Carole Goldberg
Single, Carefree, Mellow
By Katherine Heiny
(Knopf Doubleday, $22.95, 240 pages)
Who is this author?
When she was just 25, Katherine Heiny accomplished something most writers only dream of: she sent a short story to The New Yorker and got an immediate acceptance. And then she tried to write a novel and that went nowhere for years, although she did publish stories in such respected literary journals as Ploughshares, Narrative, Glimmer Train, and others. And she wrote Young Adult novels under the pen name Katherine Applegate. She married a former M16 agent – that’s British for spy, a la James Bond. They and their children now live near Washington, D.C., “Single, Carefree, Mellow” is her debut book.
Here is what she told Longreads.com about her husband:
“. . .For most of our married life he was undercover, and I couldn’t tell people what he did. We had to be careful about what we said on the phone. He was under death threats some of that time. So I think that because I lived with secrets being part of my life for so long, it’s kind of second nature.”
And secrets are a big part of her book.
What is this book about?
The 11 stories in “Single, Carefree, Mellow” feature women who often are anything but. They’re confused, possibly genuinely in love with several men at once, willing to cheat but not proud of it, needy in some ways, strong in others. In short: real people making the kinds of choices and decisions that seem inevitable at the time, but perhaps not quite so in hindsight. Heiny “gets” these women and presents them to her readers with no apologies. They might be your cousins or roommates or neighbors, or you. They have beloved dogs that die (the title story will wrench the chilliest heart) and relationships that should die but have amazing resiliency. Though the subject matter of these pieces is often pretty disturbing, the telling is often extremely amusing. One character, Maya, appears in several stories, but all the protagonists have similar traits and experiences in love affairs that break the rules and sometimes hearts. Single, Carefree, Mellow offers an unvarnished look at contemporary relationships, unsettling though understandable just the same.
Why you’ll like it:
Heiny writes with insight and sharp humor and an impressive grasp of how complicated love, or the pursuit thereof, can be. She captures the voice of young (or young-ish) women trying to navigate complicated situations: a mistress having a drink with her lover’s wife; a woman tangled up with her male roommate; a child’s birthday party from hell with the world’s most depressing clown; the aforementioned loss of a dog. The depth she finds in these well-wrought tales is genuinely impressive.
Here’s what Heiny said about her writing in an interview on the website The Review Review:
“How to Give the Wrong Impression” was the first story I ever published. I’d been sending stories out but never before to The New Yorker. Then my friend Jennifer said I was an idiot, that I was supposed to start there, so I did, and they called to accept the story less than 24 hours after I mailed it and they published it with almost no changes and I thought, “Wow, this writing career stuff is really easy.” (It turns out I was somewhat mistaken about that.) . . .
“I don’t know why that story was selected. Maybe because it’s about unrequited love, which is something almost everyone has experienced. And I wrote it when I was very young and unrequited love was about the worst thing I could imagine happening to anyone, so maybe that earnestness set it apart from stories with a more cynical tone. I do know that if I’d known then how hard it was to break into The New Yorker, I would never have tried. It was an impulsive, uninformed, late-night decision – but maybe that’s the best kind. . . .
“Years and years ago, Evan Hunter told me that unless you get up and start writing in the morning, you’re not a writer, you’re just someone who plans to write something in the very near future. At the time I thought he was crazy. Write in the morning? I didn’t even get up in the morning. I got up about noon and generally started writing at about midnight, except that it wasn’t generally, it was rarely, because usually at midnight I was out drinking with my friends. But eventually I took his advice and I went from being a writer who wants to write to one who actually does, and there’s no better feeling than that. And none worse, either.”
What others are saying:
“This radiant collection of short stories features a set of flawed yet sympathetic women in a whole mess of compromising positions . . . Many of the women in these beautifully wrought stories are single, but they are anything but carefree or mellow . . . First-time author Katherine Heiny takes great care to make her characters relatable even in their imperfections. She paints sweetly resonant moments that also can be very funny . . . Single, Carefree, Mellow is named for a story in which Maya ponders leaving her boyfriend of five years, then decides there is “such a thing as too much loss.” It’s a poignant moment that sums up this smart exploration of love and betrayal, and that fine line between happiness and pain,” says Bookpage.
“Funny and heartfelt . . . Few characters are single and even fewer are carefree—though most long to be. Instead, they are remorseful about their disloyalties, torn between spouses and secret lovers, and guilt-ridden over the betrayals they commit in the name of love . . . Maya, who appears in several more stories in various stages of life and love, is one of many captivating characters expertly imagined by Heiny . . . An exceptionally humorous collection by a talented new writer. “ says Library Journal’s starred review.
The New York Times Book Review says: “ …something like Cheever mixed with Ephron: white, middle-class suburban discontent simmering below the surface, but treated with a light touch that keeps the focus squarely on the woman’s point of view…on the whole Heiny is very good at portraying the circumscribed landscapes, both literal and emotional, in which her characters live. She also gives credence to what is still a conundrum for many women: What role can I play in a world in which I am neither fully “carefree” and “mellow” when single, nor entirely “giving” and “content” when attached? A world in which I am still implicated in conventions of how women should be? “
Kirkus Reviews says in a starred review: “Heiny explores sex, relationships and the internal lives of young women in this charmingly candid collection of short stories. The women who populate the pages of Heiny’s disarming debut are girlfriends, mistresses and wives. They are best friends, roommates and lovers. They are intelligent but not always ambitious—keenly insightful but sometimes, perhaps willfully, blind to their own deeper desires—with loyalties and libidos that may be at odds and morals that may be in question. . . “The Dive Bar” is the title of the first story. In it, we meet Sasha, an attractive 26-year-old writer whose boyfriend has left his wife for her. After a confrontation with the boyfriend’s wife, Sasha reluctantly mulls the morality of her choices, but for her, morality is really (boringly) beside the point, and she instead finds herself sinking sideways into the next chapter of her life, a happy one, from all indications. Heiny’s characters often find themselves propelled through life by circumstances: The death of a beloved dog can lead inexorably to marriage, pregnancy and secret affairs, as it does for Maya, the protagonist of three of these stories, and her kind, kindred-spirit boyfriend/fiance/husband, Rhodes. Not all the women here are as appealing as Sasha and Maya, and the less we like them, the less charmed we may be by their careless misbehavior. By the end of the book . . . we might not find ourselves overly reluctant to part company. These young women are sympathetic and slyly seductive, sometimes selfish and maddeningly un-self-aware, but they are beguilingly human, and readers will yield to their charms.”
“In the pantheon of very bad ideas, agreeing to meet your lover’s wife for a drink would seem to fall somewhere between sticking a fork in a toaster and walking blindfolded into traffic. And yet Sasha, the twentysomething protagonist of Single, Carefree, Mellow’s opening story, ‘The Dive Bar,’ decides to put on her favorite earrings and do exactly that . . . Refreshingly liberated and free of judgment . . . Single, Carefree, Mellow is a lot like the women who populate it: smart and sexy and a little bit ruthless,” says Entertainment Weekly.
