2021 Book Reviews - Robert Schladale

I’ve mentioned my approach to book reviews at the outset of my 2019 reviews, and so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that I give a book I enjoyed three stars and one that I found wanting gets two stars. I do my best to explain my rationale. To get four stars, a book has to be outstanding in terms of its characters, story, style or voice. Five stars will go to a work that is exceptional in all those areas. Typically I rate books higher if they have something to say about society at large, rather than only about individual characters’ lives. My ratings for books I’ve read during 2021 are listed immediately below, with the full review of each following thereafter.

Ask Again, Yes – Mary Beth Keane

For me, the source of enjoyment in reading this novel came from the quality of the writing. Much of the novel consists of the interior monologues of one or the other of the point of view characters. We get to see their hopes and dreams and worries and fears, some of which may be minor or petty or irrational, but altogether they help create characters that are completely real and believable.

The novel focuses on two families, the Gleesons and Stanhopes. Both husbands are New York City cops who move with their wives to the suburb of Gillam to raise their children. The Gleeson’s three daughters and the Stanhopes one son go to Catholic school together, and Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope become close childhood friends. Eventually tragedy strikes the two families due to Anne Stanhope’s mental illness. Peter and his father move away, and Peter and Kate don’t see each other for more than four years, only reconnecting when they are in college.

Multiple Perspectives are Effective

The novel tells its story through the eyes of half a dozen family members: Brian Stanhope, Anne Stanhope, Peter Stanhope, and Brian’s brother George; Francis Gleeson, his wife Lena, and daughter Kate. By shifting from one to another within a given chapter, the reader is brought into the domestic dramas in a way that makes all the characters sympathetic. I felt glad to see these people, who were at odds over various issues for much of the novel, overcome their animosity in the end.

No Fairy Tales Here

I appreciated the realism present in the story as I read it. Even though the characters succeed in keeping their lives above water (more or less), there are no fairy tale elements in this novel. Anne struggles for ten years with mental illness, and lives a minimal existence in a single room apartment. Peter Stanhope is abandoned by his father Brian and is left to live with his uncle George. Later as an adult he struggles mightily with his alcoholism, and even after he goes through an expensive residential treatment program he soon starts drinking again. The stress this imposes on Kate is enormous. I kept expecting her to threaten to leave him, but as always the novel avoids the easy drama of an ultimatum.

Strength and Endurance

In the end, this was a novel that was true to life, and to ordinary people who were strong enough to survive whatever life threw at them. As Francis says at the end, “And then he saw what he’d never seen before, which was that Peter was fine. And Kate was fine. Lena was fine. And he, Francis Gleeson, was fine. And that all the things that had happened in their lives had not hurt them in any essential way, despite what they may have believed at times.” Lena even goes one step further, saying, “I think we’ve been luckier than most people.” As a reader I would agree. They were fine, and they had earned it.

The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult

To state the obvious, this is a challenging novel. But challenging works tend to be rewarding, and this one certainly is, far more to my way of thinking than most novels. Note that this review contains spoilers, so don’t read until you’ve read the book.

In certain respects, this is more than a novel, it also a primer on ancient Egyptian civilization and archeology. The Book of Two Ways was painted inside the coffins of wealthy ancient Egyptians when they were entombed. It depicted two ways for the deceased to reach the afterlife, by land and water. The chapters of the novel alternate, with those featuring Dawn’s husband Brian titled Water/Boston. The chapters involving her British Egyptologist lover Wyatt are titled Land/Egypt. This dichotomy seems to signify Dawn’s two routes to eternal life. But the novel is more complicated than a simple choice of routes.

Egyptology in Depth

Egypt and Egyptology provide not only a setting and career/love story for the novel. They also provide a basis for many of the novel’s philosophical turns. For example, Dawn is a death doula, which is someone who provides anything needed by someone who is dying. Early on the novel Dawn’s client Win surprises her by showing her a piece of framed Egyptian art on papyrus. Win has no idea that Dawn was once a doctoral candidate in Egyptology. She had to quit when her mother died in order to look after her younger brother.

Nevertheless, Dawn explains to Win that the art depicts Spell 125 in the ancient Book of Going Forth by Day. “It’s all about how the deceased can get to the afterlife,” Dawn explains. (p146) She goes on to describe more about the beliefs of ancient Egyptians. Included is the belief that Isis took care of Osiris after he died. Hearing this, Win connects those elements to the present. She points out that Isis is like Dawn, because Dawn is taking care of her as she dies.

A very interesting part of this scene follows Win’s comment. As Dawn translates the hieroglyphs on the art, we get her interior thought: “Suddenly I am back in the desert, grit on the nape of my neck as I carefully ink hieroglyphs onto a slippery curl of Mylar.” The passage continues, with Dawn alternating between translating Win’s artwork for her and re-living a minor accident in the tombs. It was an accident where Wyatt bandaged her wound, which helped bring them together. (p148) During this brief passage, Dawn is living on two different timelines.

Multiple Timelines, Multiple Universes

The idea that reality consists of multiple timelines—multiple universes—stems from quantum mechanics. It is discussed in the novel by husband Brian, a physics professor. The novel features Brian’s theory that multiple universes may exist in which our lives. As a result, the outcomes of our lives may differ from what we, in our present life, experience. Brian explains this with the story of the zombie cat (p61-62). He concludes, “The reason we don’t see zombie cats or electrons spinning both ways at the same time is because the minute we look at them, we become part of that mathematical equation and we ourselves get split into multiple timelines, where different versions of us see different, concrete outcomes.”

Dawn then asks Brian what happens to those two different timelines (the cat is dead, the cat is alive). He says, “They get farther and farther apart. For example, the observer who sees the dead cat might be so bummed out that she drops out of grad school and becomes a meth addict and never invents the technology that would help us develop a cure for cancer. Meanwhile, the observer who sees the live cat thinks she is onto something and becomes the dean of physics at Oxford.” Brian notes ruefully that he’s destroying his career “by insisting that the multiverse is constantly branching off, creating a new timeline whenever we make a decision or have an interaction.”

I mention the foregoing because different timelines—different realities based on past choices—are at the core of the novel. In one, she leaves Wyatt in 2003 and ends up marrying Brian. About 15 years later she wonders what her life would have been like if she’d stayed with Wyatt. So she makes the choice to find out.

The Trick of the Plane Crash

Within the novel, the author plays a distinct trick on the reader. In the Prologue, Dawn is involved in a plane crash. Afterwards, the airline offers the surviving passengers a ticket to go anywhere. The implication (strongly reinforced by the blurb on the book jacket) is that she chooses to go to Cairo. She takes this fateful opportunity to find out what her life could have been on the Wyatt timeline (p7).

However, she actually goes to Cairo from London, after flying there on behalf of Win, her client (p347). Moreover, although it isn’t revealed until page 353, Wyatt is with her during the plane crash. He is returning with her to meet Meret, whom we have recently learned is his biological daughter. I’m not quite sure why the sleight of hand on page 7 was included. Perhaps her two different crashes illustrate the idea of different timelines. In any event, the first crash is riveting, and keeps a reader going. Otherwise, some might abandon the book when it becomes an intellectually heavy treatise in the first chapter.

Death in All Its Complexities

Largely because of its heavy emphasis on Egyptology, I was initially judging this novel as a three-star effort. But it grew on me, particularly the chapters with Win, where Dawn is a death doula. I had no idea what a death doula was. More to the point, our entire society generally treats death as something not to be spoken of. Death is scary, messy, undesirable, incapable of being understood, and embarrassing. By making Dawn a death doula, the novel is able to illuminate death from multiple perspectives.

For example, the novel provides a description of the way in which a body physically dies. “This is how a body dies: it’s very intelligent, so it conserves the heart and lungs and the brain…” (p320) The novel also covers the pedestrian facts of dying: “The sicker a person gets, the more equipment there is. Win’s bedroom is cluttered with pill bottles, cups with straws, wipes to soothe her skin when she is feeling hot.” (p331)

More interesting are the psychological and emotional insights that stem from Dawn’s practice as a death doula. Dawn reports, “I believe that there are five things we need to say to people we love before they die, and I give this advice to caregivers: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye. I tell them that they can interpret those prompts any way they like, and nothing will have been left unsaid.” (p333) Personally, I found this both educational and touching.

Guided Death Meditation

Even more interesting is the novel’s presentation of Guided Death Meditation (p211-214). This is a novel about life and death and love. It’s filled with thoughts about how we live our lives, and how death is an inextricable part of life. Part of the guided death meditation asks: “If your life span is decreasing every day, what are you doing now to appreciate what you have left?” This question seems to be embedded in Dawn’s thinking. If she is honest, she knows that rejoining Wyatt is essential for her to fully appreciate life. But she still conflicted by her rational, obligatory love for Brian.

In the novel, Dawn’s experience of her mother’s death is the major reason she becomes a death doula. She notes, “Before my mother died . . . I found myself touching her, as if I was the one tethering her to existence.” (p321) Just below this she adds, “I wonder if I touch Brian because I know my time with him, too, is coming to an end.” The narrator often makes connections like this, or draws insight from her observations, that add amazing richness to the novel. By this point, I was already giving the novel five stars, and pleasures like this just kept coming.

Deep Questions Emerge Naturally

Similarly, her activities in Egypt bring up deep thoughts. “The texts that Wyatt and I have found in the interior coffin are all about morality—namely, being able to stand up to the gods after death and say with honesty that you haven’t done anything wrong. But what does it really mean to be good? Is it finding a calling that helps other people? Is it running to the bedside of someone who is dying? Is it putting someone else’s needs before your own? You could argue, I suppose, that any of those actions are about not selflessness, but martyrdom. Driven not by ethics, but guilt.” These are important questions, as are the ones that follow about immorality. I appreciated the way they emerged naturally from the adventure story of investigating the tombs. And the way they apply so clearly to Dawn’s present life.

A Love Lesson

Dawn’s similarities with Win are obvious: they both left the love of their life and married other men. Both had a child whose father was that earlier love. Particularly interesting is the fact that Dawn decides not to give Win’s parting love letter to Thane, her earlier love. She gets to his London home, but sees that he has a family, and she can’t bear to destroy it. At the same time, she takes the opportunity to jump back to the timeline she abandoned fifteen years earlier. She flies to Egypt, and Wyatt. She ignores the threat this poses to her own family, partly because she knows she still has time. She has seen how Win waited too long to pursue her true love, until it was too late. Too, she is answering the question from the Guided Death Meditation: “What are you doing now to appreciate what you have left?”

Initially, I felt the ending of the novel took too long. I thought that it was obvious that she was going to leave Brian for Wyatt. A quick break would be least painful. But the novel goes on, revealing all the ways that Brian is a good match for her. The point seems to be that there is no “right” answer to the question of which love is best. As I read these last passages, I looked for a dash of insight to come from an ancient Egyptian text. Alternatively, a metaphor based on quantum physics could have worked. But there was neither. Still, the book shared innumerable insights into life and death. Perhaps the author is leaving it to each reader to decide what Dawn will do. Fair enough. She has given us a gift. It is up to us to use it well.

Thin Ice by Paige Shelton

I give this book three stars because it’s entertaining and reasonably well written—an average, decent book. Indeed, the author isn’t aiming to write a literary masterpiece or a deep psychological character study. Nor has she written an insightful commentary on contemporary society—the kind I might give four or five stars. In short, a three-star book is what the author has aimed at. She has accomplished her goal.

What I liked best about this novel was the setting – Alaska. That is what attracted me to the book. The first chapter provides some good description of the landscape. Later on those descriptions become simplified, often limited to the words “deep woods” or “thick woods”. The ocean is mentioned a number of times, but never developed as an image or metaphor of any sort. Still, there was enough good verbiage that my own familiarity with Alaska was tickled.

Two stories overlap in this novel. The first is the violent abduction of the narrator, Beth Rivers, by Levi Brooks. This event occurs before the novel commences. Though she escapes after three days, Beth suffers a serious head injury. Since Brooks hasn’t been caught, she has come to the small town of Benedict, Alaska to hide and heal. The second story involves the death of Linda Rafferty, a town resident. Her death is ruled a suicide by the Juneau medical examiner. Most townies, however, consider her a murder victim.

Tension Anybody?

I guess this novel is what is termed a “cozy mystery.” Aside from a fistfight and a couple of wild shots at the end, there isn’t any violence in the book. Beth’s abduction and Linda’s death both occur off stage. There is relatively little action, and the mystery didn’t really seem to get going until around page 137.

Tension rises only intermittently in the novel, as on page 167. There, Beth recalls Levi sticking her with a syringe, administering some kind of knock-out potion. Tension also rises close to the end, when Beth comes upon George Rafferty and Willa fighting. Elsewhere any suspense is low-key, and what there is, isn’t well dramatized. For example, shortly before the George-Willa fight scene, she is with Donner. He decides to ford a small but turbulent river, which is a dangerous idea. Tension sparks when Beth loses her grip on Donner’s safety rope, which she’s supposed to be holding. But she immediately regains control, and the danger and tension vanish. It could easily have been enhanced, and the plot made more propulsive, but it isn’t.

Convenience Trumps Credibility

A couple of aspects of the story stretched credulity. First, it seems questionable that Willa would follow Linda and George from Detroit just to keep blackmailing them. They seem relatively poor, and it probably cost her more in transportation than she could shake out of them. Plus, they changed their names and retreated to this tiny, remote town. If she’s that good at finding people, she ought to get herself a PI license and make some legitimate dough.

Also, the speed with which Orin discovers the real names of Linda and George is way too convenient.

Most bothersome to me is the fact that I don’t learn much about Beth. I don’t know how old she is, how big she is, or what she looks like. She has a mother, but apparently no significant other. No friends are mentioned. Also questionable was her quick transition from traumatized victim to murder investigator. Apparently her headaches and dizziness weren’t really that disabling.

Who Are You, Beth?

