Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 778: This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for This Is Your Life, Harriet ChanceA few years ago, I read Jonathan Evison’s West of Here. This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! is nothing like it. It’s a somewhat whimsically told story of the whole of one woman’s difficult life.

Harriet Chance is a widow nearing 80 whose husband died a few months before from Alzheimer’s. She gets a call from a cruise company telling her that her husband booked a cruise to Alaska for two. At first, she has no intention of going, but then she decides to take her best friend, Mildred.

Her friends and family are a little concerned, because she claims she is being haunted by her husband, Bernard. Harriet is a little worried that they want her to enter the retirement community where Mildred lives. She loves her home and doesn’t want to leave. Besides, Bernard is haunting her.

When Mildred’s son arrives to pick Harriet up for the cruise, she learns that Mildred isn’t coming after all. Instead, Dwight gives her a letter to open on the ship. Harriet isn’t going to like what it says.

link to NetgalleyTold in a way that is supposed to remind us of the old TV show, “This Is Your Life,” the novel skips backward and forward to scenes from Harriet’s ordinary-seeming but painful life. This narrative technique is anchored by the story of the cruise, which is told linearly.

I found this novel touching, although in some ways the narrative style creates distance from the story. It’s a serious story told as if it’s a comedy, with bumbling, repentant Bernard as a chorus in ghost form.

Related Posts

West of Here

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Sweet Caress

Day 773: We Need New Names

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for We Need New NamesI wanted to like We Need New Names more than I did. It is about an interesting topic and is vividly written, sometimes with striking images. But like some of the commenters on Goodreads, I agree that it seems to be trying to deal with too many issues at once. Somehow, I did not get as involved as I expected.

Darling is a tween girl running with her friends from Paradise, a slum of tin shacks in Zimbabwe. They spend their time playing games and stealing guavas from a richer neighborhood called Budapest. Darling’s father has been away in South Africa for years, trying to find work, but they haven’t heard from him or received any money. While Darling’s mother is traveling to sell things, Darling stays with her grandmother, Mother of Bones.

Eventually we learn that Darling’s family used to live a middle class life in a brick house, but the government knocked down their neighborhood. So, they came to live in Paradise.

Bulawayo’s tale is focused enough until, after a vote against the corrupt government results in retaliation, things become too dangerous and she is sent to live with her aunt in Detroit. Perhaps the last third of the novel reflects Darling’s confusion as a teenager, but it packs in scenes of typical teenage years conflated with growing awareness of issues back home, the disconnected feelings of immigrants, the war in Afghanistan, some sneers at the U.S., and her own homesickness. At some times it feels as if Bulawayo thinks America should be responsible for the welfare of all nations, which it can’t possibly do.

Related Posts

Unaccustomed Earth

Once Upon a River

Under the Lemon Trees

 

Day 767: Still Alice

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

Cover for Still AliceBest Book of the Week!
Still Alice is the sometimes harrowing but always compassionate story of a woman diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Alice Howland regards her life as nearly perfect. At 50 years old, she is a tenured cognitive psychology professor at Harvard who speaks regularly at conferences. Her husband is an important research scientist also at Harvard. She has three adult children. Her only regret is a feeling of loss of the closeness she once had with her husband John. She feels his lab is more important than she is.

Alice begins noticing small little lapses. She occasionally forgets a word or loses something. She puts this down to natural aging until one day when she is on her way home from a run and suddenly gets lost. She is only confused for a few minutes but is disturbed by the incident. After she forgets to go to one of her conferences, she visits a doctor and eventually gets her diagnosis.

What makes this novel unusual is that we see Alice’s deterioration from her own point of view. She understands what is happening to her until she doesn’t. In her case, the progress of the disease is terrifyingly swift. She is diagnosed in the fall, but by the spring she is receiving the only poor teaching evaluations she has ever gotten from her students. We see her loss of pride as her ability to lead her life erodes.

As an older woman, I found some of the tests she undergoes alarming, particularly one where she’s shown a picture of an object and can’t think of its name. I knew what object they were describing, and I also couldn’t think of the name for about a minute. It was a hammock. When we are older, we all have incidents like this, but I think they raise the dread of this disease sometimes. Luckily, I don’t have the gene associated with Alzheimers (although that doesn’t guarantee that I won’t get it), and I haven’t ever had any major episodes like Genova describes.

Genova’s novel makes a strong point about the lack of support for Alzheimer’s patients. She shows how Alice, because she loses language first, is unable to explain that she can still understand what’s going on, at least at times, but people behave as if she cannot.

This novel is excellent. Once you sit down with it, you won’t want to get back up until you finish it.