When is it available?
This interesting book is at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain 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!
Uncle Janice
By Matt Burgess
(Knopf Doubleday, $25.95, 288 pages)
Who is this author?
Matt Burgess is not a well-known author – yet. But he is on his way. His 2011 novel, “Dogfight, A Love Story,” got great reviews, and his second, “Uncle Janice,” is getting even better ones. A native of Jackson Heights, Queens, he makes the borough itself a character in his new book. But he hasn’t spent his whole life in New York City. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota’s MFA program.
What is this book about?
As Gilbert & Sullivan told us, “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.” That’s also true for a policewoman such as Janice Itwaru, a Queens-based, Guyanese-American 24-year-old undercover narcotics cop – they are known as “uncles” – who is trying to fight crime, her obnoxious bosses and the entrenched police bureaucracy, while also dealing with her dementia-plagued mother and other family issues. She’s in her 17th month on the job: one more good month and she will automatically make detective, something she desperately wants to achieve. But, sashaying around in her hoochie-mama outfits, can she lure enough potential criminals into making drug sales so that her partner can collar them and pump up her arrest quota? And if she does, will she have sold her soul in the process?
Why you’ll like it:
Reviewers are unanimous in praising Matt Burgess’ s deft ear for the way real people talk and ability to express it in the many voices in “Uncle Janice.” The book’s hilarious dialogue and gut-punchy story has earned him coveted comparisons to such contemporary noir masters as Elmore Leonard (pretty high praise indeed) along with predictions that this one is his breakout book. Here are some thoughts Burgess shared in an interview by Tin House magazine:
“Well, the book is set in Queens because I grew up there and I can’t yet seem to get myself to daydream about anywhere else. Stoops, park benches, pool halls, alleyways: they’re these charged spaces for me. I grew up telling and listening to stories, and it’s almost impossible for me to segue to fictional storytelling as a novelist without taking those places with me. . . . We try to cope with all this craziness by turning it into stories, and that’s what my books are trying to do. . . . I’m going to borrow a line from one of my heroes, the novelist George Pelecanos, and say, “the most valuable research I do comes from just hanging out in the neighborhoods and listening.” I was talking to a friend mine who’s an undercover cop and I asked him what was the scariest part of his job. I’m expecting him to say getting shot at. Instead he tells me he’s constantly worried that his bosses might try to screw him over. Working the streets was less stressful than navigating office politics. That was a revelation for me. It’s hard for a lot of us to relate to police officers, but my friend’s most chronic problems—how do I navigate this massive bureaucracy while retaining some sense of self?—were things almost anyone can relate to . . .”
“Before I knew her name or anything else about her, I had her job. That was first. I wanted to write about undercovers. Statistically speaking most undercovers are people of color. Because it’s a fast track to detective—if you last 18 months in Narcotics without getting killed or sent back to patrol, you automatically get your gold shield—most undercovers are also young and ambitious, without any of the internal connections that might get them promoted via a less dangerous route. So I knew those things about her: young, ambitious, a person of color, in this case Guyanese, because I thought that was a culture that has been underrepresented in fiction about New York. And I say “her” even though in the first few months of writing this book the protagonist was a man. I made the switch after realizing a female character might face particularly difficult challenges working her way through the male-dominant culture of the NYPD. That’s how character construction tends to work for me. I start with a job, a vague idea of a person, and then I put them under as much pressure as possible. Chase them up into a tree and throw rocks at them to see what they’re made of. And it turns out Janice is made of some pretty strong stuff.”
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: The uncle of the title of this gripping, well-written book set on the mean streets of contemporary Queens is an undercover narcotics officer in the NYPD. “Uncle” Janice Itwaru, a New Yorker of Guyanese descent, poses as a drug addict to make “buys” of crack and other controlled substances; she is shadowed by a “ghost,” a fellow officer who makes the arrests. Burgess has crafted an urban picaresque, though Itwaru’s undercover identity and activities are potentially dangerous. But the relatively low level of narrative momentum (this is not a genre novel) is well compensated for by the rich, vibrant portrait of Queens’s vast underclass—from the suffering addicts and smalltime dealers to the cops who are more concerned with doing their job, surviving the tedium and drudgery, and moving their way up the NYPD food chain than making the streets safer from the scourge of drugs. Burgess (Dogfight, a Love Story) has a finely honed eye and a gift for rendering street-smart dialogue that is both credible and comic; he fully realizes Itwaru’s world and makes the reader understand just how futile most of the skirmishes in the war on drugs really are.”
Kirkus’s starred review says: “The multicultural stew pot that is contemporary Queens is served up steaming in this pungently uproarious novel about a frenzied young policewoman advancing her career one drug buy at a time. . . .This crime novel written by Queens native Burgess evokes some of that hurly-burly as it chronicles several tumultuous weeks in the life of Janice Itwaru, an NYPD covert op desperate to climb from the dreary if sometimes-hazardous swamp of petty street buys to a detective’s gold shield. In the process, Janice, who lives with her sickly Indian mom in Richmond Hill, must cope with the ribald taunts and elaborate pranks of her fellow “uncles” (as in undercover narcotics cops), whether on assignment or in their nondescript HQ labeled “the rumpus.” . . . she’s also pressured by her superior officer to meet her shifting quota of buys and bullied by an Internal Affairs cop from Manhattan into helping him get the goods on a shady “uncle.” Less a conventionally plotted procedural than an anecdotal stream of harrowing encounters, scatological slapstick and polychromatic repartee, this is a multitextured chronicle of coming-of-age, or, perhaps more precisely, coming to terms with what it means to be a responsible grown-up struggling for truth, justice, love and value in a post-millennial urban universe where once-familiar boundary lines get blurrier every day.”
In its starred review, Library Journal says: “In Burgess’s outstanding sophomore effort, 24-year-old Janice Itwaru is an “uncle” for the NYPD, making controlled buys as an undercover narcotics officer, withstanding the good-natured ribbing of her fellow uncles, and counting the days until her 18 months comes up and she makes detective. But the Big Bosses have instituted a quota, and Janice, if she wants to earn that gold shield, needs to step up her game to include four buys a month, in an area where she is fast becoming a known face. As Janice attempts to scheme the hapless drug dealers of Queens in locations dank and desperate, while tending to her mother’s descent into dementia and generally avoiding her alcoholic father, she begins to crack under the bureaucratic pressures of modern-day policing—and Internal Affairs may be watching her every move. VERDICT This fresh take on the cop novel genre retains the madcap energy of Elmore Leonard’s best fiction while introducing the most irresistible police precinct this side of Joseph Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station.”
