Tag: contemporary fiction

Review 2780: Creation Lake

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

“Only activists from Paris would take up subsistence farming in a place like this,” thinks the unnamed narrator going by “Sadie Smith” of Creation Lake. This novel has been called funny, but this kind of deadpan humor, along with comments about what she did not say, are about the funniest it gets.

Sadie is a provocateur who infiltrates fringe groups to observe them for signs of violence, and if there are none, sometimes create it. She used to work for the FBI until pressure from her superiors caused her to persuade a naïve young man into planning a violent act. Then when he and his co-conspirator successfully pled entrapment, her bosses threw her under the bus. Now she works for corporations and wealthy clients, not always aware of who her clients are.

For her present assignment, she has become the fiancée of Lucien, a filmmaker, just to get close to his friend Pascal, the leader of an activist commune in a remote rural area of southwestern France. Sadie’s mission is to again watch the group for plots and also keep an eye on a sleazy politician named Platon. The activists, called the Moulinards, are concerned about a plan to drain all the aquifers in the area to make a giant reservoir. Sadie will be staying in an empty house owned by Lucien’s family and helping Pascal with an English translation of some documents.

Central to the group’s beliefs is an email correspondence with Bruno Lacombe, their mentor, who has withdrawn from the world to live in a vast cavern in the area. Sadie has been able to crack his email to read his messages to the group, which are mostly concerned with the lessons they can learn from Neanderthals. Some of these ideas can make you think, but most are completely unsupported by science, yet presented as if they’re scientific. And a group less likely to commit violence I cannot imagine.

I have to admit to getting tired of reading Bruno’s rambling emails, and of course, Sadie isn’t a likable character. However, the book picked up in the second half.

I’ve read only two other books by Kushner, but one of them seemed also to be concerned with the intersection between wealth and fringe violent groups, not really a topic I find interesting. I read it for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2775: Monkey Boy

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Something I read said Monkey Boy was “nearly autofiction.” I don’t know anything about Goldman’s history, but to me it seemed like completely autofiction. Set with the present being sometime in the 2000s, it goes back and forth between the novel’s present three days and events in the character’s life as well as imagined events in his parents’ and other ancestors’ lives. (Maybe that’s the part that’s not autofiction.)

Francisco Goldberg is a writer who has recently moved back to Boston from Mexico because of threats to his life resulting from the reporting he’s been doing about Guatemala. Over the course of three days, while he visits various figures from his past, he goes over his relationship with his abusive Jewish father, his relationship with his failing Guatemalan mother, the difficulties his split heritage brought to his life, and his relationship with his much younger girlfriend. He also recalls events in war-torn Guatemala and other subjects. Anyway, in his discussions with old friends and babysitters, he learns things about his family’s past that have been kept secret.

It took me a while to get into this novel, which I read for my Pulitzer Prize project. I am not sure why, because the writing is good and the events should have involved me. Maybe it was Goldman’s habit of getting to a point of interest and then spinning off to tell everything he knows about that person instead of what you’re interested in. (I have more recently encountered that tendency in Victor Hugo, only to the extent of hundreds of pages.) And sometimes that apparently climactic point turns out to be anticlimactic after all. And he does like long paragraphs.

I didn’t particularly like Francisco. Aside from doing some pretty rotten things when he was a kid, he seems to be focused almost exclusively on himself. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that he could be physically abused by his father for years without realizing that his mother was not just verbally abused but also physically abused. And then there’s his refusal to visit his sister for years. (He claims it’s not because his parents left her everything.)

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Review 2769: The Marriage Plot aka Literary Wives! Family Family

~ whatmeread ~ 19 Comments

Today is our first review for the newly rebranded The Marriage Plot (aka Literary Wives blogging club), in which we discuss the depiction of wives in fiction. If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives!

My Review

When I first started reading Family Family, I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like it. One of its main characters is a movie star, and it bothers me how often these days that novels are placed in a framework of wealth and privilege. I personally prefer reading about ordinary people.

However, Frankel can certainly tell a story, so I ended up reading the entire book almost continuously, ignoring some work that I planned to do instead. I have never read Frankel before, but I’ll be looking for more.

