Pandemic Reads, Part One

I signed off on my book review blog nearly a year ago (see my Blogger Reflections), but I’ve read so many good books since then that I felt obliged to check in with my faithful followers.

During the 2020-21 pandemic, I’ve gravitated toward two genres:  historical fiction and mysteries. Historical fiction carried me off to times other than my own, letting me escape the distress of current life in the United States. With a good mystery, I could get so wrapped up in untangling the plot that I could forget about case counts, mortality statistics, and vaccine data for a few hours.

Here are seven titles that I recommend:

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague Maggie O’Farrell (2020) Yes, the title is kind of off-putting during our modern plague, but there’s not a lot of 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. See also my review of O’Farrell’s This Must Be the Place.

Stuck in Manistique Dennis Cuesta (2018) Local color abounds in this well-done mystery set in a small city in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There’s also the stranger-comes-into-town trope, as the main character, from Chicago, arrives to settle his aunt’s estate. Readers from the Mitten State should especially enjoy this one.

The Voyage of the Morning Light Marina Endicott (2020) In this epic tale set in 1912, two half-sisters sail through the South Pacific on a merchant ship. Canadian author Endicott doesn’t shy away from complex issues such as colonialism, bigotry, and religious arrogance, both in Micronesia and (through flashbacks) at a school for first-nations children in Canada. The scenes on shipboard are really brilliant.

Someone Alice McDermott (2013) McDermott can conjure up New York in the early-to-mid twentieth century better than any other author I know. In this novel, she gives us an intimate portrait of an Irish Catholic woman’s ordinary life, from youth to old age. The beauty here lies in the simplicity and the lovely language. See also my review of McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017).

A Royal Affair Allison Montclair (2020) In 1946 London, Iris Sparks and Gwendolyn Bainbridge of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau are hired to investigate a potential problem with the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to her prince. This lighthearted mystery is historical, so it hits both of my pandemic requirements! See also my review of the first Montclair novel with Iris and Gwendolyn, The Right Sort of Man (2019).

The Clergyman’s Wife Molly Greeley (2019) I usually steer clear of fan fiction, but this spinoff from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice stands on its own as a gentle historical novel of the Regency period—and the Austen links give it extra resonance. The wife of the title is Charlotte Collins (née Lucas), a friend of P&P’s Elizabeth Bennet who made what Elizabeth considered a disastrous marriage. See how this modern author imagines that Charlotte’s choice  played out.

Moonflower Murders Anthony Horowitz (2020) This offering from one of my favorite mystery writers is a long haul, because it includes within its covers a second complete mystery novel, supposedly written by someone else. Hang in there for the denouement. I’ve reviewed three previous Horowitz mysteries, Magpie Murders (2017), The Word is Murder (2018), and The Sentence is Death (2019). This guy is prolific, and his metafictional mastery is astounding.

More brief reviews of my pandemic reads will be posted in coming weeks!

The Blogger Reflects

The Cedar Park Blog has reviewed 257 books over the past three years. I’ve written all of these reviews except for a handful that my guest reviewer, Paul R Schwankl, stepped in for. (Thanks, Paul!)  

The focus of my blog has been

• historical novels

• mysteries, especially historical mysteries

• contemporary fiction, mostly novels plus some short story collections

• a few biographies, memoirs, and social histories

Hundreds of other books have returned to my local library unreviewed and mostly unread. The trend in fiction publishing today seems to be toward thrillers, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. These genres either disturb my sleep with nightmares or simply don’t capture my interest. Dystopian futurist novels are especially popular, perhaps as warnings about the trajectory of our society or perhaps as a way of saying, “It could be worse.” I reviewed one of these futurist books and decided that one was enough. Among memoirs, I’ve gravitated toward those by women who have triumphed over difficult circumstances in their childhoods.  

It’s now time for me to move on to other writing projects. In suspending my book review blog, I plan to devote more of my time to my own fiction and nonfiction writing. Stay tuned for news of

• a novel set in Detroit in the 1960s

• a guide to visualization for pregnancy and birth (with Johanne C Walters)

• a liturgical pageant for the Christian season of Advent

Meanwhile, you can check out my recent publications: a coming-of-age novel, Adventures of a Girl Architect, and a musical pageant, The Medieval Twelve Days of Christmas, both of which are available on Amazon.com.