Related Posts

We Are Not Ourselves

Family Furnishings

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Day 764: Sweet Caress

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Sweet CaressAlthough I have by no means read everything by William Boyd, Sweet Caress reminds me most of his Any Human Heart, perhaps because it’s the story of one person’s life. This novel is about Amory Clay, a photographer born in 1908. Boyd creates the impression that Amory is a real person (so much so that I googled her twice) by interjecting photos of her life into the novel.

Amory leads an unusual life almost from the start of the novel. Although her father suffers from depression and other problems as a result of World War I, she is so content with her home life that she is upset when her parents send her away to school. Her parents are not well off, but Amory learns later that a legacy from an aunt is dedicated to her education.

Her mother wants her to attend university, but she decides early that she doesn’t want to go. Her favorite uncle, Greville, gave her a camera on her 10th birthday, and she wants to be a professional photographer.

Then a violent incident brings her home. Her father arrives at school unexpectedly to take her to tea. But his intention is to commit suicide, and he doesn’t want to go alone. Amory survives the drive into the lake and even saves her father, who is committed to an institution for a long time.

Soon after, Amory becomes Uncle Greville’s assistant. He is a society photographer, and although Amory does not enjoy this type of work, she must start somewhere. But she takes a risk with an unusual betrothal photo, and its reception ruins her chances. Soon Amory is off to capture the decadent night life of Berlin.

Amory leads an extraordinary life that contains many sorrows and triumphs. She is a war correspondent for both World War II and the Vietnam War, she is attacked by fascists rioting in London, she travels with lesbians to Mexico, she encounters a Charles Manson-like figure in 1960’s California. She almost unwittingly marries a lord and has a family. These are just some of the events of her life, its story punctuated with paragraphs from the “present time” of 1978, when Amory is an old woman.

link to NetgalleyI found this novel involving, although not as much as I did Any Human Heart. For one thing, I wasn’t always convinced I was hearing a woman’s voice, and in no way was this because of Amory’s adventurous life. Also, Amory’s voice is a reserved one, with certain exceptions. Still, it is a fascinating story that manages to cover a great deal of modern history.

Related Posts

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

The Signature of All Things

The Lacuna

Day 759: We Are Not Ourselves

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments

Cover for We Are Not OurselvesBest Book of the Week!
Eileen Tumulty has had a tough youth and adolescence with her Irish immigrant family struggling with alcoholism. For most of her school years she’s had to keep the house and take care of her drunken mother. So, when she meets Ed Leary, a young scientist who holds the promise of getting out of her neighborhood in Queens, she marries him.

In some ways, they are a mismatch even though they love each other. Eileen is a practical woman, ambitious for a well-to-do life. Ed cares about integrity, his teaching, and his research. When Eileen buys him an expensive gold watch for a wedding present, one she cannot return, he refuses to wear it even after she replaces the gold wristband with a leather one. He teaches and has a lab at Bronx College. Several times he is offered jobs at more prestigious schools that he turns down. He also turns down an offer to be head of his department.

After a while, Eileen becomes exasperated at their lack of upward mobility. They have bought the three-family house in which they rented an apartment, but they still live in the same Queens neighborhood they moved to when they were married. However, after their son Connell is born, Eileen settles her attention on him for awhile and also continues her nursing career.

Eventually, a shadow falls over the lives of the Learys. I don’t want to tell what it is, because it happens well into the novel. Until it happens, I sometimes wondered where the novel was going but eventually realized it is an honest, unflinching look at the pressures on a small family of a tremendous burden.

The novel is told mostly from the point of view of Eileen, a strong, independent woman with a will to succeed. Because of her upbringing, she has problems with showing affection and being open. Ed is warmer and more affectionate to Connell. Connell is slow to mature but eventually learns to accept responsibility for his actions.

I felt for a long time some distance from these characters, but the sheer weight of everything we learn about them eventually breaks through this barrier. The result is a touching and affecting story about love’s power over adversity.

Related Posts

I Know This Much Is True

The Fault in Our Stars

The House We Grew Up In

Day 738: The House Gun

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for The House GunWhen Nadine Gordimer died last year, I thought it was about time I read something by her. I’ll say right up front that I did not find The House Gun easy to get into.

Almost the only characters of any depth are Claudia and Harald Lindgard, an older upper-middle-class liberal white couple living, I assume, in Johannesburg, although the city is never mentioned by name. The novel is set in the 1990’s, just after De Clerc has left office and the nation is stumbling to find its way in a new order.

Claudia and Harald are disturbed in their gated complex one night by a friend of their son Duncan who comes to report a horrible event. Duncan has been living in a compound in a separate house from three gay men. One of them has been murdered, and Duncan has been arrested for it.

