Voices In the Night
By Steven Millhauser
(Knopf Doubleday, $25.95, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
Steven Millhauser was born in New York and grew up in Connecticut. He’s been honored many times for his fiction, such as the novel, Martin Dressler, which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize, and We Others: New and Selected Stories, which won the Story Prize. His work has been translated into 17 languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” inspired the 2006 film The Illusionist. Millhauser teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, N. Y.
What is this book about?
This collection of 16 new stories shows Millhauser, 71, is still at the top of his game. As he often does, he sets his strange tales in ordinary settings – small towns that seem “normal” but are anything but. Some play on venerable fairy tales: Rapunzel and her prince charming meet the real world – and others have Biblical themes that resonate here and now. In one, Miracle Polish, an anti-tarnish product that also buffs up a man’s life; in another, a brochure advertises a luxury resort where, when people check out, they really do check out. In another, a mermaid washes up on shore and changes a town forever. There is fantasy here, handled deftly, and the collection is a showcase of terrific literary talent.
Why you’ll like it:
Critics have called Millhauser’s technique hyperrealism or magical realism, but readers will not care what lit-crit tags are hung on these stories: suffice it to say they are funny yet disquieting, familiar yet weird, deceptively calm yet disturbingly deep. Millahuser also has been compared to a daunting line-up of literary stars: Malmud, Kafka, Poe, Borges, Lovecraft, Hawthorne, Gogol, Calvino and Garcia Marquez to name but a few – yet readers know that his is an original and distinctive imagination at play.
What others are saying:
Library Journal’s starred review says: “ Imagine a town crier delivering updates to the world in the form of newsletter or annual holiday card. This is the dominant voice of this latest collection from Millhauser, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Martin Dressler. Half the stories, including “Phantoms,” “Mermaid Fever,” “A Report on Our Recent Troubles,” “Elsewhere,” and “The Place,” are told in the voice of The Town. “Arcadia,” the darkest of the stories, is a brochure advertising a suicide retreat complete with a suite of amenities found only in a luxury resort. There is a touch of magic realism as well, including phantoms, ghosts, mermaids, and a magical bottle of furniture polish, all revealing a sense of loss, longing, and an emptiness that cannot be expressed by ordinary means. The weakest pieces, e.g., the lengthy “The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,” move beyond town life, but the change in tone and voice is quite jarring and not entirely successful. VERDICT Millhauser’s wry humor really shines in these off-kilter stories of town life. Despite a few lesser pieces, this enjoyable collection is highly recommended.”
In another starred review, Kirkus says: “A master storyteller continues to navigate the blurry space between magic and reality in 16 comic, frightening, consistently off-kilter tales. As a short story writer, Millhauser emerged in the ’70s with his sensibility fully formed, taking Bernard Malamud’s heady mixture of Jewish mysticism and urban life and expanding its reach to encompass palace courts and big-box suburbia. His strategy remains the same in this collection, but there’s little sign that his enthusiasm has weakened. In “Miracle Polish,” a man buys a mirror-cleaning chemical that makes his reflection slightly but meaningfully more upbeat and glimmering; a sly riff on the myth of Narcissus ensues. “A Report on Our Recent Troubles” describes a community wrecked by a spate of suicides, some seemingly done as perverse pleas for attention, and the narrative slowly edges toward a harrowing, Shirley Jackson-esque conclusion. That story, like many of the others here, is written in the first person plural, and Millhauser revels in upending that bureaucratic voice and making it strange; he satirizes the language of rest-home brochureware in “Arcadia,” which opens gently but becomes more sinister, darkening the bland rhetoric. Millhauser does much the same with setting, complicating our notions of suburban comfort in stories like “The Wife and the Thief.” As ever, he’s an incessant tinkerer with ages-old myths, fairy tales and religious stories: Among the best entries here are “The Pleasures and Sufferings of Young Gautama,” a tale of the young Buddha that pits foursquare language with its hero’s roiling spiritual despair, and irreverent tweaks of tales about Paul Bunyan, Rapunzel, mermaids and the prophet Samuel. Millhauser intuits modes of storytelling like nobody else, and even his satire of sports-announcer-speak in “Home Run” elevates the quotidian to the cosmic. A superb testament to America’s quirkiest short story writer, still on his game.”
“American literature never had a magical realist tradition to call its own, but it’s always had writers eager to blur reality and the metaphysical . . . For decades Millhauser has [been] our national laureate of the weirdness of our normal lives. The stories in his masterful new collection riff on advertising copy, board reports, mythology and sports announcing. But within that breadth of styles he consistently prompts the reader to sense some shadowy but important news that’s about to be delivered . . . He isn’t concerned with death so much as with the elements of human nature that are hard to articulate or that speak to our fears. . . . Voices in the Nightis defined by its playfulness; Millhauser tweaks genres and expectations like a carnival strongman bending steel bars,” says Mark Athitakis in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The New York Times Book Review says: “ …the stories in Millhauser’s spellbinding collection…are anchored by dark human yearnings—for perfection, or excitement, or some ungraspable form of fulfillment. These yearnings have a combustible quality, threatening to consume the towns and minds where a pervasive sense of unease provides the tinder…beware the uncanny magic of Millhauser: Just when you think you recognize a myth, a character, a voice—the familiar tacks toward the strange and unexpected…In Voices in the Night, Millhauser gives us worlds upon worlds—wistful and warped, comic and chilling—that by story’s end, feel as intimate as our own reflections. “
Publishers Weekly says: “In this vividly imaginative new collection of 16 stories, Pulitzer Prize–winner Millhauser draws a gauzy curtain of hyper-reality over mundane events and creates an atmosphere of uneasiness that accelerates to dread. Millhauser establishes tense yet wondrous tones while never resorting to melodrama; his cool, restrained voice is profoundly effective. In a couple of stories (“Sons and Mothers,” “Coming Soon”) the protagonist wakens in a different time zone after a nap and understands that his life has changed forever. In others, the narrator is a spokesperson for his community, places where residents get caught up in mass hysteria (“Elsewhere”), psychosis (“Mermaid Fever”), or a craving for deep emotion (“The Place”). Variations on fairy tales include a clever, humorous “Rapunzel,” which is reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods. . . . The gem of the collection is the semi-autobiographical “A Voice in the Night,” in which a young boy in the author’s own home town in Connecticut is transfixed by the biblical story of Samuel, who heard God’s voice and knew he must obey. The boy grows up to be a writer, with memories similar to those in Millhauser’s earlier book The Barnum Museum. This is a volume best read in small doses, since the voices throughout remain similar and the situations often echo one another. The cumulative effect is to transport the reader to an alternate world in which the uncanny lurks pervasively beneath the surface.”
“Brilliant . . . powerful. Each work is a delight and revelation. Beautifully made fantastic tales such as Millhauser writes don’t begin from nothing. As in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol, Italo Calvino and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (to name a few revered creators of fiction that carries us beyond the normal), most of them grow out of everyday incidents and lead us right up to the line between the ordinary and the magical. And sometimes they help us to cross over . . . But this collection it isn’t just a regional fantasia, all stories about the other side of normal small-town life . . . Let’s call [them] borderline pieces—easily described as magical realism, or perhaps, turned on their heads, tales of realistic magic. However we might describe it, Voices in the Night is a smorgasbord of deftly created short fiction by a great imaginative talent. Millhauser stands tall in the company of a growing number of contemporary American masters of magic, from Ursula K. Le Guin to Aimee Bender and Kelly Link. To use his own plain, down-home metaphor, Millhauser has polished his mirrors in the halls and bedrooms and bathrooms and elsewhere, and it will do us all good to take a look at the reflections the glass throws back at us,” says Alan Cheuse for National Public Radio.
When is it available?
Millhauser’s magical 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!
How to be both
By Ali Smith
(Knopf Doubleday, $25.95, 384 pages)
Who is this author?
