Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 574: Little Bee

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Cover for Little BeeLittle Bee begins her story from a detention center in England, where she has been held for two years. During this time, she has been learning British English in the hopes she will be allowed to stay. After another girl seduces a guard, Little Bee is released with her and two other girls, with no papers or money, into the depths of the English countryside. Bee calls the only person she knows in England, Andrew O’Rourke, a man she met on a beach in Nigeria two years before.

Sarah O’Rourke is getting ready to attend her husband’s funeral. He had been depressed ever since that day on the beach. Then, suddenly, he committed suicide. When someone arrives at the door, Sarah is surprised to find Little Bee.

Eventually, we find out what happened that day on the beach—how Little Bee lost her sister and Sarah her finger. Sarah is posed with a problem. What can she do about Little Bee to help her stay protected in England? To the British government, Nigeria is a safe country from which Little Bee does not need refuge. The government does not know or is unwilling to learn that the oil companies are murdering entire villages to get rights to the oil beneath them.

I found Little Bee to be affecting all right, and it informed me of a situation I did not know existed. With all the bad news about various countries in Africa lately, I had not heard mention of Nigeria (at least not in this respect).

A few people have written reviews complaining about the ending. Perhaps they like their endings nicely wrapped up. I don’t mind ambiguity, but I did feel sometimes as if I was being manipulated. In addition, Little Bee’s voice, although enchanting and original, is not consistent enough. At times she is amazingly naive, sometimes convincingly so, others not so much. It is some of her more sophisticated knowledge that occasionally doesn’t ring true with the character Cleave has created and can’t be explained by two years of reading classics.

In any case, it is Sarah’s stunning naivety that is more unbelievable, both on the beach that day and when she decides to interview people in Nigeria instead of immediately contacting a lawyer or her embassy in an attempt to save Bee.

With all these caveats, I enjoyed the book, though, and give it a qualified recommendation.

Day 571: The Goldfinch

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Cover for The GoldfinchBest Book of the Week!
Theo Decker is hiding in an Amsterdam hotel, ill and terrified. He is afraid to set foot in the street. Through most of The Goldfinch, Theo relates the roots of his troubles, which lie 15 years in the past.

Thirteen-year-old Theo is out in New York City for a day with his mother. Normally, this would be a day he’d enjoy, but he is in trouble at his prep school, and they are on the way to school for a meeting. They are early, though, and his mother wants to stop at the museum to look at an exhibit.

Inside the museum, he spots an unusual couple—a hunch-backed old man and a fairy-like red-haired girl. He is only half attentive to his mother’s explanations of the paintings because he is looking at the girl. They stop to view a painting called The Goldfinch, one of the few remaining works by a Dutch artist named Fabritius.

Theo’s mother goes off to the gift shop while Theo trails after the girl. A few minutes later, Theo is knocked out by an explosion from a terrorist attack. When he comes to, the museum is oddly empty, but he finds the old man dying. The man gives him a ring and tells him to take it to an address, and then he suggests that Theo pick up The Goldfinch from a pile of dust and take it with him. He does, an act that becomes a defining moment of his life.

Assuming that his mother got out okay, Theo goes home, but he soon finds that she was killed. Since his ne’er-do-well father disappeared from their lives, it has been just the two of them for years. Social services ends up taking him to stay with the wealthy family of one of his school friends, the Barbours.

Suffering from grief and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder, Theo tries to hide his insecurity and discomfort. As formal as the Barbour household is, he likes Mrs. Barbour and worries that the family might want him to leave. Eventually, he takes the old man’s ring to the address and meets the man’s partner Hobie and the girl, Pippa, who was badly injured in the explosion. She soon goes away to live with her aunt, but Theo continues to visit Hobie, who is a furniture restorer. And he is always in love with Pippa.

Just after Theo is invited to spend the summer in Maine with the Barbours, his whole life changes again. His father arrives and removes him abruptly from New York to Las Vegas. Theo is left to himself most of the time in a deserted suburb at the edge of the desert. His father at first appears to be well off, but soon it is clear he is living on the edges. Theo befriends another outcast, a Ukranian boy named Boris, and the two begin a slide into drugs and alcohol and the margins of society. Even after he returns to New York and tries to pull his life together, the secret of the painting serves as both a pleasure and a hidden terror.

It seems as if I am giving away a lot, but I have covered only the beginning of this long, involving novel. It explores such themes as the trauma of loss, the yearning for love, and the fragility of happiness and the present. In losing his mother, Theo seems to have lost his moral compass, so that even as he tries to help people, he creates problems for them and himself.

Tartt’s characters are complex and fully realized. Even the villains have facets to their personalities. Although Theo thinks of his father as a scoundrel—and he certainly has few redeeming qualities—Boris points out to him that when Boris was alone with nothing, Theo’s father took him in. An older Theo fears he has too much of his father in him.

