Book Reviews 2024 - 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. My ratings for books I’ve reviewed during 2023 are listed immediately below, with the full review of each following thereafter.

Not Alone by Sarah K. Jackson DNF

I made it through about 80 pages of this novel before I admitted that I wasn’t getting anything out of it. The style drove me crazy. Every paragraph is crammed with extraneous words. Endless trivial details of her and her son’s every little thought, feeling, and movement. I felt like I was reading the same passage over and over, just written slightly differently. Moreover, there is no literary quality present. Just a mash barrel of words.

The story premise was what kept me going as long as I did. It sounds like it would be engaging, but the style of the story telling defeated my interest.

About Grace by Anthony Doerr

I found this paperback in the little library of a cruise ship that was heading up the Nile. Recognizing the author, I pulled it out of the slush pile of mysteries and romances and started reading. I didn’t have much time in the library, maybe half an hour on three occasions, but immediately I was captivated by the author’s language and by the mystery he starts rolling out. Who is David Winkler, how did a scientist come to be living a bare bones existence on a small Caribbean island, and what is he going home to after twenty-five years?

For me, the value in this novel lies in Doerr’s expressive language—a pleasure to read right from the start: “He made his way through the concourse and stopped by a window to watch a man with two orange wands wave a jet into its gate. Above the tarmac the sky was faultless, that relentless tropic blue he had never quite gotten used to. At the horizon, clouds piled up: cumulus congestus, a sign of some disturbance traveling along out there, over the sea.” (3) The foreboding inherent in this image continues first as his prediction of a minor accident with the overhead bins comes true, and then again in the language that acts like a quiet exclamation point to that event: “He kept his gaze out the window. The frost between the panes was growing, making tiny connections, a square inch of delicate feathers, a two-dimensional wonderland of ice.” (6)

Every page contains passages of similarly stunning language. Providing this language to us is an omniscient narrator. Often the narrator operates at a distance from Winkler, providing background and connective tissue to the body of the novel: “Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.” (13)

The Beauty of Language

Less frequently the narrator moves closer to Winkler, bringing the reader into the immediacy of a scene: “Suddenly he knew what would happen—he had dreamed it four or five nights before.” (14) “Her eyes tracked from the magazine to him and back. A critical moment was passing now, he knew it: he could feel the floor falling away beneath his feet.” (18) But even on occasions where the narration comes close to Winkler, the reader can only discern his feelings by interpreting images: “He’d remain in his seat for a few minutes after she’d left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater around him, the drone of the film rewinding up in the projection room, the hollow thunk of an usher’s dustpan as he swept the aisles.” (22) This is masterful writing.

The Character

As a character, Winkler is unique in his ability to see what is going to happen in the near future in his dreams. This ability is also a disability because he has no control over when it will strike. In one instance, he dreams that a man is going to be hit while crossing a street and killed. When this dream comes true, Winkler develops a powerful fear of his dreams. Later he dreams that a flood will come, his house will be caught in it, and his daughter will drown in his arms. When the flood comes, Winkler is so terrified by the prospect of his daughter drowning that he runs away from his family to ensure that the dream cannot come true.

Winkler is both a pathetic character and a sympathetic one. His disability is such that he is increasingly paralyzed by it. Initially he is at least able to hold a professional job, win Sandy, have a child and live an ordinary middle class life. But his dreams and his fear put an end to his pleasant life. After he flees, all the way to the Caribbean, he never becomes more than a menial laborer. Moreover, when he finally develops his plan to go and search for his daughter, Grace, he ends up deteriorating still more. As a reader, it was frustrating to see him so incapable of explaining himself and his history to Grace. But the portrayal of a broken psyche rang true for me, even though seeing a man so painfully diminished wasn’t enjoyable.

Plot

The novel moves through roughly thirty years, focusing on brief periods and then moving rapidly once a situation become set. During the first half of the book, most of this time takes place in the Caribbean. Once Winkler finds his place (and a very basic, low-income place it is) the novel moves quickly from his first year there to his leaving 25 years later. The second half of the book, after he arrives back in the U.S., involves his search for Grace. Reading about his search is almost as painful as reading about his broken personality.

In Sum

In the last two of the novel’s six books I felt that developments came a bit too slowly. Throughout the novel its superlative prose always kept me going, but even that lost its luster for me toward the end. Nevertheless the author is to be commended for taking on and evoking such a unique and complex character in Winkler.

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

The End We Start From presents the story of a woman who gives birth and soon after has to flee her home because of rising water. Possibly this is caused by sea level rise, but it isn’t clear. In a way, the cause doesn’t matter. This isn’t a novel about causes, but about the human reaction to all-encompassing disaster.

The details of the disaster story are sketchy. Flooding forces the new mother, husband R and baby Z to go north out of London. They load up with supplies, including a lot of canned food, and drive. Eventually they arrive at a camp where there is food provided by some entity, probably the government. Then after a while her husband R leaves, and it isn’t clear why. Eventually the camp runs out of food, and the woman starts off for a new camp with another woman/baby. Instead of going to the new camp they go on a boat to an island, where food is readily grown and they seem safe. But eventually the mother leaves to return home, and to look for R. Back in London they are given a room on the 81^st floor of an insurance building. She finds R in a medical facility. In the end, the flood has receded enough that the authorities allow them to return to their apartment.

Distinctive Style

The foregoing information is as sketchy as the novel’s narration. What is more important about the novel is the distinctive way that it is told. Routinely it is provided in tiny morsels that provide information about what is happening either directly or in suggestive images. To an extent the novel is like an impressionist painting, where the viewer has to step back and allow individual brushstrokes to combine into a meaningful image. For example, when the first camp begins to run out of food, and some people are beginning to pack in order to leave, they hear some news. Then comes following passage:

“We are told not to panic, the most panic-inducing instruction known to man.

“The quiet packers turn into noisy packers. Into evangelical packers.

“I overhear clippings, confused whispers: incursion, interruption, increase. A quickness over the hill, the hills turned quick, coming towards us.” (p 60)

What the news that she hears is, we aren’t told. We can deduce that it is bad, since they are told not to panic. We know that people are packing to leave, and fervently. But the sentence, “A quickness over the hill, the hills turned quick, coming towards us,” is entirely poetic. Rather than allude to any physical action, it seems mainly to convey a sense of urgency.

Poetic Intrusions Are Sort of Ambiguous

While the narrative uses these poetic intrusions sparingly at the outset of the novel, toward the end they seemed to appear more frequently. Also, they became less concrete and more ambiguous, which made me feel as though I was missing something. For example:

“Reunions come from television. From sparkling screens edging backwards at the press of a button. Purple, maybe. Glittery, textured.

“From the boom of a presenter calling out the names. From the crush of a shoulder against cheek under studio lights.

“From that one brightly lit ecstasy, skin on skin, distance and separation flattened by the everlasting instant.”

These are pleasant turns of phrase, even if they don’t reveal character or move the plot forward. To me they exemplify good creative, imagistic writing.

While I largely enjoyed the style of the novel, it does seem to have two significant shortfalls. First, the bits of information that we get are incomplete and force the reader to fill in many blanks. While some might assume that this acts to draw the reader into the story, and make him or her an accomplice in its telling, to me it had more of a confusing effect.

A Style That Holds the Reader at a Distance

Second, the style holds the reader at a distance, making it impossible to feel anything for the characters. The way that the characters are named with a single initial reinforces this. As a result, although the novel offers an upbeat ending, with Z taking his first step, I didn’t come away with a positive feeling. I didn’t feel much at all.

4* for style, 3* for character and plot.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Once again I have ventured into the world of Women’s Fiction, sort of. I understand that women’s fiction is supposed to be about female relationships, and although a woman—Tova—is at the center of this book’s story, the other main character, Cameron, is a male. Still, I think of this as women’s fiction because it is about relationships, and as such strikes me as the type of story that would appeal to women more than men. Which is perhaps why it appealed to the person who recommended it to me (a woman) more than it did to me.

Why am I spending time trying to pigeonhole this novel? Perhaps because I don’t have much else to say. I don’t need to summarize the story because anybody who reads reviews about the book has almost certainly read it, and this is the type of book whose story is easy to remember. As a matter of fact, it’s pretty easy to guess where the story is going by the time a reader is about halfway through. I finished it anyway.

