F0ur great books to read when you are stuck at home (or any other time)

Ö     The Last Trial, Scott Turow

Turow brings back a continuing character, Sandy Stern, a lawyer first introduced 35 years ago in Presumed Innocent.  Now eighty-five, Stern is litigating his last trial, the defense of a friend, Kiril Pafko, a Nobel prize winner in medicine responsible for developing the drug that put Stern’s cancer into remission five years earlier.  Pafko is accused of insider trading, fraud and murder after it comes to light that he may have known the drug caused an allergic reaction in some patients but covered it up, failing to tell the FDA.  He also sold his stock right before the Wall Street journal article publicizing the scandal, making millions before its value tanked.  Turow deftly navigates the intricacies of both the worlds of pharmaceuticals and the courtroom.  There’s plenty of suspense, but what raises this book above the typical trial drama is Stern’s frequent reflection on and contemplation of his life choices as he approaches his final years.  

Ö     The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd (historical fiction)

The novel begins:  “I am Ana.  I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth” (3), but this turns out to be but one of many identities for Ana and not the central focus of the story.  Ana is a strong young woman who loves reading and, most of all, writing.  Kidd plays with the idea that Ana is one of the authors of the scrolls found at Nag Hammadi, which perhaps provide evidence of a wife for Jesus and, more convincingly, women in his ministry.  Some of Ana’s writings Kidd takes directly from Thunder:  Perfect Mind, one of the codices found:  “I am the whore and the holy woman/I am the wife and the virgin/I am the mother and the daughter” (preface).  With this, Kidd sets up Ana as a voice for women of her time, yearning to be seen as having more than one dimension.  

Despite the first sentences, Jesus is actually a minor character in the novel.  Ana first meets him at the marketplace when both are teenagers and he rescues her from an angry Roman servant.  This encounter leads Ana to pine for the kind and handsome young man and wish longingly for him over the old widower to whom she has been betrothed by her father.  Marriage is seen as transactional and Ana wants no part of it.  After the death of the man she is to marry, Ana is scorned as a whore and viewed as a widow, a curious situation given that she has not been near the man nor actually married him.  She encounters Jesus again on the hillside where she goes to store her scrolls for safe-keeping.  He later comes to her rescue again and says he will marry her to save her from the wrath of Herod whom she refuses when he seeks to make her a concubine. In addition to Jesus and Herod, Kidd brings in other Biblical characters.  Judas is Ana’s cousin and adopted brother whose anger towards the Romans for killing his father and enslaving his mother has turned him into a fiery revolutionary who sees Jesus’s growing group of followers as a means to an end.  

Kidd does a great job of re-creating a sense of time and place and, in her heroine, she has created a woman who is both modern in spirit and ambition and who deals bravely and fiercely with the constraints of her world.  

Ö     Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

In the film “Sliding Doors,” the Gwyneth Paltrow character, Helen, rushes to the London tube after showing up to work only to be fired.  Two scenarios play out:  in one, she makes a train and returns to her apartment to find her live-in boyfriend in bed with another woman.  In the second scenario, she misses the first train and arrives home after the other woman has left.  As the movie progresses, the alternate story lines play out.  Similarly, Curtis Sittenfeld’s thought experiment with Hillary Clinton invites the reader to imagine what her life might have been like had she not married Bill Clinton.  Scenario one in which she becomes Hillary Rodham Clinton is the reality we all know about.  Scenario two envisions a Hillary who, despite considering Bill Clinton the love of her life, rejects his marriage proposals and leaves Arkansas where she has moved to be with him during his run for governor.  Well aware of his sex addiction and infidelity to their relationship, she decides that she cannot continue after she is approached in a parking lot by a woman who claims Bill has sexually assaulted her.  Sittenfeld’s character returns to Chicago where she has a career first as a law school professor and then as a three-term senator.  Like the movie, the two different scenarios eventually dove-tail back to a similar narrative with Hillary’s run for president.  

