My Favorite Reads in 2016

At the risk of sounding smug, I surpassed my Goodreads goal of 70 titles this year.  I have friends who can match me title for title, but I mention my statistic to give you a sense of how much better the following books were than 60 others that I read.  To make my top list, a book had to be very engaging and fairly well written.  While most of these titles will not go on to become literary classics, they were all satisfying and worthy reads.  In no particular order:

NOVELS

Under The Harrow by Flynn Berry

A mighty fine first novel that is a literary mystery that starts with a woman’s discovery of her sister – dead – when she arrives for a weekend visit – and her attempt to solve the crime, discovering much about her sibling – and closest friend - that she did not know.

Ready, Player One by Ernest Kline

A futuristic, sci-fi novel, the story is told through the eyes of a teenage boy whose virtual reality self is more real than the actual world he inhabits.

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Frederik Backman

This is one of a trio of books by Backman that I read this year (including A Man Called Ove and Britte-Marie Was Here), and they were all good. The novels all take place in the author’s native Sweden (and are translated) and there is definitely a European feel about them.  The protagonists are all charming and despite some dark moments, there’s also a good deal of humor.  My favorite might be “My Grandmother,” told through the eyes of a little girl, but I just finished "Britte-Marie" and it was great too.  

Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty

While I think this author’s best work is Big, Little Lies, I enjoy everything she does.  The pivotal event surrounds something that occurs at a neighborhood barbecue.  The narrative jumps back and forth in time and the reader doesn’t know what actually happened until two-thirds of the way through.

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell

This is a novel that is wildly popular with high school kids as the two protagonists are teenagers, but the issues are very adult and Rowell creates both realistic voices and poignant moments.

LaRose by Louise Erdich

Erdich almost always writes about Native Americans, reflecting her own heritage, and this latest from her is no exception.  I thought her book from a few years ago, The Round House, was one of the best books that I have ever read – a hard act to follow – but LaRose proves to be equally intriguing and complex.  Erdich weaves together the contemporary story of a man who, because he mistakenly shoots the son of his best friend while hunting, gives his own son to the family, with flashback sections to several decades earlier, and to a story that appears in infrequent fragments about an Indian girl and a white trader in the 1800’s. 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This is an earlier title by the author of the prize-winning The Goldfinch, and I liked this one better.  It is the story of a group of friends at a small New England college whose secret leads to more secrets and hard choices.

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

I wrote about this title several times this year.  It’s a very literary book told in alternating points of view about a teenager from the Bronx who escapes to the countryside for a few weeks in the summer through a program designed to expose disadvantaged children to a different life.  The woman who takes her in and who introduces her to horses turns out to be as needy in her own way as the child.

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld

A modern re-telling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Sittenfeld does the original justice as she transplants her story to modern-day Cincinnati.  If you are familiar with the original, all the more fun to see the parallels, but you don’t have to know Austen to enjoy this novel of family complexity and the search for love. 

Euphoria by Lily King

Based very loosely on a couple years in the life of Margaret Mead, Euphoria tells the story of a dangerous love triangle between an Australian man, a British man and an American woman, all cultural anthropologists, set in 1930’s Papua New Guinea. 

NONFICTION

It’s a short list because I am an unapologetic reader of fiction, however I’d like to recommend two titles:

My Salinger Year by Joanna Radkoff

Radkoff takes you through her first job in New York in publishing in the late 1990’s as the assistant to the woman who represented J.D. Salinger.  The book is not really about the famous author, as the title implies, but rather about a great coming of age story that sheds an interesting light on the publishing business and which captures the aura of NYC.

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Actually any book by travel writer Bryson is a good time.  Part history and geography lesson, part commentary on his travels, Bryson includes laugh out loud anecdotes and makes dry quips that make you feel like you are there with him.  This title, published in 2001, chronicles several overland treks through Australia, “the most dangerous continent in the world.”

And on my nightstand. . .

Read Me a Story, Part 2

When I took a job 19 years ago that required me to commute 30 minutes one way, I began checking out books on CD from my local library.  My road rage went down and sitting in traffic was less annoying if I was listening to a book.  With the innovation of downloadable audio books (also from my library) and a smart phone, I discovered even more opportunities for listening.  Now, when I walk most mornings, I plug in my ear buds and hit play in Overdrive (the app that communicates with my library) and I’m off.  Thanks to modern technology (again, my smartphone), I can continue my book when I am driving (as it syncs to my car) and while I’m cooking or painting.  In this way, I usually finish an audio book in a week or two, part of my secret of reading so many books in a year.