Another shortcoming about Beth was the fact that her story-telling is utterly lacking in personality. Perhaps this may not bother cozy mystery fans. Still, Beth doesn’t think any interesting thoughts. Doesn’t express any opinions. Doesn’t dislike any things or people. Aside from fear of Levi Brooks, she reveals little in the way of desire or love or any other emotion. She is a nice person, and a decent person, but in terms of personality she is a non-entity.

In sum, Thin Ice was an easy, enjoyable read. Best of all, it takes place in Alaska, always an interesting setting.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

The Help is another novel that I finally got around to years after it was published. I’m glad I did, since for me it was the best novel I’ve read since The Mars Room. The story is important, the plot is sound, and the writing is first rate.

As someone who didn’t grow up in the South, the novel was an eye-opener. The relationships revealed between black and white were surprising in their complexity. The attitude of most of the white women who hired black help is relatively familiar. It’s an attitude that is still apparent among some parts of our population. They believe that individuals with nothing more than a different skin shade are a completely different and inferior species. The fact that the colored maids put up with this treatment was equally unsettling, though they had little choice.

This novel provided me with other peeks into Mississippi society circa 1963. One characteristic I was unaware of was the extent to which the black maids raised white babies. Mrs. Leefolt almost completely ignores her child Mae Mobley, who comes to love the maid Aibileen. But the attachment goes both ways; the black maids love the children they raise, and the children remember. Skeeter, in particular, recalls the woman who raised her, Constantine. Unraveling the mystery of why Constantine left her forms a significant subplot of the novel.

The Absurdity of Prejudice

I also appreciated reading about some of the distinct white biases about color. For example, if a colored woman was too light-skinned, she wouldn’t be hired. The treatment of Constantine’s daughter in the book illustrates the absurdity of the “one drop rule”. According to this rule, an individual with the slightest portion of black ancestry is considered black and therefore inferior. When Constantine’s daughter comes to visit, the white women have no idea that she is Constantine’s daughter. She looks as white as them. But when they find out she is Constantine’s daughter, she is forced to leave the house. (Notably, the movie version of the novel completely chickened out on this scene. In it, Constantine’s daughter is clearly black, not white.)

The novel depicts a society where prejudice is based on race and on class. Celia Foote is an attractive, good-hearted white woman, but she is shunned by Hilly and others in the Junior League. Because she is from Sugar Ditch, she’s considered white trash. The fact that her husband has money and they live in a grand house doesn’t help her. Interestingly, even Minnie, her maid, criticizes her. “She just don’t see em. The lines. Not between her and me, not between her and Hilly.” (311) Celia is actually a decent white woman who simply can’t find a place in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963.

Fine Craft, Instructive Political History

From a craft perspective, I thought the colored dialect of the maids was well done. Writing in dialect is tricky, and can make a work seem phony or pretentious if done wrong. In The Help, however, all of the dialect rang true. More impressive were the novel’s many original similes and other turns of speech, some humorous, others serious. A few examples: “Every time that phone rings, she jumps on it like a dog on a coon.” “Like vapor, Pascagoula disappears from my side.” “The white spotlight of wonder follows me as I make my way to Hilly.” “Her stories unfold like soft linen.” Fine phrases like these appear with impressive frequency.

From a political perspective, the book incorporates several historical events from those years. Doing so makes clear the violent oppression that was imposed on black citizens. A man by the name of Carl Roberts was cattle-branded and lynched for criticizing the state’s governor. Medgar Evers is shot in the front yard of his own house for campaigning for civil rights. Hilly Holbrook, the worst of the white women in the book, has her maid Yule May sent to prison. Her crime? Stealing a garnet worth fifty dollars. Her trial is no trial at all.

I read somewhere that The Help has sold 11 million copies. I am not surprised, and only wish millions more would enjoy this social masterpiece.

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

This is a political novel, and one that everybody should read. Small Great Things deals with racism in the United States, and excels at teasing out the complexity of it. The novel focuses on Ruth, a black nurse who is charged with murdering the infant of a white supremacist couple. Although the racist couple are largely at fault in the novel, the author presents them objectively and sympathetically. They have suffered the tragic loss of their first child, and are clearly suffering. The novel also shows how a terrible tragedy may ultimately be no one’s fault, and yet generate a terrible conflict.

In terms of characters, Picoult does a fine job of building solid, complex personalities. White supremacist Turk dislikes blacks for personal reasons. He believes that a black man caused an auto accident in which his brother died. The man was not convicted of the offense, however the incident led Turk’s family to fall apart. His father left and his mother became an alcoholic who lost her job. The way in which grief piles on and erodes innocence and goodness is made clear.

Lessons of Racism

Kennedy is an ambitious white public defender who takes on Ruth’s case. She begins with a simplified view of both racism and her own role, but she learns. When she goes shopping with Ruth, she realizes that store employees are watching Ruth but not her. Ruth is the only customer whose bag is checked as she leaves. Seeing this, Kennedy comes to understand for the first time how systemic racism affects Ruth and other black individuals. Later at trial, Kennedy insists that Ruth not suggest that the accusation against her was racially motivated. She knows that accusations of racial prejudice in cases like Ruth’s are poison pills. Ruth does so anyway, and it nearly results in her conviction. But she has to do it because for her exposing the truth is a matter of principle. She is a person of principle.

Turk Comes Alive

From a craft perspective, the author demonstrates a mastery of all aspects of writing. For example, she clearly expresses the feelings of Turk, as in this passage during the burial of his infant son. “I know I’m supposed to stand vigil while everyone else here helps to put Davis underground. But I’m too busy fighting the urge to dive into that tiny pit. To shovel the dirt out with my bare hands. To life the casket, to pry it open, to save my baby. I’m holding myself in check so hard that my body is vibrating with the effort.” (p97)

Ruth Keeps the Faith

Later, Ruth’s honor student son is suspended from school. Picoult effectively portrays Ruth struggling with self-recrimination but still managing to retain her belief in the value of work:

“All my life I have promised Edison that if you work hard, and do well, you will earn your place. I’ve said that we are not imposters; that what we strive for and get, we deserve. What I neglected to tell him was that at any moment, these achievements might be yanked away.

“It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you’ve never truly seen yourself at all.

“I am struggling to find the correct response here: to tell Edison that . . . he could beat up every body in that school and it would not make a difference in the long run. I am struggling to find a way to make him believe that in spite of this, we have to put one foot in front of the other every day and pray it will be better the next time the sun rises. That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope.

“Because if it’s not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are.” (p233-4)

Craft Excellence

Time and again Picoult demonstrates an ability to write eye-grabbing images and similes. At the same time she has the wisdom to limit them so they don’t slow the novel’s pace. She is also adept at lyrical writing, as in the following, which closes the passage about Ruth’s mother’s funeral:

“I hear the flow of the fountain behind me, and I think about water, how it might rise above its station as mist, flirt at being a cloud, and return as rain. Would you call that falling? Or coming home?

”I don’t know how long I stand there, weeping. Adisa comes to me, her shawl open like the great black wings of a heron. She wraps me in the feathers of unconditional love. She bears me away.” (p290)

Professional Reviews Often Faulty

I have read several “professional” reviews that fault this novel for over-simplifying racism. Alternatively, some assert that it fails to appreciate all the many ways racism operates in this country. Well, that may be true, because the manifestations of racism are multitudinous and complex. Capturing every possible instance in any one novel isn’t possible. For my part, I was impressed by the complexity that was present. Within each major character there is a substantial range of thinking and feeling. Moreover, all the characters change, becoming more aware of how racism operates in them and in society. Weaving so many aspects of racism into a suspenseful tale is a major accomplishment.

I have also read some reviews that charge the author with creating characters that are stereotypes. Well, yes and no. We are all stereotypes to some degree because society provides only so many roles for us to play. However, the novel’s characters vary widely in terms of both moral rectitude and social behavior. Neither race comes across as superior because all of the characters are complex and flawed. It’s a tribute to the author that, despite their flaws, all of the characters are sympathetic.

Remarkable Depth and Breadth

I also recall at least one review saying that the novel was too long, and the middle dragged. I disagree. The novel is in one respect a classic onion. Different perspectives on life, and the effects of racism, are continuously exposed. A lot of this richness occurs in the middle of the book. For example, one day Ruth’s wealthy white friend, a former school mate, shows up at her house, offering support. Ruth holds back, but realizes that she herself helped build the wall that has grown up between them. She thinks: “There’s a foot of space, and a world of contrast, between Christina and me. Yet I, too, know how hard it is to peel back the veneer of your life, and to peek at the real.”

So much of this novel is precisely that: peeling back the veneer of characters’ lives. As readers, we get to come along for the ride. As the characters gain insight into themselves, we have the opportunity to learn about ourselves and our society as well.

The Failure of Awards Committees

I am dismayed that this novel was not nominated for a major award like the National Book Awards. To me, this is a testament to the insecurity and failure of vision apparent in American letters. Perhaps it’s because authors feel constrained to “write what they know”. Since most have little knowledge of the critical issues facing America today, they feel inadequate to write about them. Fortunately for us, Picoult is willing to do massive research in order to build her knowledge. She is an invaluable resource for all of us readers, and deserves to be better recognized.

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

I was on a Jodi Picoult roll when I read this book. I’d just finished The Book of Two Ways followed by Small Great Things. I was awed by both of those novels and rated them both as five-star works, a rating I rarely give. I decided to read Second Glance because Picoult names as it one of the ones she is most proud of.

As I started reading, I discovered the same pleasures that I found in Two Ways and Great Things. In particular, the novel starts off with a bang: “Ross Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third.” This opening is not only shocking (he killed himself) but sets up an engaging mystery. Specifically, if he killed himself the first time, how did he have the chance to do it again? After that, the novel introduces a large cast and delivers a sweeping story told by multiple narrators. These include Ross, his sister Shelby, and his nephew Ethan. Long-dead Lia, her granddaughter Meredith and Meredith’s daughter Lucy also narrate. Additionally, 103 year-old Az, an Abenaki Indian, and Eli, the local deputy sheriff take turns.

The story itself occupies two time periods, the 1930s and the present (the book was published in 2003). The portion set in the 1930s deals with the Vermont Eugenics project. A leader of the project is Lia Pike’s husband. When he wrongly believes Lia’s baby was fathered by an undesirable genetic type (an Indian), he reacts angrily. Lia then wrongly believes he has killed her daughter and in her grief, hangs herself. Decades later, her ongoing grief causes her to appear to Ross Wakeman in the present.

Ghosts and Grief

In the present, Ross is fascinated by ghosts. He also seeks to kill himself as a way to re-join his wife, Aimee, who was killed in a car crash. Ross eventually becomes infatuated with Lia, and spends time at his sister’s home in Vermont trying to contact her. Later in the novel he discovers that Lia’s baby wasn’t killed. Instead, she was taken and raised by Lia’s housemaid, Ruby. When Ross tracks Ruby down (rather too easily), he discovers that Lia has a granddaughter named Meredith. Meredith bears an uncanny resemblance to Lia. In another interesting connection, Ross realizes that Meredith was the woman he rescued in the car crash that killed Aimee.

As I read this novel, I started out awed once again. Picoult has a powerful talent for telling an engaging story that also highlights an important issue. Here, the issue is whether humans should use science to control the characteristics of children. But my interest slowly faded, for several reasons.

First, the novel veered away from realism when supernatural events began to occur. When that happened, the novel lost its ability to convey meaning that could be trusted. It’s one thing for Ross to search for and see ghosts; that activity isn’t uncommon. Moreover, a sighting might be attributed to the seer’s own psychological desire. But it’s quite another for rain to fall as blood or for the demolished Pike house to reconstruct itself (113).

A Problem with the Protagonist

Second, I began to lose sympathy for the main protagonist, Ross, around page 250. His life is a downer, and simply reading about somebody who is depressed and not sleeping is off-putting. He doesn’t struggle and doesn’t care about his life, so why should I? Rather than explore his psychology, the novel focuses on ghosts and the paranormal.

Too Much nNovel

Lastly, the novel seemed to drag on forever. Unnecessary things happened. For example, does it matter that Shelby and Eli develop a relationship? Subplots are fine, but this novel has too many. Deleting the Shelby-Eli romance might have made the story more enjoyable. To me, the natural climax of the novel comes when Ross connects with Ruby, and meets Meredith. She is the contemporary incarnation of Lia; all the emotional oomph of the novel is bound up in his desire for Lia/Meredith. He goes to see Ruby on page 332 and on page 334 we read: “Ross turned. . . And found himself staring into the face of Lia Beaumont Pike.” But after this high point, the novel continues for another 96 pages of plot complications.

Overall, I enjoyed this novel. The history of eugenics and the issues around genetic screening and gene manipulation are important and well presented. However, I felt that Picoult tried to combine too many characters and too many plot lines.

The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld

This novel was gunning for a solid two-star rating until it picked up over the last 28 pages. The premise was actually interesting – a woman who was abducted as a child grows up after escaping to become a private investigator who is skilled at finding missing children. Over the course of the novel she learns some things about her own abduction experience, and her escape – things that she has repressed for years. As some of the characters say, she is also searching for herself. By the end of the novel she learns one horrible fact, though much of her memory is still blocked.

As I started reading, I was stopped time and again by odd word choices, bad grammar, and fuzzy descriptions. For example on page 1, when Naomi visits the mother of a missing child, “They sat on a couch in an empty living room.” Well, “empty” is an odd way to describe a room that has a couch and “a stack of children’s books on the table next to a rocking chair.” I could point out many similar errors, but will confine myself to critiquing the statement on page 9 that “There were over a thousand children reported missing each year in the States.” Well, yes, this is technically accurate, but since the actual number is 460,000, I think the author was a bit lacking in her research. Beyond this, there were so many other minor errors in the first chapter that after a while I had the impression that this book had been dashed out over the course of a three-day holiday weekend, and not edited.

Point of View Issues

Another pet peeve: lapses in point of view. On page one, when the narrative is being told from Naomi’s POV (as is much of the novel) there is this intrusion: “The parents took her in: sturdy build, tanned hands…” On page 8 she is in Strikes’ store, asks some questions and leaves. Although the scene is from her POV, the last line is: “He watched her leave, the door closing behind her.” I wondered if this sudden, one-line change in POV was meant to elevate Strikes’ significance, a clue to the reader that perhaps he knew something, or was possibly involved in Madison’s disappearance. But no, it was just a slip-up in narration.