An Opportunity for Some Speed Reading

In terms of craft, the novel is competently written. It is not literary in any respect, but it is an easy read. My only gripe is that there seemed to be a lot of unnecessary words, words that just weren’t necessary or interesting, and which slowed the novel down. My reaction was to speed read at times, and at other times to read just the first sentence of a paragraph in order to keep moving. Suspense was in short supply.

For me, the best portion of the novel came when Cameron finally met Simon Brinks, the man he thought was his father. This passage completely defied my expectations and yet was believable and informative and heartening. I also particularly enjoyed the passages from Marcellus’s POV, although they lost their charm for me after a while.

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Although I read Atkinson’s Life After Life shortly after it came out, I missed A God in Ruins, an error I have now corrected by enjoying every page.

This novel is largely about the effects of war on Teddy and others in his sphere, including sister Ursula and wife Nancy. All come through it changed. Remembering Ursula’s funeral, Teddy thinks, “Ursula hadn’t been religiously inclined at all, the war knocked that out of her.” (p 182) Teddy, when he is criticized by his commanding officer for turning back after his plane has an engine problem, realizes “that they were not so much warriors as sacrifices for the greater good. Birds thrown against a wall, in the hope that eventually, if there were enough birds, they would break that wall.” (228) He knows that only one in six bomber crews makes it all the way through their tour.

After the war Teddy notes, at a squadron reunion dinner, “that old men had reminisced about old wars since time began. Jericho, Thermopylae, Nuremburg. He didn’t really want to be one of them. Teddy left the reunion early.” (236) He tells us that, years later, plagued by insomnia, he would recite the names of the towns he had bombed. “Some might count sheep. Teddy counted the towns and cities he had tried to destroy, that had tried to destroy him. Perhaps they had succeeded.” (236)

Not Destroyed, But Changed Completely

After the war Teddy lives on another 67 years, during which time many changes take place in Britain, including the rise of the counter culture and the replacement of the natural world in places like Fox Corner, where Teddy grew up, with suburban sprawl. Throughout this Teddy, an Oxford graduate, and Nancy, a mathematics prodigy, never achieve (or even seek, really) the level of professional success that they might have enjoyed had the war not redirected their lives. Instead they opt for quiet lives in rural Yorkshire and, later, in York itself. It seems that, after the intensity of the war, both long for—and need—peace more than anything else.

Teddy and Nancy’s only child, Viola, is very different from her parents, incendiary compared to their bookish quiet, and a pathological nonconformist (she lives for a time in a commune and names her two children Sun and Moon). Nevertheless, as she ages Viola also seems to have inherited the lesson of the war: “In reality the arrow had no target, they weren’t on a journey and there was no final destination where everything would suddenly fall transcendentally into place, the mysteries revealed. They were all just lost souls, wandering the halls, gathering silently at the exit. No promised land, no paradise regained. “It’s all so pointless,” she said to her father.” (381)

Craft Matters

Two things I noticed most about the novel were, first, the way the point of view and the time in which that POV is speaking change so often and so easily. Aside from the fact that Teddy is a boy at the beginning of the novel and on his death bed at the end, the novel is not chronological, but moves around in time as needed to give a fuller picture of events. Similarly, the point of view through which we receive the story changes, sometimes from paragraph to paragraph. Although writing like this could produce an erratic narrative, that was not the case here. Instead, the novel provides a uniquely rich tapestry that is remarkably smooth in the telling.

Sly Humor Throughout

The single most appealing attribute of this novel to me is the sly humor that appears on every page. Daughter Viola is often a source of this humor, although she is too self-centered to notice it. Example: “Every summer, the three of them, ‘the family triumvirate’ as Nancy called it—according Viola equal power with her parents, Teddy noted, although really they were not so much a triumvirate as a tiny tyrant and her two dedicated attendants—took a dutiful holiday on the east coast . . .” (199)

And: “Viola had swanned off down south to demonstrate against cruise missiles and when Teddy had mildly suggested that her duties as a parent, and a single one at that, might trump the need for world peace, she said that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard as she was trying to secure the future of all the children in the world, which seemed a bit of a tall order for one person.” (276)

Upon visiting Ted in his nursing home at the end of his life, Viola’s descriptions are bitingly funny: “’DNR,’ it said on Ted’s plastic bracelet, indicating he had lingered on, long past his sell-by date.” (363) “When she visited Poplar Hill she kept a handkerchief up her sleeve doused in Chanel that she sniffed occasionally, like a nosegay against the plague. . . The doors to the rooms were kept open so that each room was a little vignette, the wreckage inside on display, like some awful zoo or a museum of horrors.” (375)

Much more could be said about this novel, and much more lends itself to being quoted. But I won’t belabor the point. This is a literary work of high art.

In this novel the good and the brave receive no special rewards, aside from being relieved of the illusion that they and their lives are anything special. the best they can do is put the war behind them and live their ordinary lives. And so they did.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

This novel drew me in with a unique look at the way our prison system largely fails in many ways. Unfortunately the book turned out to be largely a dystopian fantasy rather than a realistic novel with meaningful social commentary.

The best part of this novel for me was the sharp and sometimes pounding style, which reinforced the nihilistic ethos of the book. At times, some paragraphs did seem to become chaotic and rendered the narrative hard to follow.

The characters were a problem. By and large they struck me as unsympathetic, mainly because they were unrealistic. Supposedly (according to other reviews I’ve read) this novel is offers a critique of the American prison system. Not to me. If you’re looking for a good critique of an American prison, and the social fault lines that land one there, check out The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

For me this novel gets three stars because of its unique and startling premise: a girl who is murdered goes to her own slice of heaven where she can watch life on earth continue. There is nothing else in the book that is distinctive. No plot, ordinary characters, mediocre language. A bare three stars.

Long ago I saw the movie version of this novel but have completely forgotten it. I saw a reference to the novel in a book by Donald Maas, which made it sound interesting. According to Maas, Susie retains the readers interest because of her inner conflict: she wants to grow up and experience grown-up life, but can’t.

A Fine Premise But . . .

I have to confess that I didn’t see this. Since we learn early on that Susie is dead and has zero chance of returning to her life, it would seem rather pointless for her to experience much desire for a grown- up life. In the novel, she certainly doesn’t seem to stress about it. She watches from her perch, but to me seems to be little more than an observer. The one time the novel became interesting was when she somehow took over Ruth’s body and was able to have sex with Ray Singh. I think I probably expected more distinguishing events like that to happen in the novel, but nothing did. It’s almost as if the author had one neat idea—the novel’s premise—and that was all. Tapped out.

A Missed Opportunity

The novel could have been more, which would have turned it into a fantasy, but that would have been okay. Instead it was largely a missed opportunity to make something imaginative and fun out of the initial idea.

I also expected more to happen with respect to Mr. Harvey. The novel toyed with the reader in this regard—will he be caught? When will he finally be caught? But then the cops gave up on finding him. After that the novel largely wandered through a series of ordinary family situations that weren’t especially interesting and provided no tension. Maybe if I watch the movie again I’ll be able to figure out what the buzz was all about.

This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell

This Must Be The Place is a sprawling novel that depicts the lives and relationships of Daniel, an American linguist, and Claudette, a reclusive film star, and their extended families. In most ways, these people are ordinary, even Claudette, who is reclusive precisely because she never wanted to be famous. There is no strong plot to speak of. And yet I was totally captivated.

I first became familiar with Maggie O’Farrell when I read Hamnet. Looking back, I sometimes think that reading Hamnet taught me to read, or at least to read better. I was used to burning through books (there is never enough time!) but after doing the same with the first 5-10 pages of Hamnet I realized I had to let the author set the pace, which was slow. So I slowed down, and my reading became like experiencing a miracle. (Check out my review of the book for examples of its wondrous language.)

After Hamnet I wanted more O’Farrell, and the library sent me Instructions for a Heatwave. My experience was the same. Although the story is more contemporary, the characters just ordinary folks, and their actions and lives of miniscule importance in the grand scheme of life, O’Farrell manages to render even the simplest actions with language that is radiant. (Again, see my review for examples).

My next O’Farrell experience was The Marriage Portrait. Like Hamnet, the author reached far back in history for her story. As in Hamnet, her rendering of the social milieu of the times was incisive and illuminating, particularly in its rendering of the brutal power of the Duke of Ferrara and the maltreatment of women—even one who is a daughter of the powerful Medici family. And once again O’Farrell’s language, as in her description of Lucrezia’s bodily reaction to poisoning, was stunning.