As to that, I long ago quit thinking about whether listening to a book really constitutes “reading” it.  It’s true that it is a different experience than turning a physical page or swiping on my Kindle.  It’s hard to go back and find a passage from earlier and impossible to highlight or write margin notes.  For those reasons, I generally don’t listen to a book that my book group will be discussing, but for pure pleasure, having a professional reader essentially tell you a story is wonderful.

The quality of the reader is definitely an issue and I have returned some books without finishing them because the reader was so grating or too monotone.  There are writers who insist on reading their own work and generally, I have found that to be a bad idea.  One exception is David Sedaris, a humorist writer of essays and short stories.  Sedaris isn’t everyone’s taste; he drops the f-word frequently and he is unapologetically gay (so if that bothers you, skip forward), but I think it’s hard to find someone who tells a better story and he makes you laugh out loud.  Having discovered his audible books, I would not conventionally read one; he’s just that good with his voice.  Another author who reads his own work is Bill Bryson, the travel author.  I recently listened to In a Sunburned Country, his book about his travels in Australia.  Bryson is rather dry – not unlike much of Australia’s landscape, as it turns out – but he also makes frequent understated observations that, with his delivery, can also make you chuckle aloud.  A third writer who narrates her own books that I listened to this year is Donna Tartt (My Secret History).  Tartt has a soft, Southern accent that I initially found at odds with her setting of an elite New England college, but she grew on me.  I got lost in her story and forgot she was there.

Most authors hand their work over to actors or professional readers.  One of the best books that I listened to this year was a science fiction novel by Ernest Kline entitled Ready, Player One.  The novel was read by professional actor Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher on “Star Trek, the Next Generation” and a recurrent role as himself on “The Big Bang Theory” ) and, in addition to the great voice acting, Wheaton was a particularly good choice for Kline’s allusions to space movies and t.v. shows, creating inside jokes for sci-fi fans. 

It is fun to begin listening to a book and realize that you recognize the voice – not because the reader is famous or a friend, but because the voice has told you other stories.  I quite coincidentally listened to two books narrated by Rebecca Lowman within a month of each other:  Curtis Sittenfeld’s Sisterland and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park.  The latter actually alternated two voices, Lowman’s and that of a male reader, each portraying one of the title characters.  The Mare, a novel by Mary Gaitskill that I have written about before, is read by four different voices, a technique that emphasizes the different points of view offered in the novel and which works to help you keep the narration straight without the benefit of written chapter titles in front of you.

And then, having stumbled upon a series via audio book and loved the reader, I find that I want to listen to the next one too.  Such is the case with Alan Bradley’s series featuring 11 year-old sleuth Flavia DeLuce.  Jayne Entwistle, who I am guessing is a 20-something British woman, perfectly captures the whimsy and wonder of young Flavia’s voice.   One of my favorite listens this year was Fredrik Backman’s My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry.  His reader, Joan Walker, also narrates his newest, Britte-Marie Was Here.  She’s quite good with the interior contemplations of her protagonists, reflecting their angst, their joy and their revelations about themselves.

When my daughters were children, I read them to every night, usually for 45 minutes to an hour.  We started with picture books, moved on to the multiple adventures of the Magic Tree house kids and on to the complete Harry Potter series. We bought audio books for long car trips (first as cassettes and then as CDs – we had all of Harry Potter in both versions).  I credit this nighttime reading as well as the excellent voice of Jim Dale (“This is Listening Library. . .”) with enthusing my youngest daughter with a true love of listening to books.  She has her own Audible Account (where you pay for books rather than borrowing them) and – don’t tell – she’s shared her password with me.  My 83 year-old mother visits “the old people” in nursing homes each week and she brings along books to read to them.  Even though she was never a teacher, she reads like a veteran first grade educator, doing voices, and I think she enjoys the experience as much as her listeners. My conclusion?  It doesn’t matter how old you are – hearing a good book is good for the soul. 

Read Me a Story, part 1

As I started my second year of retirement this fall, I decided that I needed to do more volunteer work, and I remembered an organization to which I had give money in the past:  The Reading Connection. A nonprofit started by some Arlington teachers 27 years ago, TRC is committed to putting books in the hands of children who might otherwise not become readers.  Two incredible statistics that I learned when I attended the September orientation are: 

·      A child needs to hear approximately 1,000 stories before s/he can begin reading alone.

·      If a child isn’t reading on grade level by the end of third grade, the correlations between dropping out of school, getting arrested, and other sad fates go way up.  WOW.

·       

To that end, TRC sends volunteers weekly to 12 different sites in Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, DC and Montgomery County.  The sites are typically affordable housing complexes or transitional housing situations.  Each weekly read-aloud has a site-specific theme.  We read books around that theme to the whole group for about 20 minutes and then divide the children into smaller groups to read an additional 15-20 minutes.  There’s an organized activity designed to extend the theme in some way, and the hour ends with the children selecting a book from a collection provided by TRC to add to their own libraries. 

