Carole Goldberg
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
By Atul Gawande
(Holt, $26, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
Atul Gawande, the son of two doctors and a surgeon himself, is also a bestselling and prize-winning author and a staff writer for The New Yorker. Gawande’s books, all bestsellers, are Complications, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; Better, selected by Amazon as one of the 10 best books of 2007; and The Checklist Manifesto. He lives in Newton, Mass., with his wife and three children, is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won many major awards for his writing: a Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship and two National Magazine Awards. And if all this were not enough, he also works in the public health field as Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a center that pursues health systems innovation, and her is chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization that works to make surgery safer around the world.
What is this book about?
Gawande is one of a growing number of author/doctors who understands that for all the advances medicine has made in treating illness, the profession still has much to learn about the experience of dying. Too focused on achieving a “cure,” even when common sense and medical wisdom clearly shows that death is inevitably on the way, doctors find themselves causing suffering in the name of keeping a patient alive as long as possible, and this counterproductive mindset has, if you will, infected patients and their families. Gawande speaks out in this wise book about issues of dignity and the human spirit and reminds us that how we live and how we die are more important than how long we hang on as the cascade of bodily shut-downs overwhelms us. The real issue, he believes, is not the failure to cure a patient but the failure to comfort and provide a sensible and humane ending when medicine has done all – or perhaps more — than it reasonably can be asked to do.
Why you’ll like it:
If you have ever wished you had a doctor who did not have a “God complex,” who would speak with you frankly, show deep understanding of the physical and emotional turmoil you or a loved one is suffering and offer sensible and sympathetic advice, look no further: Dr. Gawande will see you now. He writes in a clear and concise way, using plenty of anecdotes from his years of practice and offering ideas and solutions that go beyond conventional approaches to treating those who are dying. This is an eye-opening book, full of hard-won wisdom. Don’t let the subject matter put you off: read this very important book.
Here is what Gawande told a Barnes & Noble interviewer about writing:
“I don’t write out of inspiration. . . . I write because it’s my way of finding cool ideas, thinking through hard problems and things I don’t understand, and getting better at something. I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.”
He said this about why he wrote Being Mortal:
“This experiment of making mortality a medical experience is just decades old. It is young. And the evidence is it is failing.
“. . . this is a book about the modern experience of mortality— about what it’s like to be creatures who age and die, how medicine has changed the experience and how it hasn’t, where our ideas about how to deal with our finitude have got the reality wrong. As I pass a decade in surgical practice and become middleaged myself, I find that neither I nor my patients find our current state tolerable. But I have also found it unclear what the answers should be, or even whether any adequate ones are possible. I have the writer’s and scientist’s faith, however, that by pulling back the veil and peering in close, a person can make sense of what is most confusing or strange or disturbing.
“. . . Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.”
What others are saying:
An Amazon Best Book of the Month review for October 2014 says: “True or false: Modern medicine is a miracle that has transformed all of our lives. If you said “true,” you’d be right, of course, but that’s a statement that demands an asterisk, a “but.” “We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine,” writes Atul Gawande . . . “We think. . .[it] is to ensure health and survival. But really. . .it is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive.” Through interviews with doctors, stories from and about health care providers (such as the woman who pioneered the notion of “assisted living” for the elderly)—and eventually, by way of the story of his own father’s dying, Gawande examines the cracks in the system of health care to the aged (i.e. 97 percent of medical students take no course in geriatrics) and to the seriously ill who might have different needs and expectations than the ones family members predict. . . . Doctors don’t listen, Gawande suggests—or, more accurately, they don’t know what to listen for. (Gawande includes examples of his own failings in this area.) Besides, they’ve been trained to want to find cures, attack problems—to win. But victory doesn’t look the same to everyone, he asserts. Yes, “death is the enemy,” he writes. “But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee… someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t.” In his compassionate, learned way, Gawande shows all of us—doctors included—how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind.”
Kirkus Reviews says: A prominent surgeon and journalist takes a clear-eyed look at aging and death in 21st-century America. Modern medicine can perform miracles, but it is also only concerned with preserving life rather than dealing with end-of-life issues. Drawing on his experiences observing and helping terminally ill patients, Gawande offers a timely account of how modern Americans cope with decline and mortality. He points out that dying in America is a lonely, complex business. Before 1945, people could count on spending their last days at home. Now, most die in institutional settings, usually after trying every medical procedure possible to head off the inevitable. Quality of life is often sacrificed, in part because doctors lack the ability to help patients negotiate a bewildering array of medical and nonmedical options. . . .Yet the current system shows signs of reform. Rather than simply inform patients about their options or tell them what to do, some doctors, including the author, are choosing to offer the guidance that helps patients make their own decisions regarding treatment options and outcomes. . . . As Gawande reminds readers, “endings matter.” A sensitive, intelligent and heartfelt examination of the processes of aging and dying.”
In The New York Times Book Review, Sheri Fink writes: “Gawande writes that members of the medical profession, himself included, have been wrong about what their job is. Rather than ensuring health and survival, it is “to enable well-being.” If that sounds vague, Gawande has plenty of engaging and nuanced stories to leave the reader with a good sense of what he means…Being Mortal is a valuable contribution to the growing literature on aging, death and dying. It contains unsparing descriptions of bodily aging and the way it often takes us by surprise. Gawande is a gifted storyteller, and there are some stirring, even tear-inducing passages here. The writing can be evocative…The stories give a dignified voice to older people in the process of losing their independence. We see the world from their perspective, not just those of their physicians and worried family members.”
“Beautifully crafted . . . Being Mortal is a clear-eyed, informative exploration of what growing old means in the 21st century . . . This should be mandatory reading for every American. . . . it provides a useful roadmap of what we can and should be doing to make the last years of life meaningful,” says Time.com.
When is it available?
You can make an appointment with Being Mortal at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Lila
by Marilynne Robinson
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 272 PAGES)
Who is this author?
Marilynne Robinson is widely considered to be one of America’s finest contemporary writers, and she is unusual among them in that her work derives inspiration and sustenance from her deep religious faith. She is a Congregational Church deacon. Robinson has written a trilogy of novels about the Iowa town of Gilead: Home, Gilead (which won a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award and Ambassador Book Award) and Lila, as well as her debut novel, Housekeeping. She is also the author of four nonfiction books, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, and Absence of Mind. She also teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
What is this book about?
Lila opens in the middle of the night, as an abandoned little girl shivers on the doorstep of a Depression-era shack in Iowa, soon to be comforted by Doll, a woman who is a drifter and a loner who pities the child and offers her well-meant, if meager, care. They live on the run, forge a bond against their loneliness and spend years on the road. Then Lila, now grown but still homeless, enters a church in Gilead, meets the much older and widowed minister, John Ames, and eventually becomes his wife. The novel brings back characters from Home and Gilead, and rounds out their stories. It was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction.
Why you’ll like it:
Robinson has a masterly way of creating believable characters caught up in dilemmas of ethical or religious nature, but there is nothing preachy about her writing. She creates these broken people with tenderness and deeply humane insights and puts them into situations where healing is possible, if improbable, and always miraculous.
Robinson told a Barnes & Noble interviewer: “I was just working on a piece of fiction that I had been fiddling with . . . There was a character whom I intended as a minor character… he was a minister, and he had written a little poem, and he transformed himself, and he became quite different — he became the narrator. I suddenly knew a great deal about him that was very different from what I assumed when I created him as a character in the first place. . . . I have to have a narrator whose voice tells me what to do — whose voice tells me how to write the novel.”