Ali Smith, a Scottish author who now lives in England and is one of the most admired (and honored) writers in the United Kingdom (and for that matter, in the entire literary world), has published eight previous works of fiction and has won many major awards. Her books include the novel Hotel World, short-listed for the Orange Prize and Booker Prize and winner of the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, winner of the Whitbread Award and short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her story collections include Free Love, which won a Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.
What is this book about?
It’s about art, love, injustice, the Renaissance, the 20th century, the twisting of time and the bending of genres and genders. Smith’s latest has been called “a literary double-take,” and was shortlisted for three big awards: the 2015 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the 2014 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 Folio Prize, and it won the 2014 Costa Novel Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. It’s a complicated book to explain but a delight to read. Here is how Publisher’s Weekly describes the novel structure of this challenging novel in its starred review:
“This [is an] inventive double novel that deals with gender issues, moral questions, the mystery of death, the value of art, the mutability of time, and several other important topics. Two books coexist under the same title, each presenting largely the same material arranged differently and with different emphases; which narrative one reads first depends on chance, as different copies of the book have been printed with different opening chapters. In one version, the androgynous adolescent character George (for Georgia) is mourning the sudden death of her mother following a family trip to Italy, where they viewed a painting by the obscure Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa. The alternate volume begins with Francesco, recounting stories of the painter’s youth and the ongoing creation of a fresco in a palazzo in Ferrara, a process described in vibrant detail. Francesco’s secret is disclosed in both sections—teasingly in one, overtly in the other. The narratives are captivating, challenging, and often puzzling, as the prose varies among contemporary vernacular English, archaic 15th-century rhetoric interposed with fragments of poetry, and unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness narration. Clever puns and word games abound. George’s mother accurately identifies the subtext when she says, “Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.” Smith’s two-in-one novel is a provocative reevaluation of the form.”
Why you’ll like it:
Smith lets her imagination soar in the structure and content of this book, and readers get to go along on this literary flight. She is a wonder at creating dialogue, which rings true no matter which century its speakers happen to be inhabiting. Nothing is ordinary about this book, from its characters to its settings to its plots and especially, to its clever writing and provocative explorations of love, death, art and identity.
What others are saying:
“Playfully brilliant. . . . Fantastically complex and incredibly touching. . . . This gender-blending, genre-blurring story, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, bounces across centuries, tossing off profound reflections on art and grief, without getting tangled in its own postmodern wires. It’s the sort of death-defying storytelling acrobatics that don’t seem entirely possible. . . . [A] swirling, panoramic vision of two women’s lives, separated by more than 500 years, impossibly connected by their fascination with the mystery of existence,” says Ron Charles in The Washington Post.
Says Heller McAlpin for NPR: “Can a book be both linguistically playful and dead serious? Structurally innovative and reader-friendly? Mournful and joyful? Brainy and moving? Ali Smith’s How to be both, which recently won the prestigious, all-Brit two-year-old Goldsmiths prize for being a truly novel novel, is all of the above—and then some. . . . Smith, whose books include The Accidental, There But For The, and the essay collection Artful, has outdone herself with How to be both. . . . To say that there’s more than meets the eye in this terrific book is a gross understatement; it encompasses wonderful mothers, unconventional love and friendship, time, mortality, gender, the consolations of art and so much else. . . . Once again, Smith’s affinity for beguiling oddballs and the pertly precocious rivals J.D Salinger’s. . . . [A] gloriously inventive novel. . . . Ingeniously conceived.”
“Ali Smith is a genius. . . . Smith, who was born and raised in Inverness, continues a Scottish literary tradition, whose practitioners include James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark, Alan Warner, and James Robertson, of tearing a rent in the scrim between the physical and the metaphysical worlds to allow a stranger, or an other to slip through. Her willingness to embrace the supernatural, when taken in conjunction with her acrobatic language, wit, philosophical bent, and her overarching obsession with form, also places her within that select British modernist sisterhood alongside such doyennes as Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Iris Murdoch. . . . [How to be both] cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy. . . . If we think of time as Smith would have us do, we do not become older but deeper; no one is ever gone, and nothing is ever lost, that cannot be found again, if sought, ” says Susan McCallum in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Library Journal’s starred review says: “ What if an Italian Renaissance painter were to drop down to Earth and observe the mysterious modern world—specifically, the world of one bright, young Cambridge girl in the wake of a recent family tragedy? This is the premise of Smith’s bold new novel—actually two novels (Eyes and Camera) in one. Camera is set in the present, when George (Georgia) is grieving the loss of her mother, a feminist art and culture critic, who liked to challenge George about the meaning of art and life, and who became so intrigued by the work of Italian artist Francesco del Cossa that she spirited her children off to Italy to view his frescoes (only recently uncovered beneath later paintings) in their natural setting. Francesco’s story (Eyes) covers his friendship with the boy who grew up to become his benefactor and patron, as well as his early art training and his work on the grand palazzo walls. VERDICT Two versions of the book will be available: one beginning with the artist’s story, the other with George’s—and readers won’t know which they will be reading first until they open their particular book. The order in which the stories are read will surely color the reader’s experience of the whole. Which version is the preferred? And “how to be both”—seen and unseen, past and present, male and female, alive and dead, known and unknown? In a work short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, Smith presents two extraordinary books for the price of one.”
Kirkus says in its starred review: “This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book. George, short for Georgia, is 16, whip-smart and seeking ways to honor her dead mother. She vows to dance the twist every day, as her mother did, and to wear something black for a year. She also inhabits a memory, a visit to Italy they made together to view a 15th-century mural her mother admired, and studies a painting by the same artist in London’s National Gallery. There, she sees a woman her mother knew and tries to study her as well. In the book’s other half, the ghost of the 15th-century artist pushes up through the earth to the present and finds himself in the museum behind George as she studies his painting and just before she spots the mystery woman. The painter’s own memories travel through his youth and apprenticeship in a voice utterly different from and as delightful as George’s. He—though gender is bending here too—also loses his mother when young and learns, like George, of the pain and joy of early friendship. He provides an intimate history for the mural in Italy and offers a very foreign take on George and modern times. The book is being published simultaneously in two editions—one begins with George’s half, and the other begins with the painter’s, which might be slightly more challenging for its diction and historical trappings. Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what’s around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych.”
When is it available?
This book – perhaps the version that begins with George, or the version that begins with Francesco – is on the shelves 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!
Jack of Spades: A Tale of Suspense
By Joyce Carol Oates
(Mysterious Press, $24, 208 pages)
Who is this author?
Joyce Carol Oates, who is now 78 and still going strong, is the author of numerous bestsellers among her more than 100 books in just about every genre: fiction, nonfiction, mysteries, thrillers, memoir, criticism, poetry, children’s books, plays, you name it. Oates has won an equally impressive list of awards, including a National Medal of Humanities, National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, National Book Award and PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. As if she weren’t busy enough, Oates also is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Impressed yet?
What is this book about?
With echoes of Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, Jack of Spades gives us an unusually prolific author (hmmm, does anyone else come to mind?) whose elegant mystery novels have earned international acclaim and earned him a boatload (and we are thinking Titanic-sized boat here) of bucks. But no one knows – at least, not at first – that Andrew J. Rush has a secret, dark and violent side, expressed in the writings by the pseudonymous “Jack of Spades.” Then his luck changes, as Rush is accused of plagiarizing an unknown local writer and his daughter finds a Spade novel that leads her to ask uncomfortable questions. Soon Rush is thinking more and more in the mode of his evil alter ego, and another fine Oates thriller lays its cards on the table.
