Wandering the Stacks

House Lights – Leah Hager Cohen

2011-05-07T12:19:00.000-04:00

House Lights was a random read, selected at a library sale for the seal proclaiming it to be a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. I enjoyed House Lights, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “notable” (although, to be honest, I don’t know what competition it was up against in 2007). Leah Hager Cohen has written a pleasant story about a young woman coming of age and discovering the disconcerting truth about her family. There is scandal, but nothing too horrible. That is the root of the problem. For all the anguish our narrator, Beatrice, endures, her life doesn’t seem all that bad. The betrayals by her family, in particular by her father, don’t seem that extreme. Many have been through much worse and handled themselves with much more grace than does Beatrice.

I found Beatrice’s naivety and immaturity confusing – she is supposed to be an intelligent girl with enough perception to be a talented actress. I grew frustrated by the lack of communication within her family, something she bemoans but does little to correct. Instead of direct confrontation and explanation, we get eavesdropping, misunderstanding, manipulative outbursts, even overhearing via the listening device in a child’s spy kit. Near the end of the book, Beatrice’s father accuses her of being arrested in her development. I have to agree. Unfortunately, it is clear that the reader is not supposed to see her this way. We are supposed to be sympathetic to her plight, to be on her side. Instead I just wanted to shake her and tell her to get over herself.

What saves the book is Hager Cohen’s language. She can craft a beautiful sentence, and although her images occasionally cross the line into sentimentality, she has a gift for finding magic in the mundane.

House Lights is a nice read. It consumed me on my commute, but I won’t remember it a month from now.

State of Grace – Joy Williams

2011-03-06T09:29:00.000-05:00

Joy Williams is a master at creating moments, which is why her short stories work so well. She imbues minor details with significance, thereby creating a world that is psychologically close to her characters. Her stories are much more about the emotional context of a singular space and time and less about the progression of a story. And for that reason, her novel State of Grace runs into problems.

The moments that Williams creates in State of Grace are mesmerizing and very, very dark. Kate, the protagonist, is hiding a secret about her relationship with her father, and we find out the truth in an elliptical, almost sly way. Kate is not a reliable narrator. She is damaged, severely, and we cannot trust her thoughts because she cannot trust them. She is fascinating, and I enjoyed my time with her, at first. However, as the pages turned and no forward movement occurred, I grew frustrated. I needed progression, but I was being held in stasis. Kate, too, is frozen, and I respect Williams for respecting Kate’s emotional state. In a short story, Kate’s moment would have worked extremely well. But drawn out into a novel, Kate becomes boring.

State of Grace was well-received when published in 1973; the novel was even named a finalist for the National Book Award. But I wonder now - with publishing’s changing attitude and readers’ changing expectations about fiction, with the emphasis on action and lightness - whether State of Grace would be published at all. I think it highly unlikely, and that’s unfortunate. While I can’t say I enjoyed the book, I was moved and disturbed and there were moments when I was absolutely transported. I would recommend reading the first few pages, at least, just to get a glimpse.

Room – Emma Donoghue

2011-02-23T16:22:00.000-05:00

Since childhood I have had an intense fascination with kidnappings and captivity (I also loved to visit cemeteries as a kid – is it any wonder that I went through a goth phase?). Of special interest have been those situations where a person – usually female – has escaped or been discovered after years of living in her captor’s cellar or shed, often hidden within “plan view:” neighbors nearby, occasionally even a family inside the main house. I’ve wondered how the victim survived. What instincts and coping mechanisms had to kick in? What are the long-term emotional, physical, and social tolls? Is living a normal life afterward even possible?

I had hoped that Room by Emma Donoghue would answer some of these questions. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Instead of an investigation into the heart of darkness, the reader gets a sterilized, happily ever after tale. The let down is especially intense because the first half of the book is so promising. Donoghue seems willing to push into difficult and shocking territory. Yet at the most pivotal moment, she retreats.

Room is narrated by a five year old boy, Jack, who is born into Room, the modified garden shed where his mother has been kept a prisoner for the past seven years. He has known no other reality than Room. At night his mother places him in the wardrobe while Old Nick, her captor, comes in and rapes her. She will not let Old Nick see or touch her son, who of course is biologically his son as well. Jack is hers alone, and she lives for him. Inside Room she creates an alternative world full of games and songs and stories. Jack’s language evolves within this context; Donoghue does a brilliant job of reflecting his naivety, joy, and (apparent to us, but not to him) deprivation through his vocabulary. His mother is an exceptional parent, given her circumstances, but time is running out. Jack has no future if his mother cannot devise a way to get them out.

She comes up with a plan – it is horrifying, panicky, and sure to fail. But it succeeds, and Jack and his mother are rescued. From there the novel loses its bravery. Instead of addressing the messy struggle of re-adaption (or in Jack’s case, initial introduction) to the larger world, Donoghue gives us a sweet, often comic, tale. Without Room to distinguish them, we soon find that Jack and his mother have only generic characteristics. We learn that his mother likes music, but she isn’t even into a particular genre. Even worse than her blandness, she constantly downplays what happened to them. During a television interview less than a week after her rescue, she speaks about how they aren’t special, “slavery’s not a new invention” and “people are locked up in all sorts of ways.”

No. Being kidnapped and confined to a shed for seven years, repeatedly raped and beaten and impregnated twice (the first a stillborn) by your captor – that’s an atrocity beyond description. And whether or not such a situation has occurred before, it’s still an atrocity. Saying anything less is insulting to real victims.

The last pages of the book take that insult even further. They are hard to stomach, but not because of any great insight into the human psyche. I wish Donoghue had kept the courage she had at the beginning of the novel instead of giving us a feeble attempt at making everything OK. Sometimes, in certain situations, things are not OK. Not even close. And if you aren’t going to admit that, you shouldn’t be writing about those subjects.

Winter Break

2010-12-17T10:12:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I’m heading off to India! The book reviews will be on hold until 2011, although I expect to get a lot of reading done on my 18 hour plane journey.

