All of 2003
(click on titles for reviews)
Brick Lane,
by Monica Ali
Still Holding,
by Bruce Wagner
The Great
Fire, by Shirley Hazzard
The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
The Known
World, by Edward Jones
The Wife,
by Meg Wolitzer
What
Was She Thinking?, by Zoe Heller
What
I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt
The
Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Ship
Made of Paper, by Scott Spencer
The Interpreter,
by Suki Kim
Songs
of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth
The
Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst
The Book
of Illusions, by Paul Auster
The Center
of Everything, by Laura Moriarty
Brick
Lane, by Monica Ali
This first
novel by Monica Ali tracks the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman born
in a primitive village and brought at a very young age to London in an
arranged marriage to a much older man. Her evolution, and the rich
detail about the immigrant experience in London, and her relationships
with her husband, daughters, and neighbors are profoundly and movingly
explored. Growing from a societal position of complete powerlessness
into one of participation not only in her own life and destiny, but in
the community, Nazneen first realizes that her husband Chanu, while educated,
is ineffectual and unfocused, full of schemes and dreams, and then that
the future of her two daughters must come before her obligation to her
husband. In a parallel subplot, Nazneen's sister Hasina, corresponds
infrequently with Nazneen from Bangladesh, providing a look at the class-bound
rigid society in which she has been left behind. Hasina, through
no fault of her own, loses her job in a sweatshop, and falls into prostitution
and squalor, only to be rescued by obtaining a job as an unpaid servant
in a rich man's home. Her story shows that even though Nazneen and
her family and neighbors have a very rough time of it in London, it is
nothing compared to what they have left behind in Bangladesh. Another
illuminating element of this novel is the examination of growing Islamic
fundamentalism in London, told from the point of view of the participants.
This is an excellent, excellent book.
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Still
Holding, by Bruce Wagner
This is
the third installment in Bruce Wagner's Cellular trilogy set in Hollywood
(including "Losing You" and "I'll Let You Go"
(click on title for review), and it is truly remarkable. Now we are
in post-September 11 Hollywood, where rampant narcissism, ambition, vanity
and excess still reign supreme. But what gives added depth and dimension
to this book is Wagner's genuine knowledge of Buddhism. The novel's
main characters are Becca, an aspiring actress and Drew Barrymore look-alike,
Lisanne, a chubby executive secretary, and Kit Lightfoot, a Brad Pitt/Richard
Gere hybrid who is also a devout Buddhist. Their lives and the lives
of the many other minor characters intersect in events that are alternately,
absurd, hilarious, and even uplifting. Kit Lightfoot suffers a horrendous
brain injury after being attacked by someone he refused an autograph and
becomes almost catatonic; Lisanne becomes obsessed with Kit Lightfoot,
starts practicing Buddhism and loses her mind; Becca becomes employed as
a corpse on "Six Feet Under" and involved with a Russell Crowe look-alike
who turns out to be more dangerous than anyone could have been imagined;
everyone pursues money, fame, influence, power and awards relentlessly.
All this said, there is a level of greatness in this novel that both surprised
and amazed me.
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The
Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard
It is
1947 and Aldred Leith, a decorated British war hero, is being posted to
Japan after two years exploring developments in China. The son of
a famous novelist, Leith is a thoughtful, lonely and reserved fellow, who
narrowly escaped death during the war and who saved the life of an Australian,
Peter Exley, who is now suffering from an inability to find a focus in
his post-war life.
When Leith
arrives in Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, he meets
the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator.
Benedict is suffering from a fatal debilitating disease, and is faithfully
tended by his teen-age sister Helen, an enchanting creature with whom Leith
finds himself falling hopelessly in love. These two young people
are precocious, brilliant and sensitive, and greatly attuned to literature.
Against the backdrop of post-war developments England, Hong Kong, Japan,
and Australia, Leith and Helen's love flourishes, despite her parents'
opposition. This is a complex, graceful novel, worthy of the awards
it has won.
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January 2003
The
Little Friend, by Donna Tartt
Ten years
ago when Donna Tartt published 'The Secret History' just after finishing
college, she was hailed as a literary 'wunderkind', profiled in Vanity
Fair and many other magazines, and given rave reviews. I was disappointed
by that book given the hype surrounding its release, and was not sure I
wanted to read this, her second novel. But when I started 'The Little Friend'
, I was very pleasantly surprised.
Set in
a small Mississipi town in the Sixties and Seventies, this novel centers
on Harriet Cleve Dufresne and her extended family, whose dynamics center
around one traumatic event -- the murder of Harriet's nine-year-old brother
Robin, which took place on Mother's Day the year Harriet was born.
Harriet and her sister Allison were both in the back yard with him when
Robin disappeared, and it seemed to take place in an instant, while Charlotte,
their mother, prepared the celebration for her mother Edie and her
mother's sisters Libbie and Tat, in the house.
Since
that day the family has been irrevocably changed. Allison, who probably
saw what happened but has never claimed to remember anything, is a withdrawn,
weepy, fragile teenager. Charlotte has effectively retired from life,
rarely leaving her bedroom and hardly noticing that her husband Dix has
taken a job in Memphis so that he does not have to live at home.
Harriet, then, grows up closest to Ida Rhew, their African-American maid,
and Edie, her no-nonsense grandmother. And Harriet is smart -- very
smart. In the summer of her twelfth year she decides to solve her
brother's murder, and she and her best friend Hely, a local boy, set out
on an adventure which changes their lives forever.
This novel
is long, and some might say, over-written, but I loved it. It evokes
the atmosphere and pace of small-town Southern life perfectly, as well
as Southerners and their relationships with the Black community on the
brink of change due to advances in civil rights. Harriet is a memorable
character, and I found myself thinking about this book long after I finished
it.
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The
Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster
This book,
while simply written, is extremely complex at its core, dealing with illusions
of all kinds -- from silent films to identity and the illusory nature of
life itself. David Zimmer, a literary professor at a college in Vermont,
is engulfed in a cloud of grief so heavy that he is barely existing.
His wife and two young sons have died in a plane crash, and even a year
after they're gone he is unable to work or write, or even do anything other
than drink himself into a stupor every day. What finally stirs him,
however, is a silent film -- a comedy starring Hector Mann, who was a star
for a brief moment in time in the 1920's, only to mysteriously disappear
in 1929. Mann wrote, directed, and starred in all of his films, of
which there are only a few available for viewing, but Zimmer becomes intrigued
and tracks down all the surviving copies, watches them, and writes a book
about Mann's cinematic universe. This occupation manages to take
up all of his time for about two years, after which he takes on the translation
of a 2,000 page French autobiography of Chateaubriand, "Memoires d'outre-tombe",
or as he calls it, "Memoirs of a Dead Man".