Barnes & Noble says: “ …. Burgess wrote Uncle Janice long before Mike Brown and Eric Garner, the riots in Ferguson and the mass protests in New York City. Yet the book, set in 2008, does allude to the Sean Bell shooting, and its thoughtful treatment of undercover work’s moral ambiguities suggests Burgess knew he would have to walk a fine line to avoid either lionizing and demonizing his heroine. Uncle Janice is in many ways a perfect book for our time, and our conversation about what we expect from the police. It reminds the reader just how dangerous and noble a cop’s job is, but at the same time it refuses to shy away from difficult questions about the compromises, missteps, and sometimes outright criminality that undermine the public’s faith in law enforcement. . . . but it is also an awful lot of fun. Burgess has already earned comparisons to that king of comic crime writing, Elmore Leonard. Like Leonard, he has the lifelong eavesdropper’s ear for dialogue and a fine-tuned sense of the absurdity of life on both sides of the law. . . .Also like Leonard, and like all the great crime writers, Burgess takes a setting and makes it his own, his jealously guarded turf. Leonard had Detroit; Charles Willeford had Miami; James Crumley had the fastnesses of Montana; James Ellroy has Los Angeles. Burgess, who grew up in Jackson Heights, is well on his way to being the Hard-Boiled Bard of Queens, evoking the character of the borough as only a native could. . . .One of the joys of reading Uncle Janice is seeing a real place lovingly described, warts and all, with the warts a disproportionately large part of the appeal.”
When is it available?
Uncle Janice is waiting for you at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain 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!
On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s
By Greg O’Brien
(Good Night Books, $15.95, 240 pages)
Who is this author?
A respected journalist with more than 35 years of newspaper and magazine experience as a writer, editor, investigative reporter, and publisher, Greg O’Brien lives on Cape Cod with his family, and, as he heartbreakingly makes clear in his book, also “on Pluto,” where his early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease is inexorably taking him. His long career includes writing for the Associated Press, UPI, USA Today, Arizona Republic, Boston Herald American, Boston Metro, New York Metro, Philadelphia Metro, Providence Journal, Cape Cod Times, Boston Irish Reporter, and Boston Magazine. He was the editor and publisher of the Cape Codder and Register newspapers, former editor of Cape Cod Life, and a founding managing director of Community Newspaper Company in Boston. He has published other authors through his Codfish Press and runs national political and corporate communication strategy campaigns, and he is now dedicated to chronicling the progress of his disease and to making public appearances to educate people about it.
What is this book about?
Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S.—and the only one of those that is rising. It’s estimated that more than 5 million Americans have it or a related form of dementia; about 35 million people worldwide are afflicted. Greg O’Brien’s mother and her father died of it, and he has inherited the disease. But he has not given up living.
With immense heart, surprising humor and dogged dedication, O’Brien’s book inform people about day to day life with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and how he is fighting bravely to stave off its threat to the ability to communicate. O’Brien has the professional chops to fight this fight, and he does so with determination and his great gift for storytelling. The foreword to his book is written by Lisa Genova, author of the novel “Still Alice,” whose movie version, starring the Oscar-winning Julianne Moore, is mesmerizing audiences and raising awareness of this devastating disease.
Why you’ll like it:
It is never easy to read about a cruel disease and the havoc it wreaks on patients and their families, but O’Brien, however much he has been damaged, still has the reporter’s instincts and grace as a writer to bring readers into his rapidly diminishing world. Here is some of what he told Huffington Post about his book:
“. . . .For years I’ve taken detailed notes as an embedded reporter inside the mind of Alzheimer’s, chronicling my own progression of this demon of a disease ever since I knew that something was terribly wrong. Doctors say a serious head injury “unmasked” Alzheimer’s in the making — a death in slow motion, freeze frame at times, like having a thin sliver of your brain shaved off every day.
“Stephen King couldn’t have devised a better plot.
“The statistics are numbing; it’s a story that might be yours one day, or the story of a close friend or loved one. . . . So, should you be frightened if you frequently forget where you put your keys? Maybe it’s nothing, perhaps a “senior moment,” or maybe it is the start of something. There is a clear distinction between forgetting where you parked your car and forgetting what your car looks like; forgetting where you put your glasses, and forgetting that you have glasses; getting lost on familiar roads because you’ve been daydreaming, and getting lost because your brain’s capacity to store information is greatly diminished.
“Today, I have little short-term memory, a progression of blanks; close to 60 percent of what I take in now is gone in seconds. . . .
“. . . Pluto’s orbit, like mine at times, is chaotic; its tiny size makes it sensitive to immeasurably small particles of the solar system, hard to predict factors that will gradually disrupt an orbit — the perfect place to have a conversation that “never existed” or a conversation one can’t recall. In the past, I often have taken close family, colleagues, and clients allegorically “out to Pluto” to discuss unmentionables about life, revelations, and comments that need to stay in a place without oxygen. Many have been there and back with me. I want them to be familiar with Pluto.
“One day, like my mom, I won’t return from this dark, icy place, and I want my family and friends to know where I am.”
What others are saying:
“In On Pluto, Greg O’Brien has given us a priceless gift: an honest, funny, heartbreaking, and powerfully poignant look into the world of an Alzheimer’s sufferer, written by a man who suffers from it himself. Greg O’Brien is a brilliant observer and superb writer, and he is at the top of his game in this book. It’s as if he has willingly dropped himself into a mental tornado so that he can tell us what it looks like from inside. You have never read a book quite like it, and probably never will again,” says William Martin, New York Times best-selling author of Cape Cod, Back Bay, and The Lincoln Letter.
“Greg O’Brien writes with the consummate knowledge of a guide and the courage of a pioneer. In this important and transcendent book he serves both roles as he folds back the veils of fear and traverses the treacherous territory of early-onset Alzheimer’s. On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s glows with honesty, intelligence and compassion and, given the subject, is a surprisingly spirit-renewing book,” says Anne D. LeClaire, author of best-selling Listening Below The Noise, Leaving Eden, and The Lavender Hour.
“On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s is destined to become a vital resource that Alzheimer’s organizations and senior centers across the country will turn to in assisting those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Greg O’Brien’s personal battle against Alzheimer’s is an everyman’s fight; he is the quintessence of the lead character in the epic New York Times best-selling Alzheimer’s novel, Still Alice. O’Brien, through faith, humor and journalistic grit, is able, like the master artist, to paint a compelling, naked work picture of this progressive, chronic disease for which there is no cure, and a sickness that will swamp a generation. This is not a misery memoir; O’Brien bluntly offers the Baby Boomers and generations to come a riveting guide in how to live with Alzheimer’s, not accede to it,” says Alisa M. Galazzi, co-founder of Dementia Care Academy, former Executive Director, Alzheimer’s Services of Cape & Islands.
When is it available?
This moving and important book is on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Blue Hills, Camp Field and Twain 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!
When the World Was Young
By Elizabeth Gaffney
(Random House, $26, 320 pages)
Who is this author?
Elizabeth Gaffney is a novelist and short story writer. Author of the novel Metropolis, she also has contributed to such literary magazines as Virginia Quarterly Review and the North American Review, and she has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. Gaffney was a staff editor at The Paris Review and now teaches fiction at The New School and is editor-at-large of the literary magazine A Public Space.
What is this book about?
