Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 386: Bridge of Sighs

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Cover for Bridge of SighsOne of my favorite books from recent years is Richard Russo’s Empire Falls. Unfortunately, the problem with reading your favorite book of an author’s first is that the others may not quite live up to it. But Bridge of Sighs comes a little closer than some other Russo novels to my initial delighted feelings about Empire Falls. (I know, I’m a bit behind the times with this one.) This novel shares some of the same themes as Empire Falls and is set in a similar working-class, industrial small town, this time in upstate New York.

The novel is narrated principally by Lou Lynch, one of three main characters. Lou is writing a novel about his life, even though he admits it will probably be boring. The son of Lou, an optimistic, cheerful if not very bright milk man turned convenience store owner, and Tessa, a sharp, insightful bookkeeper, Lou has always felt as if his parents are in conflict, and he is on his dad’s side. We understand, though, that Tessa is not really in conflict with her husband and son, she just wants them to see reality as it is, not as they would like it to be.

Seeing things as they are is also a problem for Lou’s best friend Bobby. At least, Lou thinks of Bobby as his best friend, but that is one more thing Lou doesn’t see clearly. Bobby’s father bullies his mother, who is eternally pregnant. She runs away every time she gets pregnant, but he always finds her and brings her back. It isn’t until late in the book that we find there is more than one way to look at their relationship.

The book begins when Lou is sixty and traces back through his childhood and adolescence through the device of his novel. The adult Lou is married to his high school sweetheart Sarah, and they are soon to take a trip to Italy, hoping to visit Bobby, now Robert Noonan, a famous American painter who lives in Venice. But Robert isn’t answering Lou’s letters letting him know they are coming. This trip is an anxious one for both Lou and Sarah, Lou because he has hardly ever left his home town, and Sarah because she once had to decide between Lou and Bobby.

In the background is the story of the small town of Thomaston, an industrial backwater dominated by a tannery, the dyes of which used to color the river waters differently each day and resulted in high levels of cancer in the community. The town is dying. The tannery has finally closed.

The town is divided into three areas that are widely separated by class, even though Thomaston’s richest citizens are probably big fish in a small pond. As the story moves into the present time, the wealthier citizens begin moving away. But Lou doesn’t see any reason not to love his town or his life. Sarah has always wanted to travel and experience more, but they have stayed put.

The Lynch family, as Russo creates it, is a warm and welcoming one. Both Bobby and Sarah are attracted as youngsters to the little store by the promise of a substitute family, Sarah’s own being particularly bizarre. In the modern-time story, Lou’s father is dead, and his uncle Declan has gone away, but Lou’s son works in the store, and his mother still lives above it.

As the story moves back and forth in time, I felt myself occasionally tiring of Lou’s reminiscences, especially of junior high, where he spends an inordinate amount of time. As Bobby reflects when he returns to town during his senior year after being sent off to military school, he doesn’t understand why Lou continues to bring up those years as if they were good times when actually they were horrible and Lou was not treated well at school. I personally was much more interested in the current-time story, of which there is much less, even though I understood that its seeds are in the past. But then again, the fact that Lou dwells on the past is part of the point of the novel.

This novel possesses a few characteristics of postmodernism, without being exactly postmodern. Here perhaps Russo is dabbling in some of the techniques without going full-thrust for its inventiveness and irony. The alternating point of view among Lou, Bobby, and Sarah, the alternating time streams, the metafiction, and Lou’s essential untrustworthiness as a narrator, not because he is not truthful to us, but because he is not truthful to himself, all are postmodern techniques. Within the time and narrator changes, though, Russo proceeds with a traditional narrative style.

Russo’s writing is leisurely, and he likes to muse. Still, he creates some complex and attractive characters and makes you want to contemplate their lives with them. He is also one of the few writers willing to explore the theme of class in America, a theme that is very important to this novel.

Day 376: Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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whered-you-go-bernadetteDespite the cover, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is not chick lit; however, it is a great beach read, and summer is almost over (except if you live in Texas, like I do)! This novel is quite a romp. It has a zany, ridiculous plot and is full of little jibes at such things as suburban mothers who are overly involved in their children’s schools, Microsoft, and Seattle.

