All of 2005

Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson
    This brilliant novel which covers thirty years in time and the intersection of three families and many disparate individuals is one of the best books I've read lately.  In three separate episodes, we are told of three family tragedies which on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with each other.  In the early seventies a beautiful four-year old, Olivia Land, disappears without a trace from her own back yard.  In the late eighties a young college girl is brutally slain in her father's law office on her first day of work, and at the same time a young country wife finds herself trapped in an unhappy marriage with a baby she cannot bring herself to love, again with tragic consequences.  All of these stories intersect in the late nineties when private detective Jackson Brodie, himself down in the dumps because of the breakup of his marriage and separation from his daughter, is approached by figures in all three of these cases who still want to find some answers to the questions that have haunted their lives after each of these tragedies.  Although the stories are tragic, the characters are anything but.  This is a book full of wit, humor and grace, and Detective Brodie is a gem.  I loved this book.
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Great Books for February 2005
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
    I cannot remember the last time I was as moved by a book as I was by this one.  Marilynne Robinson has written a beautiful, perfect gem of a novel, with prose so full of light that feels like it has been distilled into its purest form.  The plot is deceptively simplistic.  John Ames is a 76-year old Iowa preacher who knows his life is coming to a close.  Surprised by love, marriage and a first child in his late sixties, he decides to write a long narrative to his 7-year old son so that much later, when his son discovers it, he will know his history and the thoughts of his father.  But what is in this narrative is so much more than a history of one man - it is a portrait of lifelong faith, true Christianity, nobility, and wisdom.  Both the son and grandson of preachers, John Ames is not following the family tradition, he has a true calling and his life is full of awareness that every word and deed is a choice for one who truly wants to serve his God and his fellow man.  I am not a Christian per se, but the truth in his words goes so deep as to apply to anyone who understands that this entire life is a spiritual process and path.  Ames' description of his life, during which he has written two thousand two hundred and fifty sermons in long hand is humble and as the book's structure, is deceptively simple.
I found myself weeping at the end of this book, and have thought of it often since I finished it.
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Harbor, by Lorraine Adams
    This novel is a devastating tale about a topic which could not be more relevant to the world moment we are in.  A houseful of Algerians, all but one of whom have made it to America as stowaways, struggles to survive - escaping a horrible political situation at home they've arrived in an America where they would not only be deported if discovered, they could be thrown in jail as terrorists merely on suspicion.  All of them educated, they struggle in meaningless jobs and try to send money home, while sleeping five or six to a room.  Their only ally is Heather, a blonde American who falls in love with first one, and then another of these men.  Most of the novel is seen through the eyes of Aziz Arkoun, a 24-year old stowaway.  The novel begins with his jump into the New York harbor after fifty six days hiding on a ship.  The skin on his feet is nearly burned off, he has had no food, and it is freezing in New Yor.  Aziz's suffering is brutally described by the author, as he is rescued through the kindness of some Arab strangers who take him home and then to his friends in Boston.  Aziz has a troubled past in Algeria, and his experiences there are told in intermittent flashbacks as his present life unfolds and if anything, it was more difficult and dangerous than what he faces now.  His situation illustrates the complicated and deadly political and social situation in Algeria that we in America have no way of knowing about through our disinterest, prejudice, and lazy news media, but it is truly horrific there, just as the chances for successful survival for these illegal immigrants diminish as the climate of the Patriot Act and inept FBI attempts to carry it out intensifies their danger inside this country.  This book is a harrowing, gripping, and necessary read.
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Jamesland, by Michele Huneven
    Alice Black would seem to be at a crossroads.  Living in her aunt's historic home in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles, working as a bartender and sleeping with a married man, thirty-three year old Alice is drifting.  After fighting with her boyfriend one drunken evening, she sees a deer, or a vision of a deer in her dining room, and begins to question her sanity - not really a bad idea since she is the great-granddaughter of William James himself, and the niece of a man who has been institutionalized his whole life.  One day she bumps into Pete Ross while running in Griffith Park, and he is a scary fellow indeed.  Forty-five years old, on substantial medication and just out of a mental hospital, Pete is a brilliant chef who lost his restaurant, his marriage, and the  ability to visit his child.  His mother, a nun on leave from her convent, regulates his days and supervises him at his job at a soup kitchen.  The unlikely friendship that arises between Pete and Alice comes about  through Helen, a Unitarian Universalist minister new to the community, who holds eclectic weekly meetings on various subjects.  Pete and Alice begin attending Helen's church and the three of them form an unlikely bond, sharing meals cooked by Pete.  Alice begins to work for a man writing a book about William James and automatic writing, and her life begins to transform, as does Pete's.  Helen, on the other hand, is having a hard time with the stodgy members of her church.  The events in the story play out in interesting, insightful, and satisfying ways.  This novel, like Michele Huneven's first novel Round Rock - is humorous, humane, and spiritually transcendent without a hint of heavy-handedness.   And of course, the fact that Huneven is a food writer in Los Angeles helps the novel greatly, as we are treated to mouth-watering descriptions of the sublime meals Pete prepares along the way.