Wally Baker, a girl growing up in post-World War II Brooklyn, loves Wonder Woman and science, but hates girly clothes and manners. She has loving grandparents and an emotionally troubled mother, a little brother who died, a father away at war and a black family maid who is like a second mother (and whose little boy is Wally’s dearest friend). Also on the scene is a boarder who seems to harbor a mysterious secret. The story begins on V-J Day, when Wally is 9, and as America grows and changes after the war comes to an end, so does Wally, who finds her place in the world despite her family’s troubles.
Why you’ll like it:
If you are, as I am, a lifelong fan of that wonderful novel, “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” you will be drawn to this coming-of-age story about another young girl in that inimitable New York borough. Wally is an unconventional child, and as tragedy strikes her family, she finds the strength to adjust to a world where attitudes about women’s rights and racial issues are rapidly changing and challenging conventional wisdom.
What others are saying:
Says Publishers Weekly: “Gaffney’s affecting second novel (after Metropolis) charts the changing physical and emotional landscape of Brooklyn (and America) from WWII into the Korean War era, through a young girl’s coming-of-age. Wally Baker’s world revolves around her high-spirited mother, Stella, a doctor who gave up her profession for motherhood. Other important people in Wally’s life include her maternal grandparents, Gigi and Waldo, who live with them in their Brooklyn Heights apartment; Gigi’s African-American live-in maid, Loretta; and Loretta’s son, Ham. Wally can’t quite understand why her friendship with Ham so often arouses disapproval from outsiders. Two conspicuous absences are Wally’s father, who’s away at war, and her brother, Georgie, who died at age four. When a new boarder, mathematician Bill Niederman, arrives, Wally and Ham initially suspect him of being a spy. He becomes, however, a supportive father figure for Wally, helping with homework and encouraging her insatiable interest in the natural world. Wally’s stable existence ends after her mother’s death on V-J Day, marking the start of her journey into the uncertainty of post-WWII America. Themes of race, identity, and finding one’s personal destiny within societal expectations are all explored in this layered, delicate novel.
Kirkus Reviews says: “A 9-year-old Brooklyn Heights girl picks up some hard lessons about fidelity, race and family after World War II in this lively sophomore effort from Gaffney. Conventional wisdom dictates that American society in the years immediately after World War II was highly segregated and built on traditional nuclear families. Gaffney is determined to unsettle those assumptions by focusing her story on Wally, a girl whose home life is decidedly complicated. As the story opens on V-J Day, Wally’s father is stationed overseas while her mother, a doctor, has taken in a boarder with a mysterious government job. Wally loves her grandmother, who lives nearby, but the girl feels closer to Loretta, grandma’s black maid, and Ham, the mixed-race boy Loretta is raising as her son. Wally and Ham are the stars of the story, and if their dual obsession with ant farms is a bit metaphorically on-the-nose for a story about postwar society, Gaffney does a fine job of showing how they grow wise and slightly jaded as they experience more of the adult world. The two absorb racist taunts, dig up some family secrets and discover how easily apparently stable relationships can come undone. (The boarder Wally’s mom took in, for instance, was more than just a boarder.) The novel pivots on a tragedy in Wally’s life that occurred on V-J Day, and Gaffney expertly moves back and forth in time to show how much more sophisticated Wally becomes about that event as she reaches college age. A personal crisis involving Ham after he serves in the Korean War is relatively underdrawn, but it bolsters Gaffney’s thesis that America’s midcentury patriotism covered up plenty of emotional wreckage. None of it would work, though, without the strong central figure of Wally, an inquisitive child who becomes a world-wise spitfire. A smart coming-of-age tale that upends a raft of Greatest Generation clichés.”
“This compelling family drama features an intriguing cast of characters who are well drawn and realistic, while also being emblematic of their time. Gaffney’s writing is graceful and leisurely paced, flavored with nostalgia,” says Library Journal.
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!
After Birth
By Elisa Albert
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $23, 208 pages)
Who is this author?
Elisa Albert, author of the novel, The Book Of Dahlia, and How This Night Is Different, a collection of short stories, has written for NPR, Tin House, Commentary, Salon and the Rumpus. Albert comes from Los Angeles, but moved to the East Coast, graduated from Brandeis University and now lives in upstate New York with her family. She holds a MFA from Columbia University and is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia’s School of the Arts.
What is this book about?
Motherhood, as any honest mother would tell you if you promised her total anonymity, is not all adorable onesies and cuddling with a precious little baby. Elisa Albert makes this very clear in After Birth, her impressively candid novel about the overwhelming changes that envelope her main character, Ari, a young wife overwhelmed by trying to recover from an unplanned C-section, meet the normal but draining demands of her infant son, Walker, deal with her professor husband’s academic milieu, connect with local women, survive a brutal winter and find a friend, a real, nurturing friend, who might help her make sense of her new and often frightening circumstances. Then Mina – also a feminist and about to give birth — comes to town, and Ari seems to have found that longed-for companion. This is a novel with a lead character who will be off-putting to some, but refreshingly honest to others.
Why you’ll like it:
Elisa Albert is not known for pulling punches or creating easy-to-love characters, but all is forgiven when you immerse yourself in one of her fierce stories. Her writing voice is brutally funny, with equal emphasis on the bitter frankness and the comical.
Her debut collection of short stories, “Why This Night Is Different,” drew raves from many reviewers but disturbed some who found them irreverent. One of its stories stars a young woman with a raging yeast infection trying to introduce her non-Jewish boyfriend to her quarrelsome family at a Passover seder. Another ends with its narrator, an unhappy young wife, curled in a fetal position in a synagogue restroom, contemplating her life. But, Albert told me in a 2006 interview for The Courant, “That’s not me on the floor of that bathroom, in the worst imaginable position. I like to reach for the brutal, unflattering portrayal. Readers need to keep in mind that “my characters aren’t me,” she says. “The further away you are, the easier it is to write.”
She attempted the brutal/comical straddle in The Book of Dahlia, in which the title character is dying of brain cancer, with less success: Dahlia was more acerbic than many readers and reviewers could handle. But in After Birth, she succeeds: Ari has a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue, but she speaks the truth about the hormonal tsunami of feelings that can turn the supposed idyll of motherhood into an unexpected field of battle.
What others are saying:
“Coarse and poetic and funny as hell, full of the hard truths no one tells you beforehand, including just that: No one tells you the truth,” says Ellen Akins in The Star Tribune.
“As they bond, the women deliver themselves (if you will) of profane, cathartic, wickedly funny arias of anger about the shock of their experience. After Birth is complaint literature in the distinguished tradition of Philip Roth,” says Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal.
