A Grab Bag of Recent Novels

Leaving     Roxana Robinson     (2024)  A man and a woman meet by chance at a performance of the opera Tosca in New York City. Sarah, retired and long divorced, volunteers in the art world. Warren, a practicing architect, is unhappily married. They were romantically involved nearly forty years before, when they were both in college, but have not seen each other since then. Flashes of remembrances and of possibilities ensue. Why did they break up? Were they really soulmates who should have been together all those years? Is there such a thing as “soulmates”? The personal and family complications that arise from their renewed liaison are presented in sensitive and devastating detail.

The Five-Star Weekend     Elin Hilderbrand     (2023)  Escape to the island of Nantucket, off the coast of Cape Cod, for another of Hilderbrand’s beach-based, gossipy escapades. This time, the recently widowed fifty-something Hollis Shaw gathers four friends (one from each phase of her life) for a weekend of companionship and gourmet dining, to help her move through her grief. All the friends have their own back stories and secrets, and their lives have intersected with Hollis’s life in surprising ways. I was inundated by the many references to designer clothes, pop music, fine wines, and Nantucket restaurants, but I still buzzed happily through this lightweight novel. I’ve reviewed a number of other Hilderbrand offerings, including 28 Summers, Summer of ’69, and Endless Summer.

Mercury     Amy Jo Burch     (2023)  Next, step into the rural western Pennsylvania town of Mercury in the 1990s and meet the Joseph family:

• Mick (patriarch, expert roofer, weirdo)

• Elise (matriarch, frustrated housewife)

• Sons Bay, Way, and Shay (I’m not making this up)

• Marley (who arrives in town as a teenager and becomes enmeshed in the lives of the Josephs)

The introspective musings of these characters can go on at length, but the family dynamics are fascinating, within a plot that takes many unexpected turns. There’s a subplot with Marley’s friend Jade, a dead body that causes lots of consternation, and a harrowing denouement. Questions that the novelist seems to be asking: Which family secrets do you keep and which do you reveal? What do you sacrifice as an individual to be part of a family? Where does love come in?

Repeat Performances

In this post, I review contemporary novels by two authors—Tracey Lange and Dominic Smith—whose previous novels I enjoyed.

The Connellys of County Down     Tracey Lange     (2023)  Let’s clear up one thing right away:  This novel is not set in Ireland, even though I ordered it from my local library thinking it was. Instead, the action takes place in Port Chester, New York, about an hour’s drive northeast of Manhattan. Many of the characters are Irish Americans, and some of their relatives came from County Down in Ireland, hence the novel’s title. Irish folk tales and family stories weave through the narrative, but the main thread is a family-based mystery involving three adult siblings and their secrets. Geraldine, the oldest, is an accounting manager who is in over her head at work and who is still suffering from the effects of having spent her teen years raising her sister and brother. That brother, Eddie, sustained a traumatic brain injury in his youth and is struggling to raise a son as a single parent. But Tara is the sibling who elicits reader sympathy the most. She’s just out of prison, where she was serving a sentence for an offense that was really not her doing. These working-class Connellys live on the edge of poverty in a wealthy New York exurb. The novelist animates them lovingly, faults and all, and constructs a plot that had me racing to the denouement.

In 2022 I posted this brief summary of Lange’s previous novel: 

We Are the Brennans     Tracey Lange     (2021) Moving the plot along mostly through convincing dialog, Lange creates a vivid picture of the present-day Brennan family, pub owners in a town north of NYC. An estranged adult daughter comes home to recover after a serious car accident and gets retangled in family life, with some mystery and some romance enlivening things. The character names are odd, but the story is a winner. 

Return to Valetto Dominic Smith (2023) Hugh Fisher, a middle-aged history professor who studies abandoned villages in Italy, is himself Italian American. In his youth, he often visited the nearly deserted village of his ancestors, the (fictitious) Valetto, where his grandmother and widowed aunts, the Serafinos, still live. When Hugh arrives in Valetto on sabbatical in 2011, he finds that the cottage he inherited is already occupied, by Elisa Tomassi. She’s a chef from Milan who claims that the cottage was actually left to her family as thanks for the aid that they gave Hugh’s grandfather during World War II. From this beginning, the novel movingly explores many facets of grief and abandonment:  Hugh is a widower who has also recently lost his mother; Hugh’s grandfather left the family during the war and never returned; Elisa’s famed restaurant burned down, and her husband decamped to London with their son. Truths from Italy’s fascist past come to light and are dealt with at the celebration of Grandmother Serafino’s hundredth birthday. The themes of Return to Valetto overlap with those in another novel by the talented Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, which I reviewed at length in 2017.

Author Spotlight: Richard Russo

I’m always assured of a good read when Richard Russo’s name is on the cover. Russo has the capacity to explore the internal musings of his blue-collar characters while advancing a complicated plot, so he gets me totally invested in his characters’ happiness. Of course, not everyone in our world ends up happy.

• The Fool Trilogy

Back in 1993, Russo published Nobody’s Fool, which turned out to be the first in a series of novels all set in the decaying upstate New York town of New Bath. It helps if you read the three novels in order, but you can pick up the story anywhere along the line.

In Nobody’s Fool, set in 1984, Russo introduced Donald Sullivan, called “Sully.” At age 60, Sully has survived a number of setbacks in his rather dissolute life, but he’s buoyed by his wacky friends. (The movie adaptation of this novel starred a cantankerous Paul Newman.)

Everybody’s Fool, which came out in 2016, is set a decade after Nobody’s Fool. Russo enlarges the cast of characters and presents a flurry of incidents—sometimes hilarious and sometimes pitiable—over a two-day period.