The story is mostly about the effect this event has on the couple’s marriage. At first very close, they are driven apart almost immediately. They know nothing about what happened, and Duncan isn’t talking. Eventually they learn from Duncan’s advocate, Hamilton Motsamai, that Duncan did indeed shoot Carl Jesperson after finding him having sex with Duncan’s girlfriend Natalie.

There is much more to the story, but it comes out slowly. And Gordimer’s writing style is so abrupt and choppy, her viewpoint so removed and analytical, that the novel seems chilling. This impression is heightened by the tendency to use pronouns or other nouns instead of names for the other characters, especially for Natalie, who is referred to as “the girl,” and the victim, who is referred to as “he” or “him.” Obviously, since the novel is from the point of view of the couple, this naming is a distancing technique to separate the parents from the victim and the person they consider the instigator, but the overall effect is to also distance the reader. I have no frame of reference to know if this writing style is typical of Gordimer or not.

Of course, there are other, more political points to the novel. Although viewing themselves as liberals, Claudia and Harald are shaken to find how biased they are. For example, they wonder at first about the competency of Duncan’s advocate just because of Motsamai’s color. Racial and stereotypical comments permeate the book. It is clearly an issue that is on everyone’s mind.

Then again, the presence of the gun is an important issue. In an article about the novel in The New York Times, a statistic was quoted that after the violent and abusive regime of De Clerc ended and Mandela came into power, official statistics of violence in South Africa increased tenfold. The young men in the compound had bought the gun to protect themselves in case someone broke in. If it hadn’t been sitting there on the table, no one would have been killed. That’s a point that we in the states, with our own issues, should pay attention to.

Related Posts

The Sun is God

Conversations with Myself

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

 

Day 732: The Blazing World

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Cover for The Blazing WorldBest Book of the Week!
Every once in awhile I read a book that is so remarkable that I doubt my powers to convey it. Such a book is The Blazing World. This novel was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2014, but frankly, I think it is better than the novel that won. It is stunningly filled with ideas about such varying subjects as perception and misogyny in the art world, but it is ultimately the touching story of a flawed but compelling human being.

Harriet Burden is already dead when this novel begins. It is purportedly a book about her life, assembled through interviews, excerpts from her diaries, and art reviews and journal articles.

Our examination of Harriet’s life really starts with the death of her husband Felix. Harriet realizes that she has spent her entire life submerging her identity to please first her father and then Felix. She is a ferociously intelligent, well-read woman who has sat by and let Felix take credit for her ideas. Even more importantly, she is an artist. Although Felix was an art dealer, he never helped her find a market for her art. She has become convinced that no one pays attention to her work because she is an older woman.

Harriet, or Harry, as her friends call her, concocts a project she calls Maskings. She will convince a series of young male artists to present her work as his. Once the work gains the recognition it deserves, she will reveal it to be her own.

This novel is remarkable for the character Hustvedt creates in Harry—intelligent, articulate, caring, and extremely angry. Other characters are also complex and insightfully depicted—her grown children Maisie and Ethan, her lover Bruno, her second mask Phinny who becomes her friend, and even the Thermometer, a mentally ill man whom Harry gives a place to stay.

The novel is also remarkable for its ability to describe Harry’s art so that you can imagine it and understand its power. Some of Harry’s ideas are too abstruse for me—she is much smarter than I am and I couldn’t follow all of them even with Hustvedt’s footnotes. Still, this novel is an accomplished feat of storytelling, intellectual and dazzling.

Related Posts

The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

The Fountain of St. James Court or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

Day 727: I Know This Much Is True

~ whatmeread ~ 11 Comments

Cover for I Know This Much Is TrueI have only read one other book by Wally Lamb, the more recent The Hour I First Believed, and when I began reading I Know This Much Is True, it was like deja vu all over again. In a very long novel, crass, belligerent, macho protagonist with anger issues ignores his own problems in attempting to cope with a family member with serious mental health difficulties.

In this case, Dominick Tempesta has a twin brother Thomas who is a paranoid schizophreniac. Thomas has seemed to do very well lately, so Dominick is shattered when Thomas goes to the public library one day and chops off his own hand in an effort to halt Operation Desert Storm. When Thomas is sent to Hatch, the high-security facility for the most dangerous patients, instead of Settle, where he usually goes, Dominick is convinced there is some mistake. His misgivings are confirmed when Dominick himself is severely beaten by one of Hatch’s security guards while he’s trying to get someone to call Thomas’ doctor. He begins trying to get Thomas out of there.

In his efforts, he meets with Thomas’ social worker Ms. Scheffer and with Dr. Patel, one of the therapists who is supposed to evaluate Thomas. Dr. Patel asks Dominick to discuss his and Thomas’ past with her so that she can gain more insight about Thomas. But eventually she begins treating Dominick.