Then there are the sections from the Snow Girl’s – Madison’s – POV, plus a smaller number from her abductor’s POV. I had some trouble buying the interiority of the Snow Girl that we’re given at times, but I really have no idea what a child in those circumstances would be thinking. I wonder if the novel wouldn’t have been potentially stronger if the girl’s POV were eliminated, along with her abductor’s. Keep the focus on Naomi. She clearly is still suffering twenty-plus years after she escaped her abductor, but the narrative just toys with her issues, never really exploring them.

To Thrill or Not to Thrill?

Although I’d read that this novel is a thriller, or at least a novel with suspense, it was largely uneventful. Naomi checks some maps, talks to some people, walks around in the mountains. These struck me as reasonable and realistic activities. However, they produced little tension. Another reason that the novel didn’t build with suspense is that the narrative repeatedly digresses into interludes with Ranger Dave, Detective Winfield, Jerome, Mrs. Cottle and Naomi’s friend Diane.

Late in the novel there was bit of actual detecting on Naomi’s part that looked like it might lead somewhere, which was when she learned that the Murphy brothers had bought a doll, and who would want a doll except a young girl? The Murphys had been portrayed as rather ragged, gun-toting types, so some tension developed as Naomi went to visit them. But as it turned out the doll was for Samantha, an adult child who is “afflicted” – retarded – and the Murphy people were all pretty decent folks.

The Final Rescue

The incident with the Murphy’s was the only time in the first 235 pages that the novel generated some momentum. Overall the narrative arc of the book was rather flat, with a jump in the last 28 pages. It’s on page 242 that Naomi finds her first real clue – a thread. After that, the author dispenses with all the digressions. Tension rises, and the battle between Naomi and Madison’s abductor, the deaf Brian Owens (who was himself abducted as a child) seesaws in dramatic fashion for twenty pages. These last few scenes rescued the novel from failure, and brought me (grudgingly) to three stars. However, it never really succeeded in exploring its interesting premise.

Redeployment by Phil Klay

This book succeeds in several ways. First, it tells compelling stories of different types of service personnel in Iraq. Its spare prose effectively reveals the powerful emotions being felt by the characters. The stories highlight the trauma of this unconventional battlefield. Here it’s often impossible to distinguish insurgents from civilians, and death can come at any time and from any direction. Too, the stories reveal the trauma that soldiers are forced to endure when they come back to the states. Although they are expected to smoothly merge back into ordinary life, their experiences in Iraq make this impossible.

In portraying its characters so effectively, the book enables readers to understand the challenges faced by servicemen and women. Possibly even more than Vietnam, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are nightmare scenarios. Young men hoping to be honorable if not heroic had few opportunities to feel anything other than lost. The only clear hero in the stories, Sergeant Deme in “Unless It’s a Sucking Chest Wound,” dies while saving another man. Later we learn that that man probably would have lived even if Deme hadn’t dragged him to safety. And still later we learn that the man Deme saved, Vockler, volunteered for a second tour of duty, in Afghanistan. There, he was killed by an IED. What we see, then, is layer upon layer of pointless death. As the narrator says, “IEDs don’t let you be a hero.

The Big Bad Wolf

The second major success of this book is its revelation of the breadth of thoughtlessness that attended American military intervention in Iraq. The book reminds us again that Bush and his cronies lied; there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Moreover, Iraq was not the source of the terrorists who caused 9-11; that was our ally, Saudi Arabia. There was no legitimate reason for the United States to invade Iraq, despite the excuses offered up by government apologists. The real reason seems to have been our desire to demonstrate that we were the big bad bully on the block. Apparently U.S. hawks believed that this would intimidate other wayward states like North Korea and Iran into moderating their behavior. This adolescent strategy reflects the appalling lack of understanding of and respect for other societies/cultures. It would have failed even if we had succeeded in establishing a peaceful, democratic Iraq.

Everyone is Damaged, and Everyone Pays

The futile idiocy of the war is made evident throughout the book. Most notable is the way it damaged American lives both physically and psychologically. All of the first person narrators of the twelve stories in the book are damaged, often subtle ways. The variety of the damages reinforces the implication of the book: nothing good came out of this war. What the book pays only brief attention to is the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of treating wounded veterans. The final bill is projected to be between $600 billion and $1 trillion. This is the war hawk’s way of ensuring that we all get to share the war’s pain.

A particularly powerful metaphor comes at the end of “Unless It’s A Sucking Chest Wound.” The narrator describes an experiment in which a bee is fed nectar, and then its abdomen is cut away, so that as soon as the bee drinks, the nectar drains out of it. The result is that the bee goes on drinking but never receives any sustenance. But it keeps trying until it dies. This metaphor captures well the insanity of men like Vockler and others who are drawn to the mystique of war.

A Perfect, Enigmatic Ending

Perhaps the most powerful—and enigmatic—image in the stories comes in the last paragraph of the last story. There an artilleryman observes the body of a soldier being removed from Fallujah Surgical. Everyone within sight of the movement snaps to attention, and remains at attention until the stretcher passes from view. The artilleryman reports: “Then it (the corpse) would have gone by air to TQ. And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.”

Clearly, the servicemen stand at attention out of respect for the fallen. But the image also portrays numbed impotence: there is nothing more to be said, and nothing more can be done. So they stand in silence and salute, because it’s the best they can do, and it’s all they can do.

Excellent Craft–But What Are All Those Acronyms?

From a craft perspective, my judgment is that the writing overall is excellent. A few stories like “Prayer in the Furnace” and “Psychological Operations” wandered a bit, but I enjoyed them all. About my only gripe was the heavy use of unexplained acronyms. No doubt the decision not to include a key at the beginning or end of the book was intentional. And certainly all that bureaucratic mystery adds to the otherworldly aura of the stories. But I found it frustrating.

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

This novel was an enjoyable and heartwarming read. The narrator, Lacey, is young and innocent and sympathetic. Her voice was thoroughly engaging, mixing a kind of country humor with the wisdom of innocence.

Throughout the novel, Lacey is desperate for the love of her mother. Mom, a former beauty queen with exceptionally bad taste in men, abandons Lacey early in the novel and disappears. Later we learn that she’s gone off with Rick, a man she met while working as a telephone sex worker. Rick promises to make her a TV star, and although he never does, her mom can’t give up her dream. She is trapped by her delusion.

A Cult of Fools

The core of the story, however, revolves around Vern, a phony messiah-preacher. Vern manages to establish a cult in Peaches after he appears to bring rain to the parched town. The people who follow Vern are as deluded in their faith as Lacey’s mom is by her dream of stardom. Vern, however, turns out to be more perverse than Rick, willing to engage in rape and violence to ensure his power.

Also central to the novel is Lacey’s pregnancy. As it proceeds, she continues to search for her mother. Eventually she learns the location of the phone sex business where her mother worked. She approaches the old red Victorian and meets Daisy, the owner, and her daughter Florin. She realizes they are good people—and not entrapped by the cult. Lacey asks to take over her mother’s phone sex job, and Daisy lets her. Later, she assists Lacey in her search for her mother.

The Feminist Slant

Daisy and Florin also introduce Lacey to the doulas at the Farm of Spiritual Birthing and Uterus Celebration. This passage highlights the feminist orientation of the novel. In the novel, all the good people are female, and all the bad people are male. The novel suggests that women are perfectly capable of living good lives without men being involved.

A Plethora of Oddballs

Lacey, Daisy and Florin are among the more rational characters in Godshot. Others are amusingly quirky. Cherry, Lacey’s grandmother, plays with dead rodents. She also forces Lacey to clean up dead insects and tweeze hairs from her chin. Stringy, another oddball, paints dead lawns green for a living. Stringy, another oddball, paints dead lawns green for a living. Stringy, at least, is relatively harmless. He even believes Lacey (for a while) when she tells him that he is the father of her baby.

Appealing Language is the Heart of this Work

More than anything, what makes Godshot charming is Lacey—her view of the world, her undying desire to find her mother, and her captivating language. “My mother was the sun in a dark room,” she says early in the novel. Later, she expresses her longing to make the world a better place for her mother with lovely lyrical language:

“How I wanted the world to be good enough so that she wouldn’t have to feel its rough edges. If someone could just see her when she was at her best, the way she was in the morning back then, getting ready for the day, dancing and singing, the soft dander of her cheek. The way her neck looked when she tilted it back in the car and sang “Great American cowboy” along with the Sons of the San Joaquin.”

She explains her unwillingness to challenge Vern, saying, “Curiosity was the first rung on the ladder down to hell.” In a darkly meaningful passage, Lacey describes why she remains in the cult even after she learns of its failings: “I knew people on the outside of the church wouldn’t understand how I could stay instead of leave, withstand instead of run. I would say those people have never been under the hand of a bad thing so bad it can start to seem good.”

Minor Issues

In terms of criticisms, I have a few. Lacey’s ever-appealing voice seemed after a while to be saying the same thing in different ways. As a character, Lacey was frustratingly passive, and never took charge of her fate. Also, the novel wandered in the middle and petered out at the end. Birthing Day turned out to be anticlimactic.

Lastly, the strength of this novel is also its weakness. Lacey’s voice is so entertaining, and most of the characters so quirky, that the novel reads like a sitcom. Were Vern and his cult depicted realistically, the dangerous control that cults can exert over adherents would be more impactful.

White Ivy by Susie Yang

In White Ivy, the protagonist is a young girl from an immigrant Chinese family. Ivy, who was herself born in China, sets her romantic sights on a man from an established New England family. Eventually she gets him, but only after cheating on him and committing a terrible crime. Along the way she also inflicts severe psychological and physical suffering on herself. Worst of all, the life Ivy knowingly embraces in her marriage isn’t based on love. Instead, she accepts a role that will likely lead to a life of low-grade emotional subjugation.

Throughout, this novel is well-written, with literary flourishes and few missteps. I have read a couple of reviews where people seem to need to pigeonhole this novel in a particular genre. Most seem to call it a thriller. Odd, since it isn’t thrilling. To me, it’s clearly women’s fiction, since it’s all about relationships. Beyond that, it’s a character study of a warped personality.

A Story of Bad Decisions

The novel contains pieces of advice for women regarding men. Ivy’s roommate Andrea says, “Ask him if he’s seeing other women . . . demand that he give you an answer! Men need ultimatums.” (p 113) Later, Ivy’s mom Nan tells her, “You have to give a man something to fight for. That’s the secret to a lasting marriage.” (p 286) What struck me was that no one ever gave Ivy the one piece of wisdom that she so needed: “Make good decisions.”

Throughout the novel, Ivy makes bad decisions. She sticks with Gideon even though he seems more interested in Tom and in his own sister. He can’t manage to tell Ivy he loves her, but she accepts that. At the same time, she has no trouble having sex with Roux after becoming engaged to Gideon. Nor does she have any trouble disposing of Roux when she needs to. Afterwards she suffers psychologically, but only briefly. Indeed, her decisions in the novel go from bad to worse. Her worst one is her decision to proceed with marrying Gideon.

A Depressing Cast of Characters

Although the novel provides a deep and rich portrait of Ivy, I didn’t much enjoy it because Ivy isn’t sympathetic. Moreover, no one else in the novel is very sympathetic, either. Certainly Roux, Gideon and Sylvia aren’t. The parents of both Ivy and Gideon are not especially bad, but were not much of anything, either. They occupied story space like furniture. All in all, this novel did not have an attractive cast of characters.

Credulity is Stretched Too Far

Beyond relying on uninteresting characters, the novel has a few craft flaws. The entire first chapter is backstory, the kind of stuff that should be incorporated into the ongoing story. The appearance of Gideon’s sister at Sylvia’s school is a transparent device for re-connecting of Ivy with Gideon. Since they all went to school together, it’s acceptable. However, Roux’s re-appearance as Sylvia’s boyfriend stretches credulity too far. There is no explanation offered for how Sylvia and Roux could have known one another. Boston is a big town, and they hardly seem likely to run in the same circles.

A Soul for Sale

What remains interesting but incompletely explored is the question of why Ivy is so attracted to the upper class Speyers. Gideon is something of a dull cypher; I never got the feeling that he had much emotional investment in Ivy. His attitude made sense at the end when the novel portrayed him as in love with Tom. At the same time, the novel didn’t make clear that Gideon was gay. Moreover, he was obviously enjoying sex with Ivy. Maybe the point was that, as sister Sylvia said, Ivy was easy to handle. She didn’t give Gideon any trouble, and fit the role that needed to be filled. Sadly, Ivy was willing to accept this, and forfeit the possibility of ever loving anybody. In return she obtained an elevated social position and financial security.

Several times I wondered whether Ivy’s mercenary character was meant to portray a trait common to Chinese immigrants. But I didn’t think so. Ivy was a unique character, if not a likeable one.

The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus

In this collection, each story has a simple premise that doesn’t become anything more. “The Wish for a Good Country Doctor” is a wandering story that presents the cranky owner of an antique store. She tells the narrator about a young doctor who arrived in the 1840s, just when cholera appeared. Although the young man cured many from cholera, he was blamed for introducing it—and then died from it. In “The Mortician Confesses” two sheriff’s deputies come across a funeral home employee having sex with a dead body. In “He’s At the Office” a man becomes depressed after retiring from his job of fifty years. Knowing the problem, his son and wife construct a replica of his office for him in his home. The man immediately resumes working, as if once again employed, and the pretense restores his health.

Humor is All

Each of these simple premises is described ad nauseam by first person narrators. Frequently the narrators come with country dialects or other linguistic quirks that occasionally provide humor. Nothing much ever develops in the stories. There are no surprises or plot twists, nor do any character insights emerge. Some of the stories simply fizzle out at the end. For example, the “Good Country Doctor” ends with an ostensibly verbatim recitation of the doctor’s recommendations for dealing with cholera. All are reasonable and unsurprising. “The Mortician Confesses” ends with Wade, the narrator, saying that all he knows is that he loves his wife. The only surprise here is that his wife plays no role in the story, so this ending doesn’t connect. A twenty page story, it’s about eighteen pages too long.