Bee loves her mother, who is creative and funny, but Bernadette has managed to alienate the other mothers at Bee’s school. She is slightly agoraphobic, so she stays home most of the time and does not volunteer at school, and she has hired a virtual personal assistant to help her run errands, even though Bee’s father doesn’t approve. Bee’s father Elgie is a computer genius who is practically worshipped at Microsoft and is seldom at home.

Bee’s parents have promised her that if she gets perfect grades, she can have any gift she wants. She picks a trip for the entire family to Antarctica over Christmas. To Bernadette, the idea of such a trip is intimidating, but she thinks Bee deserves it, so she begins ordering supplies online and getting Manjula, her online personal assistant, to take care of travel arrangements.

However, Bernadette’s dispute with a neighbor (and school mom enemy) about blackberry brambles creates complications that are both appalling and hilarious. When Elgie gets drawn in, he misunderstands what is going on because of his ignorance of home events. Crisis ensues, and Bernadette disappears on the eve of the trip.

Elgie is convinced that Bernadette had a breakdown, but Bee refuses to give up on her mother. She decides to try to figure out what happened the last few weeks before her mother disappeared.

My description does nothing to convey how cheeky, inventive, and funny this novel is. It is told in an epistolary style through emails from Bernadette to Manjula, emails between plotting mothers who hate Bernadette, emails between Elgie and his administrative assistant, and Bee’s record of her search for her mother. Bee and Bernadette are appealing, even while Bernadette is going a little crazy. If I have one little quibble, it’s that I don’t believe the personality change that one character undergoes. Still, if you want something light and lots of fun, this is the book for you. I have to thank my friend Gunjan for this recommendation.

Day 373: Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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Cover for Tell the Wolves I'm HomeBest Book of the Week!

Although I think Tell the Wolves I’m Home is classified as a young adult novel, it has much to offer adults, too, in reading pleasure. Carol Rifka Brunt gives us a novel in which the voice of the narrator is so strong and the sense of her personality so developed that it is really outstanding.

Fourteen-year-old June Elbus is an unusual girl–a loner who likes to go to the woods and pretend she is living in the middle ages. She loves her Uncle Finn more than anyone and believes he is the only person in the world who understands her. She used to be close to her older sister Greta, but for some reason Greta has started treating her badly. So, when Finn dies of AIDS, June feels as if she has no one. The situation is made worse because it is the 1980’s, and no one understands the virus.

Something strange happens at Finn’s funeral. A man June has never seen before appears and tries to get her attention, but her sister hustles her away. Days later her uncle’s favorite teapot arrives for her with a note in it. The writer explains that he is a friend of Finn’s and asks to meet her. But Greta has told her that this friend, Toby, killed Finn.

A problem is posed by the portrait Finn spent the last months of his life painting. It is one of June and Greta, although Greta acted as if she didn’t want to sit for it. The Elbuses have the portrait in their living room until an article appears about lost works of art, including a picture of the portrait and reporting that its title is “Tell the Wolves I’m Home.” Until then, June didn’t even know her uncle was a famous artist. And who could have photographed the portrait and sent the article to the magazine?

June agrees to meet Toby but becomes jealous of him when she realizes how close he was to Finn. She is shocked to find they were partners for nine years, and she never knew he existed. June is torn because of her ambivalent feelings about Toby and the fact that they are keeping their acquaintance a secret from her parents, until she finds a note to her from Finn in a book, asking her to take care of Toby because he has no one.

Infused throughout with the voice of its teenage narrator, a girl like so many others struggling with feelings of self-doubt, trying to figure out what is right, this novel is beautiful and moving without being in the least sappy. It is really a wonderful book.

Day 371: A Good Hard Look

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Cover for A Good Hard LookA Good Hard Look is a novel about the last few years of writer Flannery O’Connor’s life. The book begins with the wedding of Cookie Himmel and Melvin Whiteson, which Cookie believes has been ruined because Flannery’s peacocks made so much noise the night before that Cookie fell out of bed and gave herself a black eye. Flannery’s mother Regina insists that Flannery attend the wedding, but Cookie is not happy to see her there.