Have a wonderful holiday! And please keep your local library in mind. Stop by, check out a book, and consider giving a gift.

New York Public Library

Brooklyn Public Library

The Easter Parade – Richard Yates

2010-12-12T12:37:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned previously, Revolutionary Road is one of my favorite books. Richard Yates is a master at examining crumbling marriages and the conflicting pressures placed upon women in the 1950s and 1960s (I believe those pressures still exist, if in somewhat different forms, today). In The Easter Parade, Yates again takes a look at women’s roles, choosing as his focus two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, whose lives are largely dictated by who and how they decide to love.

The story is told from Emily’s point of view, in vignettes. It’s a fast read. We move rapidly through time, but the details are well-chosen and I felt that I got to know both sisters well. As children their differences are already apparent: Sarah is able to endure pain while Emily cries for herself. As they grow older, Sarah suffers in silence while Emily, the free spirit, moves from love affair to love affair, distancing herself from her family and trying to create a glamorous life which is under her control.

Writing and alcohol feature prominently in The Easter Parade. Both Sarah and Emily write. Or, rather, they attempt to write. They have talent but lack the time, determination, or encouragement to get their work to an audience. I thought, of course, of A Room of One’s Own. Yates seems to be commenting on the silencing of women’s words, making a direct connection to the silencing of their spirits.

He also has something to say about alcohol. Everyone in The Easter Parade drinks, and when they drink, bad things happen. Sarah and Emily’s mother loses control and flirts with married men. Sarah’s husband beats her. Emily wakes up in bed beside a stranger. So many problems, Yates seems to be saying, could be solved by simply stopping at one. But his characters can’t stop, just as they can’t write. They are less tragic than hopeless.

South of the Border, West of the Sun – Haruki Murakami

2010-11-14T13:52:00.000-05:00

South of the Border, West of the Sun is a fantastic title. That accomplishment should be applauded. I am horrible at thinking up titles. After I finish a piece, I struggle for days with the title, often making last minute changes and never feeling quite satisfied. South of the Border, West of the Sun is evocative. What does the border divide? What lies south? What lies west? What is beyond the sun – darkness? And what is beyond the darkness?

Haruki Murakami accomplishes other things, too. His portrayal of young romance, with all its sweetness and awkwardness and raging hormones, is well done. No heart break, we’re shown, is quite like the first, and sometimes those broken hearts aren’t fully felt until years later. Murakami’s protagonist, Hajime, is well-wrought, both sensitive and self-centered. He hurts his teenage girlfriend and then later on his wife, choosing passion over the companionship that they provide. Yet when faced with a life alone, he chooses companionship. Anything to save himself from the darkness.

But what is this darkness exactly? Death, we find out. But why does Hajime have such a strong fear of death? Why, at the age of thirty-seven, does he feel its fast approach?

In the last ten pages, Murakami lays out all the novel’s themes. Yet his message lacks the depth that his characters deserve. We never learn the mystery of Shimamoto; the suspense never pays off. We know that Hajime has been saved by his wife, and he will not be alone, even as he feels the great darkness spreading around him. But why this darkness is such a threat and what true significance lies in what he has just experienced, we never know. And I don’t think Murakami knows either.

Fat City – Leonard Gardner

2010-11-06T20:22:00.000-04:00

Leonard Gardner’s Fat City is a slim novel following the trials and tribulations of a community of boxers and managers in Stockton, California. I use the term “community” loosely; moving in and out of each other’s lives, the men love, hate, need, and resent, forming no tight bonds. They hide their vulnerability behind toughness, their fighting a relief from boredom, insecurity, and failure. All fiercely independent, their pride is their downfall. They have drinking problems, money problems, woman problems. They will never amount to anything, and so they stop trying. They just live one day at a time.

Gardner forces us to look at these men and their environment at close range, to take in every piece of garbage, every puddle of urine, every broken nose, every blackened eye. We watch boxing matches jab for jab, sweat flying, and witness old men harvesting onion fields until their bodies give out, and even then, reaching forward to make that extra needed cent. We see middle-aged, emaciated strippers working the stage in a slow, aching burlesque, and a young husband bathing his pregnant wife and feeling for her a confused love so intense, it’s more painful than joyous. Every detail is laid bare, with no excuses. The result is breathtakingly honest.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore – Andre Dubus

2010-10-31T10:25:00.000-04:00

Andre Dubus’ novella collection, We Don’t Live Here Anymore, includes the title piece plus Adultery and Finding a Girl in America, chronicling the same group of characters several years apart. Dubus is a skilled writer, especially when he’s describing emotion, and the characters are engrossing in their conflict and neuroses. Yet I come away conflicted. I have been turning over what exactly troubles me, and it’s not that the characters lie and cheat and drink themselves into oblivion. The protagonists of many of my favorite books (Revolutionary Road, for example) do the same thing. No, what has caused this undercurrent of disgust, even anger, is the narrowness of the lives of Dubus’ women.

While the men of the book, Jack and Hank, run and teach and write, have affairs and drink in bars, read bedtime stories to their children and take them out for bike rides, the women, Terry and Edith, keep house. Terry keeps house badly, which Jack views as a sign of her lack of caring toward the family. Edith keeps house well, which demonstrates her superiority over Terry. Terry reads too much. She tries to interject into the conversations of men, which Edith knows not to do. When Hank is in graduate school, Edith enrolls, too, but we learn that she only does so to be close to him (she does well in her classes, but she’s only “pretending”). The women eventually have affairs, but as a reaction to the conduct of the men. And of course, the affairs leave the women feeling unfulfilled.

Lori, the main female character in Finding a Girl in America, is a college student, but she is quiet and shy, a contrast to the loudmouth feminists whose drama tires Hank. The scenes from her perspective center on her feelings of stupidity and inferiority and how much she has learned from Hank. When Hank proposes to Lori, they agree to raise their children in the old-fashioned way, eschewing the sexual revolution and its promiscuity. I think we’re supposed to see this decision as Hank’s redemption, but instead I see it as Lori’s trap.