This blog will be active until at least November 2021. The Archive of reviews, in the right-hand column, will be available for your browsing pleasure.

Thanks for checking in with the Cedar Park Book Review Blog!

A Woman between the Wars

A Single Thread     Tracy Chevalier     (2019)

I know what you’re thinking: “You’re really recommending a novel about embroidery?”

First off, let’s get the terminology straight. In the early 1930s, when A Single Thread is set, the British term “embroidery” referred to what we now call “needlepoint,” the stitching of yarn through canvas that has an open weave. Needlepoint is used to make objects that are sturdy and practical, as well as beautiful: cushions, chair covers, eyeglass cases, and such.

Second, portraying a group of female needlepoint experts is a clever device that novelist Tracy Chevalier uses to approach a demographic debacle in post-World–War-I England. The war took the lives of about 700,000 British men, mostly young, and maimed many others, leaving a generation of British women without male partners. These were the “surplus women,” and A Single Thread tells the story of one of them, Violet Speedwell.

Violet lost both her brother and her fiancé to the war. At the start of the novel, she’s decided to separate herself from her dour, miserable mother, who has never recovered from the death of one of her sons. Violet sets off on her own to the nearby city of Winchester and works as a typist, barely scraping by financially. Descriptions of her pitiful meals of bread and margarine reveal the day-to-day poverty endured by millions in Depression-era Britain. But Violet is also starving emotionally.

Then she accidentally happens upon the Winchester Broderers, a group of women who carry on medieval traditions (and terminology) by producing exquisite embroidered articles for use in Winchester Cathedral. The Broderers—some kindly, some decidedly not—become Violet’s anchor in an uncertain world. And because she hangs around Winchester Cathedral a lot for meetings of the Broderers, she meets the cathedral’s bell ringers, a male coterie that provides a love interest.

Tracy Chevalier excels in depicting the inner lives of women in difficult circumstances, as she did with great success in her 1999 historical novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring. In A Single Thread, Chevalier again takes on women’s issues of loneliness, servitude, sexuality, camaraderie, and defiance of social norms. Chevalier makes full use of the symbolism of embroidery (read: needlepoint) as redemptive when, in a climactic scene, Violet uses a well-placed embroidery needle to fend off an attacker.

If you love cathedral architecture or bell ringing or needlework, A Single Thread is a must read. If you just love a historical novel with compelling characters, it’s also a must read.

44 Scotland Street, Again

The Peppermint Tea Chronicles     Alexander McCall Smith     (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supportive Siblings

The Dutch House     Ann Patchett     (2019)

The Dutch house of the title is a mansion in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Cyril Conroy bought it for his wife, Elna, in the 1940s, when he amassed a large sum in real estate.  He never asked her if she wanted it before the purchase. (Guys did that back then. Some still do, I guess.) The place was previously owned by a Dutch family, the VanHoebeeks, and their portraits and furniture still adorn it.

Elna hates the opulent life that her husband’s financial success has brought to the family, and she especially hates the Dutch house. She decamps, leaving Cyril with their three-year-old son, Danny, and their ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. (That’s supposed to be Maeve’s portrait on the book cover.) The children are taken good care of by a faithful cook and housekeeper until the wicked stepmother, who covets the Dutch house, and her two daughters enter the picture. Then all hell breaks loose.

Narrated in first person by Danny, The Dutch House skips back and forth in time over a period of half a century, as Maeve and Danny cling to each other and try to come out from under the power of that huge, overly ornate structure. The reader can’t help but have sympathy for two people who struggle with the fact that their mother deserted them basically because she couldn’t stand to live in the Dutch house, which their father wouldn’t give up. Or was that really the reason?

Small recurring themes, such as the repeated attempts of Maeve and Danny to quit smoking, enliven the story. “Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats.” (277)

Ann Patchett delivers her usual assured narrative line as her highly believable characters ponder issues of forgiveness, revenge, and the bonds of family. Maeve and Danny are remarkably self-aware, despite their many questionable life decisions. Here’s Danny again: “There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.” (121)

I’ve reviewed a previous Ann Patchett novel, Commonwealth, here. Patchett has legions of diehard fans, and The Dutch House will certainly be on their request lists. It’s also a very good choice for those unfamiliar with Patchett’s novels.