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Lost in the Forest, by Sue Miller
    Sue Miller has written another reliable read - full of angst-filled women characters in complex emotional situations, with family issues not easily resolved, and resonant plotlines that keep me turning the pages until I predictably finish the book in one sitting.  In this one, Eva and Mark are the parents of teenagers Emily and Daisy, and Eva and John, Eva's second husband, are the parents of three-year old Theo.  They all exist in a comfortable world, mostly because John's presence in Eva's life has brought both financial and emotional stability, and Mark can be sure that his daughters are well taken care of even as he continues a life of work and casual womanizing.  This all changes with John's sudden and tragic death, and no one is changed more than Eva, who slips into her own grief so deeply she cannot see what is happening to her middle daughter Daisy, a quiet, intelligent outsider who found security in her relationship with John, who seemed to communicate with her and understand her like no one else has.  Her bossy, pretty older sister Emily is going off to college and adjusting to the loss, and Theo seems fine also, but Daisy withdraws further into herself until she embarks upon a dangerous sexual adventure with a much older man.  It is Daisy who is 'lost in the forest', and it is Mark who eventually sees it - changing both of their lives forever.
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Great Books for March, 2005
Runaway, by Alice Munro
    I think that it can be safely said that Alice Munro is one of the pre-eminent masters of the short story, if not the first in the firmament.  She has been writing perfect jewels for as long as I can remember, and even though the short form is not really my first choice, I would never miss the chance to read one of her collections.  Her women characters, their predicaments, and their behavior within those predicaments are always new and surprising, and utterly human and recognizable.  The characters in these stories are every bit as compelling.  One of them, the title character in three stories named "Julia" is particularly interesting as we meet her at three different stages of her life.  In the first she is a young intellectual teaching in a girls' school who suddenly leaves everything behind to rush into a passionate love match.  In the second, she returns to her parents' home with her own child and sees them in an entirely new light, and in the third she finds herself alone, her beloved daughter having vanished inexplicably into a religious cult.  Each story is remarkable in its observance of the details of an individual character's life and habits.  It would be hard to overpraise this work.
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The Memory of Running, by Ron McLarty
    Ron McLarty, a reasonably successful character actor who wrote his novels in obscurity, awash in rejection slips, had a change in his personal script that would do any fairy tale proud.  Suddenly, after years and years of failure, a sympathetic publisher read this manuscript and decided to put it novel on tape.  As fate would have it, Stephen King is an avid listener to books on tape, and happened to hear this novel read by its author and set out to help it get published in print.  The rest, as they say, is history, with McLarty gleaning favorable reviews in all the major venues and ascending to best-sellerdom, or close to it.  I would say that although I had some criticisms of its linear nature (it is after all a road trip taken on a bike), I was truly compelled by the writing and read it straight through in one sitting.  Smithson "Smithy" Ide is at first blush a lovable loser - his candor about drinking, eating and smoking is refreshing - but after we get to know him and hear the story of his family we find a character with a heart so big and full of feeling that he has to hide behind all of these things to keep from breaking apart.  When his parents are killed suddenly in a car accident, Smithy finds himself taking a drunken bike ride one night (as a child he rode incessantly, as an adult his physical activity consists of walking to the refrigerator from the couch) and riding straight through to California from Rhode Island, searching for his long-lost sister Bethany who disappeared some twenty five years before.  On the way he meets some predictably quirky characters and has some scary and humorous experiences.  By the time he reaches his destination, Smith has lost some weight and gained a life.
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The Chrysanthemum Palace, by Bruce Wagner
    Bruce Wagner has mastered the Hollywood/LA novel.  He knows the entertainment business inside out and strikes a perfect satirical note without losing either heart or soul.  In this, his latest, our narrator is Bertie Krohn, the only child of a show business titan.  His father, Perry Krohn, is the creator of television's longest-running 'space opera' "Starwatch:  the Navigators" (both Jennifer Aniston and Donald Rumsfeld are obsessed fans), and after trying for some twenty years to make it as an independent writer/film-maker, Bertie has thrown in the towel and gone to work as an actor on his father's show.  One night at an AA meeting, Bertie sees Clea Freemantle who, after being a short-lived adolescent girlfriend of his, enjoyed some stardom and recognition before spiraling out of the public eye because of substance abuse.  Clea was the daughter of another screen legend , Roosevelt Chandler, who famously drank herself to death in the Seventies, and Bertie hasn't spoken to Clea since the tragic night in their fourteenth year that one of their friends died tragically.  After their encounter, Bertie and Clea get close but soon conclude that friendship is their best option, and Bertie gets Clea a job on the show.  When Thad Michelet comes to town it becomes obvious that Clea hasn't really leveled with Bertie about her past.  Thad Michelet is a walking time bomb - son of a Norman Maileresque literary titan, he is also an author and an actor with an enormous personality, a violent temper, and a huge drinking problem.  Clea hasn't told Bertie that not only was she romantically involved with Thad, but that she was the subject of a book by Thad's father that Bertie's dad Perry is trying to make into a movie.  The three of them form a crazy clique, and when Thad and Clea team up on the Starwatch show things begin to spiral out of control.  Bertie gains wisdom and so do we in the process of watching his friends disintegrate.  Again, Bruce Wagner is amazing in his ability to portray the sublime ridiculousness of modern Hollywood without losing his characters' humanity.  Even Bertie's uber-producer father -- who could have been as one-dimensional as a paper doll -- comes through with the humanity we all at least hope everyone possesses.
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Beautiful Inez, by Bart Schneider
    It is 1962, and 32-year od Sylvia Bran has moved to San Francisco.  She is enjoying her rather Bohemian life, living alone, playing piano in a piano showroom, and moving beyond the long sad years she was alone with her mother before her mother committed suicide.  One day she finds herself in possession of a ticket to the symphony courtesy of her boss at Myerson's -"The grand piano store of the West" - and seated in a box of her own.  When a lovely blonde violinnist appears on the stage with her violin, Sylvia's life is permanently changed.  The attendant informs her that this is "Inez Roseman:  beautiful Inez", who has been with the symphony for over 20 years and is married to Jake Roseman, an attorney who's creating "all the fuss with the colored."  Jake's father was in the symphony and was Inez's teacher.  Instantly obsessed, Sylvia later constructs an elaborate ruse, introducing herself to Inez as a reporter, getting into her home, and spending time with her.  Inez is beautiful, complex, and as miserable as she is talented.  She is married to a famous attorney and has two children but really has no wifely or motherly feelings.  Jake is unfaithful to her but she hardly cares, and soon she and Sylvia begin an intimate and strange relationship which overtakes both of their lives.