In the middle of this new
project he suddenly receives a number of letters from a woman claiming
to be the wife of Hector Mann, who is alive in New Mexico, and who wants
to meet him. Skeptical at first, Zimmer ignores the letters, but
when a woman named Alma Grund comes to his home in Vermont and persuades
him to return to Hector's ranch with her, everything changes.
Paul Auster
has written a wonderful book here, with insights about film, literature,
life, and the creative process itself. The many-layered themes involved
in this story touch upon the most basic issues of life, from the illusions
we create in order to live, and the illusions that can ultimately destroy
us.
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Child
of My Heart, by Alice McDermott
This is
yet another brilliant novel -- really. Alice McDermott's last novel,
"Charming Billy", won the National Book award, and while I enjoyed that
book, I wasn't exactly sure why it was a prize-winner. This book,
however, should win a prize. The narrator of this novel is
15-year old Theresa, a beautiful child of older Irish parents, who have
moved to the Hamptons so that their daughter can babysit for, and rub elbows
with, its wealthier denizens and therefore move into a better life by virtue
of her beauty and proximity. Theresa knows this and accepts it, but
she is a child with much deeper gifts and perceptions. Children and
animals adore her, and she them, while seeing clearly the follies and problems
of the adults around her. The story of "Child of My Heart" centers
around one summer, when Theresa has invited her ten-year-old cousin Daisy
(whom Theresa calls 'child of my heart') to stay with her and come along
each day as she makes her rounds of dog-walking, cat-sitting and baby-sitting.
Daisy is the fifth of eight children in an Irish working-class home with
few privileges and frills, and Theresa wants to give her a womderful time.
Soon after Daisy arrives, however, Theresa sees large bruises on Daisy's
feet and over much of her body. These bruises are not from injury,
but illness, and Daisy begs Theresa not to tell. Wanting to keep
her as long as she can, Theresa agrees, and determines to give Daisy the
best time she can. Along with this is the story of Flora, the toddler
for whom Theresa is responsible int he daylight hours. The only child
of a beautiful young mother and a famous artist many years older, Flora
is very attached to Theresa, as her mother has left without warning and
her father drinks and paints all day and sleeps with his French housekeeper.
We see
all this and much more through Theresa's perceptive and beautiful eyes.
Her voice is poignant and moving -- and ultimately heartbreaking.
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Think
of England, by Alice Elliott Dark
Jane MacLeod
thinks of her family history in terms of before and after one specific
event -- the appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964.
Jane's father Emlin is a doctor and her mother Via is erratic and a heavy
drinker, outraged by her husband's frequent absences due to his job.
But the whole family, including her mother's brother Francis, is present
on that night and it is a good one, at least in the beginning. When
it becomes apparent that someone has taken the phone off the hook so that
Emlin will not be called away, he is furious, and leaves to return to the
hospital, never to return. He is killed in a car accident, and the
family is changed forever. Fifteen years later, haunted by family
memories and unresolved issues with Via, Jane travels to England to live
and write, and her life is changed again. She meets a glamorous and
eccentric couple who take her under their wing and who soon introduce her
to Clay, a writer with whom she falls deeply in love. But her happiness
is not what it appears to be, and neither are her friends, and Jane's life
takes yet another turn. Finally, we meet her in her forties in the
year 2000, a single mother in New York, about to attend her mother's 65th
birthday, a reunion of sorts with her siblings and their families, with
whom she has little contact.
Alice
Elliott Dark, who wrote the acclaimed short story "In the Gloaming" is
expert at describing complex emotions and the confusing and often messy
relationships we often have with those we love. As in real life,
things are left unsaid and often unresolved, but always poignant and human.
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The Crazed,
by Ha Jin
Ha Jin,
who won the National Book Award for "Waiting", his fascinating novel of
modern China, returns to China in his new novel, this time during the period
up to and including the Tiananmen Square incidents. Jian Wan, a young
man on a scholar track in China, has been given the task of sitting in
the hospital with Professor Yang, his mentor and literature teacher, after
Professor Yang suffers a stroke. Jian Wan's task is further complicated
by the fact that he is engaged to Yang's daughter Meimei, who is studying
medicine in Beijing. But one of the effects of the stroke has rendered
his teacher alternately crazed, screaming obscenities and even politically
dangerous phrases, or reciting poetry that in his right mind he would disdain.
He also seems to be revealing details of his own extramarital affair, which
might explain why his wife is out of town and not in attendance.
As the weeks pass, Jian becomes more and more ambivalent about his path,
studying to enter the Phd. program at Beijing University, hearing his teacher
call scholars nothing more than 'clerks', and learning about the incipient
uprising in Tiananmen Square. At the same time his relationship with
Meimei has become confusing and difficult.
The beauty
of both this novel and "Waiting" is that they contain human plots and emotions
that cross cultural boundaries, while revealing fascinating details about
the social structure of modern China, and the way in which people plan
and live out their daily lives. In both novels characters are doctors,
which really conveys little wealth or social status. Those with real
power are the ones working in government, but they must be Party members.
Students must pass political exams to study any subject, and people of
all occupations live side by side in close quarters. All this and
Ha Jin's graceful writing style create a very interesting read. \
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Tourmaline,
by Joanna Scott
Joanna
Scott experiments with form and point of view in her novels, with great
success. In her last book a toddler was the protagonist. In
this book a grown son attempts to write the story of the year in the 1950's
that his father and mother took him and his two brothers to live in Elba,
in hopes of making a fortune in the stone Tourmaline. Murray Murdoch
is a dreamer, drifting from job to job and mostly living off the dwindling
largesse of his mother and uncles. When he once again loses a job,
he decides to take his family to a place where he experienced great happiness
at the end of World War II as a GI. Sun-filled days, beautiful scenery,
and simple folk are what he expects to find along with the precious tourmaline,
but what occurs instead is far more complex, mysterious and difficult.
A local girl named Adriana Nardi, whose family has been on the island for
500 years enters their lives through an English historian attempting to
write the story of Napoleon's exile, and events seem to take a dark turn.
