Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 172: The Weird Sisters

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Cover for The Weird SistersRose, Bianca, and Cordelia Andreas are the daughters of a Shakespeare scholar who is obsessed with the Bard. From their earliest days they were taught to quote from Shakespeare plays, enact scenes, and use Elizabethan curses. Of course, they are named for characters from the plays. Their father’s way of communicating with them when they are away is to send them clippings from the Riverside Shakespeare. This is the setup for The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown. You might think such a gimmick would become tiresome, but it does not.

The three sisters have traits in common with their characters. Rose, like Rosalind, is smart and dutiful. Bianca is a flirtacious beauty. Cordelia is the much-loved youngest daughter. They are also a bit estranged from each other. Rose resents that she always has to be the responsible one, but Bean and Cordy think she takes too much upon herself. Both Rose and Bean are jealous of the unconditional love that Cordy receives from their parents. And Rose and Cordy think Bean has too great a need for attention, one that leads her to seduce men indiscriminantly.

When they receive a summons from their father because their mother has cancer (it says “Come, let us go; and pray to all the gods/For our beloved mother in her pains”), the lives of all the women are in disarray. Rose’s fiancé is about to leave for a  job in England, and he wants her to join him. She believes she is too urgently needed at home, where she is the organizer. Bean (Bianca) has been fired from her job in New York for embezzling the money she needs to perpetuate her lifestyle. Cordy has been living from man to man like a vagabond when she finds she is pregnant.

They all return to their crazy, poorly run childhood home, where piles of books are everywhere and all members of the family are perpetually reading but not, perhaps, cleaning. Slowly, the small town in Ohio that Cordy and Bean have been running away from begins to seem not so bad.

The Weird Sisters is an amusing, touching novel about how each of the women finds her path and reconciles with her sisters. It is extremely well written, and oddly enough, you do not tire of its devices.

Day 169: The Distant Hours

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Cover for The Distant HoursKate Morton has been one my favorite authors ever since I read The Forgotten Garden, which is still my favorite of her books. The Distant Hours is another of Morton’s atmospheric novels about family secrets.

When a letter posted in 1941 finally reaches its destination in 1992, Edie Burchill is surprised at the emotional reaction of her usually cool mother. She finds out for the first time that her mother was an evacuee during World War II at the home of Raymond Blythe, the author of Edie’s favorite childhood book, The True History of the Mud Man.

Later, after Edie has been asked to write an introduction for a reprint of Blythe’s classic, she gets lost meeting a potential author and accidentally finds Milderhurst Castle, the once stately but now crumbling home of the Blythes. Living there are the Blythe sisters, Percy, Saffy, and the invalid Juniper. In a way, too, the house is still occupied by the memory of their overbearing father.

The novel alternates between the present time and 1941, as we discover what happened during one night in 1941 that has haunted the family ever since. Morton is deft at creating a compelling atmosphere in the moldering castle and in keeping her readers in suspense.

Morton’s latest book, The Secret Keeper, is due out in October. I can’t wait to get my copy!

Day 163: Ghostwritten

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Cover for GhostwrittenBest Book of the Week!

Ghostwritten, one of David Mitchell’s earlier books, is about the nature of fate and the strange interconnections between people and events in the modern world. In this unusual novel, Mitchell illustrates his points through the narrations of nine different characters, who at first seem only vaguely connected.

The novel begins with the crazed Quasar, a member of a religious cult who has fled to Okinawa after placing poisonous bombs in the Tokyo subway. As his sect falls apart, he waits for word and instructions from his leader, His Serendipity.

In Tokyo, Satoru, a teenage employee of a record store, falls in love with a pretty customer. In Hong King, Neal Brose, a financier who has conducted some shady business with a mysterious Russian, is letting his life fall apart after his wife leaves him.

In China, an old lady lives through the various upheavals of the 20th century while she tries to keep her tea shop on a sacred mountain from being destroyed, again. In Mongolia, an entity that can move from one human being to another tries to find out what it is and where it came from.

In Russia, Margarita Latumsky, a woman who has made her way in life by seducing powerful men and has landed a job at the Hermitage, is plotting with her gangster boyfriend to steal a Delacroix. In London, Marco Chance is a drummer, ghostwriter, and womanizer whose day isn’t going very well.

Mo Muntervary is a world-famous physicist who returns home to a remote Irish island after fleeing from the CIA for several months. Her decision to stop running has fateful results. Finally, Bat Segundo is a late-night DJ in New York who begins getting annual phone calls from the mysterious Zookeeper.

As these characters pursue their own activities and thoughts in a way that seems completely organic to their natures, Mitchell slowly and skillfully weaves their stories into a dystopian nightmare that works in actual events from the late 1990’s, when the book was written.

I am continually amazed by Mitchell’s imagination and intellect and his ability to write novels that are completely engrossing. Although not every technique he uses is completely successful–for example, there are real and metaphorical ghosts in the novel (in addition to the entity, whatever it is)–his approaches are all still interesting. Ghostwritten reminds me a bit of one of his later books, Cloud Atlas, which I admire very much.