Why you’ll like it:
Oates is blessed with an apparently unlimited imagination and the strength and determination to get those imaginings down on paper so that we may share in them. But she is far more than simply prolific; she is an extremely talented writer as well. Here, she is having some fun poking at the pretensions of the literary establishment, but this book is not about inside jokes. It is a thoroughly engrossing thriller in its own right. At just over 200 pages, this book will fit nicely into your beach bag, and it will provide a little chill to counter the hot summer sun. You might well say that all work and dark play makes this Jack anything but a dull boy.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “A writer’s secret pseudonymous identity becomes a conduit for his murderous dark side in Oates’s sleek and suspenseful excursion into the literary macabre. For years refined crime novelist Andrew J. Rush—known to his audience as “the gentleman’s Stephen King”—has moonlighted as Jack of Spades, an author of violent pulp potboilers. When an unhinged reader brings a ludicrous lawsuit against him for literary theft, Andrew snaps. Motivated by what Poe called “the imp of the perverse”—a quotation from the Poe story of that name serves as the book’s epigraph—he begins acting increasingly like a character in one of his alter ego’s nasty novels. Oates has endowed her first-person narrator with the slightly affected speaking style and overconfidence of one of Poe’s monomaniacal protagonists. Although she nods to a number of Poe’s classic tales—especially “The Black Cat” and “William Wilson”—the story’s modern spin is entirely of her own clever invention. Readers are sure to be gripped and unsettled by her depiction of a seemingly mild-mannered character whose psychopathology simmers frighteningly close to the surface.”
In its starred review, Library Journal says: “Oates has written a great psychological noir novel, which also serves as a homage to Stephen King (once shunned but now embraced by the literary establishment). Andrew J. Rush, a seemingly mild-mannered and irritatingly self-absorbed and smug author of mainstream thriller fiction, has begun to write (in a partially fugue state) disturbing and violent novels under the Jack of Spades pseudonym. But when Andrew is accused of plagiarism and his daughter begins to ask questions about Jack of Spades, his carefully compartmentalized life begins to unravel. VERDICT As this tour de force reveals, Oates is a master of bleak literary fiction and its (sometimes) poor relation, crime/noir fiction. Examining and delineating insanity, obsession, paranoia, alcoholism, manipulation, and murder, not to mention book collecting and writer’s block, this tale of suspense makes for another high-caliber Oatesian outing, displaying flair, noir sophistication, and King-like flourishes.
Kirkus Reviews says: “A mystery writer slowly becomes subsumed by his dark alter ego in Oates’ tale of literary madness. Andrew J. Rush has made a name for himself and more than a comfortable living as a successful mystery writer. He’s published 28 novels, and an early review even called him “the gentleman’s Stephen King.” But behind the happily married family man with three grown children who’s the favorite son of his small New Jersey town lies a secret, ultraviolent series of noir thrillers Rush writes under the pseudonym “Jack of Spades.” No one—not even his doting wife, Irina—knows about Jack: Rush dashes the books off in secret and sends them to a separate agent and publisher. Despite its grisly content, the series sells modestly well. Rush’s two worlds seem to coexist in parallel harmony until the day his daughter, Julia, finds a copy of Jack’s A Kiss Before Killing in Rush’s office and decides to read it. Soon after, Rush is hit with a bizarre plagiarism lawsuit from C.W. Haider, a local woman claiming he not only copied her ideas, but physically stole her work. In an enjoyable bit of metafiction, Oates depicts Haider as particularly litigious when it comes to the literary set: she’s sued Stephen King, John Updike, and Peter Straub, among others. While the mild-mannered Rush is merely indignant at being accused, Jack of Spades wants revenge, and so begins his slow descent into madness. With its homages to Poe, from “The Black Cat” to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the horror masters Jack of Spades so admires, this latest unsettling and chilling thriller from Oates does not disappoint.
When is it available?
This noir thriller is on the shelves 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!
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson
(Crown/Archetype, $28, 448 pages)
Who is this author?
Erik Larson, a widely acclaimed master of narrative journalism, has written four previous national bestsellers: In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm. His books, which have been published in 17 countries, have sold more than 5 million copies in total. In addition to writing his books, he has taught non-fiction writing at San Francisco State and Johns Hopkins University.
What is this book about?
It was a century ago that the ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed in the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland, on its journey from New York to England. Its sinking took place in the early months of the conflicts that became World War I, and is one of those historic events that people – at least those of a certain age – think they know all about. Erik Larson’s richly detailed account proves that they almost surely do not. The ship was the fastest transatlantic luxury liner then in existence and its captain, William Thomas Turner, believed that Germany would abide by the rules of warfare that had, up till then, kept civilian ships protected from attack. Sadly, he was wrong, and the super-secret British intelligence-gathering team that knew better had its reasons for not alerting the liner to the rapidly approaching sub that carried doom for the nearly 1,200 passengers, who included many babies and children. Add such factors as bad weather, a late departure and unusually slow running speed, and disaster becomes inevitable.
Why you’ll like it:
Larson is both a journalist and a novelist, and he brings his considerable storytelling and research skills to Dead Wake. This is meticulously mined nonfiction, but the story is told with the tension and ironies of a great novel. While explaining the technicalities of ocean voyaging of those times in a way that typical readers can understand, Larson also brings to life many characters – some as famous as President Woodrow Wilson and others heretofore unknown, in the recounting of this story. A note to Connecticut readers: one of the passengers who survived was Theodate Pope, the woman architect who designed her family’s home in Farmington, now the Hill-Stead Museum.
Here are some remarks by Larson provided by his publisher: “The Lusitania, like the Titanic, is just such a compelling story, and I felt I could do it in a way that no one else had. I was drawn by the prospect of using the vast fund of archival materials available on the subject to produce a real-life maritime thriller—things like code books, intercepted telegrams, even some extremely passionate love letters between Woodrow Wilson and the woman he fell in love with after his first wife had died. It became for me an exploration of the potential for generating suspense in a work of nonfiction. Plus, I knew the one hundredth anniversary of the disaster—May 7, 2015—was just over the horizon. Further, I’d wager that just about everything that people know or think they know about the Lusitania is just flat-out wrong. Certainly that was the case with me. The sheer wrenching drama of the event pretty much took my breath away.
“The most valuable tools were depositions and other first-person accounts given soon after the sinking. These provided a rich timeline of events: the peace and good cheer aboard ship as the Irish coast appeared in the distance, the moment of impact, and the truly macabre and disconcerting things that followed, as parents made cruel choices and passengers confronted the decision of whether to jump, get in a lifeboat, or stay aboard. These events, juxtaposed against details about the U-boat’s voyage as revealed in the War Log of its captain, Walther Schwieger, and in secretly intercepted telegrams, helped me create a real-time sense of growing dread and danger.”
What others are saying:
Amazon.com’s Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015 review says: On May 1st, 1915 the Lusitania set sail on its final voyage. That it was sunk by a German U-boat will be news to few—and Larson’s challenge is to craft a historical narrative leading up to the thrilling, if known, conclusion, building anticipation in his readers along the way. To his credit, he makes the task look easy. Focusing on the politics of WWI, on nautical craftsmanship and strategy, and on key players in the eventual attack and sinking of the “fast, comfortable, and beloved” Lusitania, Larson once again illustrates his gift for seducing us with history and giving it a human face. Dead Wake puts readers right aboard the famous Cunard liner and keeps them turning the pages until the book’s final, breathless encounter.”
“[Larson] has always shown a brilliant ability to unearth the telling details of a story and has the narrative chops to bring a historical moment vividly alive. But in his new book, Larson simply outdoes himself…What is most compelling about Dead Wake is that, through astonishing research, Larson gives us a strong sense of the individuals—passengers and crew—aboard the Lusitania, heightening our sense of anxiety as we realize that some of the people we have come to know will go down with the ship. A story full of ironies and ‘what-ifs,’ Dead Wake is a tour de force of narrative history,” says BookPage.
“Larson has a gift for transforming historical re-creations into popular recreations, and Dead Wake is no exception…[He] provides first-rate suspense, a remarkable achievement given that we already know how this is going to turn out…The tension, in the reader’s easy chair, is unbearable…”says The Boston Globe.
The Onion A/V Club says: “The bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Thunderstruck puts his mastery of penning parallel narratives on display as he tells the tale of the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine, building an ever-growing sense of dread as the two vessels draw closer to their lethal meeting…He goes well beyond what’s taught in history classes to offer insights into British intelligence and the dealings that kept the ship from having the military escort so many passengers expected to protect it…By piecing together how politics, economics, technology, and even the weather combined to produce an event that seemed both unlikely and inevitable, he offers a fresh look at a world-shaking disaster.”