She disappears, and suspicion falls on Murray. Nearly fifty years
later Oliver, the middle son, returns and attempts to recreate the events
of that year when he was five, and his story alternates between his version
and his mother's written comments about what the emotional realities actually
were. A lovely book.
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Man
Walks Into a Room, by Nicole Kraus
Professor
Samson Greene of Columbia University is found wandering, disheveled, in
the Nevada desert. He has no idea who he is, and is soon diagnosed
with a brain tumor. After the successful surgery for its removal,
he finds he has lost all his memory past the age of twelve, and is therefore
unable to remember anything about himself or his wife or their relationship
with each other, or if he ever loved her. She finds that he has none
of the habits or mannerisms that made her love him, and can't deal with
the loss. They separate, and Samson is approached by a charismatic
scientist who persuades him to participate in his experiment with memory,
something he claims will be the breakthrough in teaching humans to be truly
compassionate, because it will consist of transplanting memories from one
brain to another. In his aimless state, Samson agrees to follow this
man to his research facility in the desert, where what unfolds is nothing
that he could have ever expected.
I loved
this book. It is full of wonderful insights and observations about
memory, the formation of the self, identity, and indeed, the meaning of
life. This is a first novel, and a wonderful voice.
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Samaritan,
by Richard Price
This is
not Richard Price's best, but it is worth reading all the same. Once
again he returns to the projects of Dempsey, New Jersey, the setting for
both Clockers and Freedomland. This time we are in
the company of Ray Mitchell, a Jewish guy who grew up in the projects and
who has come back after making some good money as a television writer.
He has returned to try and get to know his daughter, and to somehow contribute
something to the community he left years ago, after ruining his marriage
and his teaching career with an enormous cocaine habit. He's clean
now and just wants to do some good. He volunteers at the high school
as a creative writing teacher and becomes a mentor to one of his former
students who has just been released from jail. He also reconnects
with Nerese Ammons, a Black woman who was his neighbor when they were kids,
but who is now a police Detective narrowing in on retirement. She
has got major problems herself, with family members in and out of jail
and with AIDS, and a young son with an attitude. When Ray Price is
assaulted and beat within inches of death, she is assigned to find out
what happened, and Ray doesn't seem to want to cooperate.
The best
part of this novel, as in its New Jersey-based predecessors, is Price's
real grasp of life in the projects. The almost total hopelessness
of most of the residents, the lack of options available to them,
and the problems of abuse passed down between generations is all portrayed
vividly and sometimes painfully.
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Revenge,
by Stephen Fry
Stephen
Fry, actor, director, humorist, and writer, has lent his light and witty
touch to an updated version of the Count of Monte Cristo. Ned Maddstone
is happy, attractive, Oxford-bound, popular, and from a long line of British
aristocrats. He is also in love with the beautiful Portia.
Ashley Barson-Garland, a classmate of Ned's is just the opposite.
Ashamed of his low birth, homely, poor and possessing few friends, he is
nonetheless brilliant and aiming for the top. When Ned inadvertently
reads a bit of Ashley's diary which is full of self-loathing, he takes
pity on him and gets him a job in his father's office. Unfortunately,
this only gives Ashley and opportunity to act out his hatred of Ned in
a most despicable way, thus robbing him of twenty years of his life.
"Revenge" refers to what Ned extracts when he is set free over twenty years
later. Highly enjoyable.
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Altered
Land, by Jules Hardy
In this
profound and poignant story, John Player and his mother Joan relate the
story of their lives, which has been shaped by a tragedy that took place
on John's 13th birthday. On that day, on an outing in London, they
are the victims of an IRA bomb. The beautiful Joan is disfigured
for life, and John loses his hearing. Joan, a philosophy professor
whose husband left her even before John was born, finds that she cannot
return to teaching classes about esthetics, and spends the rest of her
life drinking and writing in journals. John learns to function and
becomes a successful carpenter, marrying Sonya, a beautiful Estonian.
Now, nearing forty, John finds his life changing. Sonya is having
an affair but rather than confront her he retreats back into silence.
When his doctor offers him the opportunity to get cochlear implants and
perhaps hear again, he believes this might save his marriage. Joan
finds herself unable to help John and must concern herself with attending
the death of her best friend Helen, a woman they met in the hospital so
many years ago.
The beauty
of this novel is in the writing itself -- the perceptions and moving self-awareness
of both John and Joan, and the bond between mother and son that is so deep
and indestructible.
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Casa
Rosso, by Francesca Marciano
A few
years ago Francesca Marciano wrote a brilliant novel, "Rules of the Wild",
about a group of international journalists living in Africa. It was
full of information about the genocide in Rwanda that these journalists
were not able to get Western media to report because it was deemed too
"gruesome". It was also a very sophisticated book about Europeans
and others living a rather wild life on a continent not their own.
This new book, Casa Rossa, is also a very sophisticated work, full of knowledgeable
details about politics, journalism, art, and relationships. It is
the story of three generations of women in a twentieth century Italian
family, the Stradas, told mostly from the point of view of Alina, the youngest
daughter of Alba. Casa Rossa is the large family farmhouse owned by the
family in Puglia, a village outside Rome. Alba's mother Renee,
a beautiful Tunisian, left Alba and her father, the volatile artist Lorenzo,
to live with a German woman after World War II. Renee and Lorenzo
met in Paris, where she became his model and muse, but in Italy she felt
imprisoned by the jealous Lorenzo. Now, almost fifty years later,
the farmhouse has been sold, and as she packs everything up, Alina is piecing
together the history of her family, including her own father's suicide
over Alba, and her older sister Isabella's imprisonment for a terrorist
act committed in the late 1970's.
This is
a great read, the plot retaining the fullness of the individual characters
even as they mirror the times they are living through.
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Was
it Beautiful? by Alison Mcghee
Alison
McGhee's first novel, "Shadow Baby" was
featured here in the year 2000 (click on title for review), and this novel
is no less haunting. Spare and deceptively simple, it is the story
of a broken-hearted man, William T. Jones, a lifelong resident of Sterns,
New York, in the Adirondacks. Married to his childhood sweetheart,
father of William T., Jr., who was also happily married to his own childhood
sweetheart, and best friends with his best friend from childhood, William
T. Jones is now living an almost biblically grief-stricken life.
William T., Jr. has died, his wife has left him, and he simply cannot function
any more. To make matters worse, his 20-year old cat, Genghis, has
just been killed by a bear in front of his eyes. He drives the roads of
Sterns in his pick-up truck, meditating on his life and his loss, and yet
somehow retaining a unique perspective on life and its meaning. His
patterns of speech and expression, while wrenching, are completely original
and almost entertaining. We gradually learn the details of William
T.'s death. At 27, William T., Jr., had become completely deaf.