Sittenfeld portrays Hillary as a bright, driven and ambitious person who lacks confidence in herself as a desirable woman.  In college, she connects with a handsome young man who is a theological student and they develop a strong friendship built on their mutual intellectual curiosity and enjoyment of analytical and philosophical discussions.  When Hillary expresses her romantic interest in him, he is taken aback, telling her that he sees her more as a man – someone who is a platonic buddy and an intellectual equal.  When she meets the smart, handsome, charismatic Clinton, she can hardly believe that this man is really interested in her as a woman.  When it turns out that he is also interested, sexually, in other women, her self-image of herself as unattractive is confirmed.  It is in part this belief that love isn’t in the cards for her, that she throws herself into a professional career that involves non-stop work.  

Sittenfeld cleverly tracks Bill in the background as Hillary’s political fortunes develop.  Hillary hears through mutual friends that he has married a school teacher less than a year after their break-up, and they go on to be the picture postcard family for his political ambitions, having a son and a daughter.  As with real life, Bill eventually decides to run for president in 1992, however he doesn’t make it to the nomination as his sexual behavior catches up with him.  He goes on to become a rich man in Silicon Valley, divorcing, marrying again and divorcing a second time, before turning one more time to politics where he and Hillary have a final showdown.

Hillary’s campaign adheres closely to reality as accusations of “ice queen”, “bitch” and “liar” rear their head in the media and online.  She is taken to task for her unfortunate cookie baking comment and has to defend herself against charges that no man would ever be asked – e.g. “Why aren’t you married with children?  Are you a lesbian?”  (Not a question anyone ever asks Lindsay Graham, I’m sure.)  A variation on the famous MAGA chant, “Shut her up!” is hollered at an opponent’s rallies.  As Hillary’s campaign begins to gain traction, a woman crawls out of the woodwork accusing Hillary of sexual harassment some dozen years earlier.  We have seen the event she references earlier in the book and it is fairly amazing how it has been twisted for political purposes.  Donald Trump also makes a rather hilarious appearance that is so fitting it is a wonder it didn’t actually happen. 

Ö     The Dutch House, Ann Patchett  

This was a wonderful book about memory and the lasting effects of childhood.  In this respect, it reminded me a bit of Fifth Business in which the narrator traces the relationships and patterns of behavior in later years back to a pivotal childhood event.  Here, Danny and Maeve, brother and sister, are first traumatized by the departure of their mother to India when they are 3 and 11, respectively, and then later by the addition of a new, young stepmother who throws them out when their father dies (shades of Cinderella).  Over the next several decades, Danny and Maeve find themselves parked outside The Dutch House, the name for the family home from which they have been evicted and are no longer welcome, reliving and rehashing events from the past.  One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is that characters both remember events differently and have varying amounts of knowledge.  Danny, so young when his mother leaves that he doesn’t really remember her, constructs a portrait of a woman who is essentially a mysterious stranger.  It becomes easy to resent her choice to leave because he knows nothing about the circumstances that led to her departure.  When she finally reappears in their lives four decades later, he can only ask, “What kind of a mother leaves her children?”  Maeve, on the other hand, older when their mother left, welcomes her with open arms and attempts to recoup the lost years by giving her mother a home.  Other characters – Jocelyn, the maid, Sandy, the cook, and Fluffy the nanny – come back into Danny’s life when he is a married adult with children and he is able to hire them.  They all knew his mother and, Fluffy even knew the people who lived in the Dutch House before the Conroys, and they provide stories like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that help Danny to construct the picture of his mother and father.  

Tom Hanks reads the audio book and I think that is in part why I liked it so much.  He brings Danny to life and makes it easy to see things from his point of view.  My friend Randi has another book group and they discussed this book.  Interestingly, those who listened to the book liked Danny much more than those who read the book, and I think that can be explained, at least in part, by the narration.