Publishers Weekly says: “With a narrative as smooth as the titular passenger liner, Larson delivers a riveting account of one of the most tragic events of WWI. The fact a German U-boat sank the Lusitania off the coast of Ireland in May 1915 is undisputed, so Larson crafts the story as historical suspense by weaving information about the war and the development of submarine technology with an interesting cast of characters. He expertly builds tension up to the final encounter. An unanticipated sequence of events put the Lusitania in the path of Capt. Walther Schwieger’s U-20, and he didn’t hesitate to open fire. The Lusitania’s captain, the capable and accomplished William Thomas Turner, did everything in his power to avert the catastrophe, but fate intervened, taking the lives of 1,195 passengers and crew members, including 123 Americans. Despite the stunning loss of life, President Woodrow Wilson held firm to American neutrality in the war, at least in 1915. Larson convincingly constructs his case for what happened and why, and by the end, we care about the individual passengers we’ve come to know—a blunt reminder that war is, at its most basic, a matter of life and death.”
Library Journal’s starred review says: “When veteran captain William Thomas Turner accepted the pinnacle position within Cunard Steamship Company, commander of the RMS Lusitania, he never imagined the danger that lay ahead. Bestselling author Larson traces the liner’s final voyage by intertwining narratives of Turner with those of notable passengers such as Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat, trailblazing architect Theodate Pope, and suffragette Margaret Mackworth. Hardest to shake are descriptions of impulsive Captain Schwieger and his disheveled German crewmates torpedoing vessels, reveling in the shrill of explosions; and imposing British spymaster Blinker Hall stealthily monitoring Schwieger’s U-20 as it discreetly, or so it thought, hunted targets. Rounding out the primary cast are a trio of political players: an ambitious Kaiser Wilhelm, a disciplined Winston Churchill, and an infatuated (and ergo distracted) Woodrow Wilson. Using archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Larson describes the Lusitania’s ominous delayed departure and its distressing reduced speed. He vividly illustrates how these foreboding factors led to terror, tragedy, and ultimately the Great War. VERDICT Once again, Larson transforms a complex event into a thrilling human interest story. This suspenseful account will entice readers of military and maritime history along with lovers of popular history.
Kirkus’ starred review says: “Larson once again demonstrates his expert researching skills and writing abilities, this time shedding light on nagging questions about the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915. . . . A gem of the Cunard fleet, she drew the cream of society, and life aboard was the epitome of Edwardian luxury. The author works with a broad scope, examining the shipping business, wartime policies, the government leaders and even U-boat construction. More fascinating is his explanation of the intricacy of sailing, submerging and maneuvering a U-boat. Gaining position to fire a torpedo that has only a 60 percent chance of exploding belies the number of ships sunk. Throughout the voyage, many omens predicted disaster, especially the publication of a German warning the morning of sailing. . . . Larson explores curiosities and a long list of what ifs: If the Lusitania had not been late in sailing, if the fog had persisted longer, if the captain hadn’t turned to starboard into the sub’s path and if that one torpedo hadn’t hit just in the right spot, the Lusitania might have arrived safely. An intriguing, entirely engrossing investigation into a legendary disaster. . . .”
When is it available?
Larson’s latest is awaiting readers at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Goodwin and Mark 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!
Beautiful Eyes: A Father Transformed
By Paul Austin
(Norton, $25.95, 288)
Who is this author?
I’m always amazed and impressed when doctors have the time and talent to step outside their demanding medical careers and become published authors as well. That is the case with Paul Austin, who is an emergency-room doctor in North Carolina. His previous memoir, Something for the Pain: Compassion and Burnout in the ER, was well-received, and he has published essays in such literary journals as Creative Nonfiction, the Southeast Review and the Gettysburg Review.
What is this book about?
In the moments just before a child is born, parents are awash in hopes and fears. For Paul Austin and his wife – he a medical student and she a delivery room nurse – the moment in 1987 was one of joy but also of the stark revelation that their daughter, Sarah, had the physical signs of Down Syndrome. And even for a doctor who understands the limitations that accompany Down Syndrome as well as the strides that can be made, that is the beginning of a harsh reality. The good news is that love and acceptance prevail, and Austin, over time, learns plenty about being a good parent and a better doctor from the wisdom – and I use that word deliberately — that Sarah possesses and shares. He learns we all have limitations, even doctors, and that they can be addressed, tackled and often, overcome.
Why you’ll like it:
Memoirs can be inspirational without being saccharine, and Beautiful Eyes is one such book. Austin tells his family’s story honestly and deftly, and it is just as much his own coming of age story as it is Sarah’s. He blends his family’s personal experiences with her condition from birth through age 22 with the science of the syndrome and the history of the medical world’s often cruelly low and downright ignorant expectations for Down kids. This is an enlightening book in every sense of the word.
What others are saying:
People Magazine says: “Raising a child with Down syndrome, the author had plenty of fears and preconceptions. But from babyhood to adult-hood, Sarah challenged him to accept her not as a dire diagnosis but as a beloved, inspiring daughter. This isn’t a book only for those dealing with disability; it’s a ferocious, illuminating look at the stunning surprise of human connection.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “An emergency room doctor and essayist tells the moving story of how he came to terms with being the father of a child with Down syndrome. When doctors first told Austin and his wife, Sally, that their newborn daughter Sarah had trisomy 21, the couple went into shock. Neither could fully acknowledge that they had created a life that was anything less than perfect. Bonding with the child proved difficult at first, not because Sarah was a difficult baby but because the couple could not see themselves—or traits from their families—in her. They only saw the “simian crease” on Sarah’s palms that marked her as “abnormal.” The author and his wife also found they had to deal with the prejudices of others—e.g., the senior resident at the hospital where Austin trained who suggested that a Down syndrome child would be functional enough to “make a good pet.” Seeking to understand Sarah’s otherness, Austin explored the history of Down syndrome, the philosophical writings of Locke and Montaigne, and the art of the 15th-century Flemish masters. He discovered that the negative feelings he and others had toward his daughter were as much historical as they were a product of a society that scorned difference. As Sarah grew up, so did Austin. He began to see his child as a self-aware being who struggled with her limitations rather than a set of chromosomes gone awry. Sarah made the most of her abilities in events like the Special Olympics and gracefully accepted her fate to live as a member of a group home. This tender, bright and flawed child showed how being different enhanced her humanity rather than detracted from it. A poignant and candid father’s memoir.”
Novelist Ann Hood says: “In this beautiful, unflinching memoir, Paul Austin uses science, history, and a father’s love and fear to trace his emotional journey with his daughter Sarah. Eventually, she becomes less his daughter with Down syndrome and simply his daughter. And every step of the way you will root for Austin, for Sarah, for everyone who has had to learn how to accept the path they are on. I simply love this book!”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Austin follows up Something for the Pain, his memoir of becoming an ER doctor, with an eloquent account of his experiences raising a child with Down syndrome. It begins in 1987 when he, a third-year resident, and his wife, Sally, a labor and delivery room nurse, receive the news that their newborn daughter, Sarah, has the congenital condition. As Austin watches his wife breast-feed Sarah, and later slips a flower behind his daughter’s ear as she sleeps in his arms, his love for her is unmistakable. He segues seamlessly between scenes of family life and disquisitions on the history and science of Down syndrome, arguing that we are defined by more than our genes. Though Austin doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges he faced, he also shows Sarah as an engaging, sociable child who loved movies, dancing, and drawing. While following her development from birth to age 22, readers also witness Austin’s transformation from a father who once had to “pretend” to be proud, to a man in genuine awe of Sarah’s many gifts. Parents of special-needs kids will find this story particularly inspiring, and its universal message of love and acceptance should speak to a much wider audience.”
When is it available?
You can find this important 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!
Boston Girl
By Anita Diamant
Scribner, $26, 336 pages)
Who is this author?