Lona Waters lives her life absentmindedly and takes pleasure only in the hour of solitude she has every day before her daughter Gina comes home from school. Then her friend Miss Mary asks her if she will give her awkward teenage son Joe a job, thereby eliminating her hour.

Soon Melvin Whiteson has struck up a friendship with Flannery, but he keeps it a secret from his wife because of her dislike of the writer. Cookie is busily serving on committees in town and trying to get Flannery’s books banned from the library, while Melvin, a successful New York banker who gave up his career to move to this small town in Georgia with Cookie, is feeling out of place and bored with his insurance job.

These seemingly mundane stories eventually result in tragedies that force the main characters to take a good hard look at themselves, as Flannery states is a technique she uses in her fiction.

The novel is well written but not evocative. It does not evoke the 60’s South, and my feeling is that it does not evoke Flannery O’Connor. I am not an expert on her or her life, but the incisive spirit I would expect from her is missing in this character. Napolitano uses O’Connor’s peacocks to great effect, but I found that the novel tidied things up a bit more neatly than I would expect from one inspired by O’Connor’s life and works. Finally, the character of Cookie is essentially a caricature of the southern junior matron, similar to Hilly Holbrook in The Help, although Cookie evolves a bit. Most of the other characters are only sketchily drawn.

It is rather risky to use an actual person as a main character in a novel, especially if you are not able to create a character who is convincing as that person. For a much better attempt at using a famous writer as a main character, see Colm Toíbín’s wonderful The Master.

Day 361: The Circle of Reason

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Cover for The Circle of ReasonBest Book of the Week!

Although magical realism is often mentioned in reference to The Circle of Reason, as Amitav Ghosh said himself in an interview for the New York Times review, there is nothing fantastical that happens in the book. Still, it continues to be compared to the works of magical realists such as Gabriel García Márquez or Salman Rushdie.

These comparisons may be because of the book’s rambling narrative style or its peculiar characters. The main character is Alu Bose, but we get to him only slowly through his uncle Balaram, a scholar turned teacher in a small village in India who develops a mania for the pseudo-science phrenology and worships Louis Pasteur. As Alu’s head is covered with odd-looking bumps, like a potato, he provides a subject of endless study for his eccentric relative.

Later, Balaram becomes obsessed with cleansing the village and begins a campaign to convince the villagers to coat every object with carbolic acid. His feud with the local politician combined with his obsession results in disaster, and Alu ends up fleeing India because of being mistaken for a terrorist. He is pursued by a policeman named Jyoti Das, who would rather be an ornithologist.

Thus begin Alu’s adventures, first in the Middle Eastern port of al-Ghazira, where he develops his own obsession for cleanliness, and then moving farther west, ending up in Algeria. On the way, readers encounter a myriad of other characters and stop to hear the stories of their lives or learn a little bit about weaving, say, or the history of al-Ghazira.

I was less reminded of magical realism than of One Thousand and One Nights, the tales of Scheherazade in which, in the middle of one tale, another begins. I attempted to read them at one time but despaired that I would ever get to the end of a tale or keep the various stories straight. Luckily, Ghosh’s narrative is a little more coherent, although not much. It is purposefully rambling, running off in delight to tell one fabulous story after another.

The novel is wonderfully well written, beautifully written, but sometimes I wondered where it was going or what the plot actually was. The feeling was only momentary, however, because I was always compelled onward. The ending is actually satisfying and less chaotic than I expected.

When I read that Ghosh wanted to write something like Moby Dick, that explained a lot about the novel’s narrative style. Fortunately for us, Ghosh’s style is a lot more accessible than Melville’s. Still, I prefer some of his more recent novels, particularly Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke. The Circle of Reason is Ghosh’s first novel, and he keeps getting better and better.

Day 341: Nightwoods

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Cover of NightwoodsBest Book of the Week!

Charles Frazier sets his novels in backwoods North Carolina. His first novel, Cold Mountain, was set during the Civil War. His second, Thirteen Moons, went further back to the treatment of the Cherokee in the earlier part of the 19th century. Nightwoods, his third, deals with more recent times, a small mountain town in the early 1960’s.