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “More balm in Gilead as Robinson returns to familiar ground to continue the saga of John Ames and his neighbors. Ames, Robinson’s readers will know, is a minister in the hamlet of Gilead, a quiet place in a quiet corner of a quiet Midwestern state. Deceptively quiet, we should say, for Robinson, ever the Calvinist (albeit a gentle and compassionate one), is a master at plumbing the roiling depths below calm surfaces. In this installment, she turns to the title character, Ames’ wife, who has figured mostly just in passing in Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). How, after all, did this young outsider wind up in a place so far away from the orbits of most people? What secrets does she bear? It turns out that Lila has quite a story to tell, one of abandonment, want, struggle and redemption—classic Robinson territory, in other words. Robinson provides Lila with enough back story to fuel several other books, her prose richly suggestive and poetic as she evokes a bygone time before “everyone…started getting poorer and the wind turned dirty” that merges into a more recent past that seems no less bleak, when Lila, having subsisted on cattails and pine sap, wanders into Gilead just to look at the houses and gardens: “The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of.” She never leaves, of course, becoming part of the landscape—and, as readers will learn, essential to the gradually unfolding story of Gilead. And in Robinson’s hands, that small town, with its heat and cicadas, its tree toads and morning dew, becomes as real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, just as charged with meaning if a touch less ominous, Lila’s talismanic knife notwithstanding. Fans of Robinson will wish the book were longer—and will surely look forward to the next.”
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes: “Writing in lovely, angular prose that has the high loneliness of an old bluegrass tune, Ms. Robinson has created a balladlike story about two lost people who, after years of stoic solitariness, unexpectedly find love—not the sudden, transformative passion of romantic movies and novels but a hard-won trust and tenderness that grow slowly over time. The novel is powerful and deeply affecting…In the hands of another author, Lila’s back story might sound sentimental or contrived, but Ms. Robinson renders her tale with the stark poetry of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth…capturing the loneliness of her transient existence. “
In The New York Times Book Review, Diane Johnson writes: “Told with measured and absorbing elegance, this account of the growing love and trust between Lila and Reverend Ames is touching and convincing…It’s courageous of Robinson to write about faith at a time when associations with religion are so often negative and violent. And goodness, a property Midwesterners like to think of as a regional birthright, is even harder than piety to convey without succumbing to the temptation to charge it with sanctimony or hypocrisy. That is not the effect of this lovely narrative…In the end, Lila is not so much a novel as a meditation on morality and psychology, compelling in its frankness about its truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.”
Publishers Weekly says, in its starred review: “This third of three novels set in the fictional plains town of Gilead, Iowa, is a masterpiece of prose in the service of the moral seriousness that distinguishes Robinson’s work. This time the narrative focuses on Lila, the young bride of elderly Reverend Ames, first met in Gilead. Rescued as a toddler from abusive caretakers by a rough but kind drifter named Doll, raised with love but enduring the hard existence of a field worker, and later, in a St. Louis whorehouse, Lila is a superb creation. Largely uneducated, almost feral, Lila has a thirst for stability and knowledge. As she yearns to forget the terrible memories and shame of her past, Lila is hesitant to reveal them to her loving new husband. The courtship of the couple—John Ames: tentative, tender, shy, and awkward; Lila: naive, suspicious, wary, full of dread—will endure as a classic set piece of character revelation, during which two achingly lonely people discover the comfort of marital love. Threaded through the narrative are John Ames’s troubled reflections that the doctrines of his Calvinist theology, including the belief that those who are not saved are destined for hell, are too harsh. Though she reads the Bible to gain knowledge, Lila resists its message, because it teaches that her beloved Doll will never gain the peace of heaven. Her questions stir up doubt in Ames’s already conflicted mind, and Robinson carefully crafts this provocative and deeply meaningful spiritual search for the meaning of existence. What brings the couple together is a joyous appreciation of the beauty of the natural world and the possibility of grace. The novel ends with the birth of their son, to whom Ames will leave his diary in Gilead.
“This is a lovely and touching story that grapples with the universal question of how God can allow his children to suffer. Recommended for fans of Robinson as well as those who enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, another exploration of pain and loneliness set against the backdrop of a small town,” says Evelyn Beck in Library Journal’s starred review.
When is it available?
Lila is on the shelves at the Hartford Public Library and its Camp Field branch.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation
By Eric Kaplan
(Dutton, $29, 288 pages)
Who is this author?
Eric Kaplan is a co-executive producer of (and writer for) the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory. Before that, he was a writer for The Late Show with David Letterman, Futurama, and Flight of the Concords, so he knows comedy. He has a degree from Harvard and is currently completing his dissertation in philosophy at UC Berkeley, so he is a scholar of philosophy. This book allows him to draw on both kinds of knowledge.
What is this book about?
If we all know Santa is not real – and we do – then how come so many of us believe in him anyway, or persuade our kids to? In this book, a writer and producer of the very popular Big Bang Theory sets out to explore the paradox of real vs. not real, and uses it as a clever jumping off point to explain some basic workings of philosophy. He explores how mysticism, Buddhism, Taoism, early Christianity, Theosophy and current philosophers have handled such confusing material, yet manages to keep the discussion merry and bright.
Why you’ll like it:
Is there anyone who has not pondering the Santa Claus paradox, or struggled with deciding when to admit to the kiddies that the Jolly Old Elf is actually Mom and Dad? Kaplan uses this familiar doorway to take readers deep into the thickets of philosophy, but he does it with humor and insight. Unwrap this one at your leisure and enjoy. Ho, Ho, Ho.
What others are saying:
From Barnes & Noble: “For most adults, ontological questions about Santa were solved long ago, but for philosopher Eric Kaplan, that childhood conundrum has more than lingering interest. Make no mistake: His inquiry is no sooty retake of a yuletide chimney slide; he regards “the Santa question” as a stimulating takeoff point for reopening age-long debates about the real and the unreal. For readers, his North Pole excursions are as entertaining as they are provocative and even Scrooge himself can enjoy the detours that bring Monty Python and The Big Bang Theory into the picture. One stocking stuffer that won’t be forgotten.”
The New York Times Book Review says: “an equally earnest and witty effort to explore the conflicts between reason and faith, logic and mysticism, science and religion—the usual strange bedfellows…[ Kaplan] has a rare gift for explicating jokes without leeching all the fun out of them.“
Publishers Weekly says: “Comedy writer, philosophy scholar, and co-executive producer of the hit show The Big Bang Theory, Kaplan begins his elliptical examination of the ontology of Santa Claus by introducing readers to a conundrum he faced when his son began kindergarten: how to deal with other parents who didn’t want Kaplan’s son telling their children that Santa didn’t exist. Does he let his son spoil the illusion and potentially sacrifice his school friendships, or should he encourage him to go along with the myth in an effort to fit in with most of his peers? This simple question quickly unfolds into a much larger examination of perspective, and Kaplan brings in myriad branches of philosophy and other tools to tackle the slippery subjects of existence, duality, and rationality. Socratic dialogues, fairy tales, and humor (not to mention a brief examination of humor itself) enliven the discussion and keep the reader engaged. Even fans of The Big Bang Theory brand of humor may be surprised by the density of the conversations here, but Kaplan’s deft examination of a simple contradiction manages to be both entertaining and enlightening—often simultaneously. Regardless of how readers will answer Kaplan’s titular question after emerging from this philosophical rabbit hole, they’ll likely end up appreciating the journey.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “The acclaimed comedy writer and co-executive producer of The Big Bang Theory presents a unique and peculiar philosophical inquiry into the belief in Santa Claus. . . . Thus the problem of Santa becomes one of self-contradiction, and this type of paradox is a common plague to logicians. However, the attempts of other philosophers to escape this paradox are unsatisfactory to Kaplan, and he explores the mystic tradition as an alternative. In mysticism, paradox is a fundamental tool for understanding how we exist; therefore, it does not rely on practical rationality. Using Buddhism as his primary source, Kaplan explains how self-contradiction could be embraced to justify both the existence of Santa and his nonexistence. But the ever diligent author encounters a similar paradox in mysticism, seemingly justifying a dangerous relativism in which all that is correct is equally incorrect and vice versa. To bridge the paradoxes of logic and mysticism, Kaplan suggests comedy, at least “good” comedy, as a way to “approach the unavoidable contradictions in our life.” (After all, Santa is a jolly fellow.) As he teases out this synthesis, the author’s argument is both thought-provoking and, at times, less than convincing, but he proves to be an engaging thinker whose musings are always provocative. Kaplan’s investigation into the ontology of Santa Claus is erudite, readable and exceedingly funny.”
