Breezy Beach Reads, Part 2

Heading to warm climes for a winter vacation? Here are a couple of novels that won’t demand much strenuous thought in the reading—in other words, beach reads. For more reviews of beach reads, click here.

Summer of ’69     Elin Hilderbrand     (2019)

When I pick up a book, the first thing I always do is read any sections called “Acknowledgments” and “Author’s Notes,” which are usually at the end of the main text. I take the risk of running into spoilers, but I can’t help myself. I want to know where the author was coming from when he or she sat down to write. I want to know who helped with the research, the drafts, the final editing. I look for names of people I remember from my brief stint in the 1990s as the director of a graduate MFA program.

In the Author’s Note at the back of Summer of ’69, Elin Hilderbrand explains that she was born on July 17, 1969, six minutes before her twin brother, Eric, entered the world. This alone is a surprising fact—multiple births were not as common in 1969 as they are today with advances in assisted reproduction and in neonatal intensive care. Fifty years on, Elin is a prolific writer of beach reads. In this one (her twenty-third), she revisits the momentous events of the summer that she herself was born, including in her fictional narrative such actual occurrences as the spellbinding Apollo 11 mission to the moon; the tragic death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick that derailed Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes; the fabled rock ‘n’ roll encampment at Woodstock; and the continuing slaughter of troops and civilians in Vietnam.

Her main characters are the Levin family, who summer on Nantucket, the small island off Cape Cod. Blair, the eldest of the offspring, is recently married and is diagnosed late in pregnancy as 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. Hilderbrand takes us back to 1969 in all its glory and horror through the experiences of this family. 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.

The Islanders     Meg Mitchell Moore     (2019)

Even more lightweight than Summer of ’69 is this novel set on Block Island, off the coast of the state of Rhode Island. The main character is Anthony Puckett, a writer who produced one best-selling novel and then became enmired in a literary scandal.

Anthony is hiding out on Block Island for the summer when he meets Joy Sousa, owner of a whoopee pie café and single mom to a teenage daughter, and Lu Trusdale, former lawyer now reluctantly staying home with her two preschool boys. These three characters have considerable substance, which is not the case for some of the lesser characters, such as Lu’s husband, who have the personalities of cardboard cutouts. The interactions of Anthony, Joy, and Lu drive the plot of The Islanders, and that plot won’t challenge your brain in any meaningful way as you sip your beverage of choice at the cabana. Just lap up the scenes of surf and sand.

What I’d like to mention, with a spoiler alert, is the uncanny similarity between components of The Islanders and components of three other contemporary novels, two of which I’ve reviewed on this blog.

1.   Beatriz Williams’s A Hundred Summers (2013):  a hurricane in the denouement.

2.   Ann Leary’s The Children (2017): a woman who writes a highly successful blog that has a major deception at its core.

3.   Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife (2003): an acclaimed male writer who takes the credit for his wife’s writing, with her assent.

I’ll concede that the 1. could be coincidence, since hurricanes are pretty common on the East Coast these days. But 2. and 3.—really?

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.

Pies and Brews in the Upper Midwest

The Lager Queen of Minnesota     J Ryan Stradal     (2019) Midweek Bonus Post!

Stereotypes are by definition oversimplified and formulaic, and stereotyping of any large population is particularly problematic, since variability among individuals is much more likely than conformity. Still, we all know what’s meant, for example, by “Southern hospitality,” even if not every person who lives in the southern United States is hospitable.

In The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J Ryan Stradal gives us a good portrait of “Minnesota nice,” the stereotype of that state’s residents that includes characteristics such as avoidance of conflict, social reticence, and a surface politeness that can mask passive aggressiveness. Of course, not all Minnesotans fit this profile, but the fictional Edith Magnusson certainly does. In 2003, when the fruit pies that she bakes at a rural nursing home garner statewide attention and paying dinner guests, the 64-year-old Edith shrugs off fame and is afraid to ask for a wage increase. Over the ensuing years, she doesn’t parlay her culinary genius into a job that can pay the bills, even when she has to take over raising her teenage granddaughter, Diana.

Edith’s struggles seem grossly unfair, considering that her estranged sister, Helen, inherited all the proceeds of their family farm years before and used the money to launch a successful brewery. That’s the setup of this novel, which gently pokes fun both at Minnesotans and at the currently trendy craft brewery phenomenon. The supposedly evil Helen’s non-craft  brewery is named  “Blotz,” with echoes of the slang term for drunk, “blotto.” The craft brewery where the young Diana works part-time is named “Heartlander,” with echoes of beloved farmland and amber waves of grain.

In much the same vein as Stradal’s previous novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, The Lager Queen of Minnesota features strong women who survive and thrive in business despite the appalling family situations that they have to contend with. In Kitchens, the arena for success is hyper-gourmet pop-up restaurants. In Lager Queen, it’s breweries. In a delightful twist, several of the successful female entrepreneurs portrayed in Lager Queen are well past the age when they’d qualify for Social Security. Pies might have been a more conventional route for Edith to achieve financial salvation, but Lager Queen doesn’t take the predictable plot turns. In the end, Stradal finds a way to combine Edith’s pie-baking and beer-brewing talents.

