Four 20th-Century Historical Novels

These novels vary greatly in style, but all are set in the 1900s, from the aftermath of World War I through to the end of the century.

The Paying Guests     Sarah Waters     (2014)  Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter, Frances, live in genteel poverty in 1922 London. Having lost her two brothers in the World War and her father to sadness and bad debts, Frances convinces her mother to take in lodgers. They reconfigure their house and rent rooms to a young married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber. What starts out as a slow burn of a narrative—describing in detail the constraints of this joint tenancy arrangement—turns into an explosive crime novel. Readers witness a murder and know who the murderer is. But will this criminal be caught? Will the romance that has blossomed in the house be uncovered? Are the British barriers of class insurmountable? Can the miseries of wartime be alleviated? Over the course of 564 pages, there are some dips into melodrama, but the novelist kept my attention to the very end, for the resolutions to these questions.

This Strange Eventful History     Claire Messud     (2024)  The title of this superb historical novel is taken from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .      

. . . Last scene of all                                                                   
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion . . .

This soliloquy about the “seven ages” often comes to mind as Claire Messud recounts seven decades of the lives of the members of the Cassar family (from 1940 to 2010, plus an epilogue back in 1927). The Cassars were originally French Algerians, having dwelt for generations in the North African land that was controlled by France from 1830 to 1962. When Algeria won its independence after a lengthy war, the colonizers were forced to leave the country. They were not warmly welcomed back in France. Many of the Cassar family long for a return to Algeria but have to consider career opportunities elsewhere. They end up all over the globe—Toronto, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Paris, Connecticut, the south of France. No matter where they live, love of family binds them: Gaston and Lucienne; their children, François and Denise; their grandchildren, Chloe and Loulou. The novelist based This Strange Eventful History on her own family’s story, as recounted by her grandfather in a handwritten memoir, and the truth of the story shines throughout, with deeply perceptive probings of each character and striking evocations of each setting and time period. Many reviewers have pronounced this novel Messud’s masterpiece.

The Two Hotel Francforts     David Leavitt     (2013)  In the summer of 1940, Lisbon is about the only port in Europe from which those fleeing the advance of Hitler’s armies can hope to board a ship sailing away from the Continent. It’s a crazy place, full of desperate people waiting for passage out of Portugal. At a café, Pete and Julia Winters meet another couple, Edward and Iris Freleng, and sparks fly. Pete is the first-person narrator of this novel that slowly reveals the state of his marriage and of the Frelengs’ marriage: the compromises, the secrets, the love/hate. Always in the background is the looming threat of the war, which, of course, modern readers know the outcome of. Leavitt’s prose is steamy and sometimes seamy; his plot is propulsive.

The Most Fun We Ever Had     Claire Lombardo     (2019)  I always read the Acknowledgments section of a book before I start on the actual text, and I was surprised to find that when Claire Lombardo submitted this novel to her agents it “meandered beyond the nine-hundred-page marker.”  Whew. I found the published version of The Most Fun We Ever Had to be overly long at 532 pages. But, to be fair, this saga of the Sorensen family is complex, with lots of births and deaths, betrayals and lies, successes and defeats. David and Marilyn are the parents of four daughters, each with her own set of neuroses. The narrative skips back and forth between the 1970s, when David and Marilyn meet and marry, and the intervening years between then and 2017. The Sorensen house is also a character, in a way, with much of the action taking place there, on an actual street in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The dust jacket asserts that the author has joined the ranks of novelists Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen in her chronicling of modern life. I’d say that Lombardo comes close to these three greats.  

The Latest Installments

In 2024, new novels by Allison Montclair and Alexander McCall Smith were published, and I hopped on the waitlist for them at my local library. If you are weary of my many reviews of novels by these two authors, please click on another post!

Murder at the White Palace     Allison Montclair     (2024)  In the sixth installment of the Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge Mystery Series, it’s 1946 in London, with rationing still in place and many buildings damaged by the Blitz. Iris was a spy during World War II, but she can’t talk about that because of the Official Secrets Act. She has a complicated romantic life and is currently dating a gangster. Gwen, who became severely depressed after the death of her husband in the war, has finally been released from her court-ordered designation as a “lunatic.” She’s just getting back into the dating scene. The two women are business partners in The Right Sort Marriage Bureau, and they plan to hold a New Year’s Eve party for their clients at an abandoned, bomb-damaged club called The White Palace. When a body is found behind a wall that’s being repaired, we’re off and running, with sprightly dialog and a fast-moving plot. As I’ve explained in a previous post, I think it’s essential that you read the Sparks and Bainbridge novels in order. As I’ve raced through the books, I’ve become very fond of these two plucky women—and of Montclair’s recreation of post-WWII Britain.

The Conditions of Unconditional Love     Alexander McCall Smith     (2024)  McCall Smith is an extremely prolific writer, and I follow several of his series. This novel is the fifteenth in the Isabel Dalhousie Series (reviewed at length here), which relates the adventures of a philosopher in Edinburgh, Scotland, who edits an ethics journal. Isabel is a hoot. She gets herself involved in adjudicating disputes and difficulties that arise among her friends and neighbors, pondering quite deeply the ethical implications of various courses of action. In this novel, the cases include a suspect academic conference and the relationship problems of a woman who is a guest in Isabel’s attic. The admittedly thin plots of the novels are enlivened by Isabel’s domestic situation: she’s married to Jamie, a handsome musician who is fourteen years her junior and with whom she has two young children. Isabel never ceases to appreciate her life with the doting Jamie as she unravels one little problem after another.