When is it available?
Santa has dropped off a copy at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured
By Kathryn Harrison
(Knopf Doubleday, $28.95, 400 pages)
Who is this author?
Kathryn Harrison has several novels, nonfiction books and memoirs to her credit, among them a biography, St. Therese of Lisieux, and a true crime book, While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family. Her novels are Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife, and Envy and Enchantments. She is well-known for her powerful but disturbing memoir, The Kiss, about her incestuous affair with her father, who left the family when she was an infant and did not see her again until she was 20. California-born, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, author Colin Harrison, and their children. She frequently writes reviews for the New York Times Book Review.
What is this book about?
Joan of Arc, who lived, albeit briefly, in the 15th century, made a huge impact on her times and has been a figure of mystery and inspiration ever since. But was she a mystic, a schizophrenic, possessed by demons or just a brave and courageous young woman who led the French in battle against invaders from England at the behest of “voices” that she alone could hear, and for her efforts was burned at the stake at age 19 (and later canonized)? Harrison explores historical fact, myth, folklore and scholarly research on this unusual young woman whose life inspired writings by such authors as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht and others.
Why you’ll like it:
Joan of Arc, known as the Maid of Orleans, is one of those historical figures that we think we know all about, but in fact, her story is far more complex than popular mythologized or movie versions of her life present. Was she divinely inspired, a tool of the devil or simply (if such a thing is ever simple) insane? Scholars have pored over her life for centuries without ever resolving these questions, but Harrison does a fine job of recounting the various theories and arriving at her own conclusions. While this is a biography meant for adult readers, younger (and older) fans of such genre fiction as The Hunger Games and its heroine Katniss Everdeen might find the story of a real young female warrior even more compelling.
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “The versatile Harrison novelist, biographer, memoirist and true-crime writer—becomes the most recent in a long list of authors to tell the story of the unusual warrior. Born in 1412 and executed just 19 years later, French peasant Joan of Arc began listening to the voices of angels at age 14 (“hers alone, a rapturous secret”). She did not suspect at first, nor did anybody else, that those angels wanted her to undertake a seemingly impossible task: to lead an army of Frenchmen into battle against the mighty enemy forces from across the channel in England. The tale of Joan of Arc has been told countless times, so why revisit it, especially when hard evidence is lacking? For starters, Harrison’s editor suggested the topic. At that point, the author decided 21st century readers required a new narrative of a life so improbable and heroic. Harrison knew, of course, about the daunting list of previous interpreters, including William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Bertolt Brecht and Mark Twain. She wisely examines some of those previous interpretations, finding some of the speculation and historicism plausible but some of it wanting. Harrison examines Joan as a sexual being as well as a warrior and perhaps a schizophrenic. The sexuality angle becomes especially provocative when Harrison discusses how God may have favored Joan due to the virginity she advertised so boldly. The author recounts the battle scenes in sometimes-excruciating detail and gives plenty of space to her arrest, trial and execution. She also provides a chronology. The vivid stories of Joan’s remarkable life never died completely, leading to her canonization as a saint in 1920. Harrison joins the psychobiography school of life writing, doing so with memorable writing and an energetic approach.”
“It is impossible for Harrison to write an uninteresting book. She is too skilled a prose writer, too good a storyteller, too alert to passions and the human heart to produce a work that ever flags. But read Joan of Arc for what it tells you about the world in which the subject lived and the half-millennium of culture that has continued to mythologize her. In this striking volume, it is clear that Joan fell victim to more than an era’s intolerance. She became a victim to other dreamers’ dreams,” says Marie Arana inThe Washington Post.
“[Harrison] awes us with her incisive intelligence, her fierce curiosity, her literary prowess. These qualities, along with years of meticulous research, are on stunning display in Harrison’s latest work of nonfiction, which focuses, fittingly, on two aspects of the cross-dressing teenaged warrior: her sanity, and her sexuality. Harrison sets the scene, painting a layered portrait not only of Joan’s life, but of her times,” says The Boston Globe.
Booklist says: “…In novelist [Kathryn] Harrison’s deft hands, the latest analysis is both vividly detailed and historically grounded. Casting a modern eye on a medieval legend, she is able to breathe new life into the girl, the warrior, the messenger from God, and the saint. In addition to Joan’s early years and her fiery path to battle, Harrison also includes Joan’s trials, execution, and canonization in the compulsively readable narrative.”
“Hundreds of books have been written about her, but the story remains astounding enough for new interpretations. Kathryn Harrison, the well-known author of novels, memoirs and a previous biography of a saint, has now taken up the challenge with the deeply researched and thoughtful Joan of Arc: A Life Transfigured…. Harrison shows that Joan’s worst crime in their eyes was her revolutionary audacity in dressing and behaving like a man. Of course, the ultimate victory was hers,” says Bookpage.
When is it available?
It’s at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour and Blue Hills branches.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Children Act
By Ian McEwan
(Knopf Doubleday, $25, 240 pages)
Who is this author?
Ian McEwan is a bestselling British author, who has 15 books to his credit, many of which have won major prizes. Solar won a Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Atonement won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; Amsterdam took a Booker Prize and The Child in Time, received the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award for 1987. His other books include On Chesil Beach, Saturday, The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, and he also has written award-winning story collections. Atonement was made into a major motion picture in 2007 and was nominated for seven Academy Awards.
What is this book about?
This novel blends the story of a marriage gone bad with a court case that pits a religious family against the medical establishment. The link is High Court Judge Fiona Maye, whose 30-year marriage is falling apart because of her husband Jack’s infidelity and who is charged with presiding over a case in which a dying 17-year-old and his Jehovah’s Witnesses parents are refusing treatment that is almost certain to save him. because of their religious beliefs. Should a secular court overrule the family? Should deep religious devotion win out even if it will lead to the boy’s death? Fiona visits the boy, which causes each of them emotional turmoil. How will she rule on a case that seems to have no clear guidelines, but will surely have far-reaching consequences?
Why you’ll like it:
McEwan is a very skillful writer – his On Chesil Beach was a hilariously sad exploration of two inexperienced lovers terrified of having marital sex – and he draws complicated but believable characters. And in this current period of time, when the counterclaims of religious entities and secular society are clashing over health care insurance, this is a timely book.