Yeah, it’s a quirky book, but the quirks are droll and entertaining. If you’re a Midwesterner or a friend of a Midwesterner, check it out. And if you’d like to read reviews of other books set in Minnesota, try the new Search Box at the top of this page!

A Classic Russo Novel

Chances Are . . .     Richard Russo     (2019)

Novelist Richard Russo was born in 1949, so he has first-hand knowledge of the worlds of his characters who were also born in 1949 and who are turning 66 in the year 2015. That’s when Chances Are . . . opens, as three friends—Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey—get together on Martha’s Vineyard over Labor Day weekend. Haunting them is the unsolved disappearance of Jacy, a young woman they all went to college with. Jacy has not been seen since Memorial Day weekend of 1971, right after the four graduated from the fictional Minerva College in Connecticut.

The 1957 pop hit from Johnny Mathis, “Chances Are,” threads its way through this novel. The song itself is mentioned several times, but the operation of sheer chance also affects each of the characters.

For example, males who were born in 1949 were subject to the first national draft lottery, which occurred on December 1, 1969. This spectacle, which was broadcast live on television, determined which men would be inducted into the military, and its primary purpose was to provide soldiers for the escalating Vietnam War while also responding to complaints that wealthier, more educated young men received preferential treatment in required military service. The lottery was a wrenching event for those whose birthdays were being drawn, supposedly randomly. Men who had a low number among the 366 birthdays would be drafted and very likely sent to a brutal jungle war zone in southeast Asia. Those who had a high number were spared. Those with a number somewhere in between didn’t know what direction their lives would take.

Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey learn their draft fates in front of a grainy black and white television set on that day in 1969. But other chance encounters and near-misses also shape this story, which moves effortlessly between the late 1960s-early 1970s and May of 2015. Russo is masterful in portraying the interior states of contemporary American men—unsparing in revealing their weaknesses but also unapologetic in showing their strengths. All three men in Chances Are . . . were in love with Jacy, and inevitably their return to the site of her disappearance stirs up memories both painful and sublime.

The final resolution and revelation of the Jacy mystery is a little more pat than I usually expect from Russo, but the character studies in this novel demonstrate complete command. He situates Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey on a gorgeous island, hangs over them some ugly unknowns, and then shows how these ordinary though distinctive guys react.

Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors; you can read my reviews of some of his other works here.

"Workers of the World, Unite!"

Deep River     Karl Marlantes     (2019)

Although many Americans now work more than 40 hours a week, either because they need to make ends meet or because their job demands it, the 40-hour work week and the eight-hour work day are well accepted as standard in the United States. This was not always the case.

Until the early twentieth century, when labor unions started challenging the draconian demands of employers, workers in factories, mines, logging camps, stores, offices, private homes, and other workplaces were required to put in far more than eight hours a day, six or seven days a week. The fight for a reasonable work week, for fair pay, and for safe working conditions was a bloody one, waged by courageous people who risked their jobs and often their lives by joining a labor union, by attending union rallies, and by striking. These workers were accused of being communists –or at the very least unpatriotic and lazy, unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Deep River is a fictional treatment of the labor movement in the Pacific Northwest, from 1904 to 1932, with an opening section set in Finland from 1893 to 1904. Labor organizer Aino Koski is an admitted communist, agitating for revolution by rallying loggers, many of them new immigrants, to join the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), familiarly known as the Wobblies. Stick with me here! Deep River is not a dry account of speeches, picketing, and protest marches.

Despite the theme of worker empowerment, you can read this novel solely for the drama of an immigrant family, followed over several decades, as they struggle with learning a new language and carving out an existence in one of the last wildernesses in the continental United States. The Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and Aino—draw on “sisu,” an untranslatable Finnish word for the characteristics of their ethnic heritage. It includes perseverance, fortitude, and stoicism. These Finnish Americans, especially the highly independent women, sure need sisu as they forge their way into the modern era.

You can also read Deep River for the lyrical descriptions of the magnificent old growth forests of Washington and Oregon, harvested by loggers who worked in an exceedingly dangerous environment, felling and then moving trees that were often 15 feet in diameter. “They watched the tree go down, hearing the wood creak, then crack, then sigh, the tree gaining momentum, falling faster and faster, the air rushing through the branches . . . cracking and squealing with the force of hundreds of tons of wood that for several hundred years had fought against gravity and was now hurling toward the ground from where it came.” (286)

There are a few brief scenes of violence, when union members are attacked by police, hired thugs, and deputized citizens who have been convinced that all unions are anti-American. The IWW is in fact one of the most radical of the unions of this period, bringing the spirit of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the American workforce. As one fellow organizer tells Aino, “’The government is going to crush the Wobblies. The people hate them.’” (453) Even Aino’s supportive sister-in-law repeatedly speaks warnings: “’Aino, revolutions require visionary leaders. In America, the visionary leaders go into business.’” (463) “If you tell me you love the IWW, I’m telling you that you’re fooling yourself. You can’t love an ideal. You can only love people.” (533)

At 717 pages, this novel requires commitment. I committed to it over Labor Day weekend, when the history of the labor movement was especially poignant, and I wasn’t disappointed. For another novel about the history of logging in North America, try Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. For reviews of other immigrant stories and family sagas, click on the category in the Archive in the right-hand column.