India Allwood is a popular actor starring in a fantasy series. She is also the mother of 10-year-old adopted twins, Fig and Jack. She is a private person who keeps her kids off limits to the paparazzi. Recently, she finished a movie about adoption that she thought treated the subject simplistically. Now she is personally being attacked online for the very things she criticized in the movie herself, as if it were her fault. When India gets stuck talking to a blogger, she makes some comments about it, and the internet blows up along with her producers.

India not only adopted Jack and Fig, but when she was 16, she became pregnant by her boyfriend Robbie and decided to place her daughter with adoptive parents. Her daughter Bex is now 16, and India is unaware that Bex is in contact with Fig. Trying to help out, because haters are saying that India knows nothing about adoption, Bex announces online that she is India’s daughter, placed with her mother Camile when India was a teenager. The fallout becomes worse. And Bex has hopped a plane to come to India’s home in L. A.

And that’s only the beginning, as the novel moves back and forth in time from the present to various significant times in India’s life.

The novel has a light tone, and Frankel is skilled at depicting characters you can relate to and like. I enjoyed this book so much.

Although concerned with some serious issues as a result of Frankel’s own experience as an adoptive parent, this is ultimately a warm fuzzy sort of book, without feeling manipulative but simply touching.

If I have any caveat, it’s that the novel takes place during Covid, but people are traveling all over the place and arriving at other people’s houses, often without warning. (Also, just a small point, but there are no cottages behind either bookstore in Seaside, Oregon.)

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

This novel is not really about marriage. Out of several groups of people who get dragged into India’s story, there are some gay couples, but the emphasis isn’t really on them. Instead, Frankel focuses on the subject of what constitutes a family. As India’s issue expands, more people concerned in her life arrive at the house. India eventually has to expand her definition of family from the tight group of herself, her two children, and her mother to a lot more people.

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Review 2758: Wandering Stars

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Wandering Stars is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange’s previous novel, There There. The novel begins in 1864 with the massacre at Sand Creek. A young boy, Star, escapes the massacre but is sent to school to eradicate all traces of his culture. He becomes the great grandfather of Opal and Jacquie Red Feather, characters from There There.

The novel follows Jude Star and his descendants as they suffer childhood mistreatment and cultural annihilation, many of them ending up as substance abusers.

About halfway through, we get to the Red Feather family that we already know, and particularly the grandsons of Opal and Jacquie: Loother, Orvil, and Lony. Slight spoiler—in There There Orvil ended up accidentally shot while dancing at a Powwow, the robbing of which provided the tension. As a result, Orvil, just beginning high school, ends up addicted to pain killers.

The family has been through one tragedy after another. Jacquie, the boys’ genetic grandmother, has just left a life of substance abuse and moved in with her sister Opal, who raised the boys after their mother died. The family was just beginning to be in a good place when the shooting occurred.

Much of the book deals with the characters’ struggles but also with their reflections about what it means to be an indigenous person, especially if you’ve been robbed of your traditions.

Orange’s writing style is unusual. At times, he likes his sentences to be very long. That didn’t bother me so much as the feeling that I felt closer to these characters in the previous book, except for Lony, who although very young is super intelligent but tends toward magical thinking. Yet, it turns out, he sees his family very well.

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Review 2748: Western Lane

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

Eleven-year-old Gopi’s mother died a few months ago, and her father is finding it hard to cope with his grief and his daughters. On a visit to their aunt and uncle in Edinburgh, Aunt Ranjan remarks that the girls are running wild. Then she and Uncle Pavan suggest that he leave one of his daughters with them, since they cannot have children. Their father decides instead that they need something to occupy them, and he begins teaching them to play squash.

A lot of information about squash ensues. Gopi turns out to be good at the game, and she begins training at times with a boy named Ged.

The book deals with the girls’ grief over their mother’s death and with their father’s depression, as he begins missing work and spending most of his time at Western Lane, the exercise center. None of the girls are happy to see Papa getting closer with Ged’s mother.