A Collage of Stories

So, having read those three novels, I decided to look into this one. This Must Be the Place, from 2016, is distinctly different from her two recent historical masterpieces. With episodes occurring between 1944 and 2016, and not in chronological order; and with the narrative point-of-view switching between chapters and sometimes within a chapter, the novel is like a collage of stories, while the other novels were chronological and focused. There are many more characters here, as well. There is recurrent wry humor, a passing fatalist philosophy, and multiple dramatic episodes of life and death. In short, there is a lot going on, and it is heartfelt.

Because the novel is a collage of stories, there is much that is left for the reader to fill in. One aspect I had to fill in was why exactly Claudette decided to abandon her life as an actress. She definitely was jealous of and angry at Timou, her significant other, because he was cheating on her. Although he doesn’t want her to go, he can’t stop being a cad. Too, after she has a child, she seems to lose focus on film-making, lose interest, feel trapped and want to get away. And so eventually she does, while on Timou’s parents’ sailboat in Sweden, stealing away with Ari in the sailboat’s dinghy. Daniel’s explains her action this way:

“I have always hoped that he knew Claudette well enough to . . . recognize that it wasn’t so much him she was escaping as her whole existence, a life she had unwittingly signed up for at an early age, a milieu she was whirled into without much forethought. “ (224)

A Shakespearean Aspect

Although Daniel and Claudette are the twin stars around which this novel revolves, there is a second dynamic at work: the black hole of Nicola and Todd. Daniel’s need in the year 2010 to uncover what happened to Nicola back in 1986 is the force that leads to the rupture of his relationship with Claudette, which is itself the central drama of the novel. This story of Nicola and Todd is like a domesticated version of a Shakespearean tragedy, complete with jealousy, misunderstanding, deceit and death.

What struck me as a writer in this novel were the overwhelmingly effective craft techniques that O’Farrell employs. A few, in no particular order:

Letting the reader fill in the blanks. For example, aside from being tall we are told nothing about Daniel, but we know he must be handsome because of the way others react to him. Another: we don’t know why Daniel’s father is so mean and bitter, but we learn that his mother always loved another man. Perhaps he sensed this.

Minor Characters Expand Our Insights

Using minor characters to give us a different perspective on main characters. The chapter entitled Rosalind provides a different and insightful perspective on Daniel and Niall. The one entitled Lenny gives us another view of Timou and Claudette in L.A. It not only reveals Timou’s self-involved character and his infidelity, but shows that Claudette is a decent person who likes ordinary activities like gardening.

The chapter from Todd’s POV, where Nicola shows up early to the wedding and Daniel is drunkenly with another woman, not only offers us a young and immature Daniel, but does so with language that effectively conveys the drugged out and almost nightmarish scene at night in the woods.

Instead of simply using interiority to convey information to the reader, O’Farrell finds indirect ways to do so. For example, in order to inform the reader how Ari came to be Zoe’s dad, she creates a scene in which Ari notices a woman scrutinizing him critically and doubtless wondering how he can possibly be Zoe’s father: “Ari wants to turn to her and say, I knocked up a girl at school, OK? A condom split on us, bad luck, chance in a million, could happen to anyone…”

Parallel Stories Highlight Fatalism and Free Will

Creating parallel stories that illustrate the essential conflict between fatalism and free will. Daniel’s mother Teresa and Johnny Demarco both discover a powerful love between them, but only after they are both engaged to others. Assuming they can’t change their commitments, they miss what they could have had. Similarly, an immature Daniel and Nicola miss out on what they could have. The fact that Daniel is pulled away by his mother’s death, and that Nicola tries to stop her abortion but is ignored by the anesthesiologist, both reinforce the fatalism at work in life. In another way, the fact that Daniel could somehow stumble upon Claudette in the absolute middle of nowhere, and that she could need help, also suggests fate at work.

Lastly, I admired the way O’Farrell fills out all the characters. Even tertiary ones like Rosalind, who only appear in a single chapter, come to us fully developed and with complex lives. Claudette’s exceptional character is similarly illustrated by her multiple passions. Her powerful presence in films is what others see, but she is also passionate about fidelity, and battles both with Timou and Daniel over it. At the same time, she demonstrates both love and talent with children, as when she helps Maeve with Zhilan in China, and when she welcomes Niall after he unexpectedly shows up at her home. Daniel is complex in other ways, but there is an essential goodness in both Daniel and Claudette that comes across, and makes a reader root for their eventual reconciliation.

To me this novel is an amazing achievement. Five stars seems to few; ten would be better.

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

Every once in a while I read a non-fiction book that has been mentioned in Harper’s or some other magazine. Not sure where I heard of this one. As a book of ideas—subtitle: The Science of Achieving Great Things—this isn’t one that I’m particularly well suited to review: I’m not a social scientist. Nevertheless, a few comments.

The book is competently written. The ideas are clearly presented. Frequently real situations or cases are used to illustrate points. All good.

The Importance of Character

I found some of the ideas helpful. In particular, the focus on character skills struck me as new and important. Also, the discussion in Chapter One regarding how to learn a new language was instructive, since that is one of my current goals. Put yourself in the ring before you’re ready, recognize that discomfort can speed growth, and set a goal for the minimum number of mistakes you want to make in a day or week. We learn from our mistakes.

Similarly, I appreciated the suggestions on becoming a sponge. Absorb quality information, and ask for advice, not feedback. Advice is forward-looking, toward improvement. Feedback just tells you how you did in the past.

Learn by Teaching

Later in the book the author advises: “The best way to learn something is to teach it. You understand something better after you explain it—and you remember it better after you take the time to recall it.” This is the central reason I write book reviews: that extra effort (beyond just reading a book) helps me understand a book better—and appreciate a writer’s craft.

The one part of the book that was unconvincing was the part about discovering hidden potential. Although there are good ideas here as well, I was unconvinced by the idea that performance needs to be judged in context. The idea is that a candidates (for college admissions or a job need to be judged in the context of their life. Thus, for example, if a kid grows up poor, that poverty should be taken into account in judging the person’s potential. Okay, but the hard question, which the author doesn’t address, is: how exactly do you do this? It’s a slippery slope fraught with uncertainty.

A Helpful Summary

The single best attribute of the book is that it includes a section at the end: Actions for Impact. Here, the author boils the book’s narrative down to eight pages of 40 key ideas. Very helpful.

Not a page turner, I’m at 3.5 stars for this book—which is about as high as I can imagine ever rating any non-fiction book.

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain

I did not read this novel when I first heard about it from my wife, probably because I was focused on short stories back then. Moreover, I was not particularly interested in the life of Ernest Hemingway. But I finally got round to it after reading a commentary that piqued my interest. I’m glad I did.

The novel is a fictional treatment of Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richard in 1921. He was 20 years old, and struggling to become a writer. Much of their five years together was spent in Paris, as well as Spain and Austria (for long skiing holidays/)|. By the end of their time together, he has begun to have short stories published, and has published The Sun Also Rises, based substantially on his experiences in Spain. Hadley was with him during those times, but while their friends appeared in fictional form, she did not. In the novel she tells us she was hurt, having been left out. Hemingway says that that was because she wasn’t one of the sad crew he writes about, but solid and good.

Delving into Their Emotion Lives

McClain writes that while she worked to portray the events of these years at they happened, she also aimed to delve deeper into the characters’ emotional lives, in order to “bring new insight to historical events.” (p317) My sense is that she succeeded. We see Hadley’s emotional reaction to Ernest’s evolving feelings toward her through her interiority (she narrates the book). We get a good sense of her love for him, her fears of losing him, her attempts to hold on and, ultimately, her acceptance of his leaving.

More interesting, I thought, was the expression of Hemingway’s emotional life, which has to be shown rather than reported in interiority. While he is known for macho exploits, in dealing with the beak-up his marriage we see him suffer greatly, even though he knows it’s entirely his fault. At one point Hadley concocts a test that that seems destined to restore their marriage: she makes Ernest promise to avoid Pauline for 100 days, promising to give him a divorce if after that period he still wants one. Incredibly Hemingway agrees, but although Hadley now has him to herself again, it makes no difference. She has lost him to Pauline.

Creating His Myth

Some of the most interest writing in this novel reports on Hemingway’s life as his fame grew. “The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time—but under this, I knew he was still lost. That he slept with the light on or couldn’t sleep at all, that he feared death so much he sought it out wherever and however he could. He was such an enigma, really—fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn’t one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.” (311)

Hadley reports on a telephone call she received from him in May 1961. By this time she has been happily remarried for more than thirty years, and has apparently spoken to him only once during that time. On the phone, he harkens back to their time together, sharing happy memories, and then confesses that he ruined their marriage. Hadley reports, “I felt a hot clench in the muscles of my throat, but I tried to rally.” They both do, and finish their conversation amiably.