What others are saying:
The Barnes & Noble Review says: “You’d be hard put to find a better choice for reading groups than Ian McEwan’s The Children Act. This book has so much going for it, on so many levels: moral, emotional, literary. . . . The Children Act is a compact, contemporary narrative that focuses intimately on a protagonist’s professional and personal life as she bumps up against various moral and personal crises. Where Saturday’s propulsive, explosive plot convincingly took us deep inside the life and thoughts of a male neurosurgeon under pressure, The Children Act just as persuasively zeroes in on a fifty-nine-year-old female High Court Judge in London. Fiona Maye presides over cases of divorce, custody, and child welfare in the Family Division with impressive aplomb, until her own generally solid marriage hits an unexpected but all-too-common snag. The somewhat awkward title — at least to American ears — comes from a 1989 British law that deems a child’s welfare “the court’s paramount consideration” in cases that involve them. . . . its length is a modest 221 pages, The Children Act is rich with issues that provoke thought and conversation: the nature of devotion (both religious and romantic), legality versus morality, the social aspects of welfare and well-being, the boundary between professional and personal responsibilities, and the marital tug-of-war between what one partner views as “brazen” behavior and the other as an “overblown sense of injury.” Readers will want to discuss Fiona’s various decisions, both in court and in her reactions to both Jack and young Adam, as well as the protracted, delicate thaw that follows a domestic freeze. But most of all, they’ll want to savor McEwan’s ability to pack so much into this tightly composed, ultimately moving story.”
Publishers Weekly‘s starred review says: “The 1989 Children Act made a child’s welfare the top priority of English courts—easier said than done, given the complexities of modern life and the pervasiveness of human weakness, as Family Court Judge Fiona Maye discovers in McEwan’s 13th novel. Approaching 60, at the peak of her career, Fiona has a reputation for well-written, well-reasoned decisions. She is, in fact, more comfortable with cool judgment than her husband’s pleas for passion. While he pursues a 28-year-old statistician, Fiona focuses on casework, especially a hospital petition to overrule two Jehovah’s Witnesses who refuse blood transfusions for Adam, their 17-year-old son who’s dying of leukemia. Adam agrees with their decision. Fiona visits Adam in the hospital, where she finds him writing poetry and studying violin. Childless Fiona shares a musical moment with the boy, then rules . . . . Adam’s ensuing rebellion against his parents, break with religion, and passionate devotion to Fiona culminate in a disturbing face-to-face encounter that calls into question what constitutes a child’s welfare and who best represents it. As in Atonement, what doesn’t happen has the power to destroy; as in Amsterdam, McEwan probes the dread beneath civilized society. In spare prose, he examines cases, people, and situations, to reveal anger, sorrow, shame, impulse, and yearning. He rejects religious dogma that lacks compassion, but scrutinizes secular morality as well. Readers may dispute his most pessimistic inferences, but few will deny McEwan his place among the best of Britain’s living novelists.”
Kirkus says in its starred review: “In the late summer of 2012, a British judge faces a complex case while dealing with her husband’s infidelity in this thoughtful, well-wrought novel. Fiona Maye, at 59, has just learned of an awful crack in her marriage when she must rule on the opposing medical and religious interests surrounding a 17-year-old boy who will likely die without blood transfusions. The cancer patient, weeks shy of the age when he could speak for himself, has embraced his parents’ deep faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses and their abhorrence of letting what the Bible deems a pollutant enter his body. The scenes before the bench and at the boy’s hospital bedside are taut and intelligent, like the best courtroom dramas. . . . Meanwhile, McEwan, in a rich character study that begs for a James Ivory film, shows Fiona reckoning with the doubt, depression and temporary triumphs of the betrayed—like an almost Elizabethan digression on changing the locks of their flat—not to mention guilt at stressing over her career and forgoing children. . . . Also running through the book is a musical theme, literal and verbal, in which Fiona escapes the legal world and “the subdued drama of her half-life with Jack” to play solo and in duets. McEwan, always a smart, engaging writer, here takes more than one familiar situation and creates at every turn something new and emotionally rewarding in a way he hasn’t done so well since On Chesil Beach.”
Library Journal says: “Obsession is a familiar subject for McEwan, most memorably explored in his 1997 Enduring Love. This time the theme is a touchstone in a novel exploring a man’s fixation on having an open marriage, a boy’s fascination with the judge who will decide his fate, and a couple’s determination to follow the strictures of their religion no matter the cost. The judge, Fiona Maye, must decide whether the teenage boy, a devout Jehovah’s Witness, can be forced by the court to undergo the blood transfusion that is necessary to save his life. Clouding Maye’s mind is turmoil at home: her husband is calmly insisting upon changing the boundaries of their relationship, a story line that will remind readers of the excruciating tiptoeing-around-each-other executed in the author’s On Chesil Beach. In the end, this nuanced work explores compelling ideas but is not as memorable as McEwan’s best. It may find a wider audience than some of his works, though, as its setting is contemporary and its major plotline—religious exemptions to laws—topical.”
When is it available?
It’s at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Dwight and Mark Twain branches now.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
(HarperCollins, $27.99, 416 pages)
Who is this author?
You don’t encounter all that many authors who can actually print their own books, and not by using a computer printer, either. One such is debut novelist Alix Christie, who also is a journalist and letterpress printer who learned that skill as an apprentice to two master California printers and owns and operates a letterpress. Christie lives in London and reviews books and arts for the Economist.
What is this book about?
This is a story of enormous changes in the world of publishing – but it’s not about the birth of the Internet or the Kindle. It is a historical novel set in medieval Germany, where the invention of the printing press made waves still reverberating today. Peter Schoeffer, the ward of wealthy German merchant Johann Fust, is working as a scribe in Paris but gets hauled back to his hometown of Mainz in Germany to meet none other than Johann Gutenberg, who has just invented the printing press, a device that can and will change the way knowledge is disseminated. It is no longer the exclusive province of priests and scholars, handed down via illuminated handwritten manuscripts. Gutenberg’s press opens the world of words to the masses, and that changes everything. Peter joins him in the controversial endeavor of printing copies of the Bible, despite fierce opposition, and also must deal with his two father figures: Fust, who is helping to fund Gutenberg, and the inventor himself, a difficult but brilliant man.
Why you’ll like it:
This is one of those novels that draws fascinating and unexpected parallels between the world we know today and long-ago civilization as the Middle Ages waned and the Renaissance bloomed. It shows us that cataclysmic change in how we live and think is nothing new: it happened then with the invention of the printing press and in our lifetime with the advent of computers and the Internet. There may be nothing new under the sun, as the saying goes, but the amazing details Christie recounts in her debut novel will be new, and thrilling, to her readers.
What others are saying:
Kirkus’s starred review says: “Christie debuts with a literary exploration of Gutenberg and his printing press, which sparked a technological revolution—as well as the other men involved who were left in history’s shadows. Johann Fust, prosperous merchant of Mainz, Germany, gathered guilders and gold for Gutenberg. Peter Schoeffer, Fust’s ward who was training in Paris as a scribe, was called home to become Gutenberg’s apprentice—and watch over the mad genius. An orphaned peasant boy, cousin of Fust’s first wife, Schoeffer resented being drawn away from intellectual circles but came to see his chance to “raise again the…lamp of learning.” Schoeffer’s the primary protagonist, his interior journey from frustration to reconciliation to obsession with Gutenberg’s press deftly chronicled against the panorama of the 15th century—the jealous craft guilds, the iron hand and depraved greed of the church hierarchy, the free towns like Mainz controlled by the machinations of oligarchs called Elders. Schoeffer anchors the story, but Gutenberg flashes—megalomaniacal and duplicitous, with hair “wild and bristling to his shoulders…beard cascad[ing]…glinting here and there like twists of wire,” and “glowing, canine eyes.” Christie masterfully depicts the time and energy required to print the first Bibles, a yearslong process of trial and error, tinkering with ink and type, lines and paper, guilder after guilder spent without return, all against a catastrophic backdrop of plague, the fall of Constantinople, the violent superstitions of the peasantry, and a vested intelligentsia fearing the press would generate “crude words crudely wrought…smut and prophecy, the ranting of anarchists and antichrists.” Bibles, 180 in all, are printed in the strictest secrecy lest the press be seized “as a threat to the scriptoria whose proceeds kept the landed cloisters fat.” While rendered chronologically, with a second narrative thread about Schoeffer’s courtship of his first wife, the narrative is given texture through intermittent chapters in which Schoeffer, years later—worried that Gutenberg’s triumph was more corrupt than holy—relates his story to Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim .A bravura debut. ‘
“Gutenberg’s Apprentice is an imaginative recounting of history that, despite a 15th-century setting, reflects many of today’s chief matters of concern. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the ever-changing art of publishing, ” says BookPage.