Music was his life, and almost every home and business in Sterns has a
windchime on its door made by him as he grew up among them. It becomes
clear that when William T. was hit by a train, he was with his father,
and it is not altogether clear whether it was suicide or not. It
is because of this that his wife has left him, and yet we grow to see that
William T. loved his son more than life itself. Ultimately, it is
because of the love of his best friend and others that he survives, but
we endure a profound emotional journey as he struggles to go on living.
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The
Last Good Chance, by Tom Barbash
Lakeland,
New York, a small upstate Great Lakes town, used to be full of bustling
mills, proud residents, and miles of beautiful coastline. Now, however,
it is shabby, nearly deserted, and in major need of renewal in some form.
Jack Lambeau, born and raised in Lakeland, escaped to the Ivy League and
Manhattan, but now has been lured back with the promise that he will have
a free hand in reinventing Lakeland as a tourist haven and mecca for restless
urbanites. He has a vision of a Lakeland with a theater company,
orchestra, and cultural events alongside the Great Lake, with those tired
of the crowded city seeking refuge in a gentrified lakefront walk with
upscale stores. Everything is going along swimmingly until his good
friend Steven Turner, a local reporter looking to make his mark, discovers
that toxic waste is being illegally dumped on local farms, has poisoned
the soil, infected the water table, and even killed one of the men who
was being paid to dump the barrels. This has all been going on with
the full knowledge of the town's mayor and local officials, and while Jack
doesn't know about it, his brother Harris, the black sheep of the family,
is in charge of the dumping crew. Complicating matters is Jack's
beautiful wife Anne, Manhattan born and bred, who is out of her element
in the isolated farmhouse she and Jack are occupying. When Jack's
project makes him increasingly unavailable to her, she sinks into a deep
depression, with results that make their lives even more complicated.
This is a great read.
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A Bed
in Heaven, by Tessa de Loo
Tessa
de Loo's last novel, "The Twins" was featured
in these pages in 2001 (click on title for review), and this book deals
with some of the same themes. "The Twins" was about young Dutch Jewish
twins separated at the beginning of World War II, only to meet again almost
50 years later at a spa, relating the very different events that took place
in their lives during and since the war. This short novel, almost
a novella, deals with some of the same themes. Kata, living in the
Netherlands, is the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Her
father, Jeno, a cellist, is a silent, bitter man, who was sheltered from
the Nazis by a German woman in the back of her shop. Jeno never talks
about anything from the past, and Kata's only knowledge of her father's
origins came from his brother Miksa, who fled to Amsterdam after the 1956
uprising only to die of cancer in her house. Kata is now 18, a student
and an artist who is painting the ceiling of Stefan's room. She and
Stefan are falling in love when suddenly Stefan's mother arrives unannounced
one day. Upon being introduced to Kata, she remarks that her last
name is the same unpronounceable name of "my lodger during the War", as
she puts it. The gut-wrenching realization washes over Kata and Stefan
that they might be brother and sister, something which is verified when
Kata contrives to bring her father to Stefan's apartment. Now, 40
years later, Kata and Stefan are reunited in Hungary for their father's
funeral, in a poignant journey to their own and their father's sad past
history. Beautifully written.
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A
Father's Affair, by Karel Van Loon
This small
masterpiece, translated from the Dutch, is so rich and yet so subtle, it
almost hurts. When Armin Minderhout, widowed father of the 13-year
old Bo visits a fertility specialist with his new live-in girlfriend who
wants to get pregnant, his life changes forever. It is not his girlfriend
who is having difficulty, it is him. He iis sterile, and what's more,
he always has been. Reeling with this knowledge and unable to confront
his wife Monika who has been dead for 12 years, he goes through a series
of reactions and behaviors as he attempts to figure out who it was that
cuckolded him, how to deal with the future, and revisits his entire relationship
with his beautiful, beloved wife. But Armin's distress is not without
its relief. He is a 'facts-checker' for scientific publications and
possessed of all sorts of theoretical knowledge, including genetics and
socio-biology, and manages to spice his narrative with droll and interesting
tidbits that relate to his own very human situation. Armin also possesses
a razor-sharp political intelligence, and an immense amount of information
about the natural world. His social commentaries, often tossed off
at inappropriate moments, are dead on. All this, and the fact that
when the truth is revealed no one could have expected it, makes this a
wonderful, wonderful read.
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The Interpreter,
by Suki Kim
Suzy Park
is the second daughter of a pair of Korean immigrants who were shot and
killed 5 years before in the small store/delicatessen they had managed
to buy. Estranged from her parents at the time of their death because
of her relationship with a white man, Suzy is also estranged from her older
sister Grace, who seems to have embraced evangelical Christianity and wants
nothing to do with her. Working as an interpreter for the New York
City Courts, Suzy spends her days translating for Koreans who are usually
being charged with labor violations and in doing so she is constantly confronted
with the dark past of her own family. She has moved on to another
white man, a rich, married entrepreneur whose closeness to her consists
of numerous phone calls, sex in hotel rooms, and expensive gifts, none
of which she cares about. She lives her days in a state of depression
that renders her almost paralyzed. When she unexpectedly finds herself
interpreting for a Korean man who once worked for her parents, she comes
into possession of some information about their lives and what may have
been the motive for their murder, and she begins to investigate.
She begins walking down a path of discovery that is not at all easy, leading
her to family truths and the possible reasons for her sister's strange
behavior.
There
have been a few Korean-American authors who have come out with very powerful
fiction in the last few years, notably "Comfort Woman", by Nora Okja Keller,
and "Native Speaker" and "A Gesture Life",
by Chang Rae Lee (click on title for 1999 review). Suki Kim promises
to be every bit as accomplished. Combining the murder mystery element
with the cultural aspects of the novel makes the subject matter even more
fascinating. Suzy is actually saved by tracking down the truth about
her parents, and we learn painful facts about what these immigrants do,
even to each other, to survive.
