For Black History Month

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

First, a brand-new fiction review:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category Novels, Part Three: Southern Novels

What are Category Novels? They’re fictional tales that I’ve grouped together to help my blog-followers zero in on their preferences. A category might be based on

Most novels fall into more than one of my categories. (To see all of them, on a desktop computer, scroll down and to the right to find the Archive of Book Reviews. On a mobile device, scroll way down.)

My category Southern Novels includes some of my all-time favorite books. Click on the titles below to see full reviews.

News of the World     Paulette Jiles     (2016)  In post-Civil-War Texas, a traveling performer agrees to make a dangerous journey to deliver an orphan to her aunt and uncle. (The film, with Tom Hanks, is also terrific.)

Where the Crawdads Sing     Delia Owens     (2018)  The Marsh Girl roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative nature prose and a devilish mystery.

Watershed     Mark Barr     (2019)  In 1930s rural western Tennessee, an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.

Heart of Palm     Laura Lee Smith  (2013)  A family tale populated with gun-totin’, hard-lovin’, rip-roarin’ Southerners—plus deftly developed story lines.  


And here is a very recent Southern Novel that I’ve read.

The Caretaker     Ron Rash     (2023) 

Jacob and Naomi Hampton have married against the wishes of Jacob’s well-off parents, who have disinherited him, and Naomi is pregnant when Jacob is drafted to serve in the Korean War. “Caretaker” has double meaning in this superb novel, set mainly in North Carolina. Blackburn Gant is the caretaker for the local cemetery in the small town of Blowing Rock, and he’s also watching out for Naomi while Jacob, his best friend, is off soldiering. The plot gets very thorny when Jacob is wounded in Korea. Novelist Ron Rash, writing in the tradition of John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers, makes you worry about all sorts of terrible denouements, and he adds enough mildly macabre elements to qualify this novel as Southern Gothic. The characters are skillfully drawn, and the language shines with beauty in its spareness.

Repeat Performances

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

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

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

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

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

Category Novels, Part Two--New York Novels

As I explained in my post titled Category Novels, Part One, you can explore any one of the 27 categories of books at I’ve reviewed on this blog, from Mysteries to Family Sagas to Chick Lit. Within these categories there are hundreds of choices! (To find the “Archive of Book Reviews” on a desktop computer, scroll down and to the right. On a mobile device, scroll way down.)

In today’s post, I’m highlighting New York Novels. Ever since I inaugurated my book review blog in early 2017, I’ve had a category with this title—those stories about self-absorbed, wealthy inhabitants of the largest city in the United States. New York City is a publishing hub, and New Yorkers write a lot, so the number of novels set in the city is enormous. I’ve posted 28 full-length reviews of New York novels, not to mention the many brief reviews that you’ll find in the Archive under Snappy Little Reviews.

Click on the titles below to read my extended reviews of three of my favorite historical New York Novels.

The World of Tomorrow by Brendan Mathews (2017)  Rollicking action at the fabulous New York World’s Fair, in June of 1939, when the Great Depression has eased and World War II was still unimaginable to Americans.

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (2017)  A noir novel with entangled plot lines, mobsters, and plenty of period detail from 1930s and 1940s New York City, especially the Brooklyn Naval Yard.  

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott (2017)  The pros and cons of being Catholic in early 20th-century Brooklyn. Exploring the intersections of morality, religion, and culture in resonant language.

And in this extended review from 2017, you can read my rather smug take on Jay McInerney’s contemporary NYC from my perch out in flyover country.

Here’s a brand new review of another novel that takes place in present-day New York City.

Pineapple Street     Jenny Jackson     (2023)  Pineapple Street actually exists in NYC’s Brooklyn Heights (just across the East River from Manhattan) and this novelist’s well-developed characters fit the NYC mold. Each chapter takes the viewpoint of one of three women in the affluent Stockton family. Darley had a high-powered finance job until she reluctantly decided to stay home with her two small children. Her younger sister, Georgiana, works at a nonprofit, despite her generous trust fund, and is ill-fated in love. Sasha, who has a successful graphic arts business, has recently married into the family and is tagged as a gold digger because of her middle-class background. The family story plays out with hilarity, sorrow, and satire. The conclusion of the book endowed some characters with more altruism than I thought was credible, but I nevertheless relished another glimpse into the glamor of NYC.