So, the present-day chapters of the novel, set in the early 90s, are interspersed with chapters describing incidents from Dominick’s childhood and adolescence. These incidents include upbringing by a mild-mannered mother and abusive stepfather Ray, Dominick’s constant curiosity about the identity of his real father, Dominick’s jealousy at their mother’s favoritism for Thomas.

In the end, you get to understand and feel for Dominick, if not actively like him. His insight about himself is helped along by finding a manuscript written by his grandfather, another similarity with his other novel. This novel explores issues such as bullying and abuse, mental illness, the way Americans raise boys, the closeness of twins, the way our own history flows from the history of our parents.

As with the other book, I liked it well enough but perhaps not well enough to subject myself to another 1000 pages of Wally Lamb.

Related Topics

The Hour I First Believed

The Gathering

In the Lake of the Woods

 

Day 724: & Sons

~ whatmeread ~ 14 Comments

Cover for & Sons& Sons is a novel about fathers and sons, but it is really most about sons and the effect on them of their father’s actions. It is also about the fate of a lifelong friendship.

The friendship seems to be the catalyst for events. Charles Topping has died, and his funeral is packed with people waiting to see his best friend, the reclusive novelist A. N. Dyer, give the eulogy. Dyer is noted for several excellent books, but Ampersand has become a classic about prep school life.

At the funeral, though, it becomes clear that Andrew Dyer himself isn’t quite all there. During the eulogy, he becomes upset about the whereabouts of his young son Andy and has to be removed from the podium.

The story is told by a narrator who is not at all trustworthy, Charles Toppings’ son Philip. When Andrew Dyer meets him at the funeral and finds he has split from his wife, he kindly invites him to stay.

This suits Philip, who grows more malevolent as we get to know him. He is on hand a few weeks later when the Dyers reunite at their father’s request to discuss something important. He can be there to eavesdrop and look through old papers, but generally he cannot possibly be privy to all the details of the story he tells.

Andrew Dyer has been estranged from his ex-wife and two sons since the family learned about the existence of his third son, Andy. Andy is now seventeen. Andrew has tried to avoid neglecting him, as he did his two other sons, and do a better job of bringing him up. But Andrew knows he is nearing the end and is afraid Andy will be alone. He fears Andy is just as messed up as the other sons, only in a different way. Andrew has formed another preoccupation about Andy that shows how divorced he is from reality.

Andrew’s oldest son Richard is an ex-drug addict who has stabilized his life with great difficulty. He is now a drug counselor and has a wife and two teen children. The other son Jamie is a documentary filmmaker whose films for years have dwelt on the darkest of subjects. Philip Topping has a grudge against both of them for the teasing he received as a child.

The novel is told using letters between Andrew and Charlie, passages from Ampersand, and other artifacts from Andrew’s life, as well as Philip’s testimony. We find Andrew feverishly manufacturing an “original draft” of Ampersand because he burned up the original manuscript in disgust at what he did to his old friend Charles in fiction. Now he needs one to leave with his papers.

I waited to write my review for a few days after I finished the book, and I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed the novel. It is well written and absorbing, and it provides a lot to think about.

Related Posts

The Art of Fielding

The Sense of an Ending

The Child in Time

Day 719: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for To Rise Again at a Decent HourThe descriptions I’ve read of this book in reviews and on the cover don’t really do a good job of conveying what it is like, and I’m afraid mine won’t be any better. Still, I’ll give it a try.

Paul O’Rourke is a rather neurotic New Yorker, a middle-aged dentist who loves the Red Sox. He wants to belong to something so badly that his desire has messed up his two most significant relationships. Each time, he has fallen madly for his girlfriend’s family—the first a close-knit Catholic family whom he offended by announcing he was an atheist, the second a close-knit Jewish family he tried to impress by his research into the Holocaust.

Paul feels he needs to engage more with life but instead engages less. He records and watches baseball games and eats take-out and does little else except worry about how little his patients floss. At least, that’s all he’s done since he and Connie, his office manager, broke up.

Although Paul texts, he does not use other Internet technology, so he is surprised when someone puts up a web site for his dental practice. He immediately contacts the designers of the site and asks them to take it down. Soon, someone is posting odd messages about a group called Ulm on the site and has also started a Facebook page and Twitter feed in his name.

Rather than simply working through a lawyer, Paul engages with this other “Paul” in long philosophical arguments by text. Soon Paul’s other self is trying to get him to visit his “homeland” in the Negev desert.

This novel creates a distinct personality in Paul as well as a fair amount of humor. I enjoyed it even though I thought many of the discussions were gratuitous and the plot a bit whacky.

Related Posts

Straight Man

Wife 22

Await Your Reply