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The Songs
of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth, A Ship Made of
Paper, by Scott Spencer, Househusband, by Ad
Huddler, Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane
The
Songs of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth
Barry Unsworth is a historical
novelist without equal (see review in these pages of "Losing
Nelson" about Lord Nelson --click on title for review). In this
new book he has rendered the story of Iphegenia at Aulis into modern-day
language. It is the beginning of the Trojan war, and all the famous
warriors, from Achilles and Odysseus to the two Ajaxes, Menelaus, and the
blind singer himself, are gathered on the shores of the Aegean Sea, kept
from embarking on the voyage to Troy by an unrelenting harsh wind. Both
soldiers and kings are getting restless for action, looking for causes
and blames. Agamemnon is their leader, and he is desperate to discover
the reason that the gods are not letting them begin the battle not only
for Helen's return, but for the riches that they will be able to obtain.
His Asian seer, Calchas, priest of Apollo, is tormented by visions of rivers
of blood and does not know how to tell Agammemnon what he has seen.
Croton, the priest of Zeus as the one high God despise Calchas and begin
to circulate the idea that because Agammemnon's daughter Iphegenia is a
priestess of Artemis, too much honor is being given to gods other than
Zeus. Odysseus helps this along by persuading the blind singer to
sing of this, and soon it is agreed that Agammemnon must sacrifice his
own daughter to Zeus to make the wind stop. All of this is rendered
in words understandable to the contemporary reader, making the political
machinations and jockeying for position among the various players all too
recognizable. While full of fascinating detail about customs, practices
and rituals, Unsworth, whose book Losing Nelson was reviewed here brings
the story behind the Iliad alive in a way never before done.
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A Ship Made of Paper, by Scott Spencer
Scott Spencer
is a novelist who writes with painful accuracy and amazing insight about
the messiness of human relationships. He also is very good at capturing
a woman's point of view, something which is outstanding in this new novel,
A ship made of paper. Daniel Emerson, a high- powered New York City lawyer,
has moved back to Leyden, New York, his upstate home town, in part because
of a violent attack he suffered in the City, and in part to have the kind
of happy family life he didn't have as the only child of chilly older parents.
He moves into a nice country house with girlfriend Kate Ellis and her young
daughter Ruby, who is like his own daughter, and while Kate, a successful
author prefers to sleep in, he loves the morning ritual of taking Ruby
to school on his way to his law office. He also loves seeing Iris
Davenport at the school, dropping off her son Nelson, who is Ruby's best
friend. Daniel has become not only attracted, but obsessed with the
beautiful Iris, the wife of a successful Black businessman who only comes
to Leyden on the weekends. Kate has become aware of Daniel's attraction,
and doesn't really take it seriously until the two couples go out together
one evening and she sees the warning signs. Soon it is too late,
as Daniel and Iris are having a full-blown affair and their lives are irrevocably
changed.
The best
character of all this book's complex characters is Kate. A smart,
sarcastic, sophisticated woman who drinks too much, Kate is a real kick,
even as she comes apart at the seams. Neither she nor Daniel ever
really loses their sense of humor, which somehow makes their reactions
to the events in their lives more believable as they are denied any complete
answers or predictable outcomes.
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Househusband,
by Ad Hudler
The title
of this novel of course explains what it is about. The surprise is
the depth of insight this author brings to what could be a rather cliched
and fluffy topic. It is clear that Ad Hudler has done a great deal
of thinking about parenting, housekeeping, cooking, and women, and has
come to some beautiful conclusions about each. Linc Menner, the househusband
of the title, was a successful landscape designer to the stars in California,
but these days he is living in Rochester, New York, staying at home with
his three year old daughter Violet while his wife Jo administers the area's
largest hospital, a job she has dreamed of and because of which they have
relocated. Linc approaches his new job scientifically -- planning
constructive play activities for Violet, decorating the house and keeping
it clean, doing laundry, and cooking dinners for his wife and her associates.
But as months pass, Linc becomes more and more depressed, missing his wife
Jo and longing for adult company. Soon he is barely bathing and goes
through the motions of housekeeping and parenting without realizing how
much he has deteriorated. Jo encourages him to hire a nanny and go
back to work, but Linc feels that he cannot trust anyone to make sure that
Violet eats nutritious foods and avoids television. When he finally
hires someone, he discovers through a tape recording he has set up in the
kitchen that the nanny has a drug dealing boyfriend who comes over every
day, just confirming that no one but himself should be watching over Violet.
He begins to feel that Jo doesn't understand what he goes through every
day, and understands what wives and mothers have been complaining about
forever with their husbands out working with grownups all day. When he
joins the other mothers in the neighborhood for a morning walk and participates
in their conversations, things start to change. His appreciation
of all of these new women friends grows and grows as he gets to know them.
There
is a lot of wry humor in Linc, and he includes his great recipes corresponding
to events that inspire them, and how Linc and Jo's relationship evolves
is neither predictable nor unrealistic.
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Shutter
Island, by Dennis Lehane
Dennis
Lehane cannot be classified as a writer of mystery and detective novels,
as his last book, "Mystic River" proved
(click on title for review in these pages). In this new book, he
performs a convoluted hat trick that I haven't been able to stop thinking
about, and will not even try to fully explain. In the summer of 1954, U.S.
Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital
for the criminally insane. One of the inmates has apparently disappeared
and he and his partner Chuck are supposed to figure out how she got out
of a locked and guarded room and escaped on foot in a storm leaving behind
a coded and cryptic message. Things just get stranger and stranger
when he is not allowed to look at some files which might be relevant, and
he is kept out of certain areas of the facility. But as Teddy and
Chuck seem to begin to close in on something, whatever it is always turns
out to be something else. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is what it
seems in this book, and the ending blew me away. I did not see it
coming. That's all I will say.
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The Hills at Home, The Dogs of Babel, Family History, The Center of Everything, Navigation Log
The
Hills at Home, by Nancy Clark
This wonderful
book is about an old New England family, the Hills of course, whose last
three generations suddenly find themselves beneath the roof of the old,
rambling, ancestral home north of Boston. In the recent years, it
was only inhabited by Great Aunt Lily, a spinster very happily set in her
ways. Now it is 1989, fortunes are changing, and the Hills are coming
home to roost. Beginning with Lily's 3-time widowed brother Harvey,
the two married children of her sister and their children, and Harvey's
grandson and girlfriend, what starts as a series of visits ends up an entire
year of uneasy cohabitation. All are eccentric, witty, and full of
humanity. Lily's middle-aged niece Ginger has a seemingly infinite
talent for self-dramatization, while her beautiful daughter Betsy secretly
receives money from her father left behind in Kansas and budgets for her
mother. Ginger's banker brother Alden has been 'down-sized' by the
economic woes on Wall Street, so brings his wife Becky, his daughter Little
Becky, and their three sons, along with all the furniture from their Park
Avenue apartment, to take over the top floor of the manse. All of
these characters interact, argue, and make their way through a fateful
year or so, watching the impending end of the Cold War, the changing economic
times, and bad television, while Lily quietly maintains the dignity of
the Hill family home and garden. Enjoyable from start to finish.