 

A Guide for Insomniacs

Hello Sleep: The Science and Art of Overcoming Insomnia Without Medications Jade Wu     (2023)

I’m breaking with the strong trend toward fiction in this blog to review this nonfiction title. I’ve read quite a few other books about sleep and insomnia, but I haven’t reviewed them here because they were either (a) unhelpful or (b) cruel.

I’ve also read countless online articles with recommendations for products or practices related to sleep. In response to these articles, I’ve installed a room-darkening shade, an air filter that doubles as a white noise machine, a highly-rated mattress, an expensive pillow, and an array of natural fiber blankets that can be layered on or peeled away. I’ve used eye masks, over-the-counter medications, and several types of ear plugs. I’ve practiced progressive relaxation, visualization, mindfulness meditation, and counting sheep. Some of these have helped my sleep marginally.  

Hello Sleep is a game changer. Dr Wu, who is a clinical psychologist and behavioral  sleep medicine specialist at Duke University, adopts a conversational tone as she explains how to establish a friendly—rather than an adversarial—relationship with sleep. I bounced around in her book before I then read it front to back, and I recommend reading it front to back, slowly and with attention.

Here are my key take-aways. Yours may be somewhat different, since Wu emphasizes individual differences in sleep.

  • Stop worrying that you are ruining your health because you have insomnia.

  • Distinguish tiredness from sleepiness. Sleep only when you are truly sleepy.

  • Establish set times for retiring and rising. Wu provides clear instructions for determining these times and for calculating your “sleep efficiency.”

  • If you wake in the night, get up and do something calm rather than tossing and turning. (Many other sleep books concur on this one.)

  • During the day, get some exercise and expose yourself to plenty of natural light.

  • Keep your brain from racing at night by spending time in the daytime to reflect on issues in your life. (I would add that handwritten lists help me avoid night-time ruminations.)

  • Don’t place too much trust in recommendations for merchandise that purports to help you sleep. Sure, it’s good to have a dark, cool room with good air circulation, but seeing sleep as your friend is more important.

Dr Wu also has chapters on prescription sleep medications and on medical conditions that can affect sleep.

If you are an insomniac, read this book. You can even read it at 3:00 am when you can’t sleep. Just ignore the lack of a comma in the title.   

Three Adventure Tales

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

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

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

 

 

Author Spotlight: Allison Montclair, AKA Alan Gordon

  • The First Book in the Sparks and Bainbridge Series

I’ve gobbled up all five books in the Sparks and Bainbridge historical mystery series by Allison Montclair. To catch you up, here’s a re-post of my review of the inaugural book, which you should be sure to read first!

The Right Sort of Man     Allison Montclair      (2019)  In the wake of World War II, women who had taken on substantial roles in the war effort were often expected to walk away from stimulating, remunerative work to become housewives. Recently, a number of nonfiction titles, novels, and films have been exploring the ramifications of this cultural shift. For example, in the PBS series The Bletchley Circle a cast of brilliant (fictional) female codebreakers become freelance detectives, solving murders after the war. On this blog, I’ve reviewed several novels treating the issue of women adjusting to wartime and to the post-war economy and society; see links at the end of this post.

In the novel The Right Sort of Man, Iris Sparks can’t reveal her wartime work because of Britain’s Official Secrets Act, but she clearly was a spy for the Allies. The story starts in 1946, and Iris demonstrates her chops through her contacts in high places, her sharp intellect, and her ability to wield a knife against an aggressor. She has met Gwen Bainbridge, a wealthy widow who was so devastated by the loss of her husband in the war that she was confined for several months to a mental institution and lost custody of her young son. Iris and Gwen decide to become partners in establishing a marriage bureau—Iris to have gainful employment as a single woman, and Gwen to reclaim her place in the world. The services that Iris and Gwen offer are in demand as Britons return to civilian life and seek the comforts of home and family.

