Carter Beats the Devil, Highwire Moon, Clerical Errors, The Absence of Nectar, All the Finest Girls: a novel
Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold
    Charles J. Carter, or Carter the Great was a real magician whose life has been re-imagined in lively and wonderful detail by Glen David Gold.  Carter was a contemporary, and perhaps even equal of Houdini, and in this novel Carter the Great's magic show becomes the last event attended by President Warren G. Harding, who dies mysteriously in his hotel room that same night after earlier participating in Carter's act -- a phantasmagorical set of illusions involving a lion, an elephant, a beheading, and other marvels that would surely rival David Cooperfield's today.  For Secret Service Agent Jack Griffin (your father's Secret Service being a much more primitive group than we see today) who had been assigned to check out the safety of Carter's show for the President, the tragic death of the President, whose body is taken by train almost immediately to Ohio and then cremated, is compounded by the fact that he was also on the scene for McKinley's assassination.  He determines to investigate Carter, but Carter the Great is way ahead of, or behind, him, as he is an expert at 'misdirection.'
    Along with this plot, we are told the entire history of Carter's life, how his career was borne out of childhood loneliness, and his present seemingly successful life is shrouded in sadness.  Teamed with colorful characters who really existed, like Houdini and Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television,  and loads of delightful historical detail about the heyday of of magic in the years just before motion pictures, this is a tour de force reminiscent of last years 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.'
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Highwire Moon, by Susan Straight
    This novel was a finalist for the National Book Award, and it is devastatingly powerful.  Dealing with the extremely contemporaneous issue of illegal border crossing and migrant workers in California, it seems that Ms. Straight has gone to the heart of both the illegal immigrant and migrant culture, and the almost equally disadvantaged white 'desert rat' speed-freak culture which characterizes the parts of Southern California that are not so glamorous.  Indeed, any of this book's characters could show up on the next episode of "Cops" and yet Straight makes us see them as the vulnerable human beings they are, shaped by more hard knocks than most of us bourgeois readers could imagine.  Like T.C. Boyle's "Tortilla Curtain", only more so, this should be required reading for all Southern Californians who have these people on the periphery of their vision and yet do not recognize them.
    Elvia is fifteen, the same age her mother Serafina was when she was born.  Elvia hasn't seen her mother since she was three, when Serafina disappeared, not because she abandoned her daughter as Elvia believes, but because she was caught outside a church and deported.  Serafina is from Oaxaca and only speaks her Indian tongue, so her lack of English or even Spanish mae it impossible to let the police know that her daughter was sleeping in the car.  Serafina had been taken in by Elvia's father, Larry Foley, when she first arrived in California, and she had stayed locked in their home until the day she tried to go to church.  Larry is a hard-drinking, drug-taking white man, who left for days at a time, and when Elvia was found, he was not around to claim her.  Nine years after Serafina disappears, Larry finds Elvia in a foster home and takes her with him into his rough life.  Now, Elvia is on the run and pregnant, traveling with her Indian boyfriend into the world of migrant workers and border crossings, hoping to find her mother and figure out her life.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Elvia, Serafina has at last come across Mexico and the border at great peril seeking her daughter.
    This is a tough story, and one of many more layers than I have described here.  The images of Mexicans and Indians paying 'coyotes' $900 apiece to take them across the border, with no guarantees, is sickening enough, but to know that many of these people are indeed murdered and never found makes 'homeland security' seem like a sham, at least for these poor souls.
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Clerical Errors, by Alan Isler
    This novel could be termed a religious satire, but it contains both humor and humanity, thereby defying simplistic description and being extremely entertaining and even educational.  Father Edmond Music was born a French Jew, but when his mother was taken by the Nazis and his father deserted him at the beginning of the war, he was taken to a Catholic orphanage and eventually became a priest.  A Catholic by convenience and even perhaps necessity, Father Music was never one to hold too fast to the rules, and in the Sixties he had an adulterous affair with the beautiful owner of a fabulous ancestral English estate.  When she decamped to San Francisco to follow the spirit of the times, she have the estate with its impressive art collection and historically valuable library to the Church, with the proviso that Father Music be its resident and curator for life.
    Now it is the end of his 50-year tenure at the Beale estate, and Father Music is being threatened by a rival American priest who wants to expose him as the thief of a unique and unpublished Shakespeare manuscript, which Father Music knows himself is actually a forgery written by a legendary Jewish mystic known as Pish, the Ba'al Shem of Ludlow, whom he has been researching for decades. The manuscript was sold many years before by Maude, his longtime housekeeper/lover, and Father Music must find a way to keep anyone from finding any of this out.
    There are many entertaining complications to this plot, but the most entertaining element is Father Music's dry perspective on religion of all kinds, but most especially the Catholic Church, as well as the entertaining tales about Pish.  The other interesting thing is the intellectual vocabulary of the author, Alan Isler.  I have not encountered a more prodigious and impressive use of language in years.
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The Absence of Nectar, by Kathy Hepinstall
    Eleven-year old Alice and her 14-year old brother Boone are convinced that their stepfather, Simon Jester, is going to poison them.  Though only married to their mother Meg for a short time, Simon has revealed himself to be subject to such erratic behavior and rages that they no longer believe his story that his first wife and son drowned in Lake Shine near their house.  Boone, meanwhile, is obsessed with Persley Snow, a teenager imprisoned in a  local mental hospital for poisoning her parents, but famous for the frequency and brilliance of her escapes and captures.  For some reason Simon is vehemently against Boone writing letters to Persley and forbids it, but Boon persists at his own peril.  Soon, Meg begins to realize the danger to her children, and secretly tells both of them to 'RUN' which they do.
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All the Finest Girls:  a novel, by Alexandra Styron
    Alexandra Styron is the daughter of William Styron and for this reason alone this novel becomes interesting.  One cannot help but wonder how close the portrait of Addy Abraham's father, a famous philosopher in the book, is to Alexandra's own father Bill.  Nonetheless, Addy Abraham, daughter of aforesaid philosopher and actress mother, is a child tormented by what she has seen and heard outside of herself, as well as by the formidable demons within.  Uncontrollable and defiant, she is an impossible and disturbed child, given to prolonged screaming fits and a constant refusable to obey.  That is, until everything changes for her when Louise, a Caribbean woman, comes to take care of her when she is 8.  Now, over 20 years later, she travels to Louise's home island to attend her funeral and meets Louise's two sons, Phillip and Derek, whom she has never really seriously considered beyond the small photos Louise kept in her room so many years before.  The story is told in alternate chapters, from that earlier time and to this Carribean trip.  Still over-sensitive and disturbed, Addy has always sealed herself off from others, but events on the island bring her to some startling realizations about her life in relation to others that bring her much closer to humanity.
    This is a very interesting book.  The character of Addy is difficult to read but very intriguing.  She must have been equally difficult to write, but Styron manages to create a vivid portrayal using poetically spare and piercing images, rather than lengthy explanations.  Either way we feel her pain, and that of the others in her life.
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Great Titles for March 2002
Almost, Vine of Desire,  The Doctor's House, On Green Dolphin Street, The Life Before Her Eyes
Almost, by Elizabeth Benedict
    Sophy Chase has left her husband Will and their New England home on Swansea Island, to start over in New York.  Everything is going well and she is enjoying an extremely active sex life with British art dealer Daniel Jacobs when they are surprised in the act one day by a phone call informing Sophy that Will is dead.  Stunned and devastated, Sophy returns to Swansea, where it is not at all clear how he died -- was it suicide or not?  When her former step-daughters arrive, along with Will's first wife, the situation becomes rife with emotional complications.  Sophy begins some intense self-evaluation and soul-searching, along with some deep mourning for Will's lost life.  This is an extremely well-written novel, and while the subject matter is serious, there is a great deal of humor contained in it, especially in Sophy's wry, self-deprecating character.
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Vine of Desire, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
    This novel is a sequel to Divakaruni's Sister of My Heart, which I reviewed here in 1999 (click on title for review), about Anju and Sudha Chatterjee, Indian cousins who grew up together and married under very different circumstances.  Now, Anju is living with her husband Sunil in San Francisco, and has just lost her baby boy in a tragic miscarriage.  Sudha has left her arranged marriage in India because her mother-in-law wanted to force her to abort her baby girl.  Anju thinks that bringing Sudha and her baby daughter Dayita to live with them will cure her own unhappiness and help Sudha have a new life.  What she isn't prepared for, however, is the fact that Sunil is in love with the beautiful Sudha, and has been since he first saw her at their double wedding in India, and that their tiny apartment will not be able to contain all of their extreme emotions for long.  What  happens in the end to these three adults is something no one could have foreseen.