I can accept a misogynistic character or two. But when three different works portray three different women as home-bound, unintelligent, and weak, I sense a disturbing trend. Once again I compare Dubus’ novella collection with Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. Both books address infidelity, crumbling marriages, and the oppression of suburban life. But there is nothing unintelligent or weak about April Wheeler.

Jim the Boy – Tony Earley

2010-10-24T16:49:00.000-04:00

Jim the Boy made me want to go back and read L.M. Montgomery. Like Montgomery, Tony Earley creates a sweet, nuanced story that accurately captures both the experience of a child and the adults who surround him. Earley’s prose is straightforward and often simplistic, but when he uses metaphor, he does so with skill and purpose. The result is an enjoyable book that a kid would appreciate but which an adult understands on another level.

Jim is a kind, careful child. He also is prone to selfishness. His world is the world of a ten year old: he plays baseball, goes to school, competes with his rival, and worries about getting into trouble. He is just beginning to become aware of the world beyond his town, and the looming prospect of adulthood frightens him. Yet he is in capable, competent, loving hands and you have no doubt that he will be just fine.

Reading Jim the Boy requires a certain suspension of cynicism. If you can let go and appreciate the gentle voice, the innocent subject matter, then you will find the experience rewarding, even a relief.

Brooklyn – Colm Toibin

2010-09-05T19:09:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin follows a young woman, Eilis Lacey, as she immigrates from a small village in Ireland to Brooklyn in the years following World War Two. The novel is successful on many levels. Toibin’s straightforward prose is beautiful, and he presents the loneliness and uncertainty of the immigrant experience in a way that feels true. Post-WWII Brooklyn is fully fleshed out, and I enjoyed comparing the areas described with their contemporary states.

The book’s main flaw lies in the characterization of Eilis. For the protagonist of a coming-of-age, coming-to-America story, she is disconcertingly passive. She does not decide to leave Ireland; her brave sister Rose enlists the help of a priest, Father Flood, to find work for Eilis in New York. Eilis does not want to leave, but she follows along with her sister and mother’s plans for her without voicing her concern. Once arrived in Brooklyn, she works at the store where Father Flood arranged for her to work and lives where he arranged for her to live. She takes a passive-aggressive role with her housemates and landlady, constantly second guessing their motives but never voicing her feelings outright. When a young man takes a liking to her at the parish dance, she goes along with his affections, which rapidly grow until he’s speaking of their future children. Only then does she react, feeling that the relationship is moving too fast but ultimately deciding that she loves him because, well, he’s nice enough. She never seems to make a decision that is purely her own, which I found frustrating, especially at the end of the book. Her passiveness at that point just comes across as cruelty.

The Queen’s Gambit – Walter Tevis

2010-08-10T15:50:00.001-04:00

I have never played chess, have only minimal knowledge of the game, and don’t have enough curiosity to want to learn more. However, I found The Queen’s Gambit, a book that centers its action and builds its tension around chess tournaments, absolutely riveting. Walter Tevis hooked me with his straight-forward prose, which tackles the chess world with authority, seldom pausing to explain or make concessions for the layperson. His passages of chess moves have less to do with the moves themselves and much more to do with the internal conflict faced by his protagonist, Elizabeth Harmon, whose entire identity is defined by the game.

Beth Harmon’s world is a small one. An orphan and loner, she has no family and very few friends. Her proclivity for chess is discovered in an accidental way when she is young, and afterward she has little time or interest for anything else, except for occasional bouts of alcohol and tranquilizer abuse when chess becomes too daunting. She has an addictive personality, and it is easy to imagine an alternative life in which her downward spiral is allowed to continue to a catastrophic end. But she has chess, and the need to win becomes her saving grace.

Chess, like any niche interest, has its own society, but it’s a society of which Beth never feels a true part. She is signaled out for being female, for being young, for being American. And she keeps her own distance, bred by her fierce competiveness and her distrust of the motivation of others. She plays her best, and seems to feel her most alive, when she is alone with the game, moving the pieces around in her head, her eyes closed to everything else around her.

Beth Harmon is thoughtfully created, and her story is one of the most compelling I've read in a while.

Spring Hiatus

2010-04-20T06:34:00.004-04:00

Wandering the Stacks is taking a brief hiatus while I finish up the spring semester and place attention on other writing projects. However, I'll be back to my random reading this summer. Watch for more reviews in June!

When I Forgot – Elina Hirvonen

2010-03-24T12:13:00.000-04:00

I slipped this book off the library shelf because of the title and took it home with me because of the evocative cover, bare feet leaving footprints in the snow. Once again a random selection has led to a happy discovery; When I Forgot is a beautifully written, thoughtfully crafted book. Time and again I was struck by an image so gorgeous, so accurate, that I felt the effect viscerally and had to stop, look away, and absorb the impact.

Elina Hirvonen is a Finnish writer (this novel was translated by Douglas Robinson), and the main action of When I Forgot takes place in Helsinki in the days post-9/11. The lover of Anna, our protagonist, is an American professor. For him, feelings of shame, familial and personal, become intertwined with national shame. One type of shame brings to the forefront and feeds another until he is brought to the brink of self-destruction. Anna, meanwhile, is dealing with her own shame and guilt surrounding her older brother’s mental illness. We are taken backward and forward in time, through memory and dream, gaining insight into what has brought Anna to a quiet café, where she is slowly breaking down while reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.

When I Forgot examines war – the intimate side of personal war - with deeply impressive clarity. This novel is Hirvonen’s debut, and I look forward to seeing what she produces next.

A Dog’s Ransom – Patricia Highsmith

2010-03-08T08:04:00.000-05:00

A Dog’s Ransom examines the theft of an Upper West Side poodle from the perspectives of the owner, the thief, and the young patrolman who makes the case his special mission. The theft, of course, is much more complicated than we first suspect and ultimately leads to more than one human death. Highsmith takes a journalistic approach to the telling. We are aware of dates and times, of physical descriptions and exact geography. I was reminded of In Cold Blood, but with less psychological depth. The result is an account that has great narrative tension but little emotional resonance.