You probably know Anita Diamant as the author of the wildly popular biblical history novel, The Red Tent. It was her debut novel, based on the little-known life of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and Leah, who gets a few lines in the Book of Genesis. Excellent word of mouth and recommendations from book clubs and independent bookstores made it a best-seller, and it has been published in more than 25 countries and became a Lifetime TV miniseries. Diamant, who began her writing career as a Boston journalist, also is the author of Good Harbor, The Last Days of Dogtown and Day After Night, and an essay collection, Pitching My Tent, as well as six guides to contemporary Jewish life and customs. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Newark and Denver, she is now a Boston girl herself. Boston Girl is a New York Times best-seller.
What is this book about?
At 85, Addie Baum sits down to tell her granddaughter was life was like – and more pertinently, what her own life was like, as the 20th century was born. Addie’s immigrant parents were struggling to make a living in Boston when she was born in 1900, the third daughter in the Baum family. Her parents are flummoxed by American freedoms and customs so different from their own, but Addie, smart and spirited, embraces the new ways and the increasing opportunities for women eagerly. What she discovers – short skirts, movies, the possibility of college and a career, love lost and gained – makes for a great tale that encapsulates how women and America changed and how each changed the other.
Why you’ll like it:
As the success of The Red Tent shows, Diamant has an intuitive sense of what readers, particularly women, like in a novel. Her new book doesn’t have the Bible as its inspiration, but it recounts the recent past – one that some readers will recall first-hand – and shows how far we have come, in a relatively short time, and also how far we still need to go.
Here is something Diamant has said about her debut success: “In my first novel, The Red Tent, I re-imagined the culture of biblical women as close, sustaining, and strong, but I am not the least bit nostalgic for that world without antibiotics, or birth control, or the printed page. Women were restricted and vulnerable in body, mind, and spirit, a condition that persists wherever women are not permitted to read.
What others are saying:
The Amazon.com Review says: “An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2014: There’s a lot that’s familiar about The Boston Girl. A tale of a plucky immigrant girl at the turn of the century, it addresses some of the same themes as other contemporary novels, including the author’s breakout The Red Tent: religion, feminism, the pull between tradition and the modern world. Here, our heroine is Addie Baum of Boston, now in her eighties telling the story of her life to her twentysomething granddaughter. And what a life it was: born in 1900, Addie survived the travails of aggressive greenhorn parents, world wars, abusive men and a flu epidemic to become a woman, finally, with a voice and a life of her own. What makes this story engaging is just that old-fashioned straightforwardness, as well as its perfect ear for the locutions of the time. Someone is “smiling to beat the band.” Addie “can really cut a rug.” You had to “kiss a lot of frogs before [you] found a prince.” No wonder this book rings so true: reading it feels like lazing away a winter afternoon with a beloved aging relative paging through a family scrapbook. “
Says Publishers Weekly: “Bestseller Diamant tells a gripping story of a young Jewish woman growing up in early-20th-century Boston. Addie Baum, an octogenarian grandmother in 1985, relates long-ago history to a beloved granddaughter, answering the question: “How did I get to be the woman I am today?” The answer: by living a fascinating life. First reminiscing about 1915 and the reading club she became a part of as a teenager, Addie, in a conversational tone, recounts the lifelong friendships that began at club meetings and days by the seaside at nearby Rockport. She tells movingly of the fatal effects of the flu, a relative’s suicide, the touchy subject of abortion and its aftermath, and even her own disastrous first date, which nearly ended in rape. Ahead of her time, Addie also becomes a career woman, working as a newspaper typist who stands up for her beliefs at all costs. This is a stunning look into the past with a plucky heroine readers will cheer for.”
Library Journal says: “Eighty-five-year-old Addie Baum reminisces about her life in Diamant’s step back in time. Addie’s been asked by her 22-year-old granddaughter, Ava, to explain how she became the woman she is. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1900 in Boston’s heavily populated North End, Addie and her two older sisters lived in a tenement with their unhappy parents who did not acclimate to this new world. But Addie’s caring and loyal sisters are there for her. In 1915 she is a young teen, interested in her activities at a library group held at a neighborhood settlement house. Recalling situations with her compassionate eye and remarkable sense of humor, Addie observes upheavals large and small: changing women’s roles, movies, celebrity culture, short skirts, and the horrible flu pandemic of 1918. She explores feminism, family, and love as well. VERDICT Diamant offers impeccable descriptions of Boston life during these early years of the 20th century and creates a loving, caring lead character who grows in front of our eyes from a naïve young girl to a warm, wise elder. Readers interested in historical fiction will certainly enjoy this look at the era, with all its complications and wonders.
Kirkus Reviews says: “A Jewish woman born in 1900 tells her granddaughter about growing up in the 20th century. Diamant establishes an agreeable, conversational tone in the opening paragraph: “I’m flattered you want to interview me,” Addie says. “And when did I ever say no to my favorite grandchild?” It’s 1985, and we quickly learn that Addie is the daughter of Russian immigrants, the only one born in the New World but not the only one to disappoint her bitter, carping mother by turning out to be “a real American.” Older sister Betty horrifies their parents in 1910 by moving out to become a saleswoman at Filene’s, and Addie flouts their limited expectations by attending high school and joining a reading club at the local settlement house. It’s there she learns about Rockport Lodge and snatches a vacation at this “inn for young ladies in a seaside town north of Boston” with the help of the settlement house’s nurturing Miss Chevalier. On her first trip to the lodge in 1916, Addie forms lifetime friendships with other striving working-class girls, particularly Filomena, whose affair with a married artist demonstrates the promises and perils of the new freedoms women are claiming. Addie’s narrative rambles through the decades, spotlighting somewhat generic events: the deaths of two nephews in the 1918 flu epidemic, an unfulfilling romance with a traumatized World War I veteran, an encounter with a violent rumrunner. Her increasing aspirations take her from a secretarial job to a newspaper, where she climbs from typist to columnist with the help of other uppity women. True love arrives with labor lawyer Aaron Metsky, and a quick wrap-up of the years after 1931 tells us Addie found her vocation as a social worker and teacher. Enjoyable fiction with a detailed historical backdrop, this sweet tale is paradigmatic book club fare, but we expect something more substantial from the author of The Red Tent (1997) and The Last Days of Dogtown (2005).”
When is it available?
You can find Boston Girl in Hartford, 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!
Lucky Alan And Other Stories
By Jonathan Lethem
(Doubleday, $24.95, 176 pages)
Who is this author?
Jonathan Lethem is one of our best and best-selling contemporary writers of novels, short stories and essays. His nine novels include Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn (1999) which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as a “genius grant.” He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, which has called him “something of a hipster celebrity.” He has also been dubbed a “genre bender,” as shown by his mastery of detective fiction, science fiction and autobiographical books. Lethem has said that his genre-mixing was likely influenced by his artist father’s work, which, he said, “”always combined observed and imagined reality on the same canvas, very naturally, very un-self-consciously.”
What is this book about?
Lucky Alan is Lethem’s latest collection of stories, whose plots are typically diverse: a father breaks down at Seaworld in “Pending Vegan”; a foundling child is rescued during a blizzard; a political prisoner in New York City is placed in a hole in the street; old time comic book characters are trapped on a desert island; and the title story is the tale of an actor and a famous theatre director. Some of these stories are straightforward; others surreal. All nine stories are beautifully written examinations of the weirdness of life.
Why you’ll like it:
Let’s let Lethem talk about his work, which will help you decide whether you’d like to read his latest book.
In an interview with Armchair/Shotgun in 2009, Lethem said: “I’m writing short stories right now, that’s what I do between novels, and I love them. I’m very devoted to it. You know, it’s funny. There seems to be some sort of law that you only get to be celebrated for one or the other. And then a couple of people will break it. Updike did. They didn’t review his story collections by saying, “Well, these are nice, but he’s a novelist.” Or review his novels by saying, “Well, too bad he can’t do the longer stuff.” Other people tend to get patronized on one end or the other—and I’ll take it. I have a very happy life as a novelist. But the story collections I’ve published are tremendously important to me. And many of the uncollected stories—or yet-to-be-collected stories—are among my proudest writings. They’re very closely allied, obviously, to novel writing. But also very distinct, and, you know, there’s no need to choose.”