For Indigenous Peoples Day

The Berry Pickers     Amanda Peters     (2023)  In 1962, a group of Indigenous Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, Canada, cross the border to Maine as summer migrant workers. When a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl, Ruthie, disappears from the berry fields one August day, her family is devastated. Her 6-year-old brother, Joe, is the last to see her; guilt and regret will shape his entire life. Meanwhile, in a town in Maine, a girl named Norma has recurrent dreams that she thinks may in fact be memories of people she once knew. Over the ensuing decades, the novel shifts back and forth between Joe’s life and Norma’s, until their two stories collide. The injustices visited upon Indigenous peoples are woven into the narrative of their existence—the repressive boarding schools, the employment discrimination. But what struck me even more was the author’s portrayal of the contrast between the Mi’kmaq community and the white community—laughter and light versus gloom and closed curtains. Prepare to weep by the end of this moving novel.

For another take on the Native American experience, here’s a reprise of a review that I posted earlier this year:

The River We Remember     William Kent Krueger     (2023)  “In a town where the hatred from wars long past and wars more recent still had hooks set in so many hearts, was anyone safe?” (341) This sentence from Krueger’s latest mystery novel points to the broader themes underlying his text: the untreated trauma inflicted on millions of soldiers by combat, the racism endured by Japanese Americans after World War II, and the racism endured by Native Americans ever since colonizers arrived in North America. And yet, this novel is still a solid mystery, with many twists and turns. It’s set in the fictional small town of Jewel, in southern Minnesota, in 1958, and starts with the discovery of the body of Jimmy Quinn in the Alabaster River. The dead man had numerous enemies, so the job of the sheriff, Brody Dern, is complicated. The novelist takes us deep into the lives of many of the inhabitants of the town, deftly building character through dialog. A warning for the squeamish, among whom I count myself: the concluding chapters have some gory scenes.

Finally, the relation of Indigenous peoples to the forests of the North American continent is beautifully presented in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), reviewed here.

Farewell, Nantucket

We’ve reached the autumnal equinox and the official end of summer, but you can keep the sand between your toes with these Beach Reads.

Swan Song     Elin Hilderbrand     (2024)

With this appropriately named romance novel, the rock-star author Elin Hilderbrand is ending her series set on the island of Nantucket. Hilderbrand says that she’s run out of plot ideas for her characters, but she doesn’t close the door totally on possible future Nantucket tales. Meanwhile, Swan Song tells the story of the final case taken on by retiring police chief Ed Kapenash. The $22-million home of island newcomers Bull and Leslee Richardson has burned to the ground, and Coco Coyle, personal assistant to the Richardsons, is missing and is suspected of the arson. In lengthy flashbacks, we learn that Coco has been befriended by Ed’s daughter, Kacy, and is entangled with other islanders. Hilderbrand liberally peppers this mystery/romance narrative with her usual pop culture references to music, fashion, and cuisine. When she takes readers, for example, to an extravagant party at the Richardson’s mansion, she paints the scene expertly.

Nobody does a Beach Read like Hilderbrand, as I’ve noted in my reviews of several other offerings in her thirty-book Nantucket series. Here are recaps of some of those reviews.

The Five-Star Weekend     Elin Hilderbrand     (2023)  In this gossipy escapade, 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 from the recent death of her husband. All the friends have their own back stories and secrets, and their lives have intersected with Hollis’s life in surprising ways. As usual, prepare to be inundated with references to designer clothes, fine wines, and Nantucket restaurants.

28 Summers    Erin Hilderbrand (2020)  For chick lit escapism, it doesn’t get better than this Hilderbrand novel, which borrows its structure from Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year. Two lovers meet secretly each summer, starting in 1993, on Nantucket Island. You can take lots of breezy seaside vacations with them.

Summer of ’69     Elin Hilderbrand     (2019)  In the Author’s Note at the back of Summer of ’69, Elin Hilderbrand explains that she was born on July 17, 1969. Fifty years on, she revisits the momentous events of that summer, including in her fictional narrative such actual occurrences as the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick that derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes, the rock ‘n’ roll encampment at Woodstock, and the continuing slaughter of troops and civilians in Vietnam. Hilderbrand’s main characters are the Foley-Levin family, who summer on Nantucket. Blair, the eldest of the offspring, is recently married and discovers late in pregnancy that she’s carrying twins. Kirby, the rebel sister, takes a job on the nearby island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she is almost a witness in the Kopechne/Kennedy case. Tiger, the only son, is off fighting in Vietnam, driving his mother to drink. And 13-year-old Jessie, the youngest, gets invited to Woodstock. Through the experiences of this family, Hilderbrand takes us back to 1969 in all its glory and horror. Some of the plot twists will be obvious to any avid reader of mystery novels, and a few anachronisms crop up. But, despite the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Summer of ’69 is mostly brisk and cheerful, with wrap-ups of most of the plot lines by the final pages. You can have that second margarita and still be able to follow the story.

Endless Summer     Elin Hilderbrand     (2022)  This collection of nine short prequels and sequels to several of Hilderbrand’s novels is for her diehard followers. Of special note are the sequel novellas, Summer of ’79 and Summer of ’89, that are included. These novellas follow the Foley-Levin clan ten years out and then twenty years out from the novel Summer of ’69, with emphasis on various romantic entanglements that play out in sometimes unexpected ways as the decades unfold. The pop culture references that Hilderbrand uses to set the decade can be heavy at times, but I love epilogues, and these two novellas are, in a way, highly extended epilogues.

If you need a novel set on a different island off the East Coast of the United States, hop over to Martha’s Vineyard:

The Lost Letters from Martha’s Vineyard     Michael Callahan     (2024)  This story toggles between 1959, when actor Mercy Welles disappears from Hollywood on the cusp of stardom, and 2018, when NYC television producer Kit O’Neill discovers some letters of her recently deceased grandmother. The mystery unfolds on Martha’s Vineyard in both time periods, and it’s a pretty good mystery, with a couple of romances for extra spice. (Callahan did need a better editor, though, who might have stopped him from using the word “ensconced” so many times.)