In a starred review, Booklist says: “Gorgeously written…dramatizes the creation of the Gutenberg Bible in a story that devotees of book history and authentic historical fiction will relish…An inspiring tale of ambition, camaraderie, betrayal, and cultural transformation based on actual events and people, this wonderful novel fully inhabits its age.”
Says Publishers Weekly in a starred review: “This detailed historical novel takes readers into Gutenberg’s 15th-century Mainz workshop to experience the frustration and exhilaration of designing, typesetting, and rolling the first printed Bible off the press. Focusing on contributions made by Gutenberg’s associates, the story follows the apprenticeship of future publishing pioneer Peter Schoeffer from the day Peter’s adopted father, merchant-investor Johann Fust, tells him to give up life as a Parisian scribe in order to learn a new trade using Gutenberg’s secret technology and techniques. For unhappy Peter, printed texts seem less sacred, and certainly less artistic, than hand-copied manuscripts. Demanding and sometimes devious, Gutenberg proves a difficult boss; worst of all, the equipment still has bugs to work out. Only when Peter comes up with his own innovation does he appreciate print’s artistry and power. Despite obstacles posed by the Church, guilds, family, and friends, Fust, Gutenberg, and Schoeffer’s tenuous collaboration culminates in the Gutenberg Bible. Contemporary readers suspicious of digital texts will sympathize with Peter’s mixed feelings towards print. History buffs will savor the moment the inventor, the scribe, and the merchant make a decision that leads them out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. Journalist Christie’s fiction debut descriptions of technical processes and medieval society are enthralling; the romance and personal melodrama are less compelling. At her best, she demonstrates a printer’s precision and a dogged researcher’s diligence in her painstakingly meticulous account of quattrocento innovation, technology, politics, art, and commerce.”
When is it available?
It’s on the new books shelf at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Revival
By Stephen King
(Scribner, $30, 416 pages)
Who is this author?
Stephen King, our contemporary king of horror fiction, has published more than 50 books and all of them have gained international best-sellerdom. Many have been made into haunting films – The Shining, Cujo, Christine – and TV series, such as Under the Dome, and his nonfiction guidebook/memoir On Writing has become a classic of its kind. His novel 11/22/63 was a named by The New York Times Book Review to its top 10 list for 2011 and also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Mystery/and Best Hardcover Book Award from the International Thriller Writers Association. In 2003, King won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Maine, where many of his harrowing tales are set, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King, but as a boy, he lived for a time in Stratford CT, in some ways, he says, a model for his fictional town of Derry, ME.
What is this book about?
Spanning half a century, Revival plays around with mad scientist-Frankenstein elements, and probes how fanaticism can entwine with religion and with science, to no good ends. It begins in a New England town, where a young boy, like most of the town, becomes fascinated by a charismatic new minister and his beautiful wife. But when a devastating auto accident wipes out the minister’s family, he leaves the church and bitterly mocks religion, becoming obsessed with the power of electricity. Meanwhile, the boy grows up to become a guitar player in rock bands and a heroin addict. Eventually, of course, they meet again and explore the ex-minister’s theories about “secret electricity” and its supposed powers to heal – and maybe to do even more. As countless characters in horror stories and films (including the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) have pointed out: “Perhaps there are some things man was never meant to tamper with.”
Why you’ll like it:
As with the best of King’s prodigious output, this one opens doorways you’re afraid to step through. King’s genius is his talent for creating believable characters speaking believable dialogue in the most unbelievable of situations, and it works every time. The clash between those who see the world through the lens of religion and those who see it through science is ongoing and flaring up anew, and this book plays with those larger concepts in a powerful and provocative way.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “…Revival is pure Stephen King. Like many of King’s novels, it is filled with cultural allusions both high and low: In addition to the Bible and Frankenstein, there are references to Thomas Edison’s work at Menlo Park, Dan Brown, The X Files, the “Forbidden Books” (that is, grimoires banned and burned by the Catholic Church) and particularly Ludvig Prinn’s The Mysteries of the Worm…As the Kingian references pile up, and become layered into the events of the fictional world, you fall deeper and deeper under the story’s spell, almost believing that Jamie’s nightmarish experiences actually happened…Reading Revival is experiencing a master storyteller having the time of his life. All of his favorite fictional elements are at play—small-town Maine, the supernatural, the evil genius, the obsessive addict, the power of belief to transform a life.
And in The New York Times, Janet Maslin writes: “. . . tenderly realistic despite its roots in horror and science fiction…Revival…finds [King] writing with the infectious glee that has always been at the heart of his popular success…[it] is a well-built book that unfolds on a big canvas…Revival winds up with the idea that to be human, you must know what it is to be inhuman—and to know that only this thin partition separates that horror from ordinary life. So it’s not just a book that delivers its share of jolts and then lets the reader walk away unscathed. Older and wiser each time he writes, Mr. King has moved on from the physical fear that haunted him after he was struck by a van while out walking to a more metaphysical, universal terror. He writes about things so inevitable that he speaks to us all.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “This spellbinding supernatural thriller from MWA Grand Master King chronicles one man’s efforts to, as narrator Jamie Morton phrases it, “tap into the secrets of the universe.” Charles Jacobs, a Methodist minister in rural Harlow, Maine, loses his faith when his wife and child die in a hideous car accident, but not his obsessive interest in electricity. Over the next 50 years, Jamie—a devoted congregant of Jacobs’s when young, but a wary skeptic as he matures—crosses paths with his friend as the constantly experimenting Jacobs graduates from carnival huckster, to faith healer, and finally to mad scientist convinced that he can harness a “secret electricity” to get a glimpse of “some unknown existence beyond our lives.” King is a master at invoking the supernatural through the powerful emotions of his characters, and his depiction of Jacobs as a man unhinged by grief but driven by insatiable scientific curiosity is as believable as it is frightening. The novel’s ending—one of King’s best—stuns like lightning.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “In his second novel of 2014 (the other being Mr. Mercedes), veteran yarn spinner King continues to point out the unspeakably spooky weirdness that lies on the fringes of ordinary life. Think of two central meanings of the title—a religious awakening and bringing someone back to life—and you’ll have King’s latest in a nuthouse. Beg pardon, nutshell, though of course it’s madness that motivates all his most memorable characters. In this instance, a preacher arrives in a small New England town—always a small New England town—with an attractive wife and small child. Soon enough, bad things happen: “The woman had a dripping bundle clasped to her breast with one arm. One arm was all Patsy Jacobs could use, because the other had been torn off at the elbow.” And soon enough, the good reverend, broken by life, is off to other things, while our protagonist drinks deep of the choppy waters of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. “My belief had ended,” Jamie Morton says, simply—that is, until Rev. Jacobs turns up in his life again, after having spent time at the horrifying North Carolina amusement park that is Joyland (for which see King’s 2013 novel of the same name) and mastered not just the carney’s trade, but also the mysterious workings of “secret electricity.” Well, as Victor Frankenstein learned, electricity can sometimes get away from a fellow, and though young Jamie pleads with the bereaved pastor to get himself back on the good foot (“The newspapers would call you Josef Mengele.” “Does anyone call a neurosurgeon Josef Mengele just because he loses some of his patients?”), once it sets to crackling, the secret electricity can’t be put back into the bottle. Faith healing run amok: It’s a theme that’s exercised King since Carrie, and though this latest is less outright scary and more talky than that early touchstone, it compares well. No one does psychological terror better than King. Another spine-tingling pleasure for his fans.”