I go two Monday evenings a month to a site in Arlington where our themes have included Pancakes, Ideas and Imagination, Halloween (where the activity was "turn your friend into a mummy), Around the World and, just this week, Fantastic Beasts (inspired by my viewing of the new J.K. Rowling movie and a wonderful exhibit at the Denver Science Museum on extinct animals).  The fun parts (from my point of view) are finding the books and sharing my enthusiasm for reading with the kids.  I like doing voices and making the reading an interactive experience.  

In addition to the readalouds, TRC also runs workshops for parents to teach them about reading to their children.  If you live in the DC area and would like to volunteer or just donate money to buy books for children, check out their website:  www.thereadingconnection.org.

Post-Election:  

Are We Living in An Alternative Universe?

When I woke up Wednesday morning, I hoped desperately that I wasn’t awake, that it was a bad dream.  Or maybe that it was a joke.  Or that I had fallen into a science fiction movie in which I had been hurled through the space-time continuum to an alternative reality.  My personal sense of despair is not unique here in Arlington.  The mood is somber.  Yesterday, people openly sobbed in my yoga class.  I find it difficult to stay focused on any task at hand, the pit in my stomach so deep and gnawing.  Books, however, are, as we all know, a great place to escape, at least for a few hours.   So, I offer you three books in which there really is an alternative universe – one I am currently reading, one I recently finished, and one I read with enthusiasm several years ago.  The topic immediately brings to mind science-fiction, but these books fit that category in only the loosest ways, so don’t be put off by the idea. 

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (creator of the Wayward Pines book and television series) begins with quantum physicist Jason Dessen happily making dinner with his wife, Daniela, and their fifteen year old son, Charlie, in their cozy brownstone in Chicago.  Jason, once a rising star in the scientific community, has chosen family life over one dedicated to research, and he now teaches at a second-rate local college.  He is sharply reminded of his choice to have a life outside of science when he slips out to a local bar where a celebration is in progress for his old college friend who has just won a significant award.  On the way home, Jason is grabbed at gunpoint and forced to drive to an abandoned Southside warehouse where he is knocked out.  When he comes to, he is lying on a gurney surrounded by people he doesn’t recognize, people who claim to work for him and who, mystifyingly say that he disappeared 14 months earlier.  When Jason escapes the complex, the Chicago he knew before does not seem to exist.  Although there is a little science – enough to provide a theory for the seemingly impossible –the story is really about a man who looks, with alarm, at the forks in the road, and the “What ifs?” that plague us all.  (What if James Comey hadn’t sabotaged the election?  What if more young people had voted?)  The book is a page-turner!

Ready Player One by Ernest Kline takes place in the near future when people have continued to devastate the environment and when technology has advanced to the point that people can live “virtually” in an online world known as the Oasis, without regard for the mess they have made. The creation of billionaire inventor and successful video-game designer James Halliday, Oasis is “a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis,” Mr. Cline writes.  For many people, “reality” is the virtual world, the place where they have relationships, work, play and study. (A place that is frankly looking pretty good right now)

Upon his death, Halliday leaves a series of puzzles and challenges all based on his obsession with ‘80’s pop music, tv shows and movies.  The first to be able to solve the challenges becomes heir to Halliday’s fortune and owner of the Oasis. Thousands of people, working as avatars in the virtual world to solve the puzzle, are known as gunters, and these individuals read, watch and absorb everything they can to figure out Halliday’s clues.  Tension is provided in the form of a large and greedy corporation that is devoting its mighty resources to winning the game in order to take control of the Oasis.  Thus, it becomes a bit of a battle between good and evil.

The story is told from the point of view of teenager Wade Watts who daily escapes his aunt’s trailer, 53 levels up in a stack on the outskirts of Oklahoma City, retreating to his hidey hole, a car in a junk heap that still has the keys in it and which he has rigged to get electricity.  He spends his days there attending a virtual high school in the Oasis and his afternoons and evenings as his alter-ego and avatar, Parzifal, attempting to solve the puzzle.  Wade’s only friends are people he has never met in person, other gunters known as H and Art3mis, whose avatars would suggest they are a strong and handsome young man and a beautiful, clever young woman, respectively.  Wade doesn’t really know, however.  Either could be, he says more than once, a 300 pound middle-aged guy named Chuck in real life. 

While by no means great literature, the book is exciting in several ways.  Parzifal and his friends jockey with avatars from the company in the race to find the keys and open the gates (stages in the game).  At one point, the virtual battle spills into the real world where death is more than having to recreate your virtual personality.  There’s also a bit of a romance.  I listened to this as an audio book; read by Wil Wheaton (Star Trek the Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher) with whom the inside jokes relating to Star Trek and Star Wars take on even greater humor.  I find myself wishing I had this virtual escape right now. . .