Books Set in Michigan

Funny Story     Emily Henry     (2024)  I had missed Emily Henry’s bestseller boat until I picked up this romance novel that some reviewers say is her best yet. The plot of Funny Story revolves around two tropes of the romance genre: fake dating and friends-to-lovers. Daphne’s fiancé, Peter, dumps her right before their wedding, and Daphne has to find a place to live quickly. Peter’s new girlfriend has also dumped her boyfriend, Miles, who has a spare room in his apartment that he offers to Daphne. She pegs Miles as a scruffy pothead, but she takes the room, since she knows little about (the fictional) Waning Bay, Michigan, where she relocated at the insistence of Peter. Got it? The one good thing in Daphne’s life is that she loves her work as a children’s librarian. And then Miles introduces her to the summertime grandeur of their lakeside town and its environs. The Daphne/Miles plot plays out with glittery dialogue (how could ordinary people come up with so many one-liners?) and some explicit sex scenes. Along the way, readers get a tour of the area around Traverse City, Michigan—the pristine Lake Michigan beaches, the sand dunes, the wineries, the farmers’ markets, the festivals. The characters tend to overanalyze themselves, but I raced through all 384 pages of Funny Story, inhaling the Michigan charm.

On this website I’ve reviewed many other books set in Michigan. Here are brief recaps of some of those reviews.

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. 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.

Adventures of a Girl Architect     Hazel Harzinger     (2018)  Smart and hardworking Elena Troye is determined to become a practicing architect. In this witty, fast-paced novel, she recounts the ups and downs of breaking into a male-dominated profession. After a disastrous studio review at the University of Michigan, there's the seeming triumph of landing a job in glitzy, booming Las Vegas in 2006. When the national recession deepens in 2009, Elena returns to the Midwest for grad school and then the grueling architecture licensing exams. Along the way, she balances the professional with the personal—boyfriends, family ties, friendships. And she maintains her interest in fashion, even if that seems “girly.” In the workplace world of 2011-2014, Elena battles harassment from her superiors and mud on construction sites. She never gives up her dream of designing beautiful, functional buildings—and finding romantic happiness. Elena calls herself a “Girl Architect” with ironic self-mockery as she defies gender stereotypes. Click here to order Adventures of a Girl Architect by Michigan author Hazel Harzinger.

Hunter’s Moon     Philip Caputo     (2019)  In seven linked short stories, Caputo summons up the wild allure of the far northern regions of the United States. Six of the 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. Each story revolves in some way around hunting or fishing: the appeal of rugged terrain, the terror of getting lost, and 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.

Mysteries by Aaron Stander (2000-2020)  The sand dunes, the sunsets, the resiny scent of pine forests: Michiganders will recognize that Stander’s eleven murder mysteries are set in the northwest section of the Lower Peninsula. The main detective is Sheriff Ray Elkins, a rumpled middle-aged former professor of criminal justice from downstate who has retreated to the North Woods where he was raised. He’s surrounded by a distinctive cast of year-round residents, who disdain the vacationers renting beach houses during the glorious warm months. The many state references will tickle those who, like me, cherish our nation’s third (Great Lakes) coast. Small Michigan details drop in on almost every page. Click here for more of my reviews of books in this series.

We Hope for Better Things     Erin Bartels     (2019)  Interracial relationships are the theme of Erin Bartels’ multi-century historical novel. In the present-day chapters, white Detroit journalist Elizabeth Balsam, following up on a lead about unpublished photos of the 1967 Detroit riots, ends up at her great-aunt Nora’s farmhouse in Lapeer, about an hour’s drive north of the city. A different layer of Elizabeth’s family history is revealed in chapters set in Lapeer in 1861, when the farmhouse was a stop for slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad. That title? It’s from the motto for the city of Detroit: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”

Beautiful Music      Michael Zadoorian     (2018)  This is the touching story of a high school freshman at Redford High School, on Detroit’s far northwest side, in the early 1970s—a period of increasing racial tension and violence in the city. Danny Yzemski is a sweet, shy kid who’s bullied in school and beleaguered at home. His coming-of-age is aided by his discovery of the transformative power of hard rock music. The detailed descriptions of Danny’s neighborhood along the Grand River corridor—the routes he took, the stores he frequented—re-create the era precisely. Even the breakfast cereals that Danny eats are authentic to the period. For vintage Detroit flavor, tune in to Beautiful Music.

There’s nonfiction set in Michigan, also, as in this dual biography:

The Kelloggs:  The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek     Howard Markel     (2017)  In the small southwestern Michigan city of Battle Creek, two brothers distinguished themselves in separate but related arenas. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), a physician and author, established the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1878, treating thousands of patients and promoting some surprisingly prescient wellness regimens on both dietary and exercise fronts. In 1906, Will Keith Kellogg (1860-1951) founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, now the Kellogg Company, revolutionizing breakfast foods through manipulation of ingredients and industrial mass production. Click here for my full review.

Politics. Sigh.

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation     Kristin Kobes Du Mez     (2020)  The title encapsulates the author’s argument: that an iconic 20th-century actor who portrayed heroic soldiers and cowboys epitomizes the societal goals of the segment of white American society that identifies as evangelical. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a respected historian at Calvin University, which is affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church in North America, so she writes with the authority of one who knows religion from within. Her meticulously researched and footnoted book traces 75 years of expanding white evangelical embrace of a hyper-masculine political vision that subjugates women and immigrants and elevates authoritarianism and aggression. The presidency of Donald Trump, she posits, did not come about just because evangelicals held their noses and voted for a libertine because he would stack the courts with anti-abortion judges. They voted for him primarily because he embodied their goals of “Christian nationalism.” Many self-described American evangelicals know little about theology. Their beliefs are instead cultural and political, based in what Kobes Du Mez calls a “bunker mentality” and a “persecution narrative” that only a badass autocrat can alleviate. This New York Times bestseller-list book is both enlightening and scary.