Opportunities Missed

As I read, I was mystified as to why the author didn’t develop what are potentially good premises. For example, in “He’s At the Office”, we don’t learn anything about the son, who is the narrator. If he had a story that intertwined in some way with his father’s, this story might have gained some substance. But he doesn’t. The story extends for 20+ pages while accomplishing little. The same could be said for the other stories: all seem to be opportunities missed.

I have to admit that I lost heart and patience, and only read four of the nine stories in this collection. Perhaps the other five were scintillating, and I simply gave up to soon. After all, the stories were all published in esteemed literary magazines like The New Yorker. They must be good.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Often the blurbs printed on the covers of novels tout a level of literary accomplishment that the book doesn’t achieve. Occasionally I am even left wondering whether the blurber has actually read the book. Not so in the case of Hamnet. David Mitchell provides the perfect summation of the novel in five simple words: “A thing of shimmering wonder.”

Ordinarily I like novels that have a plot, some conflict, and some tension that carries the reader along. Hamnet is light on those elements. It begins with Hamnet fruitlessly searching for a family member or a doctor to help his sick sister Judith. This search plays out slowly. What we get, however, is immersion into the house and the street and the world of the 1590s. Ultimately Hamnet fails in his search, undercutting whatever modest tension arose from Judith’s medical emergency.

Magical Prose and Metaphor

Initially I felt somewhat frustrated by this story-telling style and wanted the novel to “get going”. Instead, I needed to slow down my typically hasty reading practice. I needed to turn myself over to O’Farrell and let her dictate the pace. Once I did that, I was borne along on prose that is lyrical and even magical at times. A true pleasure to read.

Like all good historical novels, Hamnet contains much period detail. The author adeptly brings Shakespeare’s time alive. But O’Farrell has the skill to build metaphors out of these details. For example, her description of gloves (p122-123) contains the following sentences:

“She (Agnes) thinks of the seams of a glove, running up and down and over each finger, keeping close the skin that does not belong to the wearer. How a glove covers and fits and restrains the hand.”

“She thinks of the skins in the storeroom, pulled and stretched almost—but not quite—to tearing or breaking point.”

“She thinks of what must be discarded and stolen from the animal in order to make it useful to a glove-maker: the heart, the bones, the soul, the spirit, the blood, the viscera. A glover will only ever want the skin, the surface, the outer layer. Everything else is useless, and inconvenience, and unnecessary mess. She thinks of the private cruelty behind something as beautiful and perfect as a glove.”

Lyrical Imagery to Die For

In beautiful lyrical imagery, O’Farrell has Agnes describe how her husband changes in his own home. Invariably sullen and irritable in his parents’ house, he reverts in their apartment to the man she knows. “In their apartment, he lets her take his hand, lets her lead him from the fire to a chair, lets his eyes lose focus, lets her rub her fingers through his hair, and she can feel him switch from one character to another; she can sense that other, big-house, self melt off him, like wax sliding from a lit candle, revealing the man within.” (p123)

Too, there are many striking images. Referring to a very pregnant Agnes, O’Farrell has the husband describe her, “Like a woman who had swallowed the moon.” (p133)

In a wonderful chapter, the author describes the coincidences that resulted in the pestilence making its way from the Eastern Mediterranean to Warwickshire. (p140-151)

The Rich Omniscient Narrator

The narration of the novel is omniscient throughout, and the author uses the freedom it provides well. We are even privy to Hamnet’s thoughts as he is dying: “Hamnet’s mind, however, is in another place. For a long time, he could hear his mother and his sisters, his aunt and his grandmother. He was aware of them, around him, giving him medicines, speaking to him, touching his skin. Now, though, they have receded. He is elsewhere, in a landscape he doesn’t recognize. It is cool here, and quiet. He is alone. Snow is falling, softly, irrevocably, on and on. It piles up on the ground around him, covering paths and steps and rocks; it weighs down the branches of trees; it transforms everything into whiteness, blankness, stasis.

“Hamnet, in his place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow…” (p211)

Throughout the novel, the author moves the point of view deftly from character to character, major and minor like. At one point, she even gives us the perspective of an owl, flying above the town at night. The owl sees the town as a series of rooftops, sees a fox stealing about, and a rodent. The owl sees a man sleeping in the doorway of a tavern.

Characters as Real as Their Desires

The author excels at conveying what her characters want. Late in the novel we meet Judith out at night, looking for the ghost of Hamnet, her twin. She hopes he will appear in the street where they were both born, as has been suggested to her by a midwife. And she believes she sees something. “She stands outside her former home; she paces from its door to that of her grandparents. The very air feels coalescent, charged, as it does before a thunderstorm. She shuts her eyes. She can feel him. She is so sure of this. The skin on her arms and neck shrinks and she is desperate to reach, to touch him, to take his hand in hers, but she dares not. She listens to the roar of her pulse, her ragged breathing and she knows, she hears, underneath her own, another’s breathing. She does. She really does.” (p283)

Prose Almost too Powerful to Bear

The description of Agnes’ feelings of losing a child are so powerful that they are difficult to read. Agnes cannot accept his death. O’Farrell shows this in a scene that goes on for many pages. In part:

“The three words [he is dead] contain no sense for her. She cannot bend her mind to their meaning. It is an impossible idea that her son, her child, her boy, the healthiest and most robust of her children, should, within days, sicken and die.

“She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he?

“Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see.

“And Hamnet? Where is he?” (p219-220)

Grief, Loss, and Beauty Within

For a year after Hamnet’s death, Agnes’ husband stays in London. When he finally returns to Stratford, she refuses to speak to him. She is angry that he has not been there to share her grief; she thinks he doesn’t feel what she feels. But he finds her in the garden, and we read the following as he sits silently beside her. “The silence swells between them; it expands and wraps itself around them; it acquires shape and form and tendrils, which wave off into the air, like the threads trailing from a broken web. She senses each breath as it enters and leaves him, each shift as he crosses his arms, as he scratches an elbow, as he brushes a hair from his brow.” (p262)

The descriptions of grief in this novel brought tears to my eyes. Too, the novel brought Shakespeare to life for me in a new way. It humanized a figure of mythic status while also clearly presenting him as a driven artist. Living alone in his single room in London, Shakespeare did not enjoy the trappings of wealth. But considering all the beauty that came from within him, what need had he for material wealth? In the same way, this novel is a perfect reflection of Shakespeare’s life, glowing with beauty from within.

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

This is a novel that defies the novel’s conventions, and for that it can either be praised or scorned. Some critics complain that a book that combines large sections of what appear to be memoir (or fictionalized memoir) into a fictional narrative along with a good measure of political commentary cannot be considered a novel. Others complain that there is no there there, by which I presume they mean that they can’t find an old fashioned narrative arc, or a plot, or characters with interesting stories. It’s as if they think the form that a novel must take has been ordained somewhere by God. But one only need survey the cover of this book to realize that it is in fact a novel, because it says so in clear black letters superimposed on a golden tree of life: Homeland Elegies A Novel. ‘Nuf said.

Political/Cultural Commentaries

What I enjoyed most in this novel were the political/cultural commentaries. One of my enduring pet peeves is that so much of American fiction is about small people doing unimportant things. Here, there are small people doing unimportant things but they talk about important things. For example, Riaz offers an interesting rationale for why Muslim countries fell behind the West economically: “The Romans created the corporation. It enabled them to protect assets from being redistributed after an owner’s death. Which meant money could have the time to really grow, take on its own center of gravity. We had no way to do that. Muslim inheritance laws are very clear. After death, the estate has to be divided among the wives and heirs. . . . One-off deals were the rule, as there was no good way to shelter long-term ventures. Which meant no path to long-term material investments.” (p 144)

To me this is an interesting theory, although as I thought about it, it didn’t make much sense. It’s just as easy to protect and bequeath a family’s assets if they are in the form of stock in a corporation as it is to protect them via sole ownership. Were Muslims really that short-sighted, or is this theory of Riaz just hookah-inspired hot air?

The Problem of Corporate Greed and Republican Doublespeak

The book makes a particularly incisive political criticism when Akhtar (character or author, who knows?) defends his stake in Riaz’s sleazy Timur Capital: “Holding stock in Timur Capital isn’t any different from owning a stake in Nike, or Apple, or Exxon, or Goldman, or VW, or Boeing, or Merck, or any of the storied firms whose shares make up the retirement nest eggs and college funds across our divided land, companies known not only for their progressive giving and canny political stances but also for cheating and abusing their workers, duping their customers, destroying the environment, selling goods that don’t work, manufacturing cars and drugs and planes that kill, profiting in ever newer, ever more ingenious ways off the bait and switch of the permanent corporate lie, namely, that the customer—rather than profit at any and all human cost—is king.” (p 171) Whew! Good point!

Of course, the solution to this perversity is within our grasp, and has been exercised frequently in the past, though less so now, as the result of effective Republican doublespeak that has managed to demonize the word regulation as if it’s the enemy of a successful society rather than an essential component. It would have been helpful if Akhtar explored this point.

Faulty History – or Just Fiction?

I have to say that from time to time the protagonist/author/memoirist’s commentary rings simplistic. For example, “And yes, the founding fathers had sued for religious freedom, a value much vaunted and advertised—which should put us at ease—but of course we would learn (at school, at citizenship training) that those white-wigged Protestant father had mostly been making room in a new republic for competing factions of their various protesting Christian persuasions.” (p 111) Well, yes and no. Some of the most influential founding fathers (e.g., Jefferson, Madison and even Washington) were Deists. Moreover, any review of American immigration policy since the Second World War will reveal that this country has, for better or worse, intentionally held out its arms to those who can only increase its diversity in all respects, including religion.

The novel has a habit of dropping bombshell ideas and then walking away without offering anything in support. Perhaps the narrator believes certain ideas are universally accepted. For example, he describes a black attorney by the name of Jerry Jacobs (real or fiction, I have no idea) who clerked for a real or fictional judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He reports that “the professional prospects, however bright, didn’t ultimately blind Jerry to what was taking shape in DC, the rise of the ideological framework he foresaw would hurt American blacks more than anyone realized. So Jerry decamped from the nation’s capital to Opelika (AL) where . . .” (p 231) What? Whatwhatwhat? ‘Ideological framework he foresaw would hurt American blacks.’ And this framework is—what? The narrator never says.

Akhtar the Trumpist

More deviously, the novel reinforces the Republican/conspiracy notion of the government as swamp in its depiction of yokel government employees who were so easily swayed by Timur Capital’s sleazy gifts that they ended up costing their municipal taxpayers megabucks. “A city comptroller took her family on vacation for a week in Cabo San Lucas, most expenses paid; alderman ended up with season tickets to the local NFL team, despite a ten-year waiting list.” (p169-170) The impression created by this passage is that all government employees are unscrupulous, venal morons on the take. –But then again—is this fiction? It doesn’t read like fiction. It reads like a Trumpist campaign ad. And okay, as a former 30-year employee of the State of California, I am reacting from my gut. But I can say, as someone who served at high levels, that instances of corruption were almost non-existent (at least in California) and that the vast majority of civil service employees carried out their responsibilities with honesty and care for the people there were serving.

Craft Matters

Much more could be said about this book both good and bad, but at this point I’m going to end with a few comments on craft. On a sentence level, the writing is a mixed bag. Sentences are clearest when the author is describing activities that one of the real/fictional characters is engaged in. Often, however, they become florid and pretentious: “In the words of George Monbiot, I’d become a neoliberal courtier, a subaltern aspirant to the ruling class, bearing the foundation’s not-for-profit coat of arms expressly for that purpose, an eclectic and exemplary defender not only of inalienable human rights and enlightened rage but also of freedom itself, both sexual and monetary, an eager frontline recruit for the purported progressive ideological battles of our time.” (p 151) And they become almost incomprehensible when he wades into subjects he knows little about, as in the discussion of the meaning of conservative on page 234.

Lastly, I cannot leave this review without noting that the cover lies: this is not a novel. Of all the ways this fails to be a novel, I will only mention one: it lacks a story that dramatizes or at least depicts its subject. Reading this book is almost like reading notes for a novel. The political thoughts are perfectly valid, but a writer can’t simply put those thoughts in the mouths of characters, he or she needs to create a story, a plot, a drama, that expresses them. Let me suggest that Akhtar read more. Read, for example, T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain, to see how the immigrant experience can be presented effectively. Clearly, the author has the ability to do the same. But in this case all I can say is, What happened?

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

In this novel, Nora Seed’s life is going down the drain. Her cat has died and she has been fired from her job. We learn that she once had hopes of being a championship swimmer. She has a degree in philosophy, and has in the past longed to become a glaciologist. But as the novel opens, she is depressed to the point that she attempts suicide.

From a craft perspective, the book is fast-paced and well-written. There is wit, irony, and philosophy. Again and again I was impressed by the author’s talent. The book is highly engaging. A fun read.

As I started the novel, I couldn’t help wondering how Nora had let herself get to this point. I found myself thinking that it isn’t just the choices that you make in life that matter. Rather, it’s also whether you’re willing to make choices in the first place. In other words, do you take on life and its challenges, or do you try to sidestep and avoid? But when you avoid, you eventually regret, and this seems to be what has happened to Nora.

A Simple, Enthralling Concept

The book benefits from a truly imaginative, enthralling concept: Between life and death there is a library. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived, to see how things would be different if you had made other choices. This concept is a playful conceit. It encourages readers to think about all the other lives they could have led.

Interestingly, the book places Nora totally in charge of her outcome in each of the alternative lives she explores. She is never swept up by some uncontrollable social or political upheaval, or foiled by a natural disaster. What happens in her alternative lives is entirely up to her. Her biggest challenge when she enters an alternative life is to get up to speed quickly. Otherwise, the others she’s now living with might realize that she’s only just jumped into it.