A Mystery in the Cotswolds

A Bitter Feast     Deborah Crombie     (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

Youth Traveling with Old Age

Akin     Emma Donaghue     (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

Love

Find Me      André Aciman     (2019)

In 2007,  André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name broke new ground for love stories in presenting the relationship between a teenaged Elio and graduate student Oliver, who was the houseguest of Elio’s professor father in a small Italian town. Elio—preternaturally brilliant, a gifted pianist—is smitten by Oliver, who is handsome, worldly, and similarly brilliant. The language in Call Me by Your Name is lush and erudite; the story is heartbreaking.

In 2019, Aciman’s Find Me revisits the lives of Elio, Elio’s father, and Oliver years later; you can read it as a sequel to Call Me by Your Name or as a standalone novel. There are three sections to Find Me. “Tempo” tells about Elio’s father, Sami, meeting a much younger woman, Miranda, on a train rumbling south from Florence to Rome. In the “Cadenza” section, an adult Elio meets the much older Michel in Paris. Finally, in “Capriccio,” we catch up with Oliver, who’s been living on the East Coast of the United States.

You’ll like reading Find Me if you like

• Honest and incisive dialogue that drives the plot. Here is Elio talking to Sami: “You taught me how to love—how to love books, music, beautiful ideas, people, pleasure, even myself. Better yet you taught me that we have one life only and that time is always stacked against us.” (112)

• Wise aphorisms that stop you in your tracks. Two examples: “Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope.” (238)  “Sometimes it’s best to stop things when they’re perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.” (136)

• Descriptions that go beyond window-dressing to probe character: “Miranda put down her fork and lit a cigarette. I watched her shake the match with a decisive hand motion before dropping it into an ashtray. How strong and invulnerable she suddenly seemed. She was showing her other side, the one that makes hasty indictments, then shuts them off and never lets them back in except when she weakens, only to hold it against them that she did. Men were like matches: they caught fire and were shaken off and dropped in the first ashtray that came her way.” (42)  Oh, here’s another: I liked her slim feet, and her smooth shoulders gleaming with a summer’s tan that seemed to resent letting the scent of last weekend’s sunscreen wear off. Above all I liked her forehead, which was not flat but rounded and which hinted at thoughts I couldn’t put into words but wanted to know better, because there was a wry afterthought visibly floating on her features every time she flashed a smile. (219)

• Plots that turn on deep and profound love, both gay and straight.

I found the third section of Find Me, Oliver’s story, occasionally confusing, so I had to slow down in my reading race to see how the plot resolved. Savor this one, readers.

Rural Tennessee in the 1930s

Watershed     Mark Barr     (2019)

You can smell the summer heat. Or maybe that’s the sweat and the outhouses and the dust rising off the rutted dirt roads. Rural western Tennessee during the 1930s comes to life magnificently in this novel in which an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.

Although it’s never cited by name, something like the Tennessee Valley Authority is the federal program that descends upon a hardscrabble farming area anchored by a small town, several hours’ drive outside of Memphis. Nathan McReaken, an electrical engineer with a cloudy employment history, arrives to work on a massive hydroelectric dam project. The Great Depression is winding to a close, but all Nathan knows is that jobs are still perilously scarce. His secrets must be stuffed out of sight if he’s to survive an overwhelming workload, a mean-spirited and capricious supervisor, and the Southern heat. Remember, there’s no electricity in his boarding house room to power even a fan.

While Nathan is the consummate outsider in this tale, Claire Dixon is the local. Her hunk of a husband, Travis, works on one of the crews building the dam. When his sex-on-the-side ends up infecting Claire with a sexually transmitted disease, she takes their two children to her mother’s place and goes to recover her health in town with her aunt, who runs the town’s boarding house. Will Claire find a job to support herself as a single mother? Will Nathan’s past cost him his job? Will Nathan and Claire strike up a romance? You get to caring a great deal about these two, whose lives are on the edge of transformation.

The minor characters are equally engaging. Claire's Aunt Irma runs her boarding house with tough love. A seedy moonshiner named Freitag becomes Nathan’s unlikely friend. The unctuously repulsive Robert Hull has the task of signing reluctant farmers up for the electric grid. And a red-haired farm boy who looks forward to light bulbs in his family’s modest home weaves through the plot.