In The New York Times Book Review, Merritt Tierce writes: “…brilliant…After Birth cuts open the body of literature on mothering, birth, feminism, female friendship, female hateship…and wrenches out something so new we barely recognize it. Wet, red, slimy, alive: a truth baby…Its language is not only the scalpel but the flesh—it hurts, in both senses. It’s obscene, reckless, vicious, hilarious and above all real. Albert has inherited the house Grace Paley built, with its narrow doorways just wide enough for wit and tragedy and blistering, exasperated love…Paley found the seam where the important and the madcap are stitched together on the underside of life, and here is Albert working that same territory. Her Ari is bold enough to put motherhood up on a pedestal because its sanctity is as undeniable as it is dangerous. But she also wants to be sure you know the pedestal is made of excrement and tears and vomit and breast milk and the very selves of a billion unknown women…After Birth…ought to be as essential as The Red Badge of Courage. Just because so much of mothering happens inside a house doesn’t mean it’s not a war: a battle for sovereignty over your heart, your mind, your life—and one you can’t bear for the other side to lose.“
“Albert says everything women think, but don’t say, unless they are speaking to their best friend. I laughed out loud. A lot. As a mother of two, I loved how she explored this time, after the birth of a first child, with bare-bulbed honesty and an acerbic wit that gave way to humor around nearly every turn. This is the first book I’ve read that does this after birth period justice, and I’ve already recommended it to new, as well as more established, mothers.” Says Michaela Carter of the Peregrine Book Company in Prescott, Ariz.
Publishers Weekly says: Albert applies a blistering tone to modern motherhood in this cri de coeur of a novel. Six-months-pregnant Ari couldn’t wait to leave Brooklyn for the faded glory of Utrecht, N.Y., and its affordable four-bedroom Italianate with her supportive professor husband, Paul, 15 years her senior. Now, Ari has one-year-old Walker, a C-section scar, and an unfinished dissertation in women’s studies. Faculty life isn’t the “deranged orgiastic laser show” she dreamed it would be. About the women in her C-section support group she says, “A chore, trying to talk to these women.” So Ari pins her hopes for friendship and connection on Mina Morris, former bass player for the Misogynists, a late-’80s all-girl band. Mina is now a poet who is subletting from Ari’s friends while they’re on sabbatical. Into this thinly plotted story, Albert interweaves insightful portraits of Ari’s extended family, childhood friends, and frenemies. Our sarcastic and self-aware heroine never spares us her anger, her epic takedowns (“It had an addictive flavor, hating her”), and her attempts to parse her own internalized misogyny. In lesser hands, Ari might be unlikable, but Albert imbues her with searing honesty and dark humor, and the result is a fascinating protagonist for this rich novel.”
When is it available?
This newborn book is on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain 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!
Shame and the Captives
By Thomas Kenneally
(Atria, $26, 384 pages)
Who is this author?
With 31 novels to his credit, Australian author Thomas Kenneally has earned worldwide fame and acclaim for his writing, in particular for 1982’s Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s List, the World War II drama about the German industrialist who clandestinely saved many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. His other books include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates, all of which were shortlisted for the Booker. He has also written a memoir, Homebush Boy, and some nonfiction,The Commonwealth of Thieves, and Searching for Schindler. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney, Australia.
What is this book about?
Inspired by something that happened in New South Wales in 1944, Shame and the Captives tells the story of a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Australia, told through a young farm wife whose own husband is being held in an European prison camp. She meets a young Italian anarchist also being held in the Australian camp. Assigned to work on the farm, and he begins to enlighten her about the politics and realities of war. Meanwhile, the more than 1,000 Japanese prisoners, whose culture is badly misunderstood by their captors, plan an escape, a bloody uprising with unforeseen effects on the camp and the town.
Why you’ll like it:
Kenneally is a master at taking historical fact and using it as a building block for novels that go far beyond the what and where to explain the why and how. In this one, he tells the story from multiple perspectives, the cumulative effect of which produces a remarkably moving tale that explores bravery, betrayal, loyalty and love. As our memories of World War II continue to fade, and as new wars threaten, books such as this one provide invaluable insights into the powerful emotions and cultural beliefs that drive soldiers and civilians alike.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “The author of Schindler’s List again novelizes a small yet revealing event from World War II. Based on the 1944 Cowra breakout in New South Wales, Australia, the novel interweaves perspectives of people in and around the fictional Gawell prisoner-of-war camp, where Japanese captives suffer less from conditions than from living with the shame of having been captured while more amiable Italian prisoners work on local farms, sing, or share news. The novel opens during the spring of 1943, after Italy has joined the Allies. Keneally explores the lives and innermost thoughts of, among others, Abercare, the English camp commandant trying to avoid conflict with his wife, his prisoners and his subordinates; Suttor, the radio writer in charge of Compound C, more in touch with his surly unpredictable prisoners than his commanding officer; Emily, Abercare’s unhappy wife; Nevski, the intelligent Russian-born translator. Keneally depicts the tragic reach of the war on a number of different lives, including the horror of a war crime and the neatness of the cover-up. Other writers may be more adept at portraying female emotions or dinner-party chatter, but no one equals Keneally for documenting the actions of human beings caught up in war, some desperate to hold onto their humanity, others desperate to die.
Says Library Journal: “As in Schindler’s List, Keneally draws on actual events and uses a broad backdrop—here, World War II in the Pacific—for his tale of a POW camp located in a remote corner of Australia. Tensions arise when the camp’s commander, English colonel Ewan Abercare, disagrees with Australian major Bernard Suttor, in charge of the camp’s Compound C, over how to deal with its “most unpredictable and surly” Japanese prisoners, particularly should they attempt a breakout. Meanwhile, a nearly idyllic romance develops between Alice Herman, who runs a farm with her father-in-law while her husband is a captive of the Germans, and Giancarlo, an Italian POW assigned to work on the farm. This romance abruptly ends when the Japanese launch a breakout from the camp. The author deftly highlights the irony of Australians trying to adhere to the Geneva Convention while a prisoner on the loose concludes, “They’re mocking us by not trying to find us.” VERDICT The leisurely narrative gains force as it progresses. A fascinating aspect is the author’s treatment of the psychology of prisoners and their keepers, capped by Major Suttor’s conclusion that “the captors are prisoners too.” Highly recommended to all who appreciate a historical work told with great perception and insight.
Kirkus says, in its starred review: “In 1944, a group of Japanese POWs escaped from a prison camp in a rural Australian town. Keneally’s latest historical novel relates the lead-up to this event from the perspectives of many characters, including Japanese and Italian prisoners, the camp’s commanders and several residents of the town. Though the reader knows from the start that the breakout is imminent, thanks to an author’s note, Keneally manages to sustain the mounting tension. There are a number of compelling personalities, including the camp’s British commander, Col. Ewan Abercare, who’s trying to win back his wife’s trust after having a public affair; the commander’s distrustful underling, Maj. Bernard Suttor, creator of a popular radio serial; Tengan, a handsome and haughty Japanese airman, a leader among the zealots who dream only of death at the hands of the “enemy”; Ban, the Christian convert and outcast among his fellow Japanese, who sacrifices himself to warn the authorities about the impending breakout; and Alice Herman, a young Australian woman who falls into a steamy affair with the Italian prisoner working on her father-in-law’s farm while her barely remembered husband languishes as a POW in Austria. Keneally shares his deeply believable and flawed characters’ conflicting perspectives sensitively and with great empathy, expressing the full range of humanity in a few hundred pages. He does an extraordinary job of making all his characters compelling and sympathetic, with fully formed back stories, even those whose perspectives are likely to be the most foreign to the reader. The somewhat didactic title doesn’t do the book justice, and the occasional overwriting can be distracting. Nevertheless, Keneally blends history, romance and wartime intrigue in a remarkable piece of historical fiction with a strong sense of place and time.