Patrolman Clarence Duhamell emerges as our protagonist, and he is portrayed as a sympathetic, if naive, character. Yet I had trouble believing his need for approval, which materializes as his driving force. For a reportedly intelligent man, his actions often cross the line into dim-wittedness.

Also interfering with the reading experience were the typos that riddled my edition. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that contained so many proofreading mistakes.

Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

2010-02-18T11:05:00.000-05:00

A friend gave me this book for my birthday after he discovered that I had never read Evelyn Waugh. He reasoned that I should begin at the beginning with Waugh’s first and, my friend declared, best novel. I was taken at once. Decline and Fall is an ingenious satirical tale with just the right amount of pure silliness thrown in.

Poor Paul Pennyfeather suffers humiliation after humiliation. He is one of the “static” people, his straight, narrow path disturbed time and again by the “dynamic” people who surround him. When the dynamics act upon him and he is expelled from Scone College for indecent behavior, his only option is teaching. The scholastic life, it seems, is the perfect refuge for those with less than honorable pasts. The reader is then thrust into a rollicking, biting examination of academia and society.

I appreciated Waugh’s mixture of nuanced wit and just plain absurdity, which made reading this book one of the most enjoyable literary experiences I’ve had in a while. My friend knew what he was doing; I’ve become a Waugh convert.

You Don’t Love Me Yet – Jonathan Lethem

2010-02-07T16:27:00.001-05:00

You Don’t Love Me Yet must have been a lot of fun to write. Jonathan Lethem has taken a cliché subject – a band on the verge of breakthrough – and created a novel that is inventive, hilarious, and oddly touching.

As the title suggests, the book is about love - difficult, demanding love. In the first chapter, we are introduced to our protagonist, the band’s bassist, Lucinda, as she meets up with her former lover, the band’s lead singer, Matthew, at an art museum. We’re told that they’ve come there “to end it.” Predictably they end up having sex, but they do so inside an art installation, a small white box created by Lucinda’s ex-boyfriend and furnished with a “sled-size bed” and a refrigerator which she accidently kicks from one side of the room to the other.

The ridiculousness continues. The characters traverse a highly superficial, and mildly alcoholic, Los Angeles art scene in search of connection. With that motivation, the band members come together to practice their new songs; Matthew kidnaps a kangaroo; and Lucinda falls for The Complainer, a regular caller to her ex’s new installation piece, The Complaint Line. The Complainer becomes her fantasy, then her muse, and eventually a fifth member of the band. But he overwhelms her. He obscures her. And ultimately, as in any proper love story, he becomes both her downfall and salvation.

The tone of this book is light, rollicking. The banter among the band members is reason alone to give it a read. It’s not terribly deep, and it’s not going to give you any profound new insights into the human heart or the meaning of life. But it is a lot of fun. Well-written fun.

A Heart of Stone – Renate Dorrestein

2010-01-19T17:53:00.000-05:00

In A Heart of Stone, Renate Dorrestein presents a premise that has long captivated me: the evil that can occur within a family, hidden away behind closed doors. Children must trust and depend upon their parents for their survival, but what happens when one of those parents becomes dangerously unstable? The transition in the Van Bemmel family occurs when our narrator, Ellen, is twelve. After the birth of Ellen’s sister, Ida, their happy, attentive mother begins to exhibit disturbing personality changes. These changes are small at first. Slowly, however, the severity of Ellen’s mother’s psychosis becomes clear, ultimately resulting in the murder of her family.

Dorrenstein’s prose is sparse. She builds suspense by carefully parceling out information and mixing memory with dream. Adult Ellen, pregnant and haunted by the ghosts of her dead siblings, returns to her childhood home and reflects through flashback on the tragedy that occurred within its walls. Ellen is a woman at war with the past and at war with herself. She will not find peace until she obtains understanding. And when that understanding finally comes, the truth is both unbearable and lifesaving.

Dorrenstein names Ian McEwan as an influence, and I was reminded of The Cement Garden as I read this novel. Both make your skin crawl in the very best way.

The Hunger Moon – Suzanne Matson

2010-01-05T12:26:00.004-05:00

The Hunger Moon has a promising start – a young mother sets off on a cross-country drive with her infant son. She is running away from the father of her baby and a life that has her trapped. Just getting in a car and going…it’s one of the American Dreams. I think we all have had moments when escape beckoned. Most of us lost our courage, or regained our rationality, which makes reading about someone who does run away so appealing.

When the young mother, Renata, finally comes to rest, her life intersects with the lives of two other women: Eleanor, a seventy-eight year old widow and former judge, and June, a bulimic college student studying dance. For a while the three seem to complete each other. Then one is lost, and the other two flounder.

Suzanne Matson has a gift for finding beauty in the small details of ordinary lives. The descriptions of Eleanor’s bare apartment are especially striking. Eleanor is the most complexly drawn character, which is perhaps why the book falters after her exit.

The Hunger Moon deals with serious issues – eating disorders, unexpected pregnancy, aging, death, parental abduction – but these issues are never fully integrated into the emotional fabric of the characters. I didn’t understand why Renata feels such a strong need to leave the father of her baby or what June feels while she kneels in front of the toilet. Too much is explained, too little fully demonstrated. I wished that Matson dealt with emotions and motives as aptly as she deals with descriptions of motel interiors.

These characters have so much more to offer than what they are allowed to give.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-13T09:50:00.003-05:00

Wandering the Stacks will be taking a short hiatus for the holidays, returning right after the new year.

In the meantime, in this season of giving, I hope you’ll keep your local library in mind. At the Brooklyn Public Library, you can Adopt-A-Book and give the gift of discovery to many children, for years to come.

Thank you for reading, and have a safe, merry, and literary holiday!