But that heat—expressed in a hundred tiny details, like clothes clinging to the back or hats used to fan the face—pervades everything, conjuring up the rural South in this pre-electric era. “The July afternoon had swelled into full being, the heat pouring over the low hills, finding its way even into the shaded places. It was inescapable, and the day brimmed with the billowing, hot air.” (263) The heat really stokes up the intensity, so that you can place yourself in that rural site of dam construction. Then the characters and the plot development fill it all in.

For fans of historical fiction, Watershed is a winner.

My own grandparents were beneficiaries of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. Read about them, and about American technological progress, in my review of the nonfiction The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J Gordon. For another novel set in the rural South, try Brad Watson’s Miss Jane.

Prescriptivist vs Descriptivist

The Grammarians     Cathleen Schine     (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guest Review: Broadway Musicals

The Cedar Park Book Review Blog is pleased to welcome Paul R Schwankl as a guest reviewer!

Alan Jay Lerner     The Street Where I Live: A Memoir     (1978, reissued 2018)

In my childhood I was a fan of kings and castles, and at age ten I got the huge treat of seeing a road production of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Camelot. That was in 1962. Last winter, my oldest grandchild, also at age ten, was treated to a performance of Schwartz and Holzman’s Wicked. From Show Boat to Hamilton, there’s always been an audience for stage musicals—largely, I think, because throughout its history that genre has shown an astounding ability to adapt.

I make this judgment because I’ve just read The Street Where I Live by Lerner, who was a master adapter. After many years of being hard to find, this 1978 memoir has been reissued with a new foreword by John Lahr.

Lerner (1918-1986) was born into New York garment industry wealth. His upbringing included expensive schools, summers in Europe, and, crucially, evening after evening at the theater with his dad. He turned his amateur playwriting and songwriting talent into a career with the help of three wildly unlikely coincidences, involving smoking a forbidden substance (tobacco), turning his head the wrong way while boxing in college, and running into Frederick Loewe after Loewe had taken a wrong turn on his way to the restroom.

In The Street Where I Live, Lerner concentrates on the last three Lerner and Loewe hits: My Fair Lady, the movie Gigi, and Camelot. All of these shows had plenty of troubles—eccentric film moguls for Gigi, multiple illnesses and unwieldy length for Camelot—but the most interesting for American cultural history were the troubles that Lerner and Loewe had turning Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion into My Fair Lady.

The biggest problems came not from Shaw’s heirs, as I would have expected, but from some essential attributes of the play. The relationship between Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins is a very ambiguous sort of romance. Besides, Pygmalion has (1) no subplot and (2) no easy way to involve choruses and dancers, two defects that would doom a musical at that time. In 1952, after struggling with the writing for months and learning that Rodgers and Hammerstein had also decided that they couldn’t make a musical out of Pygmalion, Lerner and Loewe gave up the project. But they took it up again in 1954, and in 1956 My Fair Lady opened. It’s one of the most successful musicals ever staged.

Did Lerner and Loewe develop some new wondrous talent over the space of two years? Not a bit, says Lerner: “By 1954 it no longer seemed essential that a musical have a subplot, nor that there be an ever-present ensemble filling the air with high Cs and flying limbs.” As for the peculiarities of Eliza and Higgins, “The accent on the emotional reality of character and story . . . grew stronger and stronger.” So Lerner and Loewe could do in 1954 what nobody could have done a couple of years earlier. “What causes [such a] change? It is not the desires of the audience. It is the restlessness of authors for new forms of expression, which audiences then discover to be exactly what they were unconsciously longing for.”

I found these revelations about our American culture fascinating. I also learned more about the author. Lerner’s public personality had made me think of him as something of a jerk—conceited about his work, married eight times, overfond of his own skill, snobbish about his education and breeding. In the book, to my pleasant surprise, he’s frank about what agony songwriting was for him, matter-of-fact about his marital history, and grateful for the breaks he had. Most impressively for a theater person, he avoids gratuitous putdowns of the many people he worked with, instead talking up their talent and efforts. The entertainment world could certainly use more of that. So, for that matter, could our nation.

WASP Privilege

The Guest Book     Sarah Blake     (2019)

Ah, to be mega-rich, rich enough to buy an island off the coast of Maine, complete with house and outbuildings. But then . . . What if you bought that island to cheer up your wife after a terrible family tragedy had plunged her into despair? What if the funds with which you paid for the island were secured through collaboration with Nazis before and during World War II? What if the island became a burden to your grandchildren, who couldn’t afford the upkeep?