The Goldfinch remains a golden, potent symbol throughout the novel. Theo loves the painting and feels that owning it somehow gives him stature. Yet at the same time he is terrified he’ll be found with it. Just as the bird in the picture is shackled, so Theo is captive to the painting.

Throughout the novel Theo disappointed me with his self-destructive tendencies even though he has good intentions. Still, Tartt tells a story that absolutely impels you to keep reading. This is a wonderful job of storytelling.

Day 568: Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy

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Cover for Bridget Jones Mad about the BoyAt first, the breezy, dippy tone of Bridget Jones Mad About the Boy is a little disconcerting. Bridget sounds just like her dingy 30-year-old self, but she is now 51. Eventually, though, I was happy to renew my acquaintance with her.

Bridget is struggling to raise two small children on her own, Mark Darcy having died five years before. She also is lonely and misses Mark. Her friends decide it is time she starts dating again. Her technological and dating misadventures are complicated by her bumbling attempts to cope with school functions, for which she is always late, her efforts to write a screenplay, and her encounters with Mr. Wallaker, the teacher who Bridget believes disapproves of her.

The bulk of the novel, though, concerns Bridget’s relationship with Roxster, her 29-year-old boyfriend. This coupling provides food for flashes of insecurity and lots of cougar (and fart) jokes.

We get to spend time with many old friends of Bridget, including Daniel, Bridget’s old love interest, who has turned out almost predictably, still chasing women but now also babysitting (ineptly). This is fluff, but fun fluff, and I think it is a little better than the second Bridget Jones book. It is amusing to revisit Bridget’s world, and we occasionally have a tear in our eyes.

 

 

Day 565: Olive Kitteridge

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Cover for Olive KitteridgeThis collection of linked short stories lucidly illuminates the contradictions that make up the human condition. The link that binds the stories together is Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher in small-town Maine.

Olive is plain-spoken and gruff. Some people are afraid of her, but she can show sudden compassion and insight.

In “The Pharmacy,” Olive’s gentle husband Henry falls in love with his young pharmacy assistant without ever making his feelings known. In “A Little Burst,” Olive steals some of her daughter-in-law’s clothes during the wedding at the house the Kitteridges built for their son. She has overheard Suzanne saying nasty things about her. In “Tulips,” after Henry has a heart attack, Olive reflects upon their pain that their son Christopher moved away to California with his wife, and even after divorcing did not return or invite them to visit.

In other stories, Olive is less important or simply a presence. A timely conversation with her seems to keep a young man named Kevin from attempting suicide in “Incoming Tide.” In another story, the Kitteridges stroll to the restaurant through the bar where Angie plays the piano every night and thinks about the man she loved.

With neighbors and strangers, Olive says exactly the right thing in a difficult moment, and with her loved ones exactly the wrong thing. Many of the stories are sad but ultimately touching. Strout uses an unusual structure to create the sense of a lovely and affecting novel.

Day 562: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

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Cover for We Are Completely Beside OurselvesBest Book of the Week!
Reading Karen Joy Fowler’s fluffy The Jane Austen Book Club made me willing to try a novel that did not sound appealing on the surface. But my experience with Fowler’s previous books in no way prepared me for the profound and moving We Are Completely Beside Ourselves.

Rosemary Cooke starts her story in the middle, when she is at college and has just been arrested for a small release of her inner “monkey girl.” Rosemary has worked hard to hide her past from her new friends at college. The daughter of a behavioral scientist, Rosemary was raised with a chimpanzee Fern as her sister until she was five years old. Then Fern was abruptly removed from the household when Rosemary was away visiting her grandparents. Rosemary’s beloved brother Lowell was angry with the entire family from then on and disappeared completely during his senior year of high school.

Since then, Rosemary’s family has been broken. Her mother had a breakdown from which she never entirely recovered, and her father is remote and alcoholic. Rosemary herself has never felt as if she fits in, after years of being teased by her classmates as the “monkey girl.” Although she seldom stopped talking as a child, now she rarely says anything.  Then Lowell comes to see her, and she has a chance to recover her own history.

Although this novel is written in a light and lively tone, it eventually brought tears to my eyes. It explores such subjects as reconciliation with oneself and others, human relationships and responsibilities toward other species, and the complexities of issues surrounding scientific experiments with animals. It is odd and unusual and incredibly intelligent.

Day 553: White Oleander

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Cover for White OleanderBest Book of the Week!
This reading of White Oleander is my second, for my book club, although I have not reviewed it before now. I believe I appreciated the novel even more on the re-read.