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The
Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst
Paul Iverson,
a college professor of linquistics, comes home one day to find that his
wife has died as a consequence of falling out of the apple tree in their
back yard. It seems that it was accidental, and the police rule it
so, but Paul begins to suspect otherwise. He notices small changes
in the house that had taken place on that day, including the fact that
all of their books have been re-arranged and that his wife Lexy seems to
have cooked a steak and fed it to their dog Lorelie before the fall.
His grief is boundless, and he becomes both dysfunctional and obsessed,
and begins to try and solve the mystery by teach Lorelei to talk.
His co-workers and friends seriously doubt his sanity, but he is undeterred,
and along the way he does a lot of research on other people who have tried
to do the same, often with diabolical results. And of course we learn
about Lexy, a beautiful but disturbed and often disturbing woman, and Lorelie,
a truly wonderful dog.
This book
has been chosen by the "Today Show" book club, and as a pick of many editors.
It is a great read -- the only drawback being that for me at least, Lexy
does not ultimately come across as a likable figure.
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Family
History, by Dani Shapiro
This is
a brutally honest novel about family. It explores an issue that no
mother and father ever wants to confront. What if your seemingly
normal child commits an unspeakable act, spins out of control, and creates
a situation that destroys the entire family? This is what happens
to the Jensens, a family in a small Massachusetts town. Rachel Jensen
has it all -- a great husband, a beautiful teenage daughter, and a new
baby on the way. But upon entering adolescence, her daughter Kate
begins to behave in an extremely hostile manner, a situation that accelerates
after the baby is born. Then, while the family is visiting Kate's
mother, a somewhat nightmareish figure herself, in New York City, Kate
offers to watch the baby while her parents go out for the evening.
A terrible accident occurs while the baby is in Kate's arms, and the baby
goes into a coma. Kate spins further out of control, accusing her
father of sexual abuse, and they are forced to put her in a special school
for her own, and the baby's safety. Rachel's well-ordered life has
collapsed, and Dani Shapiro doesn't pull any punches in portraying the
range of emotions these people experience. There are no easy answers
in this situation, and one can't help but share in the pain these people
endure.
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The
Center of Everything, by Laura Moriarty
It is
the 80's and Evelyn Bucknow is ten years old, watching Ronald Reagan on
television, listening to her single mother Tina yell at him while he speaks.
Tina is the kind of single mother that Reagan used as a convenient scapegoat
to eliminate social programs, and Evelyn would like nothing more than to
have a bit of normalcy at home. But when Tina's married lover jilts
her, moving away and leaving her pregnant, life just goes from bad to worse.
Tina's conservative father is dead set against her, and Evelyn has never
even met him. Tina gives birth to Samuel, a child who turns out to
be severely retarded, and she is unable to work because of his needs.
Soon they have nothing to eat, and Evelyn is desperate. Meanwhile,
we get to know Evelyn as she grows into a teenager, somehow becoming the
adult in her household, but always aware of the world around her and its
social realities, and endless curious, especially about science.
Her best friend is Travis, a boy in the also greatly dysfunctional family
next door, but he doesn't realize that Evelyn is actually in love with
him. When Deena, a beautiful new girl comes to town, Travis falls
head over heels, and Evelyn learns about a new kind of heartbreak.
This is a wonderful book, very observant, poignant and descriptive of a
certain kind of 80's reality.
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Navigation
Log, by Martin Corrick
September
2003
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Wife, A Place of Hiding, The Photograph
The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
This is
one of the most remarkable books in recent memory. Told from the
point of view of Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year old autistic
boy with phenomenal logical and mathematical gifts, it is profound, moving,
and humorous all at once. Christopher tells us very frankly that
he really doesn't understand other people's emotions and he doesn't like
the use of metaphor. He has careful routines that he must follow
to function in even the most rudimentary way, but he is nonetheless insightful
and perceives his surroundings in a wholly original way. Christopher
lives alone with his father after his mother's death. He likes Sherlock
Holmes and animals, especially his pet rat and his neighbor's dog Wellington,
and when he sees out his window one night that Wellington is laying dead
with a pitchfork through his body, he decides to investigate, even though
his father tries very hard to stop him. When Christopher persists,
he begins to discover things about his father, his mother, and the dog's
death that change his life forever, compelling him to venture out into
the world alone for the first time. Mark Haddon's portrayal of this
young man's thought processes and growth are nothing less than brilliant.
Haddon is a well-received author of children's books, and I heard an interview
with him about this book on NPR, in which he told of his years of working
with children and others like Christopher. This is a must-read.
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The
Wife, by Meg Wolitzer
Joan Castleman
is the wife of the very famous novelist Joseph Castleman, and the book
opens with her decision to leave him after forty years of marriage, even
as they are flying to Helsinki where Joseph is to receive the second-most
prestigious literary prize an author can get. Through Joan's re-telling
of their life together, from the moment she entered his creative writing
class as a college freshman, through years of supporting him in his struggle
to write his first and then subsequent novels, while bearing and raising
his children and playing the wife of a famous man, we begin to get a picture
of a male-female dynamic we don't often think of today. This dynamic
involves the role of the woman writer in the literary world from the Fifties
to the present, and how difficult it was for them to break into what Joan
refers to as the circle of "the men who control the world", into which
her husband so completely fits. Although Joan possesses no small
writing talent herself, she has subjugated her own ambitions to Joseph's,
and now, at the end of their life together, she is ready to leave and possibly
reveal the true secret of her husband's remarkable climb to literary success.
This is a brilliant novel, poignant, ironic, and oh so true.
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A
Place of Hiding, by Elizabeth George
Elizabeth
George has once again proven herself to be a master of the mystery genre,
as well as the writer of complex novels of psychological truth. In
this book, it is forensic scientist Simon St. James and his wife Deborah
who are led into a labryinthine plot, centering on the murder of a mysterious
resident of the island of Guernsey. They initially get involved because
of a woman Deborah lived with many years before in Santa Barbara.