Day 159: The Art of Fielding

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Cover for The Art of FieldingI’m not a sports fan, and I don’t really understand why some people view baseball skills as art. This next statement may be heresy to some people, but I also did not enjoy reading Moby Dick. What do these two things have in common? The Art of Fielding, a contemporary literary novel by Chad Harbach. The book would seem to not be a good fit for me. Nevertheless, I was curious about where the plot was leading. I found the book very readable, littered with Melville references though it may be.

The Art of Fielding follows the course of a few important characters. Henry Skrimshander just wants to play baseball but has no particular ambitions until he is spotted in a game by Mike Schwartz, the team captain for the Harpooners baseball team from Westish College in Wisconsin, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Mike recruits him and devotes himself to training Henry to be a great shortstop, to the neglect of his own academic career. Soon, Henry is on the way to breaking a record for no errors held by his hero, Aparicio Rodriguez, the author of The Art of Fielding, a zenlike opus on baseball that Henry has carefully studied.

Henry’s college roommate is Owen Dunne, a brilliant student and baseball player who is also gay. He becomes involved in an affair that will have far-reaching consequences.

The college president Guert Affenlight is happy because his daughter Pella has left her husband and returned home. Affenlight is a Melville scholar, and Westish College adopted a Herman Melville motif at his suggestion because Melville made a lecture stop at the college long ago.

Pella, a difficult and rebellious woman, abandoned a promising college career to drop out of the last few months of high school and run off with an architect she met at a lecture. Guert and Pella have been estranged ever since. Both of them want to make amends but are not quite sure how.

Everything seems to be working out for everyone until Henry makes his first error in years, a disastrous throw. The characters are forced to reassess their own views of their lives.

Harbach is a careful writer who occasionally uses brilliant imagery. At heart, though, the novel is rather slight and shallow. It was 2011’s Big Book and critics raved about it, but those giving it a second look seem to be a little more critical. I enjoyed The Art of Fielding, but my enjoyment was mild.

Day 157: Empire Falls

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Cover for Empire FallsBest Book of the Week!

I’ve been picking up Richard Russo novels at the bookstore for years and putting them back down because I wasn’t sure I’d like the subject matter, but now that I’ve read Empire Falls, I wish I’d been reading them all along.

Miles Roby’s life hasn’t been going too well. He quit college to run a diner in his dying home town in Maine when his mother was ill, and 20 years later he’s still flipping burgers. His wife Janine has left him for her dim-witted personal trainer. He has been in love with one of his waitresses, Charlene, since high school but sees no sign that she returns his feelings. He has an uneasy relationship with the owner of the diner, Mrs. Whiting. The only thing that seems right in his life is his teenage daughter Tick, and she is having problems at school.

Miles’s father is an alcoholic ne’er-do-well who was hardly ever around when he was a child. He comes around when he wants to earn a few dollars or hit up Miles for money. The mill has been shut down for years, and most of the townspeople don’t feel like they have much of a future.

Miles’s brother David is recovering from a drug habit, but his cooking and new ideas have recently been responsible for an increase in the diner’s business, and he wants Miles to move the business to a larger restaurant. Miles has been avoiding a decision. He has only been hanging on because he doesn’t know what else to do and because Mrs. Whiting long ago promised to leave him the diner in her will. She owns most of the town and behaves as if she owns him, too.

Miles doesn’t realize it, but his fortunes have been stymied for years because of events in the past. His only clue to these events is his recollection of a summer spent with his mother on Martha’s Vineyard when he was a small boy.

A pleasure of this book is its myriad of small-town characters and the warm, witty way that Russo depicts them. Russo is skilled at involving you in the fortunes of Miles, his friends, his family, and even his town. This novel is delightful.

Day 156: Winter Garden

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Cover for Winter GardenI want to start out this review by saying that I usually avoid reading tearjerker fiction (by the way, that’s different from being brought to tears by emotion that is evoked honestly in fiction) and I don’t like things that are too heartfelt, if that makes any sense. Having misgivings, I read Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah upon the recommendation of a friend because I have always been interested in Russia. This decision was a mistake for me because I found this novel too corny, contrived, and predictable.

Meredith is a caregiver. She takes care of her father’s business and tries to take care of everything else for everyone. She has also tried to love her cold, withdrawn mother all her life, but her mother remains unknowable. Meredith’s sister Nina, on the other hand, is a photojournalist who seems unreliable to Meredith and hardly ever comes home. This, Meredith resents.

Their father has a heart attack, which brings Nina home. During his illness, he insists that the girls force their mother to tell them a fairy tale she used to tell them as children, only this time, she is to finish it. Then he dies, and Nina returns for the funeral.

It is obvious from the beginning, even before we hear a word of the tale, that it isn’t a fairy tale but a true story about their mother’s difficult life in Stalinist Russia. Of course, you immediately know that by listening to the story, the women will grow to love and understand their mother. By the way, they will also figure out how to reconcile their relationships with each other and solve their other life problems. A review I read says “Although this book starts off fairly maudlin, it evolves into a gripping read.” I have to disagree. I think it starts out maudlin and stays that way.