    I love Divakaruni's work.  This is the third book of hers I've put on my web page.  The way she portrays the clash of cultures in the lives of Indian women, between the old traditions and new, and between the old country and  America is both poignant and fascinating.
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The Doctor's House, by Ann Beattie
    This story is told from three points of view and in three parts -- first from Nina, the thirty-something widow who can't seem to come out of mourning for her husband and who shrinks from any involvement with others; her mother, an aging alcoholic in a home, and whom Nina has long since dismissed as a crazy monster; and Nina's brother Andrew, who in Nina's mind is an obsessive womanizer like their father, the 'doctor' in the title who is nonetheless long dead.  Scenes from Nina and Andrew's childhood are told from all three viewpoints, and though we are given Nina's perspective first, what is revealed about the same past events by her mother and brother lets usknow that Nina is not necessarily either victim or innocent, her mother is far more perceptive and complex than she realizes, and Andrew's 'womanizing' is not quite what it seems -- it represents something far deeper and more complicated than she has judged.
    Ann Beattie is a master of the short story, (I included her collection Perfect Recall  in my best of 2001 -- click for review) and the three parts of this novel could be seen as a 'Rashomon'-like short story told from different angles -- the story of an unhappy family told by three separate unhappy people.  Excellent.
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On Green Dolphin Street, by Sebastian Faulks
    In the past, Sebastian Faulks has been known for writing graceful and romantic war novels, and now he has written a graceful and romantic political novel set during a very important year in American history -- 1960.  British diplomat Charlie van der Linden and his pretty wife Mary, along with their children Richard and Louisa, are stationed in Washington, D. C.  It is December, 1959, and they are having an 11th anniversary party, one of many noisy and boisterous events they have hosted.  A new guest, American political reporter Frank Renzo, arrives, and ends up staying the night.  Charlie's drinking, his financial problems, and his growing depression render him distracted most of the time, and he does not notice at first as Mary begins spending more time with Frank.  When Richard and Louisa go to boarding school, Mary begins traveling to New York to see Frank for days at a time.  He squires her around the city, introduces her to jazz (the book's title,"On Green Dolphin Street" comes from a Miles Davis recording), and educates her about American politics, as he is assigned first to Richard Nixon's campaign, and then JFK's.  Charlie is also dispatched by his superiors to follow the Kennedy campaign, and the novel is filled with rich historical detail about the political climate in 1960, and what the world is like post-McCarthy and with the CIA taking its Cold War shape.  When Charlie suffers his inevitable breakdown while on assignment in Moscow, Mary must travel there to get him out of the country, and we are also given a good look at what Russia was like at that time.
    In some ways the love affair between Frank and Mary is a bit dispassionate, but Faulks is such a good writer we stay with him for all of the other atmospheric pleasures of the book.
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The Life Before Her Eyes, by Laura Kasischke
    Laura Kasischke writes strange, poetic novels which contain surprising psychological twists, and this is no exception.  Diane and Maureen are best friends in high school and in the full bloom of lovely adolescence when they are suddenly faced with a school shooter who asks them, "which one of you should I kill?"  Flash forward 20 years, and Diane is living a seemingly perfect dream life, with her dream husband, dream home, and dream daughter Emma, age 8.  Flash back to the two teenage friends in the year before the shooting, and again flash forward to Diane's perfect life, which suddenly has strange details going awry.  Her dead cat suddenly re-appears, and though she'knows' that he can't be the same cat, he sleeps in the same spot and goes to the same place for his food.  Her daughter takes a story to school for show and tell, and the story is sent home by her Catholic nun teacher and it has changed into something nasty and obscene.  A neighbor dead of cancer suddenly appears in her garden. Diane begins to have headaches, and soon we begin to wonder if her dream life is just that -- a dream, and that perhaps Diane was not the one who survived that moment in high school. Beautifully written and fascinating in its consideration of the nature of time, existence and dreams themselves.
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I'll Let You Go,  Sister India, Blues Lessons,  Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, The Secret Life of Bees
I'll Let You Go, by Bruce Wagner
    This novel, with the same clever cell-phone speak as its title (his last book was "I'm losing you"), is a look at Los Angeles that is up-to-the-second hip and satirical, with a twist.  It would seem that while skewering the popular culture which surrounds all of us here, he has decided to add a Dickensian and somewhat moralistic, sweet heart.  Complete with an ornate list of "The Trotter Family", "Servants", and "Other Noteworthy Characters" at it's beginning, the story concerns the fabulously wealthy Trotters of Bel Air, a family of the kind of untold wealth that in our age has made billionaires familiar to all of us.  First of all there is Tull, or Toulouse, named not after Toulouse Lautrec, but instead after a tattoo on the shoulder of the father he has never met, as in "Born Toulouse".  At age eleven Tull lives in his grandparents' opulent mansion while his glamorous drug-addled mother Kitty struggles to stay sober, hangs out with celebrities, and designs world-reknowned gardens.  He is best friends with his cousins Lucy and Edward, Lucy a precocious young novelist and Edward a genius who shines despite horrendous disfigurement due to Apert's syndrome.  On the other side of the plot is a community of the Los Angeles homeless that is lovable and idiosyncratic while pitiful and horrifying, as one would suspect.  There is the beautiful orphan Amaryllis, self-educated and horribly abused, while fascinated with saints, and most importantly Amaryillis's protector William, a gentle giant with talents and knowledge ranging from pastry-making to prodigious art, who believes himself  to be none other than William Morris, the Victorian genius of design, chosen to take the newly designated cosmic position of Chairman of the Disembodied.
    When Tull finds out that his father, Marcus Weiner, did not die in a snowmobiling accident before his own birth, but instead decamped from the newly built house given to him and Kitty on their wedding night by her father, the universe suddenly shifts for the young lad.  He and his cousins set about trying to find Marcus, and in the process the two widely divergent worlds -- that of the grossly overpriveleged and the grossly ignored and homeless -- collide.
    I've read some criticism of this novel, especially a scathing review by Gary Indiana in the LA Times, but I loved this book, an old-fashioned novel about both extremely contemporary subjects and timeless themes.
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Sister India, by Peggy Payne
    Madame Natraja, the proprietor of the Saraswati Guest House in Varanasi, India, is not actually Indian.  Though so important as a landmark she is even listed in the Lonely Planet travel guides, she is actually a 400-pound American woman who has lived in India for over 20 years, growing ever father, gorging daily on Indian sweets, and sternly ruling over her guests, most of whom come to see the amazing rituals of Varanasi, where the dead are brought burned on the shores of the Ganges amid ancient rituals, overwhelming poverty, and growing political violence between Hindus and Muslims.  When the novel opens, Madame Natraja has three American guests, each with a different history and reason for being in Varanasi, but when religious violence breaks out and a curfew is imposed upon them, much is revealed, especially about Natraja herself, who is forced to leave the house for the first time in years to try and rescue Ramesh, her Hindu cook and the only constant in her life.  As she travels out, shocking all with her gross appearance, she begins to re-live her own history and what brought her to India to begin with, and what drove her to construct the armor that is her enormous bulk and take her life's extreme and fascinating course.
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Blues Lessons, by Robert Hellenga
    Robert Hellenga's novel The Fall of a Sparrow (click here for review), was my favorite book of 1998, along with The Poisonwood Bible.  That said, this new book is not nearly as deep or thrilling, but I am including it here because even as he is not writing at his best here, Hellenga is providing an education in the history of blues music, the passion of Martin Dijksterhuis, and a good look at race relations in the 1950's and 60's, especially in the Midwest.  I also have a soft spot for Martin because he is from Western Michigan, as I am, and is of Dutch heritage, as were most of my companions in my early years.  His descriptions of the orchards and the natural beauty of that era, as well as the sort of 'no-nonsense' religiosity of  those people rings very true.
    We meet Martin in the 1950's, living a happy, bucolic life in Appleton, Michigan.  His father owns and farms large apple orchards, and the foreman of his father's farm, Cap, is an African-American with a daughter Corinna, who was first, Martin's best friend, and now, in the senior year, his love object.  When Martin develops strong feelings for Cory, their one and only night of love-making changes their lives forever.  Martin's mother wants him to go to the University of Chicago as she did, to continue his piano studies, and get out of Appleton.  Martin wants nothing more than to farm the orchards and be with Cory.  When Cory and then later her family,disappears, Martin finds that his parents have taken action he cannot tolerate.  He bolts his college scholarship for the Navy, and takes up blues music, which becomes his lifelong passion and eventually his profession, even as he never quite recovers or forgets his first love.