Definitely fitting into the mystery genre, The City and The City by China Miéville is based on an interesting premise:  two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, exist in the same space somewhere in Eastern Europe.  It’s a very Star Trek concept – parallel universes, alternate realities, but distanced by time rather than by space. Beszel is described as a more traditional Balkan city, with billings dating from an earlier time and a bit run down.  Ul Qoma is a modern metropolis.  Citizens of each city are conditioned to “unsee” each other as well as the buildings of the other city.  Cars drive around each other.  There are areas called “cross hatchings” that seem to belong to both cities and where it is most important not to perceive the other place.  Other locations are purely one or the other.  To go from one city to the other, citizens are required to go to Copula Hall, a building that exists in both cities.  There are border patrols and you must have an international passport, just as if you are going to England or France.  That is how you go from one to the other legally.  Citizens can “breach” – a term for failing to unsee the other city or for crossing into the other city at a cross-hatched area. 

The plot revolves around the solving of a crime by Beszel detective Tyador Borlu, who is called to the scene of a murder; an archaeologist PhD student from Ul Qoma is found dead in Beszel.  Borlu’s investigations lead him to groups of rabid nationalists intent on destroying the other city, groups of unificationists who want one united country, and to a cult interested in old legends that say there is a third city, hidden between the other two.  A review I read suggested that Miéville could be creating a giant allegory, a criticism of how modern societies choose to see only what they want to see (a timely idea – think climate change deniers, those who really believe that Trump is bringing back manufacturing jobs), but there is also the possibility that he is just playing with a fantasy idea while trying to write a solid murder mystery.  Either way, the book is intriguing and entertaining.

World Building

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman

Whenever I see Becca, a contemporary of my daughters and a long-time family friend as well as former student, we talk books.  Becca is famous in our two families for stealing away from get-togethers to snatch a book off the shelf (her own or one of ours), curl up and lose herself in the power of story.  She is also seen by my two daughters and by her two sisters as the imaginative lynchpin to all of their childhood games, enthusiastically articulating a world that she weaves together on the spot, creating roles for each of them to play from beautiful fairies to large animals.  Most recently when I saw her, she brought out a stack of new bookstore purchases, all fantasy novels and only one of which I had heard of – The Night Circus.  “I loved that book,” I said.  “Hmm,” she said, “I liked it okay.  The concept was interesting but I am more into authors who are really good at world-building.  I want them to create a place I can disappear to.” 

I thought about her idea of world-building more than once as I listened to My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman  (author of A Man Called Ove.)  Backman succeeds in creating a world of stories within the larger narrative of the novel that seem initially unrelated but, in fact, are quite cleverly close.  The book reminds me of Big Fish because the stories that Granny tells seven year old Elsa seem like fairy tales with princesses, dragons and monsters in far off kingdoms, but after Granny dies, Elsa discovers that the stories, at their core, are about very real people who happen to exist in Elsa’s life.  Granny, like Edward Bloom of Big Fish, is, in many ways a larger-than-life character.  A bit crazy, she shoots a paintball gun off of her balcony and she and Elsa get picked up by the police when they are caught climbing a fence after hours at the zoo.  She curses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney.  When she is hospitalized, she has friends sneak in bottles of beer that she keeps hidden under her pillow.  She’s also traveled widely throughout her life, a gifted surgeon who has worked in war-torn countries and, like Edward, as it turns out, made a huge difference in the lives of strangers. 

Elsa is a precocious child, a pariah at school because she’s different (read “thoughtful,” “Imaginative,” inquisitive”) but whose young life is made easier by the mutual love she shares with 77-year-old Granny.  Significant to the narrative are the stories of the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miasma that Granny tells Elsa every night to help her sleep.  Throughout the novel, the reader is given fragments of these stories, enough to sense how crucial and comforting is this imaginative other world that Granny offers Elsa – not unlike the escape that, as Becca suggests, an excellent fantasy novel offers.  When Granny dies (early on in the book – not really a spoiler), Elsa is devastated.  Of course Granny has anticipated this and right before she dies, she gives Elsa a mission – a letter to deliver.  Having delivered that letter, another appears for her to deliver, until Elsa has gradually met the characters who inhabit the stories.  Amusingly, each letter is an apology to someone Granny feels she has wronged in some way, but also a plea for the recipient to protect Elsa in her absence.  The fellow inhabitants of Elsa’s small apartment building – the recipients of the letters – are all, in many ways deeply broken people that Granny has saved.  As they become Elsa’s friends and she smartly matches them up with the fairy tales she knows by heart, a deeper, more poignant picture emerges.