Electricity – Ray Robinson

2009-12-10T18:55:00.002-05:00

I found Electricity both enthralling and painful to read. Lily, our narrator, is a woman who lives on the margins of society, an outcast many times over: an epileptic prone to regular and severe seizures, she was abused as a child, sent to a care home as an adolescent, and now lives in a dismal city where she has worked the same job in an arcade for the past decade. On the walls of her apartment, she has scrawled notes to herself so that when she comes out of a “fit” alone, she will be reminded who and where she is.

Lily’s voice is caustic, bitter, angry. Yet her rage barely covers her fear and shame. When she goes to London in search of her long lost brother, she begins to open up, forming connections and exorcising demons. We are lodged inside her head through the process, and that closeness can be discomfiting – which is exactly why this novel works so well.

Ray Robinson wants us to feel uncomfortable. He has a clear message - this book seems very well researched – but, for the most part, he avoids didacticism by practicing that classic adage: show, don’t tell. Beginning on the very first page, we experience Lily’s seizures. We hear the noise, feel the sensations. We’re losing control of our bodily functions right along with her. And when she’s prescribed a new drug, Robinson gives us illustrations of the pills. We can count them, adding quickly up, as she makes her descent into blankness.

It’s terrifying.

The Feast of Love – Charles Baxter

2009-11-28T13:57:00.003-05:00

In The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter gets to the core of the human drive for attachment. Through seven interwoven narratives, he examines our innate need to love and be loved by another, and the result is mesmerizing. He shows us that love can be unfair, often cruel, but also life affirming and achingly beautiful. Even in its pain, we find deliverance.

Baxter’s characters are authentically wrought, each with a distinctive voice and complex storyline. Not all are likeable, but I found sympathy for each. Even cold, calculating Diana has her moments of vulnerability, when we see directly into her heart. We have the advantage of not only hearing the characters’ stories in their own words but also seeing how they are viewed by the other characters. Baxter appears in the novel as the collector of stories, the writer, forming an interesting metafiction frame. Yet he, too, has his own love story. Insomnia drives him out of the house in the middle of the night, searching for a connection to ease his restless loneliness. And when all the tales have been told, when he has been filled up by the love shared by others, he returns, exhausted, to his bed and waking wife.

The stars of the book are Chloe and Oscar. They represent young love, idealized love, true love; they also experience the greatest loss. Yet all loss in this book leads to gain, perhaps not the gain originally desired, but a new turn of events, leading to a new love, nonetheless.

The Secret of Lost Things – Sheridan Hay

2009-11-18T12:48:00.001-05:00

I picked this book for the title. The Secret of Lost Things conjures so many evocative thoughts. In one way or another, we are all looking for that secret – the answer to what has slipped through our fingers, or what we’ve never been able to find in the first place. Appropriately Sheridan Hay’s novel addresses themes of loss, remorse, regret, and redemption. It’s the story of a girl without a home, attempting to navigate a strange new world as she searches for where she belongs. It’s also a book about books and the people who love them.

Set in the Arcade, a cavernous NYC bookstore that bears a striking resemblance to the Strand, The Secret of Lost Things is populated by a cast of literary misfits. There’s Oscar, the asexual nonfiction expert who collects facts and has a vast knowledge of different types of fabric. There’s Pearl, the opera singing pre-op transsexual who runs the cash register and has a humanitarian lawyer boyfriend. And there’s Walter Geist, the Arcade’s albino manager who falls in love with our beautiful, nineteen year old narrator, Rosemary. Rosemary, too, has her quirks and crosses to bear. She was raised above a hat shop in Tasmania; her mother has just died; she’s never met her father. She has come to New York with nothing, knowing no one, and finds her solace inside the pages of Borges and Melville.

Hay weaves a fascinating mystery surrounding a lost Melville manuscript. I loved the characters, liked the premise, and was captivated by Hay’s descriptions of the city. Yet I wasn’t as pulled in as I would have liked to be. The pacing falters halfway through, slowing down and hampering the suspense, and I found Rosemary’s revelations lacking in emotional resonance. Hay is too quick to analyze Rosemary’s responses, robbing us of the chance to feel the effect for ourselves. In the end, I wasn’t able to let go and truly believe in the reality of the Arcade, although I desperately wanted to.

Giving Up On Ordinary – Isla Dewar

2009-11-07T09:25:00.001-05:00

This novel could easily be 50, maybe 100, pages shorter, but I don’t mind that it isn’t. At first I found the strange combination of too much summary and too much extraneous detail off-putting. But then, as Isla Dewar took me further into the world of stressed out singer turned housecleaner Megs, I found myself no longer caring about the pointless dialogue or sudden switches in point of view. The prose is as cluttered as Megs’ messy house, and the reading experience is like settling on to her sofa with a cup of tea (or glass of box wine) in your hand and the oversized dog at your feet. Comfortable, easy, and familiar.

Giving Up On Ordinary is not a brilliant work of literature, but it is fun. The characters are lively, the dialogue witty, and the plot refreshingly down to earth. The Scottishness doesn’t hurt either. I loved the descriptions of the highlands, but then again I am a sucker for all things UK.

The lessons of the book are ones we could all use: don’t waste your life by not living it; don’t give in to the ordinary; don’t get battered down by routine. But at the same time, don’t try to be someone that you’re not. Cliché, yes. And yet Megs is so original, so larger than life, that a little cliché is all right with me.

When She Was Electric – Andrea MacPherson

2009-10-31T16:31:00.001-04:00

When She Was Electric is a beautiful book, the type of literary surprise that makes this project so exciting. I had never heard of the novel or the author, and the publisher is a Canadian imprint that’s only vaguely familiar. If not for the Brooklyn Public Library, I doubt I would have come across this book. And I am so very glad that I did.

Andrea MacPherson is a poet as well as a novelist, and she writes with the precision of someone who understands the full weight of words. She assembles a landscape that is at the same time concrete and lyrical, realistic and magical, and skillfully walks us along the lines of love and resentment as her protagonist, Ana, struggles with her conflicting feelings toward her mother, Min. I found myself falling in love with each one of the characters. Vivacious Nellie, the keeper of so many secrets, especially captivated me. When I finished the book, I found myself missing her.