The recently published Somebody’s Fool (2023) is the third installment. Russo moves far ahead in time, to the 2010s. Sully is dead, but his son Peter, now middle-aged, is one of the main characters. Many other folks from the previous two novels are also still around. New Bath has been annexed by the nearby Schuyler Springs, creating multiple plot threads. And, over one weekend in February, a decomposing body is found in an abandoned hotel, an estranged son returns to town, police brutality incidents are revealed, and the romantic entanglements of several couples are altered. There’s never a dull moment!

Prominent among the life lessons embedded in Somebody’s Fool is this one: when life gets tough, you have to try something. If that doesn’t work, you have to try something else. And the overall narrative theme of the novel? “How complex and multilayered even the simplest of lives [are], how they [intersect] in strange, unpredictable ways, people magically appearing at just the right moment, others turning up at the exact wrong one, often giving the impression that fate must be at work, though in all probability it was little more than chance.” (345). I loved Russo’s unconventional characters so much that I did not want this lengthy novel to end.

• The Pulitzer Winner

Russo won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Empire Falls, which broke my heart two decades ago. The novel centers on Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Diner, and the other inhabitants of a dying town in Maine. Empire Falls is a must-read in the Russo canon, and there’s a star-studded television mini-series (2005) based on it.

• Other Russo Offerings

I’ve reviewed a number of Richard Russo’s other writings, both fiction and nonfiction, on this blog in the past. Check out my comments on Elsewhere, That Old Cape Magic, and The Destiny Thief, and my lengthier review of Chances Are . . .

For fans of the contemporary American novel, Richard Russo is essential.

Settings: Traverse City, St Louis, Chicago

Tom Lake     Ann Patchett     (2023)  In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, three young adult daughters of a family are hunkered down at their childhood home, a cherry and apple farm in Michigan, helping harvest the crops. They beg their mother to tell the full story of her summer romance with movie star Peter Duke, which took place back in 1988 when Duke was a struggling young actor. The mother obliges, and the novel toggles between 1988 and 2020. Much of the plot centers on stage productions of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, so if you haven’t read or seen the play in a while, it will help if you brush up before starting Tom Lake. That said, the unfolding of the mother’s tale and its connection to the family’s status more than 30 years later are engrossing, with small and large revelations along the way. Novelist Patchett could ask for compensation from the Michigan Travel Commission, given her glowing descriptions of the state’s natural beauty, especially the area around Traverse City, in the northwest quadrant of the Lower Peninsula. (See my review of another Patchett novel here.)

The Altruists     Andrew Ridker     (2019)  An untenured visiting/adjunct professor at a fictitious university in St Louis asks his two adult children to come home from NYC for a weekend. It’s not because he misses them—he’s facing unemployment and needs to have funds from them to bail out the mortgage on the family home. This intimate family drama looks back on pivotal scenes from the 1970s to the recent past, exploring issues of grief, parenting, and, yes, altruism. What do we want to make of our lives? How do we look back from our later years on our choices? How do our finances enter in? Arthur Alter and his children Ethan and Maggie try to answer all these questions as they grope for closure after the death of the matriarch of the family, Francine. Quibbles: I do wish that the novelist’s editor had axed some of his many flawed uses of the word “begrudging.” And the depiction of Maggie’s self-sacrificing lifestyle is somewhat mocking. Overall, though, this is a well-crafted, thought-provoking study of family dynamics.  

Wellness     Nathan Hill     (2023)  I noted in my review of Nathan Hill’s previous novel, The Nix, that Hill is exceedingly verbose. He hasn’t trimmed it down any in Wellness, but I still read all 597 pages, even his 45-page treatise (gasp) on the algorithms of Facebook. The novel’s main characters, Jack and Elizabeth, are very endearing people, whom we first meet when they are in college in Chicago in the early 1990s. I kept reading to find out how they fared over the years, in their relationship and in their city. Some chapters travel back to their childhoods, but the focus of the novel is in the early 2010s, when Jack and Elizabeth are approaching middle age and dealing with finances, parenting, and careers. (He’s an adjunct art professor, and she’s a researcher in psychology.) In some ways, Wellness is a profoundly sad book, but the novelist probes deeply into his characters’ psyches, and those characters prove resilient even in the face of tragedy.

Three Contemporary Novels

Recently my longsuffering husband has hauled home large stacks of novels from our local library for me. Most of them have headed right back to the drop box. But I’ve found a few great titles about contemporary life, reviewed here for your consideration!

The Marsh Queen     Virginia Hartman     (2022)  Bird artist Loni is settled in Washington, DC, working at the Smithsonian, when she gets word that her mother has dementia and must go into assisted living. Loni drives to her home town in northern Florida to help her brother clear out the family home. What she thinks will be a two-week stay keeps getting extended, as she reacquaints herself with the flora and fauna of the marshes, swamps, and lakes of her childhood and tries to unravel the secrets around the death of her father, which occurred decades in the past. The action in this novel, told in first-person narration, builds to a startling (and, fair warning, violent) denouement. I found the descriptions of steamy, lush, leafy wildernesses to be suggestive of Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing (reviewed here), and indeed, like that novel, The Marsh Queen is a complex mystery tale that also features a romance subplot. Thanks to Meg McCarthy for recommending this book!