Backman creates funny moments in several ways.  However bright for her years, Elsa is sometimes naïve and the reader is amused by what she doesn’t realize.  As a child, she also presses adults with questions that someone with a stronger social sense would refrain from asking.  It is also funny that when she doesn’t understand something and needs to know more, Elsa’s go-to is Wikipedia, which we know provides all knowledge.  Like five year old Jack in Room, who refers to aspects of his little world without articles (He sleeps on Bed, lives in Room), Elsa likewise refers to the cars Granny and others drive in this way.  She and Granny climb into Renault, Dad drives Audi and Arf gives her a ride in Taxi.  Backman occasionally reminds me of J.K. Rowling with his clever turns of phrase and dry observations, and the reader of the audio version, interprets the language to masterful effect.

Backman’s  (or is it Granny’s?) alternative world, one filled with danger, heroes and heroines, dragons and monsters, shadows and sea angels at first seems a very different world from Elsa’s and the reader’s, but as Elsa’s real world and the stories begin to merge, Backman offers a poignant understanding of what it means to love and lose someone who is central to your own tale. 

Does a Woman Have to Be a Mother 

to be Fulfilled?

Coincidentally, recently I have read two books and seen a movie (based on a book I have also read) about women who desperately want but cannot have children.  First, the film – The Light Between Oceans staring Alicia Vikander (Isabel) and Michael Fassbender (Tom) as a married couple living on an island 100 miles off the coast of Australia where Tom is the lighthouse keeper.  Tom is content with the isolation after returning physically whole but psychologically damaged from WW1.  Isabel, at first, reveling in her newfound love soon desires a family. After a second miscarriage, this one very late term, she is devastated and broken.  When a rowboat washes up on the island 4 days later with a dead man and a live newborn baby, Isabel sees her salvation.  Tom’s first instinct is to notify the mainland, insisting that there must be someone missing the child, but Isabel’s sorrow and newfound joy are both so great that he relents.  If you haven’t read the book by M.L. Steadman or seen the gorgeous movie, I won’t spoil it for you, but an agonizing moral dilemma presents itself two years later when Tom and Isabel return to the mainland to introduce her parents to their grandchild. 

Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare is told in alternating voices, mainly those of Velvet Vargas, a disadvantaged Dominican Brooklyn teen, and Ginger, a white and affluent sometimes artist living in a small, bucolic town in upstate New York.  Both have their demons.  Ginger is 47, childless and a bit adrift, married to Paul, a college professor whom she met through AA.  Past the child-bearing age, she nevertheless desperately wants her own offspring and is continually affronted by Paul’s ex-wife and teenage daughter who reside in the same town.  She eagerly (and Paul reluctantly) agree to take a child through NYC’s Fresh Air Fund, thus bringing Velvet to their home for two weeks the summer she is eleven.  Velvet is angry, combative, picked on at school for her Salvation Army clothes and wild hair, and often the brunt of her single mother’s own anger and frustration. 

The story takes on greater complexity as Ginger bonds with Velvet.  Her desperate need to be maternal drives her to turn herself over to Velvet heart and soul.  They go to movies, take walks.  Ginger reads to her at night.  At the end of the two weeks, she cannot bear for Velvet to leave and they work through the Fresh Air Fund to get a fortnight extension.  The relationship continues over several years as Velvet comes up for weekends, holidays and more summers.  Ginger even communicates with Velvet’s teachers.  Paul watches with increasing alarm at what he considers to be Ginger’s over-involvement with Velvet, reminding her at one point that Velvet already has a mother, and as Ginger’s bond with Velvet grows, her marriage becomes increasingly strained.

Yet another story about a woman longing desperately for a child, The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey also takes place in the early part of the 20^th century as 40ish Mabel and Jack have left New England to homestead in Alaska.  Mabel welcomes the impending solitude, seeing it as an opportunity to leave behind the grief of having lost babies and what she perceives as the judgment of others because she is childless.  It is a sadness that never leaves her, however, and the miles of cold, snowy uninhabited land and the harsh, lonely challenges of life there seem to only make things worse.  One evening, after the first heavy snowfall, Jack and Mabel build a snow girl, decorating her with some of Mabel’s mittens and a scarf.  The next day, the clothing is gone, the snow figure fallen, and tiny shoe prints lead away from where the figure stood.  Soon after, they begin to glimpse a little blond-haired girl in a bright blue coat, wearing Mabel’s clothes, darting through the trees.  Over the coming winter months, they see her more often, and lure her to them by leaving her gifts.  Finally, she comes close and introduces herself as Faina.  She refuses to ever stay with them, however, preferring to hunt and trap and generally fending for herself.  When the snows finally melt and springtime arrives, Faina disappears.  Mabel’s heart has been lifted by the presence of the child and she returns to a sense of despair.  When another couple who live ten miles down the road befriend Jack and Mabel, Mabel tries to tell them about Faina, but Jack pretends not to have seen her, causing both the new friends (Esther and George) and the reader to wonder about Mabel’s sanity.  When Faina returns with the first snow, Mabel recalls a childhood book which she asks her sister to send to her.  The story of the snow child is about an old childless couple who fashion a girl out of snow; the snow child comes alive, becoming a surrogate daughter, but disappearing into the mountains when warm weather comes to the farm.  Mabel has noticed that Faina’s skin is quite cold to the touch and she sweats profusely when she is in the warm cabin too long.  Faina seems to be able to conjure up snow and one day, catches a snowflake and asks Mabel, who keeps a sketchpad, to draw it.  The snowflake does not melt in Faina’s hand.  Could they be living the story?  Is Mabel’s longing for a child so great that she has wished this child into being?