Library Journal also gives it a starred review: “King’s latest (after Doctor Sleep) is narrated by Jamie Morton, who is six years old when he meets Rev. Charles Jacobs. New to Harlow, ME, Jacobs, along with his pretty young wife and toddler, quickly become the local attraction. Jamie and his family discover that Jacobs has a love of electricity and is quite ingenious with his inventions. Soon, though, tragedy strikes the reverend, and the losses he endures cause him to give a sermon that gets him fired from the ministry and banished from town. Years later, Jamie, now in his 30s and addicted to heroin, meets Jacobs again. Noticing how Jacobs has changed, Jamie worries about the man’s constant tinkering with what Jacobs calls “secret electricity.” Jacobs begins to heal people using his knowledge of electricity, but Jamie finds that there are terrible side effects. VERDICT King (The Stand) fans will rejoice that the horror master is back in fine form. While there are fewer characters than in many of his other tomes, each character is well drawn and worth following. The ending is exquisitely horrific and will leave the reader hoping this is only a work of fiction.”
When is it available?
Don’t be scared to look for this book. You can find it at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Barbour, Blue Hills, Camp Field, Dwight and Park branches.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
By Roz Chast
(Bloomsbury, $28, 228 pages)
Who is this author?
Roz Chast was born in Brooklyn, New York, but has lived in Ridgefield with her family for many years. More than 1,000 of her inimitably quirky cartoons have run in The New Yorker since 1978 – you could call them quintessentially NewYorkerish — and others have appeared in Scientific American, Harvard Business Review, Redbook, Mother Jones, and many other magazines. She also has written or illustrated more than a dozen books. You can get a fine overview of her work in Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006.
What is this book about?
Promise you won’t stop reading if I tell you.
This #1 New York Times Bestseller, finalist for the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfiction and winner of the 2014 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, is a graphic novel about Chast’s very difficult relationship with her very, very difficult parents and how she tried to care for them as they moved into an even more difficult stage of life: declining and demented in their 90s. That’s the grim reality.
What makes this illustrated memoir so, well, memorable, is the way Chast manages to inject humor into this achingly sad and often heartbreaking story. Her parents, teacher George and vice-principal Elizabeth, met in fifth grade, never dated others and were so preternaturally close a couple that Roz, an only child, was made to feel like an unwelcome intruder. The Chasts were full of anxiety and transmitted it to their daughter: you can see it in the squiggly-wiggly way she draws. Her father, even when healthy, was a weakling; her mother an overbearing, often nasty shrew. Still, they were her family, and Chast dID her best to cope with their oddities and get them the care they desperately needed, but did not want. It was an epic struggle. To paraphrase Shakespeare: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/To be an un-thanked child.”
Why you’ll like it:
If you have coped with caring for a declining elderly parent, or wonder how well you will do if that daunting job falls to you, this book will resonate with you. Chast has a brilliant understanding of the combustible mixture of love and frustration that suffuses such situations. As a cartoonist, she has always had a firm grasp on the slipperiness of the absurd; this talent serves her well as, after years of estrangement, she attempts the nearly impossible task of gaining her parents’ trust and affection, so long missing from her life. This is a brave, wrenchingly honest and yet often laugh-out-loud funny book whose images and message will stay with you for a very long time. Read it and laugh, and then weep, and then laugh again, and then make your adult children read it too.
What others are saying:
In a starred review, Kirkus says: “A revelatory and occasionally hilarious memoir by the New Yorker cartoonist on helping her parents through their old age. Few graphic memoirs are as engaging and powerful as this or strike a more responsive chord. Chast retains her signature style and wry tone throughout this long-form blend of text and drawings, but nothing she’s done previously hits home as hard as this account of her family life as the only child of parents who had never even dated anyone else and whose deep bond left little room for this intruder in their midst. Yet, “the reality was that at 95, their minds and bodies were falling apart,” and these two people who had only relied on each other were forced to rely on a host of caretakers, their daughter in particular, and to move from the Brooklyn apartment that had been home for half a century into a series of facilities that provided fewer and fewer amenities at escalating expense. Chast rarely lapses into sentimentality and can often be quite funny, as she depicts mortality as “The Moving Sidewalk of Life” (“Caution: Drop-Off Ahead”) or deals with dread and anxiety on the “Wheel of DOOM, surrounded by the ‘cautionary’ tales of my childhood.” The older her parents get, the more their health declines and the more expensive the care they require, the bleaker the story becomes—until, toward the end, a series of 12 largely wordless drawings of her mother’s final days represents the most intimate and emotionally devastating art that Chast has created. So many have faced (or will face) the situation that the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A top-notch graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to readers’ appreciation of Chast and her work.
In The New York Times Book Review, Alex Witchel writes: “This is a beautiful book, deeply felt, both scorchingly honest about what it feels like to love and care for a mother who has never loved you back, at least never the way you had wanted, and achingly wistful about a gentle father who could never break free of his domineering wife and ride to his daughter’s rescue. It veers between being laugh-out-loud funny and so devastating I had to take periodic timeouts. Cartoons, as it happens, are tailor-made for the absurdities of old age, illness and dementia, the odd dramas and grinding repetition expertly illustrated by copious exclamation points, capital letters and antic drawings. They also limit the opportunity for navel gazing and self-pity, trapping you in the surreal moments themselves.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Something more pleasant” than the certainty of old age and death is what Chast’s parents would prefer to talk about, in this poignant and funny text-and-cartoon memoir of their final years. . . . Chast . . . describes how her parents, George and Elizabeth, try her patience as she agonizes over their past and future. She brings her parents and herself to life in the form of her characteristic scratchy-lined, emotionally expressive characters, making the story both more personal and universal. Despite the subject matter, the book is frequently hilarious, highlighting the stubbornness and eccentricities (and often sheer lunacy) of the author’s parents. It’s a homage that provides cathartic “you are not alone” support to those caring for aging parents. . . . this is a cartoon memoir to laugh and cry, and heal, with—Roz Chast’s masterpiece.
“Chast’s scratchy art turns out perfectly suited to capturing the surreal realities of the death process. In quirky color cartoons, handwritten text, photos, and her mother’s poems, she documents the unpleasant yet sometimes hilarious cycle of human doom. She’s especially dead-on with the unpredictable mental states of both the dying and their caregivers: placidity, denial, terror, lunacy, resignation, vindictiveness, and rage. . . Chast so skillfully exposes herself and her family on the page as to give readers both insight and entertainment on a topic nearly everyone avoids. As with her New Yorker cartoons, Chast’s memoir serves up existential dilemmas along with chuckles and can help serve as a tutorial for the inevitable,” says Library Journal in a starred review.
“Roz Chast squeezes more existential pain out of baffled people in cheap clothing sitting around on living-room sofas with antimacassar doilies in crummy apartments than Dostoevsky got out of all of Russia’s dark despair. This is a great book in the annals of human suffering, cleverly disguised as fun,” says fellow New Yorker contributor Bruce McCall.