The evangelical movement in the United States has long been an interest of mine. Back in 2017, I read Frances FitzGerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, and I summed it up this way:

The Evangelicals disentangles the many strands of a movement that now includes about 25% of the population of the United States. FitzGerald pulls data from the histories of religion, culture, and politics with ease, showing how evangelicals developed their stances on issues such as slavery, segregation, labor unions, the Vietnam War, communism, abortion, immigration, and gay rights. If you are bemused by the phenomenon of evangelicalism in America, or if you just want some background on a powerful segment of our society, this is the book to read. (You can see my entire review here.)

Also in 2017, I reviewed JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, concluding with this paragraph:

Vance treasures his hillbilly background and yet despises it. He hasn’t quite figured out where he stands, though he aligns himself politically with conservative Republicans. Hillbilly Elegy is an imperfect book, with far too many contradictions and generalizations and cherry-picked citations. But you may want to read it because it’s become highly influential in our present-day political climate of angry polarization. (You can read my entire review here.)

In early 2018, my guest reviewer, Paul Schwankl, assessed One Nation after Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not Yet Deported, by E. J. Dionne Jr, Norman J. Ornstein, and Thomas E. Mann. Click here to read his review.

In my next post, I’ll be back to fiction!

Gentle Reads

Longtime followers of this blog know that I don’t select thrillers or horror novels or apocalyptic dystopian fiction for my reading or for my reviews. If an author slips a car crash or a ghost into a good family saga, I’m fine, but if I hit detailed descriptions of World War I trench warfare, I close the book.

In the novels that I call Gentle Reads, the emphasis is on the interactions of well-constructed characters, and the endings are mostly happy. The best of the Gentle Reads avoid sentimentality and have some racy elements.

Thanks to Dorothy Devin for recommending this Gentle Read:

Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting     Clare Pooley     (2022)  On a commuter train in London, a well-dressed businessman chokes on a grape in his breakfast fruit salad. Although the British rarely speak with strangers on public transit, passengers do come to the man’s aid, and a nurse performs the Heimlich Maneuver, saving his life. From this interaction springs a friendship among Londoners from very different stages and walks of life. Iona Iverson, a flamboyant magazine advice columnist, is the catalyst and the central figure in the group, as they navigate major life changes with each other’s help. The story is sweet but not saccharine, offering the possibility of societal healing through friendship and mutual help. A quote from a chapter highlighting Iona: “They were joined together, like it or not, by a brush with death. So, what were the rules now? God, it was difficult being British sometimes.” (35) If you like this one, try Clare Pooley’s previously published Gentle Read, The Authenticity Project (2020), which has a similar message of the transformative power of friendship. And check out my review of a novel with a similar feel:  Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017).  

On a far end of the Gentle Reads spectrum, at the gentlest end, is this recent pick:

The Stellar Debut of Galactica MacFee     Alexander McCall Smith     (2023)  Clocking in at #17 in McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series is another of his wacky and delightful explorations of the lives of those who live (or used to live) on Scotland Street in Edinburgh. Among the many characters, my favorite is Bertie Pollock, who starts out as five years old and very, very slowly ages to seven years old over the course of the novels. The titular Galactica MacFee is an obnoxious little girl who joins Bertie’s school class and torments poor Bertie. If you haven’t read any of the previous 44 Scotland Street books, my lengthy post about #11 in the series, The Bertie Project, can help you with background. In this latest installment, McCall Smith’s authorial musings on society and politics do seem to have become more crochety, but his underlying message about the importance of kindness in the world shines through. For additional reviews of McCall Smith’s novels, click here and here and here.

On the other end of the Gentle Reads spectrum, with some intense scenes in its fast-moving concluding chapters, is this one:

The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club     Helen Simonson     (2024)  In 1919, the British are celebrating the end of World War I but also mourning the immense loss of life, both in combat and from the influenza pandemic. (Contemporary readers who are emerging from the COVID pandemic will be able to relate to the sense of having years stolen from one’s life because of a world-wide catastrophe.) In Simonson’s novel, Constance Haverhill is a young woman at loose ends. She’s spending the summer at a seaside hotel as the companion and assistant to an elderly woman, but she needs to find permanent employment, preferably in the field of accounting, in which she has experience from her job during the war. Also at the hotel is the Wirrall family: the matriarch, a former actress; the daughter, Poppy, who runs a motorcycle club for women; and the son, Harris, a former pilot who lost a leg in the war. Simonson’s drawing-room dialogues may sometimes seem old fashioned, but they build the characters. And hang on for that whiz-bang conclusion.

You may have noticed that all these titles are by British/Scottish authors. While American authors have cornered the market on Beach Reads (click here and here and here), the United Kingdom seems to generate quite a few Gentle Reads!

Pandemic Stories

First, a review of the most recent pandemic story I’ve read. But then, scroll down . . .

Day     Michael Cunningham     (2023)  This poignant novel takes us into the life of a family in New York City on three specific days:  April 5, 2019; April 5, 2020; and April 5, 2021. Of course, the pandemic is a major feature of the narrative, but readers are reminded that, in every family, many other factors were at play in those years. Isabel and Dan are struggling with their careers and their marriage. Their young children, Nathan and Violet, can’t help but notice. Dan’s brother, Garth, is trying to figure out his relationship with his friend Chess, who is the mother of their son. But the emotional support for the family resides in Robbie, Isabel’s brother. Robbie has been living with Dan and Isabel, but in 2019 the apartment has become too cramped, and he has to move on. He’s also been dumped by his latest boyfriend, finding consolation in an Instagram alter-ego named Wolfe. With deft, subtle strokes, novelist Cunningham delineates these characters, both the adults and the children, creating a rich portrait.