A Surprising Discovery

Over time, Nora tries living many of the lives she thinks would have turned out better. These include going to Australia, becoming a world champion swimmer, and opening a country pub with her boyfriend. Each of these lives, when she tries it out, proves to be unsatisfactory. She is fortunate to have the option of bailing out, returning to the library, and trying another alternative life.

In the end, Nora realizes that none of the alternative lives she tries are quite right. Even the one that seems right, with Ash and daughter Molly, fails when she learns that Leo is in trouble. Leo, her former piano student, ended up in trouble with the police because she wasn’t around to give him lessons. Those lessons, part of her original life, kept him occupied, satisfied, and safe.

After the life with Ash and Molly proves unsatisfactory, Nora is whisked back to the library. But she has learned something: that she now wants to live. She wants to create her own life, one that hasn’t been determined yet. Perhaps because she now no longer needs it, the library begins to disintegrate. The librarian, Mrs. Elm, urges her to quickly find the one book that will provide what she wants. Nora manages to do so even as the library crashes down around her. To her surprise, all the pages in the book are blank. She will have to create her life.

Who Doesn’t Like a Fairy Tale?

I know some commentators have objected to the way the novel very transparently offers its moral lesson. But I think there was no other way that the novel could end and also be true. The Midnight Library is like an adult fairy tale. It even has a fairy godmother in the form of Mrs. Elm. It is a kind and gentle fairy tale, and full of wonder.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Second World War invariably provides a solid setting for stories that expose the best and worst of humanity. The Nightingale uses the war to dramatize both the heroism of ordinary French citizens and the horrors that many were forced to endure for years at the hands of sadistic German forces. This novel was both an engaging read and an effective reminder of the kind of nightmare that can result when extreme political philosophies gain power in weak democracies.

I found the sisters Vianne and Isabelle to be both compelling and distinct. The privations of Vianne’s ordinary daily life, along with the oppression of constant German presence, including the lodging of two officers in her house, were convincingly portrayed.

A Lack of Detail Diminishes the Drama

Isabelle’s experience was more intense than Vianne’s but no more dramatic, at least initially. She begins her role in the French resistance by delivering messages and packages. While I can accept that these were the types of activities someone like her might have been involved in, I felt somewhat frustrated by the lack of details offered. I found myself wondering what exactly the message or package was. How important was it? What did its safe delivery accomplish? The narrative provided no clue, which undercut the significance of the activities. Moreover, their description was rather perfunctory. Whatever challenges Isabelle may have faced were not described. Consequently, little dramatic tension was generated by these passages.

I decided as I read that the modest level of tension generated by the initial events in Isabelle’s story was intentional; i.e., there was so much more to come that the author needed to avoid building toward a climax too soon. Indeed, this proved to be the case. When Isabelle is shot (p 291) the severity of the risks she’s been taking is finally brought home to the reader. We realize that she isn’t invulnerable, and we start to worry what will happen next. And what happens in the last quarter of the novel turns out to be truly horrific.

Irony: Death for the Only Decent German

Vianne follows a similar trajectory from housewife burdened mainly by growing deprivation, to one who becomes actively involved in resisting the Nazi’s removal of Jewish children, to one who suffers terribly at the hands of the sadistic von Richter. Interestingly, Vianne is at one point forced to kill Beck, the only decent German who appeared in novel. A powerful symbol, I thought, for the way in which the war was a lose-lose proposition for everyone caught up in it.

More Irony: Ari is Taken from the Woman Who Saved Him

Late in the novel, we get glimpses of what it was like when the war ended, and families searched desperately for those who’d been taken away. I assume that these passages were historically accurate, and I found them interesting in part because I’ve never before come across similar scenes before. In a related passage, we see Ari, the young boy that Vianne raised as her own, taken away from her (on whose authority is never clear) because she isn’t Jewish, and his family was.

The ending of the novel was sentimental but didn’t bother me. All the loose ends were tied up. Vianne’s speech to the conference in Paris was heartfelt, and opened the door for her finally coming to terms with the past.

This novel presents the story of two young black women, twins, in the fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Like everybody in Mallard, the girls are so light-skinned that they could possibly pass as white, though it’s risky. Beyond skin color, the girls are identical in appearance but not in temperament. Desiree is energetic and risk-taking, while Stella is more studious and quiet.

When the girls turn sixteen, their mother forces them to drop out of school and work to support the family. Instead the girls run away to New Orleans, where they initially take menial jobs. Eventually, however, Stella is selected to be the secretary of a young, handsome and Yale-educated marketing executive, Blake. She gets the job because the people interviewing her think she’s white. She worries that if she takes the job she will have to be white forever. And it happens. Moreover, Blake likes her so much he eventually asks her to marry him.

Stella’s Secret Means She Can Never Be Free

The novel’s central focus turns out to be Stella’s struggle in maintaining her secret. She has chances to reveal who she truly is to her family, but doesn’t take them. Although she lives an upper class life in Los Angeles, she is never free.

Children as Opposites of their Mothers

Both Stella and Desiree have one female child. Desiree’s child Jude is the result of her marriage to an abusive black FBI agent. Jude is so dark she is described as blue-black. Stella’s child with Blake, Kennedy, is blond. The two girls are opposites of their mothers. Jude is quiet and studious—like Stella rather than her own mother—and eventually enters medical school. Kennedy is wild and searching—more like Desiree than her own mother. She quits college to become a not-too-successful actress. The two girls are also opposites of each other, and yet they meet, and form of thin relationship.

This novel offers a multi-level commentary on American society in its depiction of Stella’s dilemma. Like anybody, Stella wants a good life. She wants a fair chance to succeed. She gets that chance because people assume she’s white. She is the only one who knows she is passing. She feels as if she’s committing a crime, and the novel portrays her suffering over this, but by doing so exposes the lunacy of this particular aspect of racism. Why should Stella feel like she’s living lie when the fault lies with the racism of American society? Yet in passing as white, and refusing to admit her racial background, she inadvertently accepts and reinforces racism.

The Portrayal of Black Experience is Commendable

Interestingly, the novel reflects a wide variety of black experience in America, both bad and not-to-bad. We read that Desiree and Stella’s father was murdered by a mob of white men. We see the Walker’s, a black family, being driven from the Brentwood neighborhood where Stella lives. At the same time Jude is never depicted as suffering from racism, and succeeds in going to medical school. Even Reese, her transgender black boyfriend, doesn’t suffer from overt racism. Instead, the author focuses her light on Stella’s conundrum, and the agony she undeservedly suffers.

Craft Quibbles

From a craft perspective, the novel is well-written throughout, and the story it tells is truly engaging. I have two minor quibbles. One is that I found the timeline a bit confusing at the end. Stella’s return to Mallard, their mother’s funeral, Desiree’s move to Houston, Kennedy’s flight to Rome and return, all overlap. Second, while many of the novel’s plotlines were wrapped up at the end, I didn’t feel a strong, satisfying climax. I guess I was looking for Stella to come clean and achieve real freedom. But perhaps a happy ending wouldn’t have fit this novel.

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

At 589 pages, Great Circle seemed likely to be a novel that I simply didn’t have enough reading time to devote to. But I’d heard a good review and decided to request it from our local library. My intent was simply to sample at least a first few chapters of the author’s style and story. As it turned out, the novel quickly convinced me that I could find the time for it.

A Novel of Two Women

Great Circle tells two engaging stories. The primary one is a grand epic about Marian Graves. An orphan born in 1914, she wants little more in life than to fly airplanes. She finds a way—many ways—to do it. Early on she flies bootleg liquor from Canada during Prohibition. To escape her husband, she moves to Alaska, flying supplies to remote settlements as a bush pilot. Later she serves in World War II by ferrying planes from location to location around England. Ultimately she decides to circle the globe on a route that passes over both poles – a great circle route.

The second story involves Hadley Baxter, another orphan who becomes a Hollywood teen star. Later, staring in a lucrative adventure series, she falls from studio grace as a result of a sexual indiscretion. Fired, Hadley takes on the role of Marian Graves in a biopic promoted by her neighbor, Sir Hugo Woolsey. The role, a serious one, promises to help redeem her acting career. As filming proceeds, Hadley meets people who share with her—and the reader—secrets of Marian’s life. Those secrets, known neither to the general public nor to the people making the film, change her life.

Beyond the story skeleton I’ve just sketched, the novel provides a richness of detail about a wide variety of subjects. These include passenger steamships, life in rural Montana, the WPA’s Federal Art Project, and the flying characteristics of early biplanes. Hadley’s chapters include a skewering of Hollywood life and practices that speaks to a similar inside knowledge.

The characters in the novel are well drawn and distinctive. We meet rich and poor, urban and rural, men of commerce and action, and artists, both male and female. The author succeeds in providing both Marian and Hadley with voices and attitudes that make each spring to life.

Much Fine Language

While the novel is not overly literary, the author is nevertheless an excellent writer. She is adept at inserting fine language, artful images, and captivating thoughts on a regular basis. As an example of the latter, the following caught my attention: “Listening to Redwood play, I thought about how the medium of music is time, how if time stopped, a painting would exist unchanged but music would vanish, like a wave without an ocean.” (p263)

In an amazing passage of roughly a thousand words, Hadley and Redwood engage in a discussion of what Los Angeles is while the two are high on ‘shrooms. The entire passage is a tour de force of well-wrought images, and includes the following:

“It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox. . . It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. . . It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm tree crowns on too-skinny trunks . . . It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one. . . I want him to know that L.A. is a desert wind blowing through the garden of paradise.” (p263)

Arresting Images

Some of the other images that jumped out at me:

Returning to Montana, Marian notices: “Clouds of round gold leaves shimmer on the aspen trees like a suspended rain of coins.” p316)

In describing people watching a movie:

“Light reflected back on the audience. I watched them watch my image, their faces all angled up at the screen like it was going to feed them.”

A fair portion of the novel describes Marian volunteering to shuttle airplanes for the British. Here, she is passing through Montreal, in an image that nicely captures a moment in history:

“The sky over Dorval airport had a fairground atmosphere, snarled with long buzzing ropes of engine noise, crowded with aircraft coming in from factories or leaving for Europe or wavering through touch-and-gos with student pilots. B-17s passed among single-engine trainers like whales through schools of fish. The larger bombers and transports would head up to Gander and then right across to Ireland or Britain. The smaller fighters and trainers might be taken apart and loaded on ships or they might fly the ice-cube route: Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Britain.”

The Importance of Freedom

Among the various themes (time, self-knowledge, desire, love, the value of art, etc.) the preeminent one is freedom. Throughout the novel, flying is a way to freedom for Marian. And at the end Hadley gains new self-control by learning to fly. Initially, she freaks out when she first goes up, and insists on being taken down. It’s only after she learns the secrets of Marian’s life that she grows into her new role as herself. “It’s not some big triumph, that I didn’t freak out when I flew the Cessna, that I made it go up and down, left and right. Mostly I felt relief. And a little bit of amazement. And then I must have slipped back into being Marian Graves because, for a second, I felt free.” (p589)

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

This novel was engaging from the start, principally because of the narrative voices used. Initially, we hear an omniscient that is wryly humorous when discussing the travails of writers and writing programs. This is followed by the voice of the protagonist, Jacob Finch Bonner, which is self-deprecating and ironic. For example:

“And lo: there he was, swaggering into Peng-101 (the lobby-level conference room) with the others the following morning at ten, glancing idly at the end of the seminar table where Jake was sitting, showing not the slightest recognition of the person (Jacob Finch Bonner!) who was the obvious authority figure in the room, and taking a seat.” (p 21)

The Can’t-Miss Plot

The novel focuses on a fictional situation in which Bonner appropriates a story idea from a student. The idea is, we are told, a great plot that can’t miss. Bonner doesn’t start out intending to steal it. However, he reconsiders when he learns that the student who expressed it to him has died. At that point, he decides that it’s such a good plot that it demands to be told. Moreover, he needs a success because he previous two novels failed.

As he expects, the novel with the can’t miss plot is a huge success. During a book tour, he meets Anna Williams in Seattle, and eventually they marry. At the same time, however, he begins receiving emails from somebody accusing him of stealing the story from his student. Much of what follows describes Bonner’s efforts to find whoever is sending the emails and to convince him to stop.

The novel doesn’t directly explain what is so great about the plot that Bonner has appropriated. Instead, pages of his new novel, Crib, are presented verbatim in The Plot. They are interspersed with the story of Bonner, his romance with Anna, and his search for whoever is harassing him.

Reservations

Although I enjoyed The Plot, I had some concerns. I thought the excerpts of Bonner’s novel that are interspersed in the text weren’t particularly interesting. More significantly, when I finally learned what it was that supposedly made it a can’t-miss plot, I was unimpressed. At that point, I doubted that Crib would have been the best seller that it was portrayed as.

The Plot is, among other things, an inner story (Crib) within an outer story (The Plot). Like Crib, the outer story—The Plot—also has a plot element intended to catch the reader by surprise. I found this one more effective than the can’t-miss plot of Crib, although it too was relatively simple.

Lastly, I didn’t find the ending especially satisfying. Nearly the entire novel is told from Bonner’s POV, but the ending isn’t. I understand why it wasn’t, but I wonder whether the author couldn’t have made more of out of her story. For a novel that maintains its tension well throughout, the ending struck me as ho-hum.

The Last Thing He Said to Me by Laura Dave

This was an enjoyable, well-written, fast-paced mystery. The plot involves a man who disappears, and the efforts of his wife and daughter to find him. For someone like me who doesn’t read a lot of mysteries, there were enough wrinkles in the plot to make it seem original and thereby make the story engaging.

I thought that the characters, wife Hannah and daughter Bailey, were well developed and reasonably believable. Hannah’s history with her grandfather was a nice touch and helped explain both her unique career and her solid self-confidence. I did feel as though her dogged detecting skills and her fearless willingness to confront Nicholas pushed the boundaries of credibility somewhat. Nevertheless, those skills kept the story going. Moreover, her assessment that Nicholas would be willing to make a deal with her elevated her from just a resolute protagonist to one who has a deep insight into human desire.