This novel is full of inarticulate characters, so at times I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. But it is a touching, powerful story with floundering but sympathetic characters. The writing is fluid and vivid. I read this for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2740: The Mighty Red

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Louise Erdrich has written some fantastic books but also some that I didn’t like as well. Still, she is usually a good choice for something thoughtful and insightful. However, with this novel I had to have patience for the first hundred pages as it centered on a teenage love triangle, something I had zero interest in.

It’s 2008. Kismet Poe is an eighteen-year-old part-Ojibwe girl living in a farming community in North Dakota in the valley of the Red River of the North. Her mother, Crystal, is hard working and frugal, and Kismet is working as a waiter in a restaurant. Both of them are careful with money to make up for the extravagance of Martin, Kismet’s father, who brings in little money working in theater and spends most of it on expensive clothing and extravagances.

During the last year, Gary Geist, the son of Crystal’s well-off boss, has changed from making fun of Kismet to deciding he’s in love with her. They are sort of dating. Even though he was a big high-school football player and extremely popular and she was considered a geek, he’s decided he has to marry her. I found this courtship, in which he continually tries to wear her down, so wrong, especially because Gary bores Kismet.

In fact, Kismet prefers and is having sex with Hugo, whom she finds soft and comforting. But Hugo is just a kid at 16. Gary has his reasons for wanting to marry Kismet, and his mother Winnie does, too, and he finally manages to wear her down enough to sort of say yes. Then, as Winnie takes over the wedding completely, Kismet can’t find a way to get out of it.

Crystal knows she shouldn’t let Kismet marry Gary, but she’s having her own issues besides being totally exhausted. Martin has been handling the church renovation fund and doing well. But in 2008 there’s the huge downturn and the church fund starts losing money. Then Martin disappears, and Crystal learns that her house—her own house, which has been paid off—now has a mortgage fraudulently obtained and the church fund is gone.

Surrounding all of what’s going on is something that is not being discussed but has to do with an accident the year before, in which two of Gary’s posse were killed.

The book got more interesting after the wedding, but I never really was that involved with the characters. And frankly, I didn’t like either of Kismet’s love interests that much. I liked Gary’s friend Eric, who also cares about Kismet, a lot better.

The novel has themes about the treatment of the environment and the damage modern farming techniques have done to the soil. Hugo goes to work for oil frackers at one point and sees the countryside being turned into a moonscape.

I think maybe there was too much going on in this book, too many characters, too many themes, too many directions, to have it really grab me. And some of the revelations that come out at the very end of the book would have involved me more if I’d learned about them earlier.

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Review 2735: Wild Dark Shore

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I have a fascination, at least in fiction, with islands and wild untamed places. That’s why Wild Dark Shore seemed like a great book for me.

A woman comes ashore, nearly drowned and badly injured, on a remote island south of Tasmania during a terrible storm. The island is only occupied by its caretaker, Dominic, and his three children. When she awakens, the woman, Rowan, claims she was not on the way there, but there is nowhere else she could have been going. Dominic feels she is lying. But Rowan thinks the family is hiding something.

Fairly quickly, we learn that Rowan is the wife of Hank, one of the scientists on the island. But Dominic tells her the scientists left the island, and someone wrecked all the comms (communication devices). The family and Rowan are trapped there without the ability to communicate until the next boat comes in eight weeks.

What Rowan doesn’t say is that she received a letter from Hank saying his life was in danger. Rowan can’t understand why he would have left the island without telling her.

Rowan begins to get to know and love the island, which is teeming with wildlife, and the family. There is Raffi, 18, a young man with a reading problem who plays the violin and likes to record whale songs; Fen, 17, who is fascinated by the seals and spends most of her time with them. She seems haunted, though, and won’t spend the night in the lighthouse where the family lives. Then there is Orly, a brilliant boy who loves botany but is still a nine-year-old. Dominic, a widower, still hears his wife and feels her near him.

Rowan learns that the reason the scientists left is that sea levels are rising and the seed bank on the island, an important repository of millions of seeds, is being shut down. Dominic is packing the seeds that are to be removed when the ship comes, but many will be lost. Rowan can’t understand why Hank, who was in charge of the seed bank, would have left.

This novel is terrific. It has all the things I look for in a really good book—an involving story, interesting characters, a palpable sense of setting, and a strong evocation of emotion. I loved it.