Earlier this year he told Salon: “What’s great about short stories is the opportunity to play at reinvention; all those new departures, all those new landings to try to stick. It makes me happy to think of the book as a window into the last decade’s worth of tiny revolutions and self-overthrowings, and as a laboratory for what I might still become as a writer. For instance “Lucky Alan” was the last thing I wrote before starting “Chronic City,” and it looks to me like I was testing my confidence for that milieu and tone.”
He went on to tell Salon: “I’m haunted, yes, all the time, and increasingly, by the kinds of writer I’ll never get to turn out to have been. I’ve been digging in my own buried archives recently and discovered bunches of notebooks with jottings for stories and novels I never got around to writing (as well as jottings indicating some of those I did — I was amazed to find that I’d basically already conceived the intention to write The “Fortress of Solitude,” my sixth novel, when I was 19). Crime novels, autobiographical novels about parts of my life untouched by the autobiographical novels I’ve actually managed, surrealist stories, plays even! Every one of those notes feels alive to me, waiting to be picked up and realized. Probably none of them ever will be.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “In Lucky Alan…Lethem’s considerable strengths are on display…Lethem works in an interesting literary space between realism and absurdism, modernism and postmodernism, satire and a particular brand of DeLillo-inspired darkness…His talent is large and, as these stories demonstrate, his eye as sharp as ever.
In its starred review, Kirkus says: “These nine stories by a leading American writer almost all bend away from realism, and one goes well into fantasy, while offering choice prose and insights. Lethem has a rubbery Gumby brain that bounces among genres, elements of pop culture and everyday abnormalities. “Their Back Pages” tells of a comic-book plane crash that maroons on an island 13 characters (such as the armless King Phnudge and the clown Large Silly). Their adventure fluidly, delightfully mixes human and cartoon elements, along with a hint of something malign. In “Procedure in Plain Air,” which more than nods to Donald Barthelme, a bound man is casually and without explanation placed alive in a hole in a Manhattan street, and a passerby is enlisted to watch over him. The title character of “The Porn Critic” has a certain cachet among his peers, in part by managing a sex-toy shop and reviewing its adult films, but his simple romantic ambitions are foiled when the lady in question sees the piles of XXX DVDs in his flat. “Traveler Home” starts as fragments, like aides-mémoire for a larger work, then blossoms into a modern Grimm tale. “The King of Sentences” tells of two sentence-loving, unpublished writers hunting the reclusive man of the title when they aren’t concocting lines like, “I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring.” One story concerns the estrangement between the narrator and his blog, where “gulls have skeletonized the corpse in the entranceway,” among other things. It’s as far out there as jazz might be to a Beatles fan. At the other end of the scale is an almost conventional piece about a family outing to SeaWorld that is colored by the father’s being weaned from the antidepressant Celexa. Lethem’s humor ranges from rueful to sly to “big silly,” and his careful, mostly unshowy writing has a gift for charming a reader into almost anything.”
Publishers Weekly says: “In Lethem’s collection, following the novel Dissident Gardens, the stories use absurdity, satire, or incongruity to contrast the quotidian. A bookstore clerk and his girlfriend obsess over the cadence and precision of language, stalking the reclusive writer they’ve deemed “The King of Sentences” (in the story of that name). In “Procedure in Plain Air,” the main character, sitting outside his favorite cafe, watches a work crew dig a hole in the street, then lower a bound and gagged man into the chasm. In “Porn Critic,” the lonesome Kromer reflects on his titular vocation, realizing his “special literacy was… positively toxic.” Unfortunately, the characters, with exquisitely improbable names like Sigismund Blondy, C. Phelps Northrup, and Invisible Luna, seldom surpass the concepts that formed them, and the ideas of the stories are more promising than the stories themselves. Although nearly every sentence captures Lethem’s sharp wit and copious imagination, reminding us that Lethem himself is perhaps the king of sentences after all, the sum of the parts rarely adds up. The most rewarding exception is “Pending Vegan,” which begins, “Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at Sea World.” The story that follows fulfills this line’s prediction with all the intrigue, emotion, and blunt force of reality.”
In the Barnes & Noble Review, novelist Alexander Chee says: “. . . Lethem’s feeling for the contemporary moment appears at its best in the first and last stories, “Lucky Alan” and “Pending Vegan,” and with their settings, we have the collection’s single recognizable arc, one that takes us from New York City to California, mirroring the writer’s life. “Lucky Alan” is something of a tribute to a vanishing New York, the story of an actor and the famous theater director, Sigismund Blondy, whom he befriends shortly after auditioning for him (Dianne Wiest makes a cameo). They run into each other at films in theaters in their Upper East Side neighborhood, and these repeated sightings become occasions for conversation. When Blondy fails to reappear as usual, the narrator, who by now has quit acting, pursues him — even calling him at home, an essential violation of this friendship’s unspoken terms. On this call, he learns Blondy has moved downtown but would like to see him. They make plans — momentous — when Blondy tells him he has a questionnaire he needs him to answer.
This leads to the unveiling of the titular Lucky Alan, and I won’t ruin the story by telling you how this happens. But in Blondy and his actor narrator, Lethem deftly skewers the sort of person who loves being obscure for the sake of being obscure — as if all of the fun in knowing him is in his being only partly understood. The story itself is not urgent somehow, strangely delicate in the way it is made out of obscure films and theatrical references, and the single biggest pleasure in it is the moment when Lucky Alan’s wife appears — and speaks a single, unforgettable line. She is the story’s moment of truth. The pretentiousness of the men in the story is suddenly revealed to be like the drifting smoke it was all along.
“. . . Lethem is at his best when he is the revolutionary, I think — and not the genre-reconciling statesman. When he drills down into the strangeness of contemporary life, the result is as striking as anything else he’s written. It’s a testament to this sort of exercise’s value — and makes you hope Lethem’s not finished playing around. California has many ironies left to offer him.”
When is it available?
Lucky for us, Lucky Alan is available for borrowing 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!
Early Warning
By Jane Smiley
(Knopf Doubleday, $26.95, 496 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 Early Warning is the second novel in a planned trilogy about the life of one farming family in Iowa and beyond, over the past 100 years, beginning in 1920 and told in the form in one chapter per year. Rosanna and Walter Langdon, their five children and their offspring are the microcosm; the events from the Great Depression through World War II and its Cold War aftermath, Vietnam and on is the macrocosm: both are delineated with care. This book begins in 1953 with a funeral and goes on to chronicle other deaths, births, breakdowns, successes: in short, life as it goes on. The younger family members, except for stalwart farmer Joe, have left the farm and/or Iowa and are swept up in personal and national change. Elder son Frank, he of the Mad Men ways and Midas touch in business, continues to find ways to prosper while losing his soul; thoughtful Arthur risks his sanity in working for the CIA; motherly Lillian makes the mistake of trusting her family doctor; and an unexpected new member of the family is revealed. Those who were captivated by Some Luck will want to continue following the Langdons into their future, which is ours as well.
Why you’ll like it:
Here’s what I wrote in December about Some Luck: “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.” That remains true, and I would add: Smiley maintains her pace and power in Early Warning, book two of this ambitious trilogy, in which characters grow more “modern” and situations more familiar. Readers who have invested their time and in books one and two will surely want to follow the Langdons into the final volume
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “Smiley has a big cast to wrangle in the second volume of the Last Hundred Years trilogy, which began with 2014’s Some Luck, and she starts this entry at the funeral of Walter, the Iowa farmer and paterfamilias of volume one. While the Langdons, scattered across New York, Chicago, and California, reunite, readers get a refresher on the family relationships. Covering 1953 to 1986 at a clip of one year per chapter, the focus here is the Cold War and its fallout. This material occasionally feels like the greatest hits of the post-WWII era, with Langdons brushing up against a Kennedy assassination, Jonestown, and Vietnam. And since the post-war baby boom means cousins by the dozens, the cast of characters isn’t as vivid and particular as it was in the knock-out first volume. Still, Smiley keeps you reading; as a writer she is less concerned about individual characters, but still as deft as ever at conveying the ways in which a family develops: some stories carrying on, while others fall away. This isn’t a series you can start in the middle, so pick up Some Luck, ride out the Depression and WWII with Walter, Rosanna, and Frank, then come back to the atom-and-adultery-haunted volume two.