The Barnes & Noble Review says: “Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a graphic memoir — in at least two senses. It joins Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, William Trevor’s The Old Boys, and Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up in the competition for the funniest book about old age I’ve ever read. It is also heartbreaking. In its pages, the elements of Chast’s most inspired comic work, well known particularly to readers of The New Yorker — impending calamity and aloneness — are no longer mere phantoms but are, instead, intractable, implacable reality. She, an only child, depicts in words, drawings, and ineffable mood her un-self-assured efforts to avert utter disaster as her parents descend into “the part of old age that [is] scarier, harder to talk about, and not part of this culture.
“. . . Naturally, this book begins on a doily-accoutered couch, a Chastian fixture as much existential condition as piece of furniture. There we first meet George and Elizabeth Chast, both born in 1912 and now around ninety years old . . .
Elizabeth had been an assistant elementary school principal and George, a high school teacher.. . . As a couple, they are perfectly matched: George, passive, patient, gentle, and anxious, is a man who “chain-worried the way others might chain smoke. He never learned to drive, swim, ride a bicycle, or change a lightbulb.” Elizabeth is aggressive, intolerant, confident, and domineering. She writes poetry of sorts, is given to explosions of rage (“blasts from Chast”), and played the piano almost every evening during the author’s unlamented childhood while young Roz and her father “would cower in admiration on the couch.”
“ . . . The ancient hostility between Chast and her mother becomes more fraught after her father’s death: Roz longing for some sign that her mother had loved her — this mother, now a lunatic version of her old self-centered, chilly self.
“. . . Throughout the book, Chast’s drawings express her powerful sense of aloneness. With only a couple of exceptions, it’s just Roz — her daughter appears briefly — faced, as she was as a child, with her parents’ united front: dysfunctional in the past, positively pathological now. Her style — droopy, alarmed, appalled — perfectly captures her overwhelming feeling of inadequacy in the face of this drawn-out emergency. They show, graphically, how events surround her, and how taking care of parents deep in their dotage is an all-encompassing task.
“. . . Still, one might think, without really thinking, that a cartoon book about one’s parents’ decline and death would be a breach of good taste: disrespectful and not nice. (Can’t we illustrate something more pleasant?) But no. The final chapters in both parents’ lives, and their daughter’s bit part in each, are extremely moving. Certainly, the drawings and text are very funny, but here more than anywhere else in Chast’s work, one feels her comedy to be a form of desperate doughtiness, an attempt to foil terror, ease pity, and expiate guilt.
When is it available?
This remarkable book is at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Some Luck
By Jane Smiley
(Knopf Doubleday, $26.95, 416 pages)
Who is this author?
Jane Smiley, who lives in California, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Thousand Acres, a modern retelling of King Lear set in Iowa farm country. She went on to write other novels: Moo (a biting satire of life at an agricultural college), Horse Heaven, Good Faith, Private Life and many more, as well as five nonfiction books and a series for young adults. Her honors include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.
What is this book about?
A simple plot idea, but one that is difficult to maintain: Smiley’s Some Luck is the first of a planned trilogy about the life of one farming family in Iowa from 1920 to the 1950s, told in the form of one chapter per year. Rosanna and Walter Langdon and their five children are the microcosm; the events from the Great Depression through World War II and its immediate aftermath is the macrocosm: both are delineated with care. The New Yorker says it best:
“This sweeping, carefully plotted novel traces the history, from 1920 to the Cold War era, of a single Iowa farming family. Each chapter focuses on one year, setting the minor catastrophes and victories of the family’s life against a backdrop of historical change, particularly the Great Depression. As the children branch out from their tiny town, so, too, does the story, eventually encompassing several generations, cities, and cultural movements. Smiley, like one of her characters contemplating the guests at the Thanksgiving table, begins with an empty house and fills it ‘with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious.’ “
Why you’ll like it:
Smiley is an accomplished writer, and here she has set herself a difficult task: tell the story of one family while also telling the story of America during one of its most frightening yet fulfilling periods of history. And do so in a way that readers, having finished this book, will look forward eagerly to two more that will complete the story. Smiley has the skills to carry this off and no lack of the imagination that a literary feat of this nature demands. She can be touching yet funny, insightful and provocative. Some Luck and its planned sequels are truly a three-course readers’ feast.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “In the first volume of a planned trilogy, Smiley returns to the Iowa of her Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres, but in a very different vein. The warring sisters and abusive father of that book have given way to the Langdons, a loving family whose members, like most people, are exceptional only in their human particularities. The story covers the 1920s through the early ’50s, years during which the family farm survives the Depression and drought, and the five Langdon children grow up and have to decide whether to stay or leave. Smiley is particularly good at depicting the world from the viewpoint of young children—all five of the Langdons are distinct individuals from their earliest days. The standout is oldest son Frank, born stubborn and with an eye for opportunity, but as Smiley shifts her attention from one character to another, they all come to feel like real and relatable people. The saga of an Iowa farm family might not seem like an exciting premise, but Smiley makes it just that, conjuring a world—time, place, people—and an engaging story that makes readers eager to know what happens next. Smiley plans to extend the tale of the Langdon family well into the 21st century; she’s off to a very strong start.”
From Library Journal’s starred review: “Pulitzer Prize-winning Smiley moves from the 1920s to the 1950s as she unfolds the life of Iowa farmers Rosanna and Walter Langdon and their five children. As the children grow up and sometimes move away, we get a wide-angle view of mid-century America. Told in beautiful, you-are-there language, the narrative lets ordinary events accumulate to give us a significant feel of life at the time, with the importance and dangers of farming particularly well portrayed. In the end, though, this is the story of parents and children, of hope and disappointment . . . Highly recommended; a lush and grounded reading experience.”
From Booklist’s starred review: “Tremendous . . . Smiley is a seductive writer in perfect command of every element of language. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Acres, a novel about a farming family in Iowa, and she returns to that fertile ground to tell the stories of the Langdons, a clan deeply in accord with the land . . . As barbed in her wit as ever, Smiley is also munificently tender. The Langdons endure the Depression, Walter agonizes over giving up his horses for a tractor, and Joe tries the new synthetic fertilizers. Then, as Frank serves in WWII and, covertly, the Cold War, the novel’s velocity, intensity, and wonder redouble. This [is a] saga of the vicissitudes of luck, and our futile efforts to control it. Smiley’s grand, assured, quietly heroic, and affecting novel is a supremely nuanced portrait of a family spanning three pivotal American decades. It will be on the top of countless to-read lists.”
Kirkus says in its starred review: “Smiley follows an Iowa farm family through the thick of the 20th century. We first meet Walter Langdon in 1920 as he anxiously surveys his fields. Milk prices are down, and anyway “worry-shading-into-alarm [is] Walter’s ever-present state,” thinks wife Rosanna. The freakish accidental death of a toddler daughter is the only incident here that really justifies Walter’s apprehensions (it wouldn’t be a Smiley novel without at least one cruel twist of fate), but underpinning the comparatively placid unfolding of three decades is farm folks’ knowledge that disaster is always one bad crop away, and luck is never to be relied on. . . . The Langdons raise five children to varied destinies. Smart, charismatic Frank leaves home for college and the Army. Steady, sensitive Joe stays home on the farm, its perennial round of backbreaking labor somewhat alleviated by such innovations as tractors and commercial fertilizer. Golden girl Lillian marries a government employee who gets Frank involved in spying on suspected communist agents after the war—ironic, since Rosanna’s sister Eloise is a Trotskyist. Times are changing: Henry, the family intellectual, will clearly end up in academia; Lillian and Frank are both living in Eastern suburbs. Youngest daughter Claire is less vivid than her siblings, and the names begin to blur a bit as the postwar baby boom creates a burgeoning new generation, but for the most part Smiley juggles characters and events with her customary aplomb and storytelling craft. The novel doesn’t so much end as stop, adding to the sense that we’ve simply dropped in on a continuing saga. Smiley is the least sentimental of writers, but when Rosanna and Walter look at the 23 people gathered at Thanksgiving in 1948 and “agreed in an instant: something had created itself from nothing,” it’s a moment of honest sentiment, honestly earned. An expansive, episodic tale showing this generally flinty author in a mellow mood: surprising, but engaging.”