When is it available?
This compelling historical novel is now 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!
There’s Something I Want You to Do: Stories
by Charles Baxter
(Pantheon, $24, 240 pages)
Who is this author?
Charles Baxter has written many novels and several short story collections. His novels are The Feast of Love, which was nominated for the National Book Award; The Soul Thief; Saul and Patsy; Shadow Play; and First Light. His stories can be found in Gryphon; Believers; A Relative Stranger; Through the Safety Net; and Harmony of the World. Several pieces in his newest collection also were included in Best American Short Stories. He also has published three poetry collections and two books of essays on fiction and has edited other books. Born in Minnesota, Baxter, now 67, teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
What is this book about?
There are 10 interconnected stories in There’s Something I Want You to Do, and their titles are those of five vices and five virtues, such as Bravery, Charity, Loyalty, Lust and Sloth. Those behaviors, good and bad, are reflected in tales whose protagonists struggle with everyday realities and far deeper existential questions. The characters include a shy architect who stops a woman – no shrinking violet she – from plunging off a bridge into the Mississippi River, and a pediatrician and father who has private conversations with the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, which has taken to haunting Minneapolis, where most of these stories are set. These and others reappear and disappear in these linked stories that read like a novel. In them, Baxter explores what it means to need, what it means to help and what it means to love.
Why you’ll like it:
Being a poet as well as a highly gifted writer of prose, Baxter has not only created stories filled with tensions and unexpected connections, he tells them with a lyrical style that deftly evokes the character in a few words. In “Chastity,” he describes the would-be bridge jumper this way: “Her speech style was oddly animated, and she seemed very pretty in a drab sort of way, like an honorable-mention beauty queen who hadn’t taken proper care of herself.”
Got it.
Reading authors like Baxter, who write with both ease and authority, is a pleasure.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Five stories named for virtues and five for vices make up this collection from a master craftsman. Set mostly in Minneapolis, Baxter’s interlinked narratives feature ordinary people extending themselves beyond the ordinary for those they love, or used to love, or cannot love. In “Bravery,” a pediatrician and his new wife visit Prague, where a madwoman’s ranting appears to predict their future. In “Chastity,” a lonely architect stops a woman from jumping off a bridge; she turns out to be a stand-up comedian whose dark humor and elusive emotions enthrall him. “Loyalty” focuses on a mechanic as he takes his destitute first wife back into his home; years before, she’d abandoned her family, and now she blogs about the experience. “Sloth” shows the pediatrician from “Bravery” in middle age, talking suspense with the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock, who haunts Minneapolis. Baxter’s characters muddle through small but pivotal moments, not so much confrontations as crossroads between love and destruction, desire and death: a translator dreams of the poet whose work defies translation, a gay businessman searches the Minneapolis underworld for his lost lover, and a dying woman looks forward to the resurrection like others look forward to weekend football. The prose resonates with distinctive turns of phrase that capture human ambiguity and uncertainty: trouble waits patiently at home, irony is the new chastity, and a dying man lives in the house that pain designed for him.”
In its starred review, Kirkus says: “The author’s sixth collection of short fiction features stories linked by place, character, verbal echo, and a master’s hand for foibles and fellowship. The place is mostly Minneapolis, the repeated phrase is that of the title, with its modest appeal and its larger reminder that no one gets through life without hearing a call or cry for help. A young pediatrician bravely breaks up a mugging. A man who has been mugged (and whose assailant in another story will need help with his drug addiction) stops a woman from leaping off a bridge. A man gives shelter to his ex-wife after she turns into a bag lady. (The book’s last use of the title comes somewhat too pointedly from a Schindler Jew.) Several characters have encounters that suggest nonhuman help is available (a spiritual element also lies in the ten stories named after five virtues and five vices). The pediatrician’s wife on their Prague honeymoon hears a crone’s prophecy of her pregnancy. The doctor, the book’s most frequently recurring figure, spends most of one story talking to the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock on a park bench and then asks his wife to pray for him. Bare storylines can’t convey the quickly captivating simple narratives around them or the revealing moments to which Baxter brings the reader, like the doctor’s exhilaration with the physical violence of beating the muggers. Similarly, Baxter, a published poet, at times pushes his fluid, controlled prose to headier altitudes, as in “high wispy cirrus clouds threading the sky like promissory notes.” Nearly as organic as a novel, this is more intriguing, more fun in disclosing its connective tissues through tales that stand well on their own.
Library Journal’s starred review says: “In one of his essays on craft, Baxter talks about the art of subtext. His new collection of short stories shows him to be a master of that art. His characters, mostly Midwesterners, are smart and well educated but not glib and have strong feelings they can’t articulate fully. The book is divided into two sections, with the first part comprising stories titled after classical virtues, e.g., bravery, loyalty, and forbearance, and the second titled for five of the seven deadly sins (lust, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and vanity). This structure may seem overly programmatic and potentially predictable, but the stories themselves are anything but. A few repeating characters play leading roles in both parts. Moreover, the stories named after virtues don’t necessarily end happily, nor are those named after vices free of heroic gestures. Among the memorable characters are Benny, who repeatedly falls for difficult women (“Chastity”) and falls apart when they leave (“Lust”), and Elijah, a sweet-mannered, handsome young pediatrician who, a few decades later, displays a paunch and eats jumbo bags of potato chips while alone in his car (“Gluttony”) even as he fiercely defends the honor of his seemingly taciturn son. VERDICT Baxter’s delightful stories will make readers hungry for more. Fortunately, there are more out there, and, one hopes, more to come.”
When is it available?
You can find this book 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!
Get In Trouble
By Kelly Link
(Random House, $25, 352 pages)
Who is this author?
Kelly Link, born in Florida and now living in Northampton, Mass., with her husband, writer and editor Gavin Grant, has developed what amounts to an enthusiastic cult following for her clever sci-fi and fantasy works that derive from fairy tales or ghost stories, collected in Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She and Grant have co-edited many of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies, and they also co-founded Small Beer Press, which in turn publishes the wonderfully named journal, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
What is this book about?
There are nine short stories in Get In Trouble, which begin with at least one foot in reality and deftly move into wondrous tales of speculative fiction. “The Summer People” is about an Appalachian girl who is the unhappy caretaker for a cottage used by mysterious beings from far, far away. She figures out a way to get free of their control, but learns that freedom comes with a price. In another, a suburban princess gets a life-size animated robot “ghost boyfriend’ doll for her birthday, with unfortunate consequences. “Valley of the Girls” imagines that rich, spoiled kids (think Paris Hilton) can foil the paparazzi by using body doubles. Ghosts and vampires figure in several tales, but not in clichéd ways. Stories are set in such places as an abandoned theme park and a hotel that is hosting simultaneous conventions of dentists and superheroes. But no matter what the setting, Link’s meticulously crafted tales will take you someplace you’ve never been before.