Library Journal says: “. . . this second work in the trilogy follows the complicated Langdon siblings after the death of patriarch Walter in 1955. Eldest son Frank is unhappily married to alcoholic Andy, who frets about her lack of maternal instinct. While Joe lingers on the Iowa farm with homely wife Lois, wondering what could have been, Lillian settles down with secretive Arthur, Claire hastily marries an older Paul, and everyone wonders why affable Henry is still a bachelor. Pulitzer Prize-winning Smiley . . . paints pictures with her words, describing the intricacies of each character, even the unlikable, as the family steadily grows owing to marriages and births. As in Some Luck, each chapter here represents one year, with the Langdons reflecting on events of the 1960s and 1970s and warmhearted Lillian becoming the matriarch, uniting the disparate cousins. Although the narrative can be predictable at times, Smiley’s beautifully descriptive writing compensates. VERDICT Those new to this multigenerational saga should start with Some Luck. Those already familiar will be eager to continue with the inevitable conflicts among cousins and the appearance of an unexpected family member. . . . While Smiley’s latest offering is not as captivating as the first installment, readers interested in a story well told will be satisfied.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “Opening with the 1953 funeral of patriarch Walter, Smiley follows the Langdon family introduced in Some Luck through its second and third generations. Only steady second son Joe stayed home on the Iowa farm; he watches the land soar in value during the 1970s, though the farmer fatalism he inherited from Walter is justified when crop prices tank in the ’80s. Brilliant, predatory older brother Frank rises through the Manhattan business world while wife Andy raises their kids on automatic pilot, devoting her principal energies to psychoanalysis and worrying about nuclear war. Lillian has the happiest marriage among the siblings, though husband Arthur’s employment at the CIA provokes several crises of conscience. Observing them all in her customary critical spirit, widowed Rosanna cautiously expands her horizons, learning to drive and paying a visit to youngest son Henry, a gay academic, in Chicago. His sister Claire finally dumps her husband in 1979, after years of never talking back. . . . Smiley’s narrative web snares almost every major postwar social change, and inevitably there are some generic touches: One member of the third generation is killed in Vietnam, another gets involved with Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. Such boilerplate is generally redeemed with nicely specific details, as when Andy imagines the impending nuclear apocalypse to be something like the Ragnarök envisioned by her Norse forebears. Each of the large cast of characters has sharply individualized traits, and though we’re seldom emotionally wrapped up in their experiences—Smiley has never been the warmest of writers—they are unfailingly interesting. The surprise 1986 appearance of a hitherto unsuspected relative prompts a semiconfrontation between Arthur and resentful daughter Debbie that reminds us life and love are never perfect—they simply are. Sags a bit, as trilogy middle sections often do, but strong storytelling and a judicious number of loose ends will keep most readers looking forward to the promised third volume.”
“Wondrous . . . Early Warning is a good reminder that the big, juicy novel is ascendant again . . . Smiley enriches the great-events model of American history with her equal attention to cultural history, and she makes the lives of obscure women, men and children as important as the lives of Great Men . . . Like the 19th-century novels she invokes, her stories revel in coincidences, repetitions, revelations and elaborations of events and themes. The surprises are irresistible. She plucks from a crowded gathering of relatives and, one by one, develops lives that are rich, mysterious and constantly changing . . . The Midwestern intonations of Early Warning shift subtly as Smiley narrates the Langdons’ moves to the East and West coasts, their educations, their travels to Europe, their rapid ascension into wealth and the inclusion of other ethnicities and sexual preferences into their midst. As their world expands, the events becomes mesmerizing, the reading compulsive and the direct language a guard against sentimentality,” says The Washington Post.
When is it available?
Warning: Get to the Downtown Hartford Public Library early to borrow a copy of this book.
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!
Crow Fair
By Thomas McGuane
(Knopf, $25.95, 288 pages)
Who is this author?
Thomas McGuane, chronicler of the contemporary American West, lives on a ranch in Montana, and is an expert fly fisherman. He’s also an expert writer who has published 10 novels, three nonfiction books and two collections of stories. His best-known books include The Bushwacked Piano, Gallatin Canyon, Keep the Change, Ninety-two in the Shade and, Nothing but Blue Skies. He was married to actress Margo Kidder and Jimmy Buffett’s sister Laurie. According to the Barnes & Noble Review, “In the 1970s, when McGuane partied with the likes of Buffett, Peter Fonda, and Sam Peckinpah, he was nicknamed Captain Berserko. Today, at seventy-five, he looks like a cross between the World’s Greatest Grandpa and the Marlboro Man.”
What is this book about?
In his first collection in nine years, McGuane gives us 17 stories that capture life in the far West, where freedom is treasured but the constraints of modern life still pertain. Two shocked sons learn things about Mama they’d rather have never known; a dad tries to be an outdoorsman but can’t cope with dangerous weather; a guy who makes a good living inseminating cattle unwisely pursues dreams of big money; a father and son face Dad’s out of control peccadillos; two brothers-in-law find that their loony guide is leading them into the fishing trip from Hell; a couple breaks up while celebrating their 25th anniversary. Most of the stories take place in Montana and are redolent with Western flavor, but the conflicts they describe, told with McGuane’s typical droll style and dark diversions, could take place, and be just as compelling, anywhere.
Why you’ll like it:
I’ve had the pleasure of reading some of the stories in McGuane’s latest collection when they appeared in The New Yorker: I loved their wry humor, unpredictable trajectories, quirky characters and Western flair. Although he is 75, he writes with the verve of a much younger man. McGuane is one of those “national treasure” writers who help define contemporary American literature. His fans will appreciate this collection; for those unfamiliar with his work, it opens a new door to reading enjoyment.
What others are saying:
In the The New York Times Book Review, Atticus Lish writes: “McGuane—a Montana resident who in 10 novels and two previous story collections has honed a kind of bluff Western comedy of masculinity—turns muck into art, which takes wing in flights of ingenuity…Some bonds are timeless and intractable. McGuane may be unable to free himself from his family romance, but, through his obsessive struggle, the author of Crow Fair provides us with a series of imaginative escapes that are mysterious and illuminating.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like,” a woman named Morsel tells Dave, who has just driven Ray across the prairie to visit Morsel and her peculiar father. It’s one of many funny, sad, and awful, awfully human moments from McGuane’s latest story collection featuring aging cowboys, middle-aged men resistant to growing up, and the women who plague and perplex them. “Motherlode” traces the road trip to Morsel’s house from a not-so-chance encounter at a small town hotel to a scheme for selling drugs in Montana’s northern oil fields. McGuane’s Montana retains wistful and ironic echoes of the Old West. The title story recounts how two brothers handle their dying mother’s revelation of her long-ago love affair at the Crow Fair powwow/Wild West Show. With imagery as sparse and striking as the landscape, houses figure prominently. “Weight Watchers” shows a man who builds homes only for other people. The repossessed “House on Sand Creek” becomes home to a real estate lawyer, his Eastern European wife, her infant son, and Bob the babysitter. At the “Fishing Camp,” two longtime friends find their wilderness guide cannot stand being in the wilderness with men who keep arguing about the past. Among female characters, “Prairie Girl” shines as she makes her way from prostitute to bank president. A boy steals hubcaps; a shaman begs charity; a girl hikes toward the howling of wolves: McGuane’s stories highlight the detachment of young from old, husband from wife, neighbor from neighbor, the dying from life itself.”