Mother-daughter Conflict Adds Interest

The Hannah-Bailey rivalry/conflict was believable and added a distinct dimension to the novel. Bailey is in many respects a predictably disturbed teen, and her antipathy for Hannah, who has come between her and Owen, is understandable. While the two grow closer as they search for Owen, the author sustains Bailey’s independent streak deep into the novel by having the teen make the foolhardy decision to leave the hotel room in Austin. This not only reinvigorated Bailey’s character, but added much tension to the plot.

Besides Hannah and Bailey, some of the other characters in the novel were nicely drawn, but without much depth. Of course, they didn’t need it.

The Mystery of Owen

I did find myself wanting to know where Owen got his coding skills. How did he become so skilled? Where did he work before the Shop? Hannah as narrator doesn’t provide the reader with this information; indeed, she provides the reader with little information about Owen’s background. This, of course, raises the question of why someone as sharp as Hannah wouldn’t have acquired that information before marrying Owen. Certainly it would be relevant in trying to figure out what happened to him.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the novel was well done. It was an easy read and sucked me in better than just about anything I’ve read in quite a while. While the work is not literary, I noticed a couple of nice metaphors. For example, she describes one of the lessons taught by her grandfather this way:

“The first lesson he ever taught was that it wasn’t just about shaping a block of wood into what you wanted it to be. That it was also a peeling back, to seeing what was inside the wood, what the wood had been before. It was the first step to creating something beautiful. The first step to making something out of nothing.” (p 89) Later in the novel the author extends the woodworking theme when she tells Owen that her grandfather used to say that good wood is defined by one thing. As an example, she shows him a blanched spot in a pine board and says, “I think it could turn out interesting.” Owen says he likes that philosophy: “I kind of think you could probably say the same thing about people. At the end of the day, one thing defines them.” When Hannah then asks, “What defines you?” he says, “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my daughter.” (p 296)

Severance by Ling Ma

In Ling Ma’s dystopian novel, a fever spread by a fungus turns people into zombies who typically repeat the same behavior over and over until their biology breaks down and they die. Candace, born in China but otherwise a typical young American, does much the same thing on her job: monitoring the production of Bibles over and over. The central point of the novel seems to be that modern work (and perhaps society overall) is akin to a dehumanizing virus.

I found both stories told in the novel—Candace at work in NYC at her Bible job, and Candace with a small group of pandemic survivors—engaging. I think this was because the situations described made me wonder what it would be like to continue doing a job every day while the world around me fell apart, and later what Candace’s small group was going to do when it reached the Facility. Although there wasn’t much plot in the novel, it maintained tension because it placed Candace in these unique and potentially dangerous situations. I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen to her.

Craft Matters

From a craft perspective, the novel was very well written, and that is what kept me going. The author’s descriptions are often thoughtful and arresting. For example: “Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. . . And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.” (p 199)

Did Capitalism Kill the Characters?

On the other hand, the characters aren’t that engaging. They seem to lack a zest for life, which many reviewers seem to blame (sadly) on soul-killing capitalism rather than own unwillingness to do anything with their lives. At one point, after a year at Spectra, Candace decides to quit, having learned that her job is taking her nowhere. Her boss, however, shares with her the idea that she may not find anything better, and might actually have a hard time making her way in the world. This is Candace’s Moment of Truth. Does she have the guts to say “Take this job and shove it!”? No, she doesn’t. If Candace is, then, a typical Millennial, I would have to say that it isn’t capitalism that is this generation’s problem, but their unwillingness to take risks and make something of themselves.

The Immigrant Experience

Chapter 16 about the immigrant experience is also well-written and probably much longer than needed to tell us something about who Candace is. The fact is, every character has a backstory that, if revealed, helps the reader understand the character’s thoughts and actions. The immigrant experience is just one type of backstory, and no more or less important than any other type of backstory. Oddly, in this novel, Candace seems to pretty much reject her Chinese background, which logically should make her “immigrant experience” backstory even less unimportant. Nevertheless, the novel devotes an entire long chapter to this experience, which made me wonder why. It actually reads more like a standalone memoir.

I thought it was interesting that people catch Shen fever when they go home. At least, this is what happens to Ashley and then to Bob. I wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to suggest anything about the nature of either the fever or people’s susceptibility to it. It seemed to suggest some sort of Freudian instinctual search for stasis. But the novel really didn’t develop the idea.

Out of Gas

Most disappointing about the novel was the ending. Throughout, I kept wondering what sort of future the author would invent for Candace and the others. Either they were going to survive or they weren’t, and whichever it was, seeing what happened would be a rewarding experience. However, the author ended the novel without actually ending Candace’s story, as if she simply ran out of imagination the way her car runs out of gas. As a result my experience of the novel wasn’t rewarding. Too bad.

3.5* because the writing is well above average but the ending disappoints.

This One Is Mine by Maria Semple

This is probably the funniest novel I’ve read since Kotzwinkle’s Fan Man, which was many years ago. I could easily picture the novel’s comedic scenes as scenes from a sit-com, which makes sense considering that Semple was previously a TV writer.

The novel features the stories of two women in Los Angeles, and clearly satirizes the Hollywood lifestyle and mentality. Violet is married to David, a manager of rock bands who makes so much money that Violet quit her job as a TV writer, even though she was good and made good money herself. She is now a 42-year-old Los Angeles matron who is depressed about her life, even though she cares deeply for her toddler daughter, Dot. Sally is David’s sister, and thus Violet’s sister-in-law, although the two have never much liked each other. Sally was once an up-and-coming ballerina but lost her career when she had to have one of her little toes amputated due to complications from diabetes. At 36 years old, Sally earns a modest living by giving ballet lessons, and although her diabetes is a serious problem for her, her bigger problem is that she hasn’t managed to snag a spouse, despite being beautiful.

Fun, Complex Characters

The author does a super job portraying Violet and Sally by putting us inside their heads and showing us what’s going on with them. To a large extent they are self-centered and manipulative, and yet they remain funny and sympathetic. Violet’s initial appearance starts out: “Tuesdays in Los Angeles made Violet sad.” She tells us this while driving around in her Mercedes, driving because she has nothing much to do. She doesn’t work, and the nanny takes care of Dot. She sees Gwen Gold putting up a Home For Sale sign and thinks: “Violet knew the type, and they made her sad. Those divorcees who had staked it all on being the perfect wife and mother. . . But something had gone awry, and now these women were single, fifty, and forced to earn a living without any discernible skills. So they became realtors.”

Violet continues on and sees a woman doing an oil painting which isn’t good, and that makes her sad. She finally ends up at a French chocolate shop “that was always empty . . . [and] . . . she felt unbearably sad.” She ends up buying over three hundred dollars of truffles, hoping it will stanch her sadness. The truffles are for Sally’s birthday. Her husband David has asked Violet to buy a present for his sister, but has never bothered to tell Violet that Sally has diabetes, and therefore can’t eat truffles. (pp 10-14)

Sally

Sally is portrayed with similar panache. At the outset, Sally is focused on a party where she is supposed to meet Jeremy White, an about-to-become-famous sports writer that Sally’s friend Maryam has set her up with. But Sally isn’t simply looking forward to the party, she is plotting to catch Jeremy. When we first meet her, “Sally was sitting on the edge of the tub inspecting her feet when the phone rang. It was her best friend.” Sally proceeds to tell Maryam that she doesn’t have much time for her. Then she manipulates Maryam into driving through rush hour traffic to pick her up, and then driving back the way she came to the party.

Maryam points out that this makes no sense when Sally could just drive herself directly to the party. Sally’s thoughts: “Sally knew all this. But she needed Maryam to drive. That way, after Sally captivated Jeremy White at the party, she could tell him that Maryam had left without her, then innocently ask him for a ride home. She’d invite him up, tease him with the best kiss of his life, and abruptly send him on his way. Always leave them wanting more.” (p 15)

A Four Alarm Disaster

Later, after Sally discovers that Jeremy can’t drive her home, she thinks: “Jeremy didn’t drive here? What about Sally’s plan? If he didn’t drive her home, she couldn’t bring him upstairs. If she couldn’t bring him upstairs, she couldn’t tease him. If she couldn’t tease him, she couldn’t send him away, flummoxed and erect. This was a four alarm disaster!” Sally then finds a solution by taking Jeremy into a bedroom and having sex with him on top of the coats piled on the bed. Lastly: “She grabbed something from the bed and cleaned herself off. Whoops. It was Maryam’s scarf.” Sally kicks the scarf under the bed, and later tells Maryam that she wasn’t wearing it when she came in. Nevertheless, despite her selfish treatment of just about everybody, Sally remains both funny and likeable.

Amazing Dialogue

As the novel begins to get going, Violet meets Teddy Reyes, a poor musician with a car that dies on him. Nevertheless, he has a tough, bright personality and engages Violet in smart repartee, which charms her. For example, after Violet tells Teddy she’ll pay to have his car fixed, we get this exchange:

“I might never be able to pay you back,” he said.

“Think of it as me miracling you.”

“Miracling me?”

“It’s a Deadhead thing,” Violet said. “At Grateful Dead shows, there’d be all these nasty hippies walking around holding up one finger, saying, I need a miracle, which was meant to take the form of someone giving them a free ticket.”

“You’re a Deadhead?” he asked skeptically.

“I was.”

“I feel less guilty accepting your money knowing you have such shitty taste in music.”

“I’ll call our car service to pick you up,” she said. “The mechanic will take care of you.”

“Do you think one day I’ll ever say, Our car service?”

“Most likely no.”

“Man, as hippie chicks go, you have one hell of a mean streak.”

Passages like this occur often. Quickly, Violet decides she wants to have an affair with Teddy. He isn’t especially good looking, doesn’t dress well, has a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and has no money, but she doesn’t care about any of that. Somehow, Teddy brings Violet back to life, to the point where she becomes obsessed with him.

David versus Violet

Meanwhile, David is growing increasingly unhappy with Violet because she isn’t doing even the simplest things he’d like her to do, and because she’s become so moody. David is not a particularly likeable character, however, because he’s rather demanding and unsympathetic with Violet. He thinks that providing her a grand lifestyle with essentially limitless money should be enough to make her happy.

But David undergoes a transformation when he goes to a yoga retreat for a weekend. Violet is supposed to go with him, but stays home, wanting to see Teddy. Like the off-beat humor throughout the novel, the passage describing David’s experience in the sweat lodge ceremony is absurdly funny.

The Sweat Lodge Send-up

For the ceremony, the participants enter a tiny, pitch dark sweat lodge without any clothes on. When David crawls in, a sharp rock sends a searing pain into his knee. In reaction, he stands up “and the whole lodge popped off the ground with him. He fumbled for a branch to balance the sweat lodge [made of twigs] before the whole goddamn hunk of junk capsized.

“’Jesus Christ!’” He dropped to his knees, and the structure crashed down on his back. “’Fuck me!’”

After this, David falls into a pit, then crawls forward into something soft and fuzzy. “Only when it pressed harder against him did he realize he had brushed up against a dick and some hairy balls. ‘Ahhh!’ David jerked his arm away.”

Shortly thereafter he tries to sit still in the crowded lodge, but someone else sits and leans back against his legs. Then: “He scrunched his legs closer, but the person just pushed deeper into them.

“Something heavy landed in his lap. Jesus Christ, it was a braid. One of the yoga chick slash strippers had a big one. . . David lifted the braid with his thumb and index finger and dropped it off to the side. In an instant, it was back in his lap. . . . “’It throws off my alignment if my braid falls to the side,’” says the woman. And David responds, “How’s that my problem, Rapunzel?”

David Changes and the Novel Transforms

Eventually David thinks about how Violet would react to the bizarre goings-on in the sweat lodge, and his thoughts turn to admiration, and then love. While he began the evening planning to divorce Violet, whom he is sure is home screwing Teddy Reyes, he ends realizing that their marriage is bad, but Violet is trying to do something about it. “She was taking a leap. So David would take one, too: no matter what Violet said or did, from this moment on, he would love her as he loved her now.”

About three-quarters of the way through the novel, I started to feel as though it, like the lives of the characters it portrays, would end on a down note. I was subsequently surprised and gratified by the way Semple brought all the threads of the story to satisfying and even a heartwarming closure.

I have to add that, having just read a number of one-star Goodreads reviews of this novel, I was reminded of the breadth of perspectives and feelings that people bring to their reading. Clearly, not everyone enjoys absurd humor and satire. But to me it worked marvelously.

Malibu Rising by Taylor J. Reid

This novel offers enough individual stories to comprise an entire issue of People magazine. True, it lacks photo spreads, but I’m pretty sure that people who like People, or any other Hollywood tabloid, will be instant fans.

The All-Time Best

This novel has a lot going for it. I mean, who doesn’t like to live vicariously with the rich and/or famous? For starters we get Mick Riva, the father of the four Riva siblings who occupy the center of the novel. Mick is nothing less than the all-time top vocalist in the world. Naturally, he’s also a louse who leaves his wife to raise their three kids, then returns, promising to stay for good this time. But after he produces a fourth kids he leaves again. Worse, this man-child not only fails to pay child support, he doesn’t even come to his ex-wife’s funeral. If he weren’t such a great guy he’d be a stereotype.

Then there is Nina, the eldest of the four Riva’s, who has to drop out of high school in order to keep the restaurant running that provides a meager existence for her siblings. She might also come across as a stereotype—the good daughter who sacrifices her happiness for the sake of her family. She might, except that she’s spotted by a talent agent and ends up as a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. She’s still sacrificing for the family, but with all her modeling money they eat a lot better.

Also because of Nina, Brandon is in the novel. He happens to be the top tennis player in the world. He gets Nina to marry him but, just like Mick, walks out on her, then tries to walk back in. The reason he walks out is that he’s attracted to Carrie Soto, who is—wait for it—the best female tennis player ever. Ever! People magazine never had an issue like this.