Spiritual Renewal in Palm Springs

The Family Tabor     Cherise Wolas     (2018)

Harry Tabor, the current patriarch of the Tabor family, hears a voice. It might be his conscience speaking to him, commenting on long-repressed memories. It might be God calling him to account for his life. It might be an ancestor speaking from the grave, or maybe it’s dementia.

Harry is 70 years old and about to be crowned Man of the Decade by the good people of Palm Springs, where he has long resided with his adored and adoring wife, Roma, doing the philanthropic work of resettling Jewish refugees from around the world. As the novel begins, Harry is at the top of his game, feeling healthy, proud, and deserving of all the praise that is being heaped upon him. Then that voice comes, on the very day of the Man of the Decade presentation event, which will be attended by 800 people decked out in their best. Harry was brought up as a Jew, but throughout his adult life he’s embraced the cultural aspects of Judaism more than the spiritual. Sure, he and Roma attend synagogue for the High Holy Days, but Harry doesn’t really buy into the concept of a deity and doesn’t, for example, truly repent his sins.

All that is about to change, and Harry’s seemingly perfect family life is about to explode also. Harry and Roma’s three adult children are traveling to Palm Springs to celebrate with their father, and the novelist takes us into each of their lives, revealing disturbing problems. Meanwhile, Roma, who is a child psychologist, is struggling with a particularly difficult case. Can Roma help her own children face their demons? Can a return to heartfelt religious observance heal these wounded people? Or can they at least embrace honesty in their relationships?

Novelist Cherise Wolas is only moderately successful in crafting the story of the Tabors. Some of the characters’ interactions feel forced, and the wrap-up of the book is abrupt and awkward. But Wolas deserves to be commended for tackling an exploration of the role of the spiritual in twenty-first-century life. Full-scale adherence to the rules and rituals of a particular faith is an option, and although Judaism is the faith that Wolas presents in most detail, one character seems to be testing a return to the Roman Catholicism of her youth. Being part of a community whose members share values and support each other in worship and in daily life works for some people. For others, spiritual renewal might mean a commitment to complete honesty in personal and professional interactions. Honesty can serve as a foundation for building a moral code upon which to base a fulfilling life, with or without a component involving organized religion. Harry Tabor has been a generous man and has done great good works for decades, but the voice that speaks to him makes clear that Henry’s philanthropy isn’t enough. He needs to face some serious failures and betrayals that he’d rather forget.  

The Family Tabor addresses tough moral and ethical questions in an era when the value of adherence to moral and ethical standards is being severely tested. If these issues concern you, take a look at what Cherise Wolas has to say.

Italian Americans in the 20th Century

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Juliet Grames (2019)

Fair warning:  Most of the men in this novel are brutes. Even the ones who are polite at the dinner table, who bring lovely gifts, and who work hard to support their families still tyrannize women outrageously. The worst of these men is a pervert who engages in criminal sexual activities, but there are gradations of nastiness—sexual, economic, and emotional.

So the women are the stars—especially Stella Fortuna, whose name, as the novelist tells us, actually means “‘star luck’ or maybe even ‘lucky star’.” (4) Stella is beautiful and smart, exceling at computation and at needlework although she’s functionally illiterate. But Stella’s most defining characteristics reside in her personality. She’s argumentative and honest and independent—whoa, is she independent. For a young woman with such a streak of self-sufficiency, it’s not an easy life in Ievoli, a small Calabrian mountain village in the early twentieth century. The rural women of Ievoli are workhorses and baby breeders, performing heavy labor until they go into heavy labor. Most of them submit unquestioningly to their domineering husbands. In these early sections of the novel there are touches of magic realism that some reviewers have found jarring. I thought the magic realism fit perfectly with the Italian Catholicism of the era, its rosaries and religious processions coexisting with charms to ward off the Evil Eye.