More Pandemic Stories

A world-changing event such as a pandemic is certainly a plot generator. If you are still trying to get your head around what happened, here are reprises of some of my previous posts.

The Pandemic of the 2020s

Lucy by the Sea     Elizabeth Strout     (2022) Pulitzer-Prize winner Strout 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 truly captures the sense of desperation and loneliness that the pandemic wrought.

Happy-Go-Lucky     David Sedaris     (2022)  For fans of David Sedaris (count me in), every new collection of his essays means a couple of evenings of sure-fire good reading, unveiling the vagaries of family relationships. Happy-Go-Lucky focuses quite a bit on the last years of David’s nonagenarian father, Lou, and on the impact of the COVID pandemic. The stories are honest, touching, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes disturbing. There is simply no other essayist who is as irreverent and candid and downright funny as David Sedaris.

Wish You Were Here     Jodi Picoult     (2021)  Picoult sets this novel in New York City and Galápagos in 2020, right when the coronavirus pandemic breaks out. The societal details are all too familiar, but the story takes unexpected turns, yanking the reader along. The disjointedness of alternate realities reflects our times.

Joan is Okay     Weike Wang     (2022)  All of us know what’s going to happen in the intensive care units of hospitals in New York City in the spring of 2020. We know that ICU physicians like Joan are going to be in the thick of the COVID pandemic. But in 2019, Joan can’t predict this. She’s dealing instead with the expectations of her boss (who rewards her workaholism) as well as the expectations of her Chinese American family (who want her to get married and have kids). She also has a strangely intrusive neighbor and an oddball work colleague. Still, Joan is okay, even when COVID hits. This short novel packs a punch.

Romantic Comedy     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2023) Go behind the scenes in 2018 at The Night Owls, a not-very-disguised version of Saturday Night Live, to meet Sally Milz, a comedy writer in her late thirties who has often been disappointed in love. Meet a guest host of the show, pop star Noah Brewster. Watch Sally develop a crush on Noah and then accidentally insult him so that their light flirtation ends. Next, skip to the year 2020, in the depths of the COVID pandemic, and read emails between Noah and Sally. Speculate on whether this romance will re-blossom. As befits a late-night comedy show, the scripts that Sally writes can be raunchy, but Sittenfeld’s depiction of modern America is spot on.

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, an orchard 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 should 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.

The Pandemic of 1918-1920

The Pull of the Stars     Emma Donoghue  (2020)  Julia Power is a nurse working in a maternity ward in Dublin during the 1918 flu pandemic. She contends not only with an invisible virus but also with lack of supplies, women oppressed by the strictures of the Catholic Church, and her own sexual awakening.

The Pandemics of Both the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Violeta     Isabel Allende     (2022)  Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle. The fictional Violeta Del Valle tells her captivating life story in first person, from her birth in 1920 during one pandemic to her death in 2020 during another pandemic. The backdrop is the political upheaval in the history of an unnamed South American country that is very much like Chile.

The Plague in the Time of Shakespeare

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague     Maggie O’Farrell     (2020) There’s actually not an emphasis on contagion in this fictional imagining of William Shakespeare’s domestic travails. The title character is William’s son, Hamnet, whose name is an alternate spelling of Hamlet; you can make connections to the play of that name. And the writing in this novel . . . it’s just magical.  

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?

Boomer Tales

If the Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-1964) is not a demographic that interests you, feel free to skip to another post. But if you want to dive deep into the emotional territory of aging, here are some tales for you. Remember, we all become elderly eventually!

First up, a new review of a recent book by a seasoned and reliable author.

Baumgartner     Paul Auster     (2023)  The title character of this short novel is a seventy-something philosophy professor who, at the beginning of the book, is just about to retire from teaching at Princeton. Baumgartner’s wife has been dead for a decade, but he revisits his life with her through dreams, reminiscences, and perusal of the journals and poems that she left behind. Sensing the precarity of old age, he seeks to make the most of his time, continuing to write scholarly books and pursuing various romantic relationships. At the risk of revealing a spoiler, I’ll tell you that that ending is disturbing and not at all what you might expect. (For a review of another Auster novel, 4321, click here.)

Next, recaps of a few of my many reviews over the past seven years that feature elderly characters.

Our Souls at Night     Kent Haruf     (2015)  A widow and a widower, neighbors in a small Midwestern town, carve out their own version of happiness in spite of setbacks. Readers can tuck this story away as a tutorial in how to cope with the inevitability of mortality. (The 2017 movie of the same name starred Robert Redford and Jane Fonda.) Click here for my full review.

Olive, Again     Elizabeth Strout     (2019)  In thirteen linked short stories, the incomparable author Strout revisits Olive Kittredge, a character from her previous fiction. Olive, still living in rural Maine, is retired and declining in health, but she connects with other quirky characters as she fearlessly faces her future. Click here for my full review.

Midwinter Break     Bernard MacLaverty     (2017)  A couple in their seventies who live in Scotland take a short vacation to Amsterdam in this masterful study of the pleasures and trials of a very long marriage. Click here for my full review.

Henry, Himself     Stewart O’Nan     (2019)  This is a quiet, introspective portrait of a year in the life of Henry Maxwell, a retired engineer who lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Emily. The novelist is able to turn everyday events into drama that drives his narrative in a highly effective way. Click here for my full review.

The Sense of an Ending     Julian Barnes     (2011)  Tony Webster, a retired Briton who is amicably divorced, receives an unusual legacy that brings to mind painful scenes from his time in secondary school and at university. This ruminative short novel about memory, regret, forgiveness, and revenge was made into a movie in 2017.

Violeta     Isabel Allende     (2022)  Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle. The fictional Violeta Del Valle tells her captivating life story in first person, from her birth in 1920 during one pandemic to her death in 2020 during another pandemic. The backdrop is the political upheaval in the history of an unnamed South American country that is very much like Chile.