The Not-quite and Not-yet Best

Wait, there’s more. Jay, the oldest of all-time-best-vocalist Mich Riva’s two son’s, is quite possibly the world’s best male surfer. He’s about to claim the title when he learns he has a heart condition that will force him to give up competing. I don’t know if he’s a stereotype. Poor little rich kid? Up and coming sports wunderkind who’s robbed of greatness through no fault of his own? Hmmm, tough to choose.

Then there’s Kit Riva, Nina’s younger sister, who seems to routinely get the short straw in the Riva family. Perhaps that’s why she’s become the snarky Riva—and a good thing, too, because she repeatedly adds life to the narrative when rigor mortis is about to take over. But the real surprise is that she turns out to possibly be a better surfer than Jay, so that by the end of the novel her half-brother Hud, who routinely photographs Jay for magazines, says he’s thinking of selling photographs of Kit to Surf magazine. Fantastic! I say, but why isn’t he calling People?

Those are the main characters, and not a slouch among them. During the Big Riva Party, which is held at Nina/Bandon’s mansion above the beach, and which is what the preceding 191 pages of backstory have been priming us for, all sorts of other Hollywood glitterati show up and stay up into the wee hours drinking mass quantities of booze, swinging from a chandelier, busting Nina’s wedding china, engaging in random sex and regularly barfing all over one another. Phew! Wish I could have a party like this.

Semi-protagonists Rule!

Of the main characters, Nina is the semi-protagonist because, in the end, she sheds her doormat role and tells Mick, who has shown up seeking to reconnect with his kids for the first time in about a hundred years, that she doesn’t want him in her life. She becomes strong here, but not for long because it still takes tons of convincing by her siblings before she will agree that she can do what she wants—namely, go to Portugal and live in a shack on the beach and be left alone.

From a craft perspective, I’d say this novel has everything except a plot and interesting characters. I guess I’ll admit that a party as big and crazy as the one in this novel can sub for a plot, especially since Mick showed up, Brandon and Carrie Soto showed up (separately, fighting), Jay beat the crap out of Hud, Kit discovered she doesn’t like boys, and everybody else snorted beaucoup coke and trashed the house. However, the characters never really registered because of the way the point-of-view shifted continuously from character to character, even dawdling among the many irrelevant nobodies, so that I never developed an attachment to any of them.

Nevertheless, I finished the novel, and I didn’t hate it, so I’m giving it three stars. I guess I’m like everybody else, a sucker for a low-brow fictional exposé featuring Hollywood’s (and Malibu’s) rich and famous.

Where the Forest Meets the Stars by Glendy Vanderah

I was wandering around the fiction stacks of my local library one and this book was set out at the end of a shelf, its cover facing the aisle like an advertisement for itself. It caught my eye with its image of a starry night sky bordered by the black shapes of forest trees. Vaguely, I recalled reading something positive about the book somewhere. The premise included on the inside of the book jacket sounded promising, and an easy, enjoyable read. I was up for something easy.

The Good

One aspect I really appreciated early on in the book was the way the author kept the point of view with Jo. I’d just read Malibu Rising, a novel where point of view bounces around like the steel ball in a pinball machine, which made it impossible to care about any of the characters.

Another good move in this novel is the use of a young girl as a main character. Doing so allows the author to present more extreme behaviors, as when Ursa sneaks out to see Gabe (p 106). In turn, this makes the novel more engaging.

I also appreciated the occasional references to what Jo thinks of herself, and how her double mastectomy has eliminated her appeal. She came to terms with how she looks with scars fairly easily, but just addressing the issue earns a kudo in my book.

When Jo reads Gabe’s mother’s poetry, the novel touches on the question of who the artist makes her art for. Is it worth doing if only for the artist? His mother’s answer was a definite yes, and her affirmation of her life serves as a good example for Gabe later in the book.

The Not-So-Good

This is the kind of book that I feel bad finding any faults in, just because it’s such a heart-warming and life-affirming read. Still, I have to say that this wasn’t a good read for me. The writing was the blandest of bland, with zero literary merit. For a long time, the plot wandered. There is little tension until the bad guys show up on page 236. The climactic gunfight is over by page 242, but the denouement that follows takes another 79 pages. All those pages were used to wrap the characters’ various stories up neatly, so that the reader can be sure what will happen to everybody. But I have to wonder whether the novel would have had more impact if some things had been left hanging. After all, Ursa gets her fifth miracle on page 241. How much more do we really need to see?

City of Secrets by Stewart O’Nan

What I most appreciated about City of Secrets was the fact that it illuminated an important aspect of post-World War II history that I knew a little—but not much—about. The fact that seventy-five years later the conflict over the small parcel of land that is Israel/Palestine continues, flaring into regular warfare on what seems a regular basis, renders the subject of the novel even more significant.

Unfortunately, the novel proved to be a problematic read for me. One of the problems is that the narration throws the reader into a situation without providing any background. I knew a tiny bit about the activities that predated the formation of Israel, but not enough so that I felt I knew the context for the action of this novel. Consequently, I felt confused about what was happening, and why, from the get-go.

Narrative Style

More troublesome for me were certain aspects of the narrative style. Most notably was the dearth of emotion expressed by the main character, Brand. This in turn seemed to stem from the fact that, while Brand provides the point of view of the novel, it sounds and feels as if it’s coming from an omniscient narrator. In the very least, it is a very distant third person POV. Either way, the story telling never managed to make me feel anything much for Brand.

Eventually I decided that the numbness which characterized Brand was intentional, and meant to reflect the impact on him of having his entire family killed by the Germans for no reason other than that they were Jewish. I came to expect that, as the novel progressed, Brand would thaw out emotionally, and become more expressive, and more sympathetic. But he didn’t, and so I went through the entire novel without ever feeling anything much for him.

The other aspect of the narrative style that troubled me was the muddled way in which the events of the story flowed into one another. The progression from event to event wasn’t portrayed in distinct scenes, but seemed to be a mixture of half- scenes, bits of dialogue, sections of summary, and memories and speculations by Brand. I have the impression that this situation stems from the author’s spare writing style, and perhaps I simply prefer full description of scenes, settings, and characters. Regardless, for me the chronology was somewhat vague, and the dramatic arc of each chapter was wobbly (although it was there).

Does Brand Change?

Brand does evince a sort of ethical progression. At the outset of the novel we learn that he had survived the Nazi and Russian camps by keeping a very low profile. As a result, he didn’t speak up when a guard brutally beat his friend Koppelmann to death, and he has been haunted by his failure ever after. He also blames himself for his family’s death, and for the death of Lipschitz, whom he failed to defend to the members of his underground cell. At the very end, he sounds like he may have changed: “He owed them a debt, and promised from now on to live as honestly as possible.” But he still doesn’t express any emotional grief for all those who died, so his change is modest at best.

The novel was clearest and best when describing distinct actions, particularly when Brand and others robbed the payroll train, and when the King David was blown up. Elsewhere, the novel seemed to lack dramatic tension. Even Brand’s escape at the end, when he drives to the coast and boards a freighter for Marseille, was related almost as an afterthought, and wrapped up in just a couple of sentences.

Embassy Wife by Katie Crouch

I enjoyed this novel from the get-go. The slightly absurdist humor is evident from the outset, as when Amanda, newly arrived in Namibia and driving her daughter to the International School, recalls the directive from the school receptionist, which states: No entrance without a badge, ever, ever, EVER!!! Amanda has taken care to properly display her badge, only to find that the the guard at the entrance, “a stunning Damara woman dressed like a New York cop, kept her eyes glued to her phone as she waved the cars through with a slight flick of her wrist.” (p 6)

Shortly thereafter Amanda meets Persephone, who Amanda describes as dressing “like the love child of Lily Pulitzer and Moses.” Persephone, whose husband is the attorney assigned to the local U.S. embassy, describes herself as the “unofficial greeter” of new school parents. She has also recently wrested the presidency of the school PTA from Mila Shilongo, whose husband is the Namibian Minister of Transportation. As Persephone chats up Amanda, two workmen approach Persephone and toss the carcass of a large dead oryx at her feet, “its tongue lolling dangerously close to Persephone’s polished toenails.” (p15) Then Mila comes up and says, “The meat you ordered for International Day.” Clearly, these two prima donnas have issues.

Multiple Narrators

The rivalry between Persephone and Mila, both of whom are apparently gorgeous women, continues for roughly the first half of the novel, after which they become allies. But the book isn’t just about the two of them, although multiple chapters are told from each of their separate points of view. The newly arrived Amanda, a former tech executive, also narrates many chapters, while her husband Mark, Mila’s husband Josephat, and even Persephone’s housekeeper Frida take charge of smaller story segments. This use of multiple points of view works well, providing the reader with a fuller perspective on their collective story than a single perspective could.

This novel is loosely plotted in that there is not a single story that moves us forward, but rather multiple stories. Some of these are almost slapstick comedies—the pretentious silliness of the St. Partrick’s Day party and the absolute lunacy of the International Day celebration. Elsewhere the stories are more serious, focusing on Mark’s past relationship with Esther, the arrest of the children for selling Nazi memorabilia, the end of Mila and Josephat’s marriage and the arrest of Josephat. Throughout, however, the writing remains witty. For example, when Persephone asks Mila for advice on the International Day fundraiser, she is depicted in a way that captures her perfectly—“holding a legal pad and a sparkly pen with a feather on the end of it.” (p284)

Interesting History and Geography

In addition its entertaining satire of embassy life and embassy people, the novel provides details about the unique geography and troubled history of Namibia (enough that I was inspired to consult Wikipedia for yet more), as well as some insight into the way the U.S. diplomats and those of other nations act and are viewed in a third world nation.

The book also offers commentary on subjects of racism, the German colonization of the land, the brutally hot and dry landscape, and the poverty of most native Namibians. I appreciated the verisimilitude provided by these passages, as well as the way the novel does not become preachy about past horrors or the abuse of foreign powers. The infrequent but well-deserved digs at the Orange Man were a plus, and though I wondered what the career State Department staff thought of working for an ambassador who was a Trump appointee with no diplomatic experience, the novel didn’t go there, which was probably for the best.

The Realpolitik of Mila and Josephat

As African characters, Mila and Josephat offered some interesting observations that betrayed a realpolitik attitude toward life and governing. For example, Josephat criticizes a businessman who wants a road building contract for failing to offer him a secret kickback. Mila agrees, calling the man ignorant, while Josephat shrugs and adds, “Not knowledgeable of Africa, my dear.” (p50) I found myself wondering whether the two of them accurately reflect the thinking of most Africans, or whether the author was mimicking the standard Western view of the unseemly nature of African politics.

Mila’s realpolitik is expressed in her belief in manipulation. She tells Amanda that “Every woman in Africa” knows that they must make a man think all ideas are his. (p166) She also lies, rather baldly, when she tells Amanda that Anna is not Mark’s daughter. (p352) Too, Mila believes in demonstrating her power and putting others in their place, as she does when, at lunch with Amanda, she sends back her potatoes, saying, “I must send these potatoes back. That waiter is looking far too pleased with himself.” (p357)

At one point, Josephat offers a legitimate critique of Western charities: “All of the foreigners are so worried about rhinos. How about kudu? Poached by the hundreds. Or wildebeests? Are they out of fashion? What about the kids dying of hunger in the south? Are they not adorable because they don’t have big fat horns?” (p169) Of course, later we learn that his comment stems at least in part from his own interest in allowing the rhino at his farm to be poached for the money its horn will bring. Nevertheless, his critique is a good one, and exemplifies the innumerable insights into Africa and the West that the novel offers.

Minor Quibbles

While there is much more I could say in praise of this novel, I will wrap up this review by noting a few minor faults which become evident toward the end of the novel. Firstly, because the novel is comprised of many individual stories, the author has to tie them all up, and does so in a manner that felt rushed to me.

Secondly, some of the resolutions were a little too happy-ending-ish, which eliminated the book’s ability to offer any sobering moral uplift. For example, Mark makes a big profit by investing in Anna’s gem business, so much so that he decides to start his own gem business, which Amanda decides to become the CEO of, leading the two of them to resume having good sex. At the same time, when their daughter Med is jailed for selling Nazi memorabilia and is destined for prison, her release seems to come too easily. Josephat deservedly ends up in prison, but Mila replaces him as Minister of Transportation, despite the fact that she was complicit in his corruption. Most implausibly, Persephone is asked to become the embassy’s CIA agent—an ending that I actually enjoyed because it was so totally over the top.

Regardless of the foregoing quibbles, Embassy Wife was well-written throughout. Humorous, informative, and entertaining, it is a read I’ll definitely recommend to others.

The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

Although I don’t often read non-fiction, this book demanded my attention. It should be read by everyone, and then perhaps everyone would demand the urgent action required to avoid our impending climate disaster.

The book begins: “It is worse, much worse, than you think.” Even before my participation in California’s Climate Action Team fifteen years ago, which designed the state’s current and limited system of auctioning carbon emissions rights, I was a student of climate change as far back as 1979. It is not a new problem. It is simply much worse now, and the need for certain action much more pressing.

Change is happening Faster and Faster

A large portion of the book is given over to succinct descriptions of the impacts of climate change. The author mentions the rising death rate from the increasing heat due to global warming, and at the time of his writing we hadn’t even experienced the stunning heat dome that settled over the northwestern U.S. and British Columbia in June 2021.

Similarly, he mentions that, due to drought caused by climate change, five of the twenty worst fires in California history occurred in 2017. But again, just since the book was written, six of the seven largest wildfires in state history occurred in 2020 and 2021.

Other chapters of the book focus on the ways climate change will reduce agricultural productivity and increase hunger; how sea level rise will drown coastal cities and entire island nations; how ocean acidification due to its absorption of carbon will substantially increase heat in the atmosphere while also reducing the productivity of ocean fisheries, upon which a billion people depend for food.

Climate Refugees: Where Will They Go?

The author notes that climate scientists estimate that by 2050 anywhere from 140 million to one billion humans will migrate because their homeland has become uninhabitable. Recently Europe has struggled to handle a few million refugees, and the U.S. is hardening against the appearance of several tens of thousands. How will the relatively prosperous countries of the world deal with the coming flood?