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Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, by Ruth Rendell
    Is there a more reliable writer than Ruth Rendell? As far as releasing entertaining, immaculately-plotted, and always somewhat kinky mysteries, Ruth Rendell is without peer.  I do not think I am alone in this belief, and this new novel is no exception.
    Minty Knox had jsut given her new fiancee Jock Lewis her life savings of 2,000 pounds when she got a letter saying he had died in a train wreck.  As he had been her first boyfriend in a long, sheltered life, she was devastated, especially when she began seeing his ghost.  Zillah Leach didn't believe it when she received a letter saying her husband Jerry Leach was dead in a train wreck, but it suited her purposes to act as if she did, since a gay Conservative member of parliament had just asked her to marry him to cover up the truth about his sexual orientation.  But Fiona, madly in love with her new fiancee Jeff Leigh, was the most devastated of all when Jeff disappeared without a trace and later turned up in a movie theater as the stabbed-to-death Jerry Leach.  It seems that Jock/Jerry/Jeff was conning everyone, but his death only brought on more trouble for those he left behind.
    Rendell brings many other interesting characters and sub-plots into this mess, including a loving married couple who are sort of a modern day Jack Spratt and his wife, Zillah's problem children who are not happy with her new faux-husband, despite his wealth, and the ongoing comedy of British Conservative politics.  As always, a great read.
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The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd
    It is 1964, and 14-year old Lily Owens, a white girl, lives on a peach farm with T. Ray, her father (a nasty piece of work), and Rosaleen, her African-American nanny/companion.  Rosaleen has taken care of Lily ever since her mother's death when she was 4, a death that Lily's father has told her she was responsible for.  T. Ray is distant at best and abusive at his worst, and when Rosaleen is beat up and put in jail by some local men while trying to register to vote for the first time, Lily decides they must leave.  They run away to Tiburon, South Carolina, because Lily has found some personal effects of her mother's, one part of which is a picture of a Black Madonna figure with Tiburon written on its back.  In Tiburon, Lily and Rosaleen find the source of the Black Madonna in a big pink house inhabited by August Boatwright, beekeeper and honey-maker, and her sisters May and June, African-American residents of that town.  They take Lily and Rosaleen in, but Lily is reluctant to ask about their connection to her mother, because she doesn't want them to find out that T. Ray is probably looking for her.
    While some could say that much of this book and its characters are perhaps a little too good to be true, it was very sweet in a good way, with its look at race relations in the South at the birth of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights movement, and the truth about the unbelievable strength of African-American women at any time in history.
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Great Titles for May 2002
Atonement, by Ian McEwan, The Siege, by Helen Dunmore, Spies, by Michael Frayn, Aria:  a novel, by Susan Segal, Running in Heels, by Anna Maxted,

Atonement, by Ian McEwan
    I am going to come right out and say that I am definitely on the bandwagon which has already formed behind this novel as 'great' 'near-masterpiece', and 'prizeworthy.'.  I am a fan of Ian McEwan, but this novel contains a depth and sensitivity and humanity that I have not perceived in him before this.  But what I found most interesting about this book was the exploration of the impulse to write itself, and the way the true writer actually perceives himself and the proof of his consciousness itself as existing through his writing and therefore can do nothing else.  This becomes, to me, even more meaningful in that this process is explained at first through the thought process of a 13-year old girl.
    Briony Tallis is thirteen and enthralled by her own creative powers.  Having written several stories, bound and illustrated, for members of her family, she has now written a dramatic play in honor of her brother Leo's arrival at their country home in the middle of a blazingly hot English summer in 1935.  Briony's imagination and her play, the romantic heroine of which she of course intends to cast herself, are unprepared for her difficult and untalented cousins who do not cooperate in their parts the way she expects.  In a fit of frustration that her creation has spun out of her control (as opposed to her stories in which all characters do her absolute bidding), she goes off to sulk.  In a twist of fate she encounters Robbie Turner, the grown son of their cleaning woman, as he makes his way to dinner at her home, in honor of Leo.  Robbie has been educated at Cambridge and been the recipient of her father's largesse all of his fatherless life, something which makes Briony's mother suspicious of his being lifted above his station.  Earlier on this same day, Briony had witnessed Robbie and her sister Cecilia in a compromising and confusing (at least to Briony) position, so when Robbie asks her to deliver a note to Cecilia, Briony reads it.  She does not understand its salacious contents, but nevertheless knows they speak of something mysterious and beyond her own experience, and her already vivid imagination goes out of control.  This sets events in motion that ruin both Robbie and Cecilia's futures, and as Briony matures, she decides to become a nurse in the war effort as atonement for the terrible thing she did.  It is through Briony's eyes that we see the ravaged British bodies that arrive in the hospital after the disastrous retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, and it is through Robbie's eyes that we see that retreat itself.
    During the narration that we learn that Briony is now in her late 70's, and a successful writer at the end of her life as she tells this story, and once again the role of the writer in the story is examined, this time through the eyes of one at the end of the writing life.
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The Siege, by Helen Dunmore
    At the beginning of this meticulously researched and powerful novel about the legendary siege of Leningrad that began in 1941, there is the text of the official written order relaying Hitler's belief that the citizens of Leningrad had no reason to live and therefore they, and the city itself, should die.  Against the larger backdrop of the Germans surrounding the city and preventing the passage of even the most meager of rations or supplies to its inhabitants, the events surrounding one family are portrayed.  Anna Levin is 22 and de facto mother to her younger brother Kolya, 5.  Her mother Vera died at Kolya's birth, and her father Mikhail, a once well-known writer who is now considered 'dangerous' by the Stalinist regime, has sunk into a crippling depression.  When the Germans invade and then surround Leningrad completely, life becomes purely about survival, with daily rations of food going as low as 75 grams of bread each day, and electricity, heat, and water disappearing in the coldest reaches of winter.  As conditions worsen, into the family scene comes Andrei, a doctor in training who has served with Mikhail at the front until Mikhail was seriously wounded, and Marina Petrovna, a one-time famous actress who is a former lover of Mikhail's.  The scenes of this family's cold, starvation, illness, and daily struggle to stay alive are wrenching, as are the meticulous descriptions of the disintegration of daily life in the city amidst so much death.  We are also given a glimpse into the political process and the mind of the unlucky political operative appointed to ration what food was available.  This is a difficult but extremely profound book.
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Spies, by Michael Frayn
    I'm not sure why three out of five of my picks this month are about World War II.  I have a theory that writers somehow tap into themes that surface in the collective consciousness at a particular time.  For instance, a few years ago it seemed that every American novelist was writing a Civil War novel.   Anyway, this novel by Michael Frayn is good, it is about World War II, and I picked it.  Stephen Wheatley revisits his childhood home, a street called the "Close" in rural England, after a pungent smell brings back sense memories he is compelled to explore.  The scene is early in World War II, and there are nightly blackouts and random bombings in their otherwise peaceful neighborhoold, but 11-year old Stephen and his friend Keith Hayward find many mysterious things to investigate.  Keith's life is enviable for Stephen, for he is an only child with great toys and a perfectly ordered life, while his own family seems chaotic and ramshackle.  So he is happy to be Keith's disciple, even slave in all their projects, enjoying the chocolate spread on bread for tea that Keith's mother serves them every day.  But when Keith ratchets up the seriousness of everything by reporting to Stephen that his own mother is a German spy, events take a very alarming turn indeed, and it is only now, fifty years later, that Stephen allows himself to explore what really happened.
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Aria:  a novel, by Susan Segal
    For two years Eve Miller, her children Nick and Jessica, and her husband Charlie have been sailing around the world on their boat, fulfilling Charlie's lifelong dream.  But now there has been a horrible accident, and Eve is the only survivor, recovering in an Australian hospital while the world of popular journalism makes her a notorious, unwilling celebrity.  Eve is in a state of emotional paralysis and grief that is intolerable and she can barely imagine living or even participating in life again.  But Isabel Stein, a world-famous opera diva visiting Sydney takes an interest in her, and invites Eve to stay in the guest house of her Long Island country estate.  While Eve is skeptical of her intentions, she nonetheless agrees, and soon finds herself caught up in opera itslef and finally becoming the unwitting tool of Isabel's need for publicity.