Astrid Magnussen nearly worships her poet mother Ingrid. At twelve years old, Astrid has already lived an unusual vagabond life with her mother. Now the two have settled for awhile in the dry heat of Los Angeles, reeking of creosote with the forests bursting into flame.

Ingrid, herself stunningly beautiful, believes that nothing is important but beauty. She tells Astrid stories of ruthless Viking ancestors who take what they want, for she sees weakness in Astrid and wants to root it out. She is clearly a narcissist. For pleasure, she brings home beautiful young men and then unceremoniously discards them. She keeps Astrid up all night looking at the stars. Although Astrid fears Ingrid will one day leave her, she is smart enough to realize that with her mother everything is always about Ingrid herself.

Then Ingrid falls in love with Barry, an ordinary man. For once, Astrid feels a little secure, as if she has a father. But when Barry dumps Ingrid for a younger woman, Ingrid becomes insane with rage and does something terrible. She ends up in prison, and Astrid is abandoned to the foster care system.

This novel is sometimes beautiful. The beginning dealing with the relationship between the two and their earlier lives is poetically told. Other times it is brutally powerful, as Astrid is torn from her precisely kept home and thrown into a series of horrendous foster homes. Even more heartbreaking is what happens when she finally finds a loving one.

White Oleander is original and gorgeously written, about the search for love and a safe harbor, about betrayal, madness, self-absorption, and self-discovery. The lovely but poisonous white oleander is a symbol for Ingrid’s motherhood, as Astrid finally realizes she will always ache for her mother’s love and never have what she wants.

Day 547: Signed Confessions

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Cover for Signed ConfessionsI confess to only having read about half of the stories in Signed Confessions, which was not to my taste. The main characters in the first few stories are all unlikable men who have committed acts for which they desire forgiveness.

After his gay son’s suicide, an implacable attorney regrets how he treated his boy. He remembers an earlier time when as a young boy, he was cruel to a bereaved schoolmate and found how that cruelty gave him power. Another man deserts his family and then spends his time making up stories to tell in support groups.

These two stories are written in a virile style that seems like an imitation of writers like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. The third comes from another genre—that of dark Jewish comedy. A Jewish man who plagiarizes insults ala Don Rickles to be funny is suddenly gripped with remorse and tries to beg forgiveness of some of his victims. I will admit that the results are a bit humorous.

Walker ties the first few stories together by giving a character in one story some characteristic that you can recognize and then bringing him in as an unnamed character in another story. In one case, the attorney of the first story throws legal terms into regular conversation, as does a member of a support group in the second story. My problem was that I couldn’t imagine a lawyer actually talking that way, especially one who was son of a lawyer. It seems more likely the behavior of someone who has taken one or two law courses.

In general, the stories are written in uninspired prose and show no signs of subtlety. The fourth story, “Ode to Billy Jeff,” is a little more thoughtful than the others. Nevertheless, I chose not to finish the collection.

A disclaimer here: I received this book from from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Day 542: The Burgess Boys

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Cover for The Burgess BoysBest Book of the Week!
I had an unusual reaction to The Burgess Boys. Part of the way through, I was interested in how it would come out but at the same time wondered if I was liking it. By the end of the novel, though, I found it extremely satisfying.

The novel is about the clearly dysfunctional Burgess family, from a small town in Maine. When the three Burgess children were small, their father was killed in a freakish accident, run over by his own car rolling down the hilly driveway. All three kids were inside the car, and four-year-old Bob was behind the wheel when their mother came out to find their father dead. Mild-mannered Bob has carried this burden all his life, dealing with ridicule from his brother Jim and dislike from his twin sister Susan.

Jim and Bob long ago left Maine for New York City. But they are called back by a distraught Susan. Her son Zach has committed the inexplicable act of throwing a pig’s head into a mosque during Ramadan. Although Susan shows a good deal of ignorance about the local Somali population, the family cannot comprehend Zach’s action. He is a quiet misfit teenager, confused and pathetic, who has no friends. Unhappy especially since his father left for Sweden, he nevertheless does not seem to be angry or have any strong feelings at all except for being plainly terrified by the trouble he is in. He has a reason for his actions that is generally clueless, but it takes awhile for the family to discover it.

A former hotshot lawyer in Maine and famous for having won a high-profile case, Jim is the person Susan is relying on. Zach goes in to the police station to confess to the crime, and it seems as if the case will be handled quietly, but the civil liberties groups get involved and soon there is an uproar. When Jim’s grandstanding at a political event does more harm than good, Zach is charged with a hate crime.

As Jim takes charge while Bob tries to calm and comfort, the dynamics within the family emerge. At the same time, we learn a little about the terrified, disoriented Somali community. During the initial hearings, shopkeeper Abdikarim glimpses the true Zach and tries to help him.