Category Novels, Part Four: Family Sagas

In my continuing series of posts about various categories of novels that I review on this blog, I’m turning to Family Sagas. In the Family Saga category are novels focused on the lives of characters who are related to each other and who interact over a long period of time. Family Sagas also fall into my category of Historical Novels, since they span multiple generations. They tend to be lengthy novels, suitable for reading on a long weekend or a vacation trip.

Here are four Family Sagas, published between 2016 and 2019, that I especially loved. Click on the title to go to a full review.

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016)  An expansive account of two French Canadian families and their relationship to the forests of North America over three centuries. Love all those trees!

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017)  A sweeping saga about the struggles of Korean immigrant families in Japan throughout the twentieth century.

Peculiar Ground     Lucy Hughes-Hallett     (2018)  A densely layered novel set on a fictional Oxfordshire estate in 1663, 1961, 1973, and 1989. Features walls—border walls, the Berlin Wall, walls of inclusion, walls of exclusion, and many others. 

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna     Juliet Grames     (2019)   A boisterous Italian family’s 20th-century immigration saga, starring the women.  

And here is my brand-new review of a very recent Family Saga:

The Covenant of Water     Abraham Verghese     (2023) Take a deep breath and plunge into this sprawling, 715-page family saga. Don’t be daunted by the huge cast of characters and by the many words in the Malayalam language of southwest India. The river-rich, fertile Malabar coast is the glorious backdrop for the story of a girl who, in the year 1900, marries into a farming family in which, for centuries, someone has died from drowning every generation. The novelist is a physician who slowly uncovers the mystery of these drownings. He also weaves in numerous other medical matters by including among the characters a Scottish surgeon employed by the Indian Medical Service and a Swedish surgeon who oversees a colony of lepers. The narrative occasionally sags under its own weight, and under the weight of tragedies, but there’s also plenty of joy and love as the years roll on to 1977.

Mysteries That Are More Than Mysteries

As frequent readers of this blog know, I’m a fan of mystery novels. I shy away from dark thrillers, but a knotty plot with well-constructed red herrings will keep me up until 2 am. And I’ve read a number of multi-book mystery series in their entirety. Click here and here and here to see some of my past series reviews.

In this blog post, I offer new reviews of two recent mysteries, one set in 2020 and one set in 1958, that elevate the genre well beyond the solving of a puzzle.

Happiness Falls     Angie Kim     (2023)  At its most basic, this novel is a cracking good mystery, about the disappearance of Adam Parson, a middle-aged husband and father, at a park near Washington, DC. But Happiness Falls is much more than that, because the only witness to the disappearance of Adam is his teenage son Eugene, who has a genetic disability that impedes his motor control and renders him unable to speak. To complicate matters more, the action takes place in June of 2020, during COVID lockdown. Oh, and then there’s the fact that Adam’s family is biracial. Eugene’s college-age sister, Mia, narrates the story in first person, asking readers to consider how society treats disabled people and immigrants, and reflecting on happiness—its perception and its achievement. This novel was deservedly on many lists of the best of 2023.

The River We Remember     William Kent Krueger     (2023)  “In a town where the hatred from wars long past and wars more recent still had hooks set in so many hearts, was anyone safe?” (341) This sentence from Krueger’s latest mystery novel points to the broader themes underlying his text: the untreated trauma inflicted on millions of soldiers by combat, the racism endured by Japanese Americans after World War II, and the racism endured by Native Americans ever since colonizers arrived in North America. And yet, this novel is still a solid mystery, with many twists and turns. It’s set in the fictional small town of Jewel, in southern Minnesota, in 1958, and starts with the discovery of the body of Jimmy Quinn in the Alabaster River. The dead man had numerous enemies, so the job of the sheriff, Brody Dern, is complicated. The novelist takes us deep into the lives of many of the inhabitants of the town, deftly building character through dialog. A warning for the squeamish, among whom I count myself: the concluding chapters have some gory scenes.

For Black History Month

In honor of Black History Month in 2024, this post highlights some of my best-loved books by African American women.

First, a brand-new fiction review:

Company     Shannon Sanders    (2023)  The thirteen short stories in this volume are linked to each other through their characters, all of whom are members of the extended Collins family or friends of that family. The title also points to another linkage:  each story involves the arrival of a guest—“company”—in someone’s home. Settings include the District of Columbia, New York, and Atlanta, from the 1960s to the near-present. The characters are almost all African American, but they grapple with universal human issues, such as family obligations, sibling resentments, and workplace infighting. (The depiction of the nastiness of academic politics is spot on!) In sentences that are concentrated and sharp, Shannon Sanders gets to the heart of each of her characters, and by the end of the book you’ll have a full picture of a remarkable family.

Next, re-posts of my reviews of two novels:

The Kindest Lie     Nancy Johnson     (2021)  The racial tensions that trouble the United States play out through the stories of two families in the months near the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Ruth Tuttle, a successful Black engineer, can’t move forward with her life in Chicago until she finds the baby whom she was forced to give up when she gave birth at age 17 in an industrial town in Indiana. Her search reconnects her with her family and with the family of a young white boy nicknamed Midnight. The author tackles difficult issues of race, class, poverty, and social justice forthrightly and eloquently.

The Turner House     Angela Flournoy (2015) I’m pretty familiar with Detroit, so I can attest that Flournoy has captured the city in its gritty bleakness of the early 2000s as well as, through flashbacks, in its manufacturing glory of the mid-twentieth century. Her angle in is the varying fortunes of the African American Turner family, with thirteen children who were born in the better days and who are aging in the dying urban landscape. Although the cast of characters is huge, Flournoy keeps the plot manageable by developing primarily the stories of the oldest and youngest of this clan. The house that the Turners grew up in is depicted lovingly, as an organism in decline. The Turner House is about working class Detroiters of any race or ethnicity who are trying to maintain family bonds through tough times.