Alas, after only a few months of operation, The Right Sort Marriage Bureau loses one of its female clients to murder, and a man whom the bureau has matched her with is charged with the crime. Iris and Gwen have vetted their clients thoroughly and are convinced that the wrong person has been arrested. To see justice done and save the reputation of their firm, they set out to find the real perpetrator. In the course of their investigation, they run into black market gangs finding ways around Britain’s strict war-related rationing laws, which were not fully phased out until 1954.

The action moves forward, and the personalities develop, primarily through dialogue, and that dialogue is quick-witted, reflecting Iris and Gwen’s intelligence and perceptiveness.  These two women have Sherlockian powers of observation and deduction as well as skills in subterfuge and in the discernment of the truthfulness of those they are interviewing. Some complex sub-plotting centers on Iris’s sex life, which is, to use Gwen’s descriptor, “adventurous.”

Who is the novelist? Allison Montclair is a pseudonym for an experienced fiction writer who’s venturing into the 20th-century-mystery genre with The Right Sort of Man. It’s a highly successful venture, capturing the immediate post-war period in London and unveiling the lives of two women who survived and thrived.

For other excellent fictional treatments of women’s roles in Britain in World War II and afterwards, see my reviews of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs mysteries (2003-present) and of Anthony Quinn’s Freya (2017). On the American side of the Atlantic, check out Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), and for women in post-war Germany see Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle (2017).

  • The Next Four Books in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series

Although each of these titles has a separate murder mystery for Iris and Gwen to solve, there are through-lines that develop over the course of the series. Iris tries to figure how her espionage experience will fit into the post-war world, and her romantic life gets more and more complicated. Gwen keeps struggling to have her commitment as a “lunatic” legally reversed, so that she can regain custody of her young son and become independent from her in-laws. In each of the books, post-WWII London is the vivid backdrop. For best results, read the novels in order of publication.

A Royal Affair     Allison Montclair     (2020)  Iris and Gwen are hired to investigate a potential problem with the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to her prince.

A Rogue’s Company     Allison Montclair     (2021)  In another rollicking, intricately plotted mystery, the two protagonists end up in back alleys with desperate criminals.

The Unkept Woman     Allison Montclair     (2022)  Iris’s past associations as a spy for Britain during World War II intrude on her postwar job at the marriage bureau.

The Lady from Burma     Allison Montclair     (2023)  A woman dying of cancer contracts with the marriage bureau to find a second wife for her husband, a renowned entomologist. But is her subsequent death a suicide or a murder?

  • About Allison Montclair/Alan Gordon

How did author Alan Gordon became Allison Montclair? Here’s the story: https://www.jungleredwriters.com/2022/07/introducing-real-allison-montclair.html

Under his own name, Alan Gordon has published the eight delightful medieval mysteries in the Fools Guild series. Theophilos and Claudia, a married pair of jesters and acrobats, travel widely and solve crimes in the time of the Crusades. 

From the Middle Ages to 1946 London, Alan/Allison is an author all historical-mystery lovers will want to take a look at.

Category Novels, Part One--Irish Novels

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

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

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

Next up, reviews of two more excellent Irish novels.

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

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

 

Author Spotlight: Richard Russo

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

  • The Fool Trilogy

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Pulitzer Winner

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

  • Other Russo Offerings

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

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

Settings: Traverse City, St Louis, Chicago

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

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

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

 

Historical Fiction Set in the Early 20th Century

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

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

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

 

 

Finally, Some Nonfiction

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

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

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

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

More Historical Novels

Four novels, set in four different periods of the twentieth century. (To read additional reviews of historical novels, click here and here.)