    This is a great book.  Susan Segal really makes us feel Eve's devastation, and understand how she could be led into the strange situation in which she ultimately finds herself.
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Running in Heels, by Anna Maxted
    Natalie Miller is 27 and going through some major changes.  Her best friend Babs, the closest person to her in the world, is getting married and Natalie feels lost.  She is bored with her own stuffy boyfriend, so when she meets a 'bad boy' named Chris Pomeroy at Babs' wedding she embarks upon a dangerous affair that takes her down a road that ends up costing her job as senior press officer for the London ballet.  Soon she is losing so much weight that everyone is alarmed and Natalie feels she is drowning in disapproval -- Babs, her mother, her brother, and even her father are shocked at her appearance, and it becomes obvious that lifestyle changes are desperately needed.  It would be hard to imagine an amusing and even downright funny book about anorexia, but this is it.  Anna Maxted has genuine comic gifts, as evidenced by her first novel, 'Getting over It', and one need not be a twenty-something Londoner to get a kick out of her writing.
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 June 2002
Desirable Daughters, TheBuffalo Soldier, The Dive From Clausen's Pier, The Journey Home, Right as Rain
Desirable Daughters, by Bharati Mukherjee
    Tara Chatterjee, formerly Tara Bhattacharjee, is the youngest of three Brahmin daughters, born in Calcutta to a very traditional family.  Now her husband Bish is a billionaire in the computer business, and she is divorced and living in San Francisco with her 15-year old son Rabin.  Her eldest sister Padma lives on the East Coast, and middle sister Parvati lives in a luxury high-rise in Bombay.  Both Padma and Parvati profess and still follow the rigid ways of the class and family-conscious Brahmin society, but Tara has broken free -- or has she?  When a young man shows up at her home claiming to be the illegitimate son of Padma and the brother of one of her school friends in Calcutta, Tara's world is turned completely around.  When she confronts her other sisters with this information, their denials are deafening, but Tara is compelled to investigate nonetheless, if only because the young man seems sinister and threatening.  What she uncovers is shocking, and in the end, life-changing.
    Mukherjee has written a great book here.  Her graceful prose about the intricacies of  Indian society, both within India and in the large transplanted Indian population in America, is fascinating, down to the tiniest details about appearance and behavior.  All of this plus other elements that serve to make this book resemble a thriller, and the portrayal of  Tara's relationship with her son, make this a great read.
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The Buffalo Soldier, by Chris Bohjalian
    In the middle of a raging storm, a river overflowed its banks and drowned Terry and Laura Sheldon's 9-year old twin girls.  It is now two years later, and although still gripped by intense grief, they have decided to become foster parents.  Much to their surprise, a 10-year old African-American boy is the child they receive.  Young Alfred, the son of a drug-addicted mother, has been in so many foster homes that he is extremely withdrawn, and even hordes food in his room as he awaits his inevitable expulsion.  Being in a community and a school that is overwhelmingly white is not easy for Alfred, nor is the fact that Terry, a State Trooper, doesn't warm to him and is increasingly distant.  Laura, however, finds herself drawing closer and closer to the boy, as does a retired college professor across the road who befriends him and gives him a book about the Buffalo Soldiers, African-American cavalry men during the Civil War.  Alfred becomes fascinated by these historical figures, and soon believes that he is perhaps descended from one of them.
    This book is highly readable.  I was lukewarm about a couple of Bohjalian's books after "Midwives", but this novel is rich in human emotion and realistically illuminated relationships, with all of their flaws and misunderstandings.  So even though it is hard to imagine that any foster child with Alfred's background would be quite as well-behaved as he is, the novel works on all levels.
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The Dive From Clausen's Pier, by Ann Packer
    Carrie Bell is 23 and has lived in Madison, Wisconsin her entire life.  She has had the same best friend since early childhood, and the same boyfriend, now her fiance, for eight years.  She should be happy, but is starting to feel the need to escape.  Feeling her distance, her boyfriend Mike takes a daredevil dive off the pier during a Memorial Day picnic in what Carrie realizes is a bid to get her attention. Tragically, Mike does not realize that the water level is many feet lower than before, and he ends up first in a coma, and then a quadriplegic.  Carrie is torn between her loyalty, her pity for him, and her guilt at not wanting to stay with him.  Peer and family pressure, and all her conflicting emotions, finally drive her to run away to New York City, where she begins trying to understand herself and how to live the rest of her life after this horrible trauma has turned their pleasant, predictable lives upside-down.
    Ann Packer has taken a situation which is something we read about in "People" magazine or watch on television with vague or even profound sentiments about how glad we are that those people aren't us.  Carrie is a wonderful character who remains true to herself even when she doesn't quite know who she is.  This story is not predictable, melodramatic or overly sentimental.  And Mike is not the heroic victim we like to imagine in these circumstances, a la Christopher Reeve.  He is a young man whose life has ended as it has begun, and he is neither happy nor optimistic about his future.  He alone does not judge Carrie for running away or for anything she needs to do to escape him.
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The Journey Home, by Olaf Olaffsson
    Disa is an Icelandic woman who for many years has helped her friend Anthony run a hotel on his family's historic English estate.  She has attained some reknown for her cooking and they are quite successful.  But how Disa came to this way of life was painful and difficult, as we find out from her own words as she travels to Iceland after staying away over 20 years.  She is dying of cancer, and wants to revisit the places that determined the definitive events of her life.  She left school in Reykjavik to study cooking at a fine restaurant in London in the mid-1930's.  There she met her fiance, a young German Jewish man studying in England.  But before they could marry he traveled to Germany because he was worried about his parent's fate at the hands of the Nazis.  When he didn't return, Disa returned to Iceland and worked for a wealthy family during the war, until the political undercurrents and violence beneath the surface of the household erupted, changing her forever.
    Olaffsson, who is apparently an executive in the entertainment business, has written a lovely novel.  The profound grief and tragedy which is at the core of  Disa's personality is never fully stated, only gradually revealed in the small details of her thoughts, and the sense of place, especially in Iceland, is very strong.
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Right as Rain, by George Pelecanos
    I don't read many crime novels any more -- they are usually so ridden with cliches and predictable characters, but the reviews I've read of George Pelecanos's books have consistently stated that he was different, i.e, that he can actually write.  So I tried this book, and found that yes, he can write, but no, he is not completely free of the cliches of the genre.  Derek Strange is a typically handsome, hard-boiled former cop who is now a private investigator in Washington, D. C.  I don't know why the private investigators of books, television and movies all seem to be so smart and good-looking.  I personally have only met 2 private detectives, and neither was very interesting or attractive.  Anyway, Derek fits the bill for the crime genre, complete with encyclopedic knowledge of Western movies and Black music.  He is hired by an elderly African-American woman to find out the truth behind her son's death.  Her son Christopher was an off-duty cop shot by another officer in the middle of a skirmish whose details seemed cut and dried.  The other cop who shot him was cleared of wrongdoing, but nonetheless left the police force after the incident.  Christopher's mother wants her son to be remembered with honor, and Derek sets out to help her.  In the process he makes friends with the young officer who shot Christopher, and uncovers corruption in the D.C. police force, and some really unsavory drug dealers and their clients.
    This was an enjoyable ride, regardless of the few aforementioned cliches.  Pelecanos writes with authority, especially about D. C. and its inhabitants, and the plot zips right along to its predictable conclusion, with every indication that Derek will be back, again and again.
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Unless, by Carol Shields
    Carol Shields is dying of cancer, and this will undoubtedly be her last book, something that makes the introspection of her main character, Reta Winters, even more poignant.  Reta is 44, possessed of three beautiful daughters, a doctor husband, and a grand house.  She is a translator of the French autobiographies of an important feminist, and a writer of one novel which attained a respectable success and a minor literary prize.  But for the first time, sorrow and calamity have come into her life.  For some inexplicable reason, her19-year old daughter Norah has taken to living on the street, sitting all day on one street corner, wearing a sign around her neck that says "Goodness".  She refuses to speak, and Reta and the rest of her family are forced to spy on her or sit silently by her side if they wish to see her.  This has forced Reta into a deeper state of self-examination than she has ever experienced, and her won writing and life are irrevocably changed.
    This is a lovely book, full of deep insights into the writing process, the dynamics of family, and the nature of goodness itself.  I'm sure others would disagree, but I believe that this is Carol Shields' best work.