Take What You Need     Idry Novey     (2023)  Two voices speak in first-person in this novel. Leah describes her car trip to the home of her estranged stepmother, Jean, in the Allegheny Mountains of Appalachia. In alternate chapters, we hear from Jean, who lives in a ramshackle house filled with the unusual metal artwork she’s created. Time moves back and forth, enlarging the reader’s understanding of these two characters, as the storyline progresses toward Leah’s confrontation, after Jean’s death, with Jean’s house full of sculptures. What I found much more intriguing than the plot, however, was the depiction of the difference between the two women in their attitudes toward the political divide in the United States. Jean is surrounded by people scratching out a precarious existence in a blighted town, and she treats her neighbors with kindness, even as she disagrees with their devotion to Trump. But Leah, removed from her comfortable urban milieu, is disgusted by the poverty of Appalachia and is terrified of its inhabitants. Does Leah change her views at all? Read this novel, and see what you think.

Godspeed     Nickolas Butler    (2021)  I’ve reviewed two of Butler’s previous novels, The Hearts of Men and Little Faith, so I know that he’s not afraid to tackle tough issues in his fiction. In Godspeed, he lays bare unchecked capitalism, income inequality, and addiction. The three main characters are partners in True Triangle Construction, in Wyoming. Cole is the competent, take-charge businessman, though his personal life is a shambles, since his wife has left him. Teddy, on the other hand, has a loving marriage and four kids. He’s a solid citizen and a committed Mormon, but he doesn’t always follow all the rules of his religion. Bart—well, Bart is the one with the addiction problem. All three men are skilled carpenters and contractors, but they’re barely getting by financially on small-scale renovation jobs. Then an ultra-wealthy woman offers them a chance to build her a magnificent house high in the mountains. The catch is that they have four months to complete the project if they want the substantial bonus she’s offering. As the clock ticks, more and more details of the unusual project, and of the characters’ backstories, emerge. I stayed up late into the night to finish this stunning novel, so I’ll warn you that there are some graphic scenes of violence that may give you nightmares.

Contemporary Novels by Reliable Authors

Lucy by the Sea     Elizabeth Strout     (2022)  Pulitzer-winner Strout has helped her readers examine many of the complexities of the human condition in her eight previous highly acclaimed books. Now, in Lucy by the Sea, she looks at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, through the eyes of Lucy Barton (a character she’s developed in My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, and Oh William). Lucy’s ex-husband, William, is a scientist who sees how dangerous the coronavirus is. In early March 2020, he insists that Lucy leave New York City for a rental house on the coast of Maine. In first-person narrative, Lucy details the interactions she has with family and friends during 2020 and early 2021. Lucy by the Sea is the first discussion of the pandemic I’ve read that truly captures the sense of desperation and loneliness that the pandemic has wrought. One quote: “I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone.” (245)

The Master Bedroom     Tessa Hadley     (2007)  Kate Flynn is brilliant, brash, and beautiful—never boring. She takes a leave from her teaching job in London and goes back to her home town in Wales to care for her elderly mother, who has dementia. Kate’s entanglement in the lives of old friends allows the author to explore the complexities of desire, ambition, and generational ties. I’ve been bingeing on the well-crafted books by Britain’s Tessa Hadley; they are among my favorites, as you can see in this recent post.

The Sweet Remnants of Summer     Alexander McCall Smith     (2022)  In this 14th offering in the Isabel Dalhousie series, it’s a warm September in Edinburgh. Isabel and her “dishy” husband, Jamie, get themselves involved as mediators—or possibly interveners—in two interpersonal dramas in the worlds of art, music, and wine. Glimpses of Isabel’s personal life, and of her job as editor of a philosophy journal, punctuate the gentle, easygoing story. I’ve reviewed novels in this series previously. The setting and the characters rank high for me in McCall Smith’s voluminous catalog of titles.

Among My Faves: Tessa Hadley

British author Tessa Hadley’s writing just keeps getting better with each successive book that she produces. Her plots focus on families, marital relationships, friendship, and the impact of grief. Her characters are primarily middle-class or upper-middle-class British people who are artists or writers or teachers. I find her prose to be both lucid and rich in its deep searches into motivation, desire, and personality. In this review, I take a look at two of Hadley’s books.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories (2017) is a collection of ten short stories, seven of which appeared previously in the New Yorker magazine. To give you a sense of Hadley’s writing, here are selected quotes from four of the stories:

From “An Abduction” 

“Something was revealed in her that was normally hidden: an auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an animal, blotting up against her lips and eyelids. . . Her family called her pudgy, but she just looked soft, as if she were longing to nestle.” (9) 

From “Bad Dreams” 

“In the lounge, the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon, which was balanced on top of the wall at the back of the paved yard.” (118) 

From “Under the Sign of the Moon”

“All the time he was setting out these platitudes with such solemnity, Greta felt sure that they weren’t the real content of his thoughts, just as her own sceptical, condescending cleverness when she argued with him wasn’t the real content of her thoughts either. This conversation took place on the surface, while their real lives were hidden underground beneath it, crouching, listening out, mutely attentive.” (185) 

From “Silk Brocade”

“.  . . on the white walls there were prints of paintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it. Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass.” (205) 

In Hadley’s 2019 novel, Late in the Day, two couples have been friends for decades and are now in their fifties. At the beginning of the book, Lydia’s husband, Zachary, dies suddenly. In deep shock and grief, Lydia comes to stay with Alex and Christine. Hadley explores how each of the three misses Zachary desperately, but she also delves into the interpersonal relationships of all four characters—relationships that have evolved through many changes in their lives. For this she shifts back and forth in time, looking at pivotal events. Again, I offer some key quotations:

“Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.” (118)

“Both women felt some balance of power in their lives had been restored in relation to their men, after the initial blow of becoming mother to young babies, which had knocked them back; now their children filled them out rather than depleting them.” (161) 

“And we were terribly bored by the Manifesto, couldn’t understand a word of it, we preferred historical novels, really. (236) 

Earlier short story collections by Tessa Hadley include Sunstroke and Other Stories (2007) and Married Love and Other Stories (2013). Earlier novels are Accidents in the Home (2002), Everything Will Be All Right (2003), The Master Bedroom (2007), The London Train (2011), Clever Girl (2013), The Past (2015), and Free Love (2022). I’ve reviewed Free Love on this blog.