Just before World War II, the Fortuna family emigrates to Hartford, Connecticut, against the will of Stella’s mother. Does life get easier? Well, by boarding that ship they do miss the worst of the reign of Mussolini and the wartime marauding of Nazi soldiers. But in America Stella has a battle on her hands to stay single, as she has vowed to do, having figured out about the brutishness of those males. Though life in Ievoli afforded few material comforts, at least the inhabitants were surrounded by stunning natural beauty, which is woefully lacking in the slums of Hartford. Stella daydreams: “She pictured Ievoli, the glowing yellow-green of the citrus leaves in the April sun, the silver-blue of the September olive groves, the sun-baked July rows of bulging tomato stakes marching like soldiers along the terraced mountain.” (328)

The entire novel is framed from the viewpoint of the present day, when Stella is 100 years old. The narrator, a descendant of the Fortuna clan, gets the stories of all of Stella’s close brushes with death from Stella’s sister, Concettina, (“Cettina” in Italy and “Tina” in America). In an Author’s Note, Juliet Grames mentions that memories of her own elderly relatives inspired components of Stella’s life, and I found myself wondering which parts of the novel correspond with Grames’ own family history.

The boisterous, dramatic, hard-partying Italian Americans in The Seven or Eight Deaths are not stereotypes but rather fully realized characters, some saints but many sinners. Every immigrant family (and the vast majority of Americans come from one) has similar characters. Grames has captured the immigrant experience magnificently, using the anticipatory device of the “deaths” to get me to read late into the night to find out how Stella survived yet again. Brava!

For another story about Italian Americans, find a DVD of the classic 1987 movie Moonstruck. And for more of my reviews of books about immigrants, click on “Immigrant Stories” in the column to the right.

A Mystery in Luxuriant Marshland

Where the Crawdads Sing     Delia Owens     (2018)

Mix together some of Barbara Kingsolver’s nature writing, a bit of Pat Conroy’s insights into the American South, and a good chunk of any police procedural mystery, and you’ll get an approximation of Where the Crawdads Sing. Oh, and add some coming-of-age self-realization, too.

Kya Clark is the Marsh Girl, whom we meet in August of 1952, when her mother walks away from her family’s isolated shack, deserting her children to escape an abusive alcoholic husband. Kya is six years old at the time, and already amazingly independent  in the lush woodlands and waterways of the North Carolina coast. She’s a born naturalist (instructed a little by an older brother who departs early in the story) and possesses artistic abilities inherited from her mother, who was a painter.

Within a few years, Kya’s violent and unreliable father disappears also, and she’s left on her own in the wilderness, with no funds and no schooling. Her survival might seem to stretch credibility, but in Delia Owens’s portrayal, Kya’s life among the gulls and fireflies and mussels is almost idyllic. Indeed, the many passages describing the landscape and its denizens are worthy of Aldo Leopold: “Clouds lazed in the folded arms of the hills, then billowed up and drifted away. Some tendrils twisted into tight spirals and traced the warmer ravines, behaving like mist tracking the dank fens of the marsh.” (192)

Owens introduces several characters to assist Kya in her solitude. An African American man who runs a gas station in the marshland exchanges Kya’s ocean catches for gas for her boat. His wife provides Kya with cast-off clothing. A budding young biologist from town who fishes in the marsh teaches her to read and brings her books. Trouble arrives, however, with another young man, Chase Andrews, who is determined to seduce her.

You’ll figure out early on that Kya will be a suspect in the 1969 murder of Chase Andrews. The courtroom scenes in which Kya is tried mark a shift in the tone of the book, from the dreamy, romantic marshscape to the harsh reality of criminal prosecution and defense. This wasn’t a narrative discontinuity for me but rather indicative of Kya’s distress in being separated from her beloved wilderness for her trial in town.

Kya’s estangement from most other human beings keeps her in a state of credulous immaturity even when she’s in her twenties, so the coming-of-age component of the novel has unusual twists. “[Kya] knew the years of isolation had altered her behavior until she was different from others, but it wasn’t her fault she’d been alone. Most of what she knew, she’d learned from the wild. Nature had nurtured, tutored, and protected her when no one else would. If consequences resulted from her behaving differently, then they too were functions of life’s fundamental core.” (363)

Where the Crawdads Sing has been on many bestseller lists and is being adapted into a movie by Reese Witherspoon. It’s a tale well-suited for the big screen, but I suspect that even if the adaptation is good, the book will still be better.

Wheeler-Dealers in Old Amsterdam

The Coffee Trader     David Liss     (2003)

Dutch burghers of the 17th century had original paintings by the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer hanging on the walls of their solid, comfortable houses. For me, this is reason enough to gravitate toward fiction set in Holland in this period, and indeed novels such as Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999), based on the Vermeer masterpiece of the same name, have transported readers into that milieu very effectively.