Luce is a troubled young woman with a traumatized past who has taken up a secluded life as a caretaker for an old disused lodge across the lake from town. She is unprepared when a social worker brings her the young twin children of her murdered sister Lily, an almost feral boy and girl who refuse to speak and like to start fires.

Stubblefield is lazing away his life on the coast of Florida when he learns his grandfather has died and left him, aside from a load of debt, the lodge and a road house and a considerable number of acres on the mountain. When he goes to inspect the lodge, he is immediately smitten by the skittish Luce.

Trouble is on the way, which we know from the beginning of the novel. Bud, the husband and murderer of Luce’s sister Lily has been released from prison because of a hung jury. He is on his way to town in search of the money he stole, which he gave to Lily one night when he was drunk and she refused to give back to him. He beat her to death trying to get her to tell him where it is, and now he thinks the children know.

This novel is at times tender, as Luce blindly copes with the two damaged children in the best way she can, instinctively treating them with delicacy and kindness. At the same time, the violent Bud resembles a character from a Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard novel, almost comic at times in his psychopathic ineptitude.

The result is an enthralling novel that is both a love story, not just between its characters but with the beauty of nature, and a thriller with a true feeling of danger. As usual with Frazier, the novel is wonderfully well written, with entrancing descriptions of nature.

Day 339: A Visit from the Goon Squad

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Cover for A Visit from the Goon SquadBest Book of the Week!

Describing this delightful and quirky novel is going to be difficult, so I hope curious readers will try it even if I am unable to convey a sense of it.

First, I call it a novel, but it can be just as accurately described as linked short stories. Each chapter is written from the point of view of a different character who knows one or more of the other characters. The chapters all center around the subjects of music and public relations.

The book begins in New York with Sasha, who is the assistant to Bennie, a music executive, sometime after 9/11. She is on a desultory date with Alex, but she also has a problem with kleptomania. While in the bathroom, she steals a woman’s wallet and then has to watch while Alex gets involved in helping the woman.

Next is a middle-aged Bennie, who torments himself with feelings of shame about past experiences. He takes his son to visit a sister act in order to fire them for not producing an album in the specified amount of time. He realizes he is beginning to see his legendary taste diverge from that of his younger coworkers.

Then we jump back thirty years to Rhea, a teenager in San Francisco who is a member of a punk rock band called the Flaming Dildoes with her friends Bennie (yes, the same Bennie), Scott, Alison, and Jocelyn. Rhea observes Jocelyn’s budding relationship with a middle-aged record executive named Lou, who will become Bennie’s mentor. Rhea is dismayed as Lou gives Jocelyn drugs and gets her to perform sexual acts in public.

These are just the first of the vignettes, which range forward and backward in time over 40 years and extend in structure to a touching PowerPoint presentation and a parody of a celebrity interview. They make stops in Arizona, Italy, and South America but somehow center on New York. Fans of Egan will already be familiar with a certain type of hip, aware New Yorker that appears in her fiction.

By turns funny, touching, and sharp as a razor, Egan’s observations are always entertaining and her intelligence apparent. An obvious theme of this work is the effect of time on characters but another one is how technology seems to have sped time up, the book ending in a futuristic world where public relations is centered on the tastes of babies. The PowerPoint chapter shows us that another theme is pauses, in music and in life.

One of the things I wanted to do when I finished reading A Visit from the Goon Squad was to read it again so that I could know what I was looking for from the beginning and fully understand all the connections. And that is what I plan to do, having inserted the book into my pile of future reading to enjoy again.

Day 331: Peaches for Father Francis

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Cover for Peaches for Father FrancisLast seen in Paris in The Girl with No Shadow, Vianne Rocher has been living there on a boat with Roux and her two daughters. However, the wind is about to blow her back to Lansquenet, the village she left at the end of Chocolat. In fact, her summons comes from the dead, as she receives a letter from her long-departed friend Armande. Armande’s grandson has reached his majority and, with other papers, received and forwarded a letter for Vianne telling her that Lansquenet needs her help.