  • The World War I Era

The Bookbinder     Pip Williams     (2023)  I’ve been avoiding novels set in the trenches of World War I because the blood-and-guts horrors are just too much for me. But The Bookbinder takes place in placid Oxford, England, focusing on the women left behind, with a few letters from a nurse in France. Peggy and Maude are twin sisters who work in the bindery of Oxford’s highly respected university press. Maude has disabilities that make this repetitive work ideal for her, but Peggy is bored, wishing for much more intellectual stimulation. When Belgian war refugees arrive in Oxford, a romance element to the plot emerges, to intersect with the story of Peggy’s quest to attend university. The pace of this novel is slow, with descriptions of the minutiae of daily life and details of hand bookbinding, but hang in there. The action picks up, and weighty themes (women’s rights, the morality of war, the treatment of the disabled) emerge. A companion novel to The Bookbinder is Pip Williams’s bestselling The Dictionary of Lost Words. Watch for a review of the latter in an upcoming post on this blog.

  • The World War II Era

Beyond That, the Sea     Laura Spence-Ash     (2023) First, my minor quibbles: a few language inaccuracies and a lot of coincidences. Those noted, I really liked the unusual plot and the well-drawn characters in this novel. At the start of World War II, Beatrix Thompson, age 11, is evacuated from war-ravaged London. Unlike some British child evacuees who ended up in rural England with exploitative farmers, Beatrix is sent to Boston to live with the kind and welcoming Gregory family. One of the Gregory sons is two years older than Beatrix, and one is two years younger. Can you foresee a love triangle forming?  She ends up staying with the Gregorys until the end of the war, when she reluctantly returns to her London family. The story travels on until 1977, as Beatrix (“Bea” in the US, “Trixie” in the UK) tries to find her place in the world.

  • 1959/2018

Homecoming     Kate Morton     (2023)  You either love Kate Morton’s novels or you gasp, “No way am I slogging through 544 pages!” I slogged through Homecoming, letting myself become fully immersed in the exceedingly complex plot, chock full of Morton’s characteristic flashbacks and secrets and instances of doubtful paternity—and more secrets. Here is the basic outline: In December 2018, Australian-born Jess Turner-Bridges, who has long lived in London, receives word that her beloved grandmother has been hospitalized in Sydney. Jess flies to Australia and accidentally learns about a terrible family tragedy that occurred on Christmas Eve of 1959. We’re off and running! Morton often anchors her novels’ extravagantly wide-ranging plots in spectacular landscapes and/or houses—here it’s the Adelaide Hills and magnificent houses there and in Sydney. Most people have room for at least one Kate Morton novel in their lives. You could read this one, or you could check out my reviews of two of her other family-saga mysteries: The Clockmaker’s Daughter and The Lake House.

  • The Turn of the (Most Recent) Millennium

Attachments     Rainbow Rowell     (2011)  Remember the Y2K scare back in 1999? Media hype had us all worried that computers around the world would crash on January 1, 2000, because of the use of two-digit abbreviations for years. Attachments takes place in the years 1999 and 2000, with this Y2K angst as a backdrop. Lincoln, an introverted computer security specialist at a newspaper in Nebraska, is charged with following up on employee emails that have been flagged as possibly inappropriate. He reads lengthy personal exchanges between the newspaper’s copy editor (Jennifer) and entertainment writer (Beth), and he falls in love with Beth, whom he has never met. The pop culture references from the turn of the millennium are nostalgic, and the circuitous route by which Lincoln and Beth eventually get together is hilarious. As I raced through this novel, Rainbow Rowell had me laughing out loud at hundreds of witty emails.   

 

 

Three Contemporary Novels

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

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

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

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

Breezy Beach Reads, Part 3

Just what is a Beach Read?

When I’ve posted before on this fiction sub-genre (here and here), I’ve characterized Beach Reads as novels that won’t demand much strenuous thought. A Beach Read is usually light on troubling themes about the state of the world; disasters can crop up, but a happy ending for at least some of the characters is required. The plot moves along quickly, and the pages seem to turn themselves, so that you still have time to gaze out at the body of water adjacent to your sandy perch. The setting for Beach Reads is often the summer, often at a tourist-attracting seaside town, but this setting is not mandatory.

The Beach Read reader is likely to be female. My informal sampling indicates that many men veer instead toward nonfiction for their vacation reading—maybe biography or social science or sports history. Perhaps because of its predominately female readership, the Beach Read is akin to the Chick Lit novel and the Reunion Romance, as well as to Hallmark Christmas/holiday movies. (For a great Reunion Romance, try Kate Eberlen’s Miss You.)