Does a woman have to be a mother to be fulfilled?  Two of these books are set in the second decade of the 20^th century, a time, perhaps, when roles for women were significantly more limited. I suspect that most modern women with a wider range of choices would respond in the negative; there’s also no guarantee that having children will, in and of itself, lead to self-actualization.  While The Light Between Oceans and The Mare raise other questions in addition to this one, The Snow Child’s focus is squarely on the despondent Mabel who, in the opening scene of the book, purposely walks out on ice she thinks is not solid. But even Mabel, who has to become stronger and more active due to the challenges of the unforgiving environment, begins to find self-worth in discovering that there are multiple ways that women can be validated – through friendship, through hard work, and yes, through being a mother. 

Who is telling the story 

and why does it matter?

Recently, I have been writing about the narrative techniques of contemporary novelists, noting the trend towards multiple first person points of view, often in alternating chapters, so I was intrigued by the September 11 “Critic’s Take” essay in the New York Times Book Review, in which Elliott Holt writes about “the return of omniscience.”  Holt discusses Cynthia Ng’s Everything I Never Told You as an example. Not only does the narrative voice of this novel move in and out of the heads of various characters, but Ng also utilizes the technique of prolepsis (a term I learned a few years ago in a training) – jumping briefly ahead, relating events that haven’t happened or won’t happen until much later.  As Holt notes, the book begins with this:  “Lydia is dead.  But they don’t know this yet.”  He includes other examples such as Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies and Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.  His analysis of the effects of the use of omniscience is also interesting.  He suggests that it provides “authority and scope,” and “that it reinforces that we are reading fiction.”  He leaves the reader with an intriguing premise, that “In this era of omnipotent smartness. . . Technology forces us to see the world – and construct the stories we tell about it – differently.”

To read the essay: http://nyti.ms/2cuNAvx

What I'm Reading Now -- The Mare and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, parts 1 and 2

They have more in common than you might think

I do not usually write about books until I have finished reading them, but I have two going right now that strike me as an interesting pairing as they are similar in theme but very different in form and reader experience.  I am listening to The Mare by Mary Gaitskill, an audio book that I downloaded from my public library.  Listening to books as opposed to decoding language visually automatically creates a different “reading”; while it is much more difficult to go back and re-read or, rather re-listen, to passages and thus to appreciate fully the beauty of language used, there is an added quality when the voice of the reader is so effective that you forget that it is not the character(s) actually speaking.  In the case of this novel, there are four readers who alternatively narrate the chapters and do so with accents and intonations that make the book come alive.

Meanwhile, I am reading in hardback book form the eighth in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts 1 and 2.  Although the cover artwork resembles the rest of the books in the series and J.K. Rowling’s name features on the cover, this is neither a novel nor actually a book by her.  It is the script to a play that opened in London at the end of July.  As far as I can tell from my research, Rowling collaborated on the ideas, but a writer named Jack Thorne wrote it.  The experience of reading a play, even one about The Boy Who Lived, is a far cry from the witty, rich prose of a Rowling novel.  (And by the way, why do we read plays?  Aren’t they meant to be seen? ) This script is particularly unusual in that there are so many scenes that are seldom more than a couple of pages long.  Thus, conversations are fairly short and the setting switches around so fast you need flue powder to keep up.  There are few stage directions and characters are a bit flat, which I suspect is not necessarily true if you are watching actors breathing life into them.  I find myself drawing on my visual memories of the movies. 