In July of 1961, Hemingway shot himself, and Hadley reports that both her father and his father had done the same thing, and later his brother and sister would take their lives as well. We read, “with this much loss, you begin to think it’s in the blood, as if there’s a dark magnet pulling the body in that direction—pulling, maybe, from the beginning. . . . Death was always there for him, sometimes only barely balanced out.” (313)

Craft Matters

In terms of craft, although her writing is overshadowed by the book’s subject, it is throughout well done. McClain is adept at rendering beautiful lyrical impressions: “ Later that afternoon, Paul and I took the long way to the stream and dropped out liens in just as the insects began to swarm and the light began to change. It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time and it always seemed to last longer than it should—a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds. I held my reel and felt the line list, and was back in Cologne with Ernest and Chink. Back at my first fish, knowing there wouldn’t be any fish without this one, and no lover without this first one either.” (313)

Similarly, I appreciated the way she presents Hadley’s keen observations: When she gives Pauline her slippers, she says she’ll wear Ernest’s. “ That’s what marriage does to you, by the way. Somewhere along the line you discover you have your husband’s feet.” (239) And here, about her husband’s writing practice: “He always worked well during difficult times, as if pain helped him get to the bottom of something in himself and got the real machinery turning.” (263) And on the complexity of love: “I knew he was suffering because he’d hurt me badly with the affair. Knowing he was suffering pained me. That’s the way love tangles you up. I couldn’t stop loving him, and couldn’t shut off the feelings of wanting to care for him—but I also didn’t have to run to answer his letter. I was hurting, too, and no one was running to me.” (264)

Doubtless, the author achieved her goal of illuminating the characters’ emotional lives, and did so with prose that is a pleasure of read. 4*

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

The great attribute of this novel is its language. Through the girl’s vocabulary and cadence, as well as her uneducated interpretation of everything she sees, Groff brings to life the character and worldview of a an early 17^th century servant. By the end of the novel, beginning when the girl is consumed with fever from small pox, this language approaches spiritual poetry. As such, it is a tour de force.

Although the blurb on the book cover indicates that this novel is a “fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism” my sense is that these words were written by someone who didn’t read the book. The time is 1609, Shakespeare is at his peak, there is no colonial America aside from Jamestown, and the animals she encounters are just wild animals. No, this novel is a survival story told by a fearful but resourceful young woman. Most of the novel is involved in depicting the terrors and threats that she encounters. Eventually, however, it becomes a spiritual epiphany as she realizes that her old faith is an illusion, and she sees god in nature.

As she begins her flight from Jamestown, where eighty percent of the inhabitants died in the winter of 1609-10, she is intent on trekking to a French outpost she has heard of. She has no idea where or how far away it is, only that she needs to go north. Undaunted, and motivated by a strong will to live, she steals essential tools like a knife and a flint. Indeed, so determined is she that she murders her mistress’s husband in her escape.

Desperation and Resourcefulness

A fine attribute of the novel is the way the author makes real for the reader the troubles that the girl encounters. After being brained by a rock thrown by a wild man, she seems close to death, but survives. In her desperation for food we see her dig grubs out of a rotten log. Later she thrusts her arm into a beehive to get honey, regardless of however many bee stings she receives. Although her resourcefulness saves her time and again, eventually the girl contracts smallpox from a garment she stole while preparing her escape. Weakened by the disease, delirious at times, she decides to stop moving, and builds herself a hovel for shelter in the wilderness.

Like most people of her time, the girl grows up with conventional religious beliefs. After a while, though, we see her that her thinking about god veers away from the traditional. She comes to sound more like a modern environmentalist: “And she began to see now that when god created man and woman together and said to let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, perhaps by dominion god did not mean the right to kill or suppress the fish, the fowl, the cattle, and every creeping thing.” (178)

Increasingly affected by her experience of living in uncivilized nature, her thinking edges into animism: “Then she thought that perhaps in the language of the bears there was a kind of gospel, also. And perhaps this gospel said to the bears the same thing about god giving bears dominion over the world. And perhaps bears believed that this gave them license to slaughter the living world, including the men within it.” (178)

A Spiritual Epiphany

Her reasoning on god continues as she challenges her past conventional beliefs by suspecting that “god was neither trinity nor singular but multiple, as various as the many living things that did live upon the earth. . . . Perhaps god is all. Perhaps god already lived within all.”

And having reached this idea, she follows it to its logical conclusion, which is beyond her comprehension: “And what if, girl, god is all; does that mean that, within the all that god is, there is nothing? ‘I do not understand,’ the girl said, and she did not know why but she was weeping; hot tears were dripping down her skin.” (179)

This stunning passage brings the girl an epiphany: that there is nothing where she had always thought there was god. Later in her fever she thinks she sees angels, only to realize that there were no angels, what she had seen was a trick of the light. Then in her suffering she begs, “O Lord, if you are not nothing, if you can hear my prayers, please allow your wretched servant to die where she lies here and now.” When she doesn’t die, she decides she must kill herself. Too weak to climb to a cliff and throw herself off, she approaches a bear, expecting to be killed. But the bear won’t have her.

The Beauty of Nature

At the same time that the girl struggles with the perception that there is no god, she comes to appreciate the natural world all the more. “Through the holes [in the cloud], the dazzling sun poked its long pale fingers and touched the ground, and the trees that the light suddenly singled out from the rest appeared so perfect, such pristine exemplars of their species, that she did not know how she did not see each tree’s perfect beauty before this moment. . . . It is a moral failure to miss the profund beauty of the world, said the voice in her mind. ‘Yes,’ she said aloud, for now she did see the sin in full.” (215)

Even at the end of her life, the girl cannot quite shake the beliefs she grew up with. As she lays dying, we read: “She heard a flapping, and with a swelling of hope, she thought of seraphim swimming invisibly through the element of air. . . When she made an effort to open one eye, however, she saw a vulture settling down beside her, his wings outstretched, fixing her with a humorous glint in his eye.” (232)

A Second Epiphany

In an affecting moment, the girl realizes her profound loneliness born of her fear of the native people she has seen: “She thought of the men who had followed her at the waterfall days earlier; she thought that perhaps they had not meant evil, that perhaps they had seen her illness and madness, and had meant to help her.” Later she thinks, “Yet even in the vision, she found herself yearning for another soul to have spent her life with . . . A hand to hold, a face to love. Humans were never meant to live alone.” (244)

In this moment, I hoped she might be rescued by the native people and healed, but she realizes that if this happened, they would catch the smallpox and die, and is glad that she hadn’t sought their help.

At the end the girl, though uneducated, arrives at a satisfying and profound philosophical conclusion: “She saw deeper. She saw the ghosts of everything that had come before and had once also lived in the rays of the sun. She saw the silent and invisible force that animated all creation. . . . She had once believed that in the deepest reaches of everything was a nothing where men had planted god; but now she knew that deeper within that nothing was something else, something made of light and heat. . . . It was this light and heat that endured, that was everlasting. At the center was not nothing, no. Out of the light and heat all goodness poured.” (245)

The Sun as Creator

And later as she feels the joy of life renewing with the coming spring, she thinks: “The only thing meant to be alone is the good sun that shines its endlessly giving heat and light, that one great creator who alone can burn against the nothingness.” (252)

And so she finds peace in the world’s renewal, and in that she creates her own salvation. The last paragraph is like a celebration of and prayer to the natural world: “For there was nothing there, no angels, no harps, no gates, no fires singeing the sins back into the sinner, no hungry spirits wandering the land and standing in the cold outside the firelight of the living. There was only wind drawing itself endlessly over the dark crowns of the pines, over the face of the water, over the mountains’ icy peaks, over the great wide golden stretches of the teeming land.”

And in a wondrous change from past tense to present, the author invites the reader into this celebration: “ The wind passed, even as it is passing now, over all the people who find themselves so dulled by the concerns of their own bodies and their own hungers that they cannot stop for a moment to feel its goodness as it brushes against them. And feel it now, so soft, so eternal, this wind against your good and living skin.”

Truly a literary, human masterpiece.