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Review 2722: If I Survive You

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

If I Survive You is the next-to-last book for my 2023 Booker Prize shortlist project. It is a novel of linked stories centered around Trelawny, a young man of Jamaican heritage, and his family.

This novel is about identity. First, racial identity, as Trelawny’s school friends try to fit him into the categories they’re familiar with in Miami. He looks like one of the Cuban kids but can’t speak Spanish. He’s too light to be black. And what language is his mother speaking, anyway? (It’s English.)

Then, it’s family. His parents split up when he’s still young, and his father takes his older brother, Delano. His father has always been awkward around him anyway, because Trelawny prefers reading to sports and has no friends. Much later, when he is living with his father after his mother returns to Jamaica, his father calls him “defective.”

Family is also an issue for his cousin, Cukie, whose father left when he was a child. Later, when Cukie is a teenager, his father begins to take him for the summer and he learns to catch lobster. He begins to believe he can do this for a living until he learns what kind of man his father really is.

And place is also a theme. Trelawny doesn’t feel at home in Miami, but he certainly doesn’t blend in at his midwestern college. After college, he bounces around between his father, his brother, and homelessness, but neither of his relatives seem to want him around. Then he becomes obsessed with buying the family home from his father even though it is falling apart.

This novel seems dire at times, but it is also darkly funny at times. It is probably autofiction and also slightly whiny. He certainly hasn’t grown up with any advantages except an education, but he also makes some spectacularly bad decisions.

By the way, most of the book is written in second person, but not second person addressing someone else as “you,” rather the narrator addressing himself. I got used to this, but I could see that it might be irritating.

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Review 2710: Heartwood

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Hiker Valerie Gillis has vanished in the Maine woods while hiking the Appalachian Trail. She has failed to check in with her husband at the agreed-upon location for a few days before he reports her missing, because she has often been late. Did Valerie wander off the trail or has something else happened?

This story is narrated from the viewpoints of several characters. Valerie herself is keeping a journal that eventually reveals what happened. Lieutenant Bev Miller is the game warden in charge of the search. Santo is a black New Yorker who was Valerie’s hiking buddy on part of the trek. Finally, there is Lena, a retired wheelchair-bound scientist who sees something online that helps the search.

This novel is interesting on several fronts. Readers get to know these main characters very well and feel affection for some of them. There is a lot of detail about the wildness of the Maine forests and how searches are conducted. And the tension mounts as the search continues well beyond the usual time it takes to find someone. The book is fairly hard to put down.

Finally, it has a touching ending.

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Review 2705: The Funeral Party

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I don’t often get gifts of books anymore, so I was delighted to receive this novella at Christmas.

Alik, a charismatic Russian emigree artist, is dying in his New York City loft apartment. He has been overwhelmed by a mysterious complaint that has robbed him of his muscle control, limb by limb. Soon his diaphragm muscles will stop working and he’ll suffocate.

Surrounding him are his friends, people from all walks of life, from several countries, but mostly Russians. It’s 1991, a very hot summer. As Alik is dying, we learn about the people there, how they met Alik, and what he has meant to them.

Irina, Alik’s old school friend, is a circus performer turned lawyer who is suing a gallery for not returning some of Alik’s paintings after a show. Her teenage daughter has developed an immediate affinity for Alik.

Nina, Alik’s slightly dim partner, has been convinced by a healer that her cures for Alik will only work if he is baptized. Alik is an atheist, but he was raised Jewish, so he tells her he will only see the Russian Orthodox priest if he can see a rabbi, too. When they arrive at the same time, it makes for an interesting encounter.

Now I get to talk about book blurbs again, because one quote on the book calls the novel “riotously funny.” It is so not riotous that it makes me wonder about the NY Times reviewer that supposedly wrote that. I agree more with the quote from The New Yorker, which refers to its “quiet humor.”

During the novel the attempted coup against Mikhael Gorbachev takes place, and the Russians are glued to the TV. It made me wonder what they would think about the situation in Russian today.

I liked this novel, which is more about its characters than its plot. It explores some ideas about love, death, and identity while minutely observing life in a more bohemian neighborhood (Chelsea) of Manhattan.

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