In The Coffee Trader, novelist David Liss demonstrates that Dutch baroque-era burghers were not only patrons of the arts and archetypes of bourgeois life but also innovators in the establishment of modern commodity markets, with a version of Wall Street trading that was remarkably sophisticated—and treacherous. At the Exchange in Amsterdam, “Some traders came to fill orders or to sell what their ships brought into port, but increasingly men bought calls and puts and futures, trading in goods they never sought to own and would never see. It was the new way of doing things, turning the Exchange into a great gaming pit where outcome was determined not by chance but by the needs of the markets around the world.” (90)

The fictional intrepid trader of the book’s title is Miguel Lienzo, a Portuguese Jew who has settled in 1659 Amsterdam after fleeing from the Iberian Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church. At that time, the internationalism of the Dutch business community made Holland one of the few places in the world where Jews could practice their faith without persecution. The downside of this religious freedom was that Jews in Amsterdam created self-imposed restrictions on their community, in order to assure the gentile Dutch that Jews would not be an economic drain or a cultural threat. A Jewish council called the Ma’amad could impose career-ending sanctions on local Jews, and this is one of the key tensions of the novel.

Miguel is surrounded by vividly depicted secondary characters, including the mysterious Dutch widow Geertruid Damhuis; the impoverished Dutch trader Joachim Waagener; the ostracized Jewish moneylender Alonzo Alferonda; Miguel’s pedantic brother, Daniel; and Daniel’s longsuffering wife, Hannah. Percolating through the narrative, however, is the inanimate character of coffee, which was just beginning to be appreciated in Europe for its pick-me-up qualities: “Hannah . . . loved the way it made her feel animated and alive. It was not as though she discovered a new self, rather, coffee reordered the self she already had. Things at the top sank to the bottom, and the parts of herself she had chained down rose buoyantly. She had forgotten to be demure and modest, and she loved casting off those constraints.” (201)

As Miguel coordinates a risky scheme involving coffee futures, the novelist presents business transactions of dizzying complexity. Some of the financial shenanigans zipped right past me, but I’m not complaining, since I could then focus on satisfying sub-plots involving a nefarious servant, an enigmatic sidekick, and an unhappy marriage.

Immerse yourself in the world of The Night Watch and the Zuiderzee with The Coffee Trader, and if you crave more 17th-century Holland, check out my review of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith.

More Than a Mystery

The Other Americans     Laila Lalami     (2019)

Exactly who are “the other Americans” in Laila Lalami’s novel of that title? She introduces multiple narrators, each of whom could be categorized as “other.”

• Driss, a Moroccan immigrant who runs a diner, is a ghostly presence in many ways. On the first page he dies in a late-night hit-and-run accident, yet we get his back story piecemeal in chapters throughout the book.

• Efraín, a Mexican doing landscaping in this California desert town, witnesses the accident but is afraid to come forward because of his undocumented status. We follow his crisis of conscience over many weeks.

• Anderson, a prime suspect in the accident case, is an elderly white guy who runs the bowling alley next door to Driss’s diner. He sees himself as ostracized in a corporatized and increasingly diverse society.

• Nora, Driss’s adult daughter, is convinced that her father was not killed accidentally but murdered, and she pushes the police to dig deeper into the evidence. As a musician, she finds some acceptance in the jazz community, despite her brown skin.

• Coleman, an African American police detective, is assigned to the accident case. She’s smart and savvy, but she struggles at home in raising her teen stepson.

• Jeremy, another police officer, is a veteran of the Iraq War who clearly suffers from PTSD. Early in the novel he becomes Nora’s boyfriend, and their relationship anchors a significant sub-plot.

The list of characters goes on, and Lalami integrates the disparate narrative perspectives smoothly as she disentangles the mystery of Driss’s death. All her characters (even Anderson in his way) are outsiders, with personal histories that define them in opposition to the people around them. A sense of otherness can arise from many sources, including race, ethnicity, religion, gender, immigration status, woundedness, or occupation.

Although the ensemble cast of The Other Americans is very large, the characters are fully fleshed out, with distinct voices. I really wanted Lalami to broaden each of their stories, although I know that this would have cluttered the novel and distracted from the main plot. She does provide a brief and tantalizing wrapup of the hit-and-run accident, several years out, from Nora’s point of view.

I got to know these Americans; I sympathized with many of them and wished them well. Good novels do that to a reader.

Coming of Age in the North Woods

Winter Loon     Susan Bernhard     (2019)

The loon, a large migratory aquatic bird, can be spotted in the far northern reaches of Minnesota,  Wisconsin, and Michigan (and up into Canada) only in the height of summer. The cry of a loon echoing across a lake is haunting and unforgettable, emblematic of long days in the North Woods. But if you spot a loon in these parts in the winter, the bird is probably injured and is unlikely to survive.

Wes Ballot, the teenage first-person narrator of this novel, is perhaps like a winter loon in rural Minnesota—disoriented, separated from his family, facing grim odds for survival. On the very first page, Wes’s mother falls through the ice of a semi-frozen Minnesota lake and drowns, just out of the reach of Wes’s outstretched arm. If you’re a reader who, like me, has a hard time with fictional death scenes, you may waver in committing to the story, but I’d encourage you to read on, as the path of Wes’s life winds twistingly toward adulthood.