Certain authors excel at Beach Reads. Elin Hilderbrand really rises to the top, especially with her novels set on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket. Hilderbrand’s Beach Reads are strong because she draws her characters with finesse and creates mostly plausible plot components. She carries some of her characters from book to book, following their life trajectories and encouraging her readers to pick up the next offering. Members of Hilderbrand’s fan club, the Hilderbabes, are seriously devoted, as recently documented in the New York Times.

One of my favorite Hilderbrand novels is 28 Summers, published in 2020 and reviewed briefly on this blog. 28 Summers borrows its structure from Bernard Slade’s Same Time, Next Year, with two lovers meeting secretly each summer, starting in 1993, on Nantucket. You can take 28 breezy seaside vacations with these characters.

I don’t pretend that my take on Beach Reads is definitive. Some readers will say that a Beach Read is any work of fiction that they save for reading on vacation. They pack the titles that they’ve been anxious to read but haven’t had time for during the rest of the year. Fair enough. Other readers love to settle in under that sun umbrella with a good mystery or thriller that provides page-turnability similar to that of a Beach Read. In any case, if you borrow a Beach Read from your local library, try to keep it out of the water!

Here are reviews of three Beach Reads that I recommend.

Rock the Boat     Beck Dorey-Stein     (2021)  Hallmark movies often feature an unhappy single person who leaves the big city for a quaint small town and finds love very unexpectedly. Take this trope and cross it with a Beach Read and a Reunion Romance, and you get Rock the Boat. When public relations exec Kate Campbell gets dumped by her wealthy Manhattan boyfriend of 12 years, she quits her job and moves back in with her parents in the small coastal tourist town of Sea Point, New Jersey. This is a major reversal for Kate, especially since New Yorkers really look down on New Jersey (even though those same New Yorkers flock to the Jersey Shore every summer).

In Sea Point, Kate reunites with two of her childhood friends—Ziggy Miller, a local plumber, and Miles Hoffman, a real-estate developer who has himself returned to Sea Point to re-engage with the family business. The past mistakes of Kate, Ziggy, and Miles are resurrected in brief flashbacks, and several sub-plots weave through the narrative. Don’t worry about keeping track of all the minor characters. Just watch Kate as she reinvents her life.

Summer of ’69     Elin Hilderbrand     (2019)  [A revised repost from this blog.] 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 entered the world. Fifty years on, Elin revisits the momentous events of the summer that she herself was born. She includes 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.

Hilderbrand’s main characters are the Foley-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.

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

Short, Short, Long

Two short novels, both from Ireland:

Foster     Claire Keegan     (2010, 2022)  This gem-like novella is already part of the school curriculum in Ireland, and now, twelve years after its initial publication, the full version is finally available in the United States. Keegan compresses an enormous amount into 92 pages, as she did with her acclaimed novella Small Things Like These. In Foster, a young Irish girl is taken to live with relatives at the beginning of summer. It’s unclear if the arrangement is permanent or temporary, and the tension of this uncertainty hangs over the narrative—as do mysteries about the girls’ birth parents and about her foster parents. Keegan is able to evoke panoramic scenes with spare sentences like this one, on the first page: “It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road.” The dialogue is similarly spare but revealing of character. Don’t miss this book. (The movie version, The Quiet Girl, is also excellent—in the Irish language, with subtitles.)

The Queen of Dirt Island     Donal Ryan     (2022, 2023)  In rural County Tipperary, widow Eileen Aylward shares her modest house with her daughter, Saoirse (pronounced something like SUR-sha), and her widowed mother-in-law, Mary. Their story spans the mid-1980s to the early 2010s and includes feuds, romances, deaths, and run-ins with the Irish Republican Army. Through it all, they hang on by loving each other fiercely, even though they yell at each other a lot. You might classify this book, which is divided into two-page mini-chapters, as a very long prose poem—the language is that rich. And toward the end, a delightful element of meta-fiction also enters the narrative. For another exquisite piece of writing from Donal Ryan, check out his linked short stories in The Spinning Heart, which I reviewed on this blog back in 2018.