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Me Times Three, by Alex Witchel
    It is the Eighties in all their materialistic glory, and young Jewish woman Sandra Berlin is living her dream -- working at a style magazine in New York City, in love with and engaged to her high school sweetheart Bucky Ross, an uber-WASP from a country-club family, who is now a successful investment banker.  When Bucky is called out of town on a night they were to attend a gathering at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sandra decides to go anyway, and much to her surprise meets Bucky's other fiancee, who in turn reveals that he has yet another girlfriend as well.  With her whol world crashing around her, she turns to her best friend from college, the gorgeous and gay Paul Romano, who is in some deeply charged emotional waters himself.
    While Sandra is the predictably glib and witty heroine we would expect from the 'young woman in Manhattan' story, this novel contains many deeper and richer elements than its summarized plot would imply.  Sandra engages in a great deal of soul-searching and truth-telling at every step, and there is no truly happy ending for any of the book's characters.  While entertaining, the novel is not easily encapsulated. I recommend it.
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The Nanny Diaries, by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus
    This book has been riding high on the best-seller list, something that might make one suspicious, but in this case that is a good thing.  Written by two former nannies to the super-elite Manhattanites they skewer in the book, this novel is true in the detail, but it is more than just satire.  We meet the nanny, whose actual name is Nanny, as she interviews for the position of nanny with the generic Mrs. X, the fabulously wealthy and gorgeous socialite married to Mr. X (who I swear has to be based on Ron Perlman in real life). While there is humor in the depiction of the grown-ups here, there is an underlying sadness in the lives of the children of these contemptible people.  In the case of Grayer, the 4-year old son of Mr. and Mrs. X, he is shuttled to and from French lessons, piano lessons, arranged play dates with other nannies and their charges, and at all times kept at arm's length away from his well-dressed mother and his absent father, even when seriously ill.  And while Nanny is treated like a slave/secretary/babysitter, forced to work ever longer hours as she tries to finish her degree at NYU, she is reluctant to quit because she is literally the only one looking out for Grayer's best interests, and she knows what effect her leaving will have on him.
    I was entertained, but actually saddened by this novel.  One could only hope that the grown-ups, whose lifestyle is put under the microscope by their nannies, will take the time to read it.
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Three Junes, by Julia Glass
    This book is actually three intertwined novellas, set in the month of June in three separate years, depicting episodes in the life of the Scottish McLeod family and those surrounding them over a period of 15 years.  In the first episode, Paul McLeod, a newspaper owner from outside Edinburgh travels to Greece after his wife dies of cancer.  On the tour, he reflects on his past, and becomes enamored at a distance of a young American artist named Fern, but takes no action after she sleeps with the tour guide, an English cad.  In the second, Paul's son Fenno, a gay book store owner in New York City, meets a brilliant music critic dying of AIDS, and when he travels to Scotland after his father's death four years later, he is asked to do something for his brother David and his wife that he may never have contemplated.  Finally, in the third act, Fenno meets and befriends a pregnant Fern in the Hamptons, bringing the story full circle.
    While Fenno is the most completely drawn character, all of the characters are so well depicted that one feels completely involved in their lives by the book's end.  Fenno's twin brothers, Dennis and David and their families, his mother and father, all drew me in and made me want to know what else happens after the story's events have concluded.  A beautiful novel.
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Recent History, by Anthony Giardina
    When Luca Carcera is 12 years old in 1962, he moves with his mother and father to a new house on the same street as some of his parents' other Italian relatives, who believe that their enclave will be some kind of Italian paradise for them.   Shortly after the move, however, Luca's father moves out of their dream house and into a rooming house on the other side of town to live with another man, Bob Painter, who has also left his family.  Luca spends painful weekends sleeping on the floor of their room, attending movies and watching Bob drink.  At one point he invites a classmate of his, Andrew Weston, to go with him, knowing that Andrew is obviously homosexual, hoping that he could scare his father to come back home by making him think that he also is the same.  Over the next few years, and really for the rest of his life, even after marriage, Luca's experience continues to be colored by his questions aboutwhat happened that year, why his father did this, and most of all, what that might mean about his own sexuality.
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Great Titles for August 2002
The Weather in Berlin, by Ward Just, Resolution: a novel of Crime, by Denise Mina, Perfect Match:  a novel, by Jodi Picoult, Miss America Family, by Juliana Baggott, Girl from the South, by Joanna Trollope
The Weather in Berlin, by Ward Just
    Ward Just was a political reporter for many years, and now has written many novels, each of which is deeper and better than the last.  His last novel, A Dangerous Friend, (click on title for 1999 review) which I included on this web site, was about the origins of America's involvement in Vietnam.  It was masterful and deeply insightful, but this book is even more complex and interesting.  The Weather in  Berlin is a surprisingly graceful and sophisticated meditation on human nature, maturity, the creative process, and most significantly, German history and culture.
    Dixon Greenwood is a semi-retired Hollywood director, is visiting Berlin for three months in order to lecture and write about the creative process that led to his most famous movie, "Summer 1921", a piece which examined Germany, art, and love after World War I.  His wife Claire, an actress, is away on a movie set, and his memories take him back to the time of filming in the early Seventies, when he used three beautiful, young, and unknown Sorb girls as his actresses, only to have one of them, a girl named Jana who had  the most arresting screen presence of the three, disappear mysteriously on the last day of filming.  There was an inquiry and she was pronounced dead by misadventure though no body was recovered, and Dixon re-visits this and the other events of his life and film career as he braves the horrific winter in Berlin.  But his reverie changes drastically when Jana herself actually appears at his hotel thirty years after her disappearance and he embarks upon a German film project with her.
    I enjoyed this book immensely, primarily because of Just's depth of insight into the many complicated human and cultural issues explored by Dixon himself, who may have perhaps attained wisdom and self-knowledge that does not usually visit successful Hollywood directors.
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Resolution: a novel of Crime, by Denise Mina
    In this third book of her 'Garnethill Trilogy' set in Glasgow, Denise Mina re-introduces us to Maureen O'Donnell as she anticipates being a witness in the murder trial of Angus Farrell, her former psychiatrist and the killer of her married lover, Douglas Brady.  The murder actually took place in the first book of the trilogy, but Maureen has been very very busy in the interim.  I personally feel that she is one of the most original and exciting fictional characters in any genre, not jst crime.  Maureen is a full-blown character, warts and all -- and there are many, many warts.  At present she is selling illegally-imported cigarettes at a flea market with her friend Leslie, and fighting the flashbacks and nightmares which have flared up since her father Michael, who abused her sexually as a child, has returned to the city.  Whiskey and chain-smoking seem to be the only things keeping the demons barely at bay, and when an older lady who also has a booth at the flea market turns up dead, Maureen decides to investigate -- mostly because she just wants to get in a good fight with someone.
    I loved this and the other two novels by Denise Mina.  The rough, cold life of Glasgow is brought vividly and often painfully to light, and Maureen's struggle with her past shows realistically just how hard it is for incest survivors to actually do just that -- survive.
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Perfect Match:  a novel, by Jodi Picoult
    Whenever Jodi Picoult publishes a novel, I automatically read it because I know there will be two things inside its pages -- first, she invariably explores an extremely controversial topic torn from the front pages.  In the past she has looked at teen suicide, infanticide, Amish society, and rape.  Secondly, she creates realistic human relationships and characters surrounding these so-called sensational events without becoming melodramatic.  This book is no exception, but I found it a little more difficult because I just didn't care much for her protagonist.
    Nina Frost is a prosecutor in the District Attorney's office in Biddeford, Maine, specializing in child abuse cases.  It is all the more horrifying then, when her own son Nathaniel is sexually abused and rendered mute by his trauma and unable to identify his victim at first.  Nina knows all too well how hard it is get justice for the small victims because she deals with it every day.  Nina's husband Caleb, a stone mason, is shocked by Nina's frantic behavior after the abuse is revealed,a nd by her lack of communication with him as she begins to chart her own course -- first, toward finding out the abuser's name, and then to exacting her revenge, which she does both violently and mistakenly.
    The problem with the novel, although I found it highly readable and finished it almost in one sitting, is that I could find no justification for Nina's behavior, regardless of what had happened to her son.  Parents reading this book will undoubtedly have mixed reactions, while understanding her impulses in the beginning.