So, very different reading experiences, but yet they have a common focus:  an adolescent who is struggling to find his or her place in the world.  In Harry Potter, it is 19 years after the end of the last story.  Harry is a 40 -year old parent with three children.  His middle son, Albus, is the problem child; angry, unhappy and resentful, Albus feels misunderstood and, at heart, not valued for who he is but rather for his famous connection.  Part of the problem is that he doesn’t know exactly who he is.  A bit of a social pariah, his only friend is, ironically, the son of Draco, Scorpius Malfoy.  When Albus overhears a conversation about the discovery of a time-turner (a magical device that allows the user to move back and forth through time), he sees this as his chance to be a hero and, with Scorpius, devises a plan to rescue Cedrid Diggory, the boy who died in the Goblet of Fire at the hands of Voldemort.

One of the main voices in The Mare is Velvet, a poor Dominican girl living with her mother and little brother in Brooklyn.  Her mother struggles to financially make ends meet and takes out her frustrations on Velvet.  Like Albus, Velvet feels like an outcast at school and is often the butt of teasing and cruelty.  Her life begins to change when, through the Fresh Air Fund, she is matched with a couple, Paul and Ginger, in upstate New York, for two weeks.  Ginger takes Velvet to the local stable where she begins riding lessons, learns how to care for the horses, and develops a bond with an abused but spirited horse with whom she seems to identify.  Things do not get immediately better for Velvet but the reader/listener sees that the horses will be the key to Velvet’s emergence. 

While both stories focus on the adolescents, there is an adult storyline as well.  Ginger is unable to have children of her own and her husband has been resistant to adopting.  In Velvet, she finds an outlet for her need to mother, a situation that Paul finds dangerous.  Ginger increasingly wants to extend Velvet’s stays with them and extends invitations for weekends and holidays.  Harry, now a part of the Wizard Ministry that has spent the last 19 years righting the wizarding world after the death of Voldemort and the defeat of the Death Eaters in book 7. As the play begins, he suddenly wakes up with his scar – the mark given to him by Voldemort which signaled Voldemort’s presence when it pained him – hurting.  Does this mean that the world’s worst wizard is back?  So far, (I am only halfway), these concerns are equal to Harry’s worries over Albus and their lack of a relationship.  He wants desperately to be a father that Albus loves, not unlike Ginger’s need for daughterly love from Velvet.

Both books speak to the universal desire to love and be loved.  If you are a Harry Potter fan, of course you will read the play, because you can’t stand not to, but I look forward to the production making its way to the States; only then will the story take on resonance.  The Mare, a far more nuanced work, explores the complexities of love, the divides of race and wealth and the relationship between frustration and cruelty.

Shifting Perspectives

A few years ago, my teaching colleagues and I noted two significant aspects of contemporary fiction that are problematic for younger readers:  alternating points of view and the manipulation of chronology. As experienced adult readers, we are used to navigating modern literature but not so for our students.  We restructured our curriculum around the idea of narrative structure, exploring how and why writers use these techniques and to what effect. I am reminded of this as I note the similarities of the books I have most recently read

(admittedly on my third beach trip of the summer).  

I couldn’t wait for Lianne Moriarty’s latest, Truly, Madly Guilty, and pre-ordered so that I would have it the day it came out. The latest from the Australian writer, it has all of her characteristic aspects:  changing perspectives, movement back and forth in time, and a focus on relationships.  The story centers around three couples (Sam and Clementine, Vid and Tiffany, Erika and Oliver) and an impromptu barbecue at which something devastating happens.  The book opens several months later, flashing back to the events leading up to and during the barbecue.  It is well into the book – more than halfway – before you find out what actually occurred and why Clementine, a professional cellist, is giving voluntary talks around Sydney.  One review that I read protests that the event is not all that big a deal, but I strongly disagree.  The barbecue is actually the scene of several emotional events that become linked. 

Moriarty is excellent at creating characters with their own internal and external voices.  The three women all exude an outward confidence that they do not always feel.  They are also haunted by their younger selves:  Tiffany was an exotic dancer who (hilariously) runs into a former client at her daughter’s chi-chi private school parent function.  Erika was raised by a mother who is a serious hoarder, who neglected her child in favor of the acquisition of things to further clutter her house.  She has become a second daughter to Clementine’s mother, Pam, who forced a friendship on her daughter when she spots a young, neglected Erika several decades earlier.  Clementine struggles with playing her cello less mechanically and with more soul.  She has also harbored a resentment of Erika for years, her “best friend” that she has never wanted as a friend.  The barbecue event is really about the resolution of the tensions within this friendship and the self-actualization of these two women. 

Good as Gone by Amy Gentry opens with a chapter from the perspective of 10 year old Jane who cowers in the shadows as she watches her older sister, Julie, being led at knife-point down the stairs and out into the night.  The story picks up 8 years later.  Jane has just returned from a semester at college in Oregon, and it’s clear that she landed in the Pacific Northwest to get as far away from her Houston home as possible; her relationship with her parents, particularly her mother Anna, is tepid at best.  Then the unthinkable happens:  a young woman claiming to be Julie shows up at the door.  Jane and her needs are set further aside as both parents fully embrace their long-lost daughter who has clearly suffered physical and emotional traumas.  Julie says little about what has happened to her but agrees to counseling and the over-the-top shopping trips in which Anna lavishes thousands of dollars on her long gone child. 