Why you’ll like it:
Link has a tremendously agile imagination, and she augments it with a devastating sense of humor. This wonderful combination has earned her comparisons with such admired writers as George Saunders and Karen Russell and Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson – and I’d say there is no higher praise. Reading her accomplished work will tickle your brain as well as your funny bone.
What others are saying:
“[Link] crafts a beguiling and eerie blend of fairy tale, fantasy, Ray Bradbury, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a wonderful mélange of cyborg ghosts, evil twin shadows, Egyptian cotillions, and pixie-distilled moonshine. Guys, she’s really great,” says The Portland Mercury.
In a starred review, Kirkus says: “In stories as haunting as anything the Grimm brothers could have come up with, Link gooses the mundane with meaning and enchantment borrowed from myth, urban legend and genre fiction. Here are superheroes who, like minor characters from reality shows, attend conferences at the same hotels as dentists and hold auditions for sidekicks. Here, a Ouija board can tell you as much about your future as your guidance counselor. In “Two Houses,” six astronauts wake from suspended animation to while away the time telling ghost stories, although they may be ghosts themselves. In “I Can See Right Through You,” an actor past his prime, famous for his role as a vampire, yearns for the leading lady who has replaced him with a parade of eternally younger versions of what he once was—but who is the real demon lover? In “The New Boyfriend,” a teenager discontent with her living boyfriend toys with stealing her best friend’s birthday present, a limited edition Ghost Boyfriend, capable of Spectral Mode. In “Light,” Lindsey has two shadows, one of which long ago grew to become her almost-real twin brother. She contemplates a vacation on a “pocket universe,” a place “where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you’d read as a child; a brochure; a dream.” Lindsey could be describing Link’s own stories, creepy little wonders that open out into worlds far vaster than their shells. In a Link story, someone is always trying to escape and someone is always vanishing without a trace. Lovers are forever being stolen away like changelings, and when someone tells you he’ll never leave you, you should be very afraid. Exquisite, cruelly wise and the opposite of reassuring, these stories linger like dreams and will leave readers looking over their shoulders for their own ghosts.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “These nine stories may begin in familiar territory—a birthday party, a theme park, a bar, a spaceship—but they quickly draw readers into an imaginative, disturbingly ominous world of realistic fantasy and unreal reality. Like Kafka hosting Saturday Night Live, Link mixes humor with existential dread. The first story, entitled “The Summer People,” in homage to Shirley Jackson, follows an Appalachian schoolgirl, abandoned by her moonshiner father, as she looks after a summer house occupied by mysterious beings. “I Can See Right Through You” features friends who, in their youth, were movie stars; now in middle age, she is the hostess and he is the guest star of a television show about hunting ghosts at a Florida nudist colony. “Origin Story” takes place in a deserted Land of Oz theme park; “Secret Identity” is set at a hotel where dentists and superheroes attend simultaneous conferences. Only in a Link story would you encounter Mann Man, a superhero with the powers of Thomas Mann, or visit a world with pools overrun by Disney mermaids. Details—a bruise-green sky, a Beretta dotted with Hello Kitty stickers—bring the unimaginable to unnerving life. Each carefully crafted tale forms its own pocket universe, at once ordinary (a teenage girl adores and resents her BFF) and bizarre (…therefore she tries to steal the BFF’s robot vampire boyfriend doll). Link’s characters, driven by yearning and obsession, not only get in trouble but seek trouble out—to spectacular effect.”
Says Library Journal: “. . . Link’s fiction could be described as a combination of George Saunders’s eerie near-reality mixed with Amy Hempel’s badda-boom timing, plus a dose of Karen Russell’s otherworldly tropical sensibility. In short, the tales are imaginatively bizarre yet can be seen as allegorical representations of our own crazy modern world. Most of the protagonists here are female and resourceful; it’s a pleasure to immerse oneself in fantasy worlds where women aren’t victims or pale stereotypes.”
When is it available?
You won’t get in trouble if you borrow this book from 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!
Nora Webster
By Colm Tóibín
(Scribner, $27, 384 pages)
Who is this author?
Colm Tóibín is the powerhouse Irish author of many novels and winner of many prestigious awards. His books include The Blackwater Lightship; The Master (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize); Brooklyn (winner of the Costa Book Award) and The Testament of Mary, as well as two story collections. He is also known for his travelogues on Ireland and Spain, essays, and newspaper columns. Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
What is this book about?
It is set in a village in Ireland in the 1970s. Nora Webster has been widowed young, at 40, left with four children and an overwhelming need for enough money to maintain her household and enough information to find her way in a new and confounding world she is not prepared for. Her beloved husband had helped her get away from her overbearing family; now Nora fears she will be pulled back into their stultifying way of looking at life. Nora must cope with her deep sorrow, her young boys’ need for fatherly love and her preference for privacy in a nosy world. One bright ray in the darkness of sorrow is her decision to once again lift her lovely voice in song.
Why you’ll like it:
Tóibín writes beautifully of matters of the heart, but never falls into sentimentality in this genuinely moving story of a woman forced to engage with the world at a time and in a way that she never expected. His portrait of Nora is that of a woman in full, shocked by her husband’s death and forced by circumstances to fully flower. Nora is not perfect, but that is not a problem: Tóibín, a gay man, has created a woman so real she leaps off the page.
What others are saying:
In The New York Times Book Review , novelist Jennifer Egan writes: “…Colm Toibin’s high-wire act of an eighth novel…is written without a single physical description of its characters or adverbial signpost to guide our interpretation of their speech. The emotional distance between protagonist and reader is so great that at times the title character seems almost spectral. Yet it is precisely Toibin’s radical restraint that elevates what might have been a familiar tale of grief and survival into a realm of heightened inquiry. The result is a luminous, elliptical novel in which everyday life manages, in moments, to approach the mystical. … There is much about Nora Webster that we never know. And her very mystery is what makes her regeneration, when it comes, feel universal.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Tóibín’s 10th novel offers a compelling portrait of an Irish woman for whom fate has prescribed loneliness. Widowed at 40, with four children and shaky finances, Nora rejects condolences and pity. She is so intent on making her children’s lives normal that she ignores their need to mourn as well. In the wake of her husband’s terminal illness, she instills fear and bewilderment in her two younger boys; they have nightmares, and one begins to stutter. The two girls, away at school, are resentful as well. Nora is sometimes obtuse about the choices she makes. She is short-tempered and sharp-tongued, and she makes significant mistakes—but her frailties make her an appealing character. Catholicism is woven into the setting of 1970s Enniscorthy. The Church is represented by a mean, small-minded teacher in the Christian Brothers monastery school and by a saintly nun who acts as guardian angel for the family. Several years pass, in which Nora gradually finds an unexpected fulfillment in a talent she had never acknowledged. Tóibín (Brooklyn) never employs dramatic fireworks to add an artificial boost to the narrative. No new suitor magically appears to fall in love with Nora. Instead, she remains a brave woman learning how to find a meaningful life as she goes on alone.”