Finally, a re-post of my review of a famous memoir:

Becoming     Michelle Obama     (2018)  The former First Lady’s memoir is as engaging as a page-turner novel; I read it cover-to-cover in one day. This is the same Michelle Obama that you know from talk shows and interviews and from that slam-dunk speech that she gave at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. The cadence of the phrases is the same, the warmth is the same, the frankness is the same. For my full review, click here.

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.

Three Adventure Tales

The Romantic     William Boyd     (2022)  I had enough of picaresque novels when I taught eighteenth-century British literature decades ago—think Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones. So I wasn’t keen on reading a novel that seemed to land in this genre. Never fear! Cashel Greville Ross, the star of The Romantic, is not a scalawag, and his adventures are seldom sordid. This tale of a fictional man who lived from 1799 to 1882, skips merrily from the west of Ireland to Oxford, to India, to Italy, to Massachusetts, to Zanzibar. The author establishes the story in the history of the period by having Cashel survive the Battle of Waterloo, spend a summer with the great poets Shelley and Byron (plus Shelley’s wife, Mary), and make a dangerous trek to the source of the Nile River. There’s also a grand love affair. William Boyd’s prose has just enough of a nineteenth-century tone to give the novel flavor and not so much as to render it tedious. One chapter bounces to the next for 446 pages of outrageous storytelling.

The Vaster Wilds     Lauren Groff     (2023)  Imagine a Robinson Crusoe tale, but set it in early 17th-century Colonial America. Make the hero a teen-aged female servant who runs away from a settlement of Europeans that is beset by famine and disease. Of course, famine and disease are also what this teenager encounters in the raw and gorgeous wilderness. I kept thinking that the plot of The Vaster Wilds would develop more in the present tense of the story, but instead what plot there is consists of flashbacks to past events in the runaway’s life. This is not a novel that you should read if you are prone to depression, but two elements make the grim adventure tale palatable:  Lauren Groff’s marvelous way with words and the inventive survival tactics that she describes. (I’ve reviewed two other excellent Groff novels: Fates and Furies and Matrix.)

Late Nights on Air     Elizabeth Hay     (2007)  Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories of Canada, sits at 62 degrees north latitude, where the short summers are glorious and the winters are very, very dark. Late Nights on Air starts out slowly, introducing readers to the staff of Yellowknife’s sole radio station, in 1975. The adventure comes in when four of the staff decide to take a six-week canoe trip through the Arctic wilds in the summer of 1976. The adventurers are always on the edge of disaster, facing ice-jammed rivers, back-breaking portages, and a bear attack, but the natural wonders that they encounter leave them in awe every day. Woven through the narrative are romances among members of the ensemble cast, plus a regional controversy over an oil pipeline. I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, so I appreciated many of the cultural and political references in this novel, but even I had to look up a few words. “Dene,” for example, is a general term for native peoples of the Canadian Arctic, who face many of the same issues today that they faced in 1975.

Category Novels, Part One--Irish Novels

Many of the posts on this blog are categorized, to assist you in finding just the right book. If you’re on a desktop computer, you’ll find my categories on the far right side of the web page, below “Latest Posts.” If you’re on a mobile device, the categories are at the bottom, so scroll way down. The list is called “Archive of Book Reviews.”

As you’re scrolling through a category, click on “Older Posts” to pull up more of the hundreds of reviews on this blog.

In today’s post, I’m highlighting Irish Novels. Past favorites of mine in this category are Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Graham Norton’s Holding, and Belinda McKeon’s Tender and Solace. Click on the titles for my extended reviews. I’ve also written short reviews of Claire Keegan’s exquisite prose, here and here.

Next up, reviews of two more excellent Irish novels.

The Green Road     Anne Enright     (2015)  Until now, I had somehow missed the Irish novelist Anne Enright, who has won the Man Booker Prize and has been Ireland’s Laureate for Irish Fiction. Her novel The Green Road follows in the tradition of the great Irish playwrights of the twentieth century, in that it features a rural Irish family that is riven by histrionic conflict. Enright presents episodes in the lives of the four Madigan children, starting in 1980. At Christmas of 2005, the four adults return to the west coast of Ireland (from Toronto, Dublin, and West Africa) as their elderly mother prepares to sell their ancestral home. Even though Ireland became socially and politically much more progressive between 1980 and 2005, Enright’s characters tangle with some perennial issues of Irish literature: sexual repression, alcoholism, the rural-urban divide, and the role of Catholicism in daily life. Watch for more reviews of Anne Enright’s work in my future posts!

Leonard and Hungry Paul     Rónán Hession     (2019/2020)  For a totally different writing style, check out this debut novel from Dublin musician Rónán Hession. The two titular friends are thirty-something men trying to find their introverted, low-key pathways in our chaotic world. Neither one has moved out of his childhood home, and they spend their evenings playing board games with each other. They are, however, on the cusp of change. Leonard, who writes children’s encyclopedias, chances upon a woman in his office building who may just appreciate his personality. And Hungry Paul, who works as a substitute postman, may find other employment. The novelist’s tone reminds me of the work of Frederik Backman (A Man Called Ove) and of Alexander McCall Smith, whose novels have been much reviewed on this blog. All these authors point to the value of a modest, unassuming life.

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.

Historical Fiction Set in the Early 20th Century

This Other Eden    Paul Harding     (2023)  Prepare yourself to be mesmerized by the lyrical language of this short (221 page) novel by a former winner of the Pulitzer Prize (in 2010, for Tinkers). The beauty of Harding’s words contrasts with the sometimes grim plot. Although the book is fiction, it’s very loosely based on an actual historical event: the expulsion of a mixed-race community from a small rocky island by officials from the state of Maine in 1912. Harding paints a picture of life on the island that has idyllic moments but is also hardscrabble, and he doesn’t shy away from describing the genetic consequences of inbreeding and the arguments of the eugenicists of the period. His characters are unconventional but endearing.