The chapters alternate point of view between Anna and Julie, with Anna’s chapters moving chronologically forward and Julie’s chapters moving steadily into the past.  Each of Julie’s chapters is titled with a different name (e.g. Vi, Charlotte) reflecting the moniker that this young woman used at this stage in her life.  The effect of the Julie chapters is to gradually reveal what happened to this young woman and at the same time cause the reader’s suspicions to rise.  Is she really Julie?  If she is, why didn’t she come home sooner?

Anna’s chapters eventually reinforce these doubts when Anna is contacted by a private detective who has been looking for Julie and another girl who disappeared around the same time.  The detective shares Julie’s most recent identity and location prior to reappearing in Houston, sending Anna into a tailspin.  Anna’s chapters also reveal the source of her strained relationship with Jane; Anna has made no secret that she blamed Jane for letting Julie disappear, for waiting 3 hours before telling anyone what she saw. 

Gentry deftly handles the dual narratives, bringing them together in the end.  She also invites the reader to explore both the devastating effects of a child’s disappearance on individuals, marriages and on the children left behind as well as the consequences of naively getting attached to the wrong people.  I was put off by the rapes – which recurred throughout the 8 years of Julie’s disappearance as well as the sleazy sex work she ends up doing.

Sophie Hannah is one of my favorite mystery writers.  Her novels are characterized by a narrator, a woman, who strikes the reader as unreliable, who comes to the police with a story that, on the surface, seems impossible.  Her continuing detectives, DS Charlie Zailer and DC Simon Waterhouse, work to unravel the crime as well as the mystery of their relationship with each other. The Truth-Teller’s Lie opens with a horrible abduction scene in which a young woman is kidnapped, tied to a bed, and repeatedly raped in front of a group that seems to be having a dinner party.  (Yes, I am wondering about reading two books in a row with rape.) Fast forward three years when Naomi Jenkins, alarmed that her married lover has not shown up for their regular Thursday night rendezvous, breaks their rule and goes to his house where she witnesses something so traumatic that she cannot remember what she sees; she only knows that whatever it was means that something has happened to Robert.  Her frantic requests at the police station do not, in her opinion, yield much response, particularly after Robert’s wife confirms to the police that he is alive and well, and so she ramps it up by telling them that Robert raped her, providing vivid details that correspond to the book’s prologue scene.  Naomi reasons that if the police think Robert is a danger to others, they will work harder to find him. 

The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of Naomi and  Hannah’s two recurring detectives, DS Charlie Zailer and  DC Simon Waterhouse.  It is Waterhouse who first suspects that neither Naomi nor Robert’s wife are telling the truth and he drags a reluctant Zailer back early from her holiday to investigate what is clearly becoming a much larger crime.  Naomi’s chapters carry a psychological edge to them; Hannah does a good job of giving her a character the voice of a woman who is increasingly unhinged.

Under the Harrow by first-time novelist Flynn Berry deviates from the aforementioned pattern in that the story is told from only one point of view – which becomes a significant factor in the story – and while the chronology is fairly straightforward, there are a number of flashbacks. Told through the eyes of Nora, the story opens as she travels from her home in London to her sister Rachel’s house in the countryside of Oxfordshire.  As she sits on the train, she thinks in anticipation about what Rachel is doing, the meal she is preparing for the two of them, the fun and confidences that they will share over the weekend.  Nora is not particularly surprised when Rachel does not meet her at the station, but she knows immediately that something is wrong when she enters the house.  The dog is hanging by its leash from a banister and Rachel is covered in blood on the landing.  Nora is devastated; flashback memories throughout the novel establish that Rachel was Nora’s best friend and only real family member and that the two sisters have taken many trips together over the years, a second outing to Cornwall planned for the near future. 

Nora, unable to leave the murder investigation in the hands of the local detectives, decides to stay and conduct her own, managing to alienate most of the people with whom she comes in contact.  She fixates on a local repair man to the point that has to get a restraining order.  Nora also suspects the unidentified man who attacked her sister when they were teenagers, a theory that seems a bit far-fetched to the reader until Nora discovers that her sister purchased her dog as a guard dog and that she was planning to move several hours away, a contract already in the works.

As important as the revelation of Rachel’s killer are the discoveries that Nora makes about her sister – someone she thought she knew intimately – which, in turn, lead to new self-understanding for Nora.  This was a good read and an impressive first outing for the author.