When her brother shows up on the St. James porch saying his sister has
been arrested for murder, Deborah's past comes rushing back and she decides
to go to Guernsey to help her old friend. Simon insists that he accompany
her, because their marriage is going through a difficult patch and he doesn't
want her venturing out alone with this American man. While this is
unfolding, we are given a history of Guernsey, discovering that it was
occupied by the Nazis throughout the entire Second World War, and there
are secrets about collaborators that have never been told. The wealthy
Jewish man who is murdered, Guy Brouard, has retired to Guernsey and is
dabbling in local affairs, not the least of which is helping a local man
establish a museum dedicated to what happened during the War. Guy
and his sister escaped from Nazi Germany themselves as children, and their
wealth is entirely self-made. Guy is not altogether sympathetic however,
and as the plot thickens there are many both in his family and out
who would have legitimate motives to kill him. Simon and Deborah
are drawn into the lives of the people on the island, and are forced, through
difficult circumstances to confront their own problems. This is a
very satisfying read.
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The
Photograph, by Penelope Lively
Glyn Peters
is an aging professor of archaeology in England. Kath was his beautiful
wife, now deceased. One day, as he is searching through some old
papers, he uncovers an envelope marked "Destroy -- Don't Open", and when
of course he does open it, he finds a strange photograph taken from behind
his wife in a group. She is surreptitiously holding hands behind
her back with the man next to her -- it is Nick, Kath's sister's husband.
This shock throws Glyn's understanding of his past, his life, and his marriage
completely into question, and he sets about trying to discover the truth,
with devastating consequences.
Penelope
Lively is a master of subtle and delicate plotting and character, and as
we meet all the players, including Kath's sister Elaine, a hugely successful
Martha Stewart-like garden designer, Nick, her feckless husband, their
daughter Polly, and Nick's former business partner Oliver Watson, the man
who took the photograph, we are told the tragic story of Kath herself through
their relationships with her.
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October
-November 2003
What
Was She Thinking?, by Zoe Heller
This is
a brilliant novel by Zoe Heller, whose book "Everything
You Know" , (click on title for review) made my best list in
2000. It is sort of Mary Kay LeTourneau re-imagined into the English
school system, where a new pottery teacher, Sheba Hart, gets involved in
a sexual relationship with a 15-year old boy, causing a huge national scandal,
the break-up of her family, and an opportunity for her colleague Barbara
Covett to become Sheba's closest intimate. Barbara is really the
interesting character here, even though she's the narrator of the story.
A spinster and veteran teach of 30 years, she reveals her own psychopathology
through her observance of Sheba's behavior and her opinions of all the
players involved. Barbara is really obsessed with Sheba, and has
all the characteristics of a stalker disguised in the persona of a priggish
and conservative schoolmarm. As in her first novel, Heller makes an unsympathetic
character her protagonist, someone lacking in self-awareness and insight
into their own flaws and behavior, and has them paint a picture of
themselves for us that is quite different than the one they think they
are painting.
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The
Quality of Life Report, by Megan Daum
Lucinda
Trout is a New York television reporter who decided to leave New York City
where her life could not possibly be more urban for quiet Prairie City
in the heart of the Midwest. She convinces her black-clad anorexic
boss that she can continue to work from there, producing 'quality of life'
pieces about her new life in what, to New Yorkers, is the equivalent of
a foreign country. After settling in, she falls for local eccentric
Mason Clay, and soon is living in a drafty farmhouse with him, his two
children, and a growing menagerie of farm animals. Mason soon proves
to be something far more dangerous than 'eccentric', and Lucinda finds
her own life beginning to slip out of her control. While much of
the books is humorous, it is the very real life lessons learned by Lucinda
and the decisions she makes about them, that make this book a substantial
read.
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What
I Loved, by Siri Hustvedt
Siri Hustvedt
is married to the author Paul Auster, and after reading this book, I would
love to be a fly on the wall during one of their conversations. While
being one of the very best works I've ever read about art and the artistic
process, it is also a riveting study of one character's anti-social personality
and all of its manifestations. It begins in New York in 1975, when
art historia Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting in a Soho
Gallery. When he tracks down the artist, Bill Wechsler, they begin
a lifelong relationship, living in the same apartment building, having
sons at the same time, and enduring tragic circumstances. Leo is
narrating this at the end of his life, and as the story unfolds, he also
traces an artist's evolution, as Bill's work deepens and changes over the
years. But while the story of these two men and their wives is interesting,
it is Bill's son Mark who dominates the story's end, and in a way determines
all of their fates. Starting out as a seemingly passive and sweet
boy, Mark grows into a truly frightening character in his teens, and Hustvedt
has definitely done her homework on this personality type. I literally
could not put this book down.
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Say
When, by Elizabeth Berg
Elizabeth
Berg is back in top form with her latest book, after slipping a bit (in
my opinion). This is her first outing using a man as her main character,
and she does it well. Griffin sees himself as a happy man, living
with his wife Ellen and his eight-year old daughter Zoe. Ellen has
always been shy, quiet and retiring, and so it goes that he is completely
blindsided when she calmly informs him one Sunday morning that she is having
an affair and wants a divorce. Griffin refuses to move out, and she
doesn't want to leave Zoe, so they live for a few months as roommates,
with Ellen sleeping on the living room floor. It is finally Ellen
who gives in and leaves, which gives Griffin a much greater responsibility
for parenting than he has enjoyed before. Ellen's relationship, which
she has portrayed to Griffin as a kind of love she never thought she would
experience, is actually with a man 12 years younger than her, and Griffin,
who has taken a part-time job as a Santa Claus, is pretty clumsy in his
own dating efforts. The truth is, he loves Ellen and Ellen only,
and he will do absolutely anything to get his family back. This is
a man who has truly learned his lesson and who really resolves to change,
something most women would fantasize about. Berg, as usual, has a
fine sense of humor and a great feel for dialog and the minutae of daily
life.