“One of McGuane’s great gifts is the ability to elicit laughter in dark moments or to jolt the reader of an ostensibly comic tale with a knife twist of pathos or tragedy . . . the only thing [the reader] can expect is to be surprised – by McGuane’s deadpan wit, his hyperactive imagination, and his deep appreciation for the human comedy . . . [Crow Fair] serves not merely to make us gape or laugh at man’s essential weirdness but also to recognize a bit of it in ourselves,” Says Stefan Beck in The Christian Science Monitor.
In its starred review, Library Journal says: “Family ties form the focus of these turbulent stories, set mostly in Montana. The title story concerns the strained relationship of two brothers that’s exacerbated by the discovery of their saintly mother’s infidelity. “A Long View to the West” explores the highly ambivalent feelings of a son, a small-town car dealer, toward his father as he listens once again to his too-familiar stories when visiting him in the hospital. “River Camp” concerns another strained relationship, this one between lifelong friends who have booked a backwoods expedition in hopes of repairing their friendship only to find themselves in the hands of a mentally unstable guide. In “The Casserole,” a seemingly comfortable marriage unexpectedly breaks up on the couple’s 25th anniversary as they drive to her parents’ house for what is supposed to be a celebratory get-together. VERDICT Very little about the world is ever as solid as it might seem for McGuane’s solitary and troubled characters, as the foundations of their lives can give way at a moment’s notice, leaving them suddenly bereft—or with only a casserole somehow stuffed into in a lunch pail to carry them through the long ride home. A compelling, emotionally charged collection.”
Kirkus’ starred review says: “Seventeen stories, straightforward but well-crafted, that cement McGuane’s reputation as the finest short story writer of Big Sky country—and, at his best, beyond. These days, McGuane’s writing could hardly be further from the showy, overwritten prose of his breakthrough novels like Ninety-two in the Shade (1973). His sense of humor remains, but it’s wiser, more fatalistic and more Twain-like; he writes beautifully about the wilderness but always with an eye on its destructive power. As with much of his recent fiction, most of the stories here are set in Montana and turn on relationships going bust. In “Hubcaps,” a young boy observes his parents’ breakup through the filter of baseball and football games, capturing the protagonist’s slowly emerging resentment; in “Lake Story,” a man’s long-running affair with a married woman collapses during an ill-advised public outing, exposing the thinness of the connections that united them; in “Canyon Ferry,” a divorced dad’s attempt to prove his intrepidness to his young son during an ice-fishing trip pushes them to the edge of disaster during a storm. One of the best stories in the collection, “River Camp,” displays McGuane’s skill at pairing emotional turmoil with the untamed outdoors, following two brothers-in-law whose attempt to get away from it all leads them to a tour guide of questionable mental stability, bears rustling through tents and plenty of exposed raw nerves about their marriages. “Stars” tells a similar story in a more interior mode, following an astronomer who increasingly fails to contain her anger at the workaday world—McGuane skillfully depicts the small but constant ways life goes off-plumb for her—and how she fumbles toward balance in the forest. The conflicts throughout this book are age-old—indeed, the title story evokes “Oedipus”—but McGuane’s clean writing and psychological acuity enliven them all. A slyly cutting batch of tales from a contemporary master.”
When is it available?
Take a trip to Montana through this book, 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!
Happy are the Happy
by Yasmina Reza (translated by John Cullen)
Other Press, $20, 160 pages)
Who is this author?
Yasmina Reza, who lives in Paris, is a playwright, actress, screenwriter and novelist who has enjoyed both popular and critical praise for her work, which has been published in more than 30 languages. Her plays “Art” and “God of Carnage” were produced in America and Europe, and “God,” which opened on Broadway with James Gandolfini, Jeff Daniels, Marcia Gay Harden and Hope Davis , won Best Play at the 2009 Tony Awards. Her seven books include Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy. John Cullen, who lives in New York, has translated many book from their original Spanish, French, German and Italian.
What is this book about?
Eighteen characters. Twenty-one chapters. One hundred sixty pages. Yasmina Reza packs a powerful punch in this relatively short novel, whose title comes from a quote from the novelist Jorge Luis Borges: “Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy.”
The book’s interconnected vignettes, written with humor and compassion and told in the first person, introduce and connect ordinary people – insofar as French people ever can be thought of as ordinary — struggling with ordinary problems – though some are more than a little unusual, like the plight of the parents trying to hide the fact that their son suffers the delusion that he is, in fact, Celine Dion. Sacre bleu! This Gallic go-round is very merry, yet notes of poignancy underlie the cleverness and enrich the stories, the characters and the power of this slim but memorable book.
Why you’ll like it:
Reza’s background is international – her father was a Jewish Iranian of Russian descent and her mother was a Jewish Hungarian violinist – but her appeal is universal. Smart, sharp and witty, she is a keen observer of contemporary mores and obsessions, and she uses a light touch to present characters struggling with mundane concerns that carry the possibility of major upheavals in their lives. Happy indeed will be the happy readers who explore this book.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “Happy Are the Happy is another coup, a quick and delicate book that’s as funny as it is humane. Each of its short chapters…is told in the first person and concerns, for the most part, other characters in the book soon to introduce themselves if they haven’t already. Everyone gets a word in, and the style is feathery as gossip. Characters chime with one another in ways they never realize, a conviviality that is bittersweet. Their voices are self-aware, a little jaundiced, vulnerable, sometimes plaintive, and entirely authentic…Reza is attuned to intensity and banality in equal measure—how they refuse to converge at a tolerable midpoint, how infrequently people agree on which is which.
Says Publishers Weekly: “Playwright and author Reza’s newest book is a fragmented novella of vignettes, all of which function as independent short stories. Reza follows more than a dozen characters struggling with marriage and loneliness—opening with “Robert Toscano,” a hilarious study of patience and insistence revolving around a married couple in France, the Toscanos, who get into an escalating argument over cheese (he doesn’t buy the kind she likes). Reza’s askew humor pervades the book—four chapters later, we find out that the seemingly perfect Hunter family (bitterly envied by the Toscanos) has a secret: the son is not interning abroad, he is in a mental institution because he believes he is Celine Dion. Reza’s vignettes are also dark (a man’s incestuous relationship with his brother later turns him into a sexual masochist) and sardonic (a man accuses his wife of wanting to be buried together for social reasons: “My wife is counting on the grave to outfox spiteful gossips, she wants to remain a petit bourgeois even in death”). Reza’s stories build and build, creating a complicated, multifaceted world—a world that is unmistakably Reza’s.”
“The characters in these 21 brief, bittersweet and playfully interconnected stories by the French playwright Yasmina Reza hold tight to philosophies about love…[Reza] fills the stories, most of them six to eight pages long, with efficient detail, making them feel, perhaps unsurprisingly, like a series of vibrant one-acts,” says The New York Times.
The New Yorker says: “The twenty-one interconnected monologues in this meditation on parenting, death, and relations between the sexes manage to make domestic trifles seem electrifying. With implacable wit and a dramatist’s sense of timing, Reza offers snapshots from the psyches of eighteen characters, including a couple who squabble over Morbier cheese and stuffed hamsters, and a retired financier and statesman who taunts his exasperated wife with instructions for his funeral. The tone is wry, warm, and accepting.”
Library Journal’s starred review says: “This enjoyable work from France-based novelist and playwright Reza . . . concerns happiness in one’s personal life, with spouse, children, parents, and friends. The first chapter sets a humorous tone as Odile and Robert go shopping for cheese in a crowded supermarket, arguing over Morbier and the junk food Odile has placed in the cart for their children. A few of the characters in other chapters are definitely quirky: a man playing cards with his wife gets so agitated that he eats the king of clubs, for instance, while another sincerely believes he is Celine Dion. With sharp insight, Reza quickly penetrates the thoughts and actions of the characters to reveal just how happy (or not) they really are. VERDICT Winner of the Le Monde Prix Littéraire française 2013, this charming novel will make all Francophiles want to move to France immediately. What a delightful, witty slice of life!”
When is it available?
Happily, this book is available at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Dwight and Mark 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!
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