In this multifaceted family saga, spanning four generations of the Milton family, we first meet Kitty and Ogden Milton in New York City in 1935. Ogden’s financial firm has somehow been insulated from the Great Depression, and life is very, very pleasant, until a shocking death occurs. Hence in 1936, Ogden buys Crockett’s Island for a song, and the family summers there every year, creating beloved traditions, especially involving sailing and the eating of lobsters. WASP privilege reigns, though pockets of sadness creep into the story. In one scene, for example, potential victims of the Holocaust visit the Miltons from Germany and ask for help. And, as with many families, long-held secrets can pop up unexpectedly to unsettle  assumptions and alliances.

The novel toggles back and forth, touching on the experiences of Milton family members in the 1930s, in 1959, and in the present day. The scenes from the summer of 1959 prove most consequential. Moss, an adult son of Ogden and Kitty, invites to Crockett’s Island two of his New York friends—one Jewish and one African American—causing bigoted opinions to surface and tensions to build toward the climax of the saga.

The language of The Guest Book is often lyrical, particularly in passages describing the natural beauty of Crockett’s Island. The dialogue feels authentic, and the plot twists and turns satisfyingly. Readers may think that novelist Sarah Blake occasionally gets a little preachy as she presents the racist views of the Miltons and their wealthy friends, but frankly, in the time before the Civil Rights movement, discriminatory segregation was the norm for both blacks and Jews. With racist views on the ascendance in much of the world today, Blake’s demonstration of the toxic, generation-spanning consequences of such views is especially valuable.

Bonus Post: Blogger Reflections, Part 2

The Ann Arbor District Library recently (January 2020) released lists of the most requested books in its collections. Of the top twenty fiction titles that Ann Arborites want to read, I’ve reviewed eight on the Cedar Park Book Blog:

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Normal People by Sally Rooney

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Significantly, seven of these eight books were also included in one of my own end-of-the-year list of favorites, for 2017, 2018, or 2019.  

I’m still waiting for my turn to read several other fiction titles on the library’s “most requested” list. A couple of other novels I’ve checked out and read but decided not to review. Why? Well, Jennifer Weiner’s Mrs Everything rubbed me the wrong way with its multitude of factual errors in its supposedly realistic setting. Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, though masterful, was too dystopian for my taste. I wanted very much to review Tommy Orange’s There There, but I couldn’t get a handle on the narrative. On my blog, I review only books that I can strongly recommend to my followers.

Although I post primarily about fiction on the Cedar Park Book Blog, I managed to review five of the Ann Arbor District Library’s top twenty requested nonfiction titles also:

Educated by Tara Westover

Becoming by Michelle Obama

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo

Women Rowing North by Mary Bray Pipher

And I loved another nonfiction title on the AADL list, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. My reading selections seem to align pretty well with those of my neighbors!

Outside the Norms

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church    Megan Phelps-Roper     (2019)

Take a deep breath before you start to read Megan Phelps-Roper’s powerful memoir. She’s unsparing in her descriptions of the militant anti-gay crusade of the Westboro Baptist Church, citing the many gross and disgusting slogans and songs that the cult used online and in demonstrations across the United States.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the activities of Westboro, Phelps-Roper’s first chapter, “The Quarrel of the Covenant,” explains the genesis of her grandfather’s crusade against homosexuality. Fred Phelps, who led Westboro until his death in 2014, began his national campaign in Topeka, Kansas, in 1989, by picketing a local park where gay people congregated. Phelps justified the picketing with fiery sermons in which he preached that God commanded believers to denounce the sins of those around them in society. One favorite Bible passage, among the many that Fred Phelps cited, was “Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.” (71)

The actions that got Westboro the most international press coverage were their pickets at the funerals of US military service members. Though this picketing seems to defy logic, Phelps wanted to proclaim God’s punishment of the US for promoting homosexuality and other practices that Westboro deemed sinful. In other words, the US had promoted sin, therefore God had purposely killed US service members, therefore Westboro had to draw attention to the connection. To be clear, the deceased service members were very unlikely to have been gay themselves.