“Smiley is prolific [and] seemingly writes the way her idol Dickens did—as easily as if it were breathing . . . She made up her mind at an early age that she was going to master not just one genre, but all of them. Her new book is the first volume of a trilogy—one of the few forms left for her to tackle . . . Some Luck starts in 1920 and follows the fortunes of a Midwestern farming family; each chapter covers a single year. What most surprised her, she said, was the way that, more than in her other books, the characters took on lives of their own. ‘I got the feeling that I got on a train and sat down, and all these people were talking. I was eavesdropping, and the train was just heading into the future,’” says Charles McGrath in The New York Times.
When is it available?
Lucky for you, it is at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain branch.
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Let Me Be Frank with You
By Richard Ford
(HarperCollins, $27.99, 256 pages)
Who is this author?
Richard Ford, born in the South but now living in Boothbay, Maine with his wife, got lucky when the magazine Inside Sports folded in the 1980s, leaving him without a job. Previously a novelist, he began a new one inspired by his magazine experience: The Sportswriter, about a guy named Frank Bascombe. A huge popular and critical success in 1986, it was followed by the best-selling sequels Independence Day (the first novel to win a Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award) and The Lay of the Land. Ford also wrote several story collections. Let Me Be Frank with You may be the final Bascombe book, but Ford’s fans hope not.
What is this book about?
Frank Bascombe, whose milieu is suburban New Jersey, is Ford’s triumphant creation: an Everyman for our times. Like Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman and John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, Bascombe is an iconic character who brilliantly reflects – and reflects on – his generation (which for many of us, is our generation, too.) He’s wry, cranky, smart, outspoken and intuitive, and he speaks with a voice that is almost too realistic. The book is not exactly a novel, nor a collection of stories. It is four linked novellas that bring Frank, at 68, through the horrors (and lingering aftershocks) of Hurricane Sandy and the crash of the real estate market, as well as the sad realities of aging and illness and flawed and failed marriages. Grim stuff, but Frank has the sardonic wit to survive it, and to bring us along. He is not a perfect man, but he is the perfect man to tell these stories.
Why you’ll like it:
Sit back, relax, turn the pages: you are in the sure hands of a master storyteller. Ford has no need to play with novelistic innovations and literary folderol: he just lets Frank be, well, frank with us. We are all familiar with the recent upheavals of the real estate, financial and political climates, not to mention of the climate itself, but with Frank as our savvy, if sometimes a tad bewildered, guide, this book give us the chance to relive it with the perspective that a few years’ time and a lifetime of experience can offer.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land, continues to reflect on the meaning of existence in these four absorbing, funny, and often profound novellas. The collection is set in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2012. Frank considers the evanescence of life as he travels to the site of his former home on the shore; has an unsettling experience with a black woman whose family once lived in his present home in fictional Haddam; visits his prickly ex-wife, who is suffering from Parkinson’s, in an extended-care institution; and meets a dying former friend. At 68, Frank feels “old”; his bout with prostate cancer has convinced him that he’s in the “Default Period of life.” Intimations of mortality (“the bad closing in”) permeate his musings, recounted in an unadorned, profane, vernacular that conveys his witty, cynical voice. Frank’s cranky comments and free-flowing meditations about current social and political events are slyly juxtaposed with references to Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Trollope, Emerson, Milton, and others. Despite Frank’s dyspeptic outlook, Ford packs in a surprising amount of affirmation and redemption. Readers who met Frank in Ford’s earlier novels will quickly reconnect with his indelible personality.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month review for November 2014 says: It’s been eight years since we last saw Frank Bascombe, successfully selling real estate in New Jersey, easing into his mid-50s at the conclusion of Richard Ford’s celebrated trilogy. Ford clearly had more to say about his man Frank. In the four connected novellas that comprise the touching and humorous Let Me Be Frank With You —like a coda to the trilogy—we see Frank confronting his aging self and, at the same time, a New Jersey coastline recently ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. In some ways, he’s the same old Frank: an admitted “malcontent,” cranky and kvetching, but funny and, mostly, a good guy. Speaking of being frank, I must admit: as a fan of the trilogy (especially the first two), I was doubtful that I’d care about the first-world problems of rich and retired Frank Bascombe, now on the verge of 70. But there’s a creeping sadness that infuses these stories, and a little bit of rage, as in raging against the dying light. . . . In the end, the ride of life is often a waiting game. Says Frank: “Time fixes things, mostly.”
In the The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes: “. . . Let Me Be Frank With You] serves as an apt vitrine for Mr. Ford’s talents: his journalistic eye for the revealing detail, his knack for tracing the connections between the public and the personal, his gift for capturing the precariousness of daily life…the fact that Let Me works as well as it does is a testament to Mr. Ford’s strengths as a writer and his ability to turn his hero’s contradictions and discontinuities into something more like the genuine complexities of a real human being.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “The novelist returns with his favorite protagonist for a coda that is both fitting and timely. . . In comparison to the other volumes in what had been known as “The Bascombe Trilogy”—and to Ford’s most recent novel, the masterful Canada (2012)—this is a short, formalistic work. Each of its four chapters could stand as a story on its own, featuring Frank’s meditations on odd encounters with someone from his past, now that he has settled into the detachment of retirement from the real estate racket. “[W]hat I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do,” he explains, though he somehow finds himself commiserating with the guy who bought his house, destroyed by the recent Hurricane Sandy; the wife who became his ex three decades ago; and a former friend who is on his deathbed. While President Barack Obama, the hurricane and the bursting of the real estate bubble provide narrative signposts, not much really happens with Frank, which suits Frank just fine. He finds himself facing the mortal inevitability by paring down—ridding himself of friends, complications, words that have become meaningless. As he says, “I’d say it’s a simple, good-willed, fair-minded streamlining of life in anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller-coaster.” Until then, what he experiences is “life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.” Over the course of his encounters, there are a couple of revelations that might disturb a man who felt more, but plot is secondary here to Frank’s voice, which remains at a reflective remove from whatever others are experiencing. Another Bascombe novel would be a surprise, but so is this—a welcome one.”
The Barnes & Noble Review says: “There’s something to be said for a good no-nonsense hurricane, to bully life back into perspective,” Frank says early on, pondering the “climatological shit train” that Sandy represents. He’d sold off his former coastal home, the one where he absorbed a gunshot wound at the climax of The Lay of the Land, and its new owner has summoned Frank to consider the wreckage. Damage assessment, both literally and figuratively, is the theme of the new book — in the two weeks before Christmas, he’ll hear his home’s former occupant relate a mortally tragic tale; visit his first, now ailing wife in a lavish but mortality-suffused retirement home; and grudgingly visit a distant friend on his deathbed. Every Bascombe novel thrives on the absurd disconnect between Frank’s pat sophistry and his real life: His patter about good parenting came undone when his son got whomped by a batting-cage fastball, and his pleas for civil political discourse couldn’t keep him out of a bar fight. Now, though, the dark humor is more elegiac. Frank, once a guy who could take a slug to the chest, is now just barely capable of handling his ex-wife’s Parkinson’s.
Ford’s great stroke as a novelist has come through giving us a narrator who is, at least half the time, full of horsehockey, yet making him a compelling narrator nonetheless; you’re buoyed on the sheer force of Frank’s know-it-all-persona . . .”
When is it available?
I’ll be frank with you: it’s at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Dwight branch.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
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