As for the characters, I heartily disliked the person that everyone else admires. I think Strout intended that, and part of my satisfaction with the novel is about how that turns out.

Strout’s rich, detailed exposition is matched by her empathy for all her characters. Although I disliked some of them, they are complex and deeply human. This apparently simple story wisely examines the dynamics of guilt, family tensions, social isolation, and blind political correctness.

Life in the small Maine town seems gray and dismal at first, brightened only by the fall foliage and the hues of Somali garments. Jim and Bob have fled, and Susan and Zach are unhappy. There is little employment or hope for the residents. By the end of the novel, everyone has a little more hope.

 

Day 539: The Hours

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Cover for The HoursBest Book of the Week!
One of our Pandora channels repeatedly plays Philip Glass’s music from the movie soundtrack of The Hours. So, as soon as I began reading it, the intricate notes of the score became a mental accompaniment to the novel. That is, I got an ear worm.

I came to the novel with the slight disadvantage of being unfamiliar with Mrs. Dalloway, having been traumatized by To the Lighthouse in a college English class. But you don’t have to be familiar with it to appreciate this lovely, cleverly constructed novel, an homage to Woolf’s own.

The novel begins with Virginia Woolf’s suicide. But later it returns to 20 years before, when she is writing Mrs. Dalloway.

First, though, we meet a middle-aged woman, Clarissa Vaughn, whose best friend calls her Mrs. Dalloway. Like her namesake, Clarissa is eagerly going out into a crisp, clear morning to buy flowers for her party. This is New York, though, in the late 1990’s, and Clarissa’s party is for her dearest friend Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS. He has recently been chosen to receive a prestigious prize for poetry, and the ceremony is that night.

Back in 1920’s Richmond, England, Virginia Woolf is trying to decide the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. Someone will die, she thinks, but will it be Mrs. Dalloway herself? Woolf also copes with her own fears about her mental state, her yearning to return to living in London, and a visit from her sister Vanessa Bell.

In 1950’s Los Angeles, Laura Brown struggles with being a suburban housewife and mother. Although she loves her husband and small son, she feels unsuited to this life.

Cunningham presents us with three stories, and a theme of threes recurs. Woolf has bouts of mental illness, Richard suffers from dementia caused by his illness, and Laura is struggling with depression. The jellyfish shapes and voices of Woolf’s migraine visions appear in Richard’s episodes of dementia. And Laura briefly sees a grayish jellyfish cloud floating over her son’s head. A forbidden kiss and the color mustard feature in more than one story. And other links that I will not name are more intrinsic to the plot. The three stories are so cleverly interwoven, we’re not sure if the events of one cause the events of the other.

This is a novel of astonishing beauty, cleverly constructed and entertaining. I’m going to find a copy of Mrs. Dalloway.

Day 537: The Jane Austen Book Club

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Cover for The Jane Austen Book ClubI am sometimes rather contrary about bestsellers. I assume that I’m not going to like them and avoid reading them. This attitude isn’t entirely irrational as I am familiar with the writing of many consistently bestselling authors that I do not like at all. The idea behind The Jane Austen Book Club also seemed like something I wouldn’t enjoy, as I am a little tired of all the Jane Austen spin-offs and other hoopla (although never tired of Austen herself). So, it wasn’t until I picked up the book at a used book sale that I decided to try it.

I found the novel extremely light reading but enjoyable and sometimes witty. Of course, it is about a book club of Austen lovers who get together to read all of Austen. Only one member is male, and Grigg is also the only one who has never read Austen.

The novel does not have much of a plot. There are some romances and a banquet. That’s about it. As in Austen novels, it is more about the characters and their relationships.

Jocelyn, the founder of the club, is a dog breeder in her 50’s who likes to arrange things and make matches. Sylvia is her best friend from high school whose husband Daniel recently left her for a younger woman. Allegra is a strong, adventurous lesbian. She isn’t so much an Austen fan but is in the club because she’s Sylvia’s daughter. Bernadette, a kind older woman with a colorful past, talks a lot and repeats herself. Prudie, the married French teacher, annoys everyone by speaking French during the club meetings. Grigg is a little more of an enigma, a science fiction reader in his 40’s who just moved to town.

Each section of the novel focuses on a book club meeting and tells us more about the character who hosts the meeting. Throughout the novel, quotes from Austen and other sources appear appropriately, or maybe with an angle we need to figure out. Strikingly, the novel is narrated in the second person plural, apparently by the entire book club, and in omniscient viewpoint.

I found myself liking the characters and drawn into their dramas. Early on, we feel Grigg is interested in one of the women, but I don’t think we’re supposed to guess which one. I thought it was obvious.

If you are looking for some light, amusing reading with just a hint of romance, you may enjoy this novel. I did.