Perhaps the highest praise of all: I lost myself in When She Was Electric. I was reminded of the reading experiences I had as a child, when I was less cynical and more easily able to suspend my disbelief. Just like then, I was transported to a different place and time. I believed in every detail, felt the resonance of each emotion, and did not want the spell to break.

MacPherson’s second novel, Beyond the Blue, was published by Random House in 2007. I definitely will be checking it out.

Island of Lost Girls – Jennifer McMahon

2009-10-23T09:58:00.000-04:00

The premise of this book seemed right up my alley: in a small Vermont town, a little girl is abducted by a white rabbit and the ensuing investigation rekindles questions about another child who went missing thirteen years before. Wow, I thought, so much to like - weirdness, kidnapping, intrigue! I was excited to get started.

Unfortunately, I quickly found that Island of Lost Girls has one major drawback. The writing is terrible. Jennifer McMahon’s prose takes the easy way out; I’d even called it lazy. She makes classic mistakes: telling instead of showing, faulty metaphors, needless repetition, random switches in point of view. I wondered where her editor was.

McMahon goes to great lengths to make her protagonist, Rhonda, sympathetic. Rhonda not only is chronically passive, jobless, overweight, a virgin, and from a troubled family, but she’s pining away for her childhood sweetheart. Rhonda’s obsession with the past plays a key role in the novel, yet the reader is never exactly sure why she hasn’t been able to move on. At first you feel sorry for her, and then you just feel annoyed.

McMahon tries to build suspense and fails. I had to drag myself to the end. I almost stopped several times, but I still cared enough about the premise to keep going. I kept hoping to be surprised. I wasn’t.

The Green Suit – Dwight Allen

2009-10-16T08:14:00.001-04:00

These linked short stories follow the life of Peter Sackrider, a man whose most distinctive trait is his lack of courage, from his youth to middle age. Peter has many opportunities to realize his desires, but his passivity consistently holds him back. A frustrated writer, he suppresses his sexuality, frequently self-sabotages, usually makes the wrong choice, and is deceitful and lazy. I didn’t like him, but I also didn’t dislike him. Often he’s just there, flat, on the page. The people around him, however, are a different matter. His family members, friends, lovers, and enemies are vivid, strange, and a lot of fun. They save this book, leading the reader to conclude that they must be the real reason it was written.

Dwight Allen alternates narrative styles, starting in Part One by writing from teenage Peter’s first person point of view. Part Two, covering Peter’s young adulthood, is told through the eyes of women close to him: his childhood maid/nanny, his wife, his mother, his ex-girlfriend. In Part Three, the later years, we return to Peter’s perspective, but now the narrative switches to third person. These choices keep the book moving, an important factor. Allen’s details of day-to-day life are elegant, sometimes hilarious, but not a lot actually happens.

Despite these criticisms, I really enjoyed The Green Suit. The book is a fast read with moments of incredible clarity and precision. “Among the Missing,” “Goat on a Hill,” and “Succor” are especially lovely.

The Accidental – Ali Smith

2009-10-05T16:08:00.001-04:00

I had trouble getting into this book. The story is told from five different perspectives, the first long section coming from the p.o.v. of a fairly annoying twelve year old girl, Astrid. The initial chapters are bogged down in detail, and with the minutia and Astrid’s constant “i.e.”s and “etc”s, I had to push my way through. However, I am very glad that I did. Ali Smith has created a compelling portrait of modern family life in the West. Using the war in Iraq and our worship of the media as backdrops, she illustrates our fragmentation through the Smart family and their receptivity to an enchanting stranger who deceives, ruins, and ultimately saves them.

Smith’s characters are richly drawn, their secrets many and their voices unique. I grew to like Astrid after a while, and I developed a special fondness for Magnus, the teenage brother who once was squeaky clean “Hologram Boy” and now is dealing with both his sexual awakening and the aftermath of a suicide he unintentionally caused. Dr. Michael Smart’s narrative changes in form, evolving into poetry and devolving into cliché, as his self-image inflates, deflates, and then deflates some more. Eve Smart, passive author, wife, and mother, goes through perhaps the biggest transformation. She wakes up from a life lived in deep sleep and abandons everything. She even throws her cell phone into the Grand Canyon.

Amber, the stranger who triggers all of this change, remains elusive. Her chapters are lyrical and evasive. Is she a thief? An angel? The voice of modernity? I like that the mystery is never solved.

White Ghost Girls – Alice Greenway

2009-09-26T09:21:00.000-04:00

White Ghost Girls lives up to its title – a haunting book about two sisters caught between worlds. The year is 1967, and Frankie and Kate are Americans beginning their adolescence in Hong Kong, living with a depressed mother and waiting for their father, a war photographer, to visit from Vietnam. Everything is changing – the world, their bodies, their family – and so the girls become “secret sisters,” relying on each other when no one else seems to have the answers.

Alice Greenway writes about violence with a fluidity that eases the mind and makes pain just another part of reality. With the girls, we learn to see beauty in the grotesque. Lines blur. Love becomes hate. Lies become truth. Life becomes death. White Ghost Girls is Kate’s account of her sister, and the writing follows the paths of memory, obsessing over details, focusing and drawing back, and interchanging dream for reality. The style, like the ebb and flow of the water that features prominently in the story, lulls the reader into a state of acceptance which is broken only at the end. That last tragedy, both unexpected and inevitable, gives us a hard landing.

The book falters in the second half when Greenway abandons her poetic style to make sure we understand the connection between the absent father and Frankie’s promiscuity. She rehashes this point, one that already borders on cliché, again and again. We would get the connection even if nothing were said. However, this complaint is a small one and easily overlooked.