When Wes’s father deserts him, supposedly to find work, Wes is left to live with his insensitive maternal grandparents. A local Native American family is sympathetic toward him, and Wes is smitten with a member of this clan, Jolene, who’s also had a tough life.  “She smiled at me then, a funny, crooked, closed-mouth sideways smile that I would later try to imitate in the mirror. It was like she could see something in me that I didn’t know about, and I wanted to try on that expression so I could know it, too.” (98)

Although Wes has plenty of setbacks, he keeps seeking to learn the facts about his troubled parents, particularly on classic road trips through the American West. “I tried to organize my thoughts, but the miles I’d traveled logged in my veins and I could feel the tire treads rumbling the marrow like I was still driving.” (279)

Some of the people Wes Ballot meets are selfish and cruel. Well, no, a lot of the people he meets are selfish and cruel, and sadly, many teens around the globe find this to be the case. But a few people are generous and kind. Wes doesn’t give up looking for the people who will affirm his worth.

California Dreamin'

The Golden State     Lydia Kiesling    (2018)

Daphne, the first-person narrator and main character in this novel, is the mother of a sixteen-month-old girl nicknamed Honey. She’s also the wife of Engin, who was wrongly deported to his native Turkey eight months before the story begins. And she’s an administrator at the fictional university-based Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations in San Francisco.

After a devastating incident at the Institute, Daphne is at the end of her rope on both the career and parenting fronts. She packs up Honey and heads to a remote rural area in northern California, to a small house that she’s inherited. The people she meets there include a 92-year-old woman on a personal quest and a group of libertarians who want the region to secede from the state of California. Tapping into unreliable internet connections, Daphne sends email excuses to her boss back in San Francisco and phones her husband in Turkey, all the while trying to figure out what path she wants to take for the rest of her life.

Novelist Lydia Kiesling pokes at and deflates a number of contemporary cultural beliefs in this candid novel.

• The total bliss of early motherhood? Jab. Daphne feeds Honey, diapers her, reads to her, bathes her, kisses her, soothes her when she falls on her face, and straps her into car seats and strollers as she strenuously resists being strapped in. The sentences in which these activities appear are often lengthy and lacking punctuation. With this writing technique, Kiesling is conveying the unremitting and often overwhelming demands of child care.

• The purity of purpose at major universities? Jab. A sample: “The more education you have the more removed you are from the ineluctable yawning core of work at the University, which is not in fact teaching but is the filling out and submission and resubmission of forms, the creation of scheduling Doodles, the collection of receipts and the phoning of caterers, the issuing of letters and the ordering of supplies and the tallying of points in poorly formatted spreadsheets.” (38)

• The basic fairness of American immigration enforcement? Jab.

• The universal good-heartedness of rural Americans? Jab.

• The excellence of off-the-beaten-path diners? Jab.

The “golden state” of the title clearly refers to California, and Kiesling provides lovely scenes of areas in California that seldom appear in fiction. But it’s also possible that this title is obliquely referring to the representation of motherhood as golden, or of our American political system as golden. Check it out, through the eyes of Daphne.

Retirement in Pittsburgh? Don't Yawn!

Henry, Himself     Stewart O’Nan     (2019)

Stewart O’Nan offers no rootin’ tootin’ action in this novel, no daring heroes, no grisly violence. Henry, Himself is a quiet, introspective portrait of a year in the life of Henry Maxwell, a retired engineer in his 70s who lives in Pittsburgh. If you’re already yawning, stop that for a moment and read this review.  

Somehow, novelist O’Nan is able to turn everyday events into drama that drives his narrative in a highly effective way. I haven’t yet figured out how he does this. It could be the naturalistic dialogue. Henry’s conversations with his wife of nearly fifty years, Emily, can be hilarious. The two have well-worn phrases that they toss back and forth, parrying each other’s comments. 

Maybe the novel works because the hundreds of minor quotidian events are enlivened by actions beyond the edges of the main story, such as the troubled marriage of Margaret, Henry and Emily’s alcoholic daughter.  

It’s also possible that I see my own life in O’Nan’s prose because I’m in the same age range as Henry and Emily. But O’Nan is a decade younger, so I don’t know how he’s able to depict the attitudes and approaches of the elderly so astutely. He’s simply a fine novelist.  

So, what exactly does the character Henry do? He may be retired, but he certainly keeps busy every day, well beyond walking the dog. At his basement workbench he re-glues a kitchen drawer because he can’t afford new cabinets. He makes innumerable trips to his local Home Depot store to buy supplies for his fix-it projects, and in his home office he keeps meticulous records of household expenses. Despite his multiple health challenges (which he manages with an array of prescription medications), he golfs with his old pals, trading barbs in camaraderie. Henry’s beloved wife Emily is always in the picture also, and he takes pains to please her with dinner dates for Valentine’s Day and Mothers’ Day. The two of them escape Pittsburgh in the summer for Chautauqua, New York, where they meet up with their children and grandchildren at their lakefront house.  