    To me, what is most remarkable about this eminently readable story about two fascinating women is the material about the music they both love and cherish.  While Inez is a virtuoso who knows nothing so well as the music she has played her entire life, Sylvia - who plays popular music all day for a living - has her own passion for music that is just as strong.  The other characters in the novel are also well-drawn, especially Inez's young son who wants to play violin (against his mother's wishes), and Sylvia's wonderful, generous boss, Myerson.
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Great Books for May 2005
A Changed Man, by Francine Prose
    Francine Prose is one of our greatest writers and I have included many of her books on this page over the last seven years.  Her gift for satire and social commentary is unsurpassed, but her fictional characters also retain their humanity.  This book is no exception to that.  Vincent Nolan is a young Neo-Nazi - a member of the so-called American Rights Movement - but his fellow members, including his cousin with whom he lives and works, don't realize that he is not really with the program.  So when Vincent takes off one night, taking his cousin's van, drug stash and money, none of them would have ever expected his destination.  Vincent drives to New York City and presents himself in the offices of World Brotherhood Watch, a human rights foundation headed by Meyer Maslow, a Holocaust survivor.  Vincent announces himself as someone who wants to help guys like him not turn into guys like him, and as someone who has read all of Maslow's books and wants to live like him.  At first taken aback, Maslow begins to see this as a great opportunity for his foundation, and instructs his fund-raiser Bonnie Kalen, a divorced single mother of two, to take Vincent home with her.  As the next weeks and months play out and Vincent is exposed to Meyer's high society life and Bonnie's domestic misery, the failings and strengths of all are revealed in darkly comic, satiric, and poignant ways.  This is a highly entertaining and surprisingly moving look at our TV-saturated, drug-addled, money-besotted world.
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Saturday,by Ian McEwan
    Ian McEwan is a writer of unparalleled depth and complexity.  In each of his novels, he sets about examining something and does it through his characters and their actions.  As with Francine Prose, I have featured a number of his books on this page, and 'Saturday' is no less deserving (if indeed it is an honor).  I read in an interview with McEwan about this novel that he had set about to explore 'happiness' itself, but the way in which this is revealed is characteristically, extremely nuanced and complex.  Henry Perowne is an accomplished brain surgeon who lives in a wonderful London house with his beautiful wife Rosalind and his son Theo.  His daughter Daisy is studying in Paris and is about to have her first book of poems published.  His wife's father is a famous poet - John Grammaticus - who is mostly drunken and cantankerous, but who has played a significant role in their lives because of their long summer visits to his home in France.  On this particular 'Saturday' of the book's title, Henry sets out in the morning for his weekly squash game with a fellow physician and all is right with the world.  His daughter is coming for a visit from Paris, and his father-in-law is expected for dinner, and he settles into his expensive and comfortable Mercedes to start his day.  But on this Saturday the streets are altered for a large demonstration protesting the incipient Iraq war, and the atmosphere is changed.  As he drives to the gym, he inadvertently crosses one closed street and has a seemingly harmless fender-bender with a BMW.  But when he encounters the occupants of the other car, they reveal themselves to be street thugs led by a particularly nasty bloke named Baxter, intent on shaking him down.  Henry's acute abilities as a neurosurgeon come to his aid as he disarms Baxter by letting him know that he sees the symptoms of the genetic disease that is taking over Baxter's life, and they back off.  But this incident will culminate in an episode of such violence in Henry's own home that his and his entire family's lives will be irrevocably altered.
    The amazing thing about McEwan's books is that while exploring one them he delves so deeply into his character's lives and occupations that we are educated about so much more.  In 'Amsterdam' it was classical music against a backdrop of euthanasia, in 'Enduring Love' the protagonist's occupation as a science writer was as descriptively detailed as was the theme of obsession, and in 'Atonement' the process of writing itself was revealed even as we gleaned the rich details of the effect of World War II on the British upper classes.  So in this book, as Henry's own epiphany develops, we are privy to his ruminations on the upcoming war, the essence of poetry, the war of squash-playing egos, and many interesting and complex facts about brain surgery itself.  Genius.
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The Year of Pleasures, by Elizabeth Berg
    Elizabeth Berg is another regular on this page, as indeed all the writers chosen this month.  While not necessarily the most serious of writers, Berg is nonetheless imminently readable and insightful about women, their relationships with other women, and their relationships with men.  In some cases her plots may seem a little to pat and her characters a bit too quaint, but I find myself reading every book she writes straight through to the end, usually in one sitting.  In this one, Beth Nolan, newly widowed after an extremely happy marriage, starts driving until she reaches a small town that looks like one in which she could reconstruct her life.  She finds a perfect old house in Ohio - one with lots of history, nooks, and crannies - and buys it impulsively.  Throughout her long marriage Beth and her husband John had been in their own world, needing nothing but each other, but as the next year unfolds, Beth begins to reconnect with life - re-connecting with her three best friends from college,  experimenting with ideas for opening a shop, getting to know her ten-year old neighbor, and tentatively dating.  Predictably, Beth learns a lot about herself as a friend and as a woman, and along the way we are treated with soothing and entertaining prose.