Add some of these titles to your list of books to buy or to request from your library!

44 Scotland Street, Again

The Peppermint Tea Chronicles     Alexander McCall Smith     (2019)

I’m an admitted partisan of Alexander McCall Smith’s mellow, good-humored novels. The prolific writer churns out several new books every year, and I’ve reviewed many of them on this blog.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series (with the most titles) recounts the mild adventures of Precious Ramotswe in Botswana, where McCall Smith lived for many years.

The Isabel Dalhousie Series follows the life of a professional philosopher who is also an amateur detective, living in Edinburgh.

My absolute favorite, also set in Edinburgh, is The 44 Scotland Street Series, with its wacky ensemble cast of characters.

The latest, and thirteenth, in the 44 Scotland Street Series is The Peppermint Tea Chronicles. It does not disappoint. As I’ve done with other novels in this series, I called my husband to listen to me read paragraphs that are laugh-aloud funny. The character I love most is young Bertie Pollock, who has transitioned very, very slowly from age five to age seven as the novels have appeared. Young Bertie is so sweet and sincere that you can’t help but root for him when he gets into a pickle, as he often does. To me, he represents all that is good in the world, trying to survive in the face of callousness and exploitation.

As usual, McCall Smith dispenses plenty of nuggets of simple wisdom, like this one: “Older people told long stories that younger people found dull. Everybody knew that, except for older people.” (143)

And he displays his support for feminism, both in his portrayal of female characters and in their dialogue and musings. Here is Elspeth, the mother of triplet toddlers: “Why should masculinity be thoughtless or indifferent to the feelings of others? There were plenty of men, she felt, who did not want to be hard-hearted or unfeeling; there were plenty of men who felt the pain of others, who wanted to do something about it, who wanted to comfort those in need of comfort. Yet there were rather more, she suspected, who did not.” (186)

When the political headlines of the day are getting you down, steer right toward your local library for a McCall Smith book (filed under “M,” not “S”). The 44 Scotland Street Series is best read in the order that the books were written, but McCall Smith’s other series can be read more as stand-alone novels, since he always fills in character background briefly.

A Mystery in the Cotswolds

A Bitter Feast     Deborah Crombie     (2019)

I love a good mystery, so I can’t figure out how I’ve missed Deborah Crombie’s offerings all these years. A Bitter Feast is her eighteenth book in the series of novels about Detective Inspector Gemma James and Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid, two present-day Scotland Yard police officers. The series began way back in 1993! What’s more amazing to me is that Crombie is from Texas, and currently lives in Texas, but she writes effortlessly about British cops and British customs. As an American, maybe I’m missing some of the subtle errors that a native Briton would catch, but Crombie is pretty convincing to my mind.

In A Bitter Feast, Gemma and Duncan, along with their three children, are off in the Cotswolds for a weekend visiting the family of a colleague. The Cotswolds region of Britain has long been designated an “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty,” with its rolling hills and historic buildings constructed from the local golden-colored limestone. So the novelist takes the opportunity to describe bucolic scenery and the glowing of that Cotswold stone in the late afternoon sun. The mystery arises from a car accident: at first the accident seems to have been caused simply by driver error at a dark intersection, but further investigation reveals more nefarious activities. Gemma and Duncan join forces with the village police to gather evidence. The mystery plot itself would make A Bitter Feast worth reading, but there’s a lot more to enjoy.

The “feast” of the title is a gourmet charity luncheon catered by a chef who runs the town pub, which has become a tourist hotspot for its food menu. This chef, Viv Holland, was on a path to becoming a celebrity in London when she mysteriously decamped to the countryside. Viv’s culinary skills are highlighted, and her employment history becomes part of the investigative mix. Small touches work well; for example, Gemma and Duncan’s teen son, who helps out in the kitchen, may have a potential career path in the restaurant industry.

The plot is moved along in large part by dialogue, and fine dialogue it is. I got a good sense of the main actors even though I haven’t read any of the previous Gemma-and-Duncan mysteries—Crombie provides enough background detail for readers just picking up the series. I’d label this novel a cross between a police procedural mystery and a cozy mystery, with the rural setting enhancing the cozy side.

I already have some early volumes by Crombie on order from my district library, so stay tuned to the Cedar Park Book Blog for further reviews. For mysteries by other authors, click the category in the right-hand column.

Youth Traveling with Old Age

Akin     Emma Donaghue     (2019)

The premise of this novel is unusual, stretching credibility a bit. Noah Selvaggio, a recently retired chemistry professor in Manhattan, is about to leave for a solo trip to Nice, in the French Riviera, to celebrate his 80th birthday. Two complications arise. First, in clearing out a box of family memorabilia, Noah comes across a group of odd photographs that seem to have been taken in Nice during World War II. Second, a social worker phones Noah to ask him to become a temporary foster parent to his eleven-year-old-nephew, Michael, whom he’s never met. Michael’s father is dead, his mother is in prison, and his maternal grandmother, with whom he had been living, has just died. Noah decides to take Michael along on his European vacation, since it would be expensive to cancel the trip altogether.