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lenox by Maggie O’Farrell

In this novel, Iris, a 30-ish shop owner in Edinburgh learns that she has a great-aunt, Esme, who is being released from Cauldstone, a state mental facility, after spending 60+ years there. Iris tells the staff responsible for finding Esme a new home that she could not possibly take the woman on, but then volunteers to drive her to temporary lodging while a long-term home is found for her. When she does so, Iris feels the place is too awful for Esme, and tries to return her to Cauldstone. When Cauldstone refuses to accept Esme, Iris takes her home, intending to offer nothing more than the temporary housing that Esme needs before she is provided a long term placement.

Many have commented on how terribly easy it was for families to rid themselves of a difficult member by sending the individual to an asylum like Cauldstone. In Esme’s case, the sense I got from the novel was that this was particularly unfair, since her offenses—forgetting things, talking out of turn, trying on her mother’s clothes—were so minor. How, I wondered, could her family be so heartless?

Language Lesson 1: Indirection

As always with O’Farrell, her language is outstanding. For me, the distinguishing attribute of this novel is the way the story is revealed through multiple forms of indirection, with so much left unsaid, only implied. An example of this is the way we are treated to a series of brief scenes or memories, little tidbits of novel that begin and end with dashes. These moments require the reader to assemble them into a narrative collage in order to derive depth and meaning.

Another example of O’Farrell’s indirection is the way dramatic action is presented. For example, when Esme is raped we only read: “He rammed a hand over her mouth, said, wee bitch, in her ear and the pain of it, then, was so astonishing, she thought she was splitting, that he was burning her, tearing her in two. What was happening was unthinkable. She hadn’t known it was possible. His hand over her mouth, his head ramming against her chin.” Equally impressive is the way, in the sentences that follow, the author shows Esme’s mind escaping her terror: “Esme thought about how, perhaps, she would cut her hair after all, the sound of the rubber trees, how she must just keep breathing, a box she and Kitty kept under the bed with programmes of films, the number of sharps in F minor diminished.” (168) In short, we see her mind shatter.

Similarly, when Esme gives birth, the author describes the event so indirectly that it almost seems as if Esme doesn’t understand what is happening any more than she understood what was happening when James Dalziel raped her: “Esme has lost sensation in her legs and arms. She can hear a high-pitched shriek and a panting, like that of a sick animal, and the nurse saying, that’s it, that’s it, keep going, and she thinks that she has heard these sounds before somewhere, somehow, a long time ago, and is it possible that she could have overheard her mother in labour—with Hugo, with one of those other babies? . . . She bends her own head. Gives three short pants, and even this appearance of a small, slick, seal-being has the unreality of something that has happened already. (213)

Powerful Emotions

Then comes the most devastating scene in the novel, when Esme asks to hold her baby. Her request is granted, but then the nurses want to take it away. Esme springs from the bed and runs with her baby. She is chased and caught, and they rip the baby from her: “Esme sees the whorl of hair on the crown of his head as the nurse hurries away with him, one clenched starfish hand, she hears the eh-heh eh-heh noise. People, men, big men, are running toward her with straps and needles and jackets. She is pushed to the floor, face down, a puppet without strings, and she sees that all she has of him is the blanket, the green blanket, which has unwound in her hands, empty, and she struggles, she screams, she lifts her head and she see the feet of the nurse who has her baby, she sees the shoes and the legs as the nurse walks away but she cannot see him.” (215)

Language Lesson 2: Understatement

Understatement is the second of O’Farrell’s masterful techniques. In the novel’s penultimate scene, Esme asks to be left alone with her sister. We read: “Esme holds the cushion between both hands. Its fabric—a textured damask in a deep burgundy—is packed tight with foam stuffing. It has fold piping at its edges. She turns it over, then turns it back. She takes two steps across her sister’s room and she places it back on the sofa. She does this carefully, propping it against its twin, making sure it looks exactly as it did when she found it.” (240) Everything that happened before Esme puts the cushion back goes unreported, and the uncertainty this creates in a reader’s mind only serve to exacerbate the horror.

Perhaps equally interesting is the understatement at the very end of the novel, as Iris begins to understand what Esme has said: “’I have to,’ she begins again, and suddenly something that has been snagged at the periphery of her mind seems to slide forward, the way a boat might loosen from its moorings and float free. Mine all along. Wouldn’t let go. And do you have a picture of your father. Iris puts her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh, God.’” (243) Half the secrets of the novel pile out here without ever being specifically articulated.

Language Lesson 3: Less is More

Once Iris has grasped the truth about her aunt’s life, the novel continues, with perhaps its slimmest implication yet: “She begins to move, slowly at first, then much faster, toward the building. Alex is close behind, calling her name. But she doesn’t stop. When she reaches the door of the home, she wrenches it open and sprints along the corridor, taking turns so fast that she glances off the wall with her shoulder. She has to get there first, she has to reach Esme first, before anyone else, she has to say to her, she has to say, please. Please tell me you didn’t.”

But of course she did. And it seems fitting, a reward, the only one available to any of them, for Iris to hold Esme’s hand when her grandmother is taken away, “through the white, through the crowd, out of the room, into the corridor and beyond.” (245)

The Oceans and the Stars by Mark Helprin

My only other experience with Mark Helprin was The Pacific, which to me is one of the best collections of short stories that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot. The stories and the way he tells them were stunning. When I heard the Oceans and the Stars described by its subtitle—a sea story, and war story a love story—I anticipated more of the same. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

Standard Plot, Unimaginative Ending

The novel is bookended by scenes of the court martial of Stephen Rensselaer, a career naval officer. In between we get the story of what happened to cause the court martial. It’s pretty predictable: Rensselaer disobeys orders in order to take a morally righteous action. Indeed, he is viewed by many, aside from Navy brass, as a hero. Nevertheless, he disobeyed. The result of the court martial is also, in a different way, predictable, and involves what to me seemed like a deus ex machina. Overall, the predictability of the plot undermined the tension of the legal drama.

A Love That is Not Convincing

The love story in the novel wasn’t convincing. Mostly we are told that Katy Farrar is beautiful and that it’s love at first sight for both of them. Although there are a few scenes between the two of them, I didn’t get the feeling that this romance was earned. And then, after about one-fifth of the book, Katy Farrar is left behind. Although she returns during his court martial, she appears hardly at all because Rensselaer is held in the brig until his trial ends, which is just a few pages before the book ends.

The best part of the novel are the battles. The description of the ability of Rensselaer’s small patrol coastal ship to obliterate many targets, and Rensselaer’s own tactical smarts, are engaging. These are, of course, the smarts that get him in trouble. Nevertheless, the battle scenes were where I felt the book acquired some tension. The author did a particularly good job of showing how men—sailors and marines, at least—not only lose their fear of battle after they’ve been exposed to enough of it, but how they want more. These are the virtues that bring me up to 3.5 stars for an otherwise uninspiring novel.

Improvement by Joan Silber

Although identified as a novel, Improvement is more like a collection of loosely connected short stories. Indeed, Chapter 1 appeared as a stand alone story in Best American Short Stories 2015. Regardless, the book is exceedingly well written and entertaining.

Although ‘Improvement’ seems like a half-hearted title for this or any book, a few of the characters are hoping to do just that: improve their lives. Claude, Maxwell and Wiley hope to do so by illegally re-selling cigarettes bought in a low-tax state (Virginia) in high-tax New York City. Clause’s sister Lynette also hopes to improve herself by opening up her own brow clinic.

As far as the other characters are concerned, it’s hard to say that Kiki or Reyna substantially improve their lives. Boyd gets out of jail, and holds down a job at a diner, so that’s an improvement. The Germans Bruno, Dieter and Steffi make money by reselling antiquities purchased in Turkey, but do so only on one occasion, and their lives don’t seem to improve much.

More interesting is the way that Steffi’s daughter Monika improves her life. She and husband Julian, an artist, are facing difficult times at the outset. They have already broken up once. But Monika’s connection to Bruno creates a new opportunity for Julian’s art, which has been going nowhere, to be displayed. In turn, this brings Julian and Monika closer emotionally, if not financially.

Characters

Kiki and Reyna are main characters in the novel, and Boyd, Claude and Lynette play supporting roles. Other characters turn up only for a single chapter. Darisse who was hoping to develop a relationship with Claude is one, as is Teddy, the driver of the big rig that Claude crashes into. Both of their stories seem to illustrate a theme of happenstance, how random chance can determine the course of one’s life. Shit happens, and it happens to them, even though they are in no way responsible for it.