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The Breakdown Lane, by Jacquelyn Mitchard
    I rather reluctantly included Jacquelyn Mitchard's last novel 'Twelve Times Blessed' on this page, but I am much more enthusiastic about this one.  Mitchard also writes very well about the emotional complexities in modern women's lives, but this book explores much deeper and darker themes.  Julieanne is an advice columnist in her local paper, and she believes that her twenty-year marriage to Leo which has produced three children - Gabe, Caroline, and Aury - is a success.  Leo's parents live close by and couldn't be closer to Julieanne and the kids.  When Leo begins taking trips by himself to explore New Age pursuits she doesn't worry or even notice, but when he suddenly announces his need for a 'sabbatical' from their marriage he really gets her attention  - especially when he then proceeds to stop writing or calling either her or the children.  Adjusting to this would be hard enough, but then Julieanne is diagnosed with MS the fragile family is forced to deal not only with Leo's betrayal but with a serious threat.  When Gabe and Caroline take off on their own to find their father and encounter danger themselves before being shocked by what they find at Leo's house when they get there, things reach a breaking point.  But of course, they all do painfully reconstruct and re-define their family with a new perspective and life goes on.  The strength of this novel is in its unflinching look at the realities of serious illness and how it affects everyone in the family, the very realistic portrayal of adolescent angst in Caroline and Gabe,  and the hypocrisy that is often produced in the self-righteous ones who purport to be living a more 'conscious' life in search of the 'true self', but who are really pursuing their own self-absorption.
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Great Books for June 2005
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
    Leo  Gursky, elderly survivor of the Nazis, knows he is going to die soon, but he goes out each day to make someone notice him.  He either spills his coffee in Starbucks, tries on multiple pairs of sneakers, or generally creates some sort of commotion just so he can feel like he is not completely invisible.  Leo has lived his life in the memory of his first love Alma, a girl who lived in the Polish village where he was born.  Leo wrote a book about Alma called 'The History of Love' that he believes was lost when he escaped from Poland, but the book was actually taken to Spain by a friend of his and published.  Leo's friend was believed to have been the book's author, and it attained something of a cult following, finding its way into the home of another Alma, whose parents named her after the Alma in Leo's book.  Alma and her younger brother Bird live with their widowed mother, whose sadness is so profound that Alma is trying everything she can to find someone to cheer her up.  Bird, on the other hand is so devoutly Jewish that he believes he may be the Messiah.  Events transpire that lead Alma to discover Leo's identity and begin to search for him, while meanwhile Leo has written another book and decided to send it to his son who was born to the first Alma after she had escaped to America.   Another man had married the pregnant Alma, and she stayed with him even after Leo found her when he reached the States.
    This is a wonderful, poignant and clever novel.  The character of the young Alma is a great narrator, and Leo is tragic, humorous and wise.  I featured Nicole Krauss's first novel 'Man Walks Into a Room' on this page, and this is a fabulous follow-up.  Nicole Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, author of 'Everything is Illuminated' and 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' and in a strange way they have begun to stylistically resemble each other.
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The White Rose, by Jean Hanff Korelitz
    Marian Kahn is a successful writer and historian, a professor at Columbia University.  She has had a long, comfortable marriage to Henry, a man who does not share her academic interests and travels a lot.  Marian has become famous through her discovery and writing about Lady Charlotte Wilcox, an 18th century adventuress who led a singularly fascinating life.  When this story opens, Marian is involved in a steamy affair with Oliver, the twenty-six year old son of her oldest friend, Caroline Rosenthal.  Marian is terrified of being found out, but Oliver insists he wants the world to know.  When Marian's snobbish cousin Barton Ochstein shows up one afternoon while Oliver and Marian are 'in flagrante', Marian forces Oliver - who has no time or route to escape - to dress up in her clothes, which he does so quite attractively.  Unfortunately, Barton fancies Marian's 'assistant' and begins to pursue Oliver as  'Olivia', even as he proudly announces that he is engaged to Sophie Klein, daughter of the fabulously rich mogul Morton Klein who lives in one of Manhattan's most famous mansions.  Marian soon realizes that Sophie is one of her graduate students, another coincidence that puts all of the players in each other's paths over and over again.  Oliver's profession as a florist plays prominently throughout the rest of the story, with all of their paths crossing and re-crossing until Marian, Oliver, and Sophie ultimately end up tied to each other in ways that one might not expect.  This is a highly readable and entertaining novel, full of wit, surprise, and historical detail.
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Vanishing Acts, by Jodi Picoult
    Jodi Picoult writes novels about events that could be ripped from the headlines, always putting a human face on stories that we may have seen on the evening news, and I usually end up featuring her books on this page.  She has a talent for writing about complex and conflicted emotions and difficult situations without resorting to stereotype or pat characterizations.  This novel is no exception.  Delia Hopkins is the beautiful fiancee of her childhood sweetheart Eric, who is the father of their daughter Sophie.  Delia has grown up with her father Andrew, a beloved local figure and amateur magician, who seems to have given her a charmed life, filled with love after the death of her mother in a car crash.  Delia, Eric, and their best friend Fitz grew up as neighbors, but it was as teenagers that Delia and Eric fell in love, but it is only now that Delia has agreed to marry Eric because of his long-standing drinking problem.  Delia's work is 'search and rescue' using her bloodhound Greta.   But this lovely scenario is turned on its head one day when Delia returns home to find out that her father has been arrested and is in jail - for kidnapping her 30 years before.  Delia's life spins out of control as she realizes that not only is her mother not dead, but that her father took her away from Arizona when she was too young to remember.  As all this unfolds, she begins to have some sense memories of that earlier time, and when her father is sent to Arizona for trial, Delia, Eric, Sophie, and soon Fitz all follow.  Delia meets her mother, rages at her father, and begins to unravel the painful threads of what mystery could have caused all this to happen.  Eric, who has agreed to be Andrew's attorney, also begins some profound self-discovery, as does Andrew who is thrown among a violent prison population and must learn to survive.  This is an engrossing read, the usual for Picoult.