Several plot lines move the story forward. In Nice, Noah is trying to figure out why his mother would have taken those photographs in Nazi-occupied Nice. He himself was born in Nice and lived there until he was about four, so he’s conjuring up early memories, grasping for obscure French words, and remembering his beloved grandfather, who was a famed photographer. Noah is also thinking through the mysterious circumstances of the death of Michael’s father.

But mainly Noah is trying to get along with Michael, which is particularly challenging because Noah and his late wife had no children of their own. Noah has little knowledge of the digital world into which Michael was born—a point that the many dialogue exchanges between Noah and Michael highlight. For example, when Michael asks about the availability of wi-fi, Noah hears it as a question about his deceased wife, whom he dearly misses.

Both Michael and Noah are alone, but they are “akin” in a world where each has lost most of his family connections. On this trip they’re together, in a foreign place, forced to rely on each other. (In this way, Akin has some similarities to Donaghue’s blockbuster novel-and-movie Room, about a mother and her son kept captive together in a shed by a deranged rapist. Akin, however, is not at all horrifying.) Noah and Michael roam the tourist sites during the Carnaval de Nice, an annual festival, gradually learning each other’s vocabulary and interests and tastes in food.

The sub-plots in the novel are wrapped up pretty tidily, but don’t expect a dramatic happily-ever-after for the protagonists in Akin. Instead Donaghue paints a realistic and satisfying picture of the possibilities for a little less loneliness for both Noah and Michael.

Prescriptivist vs Descriptivist

The Grammarians     Cathleen Schine     (2019)

In the esoteric reaches of English language studies, a debate rages. Should there be unwavering standards for English writing and speech, or should we let the language take its own course and change with it? I’ve oversimplified, certainly, this battle between the prescriptivists and the descriptivists, but I live with it every day in my own house, since I’m a moderate descriptivist who is married to an extreme prescriptivist. My husband gets nearly apoplectic at “wrong” usage of a past participle or a comma. In his defense, he’s just adhering to the principles we’ve both learned from Fowler’s Modern English Usage and The Chicago Manual of Style. Really, any guide to current grammar or usage or definitions is inherently prescriptivist, since it’s setting criteria of reference.

In Cathleen Schine’s novel The Grammarians, the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate causes a dramatic rift between the identical twin sisters Laurel and Daphne. The girls grow up in the 1960s loving words, inventing a language to speak to each other, and actually trying to take Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition to bed with them. They are always keenly competitive, but as they make their way in the adult world of 1980s New York City, their paths diverge, with one becoming a free-wheeling poet and one a columnist famed for her prescriptivist pronouncements.

The rantings on both sides are witty, sparking this short novel along after a few  slower-moving initial chapters. I was taken with some of the comparisons. For example: “[The renowned grammarian] Fowler, gallant and chivalrous, call[ed] for the rescue of words that were ‘cruelly used’! As if they were running into the fog, shivering on the London streets, clutching pitifully at their thin shawls” (182)

One twin believes that “’there is no standard English, language keeps changing. And to understand language and teach it, you have to know what is actually spoken.’” (209) Later in the book she decides that “even the dictionary is arbitrary, trying to capture contingency, to enchain syllables, to lash the wind.” (234)

The other twin says of her estranged sister, “The last time we spoke she called me a prescriptivist! You know what that is? A person who cares about proper language usage. A person who cares about the rules of grammar.” (217)

Yet, in the face of the loss of a loved one, the prescriptivist sister laments: “There were no words for what she felt, the depth of the emptiness, the breadth of the emptiness, the emptiness of the emptiness. Words could only cloak what she felt. Words were supposed to illuminate and clarify. Words were meant to communicate information and feelings from one person to another. But today words stood numb and in the way.” (238)

The grammatical division between the twins clashes with their identicalness. But I think that when the novelist assigns these two opposing viewpoints to identical twins she may be pointing to the way that prescriptivism and descriptivism are two panels of a diptych. Rules and regulations help us all to have common ground in understanding exactly (not approximately) what others are speaking or writing. And acceptance of change in language is also inevitable. That’s why we don’t all speak and write the way Chaucer did in the fourteenth century!

Men. Hunting. Way Up North

Hunter’s Moon     Philip Caputo     (2019)

In seven linked short stories, Philip Caputo summons up the wild allure of the far northern regions of the United States. Six of the seven stories take place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which hovers around the 46th parallel of latitude, and the seventh is set even farther north, in Alaska. Hunting and fishing are the prime attractions of Caputo’s settings. Each story revolves in some way around these outdoor sports: the appeal of rugged terrain, the terror of getting lost, and (yes) the reality of weapons violence.

I don’t hunt, and I don’t understand the technicalities of rifles, but as you read Hunter’s Moon you can set those components aside and revel in Caputo’s descriptions of the natural world, like these: 

• “The sky lightens from the gray of old asphalt to oyster and snuffs out the stars one by one until all are hidden in a canopy of brilliant blue. A hoarfrost glitters on the brown bracken fern matting the clearing across which the white pine’s shadow lies like a fallen spear.” (61)

• “This is a silence never broken by humanity’s clatter; it is layered, dense, virgin, alien—a disquieting quiet, if you will. All the otherness of the natural world is in it—a world complete unto itself, independent of man’s endeavor’s and conflicts, his plans, schemes, joys, griefs, his egoistic certainty that he is a child of God.” (133)

You can move past the brief scenes of violence in Hunter’s Moon, but you can’t escape Caputo’s exploration of distressing aspects of male experience. Characters include military veterans who suffer PTSD from combat and fathers and sons who have fraught relationships. Here’s one father, speaking about his son, who is on a hunting trip in Alaska after having been expelled from college: 

• “Being a male of the old school, the kind who prefers back slaps to bro hugs, I would welcome a mood of active aggressiveness, an air-clearing, spleen-blowing flight, albeit one that doesn’t turn physical. . . I’m a fifty-six-year-old Russian literature professor who hasn’t been in a scrap since I was his age, and maybe younger.” (113)

One particular character, Will Treadwell, appears in five of the seven stories and lends a unifying presence as he transitions from owning a small-town bar and craft brewery into retirement. Only one female character, appearing in two of the seven stories, has a substantial role, but I’m okay with that. Caputo’s understanding of his male characters is deep and rich. And, along with the best nature writers, he captures the very feel of those remote northern forests.   