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Miss America Family, by Juliana Baggott
    It is 1987, and Ezra Stocker's 16th summer starts off with him realizing that he needs a Code of 'Rules to Live By' in order to navigate through life with the family he has been given.  His mother Pixie is a beautiful ex-Miss New Jersey cruising the edge of sanity, his stepfather Dwight is a fatuous oaf who can't or won't realize how miserable his wife is, his 10-year old half-sister Mitzie seems to feel she has to keep the family together by constantly performing and entertaining, and his own father is gay and even more immature than either Ezra or Mitzie.  It turns out that Pixie is struggling unsuccessfuly with memories and nightmares about an adolescent trauma that her mother has been lying to her about for over 20 years, and when her mother has a stroke and suddenly begins telling her the truth, Pixie goes off the deep end and actually shoots Dwight.  This makes it the responsibility of Ezra's father to care for him, which goes well for no one, and the fracture of the fragile family is complete -- or is it.
    While dealing with serious and even tragic events, Juliana Baggott, who also wrote Girl Talk (click on title for 2001 review) which I featured here, lends a tone of rueful and compassionate humor to her characters, who are neither doomed nor successful, bad or good.  Ezra, especially, is a wonderful character -- so aware and watchful over his mother and sister -- so resigned to his fate, and yet absolutely ready to take time from his troubles to have his first sexual liason with his step-father's golf partner when it presents itself.
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Girl from the South, by Joanna Trollope
    The British writer Joanna Trollope, descended from Anthony, has also inherited his gift for the quotidian novel -- capturing the details of everyday life for ordinary human beings, with their complicated relationships, messy problems, and the ability to muddle through.  I'm not sure if it is because she has attained sucess in both America and England now that she has created a novel with half American and half British characters, set half in America and half in London, but that is indeed what she's done.  The novel succeeds as hers usually do, but not as well as her other books, in my opinion.  This however does not mean that I would advise anyone not to read it.
    Thirty-year old Gillon Stokes is the eldest daughter of an elite Southern family in that 'oh-so-elite' of Southern cities, Charleston.  But Gillon has resisted beomcing a perfect Southern lady, instead working in art history and restoration, shunning the society functions and fashions which would be her rightful bailiwick.  In this she resembles her mother, while her grandmother and her younger sister both represent the archetype she has rebelled against.  When Gillon decides to go to work in London, in part to avoid her perfect sister's pregnancy, she meets Tilly, a young professional Londoner, and Tilly's boyfriend Harry, a nature photographer.  There are cracks in Tilly and Henry's 10-year relationship, however.  Henry doesn't want to get married and Tilly feels that is the only proper next step for them.  When Gillon describes the beauty of nature in and around Charleston to Henry, a seed is planted, and much to Tilly's chagrin he travels to Charleston and loves not only the natural surroundings but the very structured Southern family life that Gillon has been avoiding.  This novel is full of engaging characters, but we do feel that we haven't spent quite enough time with them.  Some find resolution, others don't.  Still, a good read.
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Great Titles for September 2002
The Lovely Bones, True to Form, Acid Row, Undressing the Moon, The Language of Good-bye
 

The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
        I am of course among the millions of people who have read this book in the last couple of months.  The Lovely Bones is that rare best-seller that actually deserves its success.  It is most of all remarkable because of its utterly original point of view.  14-year old Susie Salmon was raped, murdered, and dismembered by her neighbor in a field close to her house while walking home from school on a cold day.  We are told all of this by Susie herself, who is now in heaven watching the effects of her death on her family and friends, as well as on her murderer himself.  The heaven she is in now is one which her 14-year old mind would create -- high school, friends, and pets, but not those she loves and misses.  Through her eyes we see the extreme suffering of her father and the growing alienation of her mother from her own family, as well as her younger sister and brother trying to cope in their own separate ways, all of them truly poignant, heartbreaking, and not without humor.  Strangely, in such a heartbreaking story, Alice Sebold has also put hope, recovery and even the possibility of happiness --  just like life.  Alice Sebold is married to Glen David Gold, the author of Carter Beats the Devil  (click here for review) another book featured on this page.  When I read his book, I was touched by the long tribute at the end to his wonderful wife -- now I understand why.
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True to Form, by Elizabeth Berg
    It might seem that I read only so-called 'women's books' in the last month, but it just happened that they were the best ones I picked up.  Elizabeth Berg is a discovery that I have seen many new and even long-time readers make.  Once found, her books become something one automatically reads, at least in my case.  Katie Nash, the 11-year old heroine of Berg's earlier book, "Durable Goods", is back.  She is now 13 1/2 and living in Missouri with her father and his new wife Ginger and living the life of a social outcast with her only friend, Cynthia Rylant.  It is the summer before her first year in high school, and her father informs her that he has obtained some summer jobs for her -- babysitting 3 young boys part-time, and helping an elderly man care for his bed-ridden wife.  Over the next weeks, Katie learns a lot by observing the beautiful marriage of the elderly couple and the dysfunctional marriage of the boys' parents.  When she wins a trip in a radio contest, she chooses to visit her old home town in Texas and see her best friend Cherylanne, now 16.  During this trip she realizes how much has truly changed, with her own interests branching out into poetry and literature, while Cherylanne concentrates only on her boyfriend and her looks.  Soon, however, Cherylanne is pregnant and Katie finds herself accepted at a prestigious private school in Missouri because of her writing talent.  Faced with the chance to start over socially with a new, more glamorous crowd, however, Katie does something to be accepted that alienates her best friend Cynthia and makes her truly ashamed of herself.
    Katie is a wonderful character, and Elizabeth Berg states in the book's introduction that she wrote this book because of an Oriental woman who approached her at a reading and asked her whatever happened to the little girl from Durable Goods.  We're lucky she decided to tell us.
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Acid Row, by Minette Walters
    To my mind, Minette Walters belongs in the category of P.D. James, Elizabeth George, and Ruth Rendell -- those who write mysteries for people who also care about the quality of the writing.  Her plots, especially, are layered and complex, with great psychological insights into the minds of those who do evil or have it befall them.  This book is no exception.
    Acid Row is what the residents of Bassindale Row South call it, because of the crime, drugs, filth and violence which have totally taken over the street.  Inhabited by some of London's most downtrodden residents, it is a truly dangerous place, and when a disgruntled social worker lets it slip to a welfare mother that a registered pedophile has been relocated to their neighborhood, everyone is more than ready to start a riot.  After a 10-year old girl from the area goes missing, emotions boil over and chaos reigns.  The crowd goes after the pedophile, and Sophie Morrison, a young visiting doctor, finds herself taken hostage inside his house.  Before the girl is recovered and the day is over, lives are lost, nothing is revealed to be as it seems, and all involved are profoundly changed.
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Undressing the Moon, by T. Greenwood
    Young Piper Kincaid loved her artistic and beautiful mother more than anything in their desolate world, but she always knew that one day she would leave, and when Piper turned 14, she did.  Now thirty, Piper is dying of cancer, and as her long-lost mother finally reaches out to her she recalls the events of her 15th year.  In her pain and confusion, abandoned by both her mother and her father, who couldn't cope with his children without his wife, Piper grew close to one of her teachers in an inappropriate relationship that had horrible consequences.  Now, as she waits for her own death with only her lifelong best friend as a companion, she wonders whether she should try to make amends or do anything to resolve what she now regreats and has begun to understand.  This is a profound meditation, especially on friendship, as Piper realizes what companionship really means.
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The Language of Good-bye, by Maribeth Fischer
    Maribeth Fischer has written one of the most wrenching books about love -- its meaning and consequences -- that I have ever read.  I could only wonder what the author had put herself through while writing it, because it examines love and relationships at their most minute levels.  Annie, a college professor of English as a Second Language, and Will, a psychologist, have left their long-time marriages to be with each other -- not because their marriages were bad, but simply because they were too in love not to do it.  Carter, Annie's grieving ex-husband, has been with her since they lived next door to each other as children, is simply unable to move on, and Kayla, a coffee bar owner, is devastated that Will has done this to her and their 5-year old daughter, Brooke.  So however in love they may be, Will and Annie are both suffering from the pain their relatioship has caused, something which drives a wedge between them.  Meanwhile, one of Annie's students, a Korean woman who coincidentally bakes goods for Kayla's shop, is wrestling with a profound loss of love herself.  Twenty years earlier she left her lover and the child she had with him to come to America with her husband because of the Korean belief in duty over love.  All of these people are in pain, and there really is no happy ending or resolution here.  Love, in the romantic sense, does not make us happy Ms. Fischer seems to be telling us, and yet it remains something that compels us even as it can ruin our lives.  How true.