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With No One As Witness, by Elizabeth George
    Elizabeth George is the only mystery writer I still read regularly, along with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, and this new book does not disappoint.  George always deals with profound social and character issues in her plots, often involving abuse, and these issues become as important as the murders Inspector Lynley and Barbara Havers must solve.  When this story begins, Havers has been suspended and Winston Nkata has been promoted to her position.  Lynley wants to get her back in the game, but her fiery temper antagonizes the powers that be.  When an adolescent boy's nude body is found mutilated and artfully arranged on the top of the tomb, the police recognize that this is the work of a serial killer.  The twist is that this is the fourth victim, but the first to be white.  In order to avoid press and public charges of racism, the Machiavellian Superintendent Hillier wants Winston Nkata, a black man, to be the face of the investigation, something that Nkata deeply resents.  The case is handed over the Lynley's people to solve, and it immediately begins to take its toll on all of them.  Lynley's wife Helen is expecting their first child, and this event, coupled with the resolution of perhaps their most difficult case, changes all of them irrevocably.  It leaves me waiting to find out what will happen to these characters in George's next book, because with the end of this one we know none of them can possibly ever be the same.  I find that in particular, the character of Barbara Havers is one of the richest ever in detective fiction, and the course of her life path is every bit as intriguing as the mysteries themselves.
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Great Books for July 2005
The Coast of Akron, by Adrienne Miller
    This comic and yet somehow disturbing novel is about extremely quirky characters who all live in Akron, Ohio even though their lives are somewhat exotic.  Lowell Haven is a famous American artist, much-honored and revered for a lifetime of self-portraits in widely varied settings.  He and his wife Jenny and their daughter Merit lived with Fergus, a wealthy and eccentric childhood friend of Jenny's until Jenny and Merit moved out and Lowell and Fergus became a couple.  Lowell and Jenny continued to create together for years after that however, but as the novel opens Jenny is a broken woman, Lowell has had a long artistic dry spell, Fergus is drowning in alcohol and his obsession with the abusive Lowell, and Merit is trying her best to be a normal housewife and mother.  Merit has long known that Lowell is a fraud and her own disquiet is exacerbated when she finds Jenny's diary which recounts in great detail Jenny and Lowell's early romance and marriage, all which seemed to be intertwined and suffused with the unhealthy presence of Fergus.  And while she seems to be the 'normal' touchstone for all of them, she drifts through her own life in a strangely disengaged way.  Her husband Wyatt is a fussy, detail-obsessed critic, and she falls into adulterous affairs without emotion, passion or remorse.  As the novel's events unfold, the end of their saga, as it did in the beginning, hinges on the money and the shaky mental condition of the pathetic Fergus.
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My Name is Legion, by A. N. Wilson
    This novel is big, complex and satirical, but it somehow has both cosmic and spiritual underpinnings.  The title is from the New Testament, as when Jesus cast out demons from a man and when asked what its name is, the demon replies 'my name is Legion, for we are many.'  The Daily Legion is a London tabloid that lives up to the worst of its genre - celebrity gossip, scandal, and the advocacy of prejudice against asylum seekers, liberals, and anti-war protestors.  It also serves as the main source of propaganda and support for the brutal dictator of the African country Zinariya.  The reason for this is that Lennox Marx, the owner of the tabloid, owes his fortune and position to his family's ownership of Zinariya's copper mines.  Indeed, Lennox spent his early years in Africa, and while there came under the tutelage of Father Vivyan Chell, an Anglican monk and missionary in  Zinariya who at first instilled him with compassion and a spirit of social activism.  Now, however, Lennie is a gluttonous and greedy opponent of Father Chell, who is working to overthrow the dictator in Zinariya and operating a safe haven for zealots and asylum-seekers in London.  The conflict between these two men is only a small part of the elaborate plot of this big book, but just let me say that there is much, much more in this plot - which deals with racism, religion, imperialism, corporate greed, vanity, plastic surgery, schizophrenia, and nothing less than the existence of God and the proper way to observe this.
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A Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby
    I'm beginning to think that Nick Hornby is incapable of doing any wrong, at least novelistically.  While I think I enjoyed this book more than some reviewers, I found it yet another delightful, witty, and totally human read, dealing as always with big issues deftly - with a light and humorous touch.  In this book, four unlikely friends meet on a rooftop on New Year's Eve - each with the same intention - to jump off and make an end to a miserable life.  Each of these individuals, in true Tolstoyan fashion, is unhappy in a different way, and they all form a group based on their original thwarted intent - feeling that somehow they should continue to meet and let their unhappiness play itself out.  Martin is a fallen celebrity - a chat show host whose downfall came about when he slept with a 15-year old girl.  He not only lost his job and his family, he went to prison.  He actually left a New Year's date to climb to his suicidal perch, while JJ, bereft at losing his rock band and musical future, and working as a pizza delivery man, actually brings a pizza to the top of the building where he plans to end it.  Jess is the foul-mouthed daughter of a prominent Cabinet member, who is so out of control she is unaware that she might actually jump until she just tries it and the others sit on her head to stop her.  And Maureen, the mousy spinster and strict Catholic of the bunch, has simply come to the end of her hopelessness as the single mother of a twenty-something son who has lived in a vegetative state since his birth.  The rest of the novel is about what happens between them and to them after they all come down from that roof, and it is both insightful and entertaining.