For similar themes and settings, read my reviews of Susan Bernhard’s Winter Loon, Leif Enger’s Virgil Wander, and Nickolas Butler’s The Hearts of Men.

More by Elizabeth Strout

Olive, Again     Elizabeth Strout     (2019)

Olive is back, and you won’t want to miss her return.

Elizabeth Strout, the queen of linked short stories, has produced a sequel that matches or exceeds her Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge of 2008. In thirteen succinct stories, each of which can absolutely stand alone, Strout unpeels life in the fictional rural town of Crosby, Maine. The crusty, candid Olive—a character in most of the stories—is sometimes intolerant and cranky but often kind. When her kindness is awkwardly expressed and causes offense, she’s surprised, and she tries to rectify her behavior. She’s mellowed as she’s aged.

The other characters in Olive, Again are townspeople whom Olive interacts with in some way. Their lives are intertwined with each other and with the inevitable sadnesses and transgressions and occasional triumphs of living on this Earth. There’s unfaithfulness, pedophilia, disease, and death (especially by suicide) aplenty. The surroundings of the town can reflect the despair of the inhabitants:

• “Around them a sudden gust of wind sent a few twigs swirling, and muddy plastic bag that had been run over a number of times rose slightly, then dropped back to the ground among slushy car tracks from the old snow.”(120)

• “As Denny approached the river, and could see in the moonlight how the river was moving quickly, he felt as though his life had been a piece of bark on that river, just going along, not thinking at all. Headed toward the waterfall.” (142)

Yet it’s not all bleakness. Strout's characters can also connect with the natural world in a way that lifts their spirits, if only briefly:

• “The field was darkening, the trees behind it were like pieces of black canvas, but the sky still sent down the sun, which sliced gently across the grass on the far end of the field.” (17)

The stories, which take place the very recent past, span more than a decade of Olive’s retirement from her school-teaching job. Early in the book, when she’s still mourning the loss of her husband, she marries for a second time. I was shocked by this plot development, not the least because Olive did not seem to me like someone who’d be considered a prize mate. I could hear Strout gently chiding me for my belittling thought. Though Olive doesn’t possess physical beauty and can be irksome in her bluntness, she is unfailingly honest. Honesty is a rare trait, and her second husband recognizes this.

Please read this book. It will open your eyes to components of the human condition that you’ve never thought about before. 

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I’ve reviewed two other excellent Strout linked-story novels: My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and its sequel, Anything is Possible (2017), set in New York City and rural Illinois respectively.

Another Great Horowitz Mystery

The Sentence Is Death     Anthony Horowitz     (2019)

I’m unabashedly a fan of Anthony Horowitz’s mystery novels. On this blog I’ve reviewed his 2017 offering, Magpie Murders, as well as the first of his metafictional Daniel Hawthorne mysteries, The Word is Murder (2018). With The Sentence Is Death, Horowitz presents the second volume that features the private detective Hawthorne, a former police officer now hired by the police to help on particularly challenging murder cases.

As with The Word is Murder, The Sentence Is Death features as first-person narrator a character named Anthony Horowitz, who bears a startling resemblance to the real-life Anthony Horowitz in his work life and in his family configuration—hence, metafiction. Watch for zingers that play off the insertion of the author into his own fiction. For example, the fictional Horowitz notes that Jill Green, actual wife of the author Horowitz, “has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about.” (303) Uh, “truth” in this case is a fictional narrative about a fictional murder.

The case involves the murder of a prominent divorce lawyer in London, with red herrings and potential suspects abounding. Key clues include an overheard doorway conversation shortly before the murder and the number “182” painted on the wall near the corpse. Throughout his writing career the author Horowitz has been captivated by word play—mistaken similar names, anagrams, homonyms, crosswords, multiple meanings, and such. Word play often has an important plot function in the episodes of Foyle’s War, the World War II mystery series (2002-2015) that he wrote for British television. Fictional Horowitz also loves words, as he transcribes the details of the murder case that Hawthorne is investigating in The Sentence Is Death. Hawthorne says to fictional Horowitz, “You’ll choose all the right words and you’ll make it come to life. There’s no way I could do anything like that. Which is why it’s such a great partnership. I do the legwork. You do the rest.” (358)

Fictional Horowitz also chastises writers who break the “fair-play rule” of mysteries:  “Whenever Hawthorne saw anything or worked something out, he deliberately kept it from me as if the whole thing was some sort of game. This is often the case in detective stories and I always find it infuriating . . .” (164-65) Of course, author Horowitz leads his readers down many cul-de-sacs before he reveals the solution to the crime. This is despite his avowed approach:  ”In a museum, a department store, a theatre, a Tube station, I’ll find myself wondering what goes on behind those locked doors. I sometimes think that it’s actually a good definition of creative writing: to unlock doors and take readers through to the other side.” (131) Multiple doors in The Sentence Is Death open and shut and then open again.

Mystery lovers, don’t miss this one.  