And a long novel, from the United States:

Commitment     Mona Simpson     (2023)  Walter, Lina, and Donnie Aziz are teens in California in 1972 when their struggling single-parent mother, Diane, becomes severely depressed and is institutionalized. Walter, who is starting college at Berkeley, leaves Lina and Donnie in the care of a devoted family friend, Julie. The novelist tracks the lives of these five people over the next decade and a half, delving by turns into decisions by each of Diane’s three children, often in intricate detail. The narrative structure made me want to know what would happen in the next chapter—and the next—but  this long novel does require (ahem) commitment on the part of the reader. I think it’s worth the time to observe how bravely the characters face adversity.

Author Focus: Curtis Sittenfeld

The sophisticated and sassy author Curtis Sittenfeld burst onto the scene in 2005 with her novel Prep, about life in an elite East-Coast boarding school, and she’s been going strong ever since. Sittenfeld has a knack for naturalistic dialogue and page-turning plots. Here are my reviews of five of her books; two of the reviews are reposts.

The Man of My Dreams     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2006)  This early work by Sittenfeld (right after the blockbuster Prep) explores the fears and fantasies of a young woman, from high school into her late twenties. Hannah Gavener is not a very likeable person, but the reader develops sympathy for her because she’s so self-doubting. She desperately seeks a male partner, hoping that marriage and children and domesticity will solve all her problems, but the men in her life either smother her with care or don’t care for her enough. I found the ending of this novel structurally unconvincing, but the insights into a young woman’s mind are worth the read.

Eligible     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2016)  Part of the propulsiveness of this novel lies in its being a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Set in Cincinnati in 2013-2014, Eligible follows all five of the Bennet sisters (Jane, Liz, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia) as they pursue or fail to pursue multiple romantic options. Their father is as droll as Austen’s Mr Bennet, their mother as ditsy as Austen’s Mrs Bennet. I gulped down the chapters, anxious to learn how Sittenfeld had transformed the next bit of early-18th-century narrative to 21st-century sensibilities. (One major approach: lots more sex.)

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  The ten short stories in this collection reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story presents a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the offerings are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life.

Rodham     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2020)  What if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton in 1975? This alternate version of Hillary’s life starts out hewing pretty closely to well-known facts—Hillary goes to college at Wellesley and then to law school at Yale, where she meets Bill. But at that point the novel follows a different trajectory, with Hillary as an unmarried law professor and politician (and Bill on another path also). Throughout, the portrayal of Hillary is, for me, totally believable, and the dialogue is especially realistic. Sittenfeld takes readers on a fun ride through the ”what ifs” with Rodham.

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

 

 

 

Short Stories

When you’ve had a long day but want a mental getaway before your head hits the pillow, consider turning to a collection of short stories for a quick dose of fiction.

  • First, two books of regular short stories:

Blank Pages and Other Stories     Bernard MacLaverty     (2021)  MacLaverty now lives in Scotland, but he grew up in Northern Ireland, and his fictional characters live on both sides of the Irish Sea. As I’ve noted in my review of his novel Midwinter Break, he focuses on the intricacies of ordinary domestic life, among people of the middle class or lower middle class. Some of these stories are set in the present day, and some reach back into the 20th century. There are no wild rides here, but there are plenty of introspective observations, in spare and lovely prose.

You Think It, I’ll Say It     Curtis Sittenfeld     (2018)  These ten stories reveal Sittenfeld’s wide-ranging understanding of women’s roles in romantic relationships, in parenting, in the workplace, and even in volunteer activities. As each story delves into a different set of characters, human foibles are certainly on display, but so is human compassion. I especially like that many of the stories are set in non-coastal places such as Houston, Kansas City, and St Louis, underscoring the ordinariness of the plots, even though some of the plots are pretty zany. Of course, zaniness is a characteristic of twenty-first-century life. (For a Sittenfeld novel, see my review of Rodham.)