In 1986, Megan Phelps-Roper was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, which has never numbered more than 100 members, most of whom are and have been members of Fred Phelps’s large extended family. Although he kept close control, insisting on absolute obedience and adherence to rules, Fred Phelps also required that members receive formal education in public institutions, including colleges and law schools. Thus Megan Phelps-Roper, a bright and diligent student, became an articulate spokesperson for Westboro, handling the cult’s online presence starting around 2008, when she was in her early twenties.

By 2012, Megan Phelps-Roper’s concerns about Westboro grew to the point that she and one of her sisters moved out of their family home and severed ties with the cult. Her agonizing decision was based on recognition of multiple inconsistencies in Westboro’s dogmas, plus an internal coup by men (“elders”) who displaced her grandfather:

“I couldn’t believe how our love within the church had been warped beyond recognition by the elders’ unscriptural will to punish. By their implacable demands for unquestioning obedience. By their pernicious need for superiority and control. They had developed a toxic sense of certainty in their own righteousness, seizing for themselves the role of the ultimate arbiter of divine truth—and they now seemed willing to lay waste to anyone who disagreed with them. It was a heinous arrogance and sinfulness that could not be denied. And in a moment of horrifying clarity, I finally saw what had eluded me for so long: We had all been behaving in the exact same way toward outsiders. It was as if we were finally doing to ourselves what we had been doing to others—for over twenty years.” (158-9)

As I read Unfollow, I tried to track the theological arguments underpinning Westboro’s despicable actions. One doctrine, among many, that I could not get my head around was their belief in double predestination—an unchanging decision of God to send a human either to heaven or to hell. If the sinners of America were totally doomed, what was the point of picketing? Such sinners could not be saved, even if they turned away from their wickedness. The picketing did attract media coverage of Westboro, but the group did not gain converts to their belief system as a result of that coverage.

You need not immerse yourself deeply in such theological conundrums to appreciate Phelps-Roper’s moving story. However, it may help to know that she puts the many biblical quotes used by Westboro in italics in her text. And all Bible passages are from the 1611 King James version, which is the only English version that Westboro accepts as inspired by God. (Phelps-Roper also uses italics liberally in her own, non-Biblical text.)

Phelps-Roper presents the evolution of her understanding of the world and of her family in painstaking detail. Despite the constraints on her, she felt deep love from her family within Westboro, and in turn she continues to express love for all of them, both those who have remained with Westboro and those who have broken free. For me, the most astounding component of Phelps-Roper’s life story is her relationship with Chad Fjelland, the man who would eventually become her husband.

Fjelland began interacting with Phelps-Roper online when she was still Westboro’s PR person. He didn’t send the kind of angry messages that she usually received through social media. Instead, he was patient and inquiring, trying to understand why Westboro rejoiced in military deaths and in other tragedies around the world, though he was unambiguous in saying that he would never espouse the beliefs of Westboro. Fjelland and a couple of other brave souls who debated reasonably with Phelps-Roper online were instrumental in her departure from Westboro. My one minor complaint about Unfollow is that Phelps-Roper did not carry her story a little further, to describe her deepening relationship with Fjelland after she finally met him in person.

Unfollow demonstrates that religious beliefs that are taken to extremes, that fall outside the norms of a civil society, are dangerous, not only to the individuals caught within those belief systems but also to the society at large. Social media can spread falsehoods, imagined conspiracies, and bigotry, but, as the case of Chad Fjelland demonstrates, social media can also provide a way for rational, concerned people to connect with some cult members. The undercurrent of hatred in the United States today is frightening. We owe it to our nation to understand groups like Westboro Baptist Church, and Megan Phelps-Roper offers us a clear window to that understanding.

[Please note:  I call the Westboro Baptist Church a “cult” intentionally. For an explanation of how I approach such groups, see this previous review of mine. Note also that mainstream Baptists have renounced Westboro.]]

Men. Hunting. Way Up North

Hunter’s Moon     Philip Caputo     (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite Reads of 2019

Favorite Reads of 2019

photo by Ed Robertson

I’m a finicky reader. About 80% of the books that I check out from my local library never get a review, after undergoing my 50-page test. (To be honest, some don’t make it past page 10.) Reasons that I send books back unfinished and unreviewed? Oh, too much violence or an insipid plot or characters who are so disgusting that I don’t want to get involved with them. And remember, I don’t even check out books in the genres of horror or science fiction or fantasy.