Roux is mysteriously reluctant to return to Lansquenet, so Vianne takes her daughters Anouk, 15, and Rosette, 5, for the journey back to the village. She arrives during Ramadan and finds the village practically in a state of war. A large population of Moslems has moved into Les Marauds, the slums where Vianne had her chocolaterie. At first cautiously welcomed into the community, the Moslems now are at odds with the original inhabitants.

This state of affairs is almost uniformly being blamed on Ines Bencharki, a veiled, mysterious woman dressed in black. However, it has most urgently affected the fate of Vianne’s old nemesis, Father Francis Reynaud. He has been accused of burning Madame Bencharki’s home, the same building Vianne used for her chocolaterie, which Ines had turned into a school for Moslem girls. Father Francis is expecting to be transferred out of the village by the bishop. Ironically, he finds himself forced to turn to Vianne for help.

Although I continue to enjoy Vianne and her family, I feel that this novel does not contain the magic of the previous two and is a little more predictable. Vianne’s doubts about Roux’s fidelity seem too foreseeably wrong. We know that Vianne favors the underdog, but considering Reynaud’s unrelenting treatment of her in Chocolat, their alliance seems unlikely. The flavor of the small village that makes us want to return there, so evocative in Chocolat, is missing.

Also, few of the secondary characters, so colorful and interesting in the other books, are given much consideration here. Luc, whose house Vianne and her family are staying in, barely gets a mention. Even though Vianne makes friends with several of the Moslem women, their personalities do not stand out, one from the other. Only the old lady Omi is her own self. The sole old friend who gets any attention is Joséphine.

Nevertheless, it is always a pleasure to spend time with Vianne. There is real danger in this novel and an evil villain. And as always, the novel is beautifully written.

Day 316: The Keep

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Cover for The KeepI only recently discovered the pleasures of reading Jennifer Egan when I read Look At Me last year. The Keep is another of her very interesting novels. Her most well-known novel, which I have on my list to read, is A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Danny is an aging hipster who has long occupied the edges of power looking for a way to get some for himself. He is on his way to Europe to take up an invitation extended by his cousin Howard to help develop an ancient castle into a hotel.

Danny is anxious about accepting this position because of his guilt and paranoia over a horrible childhood event, when his older cousin talked Danny into abandoning Howard in a deep cave. However, Howard’s invitation comes at a time when Danny urgently needs to get out of New York, so he goes.

After an unsettling arrival at the half-renovated castle, which contains opulence and filth within rooms of each other, Danny meets an almost unrecognizable Howard, his wife Ann and their two young children, his second-in-command and best friend Mick, and other assorted workers. Living in the keep of the castle is a mysterious old baroness who thinks she still owns the castle. A creepy feature of the property is a dark, reeking pool that may be haunted by two twins who drowned in it.

Back in the states, Ray, a prison inmate, is taking a writing class and begins reading aloud his story about a guy named Danny who journeys to Europe to help his cousin develop a castle into a hotel. Discovering the connection between the two stories, and a third one involving the writing class teacher, is part of the pleasure of reading this deeply involving novel. Egan moves the narrative back and forth in time to tell these two parallel stories, keeping the reader’s interest with consummate skill.

Day 315: Beyond Black

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Cover for Beyond BlackI have liked almost everything I have read by Hilary Mantel but could not finish Beyond Black. It is supposed to be extremely black humor, which I usually enjoy, and the idea is certainly an entertaining one, but somehow I felt it went too far, at least for me.

Alison is a medium who travels the rounds of the psychic “fayres.” She actually does see and hear the dead. Alison meets Colette, an event planner, who she hires as her personal assistant. Soon, the two women are sharing a house in a suburban wasteland, where apparently all hell breaks loose. (I did not get this far in the novel.)

Mantel’s skewering of the “fayres” is amusing. Another clever idea in the novel is that the dead are a bunch of seedy characters obsessed with trivial things, just as are many people in life. However, after awhile the sheer bulk of the trivialities becomes overwhelming.

Alison’s spirit guide, Morris, instead of being the traditional Indian chief or swami, is the ghost of an actual hoodlum Alison knew when she was young. I could deal with the spirits constantly talking about minutia, but Morris was incredibly repulsive and disgusting. With the mundanity going over the top combined with my disgust at Morris, I stopped reading.