In the midst of these ordinary activities, Henry mentally retraces significant events of his past—a passionate but doomed youthful love affair, his searing combat experience in World War II, his fulfilling career in aeronautics. His companionable marriage to Emily anchors him even as he is baffled by the animosity between Emily and the wife of their son. The unhappy life of daughter Margaret comes to Henry’s mind frequently, as he assesses whether he has failed her as a father. He muses, ”Late in life, after his mother had died, his father cried at baptisms and funerals and sappy movies on TV, age stripping away a final protective layer. Now Henry could feel the same softening taking place inside him, a helpless grief for the past and boundless pity for the world, and that was right too. No fool like an old fool.” (72)

You can get more of the Maxwell family in two other O’Nan novels that I also highly recommend:  Wish You Were Here (published 2002) and Emily, Alone (published 2011). Both are set after Henry, Himself, which makes Henry, Himself a prequel. I can also vouch for two stand-alone O’Nan novels that probe interpersonal relations in a warmhearted way: Last Night at the Lobster and The Odds. Be aware, however, that O’Nan has also written terrifying thrillers that I have stayed far away from!

For other novels about Rust Belt places like Pittsburgh, check out Anne Tyler (Baltimore), Richard Russo (upstate New York), and Leif Enger (northern Minnesota). For other introspective novels, try Kent Haruf or James Wood or Bernard MacLaverty. You can click the links for my reviews.

Miracles in MN and ND

Peace Like a River     Leif Enger     (2001)

Most of the religions of the world have in their histories or traditions the working of miracles, perhaps because humans want to believe that the usual unrelenting laws of the universe can sometimes be subverted. Peace Like a River is a book about miracles, but novelist Leif Enger doesn’t proselytize. Right up front, on page 3, his narrator, Reuben Land, writes, “Here’s what I saw. Here’s how it went. Make of it what you will.”

Reuben is an eleven-year-old asthmatic boy living in rural Minnesota with his younger sister (Swede), his older brother (Davy), and his father (Jeremiah, the one who performs the miracles) in the year 1962. After their small town’s two bullies engage in an escalating series of episodes of battering and vandalism, Davy strikes back and ends up in jail. When Davy’s trial seems to be going against him, he escapes, managing to evade both officers of the law and a civilian posse. His family sets off to find him, figuring that he might be hiding out in the rugged Badlands of the neighboring state of North Dakota. The family encounters several distinctive characters on their quest, and the story—after taking turns toward love, fear, hope, and loss—builds to a shocking conclusion.

This forward-driving narrative line alone would be sufficient to keep the interest of many readers, but Enger adds much more. Jeremiah’s miracles, some of which might be odd coincidences, appear when they’re least expected, as the family’s road trip to the Badlands takes on qualities of the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Reuben is an unpretentious first-person storyteller who inspires reader confidence in his truthfulness, and his version of 1962 is accurate without feeling forced. His language can be rich: “Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long.” (54) He frequently includes galloping verse, based on the lore of the Old West, which he presents as written by Swede, who is unusual in both her name and her precocity.

I sought out Peace Like a River, Leif Enger’s debut novel, after placing his most recent offering, Virgil Wander, on my Favorite Reads of 2018 list. Enger’s prose style has developed in seventeen years, but his writing was already powerful in 2001, and if you’re familiar with the Upper Midwest, you may feel an extra zing. For the record, you don’t  have to believe in miracles to love this novel.

A Cautionary Novel about Cults

Little Faith     Nickolas Butler     (2019)

In the title to this blog post, I don’t use the word “cult” lightly. I use it to mean a group professing a religious belief that they claim provides exclusive access to salvation. But this alone would not distinguish a cult from many mainstream religious groups. Cults often have arcane rules about conduct of life—rules that can be secretive. In addition, a cult demands absolute obedience to a leader, usually a charismatic man, and urges total allegiance to the group, alienating members from family and indeed from the greater society. The risk of exploitation of members by the cult’s leader is high.

I’ve noticed that the media don’t much use the term “cult” lately, rather giving these groups the benefit of the doubt as “new sects” or “alternative religious movements.” I was raised in the 1960s in a religious splinter group that fell short of being a cult but that could also have been given one of these more benign labels. I see a distinct tipping point between “new sect” and “cult”: When a member’s fervent adherence to the group leads the member to perform destructive (including self-destructive) acts that are widely recognized by civil society as unacceptable or even criminal, to me that group is clearly a cult.

Now, to get the novel at hand, Little Faith. In present-day rural Wisconsin, a retired couple, Lyle and Peg Hovde, are delighted when their long-estranged adult daughter, Shiloh, comes to live with them again. Shiloh brings with her Isaac, her five-year-old son. The Hovdes don’t ask about Isaac’s father; they’re just reveling in their newfound grandparenthood. And Isaac is a bright, sweet child.