  • Next, some short stories that are put together as a novel:

The Seamstress of Sardinia     Bianca Pitzorno     Translated from the Italian by Brigid Maher     (2022)  Although this book was published as a novel, it’s more a series of interlinked short stories about a young woman who lived at the beginning of the 20th century on an island off the coast of Italy. Pitzorno evokes Old World charm while detailing the extreme social and financial stratification that the unnamed seamstress faces as she hand-crafts clothing and household linens for her wealthy clients. The female supporting characters are mostly competent and feisty; the male characters are mostly corrupt and lecherous. The seamstress is advised by one woman, “Don’t ever let any man be disrespectful to you.” (138)

  • Finally, short stories that are sort of essays, too:

How It Went: Thirteen More Stories of the Port William Membership     Wendell Berry     (2022)  This book is the 14th in a series of novels and short-story collections that celebrate rural life in the American South. In this collection, Berry further fills in the cast of characters from his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and environs. Central to the stories is Andy Catlett, who, like Berry himself, was born in 1932. The narratives cross the border to essay form, and often to threnody, as Berry laments the industrialization that has nearly obliterated the old agrarian ways. I had not read any of the previous Port William books, but I easily picked up the threads, and I treasured Berry’s majestic and evocative prose, which is also in evidence in his acclaimed nonfiction on environmental issues.

 

A Grab Bag of Novels

Historical Fiction, Medieval Variety:

The Maiden of All Our Desires     Peter Manseau     (2022)  We can’t escape our involvement in planetary calamities, as the 14th-century inhabitants of a small, isolated convent in the north of England discover. This novel is set on a single day, during a fierce December blizzard, twenty years after the peak of the Black Plague. (There are multiple flashbacks to the plague years, including one very violent scene.) Several lives and past lives intersect, including that of the abbess, the former abbess, the resident priest, one of the nuns, and a young woman who lives in the nearby forest. The novelist evokes the period effectively, with gorgeous descriptors. I predicted the denouement early on, but I couldn’t help wondering how the nuns managed to brave the blizzard without cloaks!

Modern Families:

Hello Beautiful     Ann Napolitano     (2023)  William Waters had a terrible childhood in Boston. When he goes off to Northwestern University in Chicago on a basketball scholarship, he meets Julie Padavano and her gregarious Italian American family, which includes her three sisters. He begins to think that his life is turning around, but his dark past is only temporarily tamped down. All sorts of trouble ensues. The novelist echoes some of the themes of the four sisters in Little Women, however it isn’t necessary that you pull out your tattered copy of Louisa May Alcott’s classic to appreciate the well-drawn characters in Hello Beautiful. The Padavano sisters’ love for each other—and for William—shines brightly as they work their way through the decades of their lives to the chapters that conclude in 2008. And you don’t have to understand basketball, either.

Story of a Bad Guy:

The Complicities     Stacey D’Erasmo     (2022)  How might the people who surround white-collar criminals, such as the charismatic con man Alan, be complicit in their crimes? Readers get insights into several of Alan’s relationships. When Alan goes to prison, Suzanne, his first wife, divorces him and tries to reinvent herself. Lydia, his second wife, has survived a terrible accident and is a recovering alcoholic. Sylvia, his mother, is an aging free spirit who wants to reconnect with her estranged son. Noah, Alan’s adult son, always remains loyal to him. I found the shifting narrative viewpoints sometimes hard to reconcile, but the characters here are well developed, and the moral issues are thought-provoking. Oh, and a beached whale plays a major role.

Dystopian Fiction (Story of Extremely Bad Guys):

The Testaments     Margaret Atwood     (2019)  Dystopian novels and movies creep me out, but I had to read Atwood’s Booker-prize winning sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985), which I reviewed recently. For decades, fans begged Atwood to explain how her fictional society of Gilead (theocratic, brutal, corrupt) finally fell, leading to the restoration of the United States. The “testaments” of the sequel title are documents written by three women—two of them are within Gilead, and the third, though in Canada, is unknowingly linked to events in Gilead. The narrative moves from one testament to another at a brisk pace, so I kept turning those pages even as I shuddered at the gruesome atrocities depicted. The highly skilled Atwood has written this sequel with meticulous care, offering truly sobering parallels between Gilead and the United States of the early 21st century.