In 2019 I reviewed 72 books on the Cedar Park Book Blog, and picking my favorites was a challenge. The sixteen below are the best of the best! Contemporary fiction rose to the top this year, with eight of the sixteen titles that I selected.

Here are the winners, in alphabetical order by title. The brief descriptions with each are totally insufficient, so be sure to click on the title to go to my full review.  

Becoming by Michelle Obama   The former First Lady recounts her remarkable life as if she’s sitting right in the room with you. MEMOIR

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment   In spare prose, the story of an affair between two jurors sequestered for a sensational murder trial. CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng   An intimate family tale wrapped around a tragic death, probing racism and sexism in 20th-century America.  HISTORICAL NOVEL

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling   Deftly deflates cultural beliefs about immigration law, motherhood, and rural California.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Henry, Himself by Stewart O’Nan   An introspective, naturalistic portrait of a retired engineer in Pittsburgh.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

How Not To Die Alone by Richard Roper   A forlorn civil servant in London has a job searching the homes of the deceased for evidence of family. Can he find happiness?  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J Ryan Stradal   A quirky take on the craft brewery phenomenon, featuring feisty women of the upper Midwest. CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Little Faith by Nickolas Butler   A family in rural Wisconsin becomes involved with a religious cult as they try to sort out their relationships. Poignant portraits of varying beliefs.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Normal People by Sally Rooney   Coming of age, falling in love, and confronting societal constraints, by Ireland’s hottest new novelist.  CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout   Don’t miss this sequel to the Pulitzer-winning novel Olive Kitteridge. Linked short stories by a truly gifted American writer. CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield   A nearly drowned young girl is the center of a magical mystery that unwinds along the Thames in the 19th century. HISTORICAL MYSTERY

The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair   In post-WWII London, two bright women start a marriage bureau and end up solving a crime. Spunky and sparkly. HISTORICAL MYSTERY

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

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens   A “Marsh Girl” roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative prose. HISTORICAL MYSTERY

The Winter Soldier by Daniel Mason   A medical student assigned to an eastern European field hospital confronts the physical and mental damages of WWI. A bleak but rewarding read. HISTORICAL NOVEL

The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz   An invented version of the author Horowitz helps solve a crime in this spritely metafictional British whodunit.  MYSTERY

Happy reading in 2020!  Check back with the Cedar Park Book Blog every Friday for curated recommendations of historical novels, mysteries, and contemporary fiction, plus an occasional social history and memoir. Follow the blog on Facebook to get a reminder.

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More by Elizabeth Strout

Olive, Again     Elizabeth Strout     (2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Non)Fictional Mathematicians

The Tenth Muse     Catherine Chung     (2019)

The nine Muses of ancient Greek mythology, all daughters of Zeus, traditionally provided inspiration for many different arts, from dance and music to history and lyric poetry. Catherine Chung tells us that, in addition to the nine Muses, there was once an unheralded tenth Muse, a woman who “did not wish to sing in the voices of men, telling only the stories they wished to tell. She preferred to sing her songs herself.” (1) The tenth Muse gave up immortality and came to inhabit the bodies of millions of women on earth who told their own stories. This novel is about one of those women, a mathematician of extraordinary abilities who speaks in first-person narration.

Women are distinctly a minority in the field of higher mathematics, where an academic can spend an entire career seeking to solve a single major mathematical problem. The character Katherine in The Tenth Muse comes of age in the 1960s, when mathematics was even more male-dominated than it is today, and she confronts exclusionary policies head on.

Complicating Katherine’s life is her heritage: it’s especially difficult to grow up in the mid-20th century in small-town Michigan when your father is white and your mother is Chinese. Katherine’s parentage turns out to be even more complex than the obvious mixed-race issues presented in her childhood. She’s determined to sort out her ancestry, and a graduate fellowship to study at a German university gives her access to first-hand information.

Katherine’s path, both in her mathematics career and in her ancestry search, winds and twists in unexpected directions. In reading The Tenth Muse, I occasionally thought that the turns of plot were not true to life. But then I remembered my own meandering path in academia, which no one could have predicted at the outset of my career.