Loneliness in London

How Not to Die Alone     Richard Roper     (2019)

In 2017, I posted a review of Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, and that novel also made it to my exclusive list of favorite books of the year. In Honeyman’s story, an awkward and abused woman in present-day Glasgow faces her demons and seeks to change her life.

Richard Roper’s How Not to Die Alone, set in London, has as its central character the forty-two-year-old Andrew Smith, who is another lonely soul, desperate for connection with other human beings. Although the premises of the two novels are similar, Roper’s book is by no means a clone of Honeyman’s. His narrative voice is distinctive and powerful, treating the issue of trauma and its resultant isolating consequences. Roper also succeeds in making How Not to Die Alone uproariously funny.

Andrew is employed in an unusual civil service job: he searches the dwellings of deceased people who have no known family, trying to find any evidence of relatives who can (1) be notified of the death and (2) pay for disposition of the body. If he can’t find anyone related to the deceased, the local government must foot the bill for a basic funeral and cremation. As you might expect, the bodies of people who die alone are sometimes not discovered until long after they expire. The coroner removes these bodies before Andrew shows up to comb through the possessions of the deceased, but the sites of death are often grim—cluttered, filthy, and malodorous. Nevertheless, Andrew seems to get satisfaction from his work, even going the extra mile by attending the funerals of those who have no discoverable relatives.

The novel opens at one of these funerals, and we immediately get a picture of Andrew’s fragile mental state. He has an obvious case of PTSD—with terrifying episodes being triggered whenever he hears the song Blue Moon—but we don’t learn about the initial traumatic event until late in the book. Meanwhile, Andrew becomes friendly with Peggy, a new employee who joins the eccentric Death Administration staff. Peggy could be Andrew’s ticket to better mental health, but unfortunately a longstanding lie on Andrew’s part blocks romance. As Andrew explains, “It came from a misunderstanding, but then I kept the lie going, and the longer I did the harder it was to tell the truth.” (245)

As the tension resulting from Andrew’s lie grows, the novelist injects humor that defuses the morbid aspects of the death scenes. Roper also has some lovely descriptive passages, like this one: “She’d fiddled with one of her earrings so much that it came free in her hand and bounced onto the table like a little blue tear that had frozen as it fell.” (245)  And I found Andrew’s obsessions with model trains and with the discography of Ella Fitzgerald endearing.

As the novel wraps up, Andrew observes, “Life, just sometimes, can be wonderfully, beautifully simple.” (308) By this point I was really rooting for ol’ Andrew, wanting a sequel to How Not to Die Alone, to find out what the next chapter would bring for this forlorn yet appealing character.

A Cross-Atlantic Immigrant Mystery

Searching for Sylvie Lee     Jean Kwok     (2019)

Jean Kwok sets up a tantalizing mystery while at the same time constructing a moving story about an immigrant family in today’s highly mobile global economy.

The mystery:  Successful 30-something New Yorker Sylvie Lee has disappeared on a trip to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother. Her younger sister, Amy, flies to Amsterdam to look for her. This mystery component keeps the pages turning as chapters skip back and forth in time, presenting alternating narrators.

The immigrant family:  Originally from China, the extended Lee and Tan families emigrated to the Netherlands and to the United States more than a quarter century ago. Members of the younger generation are assimilated and fluent in multiple languages but still face bigotry in both countries. As one Chinese American character puts it, “I think that wherever you are, to live in the world as a white person is a completely different experience than a person of color. Discrimination is invisible to them because it does not affect them. They are truly shocked.” (227)

The dual settings (Amsterdam and NYC) add a layer of interest, since the attitudes toward immigrants have both similarities and differences. Social class is another factor. Even though Sylvie attended all the right schools and landed high-paying jobs, she laments, “I never mastered the art of the graceful shrug, the careless indifference of those who summered on private islands and tied clove hitches on sailboats.” (198)

I found the syntax and word choice in this novel particularly arresting. With each chapter, the language changes to suit the narrator of that chapter. So, when Ma, the mother of Sylvie and Amy, narrates, the sentences are shorter, with nouns often lacking articles, because Ma speaks very little English. The invoking of proverbs—such as “Those who wish to eat honey must suffer the sting of the bees” (198)—also varies. Ma’s narrative is chock full of traditional sayings, but the more Westernized Sylvie and Amy cite proverbs somewhat less often. The characters whose native language is Dutch speak in sentences that mimic the patterns of that language. Of course, we’re reading the words of fictional Dutch speakers, who are speaking Dutch that has been “translated” by Jean Kwok into English.

The fine character development in Searching for Sylvie Lee overshadows any deficiencies in the plot department, so I won’t downgrade the novel for its few melodramatic twists. In the end, Amy concludes: “How my knowledge of Sylvie, of Ma, of myself has changed. We had all been hidden behind the curtain of language and culture: from each other, from ourselves. I have learned that though the curtains in the Netherlands are always open, there is much that can be concealed in broad daylight.” (312)

For reviews of other fiction about immigrants, click on Immigrant Stories in the Archive column on the right. For another novel that combines mystery with the immigrant experience, see my post reviewing The Other Americans by Laila Lalami.

Jury Duty Intrigue

The Body in Question     Jill Ciment     (2019)

If you read this novel, you may never want to be selected as a jury member on a serious criminal case. In fact, you may get several ideas for how to disqualify yourself, so that you don’t have to deal with confusing and contradictory evidence, seemingly capricious legal rulings, morbidly curious spectators in the gallery, members of the press trying to get a story, and fellow jurors who are disinterested or foolish or rude. You may squirm at the thought of being a jury member on a sensational case and being sequestered for the duration of the trial with your fellow citizens. Oh, and you may vow that, even if one day you do end up on a jury, you will not, under any circumstances, enter into a sexual liaison with a fellow juror.