The starred review from Kirkus says: “A subtle, pitch-perfect sonata of a novel in which an Irish widow faces her empty life and, incrementally, fills the hole left by the recent death of her husband. Tóibín’s latest serves as a companion piece to his masterful Brooklyn (2009), which detailed a young Irish woman’s emigration in the 1950s. Set a decade later, this novel concerns a woman who stayed behind, the opportunities that went unexplored and the comforts that support her through tragedy. Left with two young sons (as well as daughters on the verge of adulthood) by the death of her husband, a beloved teacher, Nora exists in a “world filled with absences.” Not that she’s been abandoned. To the contrary, people won’t leave her alone, and their clichéd advice and condolences are the banes of her existence. And there’s simply no escape in a village where everybody knows everything about everybody else. What she craves are people who “could talk to her sensibly not about what she had lost or how sorry they were, but about the children, money, part-time work, how to live now.” Yet she had lived so much through her husband—even before his unexpected illness and death—that she hadn’t really connected with other people, including her young sons, who now need more from her than perhaps she has to give. Without any forced drama, Nora works her way back into the world, with new priorities and even pleasures. There’s a spiritual undercurrent here, in the nun who watches over Nora, in the community that provides what she needs (even as she resists) and especially in the music that fills her soul. Explains a woman she would never have encountered, left to her own devices: “There is no better way to heal yourself than singing in a choir. That is why God made music.” A novel of mourning, healing and awakening; its plainspoken eloquence never succumbs to the sentimentality its heroine would reject.”
When is it available?
The Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain branch have copies of Tóibín’s latest novel.
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!
Chestnut Street
By Maeve Binchy
(Knopf Doubleday, $26.95, 384 pages)
Who is this author?
Maeve Binchy is no longer with us, but her many novels live on. Her long list of bestsellers includes Nights of Rain and Stars, Scarlet Feather, Circle of Friends, and Tara Road, which was an Oprah’s Book Club choice. Binchy also wrote for major magazines, such as Gourmet; O, The Oprah Magazine; Modern Maturity; and Good Housekeeping, and London. She was married to Gordon Snell, and they had homes in London and Dalkey, Ireland, until her death in 2012.
What is this book about?
Binchy, for many years, wrote hitherto unpublished short stories and sketches about the fictional residents of fictional Chestnut Street in very real Dublin, where neighbors knew each other’s business, sometimes getting involved and sometimes just observing from behind the living room drapes. These stories are gathered here for posthumous publication. In them you will meet many women learning to stand up to overbearing husbands, mothers and children; the glimmers and growth of unlikely love affairs, fathers trying to do right by estranged children, families confronting long-simmering issues and other domestic dramas. Visiting Chestnut Street with Binchy as your guide is like taking a trip to the Ireland tourists overlook.
Why you’ll like it:
Whether you read this collection as minor short stories by a great storyteller or as preliminary sketches for novels that might have come, there is plenty to enjoy on Chestnut Street. Binchy had a great gift for storytelling, and while some of these short pieces end abruptly or too tidily, the characters she invents are fascinating. The stories are brief but compelling, and you may find this book reminiscent of that old potato chip commercial: Nobody can read just one.
What others are saying:
Booklist says: “Binchy was well-known for creating realistic characters who interact in ordinary ways, in ordinary places. Before her death, in 2012, she had been jotting down short stories here and there featuring a number of different characters who all lived on the same Dublin street, Chestnut Street. This collection was gathered by her editors and approved by her family for publication. Readers meet plain Dolly, who wants to be just like her glamorous mother; Joyce, a model who gets her comeuppance on a blind date with an obese man; and Kevin Walsh, the taxi driver who keeps strangers’ secrets. Many of the stories are quite brief (as short as three pages) but serve as lovely character portraits. There is no common plotline moving the stories along, and some stories are stronger than others, but, overall, the collection works well, and her fans will be pleased. . . . Binchy’s many fans are sure to line up to read this collection of short stories, especially since they know there will be no more.”
“Reflect[s] Binchy’s generous spirit and realism about human frailty, never ignoring it but always empathizing with its cause,” says the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Publishers Weekly says: “This posthumously published collection of stories revolving around an imaginary street in Dublin was written by over a period of decades, and approved by her husband, writer Gordon Snell. The earlier stories are more developed than some of the later tales, but overall, the author gives us one last extraordinary look at ordinary people as they struggle with family relationships, romances gone awry, and the possibility for a better future. Standouts include the first story, “Dolly’s Mother,” in which a shy, unassuming teenager copes with having a kind, charismatic mother who is more popular than she is, and—as is revealed—might not be as perfect as everyone thinks. In “It’s Only A Day,” Binchy fondly portrays the transformation of three childhood friends into adults, using the lens of their disparate views on romance, as old-fashioned values find a place in their modern worlds. The book is filled with vignettes in which dissatisfied husbands leave their wives, but find their new lives wanting; disparate people find common ground, and even romance; and holding one’s tongue leads to the best way to make relationships thrive. While some entries come off more as character studies than actual stories, one finds here insightful observations about human nature—all with Binchy’s thoughtful and loving touch that will be sorely missed.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “A variable, posthumous collection of loosely linked short stories from the much cherished Irish writer who died in 2012. Thirty-six tales of differing length, predictability and quality, generally focused on female characters—wives and mothers, partners, singletons, daughters and friends—make up this late addition to the Binchy oeuvre and explore domestic problems ranging from cranky relatives and problem children to unexpected attractions, and, most often, insensitive and/or faithless men. Binchy’s wise insights and wicked humor are visible now and then, for example in the cheerily sparring dialogue of “Fay’s New Uncle” and the teacher looking for mischief in “A Problem of My Own,” but too often there’s a sense of datedness, superficiality or simple fairy tale. . . . Nevertheless, the author’s compassion extends widely, notably to the many cheated-upon wives, girlfriends and children, as in “Taxi Men Are Invisible,” when a driver finds himself observing an affair, or “Reasonable Access,” which views divorce from the confused child’s point of view, or “The Gift of Dignity,” one of the few longer, more emotionally complex stories, which contemplates, from a friend’s perspective, a silent wife’s possible collusion in her husband’s adultery. Chestnut Street itself, a semicircle of 30 small houses in Dublin, plays a minor but constant role, as safe harbor to the nurse, the window cleaner, the couples, families and loners and, in “Madame Magic”—a typically tidy offering—a substitute fortuneteller who turns Melly’s empty house into a busy home. For Binchy aficionados, a late indulgence; for others, slim pickings.
When is it available?
Binchy’s last book is at the Camp Field, Goodwin, Mark Twain and Ropkins branches of the Hartford Public Library.
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