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Sunday Jews, by Hortense Calisher
    I've only chosen three books this month, and this book is the reason.  At 800 pages, and with the scope and depth of its content, this novel defies description.  It is nothing short of a cultural excavation, examining the divisions, layers, and strata of Jewish culture on the East Coast in particular, but also that of the rest of the world.  Until now I had not read anything by Hortense Calisher, who is in her eighties , but I can only think that this work is the culmination of a lifetime of acute social observation, contemplation, and compassion.
    At the beginning of the book Zipporah Duffy, formerly Zipporah Zangwill, anthropologist, mother of six children, and wife of Irish philosopher Peter, is facing her twilight years with a burden.  Peter is afflicted with rapidly advancing Alzheimer's disease, and she doesn't want him to be humiliated in front of friends and family.  So she arranges to go with him on a European tour, bringing along Deborah, an Israeli nurse and Sabra who has just lost her new husband to a gunshot attack.  When Peter can go no further and dies in an Italian chapel (perhaps with Deborah's help?), Zipporah returns home to live another 20 years amidst her colorful and extended clan, which includes grandson Bert Duffy, who becomes a rabbi, lawyer Nell, art curator Erika, artist Zach, stock broker Gerald, and many more -- all of whom are the objects of Zipporah's affection and anthropological analysis.
    That said, this is only a thumbnail sketch -- there are so many complex layers in this book that it truly deserves to be called a 'weighty tome'.  Calisher's oblique and acutely observant writing style assumes the intelligence of the reader, and demands much, but is well worth the effort.  I felt like I had accomplished something when I finished this book -- I can only imagine how the writer felt.
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The Thirty-third Hour, by Mitchell Chefitz
    Moshe Katan, the ex-rabbi and Kabbalist introduced in Mitchell Chefitz's first novel "The Seventh Telling of Moshe Katan" (reviewed here earlier), has started a family education program as an adjunct to a large synagogue in Miami, run by an old classmate Rabbi Arthur Greenberg.  What seems to be a spectacularly successful and inspirational program suddenly appears to go wrong when Arthur gets a report of Moshe's alleged sexual misconduct.  As the Rabbi watches the many hours of videotape documenting the family project in an effort to understand what has happened, Moshe's teachings regarding the Torah and the Kabbalah unfold and he finds himself being re-inspired in his own faith, and examining his own conduct and priorities.
    Mitchell Chefitz may not be the best prose stylist but he is a good storyteller, and both this and his earlier novel help to explain the Kabbalah in a way that it becomes more accessible.
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Small Change, by Elizabeth Hay
    This novel is the most profound meditation on friendship, especially between women, that I have ever read.  In a series of interconnected stories, Beth, variously a writer, mother, mistress, wife and friend, describes her friendships with the women in her life.  She does this in a way that is so brutally honest about behavior, motivation, and the small cruelties and kindnesses we inflict upon each other under the guise of or in the name of friendship that I was tempted to buy copies and send them to many of my present and former friends.  Truly moving and thought-provoking, Elizabeth Hay, who is also the author of "The Student of Weather" (reviewed here) has created something beautiful.
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Family Matters, by Rohinton Mistry, The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter, The Idea of Perfection, by Kate Grenville, In the River Sweet, by Patricia Henley
Family Matters, by Rohinton Mistry
    This novel, by the prize-winning 'Oprah-book' author of  A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry, is another look at part of Indian society.  While the first was set in the Seventies "Emergency" during enforced sterilization, this novel is set in 1990's Bombay, a teeming cauldron of races, religions, political corruption, and upheaval -- nothing new for the vast Indian sub-continent, but brought vividly to life herein.  The focus is on the Parsi community of Indians in Bombay -- a tight knit group practicing the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, or as they call it, Zarathustrianism.  Nariman Vakeel is the aging patriarch of a family with deep wounds and tragedy in its past.  Now old and frail, and suffering from Parkinson's disease, Nariman had never wed until late in life because his long time love Lucy was not a Parsi and his family would not allow it.  When Nariman finally relented and agreed to an arranged marriage, he wed Yasmin Contractor, a widow with two adolescent children, Coomy and Jal.  Briefly happy after the birth of his own daughter Roxana, Nariman's life soon became miserable, as Lucy began to haunt his life, even moving into the same apartment building.  Since a terrible time during which Lucy and Yasmin both died tragically (the details of which we find out episodically), Nariman has lived with Coomy and Jal in their large crumbling flat, the spinster Coomy never overcoming her bitterness towards him until he breaks his ankle and can no longer care for himself and she finally contrives to get rid of him, sending him to live with Roxana, Roxana's husband Yezad, and their two young sons Jehangir and Murad .  Roxana and Yezad have troubles of their own, however, and having the invalid old man in the living room of their three-room flat only compounds their situation.  Yezad, who works for the Bombay Sporting Goods Emporium, is frustrated by his lack of success and his failure to successfully emigrate to Canada.  Roxana can barely feed the family with what they have, and Coomy withholds much of Nariman's money, even forcing Jal to create damage to the ceiling of Nariman's bedroom in their apartment so that Nariman cannot return home.  Meanwhile, sensitive nine-year old Jehangir and twelve-year old Murad try in their own ways to make money to help their increasingly fractious parents.
    All of this family drama reflects the drama of the society surrounding them.  Yezad's boss is murdered by Hindu extremists who insist he change the name of his store to the Mumbai Sports Emporium, and Yezad finds himself turning more and more to the rigid Parsi traditions and beliefs in blood purity as a way of making sense of his life.  The family struggles and survives, laughs and weeps, fights and reconciles.
    This is a beautifully written novel and a fascinating portrayal of a part of Indian society and its diverse religions with which that I had no familiarity.  I can't recommend it enough.
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The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter
    Talcott Garland (nicknamed "Misha" because of early chess-playing ability) is an African-American law professor at an Ivy League school, and he is also the son of an upper-crust African-American judge, Oliver Garland -- a man who just barely missed making the Supreme Court.  When Oliver Garland, who in his later years had become so embittered by his defeat that he became a right-wing poster boy, dies suddenly, it certainly looks like suicide, but Talcott's sister Mariah believes that he was murdered.  Misha, who doubts this, is further disturbed because one of his father's old friends -- a shady gangster type called Uncle Jack, with whom Oliver's association cost him the Supreme Court appointment -- keeps asking him about "the arrangements" his father made.  Mishat has no idea what these arrangements might be, but is soon behing followed and hounded by both fake and real FBI agents, and uncovering clues based on the arcane chess problems with which his father occupied himself and which only he would be able to understand.  Further complicating his life is his rocky marriage to Kimmer, a beautiful and brilliant lawyer who is a possible nominee to a Federal judgeship and who doesn't want Misha rocking the boat by invesigating his father's death, and who is obviously not much interested in maintaining her marriage.  All of this, along with layers of complicated political machinations at the law school where Misha teaches, makes for a very complex read.
    This novel gives us glimpses of two worlds rarely seen so closely -- first, the social structure of the African-American upper class, which turns out to be every bit as structured and rigid as what we imagine the East Coast White upper crust to be, and second, the interplay of personalities, opinions, and ideas on the faculty of an Ivy League university. Stephen L. Carter is a law school professor at Yale, and has apparently written many non-fiction books, but he certainly knows how to write an intelligent, multi-faceted novel.  While I have spoken to many who said they just 'couldn't get into this book', I found it great reading start to finish.
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The Idea of Perfection, by Kate Grenville
    This novel won Australia's Orange Prize for fiction, not the first for Kate Grenville, who also received international recognition for "Lillian's Story" and the subsequent "Albion's Story", alternate daughter and father stories of a life of abuse among the Australian merchant class early in the 1900's.  Here we have Harley Savage, a raw-boned, no-nonsense type of Australian, who has been called to Karakarook, a small, remote town in New South Wales, to help the locals create a heritage museum in hopes of encouraging tourism in their environs.  Harley's specialty is quilts, and she has attained a sort of fame in the 'crafts' movement, but more than anything she is haunted by what has happened in her past.  She thinks of herself as 'dangerous', especially since the suicide of her last husband.  She keeps to herself at all costs, even trying to ignore the friendly local dog who attaches itself to her upon her arrival in Karakarook.  Among the assorted local eccentrics which include a lecherous Chinese butcher/photographer and an obsessive-compulsive banker's wife is also Douglas Cheeseman, a painfully shy and hapless engineer who has been sent to Karakarook to oversee the demolition of a wooden bridge that the locals want preserved as a historical landmark.  Douglas, divorced by his dismissive wife, can barely tolerate conversation and is incapable of normal social interaction, is terrified of heights (a drawback in his profession to be sure) and can only talk passionately about concrete.  Nonetheless, he finds himself drawn to the surly and equally uncomfortable Harley, from afar at first, but later, due to his brave efforts to save her prize quilt from a fire, and Harley's realization that she was not necessarily the cause of her husband's suicide by chain saw, these two seeming misfits find each other and perhaps the promise of a modicum of happiness.