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Liars
and Saints, by Maile Meloy
This is
a family saga that begins during World War II, and comes right up to the
present day. (more later)
The Namesake, The Known World, Behaving Like Adults, Saul and Patsy, Fox Evil
The
Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa
Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies", her first short story collection, won
the Pulitzer Prize. This book, her first novel, has already been
both highly acclaimed and widely read, and rightly so. Once again
exploring the Indian-American cultural interface, she poignantly portrays
the often painful juxtaposition of the older traditional ways of first-generation
Indian immigrants, and the predicament of their children, born into the
new society their parents have chosen. In "The Namesake" it is the
Ganguli family from Calcutta that is examined. Ashoke brings his
bride Ashima, the product of an arranged marriage, from India to Cambridge,
Massachusetts in the 1970's. Ashoke is studying engineering and eventually
becomes a professor, and Ashima is forced to adjust to a world that is
completely alien and removed from her secure and cosseted life in Calcutta.
When their first son is born, he lingers without a name, waiting for his
maternal grandmother, who has chosen it for him, to send it from abroad.
When it doesn't arrive, the boy is named "Gogol" after his father's favorite
author, an edition of whose short stories was clutched in his hand in a
near fatal railroad accident many years before. Gogol hates his name
as he grows up, just as he grows impatient with all the other Indian traditions
observed by his parents and their many immigrant friends. The novel
basically follows the course of Gogol's life against the backdrop of the
rest of his family's experiences, taking him through adolescence, into
adulthood and marriaage, and to the events that eventually reconcile him
to his heritage and bring him to honor it. This is a subtle and deceptively
simply novel, the elegant and flowing style of the writing outlining extremely
complex cultural and familial issues.
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The
Known World, by Edward P. Jones
This is
one of the most profound and interesting books I have ever read.
A historical novel written by an African-American, it is the story of what
happens to the slaves owned by a Black plantation owner while he is acquiring
his wealth, and then after he dies. When I read the first reviews
of this highly-praised book, I was fascinated to learn that there really
were Black slave owners before the Civil War, and in the location described
in this book, Manchester County, Virginia. Henry Townsend, the plantation
owner, was himself a former slave, the son of freed slaves who had purchased
their own freedom. His parents are unable to understand why he would
want to own slaves of his own, and when he dies, his widow Caldonia is
unable to control either her grief or the rest of the plantation business.
Moses, the overseer, is the most vividly portrayed of the slave characters,
and once he falls, the rest of the slaves begin to run away and the daily
rhythm of the farming business suffers. The slave's daily lives,
and the culture surrounding them, is fascinating. Their perception
of their Black owner, the interaction between them and their Master,
and their own perception of who they are, is something that has forever
changed the way I think about the slavery issue. Very profound
indeed.
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Behaving
Like Adults, by Anna Maxted
I've featured
Anna Maxted's other work on my page ("Running
in Heels", 2002, click for review), and like her other novels, this
new one is clever, witty, and highly entertaining. Maxted's wit is
razor-sharp and often breath-taking, but her breezy style always belies
underlying complex themes. In "Running in Heels", her heroine dealt
with personal issues while sinking into anorexia, and in this new book
29-year old Holly, the proprietor of a successful dating agency, is forced
to come to terms with date rape. "Girl Meets Boy" is the name of
Holly's business, but her own love life leaves something to be desired.
She has broken up with her fiance Nick who can't seem to progress beyond
Mr. Elephant, the character he plays for children's parties, and decides
to try one of her own applicants, a fellow who looks perfect on paper --
successful, rich and handsome. Stuart, however, is far from perfect,
and after Holly's experiences with him she spirals downward, neglecting
her appearance, her business, and worrying all who care about her.
Nick misunderstands what has happened and begins dating someone else, something
Holly has not prepared for. When Holly finally decides to trust herself
and be honest about what has happened to her, things begin to turn around.
But throughout, the tone and perceptive humor of Maxted's writing makes
us happy to take the journey with these characters.
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Saul
and Patsy, by Charles Baxter
Charles
Baxter writes with such accuracy and detail about characters and relationships
in his novels, that he never seems tor repeat himself (see review of "Feast
of Love", one of my favorites for 2000). In this book, Saul and
Patsy would seem to be the perfect couple. They met in college on
the East Coast, and have settled into married life in the Midwest, a place
that soon seems completely foreign to both of them for many reasons, not
the least of which is that Saul is Jewish. Saul is teaching at the
local high school, where one of his classes is teaching writing to under-achievers,
who soon begin writing anti-Semitic slogans on their papers for him.
Then, one of these students, Gordie, and unkempt, unlikeable, and unnatractive
teenager, seems to become obsessed with Saul's life, lurking in his yard,
forcing Saul to drive him home almost every day, and soon scaring Patsy,
who is worried about their new family. Other things strain their
relationship, including the fact that Saul's excessive uxoriousness is
challenged by the addition of their children Theo and Emmy. He is
at first jealous of Patsy's attention to them, and is forced to confront
many of his own issues, including a difficult relationship with his mother
Delia, and his absent but seemingly wildly successful brother Howie.
When events take an extremely dramatic turn, their lives turn upside-down,
and Saul and Patsy have to look hard at the life they've chosen and whether
or not it's worth staying where they are and who they've become.
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Fox
Evil, by Minette Walters
Minette
Walters is so much more than a mystery writer, although she writes mysteries.
She is a writer of the highest caliber, concocting in her every novel a
complex psychological web from which her mysteries derive, rather than
having her plots create her characters, as so many others in her genre
choose to do. I have featured her twice before ("The
Shape of Snakes", 2001; "Acid Row",
2002), and this new book is no exception to the excellence of the others.
This novel has so many elements -- the fight against fox hunting in England,
squatter's rights, child abuse, drug addiction, inheritance laws, the British
class system, and so on. This is a plot that is impossible to encapsulate.
When elderly Alisa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed in
her night clothes, with her husband sleeping in the house with the door
locked, the gossips in the small village they live in start a rumor campaign
that he is the culprit. Even when her husband James is cleared and
it is discovered that the blood stains around her were from an animal,
he refuses to try and defend himself and becomes a recluse, asking his
lawyer to locate the illegitimate grandchild his daughter gave away almost
30 years before. Through this dynamic we learn of the troubled relationship
James has with his own son and daughter. Simultaneously, there is
a mysterious character named "Fox" who has led a group of caravans to squat
on an unowned piece of land in the village. We first get to know
him through the eyes of Wolfie, his son, whose mother and brother have
mysteriously disappeared. Wolfie knows that it is not a good idea
to question Fox, and spends his days staying out of sight. All of
these disparate elements come together over the Christmas holiday in 2001,
when village residents, squatters, James, his lawyer, and his long-lost
granddaughter are all there at the same time.
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