The knot of this novel, however, arises when we find that Shiloh has become a member of a cult. True, Shiloh calls the group that she joins her “church,” but it has all the hallmarks of a cult. Lyle and Peg try to be respectful of Shiloh’s beliefs, not the least because they’re desperate to have good relationships with their only child and only grandchild. But the deceptive and damaging aspects of Shiloh’s beliefs become more and more apparent as the story wends through the seasons of a year. Lyle’s own struggles with religious belief weave in and out of the narrative.

Nickolas Butler’s prose is straightforward but occasionally lyrical, his characters are beautifully developed, and his plot is achingly tragic. I challenge any reader of Little Faith not to weep at the ending of the novel, which I will not spoil with a full revelation of the plot. An Author’s Note tells us that part of the story is based on an actual 2008 incident in Wisconsin, where Butler lives. Thus, Little Faith becomes a cautionary tale about the dangers of extremist, authoritarian groups that entrap needy souls in the name of religion.

Click here for my review of another of Nickolas Butler’s novels, The Hearts of Men.

Cozy Mysteries in Maine

The Mainely Needlepoint Mysteries     Lea Wait    (2015-present)

I’ve recently dipped into this popular American cozy mystery series. In the initial book, Twisted Threads, we learn that the first-person narrator, Angie Curtis, was raised in Maine by her grandmother (“Gram”) after the disappearance of Angie’s mother. When the mother’s body is found after 17 years, 27-year-old Angie heads back to Maine from Arizona, where she’s been working as an assistant to a private detective. Angie’s skills come in handy with the investigation into her mother’s death and other mysteries in the small Maine tourist town of Haven Harbor. After these are solved, Angie agrees to stay on for six months to help Gram run her home-based business, Mainely Needlepoint, which produces high-end custom pillows, chair covers, and wall hangings.

Of course, in subsequent books in the series, other crimes in Haven Harbor bubble to the surface for Angie to tackle. She finds herself pretty happy to be back in Maine with her delightful Gram, the eccentric cast of needle crafters who work for Mainely Needlepoint, and potential romantic partners.

The dialogue in these novels is realistic, and the plots move quickly, resolving in the final few pages, though I did detect signs of haste in the writing. The setting on the coast of Maine comes to life with descriptions of ocean views and luscious seafood. I guessed some of the perpetrators of crimes early on, but I liked learning more about Angie as she weighs whether to stay on in her native Maine or return to the sunny Southwest.

You can read the books in any order, but chronologically works best. The series titles are

Twisted Threads (2015)

Threads of Evidence (2015)

Thread and Gone (2015)

Dangling by a Thread (2016)

Tightening the Threads (2017)

Thread the Halls (2017)

Thread Herrings (2018)

Thread on Arrival (2019)

For other cozy mysteries, see my reviews of Alexander McCall Smith’s novels (also here).

Graham Norton’s Holding is another great cozy, reviewed here.

Surviving Exploitation

Before We Were Yours      Lisa Wingate     (2017)

When children are exploited and abused by adults, the response of most people is to recoil in horror and call for criminal prosecution. This has occurred with Jewish children in the Holocaust, indigenous children in Canadian schools, children abused by Roman Catholic priests, and Central American children in the detention centers at the southern border of the United States.  

One documented case of severe and widespread child abuse that has not received much attention took place from the 1920s until 1950 at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, under the direction of a woman named Georgia Tann. Although Tann covered her tracks through falsification of thousands of records, some survivors have been able to piece together the history of how they were abducted from their impoverished parents and sold by Tann to wealthy families. Children with blonde hair and blue eyes fetched especially high prices. Tann never came to trial because she died in 1950 just as the her nefarious scheme was being exposed.   

Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours is a novel, but it’s based on the actual remembrances of survivors who lived in Tann’s squalid holding facility while they were waiting to be sold. In this re-creation, we meet the fictional Foss children through the eyes of the eldest, Rill Foss, who is twelve. In 1939, she and her four younger siblings are living happily with their loving parents on a houseboat that plies the Mississippi River. When the mother faces complications in childbirth, the father rushes her to a hospital on shore, and Rill is left to supervise her siblings. She’s powerless when strangers arrive at the houseboat and spirit all the children away to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis. In first-person narration, Rill describes the maltreatment of the children with a level of detail that I found painful to read.  

Novelist Wingate wisely softens this narration by flashing forward in alternate chapters to the life of a young woman named Avery Stafford, an affluent attorney in present-day South Carolina. Avery stumbles upon some pieces of her family’s history that confuse her, and she sets out to unravel the mysteries of her lineage. Readers know that the story from 1939 and the story from the present day are likely to coalesce at some point, and Wingate handles the tension that leads to the solution of the mysteries adeptly, throwing in a couple of sub-plots to further pique reader interest. The tenacity of familial love is a central theme in this fictionalization of a dark chapter in the history of adoption services.  

Postscript: Many thanks to Dorothy Needham Moreno for suggesting this author for me to read!