Two Harbors – Kate Benson

2009-09-10T21:37:00.001-04:00

This random pick is a novel about identity – discovering it, denying it, throwing it away, trying a new one on. Casey, our narrator, is the daughter of a wannabe actress, Lila, who teaches her from a young age that, for a woman, acting is the key to survival. Casey idolizes her mother and takes these lessons to heart. As a result, when Lila abandons the family, Casey is left with an internal cast of characters but no real sense of who she is or how to love another.

Kate Benson writes in an airy, elliptical style that is both beautiful and frustrating. I had trouble believing in Casey’s reality, although I very much wanted to. Much of this story feels like a dream. We float through Casey’s poetic thoughts, moving backward and forward in time, into movie scenes, letters, psychiatric reports, Lila’s imagined life. Benson offers some lovely turns of phrase, but I found myself wanting more grounding. Her characters sometimes speak in movie dialogue, and even when they aren’t quoting, their conversations come off as stilted. Too often just the right thing is said; everyone is calculating, constantly. Yes, they are all playing a part, a role, acting. But even an actor messes up his lines occasionally.

Benson does a better job with setting. In her search for identity, Casey travels from Duluth to Los Angeles, where the bulk of the book takes place. Benson’s descriptions of LA are particularly well-wrought. Her LA is full of contradictions, grotesque in its glamour, a city defined by hope and sadness. She takes us over familiar ground yet does not retreat into cliché. Although Casey’s final transformation remains unclear, LA as her catalyst makes perfect sense.

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

2009-09-06T16:51:00.001-04:00

I’ll admit that this pick was not completely random. I’d been intending to read The Remains of the Day for a while, and when I saw the book on the library’s recommended fiction shelf, I knew the time had come. I was predisposed to like this novel: a Booker Prize winner about a British butler, and I’m a self-professed Anglophile. I’m happy to say that I was not disappointed.

What impressed me most was the authority and authenticity of the narration. Kazuo Ishiguro’s control rarely falters. His butler, Stevens, has devoted his life to his profession and is obsessed with service and dignity. Stevens never “takes off his clothes,” even when alone, and as a result, his private self has become suppressed to the point of alienation. When his father dies, we learn of his grief only through the observation of the gentlemen he serves, who note that he looks as if he is crying. Stevens himself is unaware of these tears, which makes their presence all the more wrenching. Near the novel’s end, when Stevens states that his heart is breaking, he tells us more about love and loss in that single sentence than any psychological analysis or florid physical description ever could. And we feel his pain all the more because he lets the moment pass.

I was so entrenched in Stevens’ manner of thinking that the full impact of the story did not hit me until I had finished and was able to step away and become an outsider once more. You could view Stevens’ life as sad, tragic even, full of deluded loyalties and missed opportunities at happiness. Yet Stevens is a man who chose a certain path in life and is following it to its completion. In that way, he is like many of us. While literature is filled with dramatic life changes and passionate love affairs, real life seldom is. Instead real life is filled with duty, responsibility, obligation. Perhaps the best any of us can do is live that life with dignity.

The Millstone - Margaret Drabble

2009-08-28T21:01:00.003-04:00

The protagonist of The Millstone, Rosamund Stacey, is a woman who seems to embody 1960s feminism and sexual freedom. Young, independent, and a member of a sophisticated, decadent London literati, she puts on the appearance of being knowledgeable about the world and about sex. In reality, though, she is terrified of both, and even more terrified of upsetting or imposing upon anyone. She is a woman of the modern age yet still the child of her parents’ middle class socialism and British stiff upper lip. When she becomes pregnant from her first sexual encounter, a one-night stand with an acquaintance, she finds that both her parents’ preaching and her friends’ flippancy leave her without a foundation on which to stand. Instead she must build her own moral code from the ground up, discovering in the process that nothing is as easy or certain as she has been led to believe.

Margaret Drabble does not separate The Millstone into chapters. We are put inside Rosamund’s mind and set forth without a break, which results, at least for me, in a breathless read. Rosamund’s position is precarious throughout the novel, and I was anxious to find out how she would manage. I didn’t always like her; Drabble has created a not entirely sympathetic character. Rosamund is very intelligent and knows it, to the point of being conceited and, despite her continuously professed socialist leanings, elitist. I found her conversations with her friends especially irritating. Her timidity, too, can get annoying. However, she is a product of her time and place and redeemed through her honesty and ability to finally overcome her passivity to do what she needs to do for her child.

Drabble avoids cliché by rarely taking the easy way out. At times the details are quite chilling: the U hanging from Rosamund’s hospital bed to mark that she is unmarried; the horribly unflattering descriptions of haggard, prematurely aged mothers; the long hours in dismal NHS waiting rooms. Rosamund is not maternal, nor romantic, which makes her evolving emotions all the more convincing.

Madly – William Benton

2009-08-23T09:26:00.001-04:00

Another completely random pick, this short novel is imbued with an urgency that perfectly reflects the characters’ tenuous situation. Set in Manhattan, the book is familiar to me, but not just in setting. I recognize the impulsive love, the blinding romance, the tragic glamour of knowingly going toward your own annihilation. I believe that anyone who has ever been caught up in the life of another would feel the same.

In the elliptical style of Duras’ The Lover, William Benton presents us with a close examination of a chaotic, all-consuming relationship. Bill, the narrator, is a poet, and poetry is the uniting force between Bill and Irina, a psychologically unstable Russian beauty. Poetry also connects the characters to the reader; like the lovers, we are caught up in a world of words, images, meaning turned on its head. Logic falls to the wayside, even as Bill struggles to analyze Irina’s behavior and process his own reactions to her moods. Again and again he retreats to the safety of intellectualism but to no avail. Irina’s emotions cannot be constrained, and her unreliability is her danger, what ultimately makes her so attractive and hard to let go.

Benton’s New York is a dark, hedonistic city, populated by poor immigrant artists who trade sex for money, wealthy patrons who leave behind keys to villas, aging writers who believe in an old-fashioned, literary romance – the romance of the poets – that has now become obsolete. Everyone is isolated, especially in the throes of passion. Because they cannot reach each other, Bill and Irina instead reach out to Pasternak. Together they translate his work, creating a project that is solely their own. Except not quite. Others have been down this road before them, and when Irina takes home her Russian/English dictionary, Bill realizes that nothing is sacred, nothing is permanent. Nothing is to be trusted.