Surely it’s not a coincidence that the given name of the narrator of The Tenth Muse is almost identical to the given name of the author of the novel. Novelist Chung  holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, so she knows the field of mathematics, and she draws into the story many real-life mathematicians. But she doesn’t overwhelm ordinary readers; she invokes mathematical terms only in broad strokes, so readers don’t have to drill down with the experts.

Do some of the scenes in The Tenth Muse reflect discrimination and harassment that Chung herself has suffered? Is the novel a call for mathematicians to wake up to the #metoo movement and clean up the discipline? A couple of statements by the character Katherine help to answer these questions:

• “I was so used to my perpetual status of outsider that I’d stopped questioning in each situation whether this time it was my femaleness or my Asianness or the combination of both that branded me different. Even now, I feel impatient when asked about what being these things mean to me—the expectation that because my race and my gender are often the first things people notice about me, they must also be the most significant to me. When I die, I know the first sentence in my obituary will read, ‘Asian American woman mathematician dies at the age of X.’” (162)

• “Here was the problem: I was ambitious. I wanted a career. I wanted accolades and validation. More than anything, I wanted to do something that mattered. At a time when it was unseemly for a woman to want these things (is it really so accepted now?), I wanted them desperately. I went after them openly.” (233)

In one scene, when young Katherine meets a female Nobel laureate, the older woman says to her, “’Life’s not fair . . I could have spent my time fighting the unfairness of it all, or I could dedicate my time to science. There wasn’t time for both.’” (119) This is the quandary that many women face.

I’ve reviewed quite a few books about exceptionally bright women, including Chemistry by Weike Wang, Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple.

Ordinary Women in History

Tidelands     Philippa Gregory     (2019)

Philippa Gregory is best known for her 2001 historical novel The Other Boleyn Girl, which was twice made into a film. Throughout her long writing career, Gregory has fictionalized the lives of prominent women from the history of Britain, sometimes in the face of criticism that she’s distorted the facts. (Yeah, probably, but who knows the facts for certain, and Gregory’s books have always been labeled “fiction,” and, uh, Shakespeare.)

With Tidelands, Gregory embarks on a new series, “tracing the rise of a family from obscurity to prosperity,” as she explains in her Author’s Note. Her protagonist, Alinor Reekie, is both obscure and fictional, a wisewoman—a midwife, a healer, an herbalist—who poses a threat to the patriarchal religious beliefs of the seventeenth century, especially those of the censorious Puritans. It’s 1648, during the English Civil War, pitting Royalists who support King Charles against Parliamentarians who want to abolish the monarchy. This political polarization is overlaid on Catholic-Protestant religious polarization at a time when it was highly dangerous to be a Catholic in England.

Alinor is swept up in these national disputes that she cares little about; she’s mainly concerned about her status as neither wife nor widow, since her abusive sailor husband has disappeared. As the novel opens, she’s waiting in the graveyard of the local church at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve, when ghosts are reputed to walk. She hopes to see the ghost of her husband, to confirm that he’s dead. Instead, she meets a living man, James Summer, a high-born Catholic priest seeking a safe house in the area. She doesn’t yet know that he’s involved in a dangerous plot against the Parliamentarians, who are the dominant party in the tidelands, a marshy area on the southern coast of England.

Tidelands launches slowly, with plenty of atmospherics appropriate to a graveyard at midnight and plenty of exposition to set the political scene. But readers surely sense the frisson between Alinor and James from this very first meeting of theirs. She guides him along boggy pathways to the home of secret Catholics who will shelter him. Then the story turns to Alinor and her two young teen children, who scrape by on odd jobs and the occasional payments that Alinor gets for attending births.

There’s some lovely prose here, evoking the setting: “[James] shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well.  . . . He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.” (190-1)

Tidelands also carries a strong message about the oppression of women, especially poor women, pithily expressed by an elderly seller of lace at the Chichester market: “’It’s a crime to be poor in this country; it’s a sin to be old. It’s never good to be a woman.’” (244) The male characters in Tidelands tend to be exploitive, gossipy, and fickle.

Since Tidelands is the first novel in a planned series, Philippa Gregory leaves readers with a “to be continued” feel at its close. I’m hoping that we hear more about the indomitable Alinor in the next book. Citing Gregory’s Author’s Note again, “For much of English history women have been legal nonentities. But they always lived as if they mattered. Alinor is a woman like this.”

For another novel about a strong woman living in marshlands, see my review of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.