Steffi and Monika have stories that are, in a way, parallel to those of Kiki and Reyna. Mother and daughter, Aunt and Niece. Interestingly, these characters have one point in time that is common to them: the night that Steffi stayed at the farmhouse in Turkey where Kiki was living with Osman. Monika and Reyna, on the other hand, never meet, although they come close, as both use Lynette to style their brows.

A better title for this novel might have been “The Power of Money” since that is its unifying theme. Everyone in this novel could use a little more wampum. Claude, Maxwell and Wiley engage in petty crime in the hopes of striking it rich, and do for a while. Bruno convinces Monika to help out her mother by giving her some money, and she does so to the tune of 1700 euros. Reyna, who states clearly that she does not like Lynette, gives the woman $4900 that she gets by selling a valuable Turkish rug that her aunt Kiki gave her.

Entertaining Language

The highlight of this book is neither the stories it presents nor the characters. What I found most appealing was the style in which it was written—colloquial and gossipy, and saturated with irony and humor. Just one example:

Monika asked Lynette, “When you’ve done something stupid, do you try to make up for it eventually? Like if you mess something up?”
Lynette said, “If you think I ever mess up people’s eyebrows, I do not. You wouldn’t suggest that, right?”

“No! Of course not. I’m thinking more about a friend I offended.”

“My brother went and bought me a new pair of sunglasses when he stepped on mine. That was good, wasn’t it?”

“Extremely.”

“He was afraid I’d kill him,” Lynette said. (173)

And later, when Monika almost mistakenly gives Lynette some euros for a tip, Lynette says,

“All money is good. But we take American here.”

“I bet other people forget and slip you foreign coins. People who travel.”

“I pity the fool,” Lynette said, “tries it on me.” (195)

The final movement of Improvement has Reyna selling the expensive Turkish rug that Kiki gave her and sending the money anonymously to Lynette. Perhaps she does this to make up for refusing to drive Claude and Maxwell to Richmond, which indirectly led to Claude’s death. Regardless, she sends the money anonymously because she says she isn’t looking for thanks from Lynette, but she does seem to be a little disappointed when Lynette assumes that the money came from an old boyfriend. Still, she got what she wanted, and this novel-as-a-collection-of-stories ends on a positive note.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

This novel of an Irish family struggling to find its way in the midst of economic and personal challenges was a pleasure to read in the way it captured the voices of its Irish characters and in the fullness it provides for each. On the downside at 650 pages it was rather too long and suffered from an ending that was problematic.

The novel takes place in the hinterlands of Ireland, in a village large enough to have a VW dealership. Once upon a time the dealership made the Barnes family rich but more recently, perhaps with the end of the Celtic Tiger years, a recession has set in. Thus, 12 year-old PJ suffers in silence with boots far too small for his growing feet, Cass fears that her anticipated enrollment in Trinity College will be unaffordable, Imelda is faced with selling her grand assortment of consumer goods, and Dickie, unable to make the dealership profitable, is removed as general manager by Maurice, his father, who originally built the business into a success.

Ordinary Stories, Lovely Language

The stories of these characters are ordinary, but also quintessentially human and well fleshed out. What makes them most interesting is their voices, which are both convincing and entertaining, incorporating at they do unique Irish cadences and turns of phrase. For example:

“Well you could knock Imelda down with a feather at this point It’s as if the postman’s dog had suddenly come up to her and struck up a conversation” (173)

Or, when Big Mike asks for Imelda’s phone number in order to send her a photo, we read:

“What can she do but give it to him? A moment later the photo duly arrives with Imelda’s hair like a bird’s nest Dickie looking like he’s about to have a stroke Cass with a face on her of purest Misery and Maurice and the Mayor beaming in the midst of them like they’re paying a visit to a mental hospital” (175)

Or Imelda describing her impoverished upbringing: “The only girl in a house full of cavemen farting and punching each other”. (217) Later, she expands upon her past as she recalls being driven around by her psychopath of a father to beg: “Getting up on tippy-toes to press the doorbell Your heart in your mouth yet you never thought of turning back for scary as it was nothing was as bad as the thought of returning to the van empty-handed. . .” (525)

A realistic novel with warmth and humor, I found myself caring about the fates of each of the Barnses, hoping they would survive and thrive. Even Dickey was sympathetic, despite his perverse sexual desires that lead to him being blackmailed to the tune of thousands of euros, money which he steals from the family business, and thereby harms everyone else.

Going Off Track

Unexpectedly, the novel falls apart as it arrives at its conclusion. There the reader is presented with a situation in which all of the major characters are moving through the pitch dark woods behind the Barnes residence for one reason or another. Unknown to Imelda, Cass and PJ, the man who is blackmailing Dickie is also coming into the woods, and Dickie plans to shoot him if he works up the nerve. Clearly, we have reached the climax, where in the darkness something truly tragic seems likely to occur. And there the novel ends.

I watched an interview with the author in which Murray said he thought it was clear that Dickie ended up killing his family. I suppose that’s possible, although Dickie scarcely seemed to know how to use a gun. If he did hit one of them, why would he shoot a second and third time? Seems a stretch. More than anything, I didn’t feel that this ending emerged naturally from the story that took place in the preceding 630 pages, although I suppose it could be viewed as Dickie’s penultimate fuck-up. For this reason I am at four stars for this book, still far above average because of its lovely depiction of Irish voices, but unpersuaded by the ending.

In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger

In this brief book, Sebastian Junger describes in detail his experience of nearly dying after an aneurysm in his abdomen ruptured and he began to bleed internally. As he came close to slipping away, he describes being visited by his father, who speaks to him and tells him everything will be all right. In telling this tale, Junger indicates that he was absolutely convinced that this deathbed visitation occurred.

Luckily for Junger, his internal bleeding is slow enough that he has time to reach a hospital in Hyannis on Cape Cod. There, the medical staff solve the mystery of what his ailment is, and then manage with great skill to save his life. All of the details that Junger provides regarding his life-threatening emergency are well told and engaging.

The second half of the book describes what Junger learned after he left the hospital alive and began to research near death experiences (NDE). As it turns out, a number of individuals over the years have documented various NDEs and published the stories. Junger’s interest stemmed from his certainty that he too had experienced an NDE and needed to grapple with what is, after all, a question of endless interest: is there life after death?

The Distinctive Vision

In approaching this question Junger describes the way in which various physical traumas can result in a variety of different visions and experiences: plunging down a tunnel, seeing bright lights, your life passing before your eyes, out-of-body experiences, feelings of peace and unity, and so on. But there is one experience, he says, that only those who are dying have: they see in their last days and hours the dead. As he writes: “There are neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they keep hallucinating the same thing.” Specifically, they see a loved one hovering over them.

I found the book most interesting when Junger suggests why death after life might be possible: “The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives. But what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true. Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television. So, abandoning likelihood for a moment, one might try out the idea that death is simply where the veil of belief gets rent to reveal a greater system beyond. “Reality” may just be a boundary we can’t see past. “ (118)

Reality According to Quantum Physics

To further elucidate this possibility, Junger spends seven or eight pages on a very brief discussion of the study by physicists of the question of what exactly constitutes “reality” as illuminated by quantum theory. “Physicists eventually proposed that the universe existed as a nearly infinite wave function containing all possible outcomes until conscious thought forced it to spring into existence in its current singular form.” (125) From here, Junger considers how human consciousness plays a role in defining reality: “One theory holds that consciousness is part of the physical world, like gravity, and participated in the original creation of the universe. A fleeting subatomic particle called the Higgs boson is responsible for the force of gravity and gives matter mass; perhaps a similar unknown particle is responsible for consciousness.” He goes on to add: “Without it, nothing would exist; the universe would just be a massive wave function.” (131) In sum, what he is saying is that reality exists because of human consciousness of it. And if consciousness actually emanates from a physical particle, like gravity, then it must continue after death.