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The Wonder Spot, by Melissa Bank
    I featured Melissa Bank's first novel, 'The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing' on this page when it came out, and while this new book by the author has been criticized for being somewhat too much like her first, I found it just as entertaining and worthy.  This is a series of interconnected stories about Sophie Applebaum, the black sheep of a Jewish family from Pennsylvania.  She's somewhat inept in almost every situation, and although she wants to be a writer, can't get a job in New York after college because she can't learn to type.  She does eventually make her way in the publishing world, however, and begins to take tentative steps toward romantic success, but along the way she has chronicled her progress with irony, self-deprecation, fondness and wit.
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No Country for Old Men,by Cormac McCarthy
    This novel is set in the same territory as McCarthy's brilliant "Border Trilogy" but it navigates a darker and harsher terrain of the human spirit.  In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash. The choice he makes will irrevocably change his life, his wife's life, and the many characters who become involved.  The bulk of the novel is a gripping man-on-the-run sequence relayed in terse, masterful prose as Moss, who's taken the money, tries to evade Wells, an ex–Special Forces agent employed by a powerful cartel, and Chigurh, an icy psychopathic murderer armed with a cattle gun and a dangerous philosophy of justice. Also concerned about Moss's whereabouts is Sheriff Bell, an aging lawman struggling with his sense that there's a new breed of man (embodied in Chigurh) whose destructive power he simply cannot match.  It is Bell who is the heart of the novel, a wise man who loves his wife and who tries to do good even as he feels he is seeing evil that has never been seen before.  McCarthy's graceful and lyrical prose is used to describe scenarios that are incredibly violent, land that is hauntingly beautiful, and lives with prospects that are bleak at best.
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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See
    I got an e-mail from Carolyn See, the writer who is Lisa See's mother, raving about this novel, and the rave was extremely well-deserved.  What she has produced is such a fascinating and poignant portrait of the plight of Chinese women during that time and before, the harsh prisoners of customs and traditions which granted them no real identity or humanity.  We meet Lily, the narrator, when she is six years old and still allowed outside the house to play.  But when she turns seven, as is the custom, she will spend all of her days inside the women's room on the second story of the house, never leaving, and her feet will be bound -- the dreadfully painful and dangerous torture that all young girls must endure.  Indeed, one of Lily's sisters dies from an infection after her feet are bound.  The woman who arranges marriages for all of the villages nearby realizes that Lily has exceptionally beautiful feet and therefore the possibility of making a good marriage - something her desperately poor family could not otherwise hope for.  This same woman also arranges for Lily to have a 'laotong', an 'Old Same' who will be her lifelong friend.  Lily and her Old Same Snow Flower first meet at the age of seven, and learn to communicate in the 'nu shu' language - a special women's writing that is a secret code.  The novel follows the progression of their lives, and Lily is telling the story now at the age of 80 - how the bond between herself and Snow Flower lasted and then changed as the events of their hopelessly circumscribed lives unfolded against a historical backdrop that was often brutally difficult.
    There has been much Chinese literature coming out in the Post-Mao era, opening a window on what Chinese society has been in this century, but this is the most in-depth exploration of what life was like in China in the last century.  The area of Hunan province where this novel is set is still little-traveled, and Lisa See has made an invaluable literary contribution here - thoroughly researched and brilliantly imagined.
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Envy,by Kathryn Harrison
    Kathryn Harrison knows her way around sexual obsession and perversion, and how to write gracefully and powerfully about both of these disturbing and intriguing subjects.  She has even written an autobiographical account of a brief incestuous affair she had with her own father, something she had earlier fictionalized in a novel.   I featured her book "The Binding Chair" on this page a few years back.  This new novel is a layered, complex and ultimately surprising story about a psychoanalyst whose own life seems to be veering off course.  Will is happily married to his wife Carol, but their family was rocked by the death of their 12-year old son a few years ago.  Carol seems to have moved on, spending her time on yoga and reading gruesome true crime books, while Will holds on to his grief and guilt.  Their once healthy sex life has taken a strange turn however, and Will finds himself becoming sexually obsessed with nearly all of his female patients.  He begins seeing his own analyst more often, and it is in these sessions that other issues are revealed.  Will has an identical twin brother Mitch, who was disfigured at birth by a huge red birthmark covering his face.  They were together until Will married Carol, and Mitch then went on to become a famous long-distance runner, leaving Will puzzled by the estrangement.  In the middle of this, a young female patient begins to come to see him, detailing sordid sexual adventures with a series of older men.  When she finally seduces him, she reveals that she is the girl who may or may not be his daughter by an old college flame.  The shock and surprise that comes with this event has an explosive effect on all parties and the story does not end in any predictable way.  Needless to say, psychobabble abounds in this book, but it is not off-putting in Harrison's gifted hand.  Gripping read.
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Red Carpet:  Bangalore Stories, by Lavanya Sankaran
    This first collection of short stories by Lavanya Sankaran is a true delight.  Set in present-day Bangalore among what would pass for India's version of yuppies, they portray the clash of the modern culture with the traditional Indian past, especially when it comes to marriage.  Most of these characters have been educated in America, but in the post-outsourcing world they have come to a newly developed and modernized Bangalore to establish businesses and get married.  Bangalore has become India's own silicone valley, and Sankaran, one of these American-educated characters herself, captures these lives in poignant and fascinating ways.  In one story we meet Ramu, a young computer engineer who finally and reluctantly has decided to ask his mother to help him find a wife after failing to do this himself.  When she mentions a young woman who is in his own crowd of friends, he comes to see it as a good match only to find out she has started dating his best friend.   In another, we meet Mr. D'Costa, a retired Indian gentleman who patrols his neighborhood and knows everyone's business.  But when a block of luxury condominiums opens up and a young, thoroughly Westernized couple moves in, he becomes fascinated with their way of life - staring into their open curtains and observing their modern life with wonder.  Circumstances even transpire that he befriends the young wife, and one day when he sees her curtains closed, he knows something has happened inside their gleaming life they seem to have.  Little does he know how serious it is.  The book jacket says that Sankaran is working on her first novel, and I for one cannot wait.
