civilization.  Like I said, not always successful, but worth the effort.
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The World Below, Falling Angels,  Rough Music, London Bridges, A Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance,

The World Below, by Sue Miller
    On the heels of her second divorce, Catherine Hubbard finds that she has inherited her grandparents' big house in West Barstow, Vermont -- a place where she spent much of her own youth because of her own mother's mental illness.  Catherine decides to move into the old house, at least for awhile, to take stock of her own life and future.  Soon after arriving there, she unearths her grandmother Georgia's diaries, which reveal much she hadn't known abut her grandparents' history, particularly about the time spent by a 19-year old Georgia in a sanitarium for tuberculosis victims.  It seems that Georgia, the eldest of three sisters, had been responsible for her family's household since her mother died when she was 11 years old.  When she became ill, she was effectively rescued from her life of servitude by the doctor who sent her to the sanitarium, and who later became Catherine's grandfather.  The diaries also reveal another of Georgia's secrets -- that she may have had a lover before her husband. Catherine begins to realize that she and her grandmother, while alive in very different times, had lives and made choices that were essentially very similar.
    I always read Sue Miller's books.  As one reviewer put it, there is no emotion that she will not attempt to describe, and at this she is expert.  She is also very good at portraying mental processes and the evolution of relationships.  Her female protagonists are never perfect, but the ways in which they change and the things they realize along the way are always resonant.
 

Falling Angels, by Tracy Chevalier
    One of the premises I found fascinating about Tracy Chevalier's new book is that in the Victorian Age, because the queen herself was in mourning for 45 years, and insisted on wearing mourning clothes all of that time, death, cemeteries, and mourning customs were very fashionable.  In January of 1901, the day after Victoria's death, two families met at a cemetery, where their family plots adjoin.  The Colemans, with their young daughter Maud, are a bit more posh than the Waterhouses, who have two daughters, Livy and Ivy May, and indeed Mr. Coleman frouns upon the angel the Waterhouses have chosen for their plot, preferring the urn he has chosen for their own. Nonetheless, Maud and Livy become instant best friends and soon the Waterhouses by a home next to the Colemans as well.  Over the next ten years Maud and Livy are practically inseparable, and one of their favorite things to do is visit the cemetery and their friend Simon, the son of one of the gravediggers.  The novel is told from alternating points of view, with all of the characters being heard at one point or another describing the events involving the two families, including the servants.  The pivotal character, however, is Kitty Coleman, Maud's beautifulmother.  Being raised in a home where she was allowed intellectual pursuits and higher education in some form, Kitty chafes at the rigid social structure and prescribed Victorian domesticity to which she is expected to conform.  When she becomes a Suffragette, her extreme behavior and the dramatic tone of her zeal ends up irrevocably changing all of their lives, sometimes tragically.
    Tracy Chevalier's first novel, The Girl with a Pearl Earring, is a staple of the book clubs which seem to be cropping up with more frequency, and this book should do the same.  Not too long, not too challenging, and with some historical interest, it's easy without being too simple or banal.
 

Rough Music, by Patrick Gale
    Patrick Gale, the author of Tree Surgery for Beginners a book I reviewed here in 1999 (click on title for review), has written another interestingly plotted novel in Rough Music.  Will Pagett, the quiet-living owner of a bookstore in Barrowcester, England, is given a two-week holiday in Cornwell for his fortieth birthday from his sister Poppy and her husband Sandy.  He decides to take his mother and father along with him.  Frances, his mother, is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's disease, and Will wants to share some quality time with her while giving his father a respite from constantly caring for her.  When it turns out that the cottage is the same one they stayed in as a family 32 years ago, where traumatic and life-altering events took place, and that Poppy has done this intentionally, old memories are uncovered and lives are changed irrevocably.
   The events of the two vacations, so many years apart, are told in alternate chapters.  8-year old Will's father John was a prison governor at the time of the earlier vacation, and the young boy Will made many friends among the more trusted inmates, one of whom undertakes a daring escape while they are at the shore, followed by a daring robbery and escape to Brazil similar to the Great Train Robbery.  Indeed, in the book's Afterword, the author reveals that his own father was a prison governor and was associated with that same case.  When John is called away to deal with the prison crisis,  Frances engages in reckless behavior involving the American husband of John's dead sister Felicia, who has joined them in Cornwall with his daughter Skip.  That short summertime interval has structured all of their lives since, but it has been long buried and never discussed, and in fact Will at first claims to remember nothing.
    Gale does an excellent job of depicting the confusion of the early Alzheimer's patient, and does a fine job of developing the details surrounding his intricate plot which contains far more layers and elements than described here.
 

London Bridges, by Jane Stevenson
        Scenic, diverse, and multi-cultural London provides the backdrop for this mystery involving several characters whose livee intersect almost by happenstance.  Sebastian Raphael, a classical Greek scholar and professor at the Institute of Classical Studies, meets an Australian student from the Institute at her other job, as a pharmacist.  At that very moment, two people speaking Greek purchase a prescription for diabetes medication for a man from Scotland.  These peole are actually working with Edward Lupset, a London lawyer, in an attempt to defraud an old Greek gentleman out of some property by making him confused with medication prescribed for Edward's Scottish uncle.  Coincidentally, this same Greek gentleman has been allowing Sebastian to do reseach in his priceless library of Greek manuscripts in his search for an ancient Greek erotic poem.  Over the course of a few weeks, these lives and a few others collide over the death of the Greek gentleman.
       This is a highly amusing and fey novel, full of intellectually  rich details about Greek manuscripts and monuments and the preservation of London's historical integrity.  If there is one problem it is perhaps that this reads almost like an intellectual exercise, and indeed the author announces early on that she is attempting to write something along the lines of a Margaret Allingham mystery.  Even so, it does work, both as exercise and entertainment.
 

A Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance, by Benjamin Anastas
    The peaceful community of W__________, Massachusetts is disrupted by the sudden disappearance of Thomas Marsh, the handsome African-American pastor of the Pilgrims' Congregational Church. All of the faithful are disturbed for a number of reasons, but Bethany Caruso, a beautiful 35-year old new congregant is upset most of all, because she was sleeping with him.  Bethany came to the church in the grips of an existential crisis, and while religion didn't seem to help, seeing Thomas did.  Now, with him suddenly gone, she feels herself spiraling out of control.  Her husband, however, seems to believe that everything would be all right if only Bethany would start sleeping with him again.  Others in the congregation wonder if Thomas's disappearance could have something to do with the esoteric nature of his final sermon, wherein he described god as an 'infinite sphere'.
    While Bethany's mental state seems to be taken seriously by the author, the rest of the community is treated satirically in all its hypocrisy and suburban angst.  This is a very well-written book and I love its style and humor.
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