Consciousness is Forever

Junger connects his conception of reality to the idea of life after death in this way: “In such a world, consciousness could never be lost because it’s part of the cosmic fabric, and my father as a quantum wave function could welcome me back to the great vastness from which we all come. One might allow the quick thought that it is odd that so many religions, so many dying people, so many ecstatics, so many prophets, so many schizophrenics, so many shamans, and so many quantum physicists believe that death is not a final severing but an ultimate merging, and that the reality we take to be life is in fact a passing distraction from something so profound, so real, so all-encompassing, that many return to their paltry bodies on the battlefield or hospital gurney only with great reluctance and a kind of embarrassment.” (135)

I find Junger’s conception of life after death appealing , largely because my intuition suggests that there is something beyond death other than the traditional Christian notion of heaven that I was brought up with. Unfortunately, Junger offers no specification for a “consciousness particle” similar to the Higgs boson, and thus no path to prove its existence. Perhaps this is just as well. If humanity could prove that there is another life after our life on earth, chaos might ensue, or at least a quantum jump in suicides.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Ministry of Time succeeds on multiple levels: a complex and sympathetic first person narrator; an inventive sci-fi riff on an actual lost expedition to the arctic; a story that teases the brain with speculative possibilities of time travel; and a use of language that is inventive and pleasurably unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

Briefly, in the near future a British government agency has acquired a machine that it uses to bring forward in time five individuals from past years, ranging from 1645 to 1917. The government’s purpose in doing so isn’t exactly clear, although it appears to want to learn how to use the time door as a weapon of sorts. As the novel progresses, we learn that two people from the future have used the door to come back to the present, with nefarious intent.

Exactly what is going on with the time door thread of the novel was never entirely clear to me. For most of the book, however, the focus is on the assimilation of the five individuals who have been brought forward from the past. The first person narrator, referred to only as “little cat”, is a “bridge” for one of the five, a naval officer, Graham Gore. Like the other four “expatriates,” Gore was brought forward before he could die—in his case, on the lost arctic expedition. As a bridge, little cat lives in the same safe house with Gore and responsible for his safety and acclimatization to the 21th century.

Brilliant Prose

While it was fun to read of the ways in which Graham does and doesn’t mesh with his new surroundings, the preeminent achievement of this novel lies in its inventive language. For example:

“I stared at the lawn and felt like I was manually operating my lungs” (14)

“That night, I slept with unpleasant lightness, my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect’s foot on the meniscus of a pond.” (16)

“The handlers had offices in one of the Ministry’s inner sanctums. They were all glass-walled and made me feel like a lackluster fish in an aquarium. (35)

“Quentin treated me with an impatient familiarity, as if we were both sticky and were leaving streaks on each other.” (35)

“She was a small, tough, wiry woman who put me in mind of an elegant alligator.”

“I arrived at the Ministry sweaty and vibeless. It was another dank toothache of a day, barely qualifying in its chromatic dullness for ‘gray.’” (238)

In scenes, much of the language involves droll humor. For example, when Margaret, from 1645, has a cocktail called ‘sex on the beach’, she says, “I must assume it is a potion to summon its namesake.” To which little cat responds, “Well, it’s made with cranberry juice, which is supposed to be good for UTIs, which is what you’re going to get if you have sex on an English beach.” (185)

Beyond Laughing Matters

But not all is humor. One of the most affecting passages comes after Anne Spencer, from 1797, is shot dead trying to escape from the Ministry. The author follows this with a passage that reflects her own family’s traumatic Cambodian history:

“The most difficult stories about the Kymer rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Cheoung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken.” (210)

Sympathetic Characters

A second element that make this novel so successful is the good and eminently likable nature of Gore and little cat. When she takes Graham to meet some of her friends in a pub, he asks if any of what she’d told them about him was good. Tongue-in-cheek, one replies, “Not a word.” An ever-upbeat, good sport, Graham responds, “Oh, I am relieved. I wouldn’t want her telling lies on my account.”

And little cat, hearing this, interiorizes: “I flexed my shoulder blades, forcing the tension out. He was an anachronism, a puzzle, a piss-take, a problem, but he was, above all things, a charming man. In every century, they make themselves at home.”

Later, after she and Graham have become a couple, the narration becomes even more affecting: “He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does. If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.” (248)

The Plot in Question . . .

Having a number of characters from the future (the future as compared to little cat’s time) gives the author the opportunity to touch upon the outcome of current events such as climate change and mass migration from Africa. What we see is a future that is more violent and degraded than the present, so it’s probably good that these moments are quickly passed by.

My one quibble with the novel stems from the fact that I found the plot difficult to comprehend. Why did the government decide to use the time door that it discovered to bring forward people from the past? And why exactly did a couple of people from the future come back to the present seeking to kill both the time-traveling expats and little cat? The novel suggests that the government is seeking to determine if the time door can be used as a weapon, and that by killing the time-traveling expats the Brigadier and his side-kick will obtain more power – I think. Probably if I re-read the novel these mysteries would become clear, but it isn’t a novel that pulls me back, despite its brilliant language and sympathetic characters. Still, the ending was upbeat when it could have been bleak, and for that and all the other positives I mentioned, I’m at four stars.

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

In “Women and Children First,” down-and-out Lisa steals another woman’s baby while staying at a battered women’s shelter, thinking that having a baby will open up a whole new life for her. “She would go to the church and the church would care for her. She had Psalm (the baby] after all.” Later she interiorizes: “It seemed the world was opening up, offering solution after solution, and for the first time in so long she had hope and it fluttered around her, danced before the bus as it lurched down the highway like a sparkler, the baby on her body.” (180) At one point Lisa realizes she has left her wallet with her ID in it back at the shelter, but doesn’t even register that the authorities will be able to use it to identify who took the baby.

And then there is Plain Old Bad Luck

For other characters, their lives are ruined by nothing more than bad luck. In “Raisin Man,” Boots and Clara get married and have a child they name Pearl. But from the start, something is wrong with Pearl. She never speaks, is never the child Clara wanted. Worse, they are both upset by Sims, a child that Boots fathered out of wedlock with Bonnie. Sims troubles them because he is such a fine boy, especially compared to Pearl. He is exactly what they wanted, and it’s as if life is taunting them by showing them what they might have had. In the end, they place Pearl in a home for children with disabilities and move from California to Albuquerque. They change their names, and make a pact never to speak about Pearl. But the move does them no good, and they break their pact and talk frequently about Pearl, and have nothing but regret and loneliness in their lives.

Similarly in “Heartbroke” we meet Haldis, who lost her first two children in a house fire when their oil stove exploded. From her first person POV she is clear when she says, “A mother doesn’t forget her babies, no she don’t.” And Haldis never does. In this story, decades have passed since the fire. She tells us she is now an old women and doesn’t have much time left, yet she still thinks everyday about the babies she lost in the fire. It was not her fault, and she herself was unharmed. Nevertheless, her life ended when the babies died.

Violence as Redemption

Finally in the last story in the collection, “The Bare of Our Chests,” we meet a narrator who has dug his way out of poverty. Maynard tells the story of when he was about fifteen and living with his mother and younger sister Elaine in an apartment in Fresno. One night both he and his mother realize that the man who lives downstairs, George, has been sexually abusing five year-old Elaine. His mother, who was raised in a world where violent reprisals were normal, decides to poison George with anti-freeze. When the anti-freeze fails to kill him quickly, Maynard helps his mother smother him with a pillow. Unhappily for Maynard, his mother, whom he loves deeply, runs away, leaving him behind. But she succeeds in escaping, and Maynard avoids being blamed by insisting to the authorities that he was upstairs reading a story to Elaine when George was killed.

Craft Matters

A distinctive characteristic of this collection is the way the author utilizes an uneducated, rural dialect in much of the dialogue. This works to illustrate the sketchy worlds in which the characters live.

Understatement is also used effectively, as key facts often go unstated. In “Fact of Body” the narrator never explicitly states that Bobby became a male prostitute. In “Say Where She Is” we never learn how Selena disappeared, although there are hints that something bad happened.

The signature feature and achievement of this collection is the depth the author gets to with these women. They are never reduced to simple, clear personalities that can be understood and judged. They are often grappling to understand themselves and their lives, usually without success. For example, in “Lyra,” a PhD student named Merriam who is living in Lyra’s cathouse while researching her dissertation, decides that she wants to have a client so she can experience what the other women experience. Lyra disappoints Merriam by telling her that it’s a bad idea that makes no sense because she’s older, and educated, and has other options in life. The Lyra interiorizes: “She seemed dejected and young. Her eyes closed. I spent some time looking at her. Her long nose and bucked teeth. Her wild hair. Someone’s smart little girl. I felt proud of her and confused over it all at the same time. I wondered if my mother ever watched me and Maple while we slept. Did she feel any special way toward us? In my deepest place I know she didn’t. At best she thought of us as her friends. I could never figure out who was supposed to be taking care of who.” (150)

In sum, this is a collection of stories that grew on me. The characters are not admirable people with praiseworthy lives but are, nevertheless, mostly good, and sympathetic.