Permafrost: The Climate Wild Card

While the book should be sufficient to mobilize any reader to demand that our politicians immediately initiate dramatic actions to curb what is happening, there are two key areas where the author may actually underestimate the likely impact: the coming explosion of methane emissions as the permafrost in the far northern latitudes melts, and the slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Based on information available when he wrote the book, the author dismissed the threat that the permafrost will melt anytime soon. And yet beginning in 2019, summer temperatures in Siberia have at times risen to thirty degrees above normal. At the same time, massive fires have broken out across the Siberian boreal forests (and to a lesser extent in the forests of Alaska and Canada). Some forty million acres per years have burned in Siberia each year since 2019—ten times the acreage burned in California’s worst year (2020). Not only do these fires send 500 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, but where they burn, the melting of the permafrost accelerates. Altogether, the amount of carbon that could potentially be emitted out of the permafrost is perhaps eight times the total amount of CO2 emitted worldwide each year, and its release will dramatically increase global warming.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current

The AMOC isn’t a source of carbon. It is an ocean current that flows from the tropical waters east of Central American north along the U.S. east coast and then across the Atlantic to the ocean waters near England. Commonly known as the Gulf Stream, these waters cool in the north latitudes and sink, causing a flow back to the tropics, where the water warms and circles west to become part of the Gulf Stream again.

The heat transfers facilitated by the AMOC bring warmth to Europe and cooling to the tropics. But as the ice sheets in the arctic and Greenland melt due to global warming, the water they add to the AMOC interferes with and slows its flow. The melting of the permafrost will accelerate the melting of these ice sheets. Some scientists estimate that these effects have already slowed AMOC circulation by fifteen percent. The more it slows, the less is heat is transferred to the benefit of both Europe and the tropics. Should this circulation stop completely, Europe would become largely uninhabitable.

How Long Do We Have?

The author argues clearly and persuasively that the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of our plight. He indicates that burning needs to be completely stopped within thirty years if we are to prevent mass death and environmental devastation, and even then we will find ourselves living in a radically different—and less beneficial—world. Personally, I would say we need to begin phasing our fossil fuels now and be finished within five to ten years in order to preserve the kind of environment we are accustomed to living in. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Americans maintain a willful ignorance of horror that is coming. They will get what they deserve.

Matrix by Lauren Groff

Matrix is a historical novel set in the England of the 12^th century. The focus of the novel is Marie, an illegitimate child who is nevertheless of a royal family and related to Eleanor, who for much of the novel is the queen of England and of parts of France.

Marie is a powerfully large woman with a face that is not appealing. Rather than marry her off, the queen decides to send her to serve as prioress for a failing abbey. Angered at being sent away from court, Marie vows to make the abbey a great success, and thereby cause those who cast her out to feel sorry they did so. In this effort, Marie succeeds.

Life in the 12^th Century

The author demonstrates a deep knowledge of what life was like in the 12^th century. For example, when a disease causes the winter rye to poison people, we read a startling description of attempted cures: “Nothing can drive out the disease: not praying, not bathing them in holy water, not tying them to their beds, not leaping out from the night to frighten them, not holding them by the ankle in the cold river, not beating them around the head with a yew branch, not burying them crown to toe in warm manure, not hanging them upside down from a high tree and spinning them until they vomit, not drilling a tiny hole through their skulls to let the bad humors out of the brains.” (p 57)

The novel also clearly depicts how a powerful woman can earn the dedication of her nuns and other acolytes in the abbey, and how women alone, under Marie’s leadership, can bring the abbey to a state of wealth and power. Indeed, no male characters play a role in the novel, although one of Marie’s favorites, Wulfhild, chooses to leave the abbey and marry. Marie and the other nuns do exhibit sexuality, as Marie learns from Nest, the infirmatrix. Nest not only has a first encounter with Marie that leads to orgasm, but teaches Marie that there is no shame in it, that “it is an expression of the humors, not unlike bloodletting, it is utterly natural.” She informs Marie that other nuns come to her for such expression, and from then on the novel circles back several times to sexual matters.

Religious Belief and Political Skill

Throughout the novel the mindset of Marie and the other women is totally dominated by their religious faith. Their lives revolve around episodes of praying—a total of eight hours each day. Although they have earthly bodies and perform ordinary tasks like growing crops, they are wholly committed to serving and honoring God. They feel ecstasy when they hear the singing of psalms, and think often of living the kind of good lives that will earn them a place in heaven.

At the same time, Marie demonstrates acute political awareness. She has spies in town, at the royal court, and elsewhere, whom she uses to stay one step ahead of her superiors. She surrounds the abbey with a labyrinth to keep men and other undesirables away. At one point, a beautiful novice named Sprota arrives. Everyone in the abbey is attracted to her, and she appears to be a visionary like Marie; indeed, she has the makings of someone who could eventually take over when Marie retires. But instead of grasping this possibility, Marie sees Sprota as competition, and assigns her to care for lepers, which causes her to run away—eliminating the threat she posed.

A Literary Masterpiece

More than anything, it is the prose that elevates this novel into the literary stratosphere. Frequently the writing is austere, leaving much for the reader to fill in: “Work. Prayer, which is the element of the abbey as much as the damp, the wind. The fields, the sows, the orchard.” (p 86) At other times the writing becomes lyrical, as when Marie seeks relief from the throes of menopause: “Her body is inhabited, electric with heat, her skin has a roiling fire stuffed into it, the heat is unbearable, she is now running toward the low light off the water. Night in its heaps of darkness spins by.” ( p88) At still other times, we are treated to luminous similes: “Letters fly to Marie’s hands, letters like flocks of starlings, wild commotion, stripping the grain.” Sentences like these appear on every page, making for an unforgettable reading experience.

The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

In this novel, the author does a lot of things well and only a few not-so-well. Among the positives are the sharp depiction of the experiences and attitudes of Black women. Harris effectively brings her characters to life by immersing the reader in the hopes, fears, and day to day trivia of their lives—most notably, their treatment of their hair. Similarly, her description of the publishing world created a powerful if unflattering impression of the industry.

As the novel opens, the main character, Nella, is working hard both at her career and at getting Wagner Books to recognize how racism operates in the industry. In particular, she organizes monthly Diversity Town Halls. Initially, these are well attended, but soon most staffers find themselves too busy to attend, leaving Nella frustrated.

Nella’s Lack of Diplomacy

Aside from the Diversity meetings, not much action occurs in Part I of the novel. Most of what we read are Nella’s thoughts, and to me this was fine. The novel held my attention as I absorbed Nella’s background and watched her navigate her situation. Book I (of four) climaxes with Nella giving a harsh critique of the latest novel by Colin Franklin, who is one of Wagner’s highest producing authors. Egged on by her friend Malaika, Nella disses Franklin’s presentation of a Black opioid addict as failing to reflect real Black experience. But in attacking the book so directly and undiplomatically, she earns the author’s and her boss’s enmity. She also illustrates the core of her problem—wanting to be Black in a White industry.

Changes in Time and POV

The novel moves around in time, and includes several other points-of-view besides Nella’s. The prologue occurs about 35 years before Nella’s time, and features a black woman escaping New York City in a rush. Only much later do we learn that the woman is Kendra, who is leaving Wagner Books after publishing a scathing critique of the White publishing world. Still later we learn that a similar fate befell Shani, who was forced to leave a Boston magazine after publishing a harsh critique the magazine’s white world.

I found that these jumps in time and between narrators worked well to reveal, bit by bit, more clues about the mystery of what exactly is going on in Nella’s world—and, in particular, what the intent is of Hazel, the new black assistant editor hired at Wagner Books. A number of reviews I’ve read complain that nothing much happens in the book until the last thirty pages, but in fact there are clues dispensed throughout, though they are easy to miss. Following them felt kind of like going on a scavenger hunt.

The Hazards of Over-writing

One of the reasons that the novel’s clues are easy to miss is that the narrative is excessively overwritten. Unimportant descriptive details pile up on virtually every page. For example: “My eyes followed Reagan’s. A young Black woman appeared to have entered from the parking garage side of the office. Holding a tote bag in one hand and a coffee cup in another, she’d already passed the potted ficus and the politics editor’s empty desk; now she was strutting past Printer Row, hair cropped and glistening, and her sights set on me and Reagan.” (p 353) Once we learn that she’s holding a tote and a coffee cup, we see her. We don’t need the description of her passing the ficus, the empty desk, and Printer Row. For example: “Holding a tote in one hand and a coffee cup in another, she came toward us determinedly, hair glistening.”

Nella’s Dilemma, Hazel’s Solution

The conflict between resenting and wanting to reform the White publishing world on one hand, and wanting to succeed in it on the other, lies at the core of Nella’s character. She can’t seem to find her Black place in this world. Hazel, on the other hand, has no trouble—despite the fact that she is undeniably Black-centric in her outside literary activities.

Hazel’s success, it turns out, is artificially produced (I’ll avoid the spoiler of saying how). Indeed, she encourages Nella to embrace the same artifice as way of succeeding in the White world. Nella resists, and in doing so is encouraged by a shadowy group that calls itself The Resistance—a group of Black individuals who reject the Stepford-ish rapprochement with the White world that Hazel promotes, and wants to keep fighting—albeit to what end isn’t clear.

The novel, then, sets up a no-win situation for Nella: either she loses by accepting Hazel’s alternative and abandoning her demand for Black equality, or she loses by retaining that demand but forfeiting her place in the White establishment. In the end, she is poised to incur a fate similar to that of Kendra and Shani by publishing an article outing Hazel and those allied with her. But the sudden appearance of new boss Delilah with her glistening hair suggests that she will be prevented from doing so—and presumably converted at last to Hazel’s side.

A Missed Opportunity

The author should be praised for raising the issue of racism in the publishing industry and society at large. If there is a shortcoming to this book, it is that the author chose not to investigate and articulate, or attempt to articulate, a path to an accommodation between the White professional world and Black professionals. We see only Hazel’s willingness to conform to and assimilate into the White world through the use of Smooth’d Out, on the one hand, and the uncompromising opposition to such actions by the Resistance. Neither of these options will lead to the type of deep communication that might change the attitudes of both groups, and the exploration of how such communication might be handled would have made this an important work. Nevertheless, the book remains a good read simply by offering us a window into the world of Black women professionals.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell

Instructions for a Heatwave is set in London and Ireland during the historic U.K heatwave of July, 1976. The story begins with the disappearance of a retired father, Robert Riordan. This leads to a frenzied search for him by his wife, Gretta, and their three adult children.

There is little here that might be called plot. Instead, the novel presents the sometimes strained interplay of the mother and her children. All three siblings are experiencing relationship troubles with their significant others. Michael Francis, a teacher, is struggling with the guilt of having slept a single time with another teacher. For this and other reasons he is fearful that his marriage to Claire will fail.

Monica, the middle child and the favorite, is generally the most reliable and rational of the clan. However, she has become almost a prisoner in an unrewarding marriage. Over the course of the novel she learns what she has to do about it.

Aoife, much younger than the others, suffers from what appears to be severe dyslexia. This has left her unable to read and largely a failure in school. She left her family because they could neither understand nor help her with her disability. Moving to New York City, her knack for getting others to read for her enables her to survive. Unmarried, Aoife is nevertheless involved with a man named Gabe. When she finally tells him of her difficulty reading, he replies that he had a grandfather with the same problem. Hearing this, Aoife for the first time knows that she isn’t an isolated freak.

The Gift of Language

The strength of this novel lies in its language. The author deftly evokes each character’s personality in finely wrought sentences and paragraphs. Monica, for example, is exposed here:

“Monica hovers on the landing; she turns her foot one way, then the other, observing how the instep of her shoe has acquired a scuff. She’ll have to deal with that today; always better to treat scuffs as soon as they happen. But will her mother have burgundy polish? She doubts it very much.” (p195)

Aoife, on the other hand, feels deep resentment for having always been treated as the family dunce. This resentment shows up in her over-reaction to the criticism that she woke her siblings too early one morning. In fact, she merely set her watch wrong:

“’It was a mistake!’ she shrieks . . . ‘I’d just got off a transatlantic flight! I set my watch wrong. That’s all. It doesn’t make me an idiot.’ . . . Why is it that twenty-four hours in the company of your family is capable of reducing you to a teenager? Is this retrogression cumulative? Will she continue to lose a decade a day?”

Subtle Humor is Present as Well

Michael Francis is a gentle giant whose lack of self-control it matched by histrionic effusions of guilt. He is revealed in a slyly funny scene in which he can’t stop eating the sandwiches his aunt has made. The sandwiches were intended for everyone to share at a family meeting on Robert’s disappearance:

“He returns to the plate, just for a small top-up. One or two more should do the job, then he’ll leave them alone. He tosses one into his mouth but somehow misses: the sandwich drops to the floor, glancing first off the toe of his shoe before disappearing somewhere near the bin. . . It is only fitting that this should happen; it seems entirely in keeping with his current situation in life—a man with a wife who seems to loathe him, a man whose family is fragmented, in crisis, a man beleaguered by heat, by drought, by water shortages, a man whose father has run off to Godknowswhere.” (P130)

Gretta, Mother and Sometimes Manipulator

Gretta is the novel’s central figure, with a personality that ranges from empathetic to petty. Over the course of the novel she has a dark secret revealed. So shocking is it that Monica vows never to speak to her again. Nevertheless, Gretta keeps talking to her about Robert’s brother until finally there is this exchange:

“And my father? What about him?”

The sound of Monica’s voice makes Gretta’s heart leap—in relief and also triumph. She knew she could get her to talk to her again! She knew it!

To mask her glee, Gretta puts her head on one side, she drops her eyes, she lowers her tone . . . (271)

In revealing her characters so deftly, O’Farrell utilizes a technique of frequently shifting the point of view. All of the children interiorize for us, and in so doing show themselves. These shifts in POV occur frequently, sometimes moving from one character to another on the same page. Nevertheless, the shifts are scarcely noticeable. The fact that they proceed so smoothly and seamlessly is yet another testament to the author’s skill.