Jill Ciment draws out all these thoughts in the 174 pages of this novel/novella, as she chronicles the experience of jurors C2 and F17, who are asked to decide a case of murder: a teenager is accused of killing her infant brother by setting him on fire. The details of the death are gruesome, laid out dispassionately in courtroom scenes by the witnesses who come forward to testify. The murder case is by no means straightforward, as the actions of the teen’s identical twin sister and of that twin’s boyfriend are revealed.

The behind-the-scenes affair between C2 and F17 (whose names we don’t learn until late in the book) is also complicated. Juror C2 is a highly successful photographer, age 52, who is married to a renowned journalist 33 years her senior. F17 is a professor of anatomy in his early forties, unattached at the time of the trial. C2 and F17 are immediately attracted to each other during the jury selection process, and they go on to have an affair that they must hide from the other jury members and from the officers of the court. This isn’t easy, since the jury members are under constant surveillance—in the courtroom, in the greasy spoons where they’re fed, and at the seedy motel where they’re kept isolated from the press and from the public at large.

As C2’s backstory is revealed, we learn that her marriage is strained by the increasing frailty and neediness of her elderly husband. She’s been tending to him, but this very caregiving points out to her the indignities of old age, which she herself will have to face eventually. Perhaps this is why she decides to have a fling with F17—to assert her own attractiveness and vigor. Perhaps the challenge of keeping the affair secret during a lengthy jury sequestration makes the sex more titillating. 

With spare language and a driving plot, Jill Ciment gives readers a ring-side seat in the courtroom and in the motel room. Read this riveting book in one sitting, and remember your civic responsibility if you’re called for jury duty.  

Mental Illness in the Family

Ask Again, Yes     Mary Beth Keane     (2019)

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope meet in the police academy in New York City in the early 1970s. After they each marry, they end up buying adjoining houses in a leafy suburb, commuting to the city to pursue their cop careers. This could become a pretty idyllic tale, especially when Kate, one of Francis’s three daughters, forms a deep childhood friendship with Peter, Brian’s only child. But mental illness is no respecter of happy endings.

We know from the start that Brian’s wife, Anne, is unconventional and taciturn, and Brian “always seemed to want to defuse things by agreeing with her.” (73) After Anne loses a baby, her mental state becomes dangerously explosive. (A word of warning that Anne’s turn to violence results in a distressing scene, though it’s very brief.) Anne’s actions have long-term consequences for both families: the teenage Kate and Peter are torn apart, and adult careers are shattered.

The novelist gives her story a long arc of many decades and handles it with sensitivity. Anne is not cast as a villain but rather as a suffering soul whose mental illness needs treatment, not contempt. Her actions are hurtful to others, physically and emotionally, but these actions don’t arise out of malice.

Despite the difficult subject matter, the tone of the novel is steady and even, probing family interactions with subtlety, holding the attachment of Kate and Peter as a spark of hope.

What about that title? The phrase “Ask again, yes” is plucked from an exchange, late in the book, between Kate and Peter, and it hints, from the time that you first see the cover, that they may eventually be reunited. Other than that, I didn’t find the title particularly illuminating. Still, my need to learn how life turned out for the members of the Gleeson and Stanhope families kept me moving from chapter to chapter in this immersive, well-wrought novel.

Brexit's Effects on Britons

Middle England     Jonathan Coe     (2018)

The Brexit crisis in the United Kingdom fascinates me. I’ve been following all the convoluted negotiations by reading the Guardian news online, and I’ve learned more about arcane parliamentary practices than I ever thought possible. So when I noticed that a recent novel by Jonathan Coe was billed as a satire on Brexit, I immediately reserved it at my local public library.

Fear not, however, if you have little interest in Britain’s attempts to leave the European Union. Since Coe is an accomplished writer, Middle England is a perfectly fine family drama, set against the background of contemporary British cultural and political events. (The extended Trotter family and their friends have been the subject of two previous novels by Coe, but it isn’t necessary that you read those novels to follow the family dynamics.) The 50-something siblings Benjamin and Lois Trotter are depressive types even in the best of times, and Coe’s exploration of their relationships is compassionate.

Starting in 2010, Coe traces eight years in the lives of Britons of all political stripes, from bigoted, anti-immigration Brexiteers to self-righteous left-wing crusaders. He skewers them all, even as he demonstrates how the Brexit issue has divided people and damaged relationships. Friendships are shattered, and one married couple in the novel actually separate because of their political differences. Yet other characters refuse to allow Brexit to enter their bedrooms. Some scenes in Middle England are played straight, and others are piercingly satirical. The chapters that feature a left-wing newspaper writer interviewing an obfuscating communications staffer from the office of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron had me laughing out loud.

In current British political writing, “Middle England” is somewhat analogous to “Middle America,” referring to middle-class and lower-middle class citizens who do not live in urban centers—in this case, London. Some find that “Middle England” also refers to a geographic region in the Midlands region of England. For me, the title of Coe’s work has additional resonances:

• JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth (mentioned several times in the novel)

• Political moderation (as distinct from rabid right-wing or left wing stances)

• Middle English from the Middle Ages (evoking the glorious literary heritage of Britain, hence nostalgic nationalism, hence isolationism, hence Brexit)

Jonathan Coe writes in a British tradition of razor sharp observers of the contemporary human condition. If you like his approach, you might also like the work of Penelope Lively or Margaret Drabble or Joanna Trollope. Or use the new Search Box at the top of this page to find all the British novels I’ve reviewed.