Day 148: The Map of True Places

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Cover for The Map of True PlacesThe Map of True Places is another very good book by Brunonia Barry. Zee is a psychotherapist with a shattering past. The death of her patient Lilly, a bipolar housewife who jumped off a bridge, has brought back to Zee memories of her own mother’s suicide. Her father Finch was unfaithful to her bipolar mother with another man, and when Zee was 11, her mother committed suicide by swallowing strychnine. Zee came home in time to witness the fatal convulsions.

Zee goes to visit her father and finds that his Parkinson’s disease has turned to dementia and he has kicked his partner Melville out of the house. She decides to take a leave of absence from her practice to care for Finch. Trying to come to terms with the past and figure out what to do with Finch, she begins to doubt everything in her life. As she finds out the truth about many of the myths in her life, Zee also finds clues about what happened to Lilly in her final days.

This second book of Barry’s is also set in Salem, Massachusetts, and features some of the same characters as in The Lace Reader. I have really enjoyed both of Barry’s books. She creates a strong sense of place in the quirky Salem and populates her novels with complex, interesting characters.

Day 138: Once Upon a River

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Cover for Once Upon a RiverBest Book of the Week!

In 1970’s Michigan, Margo Crane has grown up on a tributary of the Kalamazoo River, learning how to hunt and fish from her grandfather and swimming across the river to play with her Murray cousins. The first chapters of Once Upon a River, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s coming-of-age novel, show her running wild while her depressed, alcoholic mother sleeps all day in the sun.

Margo is a young teenager when her mother abandons her and her father. The two of them manage until a party at the Murray’s, when Margo is sexually assaulted by her uncle Cal. This incident becomes very public, severing the Cranes’ ties with the Murrays. Although Margo is initially confused about how she feels, her eventual attempt to revenge herself on her uncle goes horribly wrong and results in her cousin Billy murdering her father. With no one to care for her, Margo takes a boat and her uncle’s best rifle and begins a journey on the river.

For Margo, this is a journey of discovery, about what kind of person she is and how she wants to live, about how to form her system of ethics and what it should be. Rather than being plot driven, the novel is about the people Margo meets and her interactions with them. It is a sometimes lyrical novel about a way of life that is almost completely gone except in remote areas of the continental United States.

I was attracted to reading this book because I grew up in Michigan a decade earlier than Margo. But this is a different Michigan. I had a hard time imagining that such a life was possible around the Kalamazoo, which is now and was then in a fairly populated area of the state. I would not have such a hard time with this if the novel was set further north. However, don’t misunderstand me. I am not implying that Campbell doesn’t know her subject.

I have seen the novel compared to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but even though Margo travels up and down the river, the journeys here are mostly internal. Once Upon a River is beautifully written in spare prose, creating an unforgettable main character in Margo.

Day 130: Under the Lemon Trees

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Cover for Under the Lemon TreesIn Under the Lemon Trees a high school girl tries to live her dreams while being held back by tradition and her family’s expectations.

In the beginning of the novel it is 1970’s California and Jeeto’s sister has just been hurried into marriage with a stranger. Jeeto finds out later that this happened because her sister had been pregnant by a local boy and lost the child. As a result, Jeeto’s mother is even more determined to marry her off directly after she graduates high school even though Jeeto has been offered a scholarship at Berkeley. And, in  the meantime, Jeeto develops a relationship with another local  boy.

Jeeto also tells the story of her uncle’s lost love when he first came to America as a Punjabi Sikh and eventually helped found the Sikh settlement in Oak Grove, California.

The plot of the novel was interesting, but I got frustrated with Jeeto. She was too ready to give up her dreams. I realize that there are cultural issues involved in the question of whether Jeeto can go to college, but what I found frustrating was not that Jeeto would give up her dreams but that she would not even fight for them.

Day 127: Hush

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Cover for HushI have read a few Kate White mysteries, but this one was disappointing. The heroine of Hush, Lake Warren, is a shallow, stupid woman who is so afraid she will lose her children in a custody battle that she lies to everyone all the way through the book, even when it doesn’t seem necessary. She is so stupid that even though she has been told to be careful about her behavior while custody is in question, she can’t resist having a one-night stand with a doctor she’s been flirting with at work. Afterwards, she falls asleep on his terrace, only to return to find he’s been murdered.

Her fears about drawing attention to herself extend to the point of ridiculousness. She doesn’t report that her cat was drugged and all its hair shaved off, that she has been receiving sinister calls, or that a man attacked her with a knife. Even when she finally finds someone she can trust, she never tells him what is really going on.

In the course of investigating the murder herself, she uncovers corruption at the doctor’s fertility clinic. Even an idiot would be about five steps ahead of her all the way. I used to enjoy the TV series “Sex and the City,” but this book reminds me of that sort of vapidity that often appears in chick lit, without the great script. A predictable, even annoying novel.