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Great Books for September 2005

Field of Blood, by Denise Mina
    Denise Mina, to my mind, is the most original voice to come to the crime fiction genre ever.  This book, her fifth, introduces yet another edgy, clever female protagonist in Paddy Meehan, a young girl from meager beginnings with big ambitions.  Paddy wants to become a real journalist and lacking funds for education, she has taken a job as a copygirl at the Scottish Daily News, fetching coffee and running errands for the jaded and colorful members of the newspaper's staff.  When three-year old Brian Wilcox is murdered, it turns out that one of the young boys who has been accused of the crime is actually related to Paddy's long-time boyfriend Sean.  Paddy doesn't want to hurt Sean or her family by exposing this, and when it inevitably happens, she faces ostracism at home and a huge challenge at work.  She has her doubts about the young boys' guilt, and begins to investigate on her own.  Paddy is a great character and this is a great read.
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72 Hour Hold, by Bebe Moore Campbell
    I featured an earlier work by Bebe Moore Campbell on this page, and this book is also worthy of notice.  Ms. Campbell explores a segment of the population that is seldom portrayed in film or literature - the educated, professional, and successful African-American community, particularly in Los Angeles.  In this novel a mother, Keri, the successful entrepreneur who owns a high-end resale clothing store, struggles to help her 18-year old daughter Trina who suffers from extreme bipolar disorder.  The beautiful Trina, who has been accepted at Brown University, has to postpone college and even endure repeated hospitalizations.  At her worst, she is paranoid, wild, violent and bizarre, resisting the medication that she needs to function in society.  Finally, in desperation, Keri signs on for an illegal intervention with a group that does not subscribe to the existing psychiatric system, modeling themselves on the Underground Railroad.  One of the cultural issues that is highlighted here is the reluctance of the African-American community to acknowledge mental illness honestly and openly.  In the wake of this novel's publication, Bebe Moore Campbell has talked and written about this experience in her own family and her participation in support groups for families trying to make it through the ordeal of a loved one's illness.  But besides the issue being explored, Ms. Campbell has a great writing style.  The characters are fully human and recognizable and they provide a window into a part of our culture seldom seen.
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Baker Towers, by Jennifer Haigh
    Covering a period from the 1940's to the 1970's, this family saga set in the coal mining town of Bakerton, Pennsylvania is a stark portrait of the culture created by the coal mining companies during that era.  In a town of church festivals and sharply defined ethnic neighborhoods, children are raised in company houses-- three rooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs.  The novel opens with the death of Stanley Novak, a Polish coal miner married to Rose, an Italian woman.  Stanley's oldest son Georgie is in the military during World War II, and the rest of the family consists of three girls and another boy, Sandy.  Through the stories of their lives we see the coal mining culture and the town itself grow, change, and eventually fade away as the coal industry becomes less and less important.  The choices made by Rose's children also reflect the changes in society over time, with Georgie essentially rejecting the family to join the upper class through marriage, with results he didn't anticipate, Joyce eventually obtaining the college education she always coveted, and shy, withdrawn Dorothy finding a modicum of love.  A well-written and very interesting portrayal of a way of life that essentially no longer exists.
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Blood Father, by Peter Craig
    Lydia Carlson is an out of control, beautiful teenager who is strung out and on the run.  When the novel opens, Lydia has been up for days and is brought into a drug-related murder by her boyfriend and ordered to participate.  When she shoots her boyfriend instead, she realizes her days could be numbered and she looks up her 'blood father' John Link, a former Hell's Angel, convict and master tattoo artist for help.  Link seizes the chance to rescue her as there has been little contact between them since her early years, but he has been around this block many times and realizes that her situation is far deadlier than it initially seems.  He pulls out all the stops to help her, even re-connecting with the Angels to try and salvage something for her future.
    This visceral and wise novel is written at break-neck speed, with grit, compassion and a great attention to Southern California detail.  Peter Craig is a real find.
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Exposure, by Talitha Stevenson
    This is a lovely novel about contemporary Brits, and it conveys very well many different varieties of angst within one prominent family.  Alistair Langford is a successful and well-known attorney in London.  He has a lovely wife, Rosalind, a twenty-something son, Luke, and an estranged daughter, Sophie.  It looks like such a perfect life, well-organized and well-planned, that of course one knows that it is hiding a number of secrets.  When Alistair is mugged outside a friend's home one night, all is suddenly changed.  Lies that have been told for an entire lifetime are exposed, and nothing is as it always and ever seemed.  Meanwhile, Luke is knocked off balance by a beautiful young actress with whom he has fallen hopelessly in love.  A successful advertising agent, he falls into a hopeless depression and emotional paralysis when she leaves him.  He moves back home, and is there when his mother finds out Alistair's lifelong secret which would seem to render their entire marriage a sham.  The events that follow these happenings actually transform all involved, but not without much self-examination.