Madly is a book about obsession, about love, about how none of us will ever really know another. Yet its message is not entirely bleak. Within madness exists great beauty, which we are fortunate to possess and even more fortunate to behold.

The Mating Season – Alex Brunkhorst

2009-08-19T20:09:00.002-04:00

The Mating Season is a charming novel, a grown-up fairy tale that takes you to that same magical, comforting place as bedtime stories from your childhood. The narrator, Zorka, is a shy, awkward girl who grows up to be a shy, awkward woman. Fearful of humans, she fills her life with her creatures, a menagerie of animals most of us would squish with our shoe. She is not lonely exactly; her creatures talk to her, and she with them, and together they live a contented existence. The difficulty arrives when she has to interact with the outside world. An outcast, she wonders what she is missing, and her confusion and heartache magnify when she falls in love with a reclusive architect whose secrets and feelings of disconnectedness outmatch even her own.

Alex Brunkhorst is a talented writer who creates an authentic, yet surreal, world. I tend to be pretty cynical when it comes to anything unrealistic, and I’m always on the look out for gimmicks. Yet Brunkhorst is so original in her ideas, so precise in her prose, that I was drawn into Zorka’s realm from the start. I enjoyed every strange twist and turn, even the ones I could spot coming.

Although Brunkhorst convinces us of magic, she does not deny the realities of life. Quite the contrary. We do not get a happy ending here, but we close the book satisfied. The last line is one of the most beautiful, and touching, I have ever read.

Rules of the Wild – Francesca Marciano

2009-08-09T13:51:00.002-04:00

A random pick from the library, this novel is part romance, part social critique, part political commentary about white expatriates living in Kenya. The premise seems promising. However, Francesca Marciano struggles to blend these different aspects into one cohesive whole, leaving us instead with a story that wants to be deep and meaningful but never moves beyond a shallow overview.

Everyone in Kenya is good-looking. Francesca makes sure that we know this by describing her characters in exactly that way: “good-looking” or “very good-looking.” Sometimes she follows with a few adjectives about hair color or build, often adding that the women resemble models. These rather bland details left me to envision a Nairobi populated by glossy images from fashion magazines. By contrast, Marciano writes about Africa itself in rich, vivid language that seems much more suited to the sensuous worldview of her narrator Esme.

Character is the main problem of this book. I wanted to be won over by the African bush, moved by the powerful stories of Rwanda, outraged at the racial divide. I wanted the emotions expressed by the characters to come across as genuine. But the pivotal scenes fall flat. Esme is going through an identity crisis, but we gain no sense of who she was or who she is going to be. She depends so heavily on the people around her, the men especially, that she herself is a void. I wasn’t convinced that she was real, and so I could never quite buy into her reality.

Rules of the Wild has an important, urgent point to make, if only we look past Esme and her friends. But doing so takes an awful lot of effort on the reader’s part.

After This - Alice McDermott

2009-08-04T07:48:00.000-04:00

I knew of Alice McDermott but strangely had not picked up her work until one afternoon when I was crouching in front of the library’s neat row of Ian McEwan and happened to glance up. I read Child of My Heart first and went back for After This. I choose the latter to review here, but both are compulsive reads, soothing even. McDermott takes small, domestic worlds and makes them large through rich detail and carefully chronicled emotions. She has a tendency to veer off into sentimentality, bordering on sweet. At times I felt guilty for being so sucked in, but then I decided to just relax and enjoy the pulls on my heartstrings.

After This was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and a very good book it is. McDermott follows the Keane family through two generations, taking us from post-Word War II to post-Vietnam. She begins with the mother, Mary, as a young, single secretary, stepping out to lunch on a windy April day in Manhattan. The description of the wind is beautifully crafted and introduces the prominent role of weather throughout the book, especially in the first half. Nature and fate, we learn, are one and the same, constantly pushing and pulling our lives, leading us into the inevitable.

We follow Mary as she meets, and immediately desires, John at a diner. They wed, conceive a child. Time jumps around, as does the narration. In the second chapter, when we’re suddenly taken outside of Mary’s point of view and put inside the head of a minor character, I felt rudely interrupted. Eventually we inhabit the minds of Mary, John, all four of their children, and various other secondary and even tertiary characters. The chapters begin to feel more like linked short stories, and when accepted as such, the leaps become less jarring. The changing perspective adds to the overall themes of interconnectedness and fate and allows us to peek inside some very interesting characters, many of whom would seem otherwise like simple suburban stereotypes of a particular era.

As the book continues, the emphasis switches from Mary and John to their children. We witness years passing, society changing, kids growing up, parents growing old. McDermott makes a surprising, and unsentimental, choice by enacting the biggest emotional turning point off page. We are left to fill in the details. After being so immersed in description, I found the blankness of that moment incredibly powerful.

Anything You Choose...

2009-08-04T07:44:00.000-04:00

This summer, my book habit having grown into a financially unsustainable addiction, I began going to the Brooklyn Public Library on a regular basis. There, beneath the soaring ceilings of the Central Branch, I discovered my version of Paradise. Or, I should say, rediscovered. As a child I remember being let loose in the Akron Public Library and feeling the ultimate freedom of being able to choose any book and, thus, any future, of stepping inside any life, the limits and possibilities endless. All I had to do was reach up and take a book down from the shelf.

Now that freedom has returned. Once or twice a week, I wander the library stacks and pick at random. Maybe I’m drawn in by the title, maybe by the author’s name. Sometimes I just close my eyes and grab. The thrill makes me almost delirious.

I’m dedicating this page to reviews of my selections. Some of my reads will be by well-known writers, others by authors just emerging. If you have suggestions or a book you’d like me to review, please let me know. I’m not constraining myself to the library’s offerings; after all, this project is all about limitlessness.