    Kate Grenville has an especially beautiful way of describing both the countryside and climate of New South Wales, and of bringing the local characters to life humanely and humorously, without caricature.  Her look inside the minds and hearts of these two lonely souls is skillful, sweeet and uplifting.
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In the River Sweet, by Patricia Henley
    Patricia Henley's book Hummingbird House, (click here for review) was one of my 'Best of' 2000', and this novel, while not as complex, is every bit as inspirational.  Ruth Anne and Johnny Bond, married for almost thirty years, have been devoted to each other since high school in the 1960's.  When Johnny went to Vietnam in 1967, Ruth Anne left college and volunteered to work in a convent there in hopes of seeing him while he served in the war.  But when Johnny fails to meet her at a planned rendezvous, and no one knows if he is imprisoned or dad, Ruth Anne allows herself to become involved with Vo, a blind Vietnamese boy of 18 to whom she has been reading aloud.  After she becomes pregnant and has a child, the boy's mother convinces Ruth Anne to relinquish her child to his Vietnamese family and return to America after the fall of Saigon.  When Johnny is released from a POW camp in Cambodia and comes home, they ge married and have a daughter of their own, settling into a peaceful life -- Johnny running a restaurant, Ruth Anne working at the library and the local Catholic church.  When suddenly on a morning late in the 1990's Ruth Anne receives an e-mail from Tran, her Vietnamese son, the secret she has kept for a lifetime explodes to the surface of her life and takes over, changing her and her family forever.
    This novel, as in her earlier work, has a strong undercurrent of spirituality, especially in the form of Catholic priests, nuns, and faithful practicioners struggling with their faith and politicaly realities in contemporary times.  Ruth Anne is a devout Catholic whose daughter is gay and the victim of a hate crime, and whose best friend is a Catholic nun beginning to blend Buddhist meditation and principles into her religious practice.  As Ruth Anne seeks to deal with her new reality and Johnny's reaction to what is happening, she plumbs new depths in her own spiritual life.  Along with this, the description of life in Saigon, beautiful and mysterious in the early days of the war, adds layers to the events of the story which could have descended into soap opera in less skillful hands.
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Great Titles for December 2002
 

Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros, Century's Son, by Robert Boswell, All is Vanity, by Christina Schwarz,  Big If, by Mark Costello
Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros
    This is a novel of many layers and textures, poetic, colorful and beautiful, and impossible to summarize.  Celaya Reyes, called Lala by her family, is narrating the story of her Mexican family, beginning with the story of the Awful Grandmother, Regina Reyes, born to a mother who made 'rebozos', the traditional Mexican fringed shawls.  The story begins at the beginning of the 20th century and spans almost 70 years of  Mexican history, and much of America's, as Regina's sons emigrated in the 1950's.  The family is based in Mexico City and is deeply affected by that country's tumultuous political upheavals.  Lala's father, Innocencio, is the Awful Grandmother's favorite, and he takes his wife and 7 children, of whom Lala is the youngest and the only girl, to spend the summer in Mexico City every year.  There are many secrets in the Reyes family, some of which hold the family together, and many of which the family has chosen to forget so that they might stay together.  Lala becomes the storyteller for them all, and slowly reveals these secrets as their history unfolds.
    I found this book to be, for me, almost an education in itself.  We have millions of Mexicans among us, especially in California where I live, and yet I have had little idea of the richness and complexity of Mexican culture and society, which is every bit as diverse as our own.  Cisneros has set out to paint a portrait of her culture, one which she loves, and it is good.
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Century's Son, by Robert Boswell
    Robert Boswell is one of my favorite writers, and this book has just re-confirmed this for me.  It is a portrait of a family and its inter-relationships, a social commentary, a comedy,and a love story.  Morgan and Zhenya are an unlikely couple -- she is a prominent political scientist, he is a garbage man cum union organizer who, since the suicide of their 12-year old son, has settled into just garbage.  Soon after their son's death their 14-year old daughter Emma became pregnant, and for six years has refused to reveal the identity of her son Petey's father.  Now all of their lives are set to change because Zhenya's Russian father, Peter Ivanovich Kamenev, an eccentric political figure who claims to be 100 years old, is coming to live with them.  Zhenya has never lived under the same roof with her father, who is famous for his political philosophy and writing, his drinking, his womanizing, and his claim to have had a chance to kill Stalin at one point.  The household is filled with ambivalence, and not only about Peter's arrival.  Zhenya is frustrated with Morgan's seeming inability to recover from their son's death, and the fact that he has taken a young ex-gang member, his partner on the garbage truck, under his wing.  Morgan seems to dislike his wife's utter practicality and common sense approach to issues of ideals, ethics and emotions.  And Emma seems torn between trying to please all the members of her fractious family, her secret love affair with Petey's father, and her desire to live her own life.
    In the book we are given the opportunity to see this family through everyone's eyes, and while the character of Peter could become a caricature, he is surprisingly perceptive and wise, even while behaving like a buffoon.  Boswell is at his finest when describing complex emotions, and the subtlety he brings to these relationships is almost heartbreaking.  We find ourselves appreciating each one of these people both separately and together.
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All is Vanity, by Christina Schwarz
     Margaret, an English teacher in a private high school in New York, has always considered herself 'special', and her best friend Letty, a wife and mother in California, has always been there to confirm Margaret's belief.  So when Margaret decides to take a year off and write the literary tour de force she just knows she has within her waiting to pour out on the page, Letty is her biggest supporter.  As days and weeks drag on, however, Margaret's novel is not only not pouring, it isn't even dripping, and she is sinking further and further into her own web of deception -- of herself and of her husband Ted, whose support is edged with both skepticism and frugality.  Letty's life, on the other hand, seems to be taking off.  Her husband, an art historian, gets a lucrative new job as the head of an art gallery, and suddenly her life takes on all the accoutrements of outright 'yuppiedom' -- private schools, expensive hairdressers, a new house in a good neighborhood, and lavish parties.  She details the daily developments of this change in long e-mails to Margaret, who suddenly finds the mother lode of material for her book -- the rise and fall of a young upwardly mobile family -- that of her unwitting best friend.  Margaret sees the direction Letty is going, but does nothing to stop it, because every misstep provides another chapter.
    I don't think I've ever read a more entertaining book than this one about the so-called 'writing process.'  This, plus the satire about the Los Angeles yuppie or nouveau riche culture, with its SUV's, personal trainers, and all the rest, renders this book  a 'must-read.'.
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Big If, by Mark Costello
    This book is this year's National Book Award winner.  It is a good book, and I am definitely recommending it, but when books are selected for these awards I always find myself wondering how they got there in the first place.  Why this novel as opposed to 20 others I could think of? Oh well, at any rate, this is a very interesting book about 2 things we read very little about -- the inner workings of the Secret Service, in particular the elite group surrounding the President and Vice President, and the complicated process by which hugely popular computer games are created.  Vi and Jens Asplund are a brother and sister who grew up in New Hampshire, and it is through their characters that we enter these worlds.  We first meet them as children, but now the grown-up Vi is a Secret Service agent assigned to the Vice President, now a candidate for President.  Jens is a talented computer scientist who has turned to writing computer games in an attempt to make money, although he is haunted by his dead father's disapproval of his choice to create computerized monsters that engage in killing games.  Brother and sister meet during the days of the New Hampshire primary, but it isn't their relationship or family dynamic that dominates the plot beyond this.  Other characters seem to take over once the stage is set.  Vi's boss Gretchen, an African-American single mother, is the head of the Secret Service detail and she is haunted by many things -- her troubled relationsihp with her son, the fact that one of their agents was lost in the last campaign sweep, agency politics, and much more.  Tshombo, an old-time agent who was with Reagan during the assasination attempt, is trying to abandon his womanizing ways and is afraid his own wife will find out he had an affair with that of his best friend, the agent who was recently lost.  Jens' wife Peta is a successful real estate agent worried about her husband's increasingly erratic behavior and sick of hand-holding with the millionaire's wife whose deal she is trying to 'close.'
    Once these characters take shape, the plot really begins to move, with results that are not particularly surprising, but at the end, we're glad we've taken the ride with these well-drawn characters.
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