The Summer Before the War     Helen Simonson     (2016)  As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I try to avoid historical novels that present graphic scenes of World War I trench warfare. The title of this novel led me to believe that I’d be safe from nightmares. The novel starts in East Sussex, England, in the summer of 1914 (with the best summer weather that anyone can remember), but, alas, toward the end there are disturbing scenes set in 1915 France. By that point in the book, however, I was hooked—and anxious to know what would happen to the characters. Beatrice Nash is an independent, highly educated young woman who comes to Sussex to teach Latin at the grammar school. Hugh Grange and Daniel Bookham are cousins, visiting their Aunt Agatha there—Hugh is a surgeon in training, and Daniel is an aspiring poet. Snout is a local ruffian who is also a brilliant Latin scholar. Surrounding them are an array of often comical English village stereotypes. The descriptions of the far southeastern coast of England are rhapsodic, and the dialog, a la Edith Wharton, conjures up the era.  

The Trackers     Charles Frazier     (2023)  The journey story has been a part of Western literature since The Odyssey, and Charles Frazier is a master of American journeys. (See my review of Varina, and there’s also Frazier’s award-winning Cold Mountain.) The Trackers is set in 1937, with the Great Depression dragging on. Val Welch is a young East Coast painter who, by good fortune, is commissioned to create a mural for a post office in Wyoming. Val’s hosts for his stay in the West are a wealthy rancher and art collector, John Long, and his wife, Eve. Val is busy with the laborious process of painting in the ancient fresco style when he’s enlisted to help find a missing person, and he leaves his art work to travel to Seattle, to Florida, and to California. Trackers feature in Val’s mural, and he himself becomes a tracker. In first-person narration, he recounts getting beaten up (caveat: violence) and also acquiring an education in human greed and passion and struggle. The characters in this novel are exquisitely drawn, and the scenes of the American West are breathtaking. Example: “Wyoming felt clean and brittle, the light fragile as a flake of mica, the high air rare enough to be measured in the lungs and appreciated in its thinness, its lack of substance.” (188) As a bonus, the jacket art, by Tom Haugomat, beautifully evokes the travel posters of the period.

Finally, Some Nonfiction

Yes, in addition to all those historical novels that you see reviewed on this blog, I do read some nonfiction, especially on the topics of gardening, society, and cooking. Here are three titles that I recommend.

The Complete Gardener     Monty Don       (2021)  This revised and updated second edition of Monty Don’s popular 2003 guidebook is a delight. I’ve streamed many episodes of Don’s long-running BBC television program, Gardeners’ World, and I find that his written text mirrors his television voice—wise, friendly, sensible. Although Don has had no formal training in horticulture, he’s been a gardener since his youth, and his knowledge base is extraordinary. He championed organic gardening and pollinator protections long before these approaches became widely accepted. In The Complete Gardener, he takes the reader through all the basics, from garden design and soil enrichment to the management of wildlife and pests. Then there are chapters on each of the eighteen sections of Don’s own extensive garden, which is located in Herefordshire, England: The Spring Garden, The Damp Garden, The Orchard Beds, The Herb Garden, The Vegetable Garden, and so forth. The book continues with advice on specific perennials, annuals, bulbs, climbers, shrubs, wildflowers, vegetables, herbs, and fruit trees. The entire text is accompanied by evocative photos. The British are blessed with a mild, moist climate, so most of that island has conditions similar to USDA zone 8—kind of like the coast of Washington and Oregon. I sometimes fall in love with a plant recommended by Monty Don only to find, upon digging (ahem) further, that the plant will not grow in my own gardens in southeast Michigan, which are USDA zone 5b, approaching 6a. Thanks to Paul Schwankl for finding this book and giving it to me as a gift!

Graceland, At Last:  Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South     Margaret Renkl     (2021)  Once I discovered Margaret Renkl’s column in the New York Times, I’ve never missed it. But I did miss her pre-2020 essays, so this collection of 60 of them, published from 2017 to 2020, is a gift. Renkl has organized the pieces by topic: Flora & Fauna, Politics & Religion, Social Justice, Environment, Family & Community, and Arts & Culture. There are occasional digs at former president Trump, but my favorite pieces are about Renkl’s pollinator-friendly, wildlife-friendly yard in suburban Nashville. The wise, sharp-witted, insightful, and wide-ranging commentary has opened my eyes to many issues in the southern United States, especially in Tennessee, that I would never have thought about. One summative quote: “Maybe being a Southern writer is only a matter of loving a damaged and damaging place, of loving its flawed and beautiful people, so much that you have to stay there, observing and recording and believing, against all odds, that one day it will finally live up to the promise of its own good heart.” (282)

Smitten Kitchen Keepers:  New Classics for Your Forever Files     Deb Perelman     (2022)  In this third printed cookbook from Deb Perelman, you’ll find 100 of her favorite recipes, some of which also appear on her hugely successful cooking blog, smittenkitchen.com. Perelman cooks in a tiny NYC home kitchen, so she’s obsessive about minimizing steps and dishwashing while maintaining high culinary standards. In addition to recipes with unusual combinations of ingredients, Smitten Kitchen Keepers presents a number of very ordinary dishes that Perelman has amped up to gustatory heaven—French toast, potato salad, meatloaf, chocolate chip cookies, and many more. Sometimes it’s the condiments she chooses, sometimes it’s the order of cooking operations, but her recipes (which are always very clear) make these dishes sing. Since there’s a strong emphasis on recipes for vegetables, beans, and lentils, vegetarians will find much to love here, and Perelman sometimes offers vegan options in her notes. Speaking of notes, don’t skip the entertaining headnote that introduces each recipe.