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The Seven Sisters, by Margaret Drabble
    Yet another tale of British angst, this novel by Margaret Drabble tells the tale of Candida Wilton, an older women recently betrayed, rejected, divorced and alienated from her three grown daughters.  Her husband, the handsome headmaster of a private girl's school, has taken a new wife, and she has moved from her beautiful Georgian house in Suffolk to a two-room walkup flat in London.  The early portions of the book are her diary kept on her new laptop computer, and they detail the wonder of learning to live alone for the first time in her life.  The city, and the single life, are totally foreign to her, and it is interesting to watch her beginning to branch out, and ultimately embrace, the multi-cultural milieu in which she has found herself.  She makes new friends, especially in a group she joins to read Aeneas and then ultimately follow Virgil's path through Italy, and most importantly, she makes peace with her life, long lived in the shadow of  a husband who, if she had a different beginning to her life, she may never have married at all.  Margaret Drabble can always be counted upon to provide a good, intelligent, comfortable reading experience.
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On Beauty, by Zadie Smith
    Zadie Smith's first novel "White Teeth" was my favorite book the year it came out.  This novel, after a disappointing sophomore effort in "Autograph Man" is a return to that greatness, in my view.  Full of rich characters, humor, and intelligence, she juggles so many different elements, and does it so well, that this novel was pure joy.  Howard Belsey, the story's main character is an Englishman abroad, teaching at Wellington, a New England college.  Howard teaches aesthetics, and his theories about what is beautiful in art are indeed controversial and have resulted in a long-term feud with a right-wing Black conservative and pundit, Monty Kipp.  Howard has been married to his wife Kiki - a striking and earthy Black woman - for thirty years, but when we first meet them Howard is trying to win back Kiki's affections after a disastrous affair with a colleague.  This infidelity has resulted in his son Jerome's de-camping to London, where he is interning for Monty Kipp himself, much to Howard's chagrin, and where he has become a born-again Christian - again to the dismay of the iconoclastic Howard.  Howard and Kiki's daughter Zora has become and intellectual zealot at Wellington and is endlessly critical of her father, and their youngest son Levi has taken to talking like a gangsta and pretending to be from the Boston 'hood.  When the Kipp family unexpectedly comes to Wellington and Monty actually takes a position in Howard's Humanities department, the stage is set for Zadie Smith's version of a modern Howard's End.   This is a wonderful book.
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The English Teacher, by Lily King
    Vida Avery is the English teacher of the title, and she teaches at the Fayer Academy, living on its grounds with her 15-year old son.  She has cocooned herself and her son Peter in this isolated place, always concealing from Peter the identity of his father and what happened in her life before his birth.  She is esteemed as the finest English teacher at the school, and takes it extremely seriously, living through her classes and the books she teaches.  This year Peter is in one of her classes, and the book they are studying is 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles', a book which allows Vida to lecture her classes on its pessimistic world view and revealing some of her own.  When Vida accepts the marriage proposal of Tom Belou, a widower with three children, Peter looks forward to finally having a 'normal' family life.  This expectation proves profoundly unfounded when he and Vida move into the Belou household, and Vida's mental state begins deteriorating rapidly in the face of resentful step-children and her husband's demands.  I featured Lily King's first novel 'The Pleasing Hour' on this page earlier, and this is a worthy follow-up.  As in her earlier book, King here portrays complex and even unlikeable characters in a masterful way.
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13 Steps Down, by Ruth Rendell
    Mix Cellini, the disturbed character at the center of Ruth Rendell's latest venture into bizarre psychological territory, is obsessed with the life of Reggie Christie, a serial killer who strangled, raped and buried several women in the Fifties.  Mix owns every book written about Christie, and has chosen his present living quarters because the old house is across from the area where Christie lived and perpetrated his heinous deeds.  Mix is also obsessed with Nerissa Nash, a beautiful super-model, and his walls are covered with her pictures.  He finds out where she lives and begins stalking her, convinced that it is only a matter of time before she will talk to him and realized that they belong together.  Further complicating matters is his elderly landlady, Gwendolyn Chawcer, an eccentric spinster who has lived in the same huge, now ramshackle Victorian house her entire life.  Mix lives in an upstairs flat in her house, and she spies on him suspiciously, while meanwhile she is resurrecting a fantasy she had that a Dr. Stephen Reeves, who treated her father at the end of his life, and with whom she was infatuated, was actually in love with her and she should get in contact with him again.  Both Mix and Gwendolyn are extreme headcases, and when Mix dates a young receptionist from Nerissa's health club to try to get closer the violent impulses so close to the surface come out and wreak havoc for all concerned.  Once again, Rendell proves she's the master.
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Adored, by Tilly Bagshawe
    The best way to describe this novel would be as a sort of thinking man's Jackie Collins novel, or something in the same mode as a Bruce Wagner book.  Set in the world of show business, it nonetheless has a plot and characters that are complex.  Siena McMahon, the book's main character would seem to have an ideal life.  Born into a Hollywood dynasty - granddaughter of movie legend Duke McMahon and daughter of billionaire movie producer Pete McMahon - she has brains, beauty and wealth.  But behind the elegant facade of the family's Hancock Park estate, things are anything but ideal.  The McMahons are bound together by jealousy and infighting, and when Duke moves his mistress Caroline into the family home with his wife still in residence many destructive forces are unleashed.  Siena is packed off to an English boarding school and for the next seven years misses her old life dreadfully, waiting impatiently for the day she can become a Hollywood star in her own right.  She takes up modeling over her parents' objections, they disown her, and she starts her career.  This is a very engrossing portrait of wealth and power, and a great read.
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Great Books for December 2005
The Sea, by John Banville
The Truth of the Matter, by Robb Forman Dew
In the Fold, by Rachel Cusk
Truth and Consquences, by Alison Lurie