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

Having recently returned from a fun trip to Sicily, I was keen to read this novel after coming across a brief recommendation for it. Two stories are told, one contemporary, and the other occurring between 1908 and 1925. Two women narrate the stories in the first person, Sara and her great-great grandmother, Serafina. The crux of the novel has contemporary Sara going to Sicily in order to sell some land that has come down to her from Serafina. While in Sicily, she deals with a variety of untrustworthy characters and also manages to have a brief affair with the owner of a restaurant.

While the novel started well enough—the prologue was engaging—the narration soon seemed to bog down in scenes where not much of interest happened. Although the novel is pitched as a mystery there is little tension until the end, where a man who wants to claim her land for himself comes close to murdering Sara. Overall I felt that perhaps the first 150 pages could be reduced to about 50, with many of the uninteresting scenes either excised or covered by summary.

Craft Matters

As I read, I also noticed sloppy writing, where words were that may have been meant to add some zest to the narrative, but produced sentences that didn’t make much sense. For example: “The witch’s home smelled like an animal right before slaughter: wild, anxious, clinging to hope.” (20) This sort of sounds okay, except that wild, anxious and clinging to hope are not smells. Then we read: “A quilt sewn from rag scraps was tucked around a mattress in the corner of the room.” (20) This baffled me. I can imagine someone tearing a worn-out quilt into rags, but not sewing a new quilt out of torn bits of old fabric.

Later on, when Sara first arrives in Sicily, we read: “He gazed up at the church and pulled a crumpled Google map from his back pocket.” Since Google maps are digital, how can they be crumpled? For a time I kept noticing clichés: “Once we were back on sand, relief flooded my body.” (83) “We went to the public wells and springs and protected every drop like it could be our last.” (85) And the voices of the two first person narrators, Serafina and Sara, sounded very similar—too similar at times.

Some Secrets Emerge

Up until page 150 I was close to a DNF on this novel. I kept going mainly out of literary inertia, and after about page 150 this one seemed to gain some forward motion. In the end, during the climax, some interesting secrets were revealed. But because the climax was engineered by Giusy, a woman who befriended Sara when she came to Sicily, and because Giusy essentially told Sara the secrets, there was minimal drama. Then came the Epilogue which is apparently told by Serafina from beyond the grave. In short, the novel is pulled together by a lot of telling rather than showing.

I am at three stars with this novel. For a long time I was a DNF, then two stars. Bottom line is that this sort of fiction just isn’t my cup of tea, and I wouldn’t want to under-rate it just because of my own reading bias.

The Marriage Act by John Marrs

I made it through one hundred pages of The Marriage Act before I gave in to boredom and quit. Part of the problem for me lay in the fact that each of the first half dozen or so chapters introduces a new story with new characters. Consequently it was both hard to keep the characters straight in my head, and hard to see what the novel as a whole is about. I imagine that eventually all of their stories will converge into the overall story of the novel, but by page 100 they hadn’t.

Another reason I didn’t keep going is the fact that none of the characters are interesting. The author introduces each and dispenses tidbits about their lives that suggest they may be up to or involved in something related to supporting or undermining the Marriage Act—a government attempt to produce a more stable society. Then a character’s introductory chapter ends and another character/story is introduced. The story/mystery is left hanging/not developed.

Also, the characters don’t seem to have any depth and don’t come across as much more than symbols. This is standard in science fiction, and the same sort of focus on THE IDEA rather than the characters is present in this novel. Not my cup of tea. (As an aside, there is one speculative fiction novel I’ve read recently which I enjoyed, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. My enjoyment stemmed principally from the author’s wonderfully inventive use of language; the characters had a bit of life in them, too.)

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Through her earlier novels Rooney became known for her ability to depict the complexities of human relations. This novel advances her capability another notch, providing a microscopic look at the interplay of five people without relying on any real plot and even much of a story. Essentially the book chronicles the reactions of two brothers to the death of their dad, illuminating their fraught sibling relationship and the effects of their loss on the women they love.

Most obviously notable about Intermezzo is the writing style the author has brought to it. Long paragraphs predominate, often containing changes from first to third person, or from character to character, and often mixing dialogue in with interiority and narrative stage directions. At times the style almost seems like a stream of consciousness, but never completely becomes one. Overall, although the style renders the novel harder to follow that it would be if written according to standard convention, it isn’t all that challenging.

Miserable Men, Wonderful Women

The characters in the novel are exceptionally well developed. Not that they are all admirable. The two brothers, Peter and Ivan, are horribly immature and self-involved. Peter is largely a hopeless case, and is saved only by virtue of his good looks and, to some extent, the fact that he earns a good living as a lawyer. Ivan, though more sedate than Peter, is nevertheless addicted to his own insecure and unhappy mental ramblings. Lacking any sort of career, what saves him is his prowess with chess. Perhaps I am being too harsh in my reaction to Peter and Ivan, but both of them struck me as solipsistic creatures in need of, as my father used to say, a good swift kick in the rear.

The women in the novel are all rather lovely. Peter benefits from two of them, Sylvia and Naomi, neither of whom is a perfect match for him, but both of whom are wonderfully accepting and forgiving and understanding. (Yes, Sylvia rejects Peter’s desire for an exclusive relationship late in the novel, and this I found somewhat unconvincing, perhaps because Sylvia’s supposed chronic pain only appears once. Overall, I didn’t feel that Sylvia was fully developed. In the end, though, she was quite wonderful to Peter.)

Ivan, not the ladies’ man that Peter is, nevertheless stumbles into beautiful, responsible, wounded and lonely Margaret. How two such unworthy men could luck into such excellent women is perhaps the mystery that the novel never solves.

Quibbles

Personally I enjoyed the style that Rooney employs in this novel. It shoves the reader up close to the characters—as if we’re the room they’re meeting in, or even the air around them. We’re that close. Too, she keeps the style consistent throughout, which is no small achievement. Although it takes some getting used to, the style for me worked admirably.

In terms of plot and story I would have appreciated more. Something. Compared to her previous novels, Rooney leaves her characters swimming in air in this one.

The novel also seems to be unnecessarily long. Not only is there no plot to work out, but not much change occurs in these characters. Yes, the brothers reconcile in the end, but their intermediate changes (and many stumbles) are modest and seem slow-walked. As soon as Ivan’s big chess match in Dublin is announced, I could guess that the novel was heading toward a resolution there. And the happy ending was, for me, not as inspiring as that in Beautiful World, nor as complex as the one in Normal People.

I am at four stars for Intermezzo. Not quite as good as her two preceding novels, Intermezzo is, in terms of style, a dazzling literary achievement.

Not Alone by Sarah K. Jackson DNF

About Grace by Anthony Doerr

The Beauty of Language

The Character

Plot

In Sum

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

Distinctive Style

Poetic Intrusions Are Sort of Ambiguous

A Style That Holds the Reader at a Distance

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

An Opportunity for Some Speed Reading

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

Not Destroyed, But Changed Completely

Craft Matters

Sly Humor Throughout

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

A Fine Premise But . . .

A Missed Opportunity

This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell

A Collage of Stories

A Shakespearean Aspect

Minor Characters Expand Our Insights

Parallel Stories Highlight Fatalism and Free Will

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

The Importance of Character

Learn by Teaching

A Helpful Summary

The Paris Wife by Paula McClain

Delving into Their Emotion Lives

Creating His Myth

Craft Matters

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

Desperation and Resourcefulness

A Spiritual Epiphany

The Beauty of Nature

A Second Epiphany

The Sun as Creator

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lenox by Maggie O’Farrell

Language Lesson 1: Indirection

Powerful Emotions

Language Lesson 2: Understatement

Language Lesson 3: Less is More

The Oceans and the Stars by Mark Helprin

Standard Plot, Unimaginative Ending

A Love That is Not Convincing

Improvement by Joan Silber

Characters

Entertaining Language

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Ordinary Stories, Lovely Language

Going Off Track

In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger

The Distinctive Vision

Reality According to Quantum Physics

Consciousness is Forever

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Brilliant Prose

Beyond Laughing Matters

Sympathetic Characters

The Plot in Question . . .

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

And then there is Plain Old Bad Luck

Violence as Redemption

Craft Matters

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

Craft Matters

Some Secrets Emerge

The Marriage Act by John Marrs

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Miserable Men, Wonderful Women

Quibbles

Share this:

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta