The Harder They Come: A Novel
By T. C. Boyle
(Ecco, $27.99, 400 pages)
Who is this author?
First, let’s get the name right, if we can: He was born Thomas John Boyle in 1948 and is known as Tom (or just T.) Coraghessan Boyle and T.C. Boyle. An author who has published 14 novels and 10 collections, comprising more than 100 stories, Boyle has won several major literary awards, as well as a devoted audience. He also is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara, Calif.
What is this book about?
Three complex characters collide in this thriller set in contemporary times. They are Sten, a father in his 70s who was a Marine in Vietnam and later a high school principal and becomes a hero for killing a thief in Costa Rico while on a trip; his schizophrenic son Adam, who identifies with Lewis and Clark guide John Colter, and Adam’s lover Sara, an older woman deeply involved in the survivalist and ultra-rightwing sovereign citizen movement. As the three Californians’ lives grow more entangled, they spiral into violence fueled by their various political and personal obsessions. This is an unflinching look at right-wing paranoia, violence, the American myth of the West and the desire for freedom at any cost: all topics increasingly in the news and in our communities.
Why you’ll like it:
Boyle is a masterful writer who creates hard-to-forget characters and is drawn to stories of man vs. nature and man vs. his own imperfect nature.
The Barnes & Noble Review describes him well: “Practically from the start of his fiction career in 1980, T. Coraghessan Boyle has been an outlier in American letters — not so much its Bad Boy or Angry Young Man as its Weird Uncle, spinning tales of pot growers and communes and survivalists and man-chimpanzee bonding at a nearly Oatesian pace. Like another California-based Weird Uncle, William T. Vollmann, he’s long written about the ways mankind’s feral instincts collide with the hubristic urge to bring nature to heel. Unlike Vollmann, though, Boyle has stuck exclusively with fiction — the long list of titles in the front matter of The Harder They Come includes no reportage. He’s remarkably determined to use the tools of imagination alone to critique postlapsarian humanity in its untamed — and often absurd — state. This frees him to be wild himself, though in this case his free-range instinct has its imperfections.”
What others are saying:
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes: “. . . stunning…The Harder They Come…is very much a showcase for all of Mr. Boyle’s storytelling talents. It’s gripping, funny and melancholy, and opens out from the miseries of a father and his troubled son into a resonant meditation on the American frontier ethos and propensity for violence—a dramatic novelistic rendering, in many ways, of the scholar Richard Slotkin’s pioneering studies on the mythology of the American West…From the novel’s thrilling set piece of a start…to its pensive conclusion, The Harder They Come is a masterly—and arresting—piece of storytelling, arguably Mr. Boyle’s most powerful, kinetic novel yet. “
The New York Times Book Review says: “The Harder They Come…takes on the paranoia of the far-right sovereign citizen movement and off-the-grid/mountain-man survivalism, as well as more mainstream American notions of independence. This could easily have been an opportunity for a writer of Boyle’s comic gifts to go full-tilt satirical, but Boyle takes a darker and more restrained approach. He has written a compelling, complex and intimate novel about three particular people in a specific time and place, a novel that tells us something unnerving about certain precincts of the American Now.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Boyle’s hypnotic narrative probes the complexities of heroism, violence, power, and resistance. At its heart are ex-Marine and retired school principal “Sten” Stensen and his schizophrenic son, Adam, who arms himself against shadowy “hostiles” and identifies with heroic 19th-century wilderness guide John Colter. On vacation in Costa Rica, Sten kills a gunman attempting to rob his tour group. Back home in Mendocino, Calif., he becomes an instant celebrity for his act of vigilante justice, and he is drawn into a citizen brigade whose mission is to protect nearby forests from the South American drug cartels that despoil the land. Meanwhile, Adam forms a tenuous, lust-fueled bond with anti-government activist Sara Jennings. Driven further into delusion by her brushes with the law and his physical confrontation with his father, Adam flees for his secret camp in the woods; when one of the citizen patrollers challenges him, Adam shoots that man, and soon another. As the manhunt intensifies, Sten realizes his son’s involvement and his own inability to change his son’s fate. Written with both clarity and compassion, each of the novel’s characters inhabits a rich and convincing private world. As they traverse a landscape none of them control, their haunting stories illuminate the violent American battle with otherness. “
Library Journal’s starred review says: “An elderly California couple’s vacation cruise is turned upside down when bandits attack their party at a Central American nature preserve. Former high school principal and Vietnam vet Sten Stensen reacts with unexpected fury when an armed thief approaches him, strangling him to death. While viewed as a hero back home, Sten’s disturbed by the violence that’s visited his life and will deal with more as the mental state of his emotionally troubled adult son, Adam, grows worse. A paranoid survivalist who fashions himself after 19th-century mountain man John Colter, Adam has taken up with another disquieted soul, Sara, a local farrier and proponent of radical right-wing ideas. A fight with his parents after they sell his late grandmother’s cabin, where he has been living, sends him spiraling downward. He retreats to a deep-woods bunker with his weapons where his shooting of a perceived “alien” will set off a massive manhunt. VERDICT Inspired by a true story (and also echoing recent events in Pennsylvania), Boyle tellingly explores the anger, paranoia, and violence lurking in the shadowlands of the American psyche. A powerful and profoundly unsettling tale.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “Violence corrodes the ideal of freedom in an ambitious novel that aims to illuminate the dark underbelly of the American dream. In the prolific Boyle’s latest, the estrangement between a father and son provides the plot’s pivot. The father is 70-year-old Sten Stensen, a Vietnam Marine vet and later a high school principal, whose military training comes in handy when he’s among a group ambushed during a cruise. Three armed robbers threaten the group, and Sten kills one of them. He initially fears he might face criminal prosecution in Central America but subsequently finds himself hailed as a hero. In his mind, “He’d done what anybody would have done, anybody who wasn’t a natural-born victim, anyway.” There’s a hint of xenophobia in his attitude, a dismissal of a foreign culture where life is cheap and values ambiguous and where expediency has him cooperating with officials who let him know he has done them a favor. Sten has never been a hero to his son, Adam, a troubled youth since his days in his dad’s high school, now a self-styled mountain man on the outskirts of Fort Bragg, California. In Adam, Sten sees the chickens coming home to roost, the propensity for violence that they share twisted by drugs and paranoia. Adam has become involved with a right-wing anarchist 15 years his senior, who seems to be in the novel mainly to distinguish her misguided politics from his insanity. And even Adam and Sten function more as types and symbols than individuals, though Boyle remains a master at sustaining narrative momentum as the sense of foreboding darkens and deepens. Boyle’s vision and ambition remain compelling, though his characters here seem like plot devices.”
When is it available?
This engrossing novel 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!
Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History
By Arlene Alda
(Holt, $28, 336 pages)
Who is this author?
We all know Alan Alda, a terrific actor with many fine movies and TV appearances to his credit. But how many of us are aware that his wife, Arlene, (nee Arlene Weiss, of the Bronx) is a gifted musician and a very successful photographer and author of books for kids and adults? Arlene Alda was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Hunter College, earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study clarinet in Germany and was a clarinetist in the Houston Symphony, under Leopold Stokowski, before marrying Alan. She went on to become adept at photography and writing and has published 19 books, among them bestselling, award-winning children’s titles.
What is this book about?
Alda’s latest book is about childhood but is for adults. It is a collection of oral histories about growing up in the famous borough of New York City, a book in which well-known people in the arts, business, science and more share their memories of how its culture affected them then and now. Their stories recall life there from the 1920s to 1990s, and among the 60 men and women sharing them are scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson; Millard “Mickey” Dressler, CEO of J. Crew; rock singer Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts; hip-hop Grandmaster Melle Mel, Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell and Mary Higgins Clark. Nuns, cops, athletes and artists, entrepreneurs and more look back with affection and pride at their youth and the unique place that encouraged them to pursue – and often realize – their dreams.
Why you’ll like it:
If the words “oral history” sound forbiddingly academic, then call these reminiscences family stories instead. Alda re-creates a wonderful slice of urban 20th century Americana here and has chosen an impressive line-up of speakers who invoke the recent, but rapidly receding past. Whether you grew up in the Bronx or not, you will relate to the era she has captured, and you will be fascinated by the personal tales Alda and her participants tell. This is a warm and engaging book that has tremendous appeal.
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “Short essays connected by a common thread: a childhood spent in the Bronx. Through the voices of more than 60 interviewees, Alda presents a kaleidoscope of images from these vignettes of life in the New York borough. The pieces span from the late 1920s to the early 1990s and capture the evolution of a neighborhood. Since the Bronx was originally settled primarily by Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants, the initial stories are rich with details about life during the Depression and World War II and its aftermath. Then the narrative gradually shifts with the progression of time to personal reflections from newer arrivals comprised of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. These short slices of life offer intimate glimpses into the childhood memories of well-known people such as Colin Powell, Milton Glaser, Abe Rosenthal and Al Pacino. Whether it was the women’s changing room at Loehmann’s department store, riding a bike to Pelham Bay Park or running to an apartment block to fetch someone for a telephone call at the corner store, living in the Bronx made an impression on all of them as they worked their way up the American dream ladder to become productive and prosperous members of society. Amar Ramasar, principal dancer for the New York City Ballet, sums up the essence of these narratives, writing, “Manhattan wasn’t home until recently, when I moved there. It was always associated with work and studying, but the Bronx is different. It was, and I think always will be, home, comfort, love.” Other contributors include Carl Reiner, Regis Philbin, Dava Sobel, Maira Kalman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bobby Bonilla. Entertaining and informative; cherished memories from a diverse group from the Bronx.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Alda has compiled a fabulous collection of 65 brief oral histories from a wide range of people who began their lives in the Bronx. The assortment of childhood memories begin as far back as the 1920s, move through the 1940s and 1950s, and end with those born in the late 1980s. Contributors include Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, and—among younger names—dancer Amar Ramasar and Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. While the borough’s underdog status is acknowledged (Odgen Nash’s “The Bronx? No Thonx?” gets quoted), the general tenor is fond and wistful. Mary Higgins Clark sets the tone by dubbing the area one of “only three places in the world that have a ‘the’ in front of their names: the Vatican, The Hague, and the Bronx.” Stories often recall the mundane: stickball in the streets, trying to get “home before dark,” the unforgettable smell of bakeries and delis. Al Pacino recalls teachers who changed his life, and an urban planner remembers his mother drilling him on the subway system before sending him off alone at age 9. There are few readers who won’t be touched by this affectionate look backward, which is as much about the universal state of childhood as the specific borough of the Bronx.”
President Bill Clinton says: “Arlene Alda must be a great listener because all kinds of amazing people tell her remarkable things in Just Kids from the Bronx. No matter where you grew up, you’ll find this a down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled.”
The New York Times says: “More than 60 evocative oral histories . . . Just look at the angelic faces captured in the photographs that accompany each of the essays and ponder the question she [Arlene Alda] poses: ‘How did they find a place for themselves?’”
“In these funny, intelligent, generous-spirited reminiscences, an extremely diverse group of Bronxites pay tribute to the borough where they were raised. Many of these are rags-to-riches impresarios whose riches are better known than their rags. Here, they give voice to the place that made them and in doing so, they make you fall in love with the Bronx, and with the resilience and moxie it seems to have bred in its sons and daughters. This is an enchanting collection,” says bestselling and National Book Award-winning author Andrew Solomon.
When is it available?
You can visit the Bronx by borrowing 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!
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids
Edited by Meghan Daum
(Picador, $26, 288 pages)
Who is this author?
Meghan Daum knows her way around the persuasive essay. Daum, who lives in Los Angeles, has been an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for about 10 years and has contributed to The New Yorker, Harper’s, Elle, and Vogue, among others. She also has published four books: The Unspeakable…And Other Subjects of Discussion: the essay collection My Misspent Youth, the novel The Quality of Life Report, and the memoir Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House.
What is this book about?
You have only to look around you, at your relatives, co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances, to realize that there are many people who never should have had kids, or are happy being childless (or certainly would be, if their lives had turned out that way). Nevertheless, it still takes guts in our child-centric society, to come out of the nursery closet and announce to the world that being a parent is so not you. Here, 13 women and three men, including Lionel Shriver, Sigrid Nunez, Kate Christensen, Elliott Holt, Geoff Dyer and Tim Kreider, do just that, in well-reasoned, heartfelt essays that say the way to have it all, for them anyway, is to NOT have it all. Now that LGBT people and atheists are speaking up and out, there is less and less reason for the committedly child-free to pretend they are unhappy with their state. Daum’s provocative compilation has done a service by giving them a national voice.
Why you’ll like it:
You may love your kids above life itself, but in your heart you know that parenthood is not for everyone (and sadly, the children of those who would have preferred being “childless by choice” would agree). Here are 16 voices explaining why they made that choice, an admission that still takes bravery to make. You may not come away agreeing with them, but you certainly will understand their side of the argument.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “Contrary to the title, none of the 16 essays in this absorbing collection reflect particularly selfish or shallow motivations for childlessness. As Daum points out in her introduction, she and the other writers surveyed here “are neither hedonists nor ascetics,” nor “do we hate children.” Some entries are heart-wrenching—especially Elliott Holt’s “Just an Aunt”—while others are downright hilarious. Geoff Dyer announces that he’s “had only two ambitions in life: to put on weight (it’s not going to happen) and never to have children (which, so far, I’ve achieved).” He pegs the latter goal in part to his reaction to the argument that having children gives life meaning, which rests on an assumption he doesn’t share: “that life needs a meaning or purpose!” In one of the more rigorous and thoughtful essays, Laura Kipnis deftly argues that the so-called maternal instinct is really a “socially organized choice masquerading as a natural one.” Pam Houston questions the familiar social message that encourages women to “have it all” by juggling motherhood and a fulfilling career. Elegantly giving voice to her childlessness, she observes that “love, like selfishness and generosity, is not exclusive to one demographic; it infuses every single thing we do and are.”
“A taboo will linger until someone writes lyrically enough to destroy it. Here, sixteen writers finally say what women are never supposed to but what we all know is true: pregnancy seems terrifying, birth even more so, baby lust passes, and, just as with men, work, creativity, and love affairs can crowd out everything else. Also, who really cares about getting a Mother’s Day card? My three children are of course perfect in every way and yet, the longer I am a mother, the more it’s obvious to me that it’s not for everyone. Any woman who shares that instinct: Ignore your grandmother. Read this instead,” says author and journalist Hanna Rosin.
“To her illustrious list of literary accomplishments, Meghan Daum must now add brilliant anthology editor. In this thoughtful, hilarious, gorgeously written collection of original essays by anything-but-the-usual-suspects, Daum has taken a taboo subject and turned it inside out so that we see the seams, the stitching, and the bloody guts of one of the most personal and complex decisions any of us can ever make. This is a wonderful book,” says Connecticut author Dani Shapiro.
Library Journal says: “Author and columnist Daum wrote a lengthy piece about choosing not to procreate, which was published in the New Yorker in 2014; she then reached out to 16 of her fellow childless (or child-free) writers. In what occasionally feels like a bi-coastal support group, 13 women and three men discuss their feelings and experiences. The essayists all appear to come from the educated, if not the upper-middle and middle classes. Almost all of the writers go to great lengths to say that they like kids and often enjoy their company more than that of the parents (a hilarious exception is Geoff Dyer’s class-warfare screed against the hyperprivileged kids in his neighborhood). Many of the women discuss proudly their abortions; several mourn their miscarriages. Of note is “Antimom,” Lionel Shriver’s rumination on how the “be-here-now” lifestyle could change the racial makeup of the Western world, Laura Kipnis’s and Anna Holmes’s takedowns of competitive mothering, and Sigrid Nunez’s recounting of never feeling safe as a child. Many themes are repeated, such as the conviction that one cannot have it all—motherhood and a fabulous career. The men’s contributions seem tacked on and perhaps beyond the scope of this volume, and one wonders if this collection would have been better as a TED panel discussion. VERDICT For libraries with feminist collections, for fans of the featured essayists, and for those who are considering a child-free life. The questions and answers presented here are sure to stimulate discussion and debate.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “Daum compiles essays from a group of noted writers—including Kate Christensen, Geoff Dyer and Lionel Shriver—holding forth on the topic of deliberate childlessness. The quality of the writing is uniformly high, but read as a whole, the pieces become repetitive and bleed into one another as the same notes are sounded over and over again. One prevalent theme concerns the oppressive conventional wisdom that holds parenting as life’s most profound and worthy calling and the stigma attached to those who choose to forgo children in the interest of other pursuits. Other recurring motifs include the incomprehension of others regarding the writers’ choices, the artistic sacrifices necessary for conscientious parenting, resentment of the physical demands of pregnancy and childbirth, frustration over prescriptive gender roles and the self-annihilation associated with domestic responsibilities. Thirteen of Daum’s contributors are women, and three are men, but the perspectives and insights offered by all of the authors remain more or less uniform. A few of the essays touch on childhood abuse perpetrated by parents as a deterrent to procreation, but the majority cite a dedication to the writing life—and the profound disruption to that path that having children promises—as a primary motivator in remaining child-free. Regret over the decision to not have children is notably absent from the book; the authors here largely profess a sense of satisfaction and relief about the choices they have made. . . . A courageous defense of childlessness and a necessary corrective to the Cult of Mommy, but Daum’s collection could have benefitted from a more diverse pool of contributors and a fuller consideration of contrary opinions.”
When is it available?
It’s on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Blue Hills 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!
The Marauders
By Tom Cooper
(Crown/Archetype, $26, 320 pages)
Who is this author?
Unless you are a faithful reader of short stories in small literary magazines, you’ve likely never heard of Tom Cooper. Until now. Cooper has published his first novel, and The Marauders ought to propel him into the literary limelight. Born in Fort Lauderdale and transplanted to New Orleans, where he teaches and writes, Cooper is gathering high praise for his noir-on-the-bayou adventure novel, and he is working on other novels and TV screenplays. Fans of The Marauders, of which I am one, are looking forward to whatever Cooper does next.
What is this book about?
The tiny town of Jeannette, LA, was never paradise, but this bayou hamlet offered a living to a scruffy, tough and generally eccentric band of shrimpers. Then came disaster, not only in the form of Hurricane Katrina, but also the ecology-destroying BP oil spill. That was enough to tip precarious lives into total disarray, as Tom Cooper so brilliantly describes here. The story opens with Lindquist, a one-armed shrimper and full-time drunk who has managed to mislay his custom-made artificial limb, just as you might lose your wallet. Lindquist makes his living netting shrimp, but his passionate obsession is treasure-hunting: specifically, seeking the loot rumored to be buried on a bayou island by famed French pirate Jean Lafitte. Orbiting the half-crazy Lindquist are other piquant characters: the rattlesnake-mean, psychopathic, pot-growing Toup twins; a gruff and stubborn shrimper whose sweet son wants to build his own boat and blames his dad for his mother’s death during Katrina; a weasel-y BP operative whose job it is to persuade the locals to accept a measly settlement for their oil-spill losses; and two jailhouse losers and dedicated stoners who get mixed up in everybody’s business. This is a character-driven novel, and with characters like these, that’s the only way to go.
Why you’ll like it:
More fun than a barrel of alligators, and just as menacing, this is a vibrant first novel that leaves you wanting more. The characters are piquant, pungent or whatever adjective meaning highly spicy you choose; the dialogue is, too. Though the plot occasionally becomes as murky as swamp water, it does not spoil the enjoyment. But it’s not all laughs: Cooper writes so vividly you can smell the oily environmental devastation and feel mightily for the plight of the characters who are drowning, in every sense, in circumstances they did not create and cannot control. While its humor is to be treasured, the anger buried beneath The Marauders gives it weight and makes it a cautionary tale for our times.
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews gives it a star and says: “Rumors of lost pirate treasure in the Gulf of Mexico drive hard men mad in the sweaty, desperate days after the BP oil spill. This is one hell of a debut novel. Cooper combines the rough-hewn but poetic style favored by writers like Charles Willeford with the kinds of miscreants so beloved by Elmore Leonard, all operating in the tumultuous modern-day disaster that is New Orleans. Our chief troublemaker is old Gus Lindquist, a one-armed drunk who believes that a hard-to-find island off the coast still holds the buried doubloons of French pirate Jean Lafitte. He hires Wes Trench, the troubled teenage son of a local shrimper, to accompany him on his so-called adventure to find the loot. Unfortunately, the site in Louisiana’s Barataria region is also home to a patch of particularly potent weed farmed by Reginald and Victor Toup, two dangerous scumbags who think up stunts like delivering an alligator to Lindquist’s bedroom in an attempt to scare him off. Other comic moments come from the efforts of slick BP representative Brady Grimes to convince the hardheaded and suspicious locals to take a paltry, token payment over the massive settlement everyone knows is coming. Lastly, Cooper throws in a pair of wild cards in Nate Cosgrove and John Henry Hanson, unlikely allies who meet on a road crew while serving out their community-service sentences. When Cosgrove and Hanson decide the Toup brothers’ ganja is worth ripping off, it all comes boiling over in a conflict not everyone will survive. With crisp, noir-inspired writing and a firmly believable setting, Cooper has written an engaging homage to classic crime writing that still finds things to say about the desperate days we live through now. Somewhere, Donald E. Westlake, John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard are smiling down on this nasty, funny piece of work.”
The Barnes & Noble Review says: “This sounds like a Carl Hiaasen caper, but The Marauders, with all its humor and snap, is also a subtle elegy: for the Barataria, a fragile Louisiana waterland, and for the working lives of its ornery inhabitants. Not that Cooper romanticizes either one. “By forty, they were drinking whiskey every night to keep the pain at bay,” Wes knows, “scoring Oxycontins from their doctors and friends just to make it through another day of trawling.” In a series of alternating chapters so compressed and finely drawn that any one could be a short story, (Cooper’s first discipline), each skewed character and gimcrack dive emerges with the tactile clarity we expect from Elmore Leonard or Annie Proulx. We can picture the shrimp buyer’s teeth, ” . . . fake and over-large and country-club white,” and the sheriff settling his hat ” . . . on top of his mastiff head”; the motel room whose ” . . . cinder-block walls were painted shiny beige with hardened drips like veins” and the roadhouse vibrating with “the mortar fire of music in the bar.”
Publishers Weekly says: “Cooper conjures all the complexities of post-Katrina, post–Deepwater Horizon bayou life in his first novel, a noirish crime story with a sense of humor set on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Each of the memorable main characters is introduced by a short chapter bearing his—or, in the case of the sinister marijuana-growing Toup Brothers, their—name. The shifting perspective keeps things moving along as we move deeper into the muck. Wes Trench ponders whether there’s a future in shrimping when the hauls are getting smaller and smaller, and Bayou men like his father are broken down by the time they reach 40. There’s Lindquist, a one-armed shrimper who’s searching for the fabled treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte in the bay with his metal detector, and whom nobody takes seriously. Then there’s Cosgrove and Hanson, a couple of small-time cons, and Grimes, a BP lawyer poking around the Barataria region, asking the old-timers to sign away their claims. Add in some alligators, body parts, and hidden treasure, and this mélange begins to thicken into a roiling gumbo. Cooper’s novel is a blast; descriptions of the natural beauty of the cypress swamps and waterways, along with the hardscrabble ways of its singular inhabitants, further elevate this story.”
“Sad, grotesque, hilarious, breathtaking…stands with ease among the work of such stylistic predecessors as Twain, Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard. One thing that gives “The Marauders” its own clear hallmark is its quicksilver prose. The book’s other standout aspect is how it demands and earns sympathy for all but its most evil characters and for the fate-blasted but nature-blessed locale they inhabit. You might not want to retire there, but you’ll savor this visit,” says The Wall Street Journal.
“Tom Cooper has Louisiana dead to rights. Every aspect. Jeanette, the sleepy bayou town ravaged by man and nature alike, is rendered in Technicolor detail. Its residents, lifers and visitors alike, leap from the pages. The story rolls like a tide, handling triumph and tragedy alike with a dark, mischievous humor that Cooper wields expertly…There’s more than a hint of the Southern gothic here, more than a little Flannery O’Connor…It’s easy to forget this is his first novel. Some books require boxes of tissues. This one requires an, as Cooper writes, “an ass-pocket whiskey bottle.” Get you a drink and get comfortable. You won’t be moving until you hit the last page,” says The Advocate.
“A debut novel that does nothing in half measures. It isn’t afraid to take risks, dabble in darkness and skirt the edge of ruin, and this is what makes it such an exciting read…The Marauders takes readers on a rollicking adventure deep into the heart of Louisiana’s marshes as well as some of the darkest corners of the human psyche…The plot is brisk, the characters are captivating and the writing is lush and striking. Cooper’s writing is the kind a reader can happily get lost in, and his depictions of the Deep South are so evocative that if he ever gets tired of fiction, he might give travel writing a try. But The Marauders is such an impressive offering from an audacious new voice in fiction that one can only hope it is but the first of many. As far as bibliophilic treasure hunts go, this one is literary gold,” says Bookpage.
When is it available?
This adventure tale is waiting for you 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!
The Dream Lover
By Elizabeth Berg
(Random House, $28, 368 pages)
Who is this author?
With a long list of bestselling novels to her credit, Elizabeth Berg has established herself as one of today’s most successful authors. Her novels include Talk Before Sleep, Tapestry of Fortunes, The Last Time I Saw You, Home Safe, The Year of Pleasures, and Dream When You’re Feeling Blue, Open House (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), Durable Goods and Joy School (ALA Best Books of the Year), and The Pull of the Moon was adapted as a play. In addition, she has published two collections of short stories and two works of nonfiction. Berg has homes in Chicago and San Francisco.
What is this book about?
Nineteenth century French novelist George Sand, as we know or should know, was not a male writer. Sand was the pen name of Aurore Dupin, a powerful author who was as unlucky at love as she was successful in writing. Unafraid of living an unconventional life, and undaunted by those who called it scandalous, she had many lovers and friends include Frédéric Chopin, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Liszt, Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, Marie Dorval, and Alfred de Musset and she herself became a Paris luminary in her time. Ivan Turgenev said of Sand: “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman.”
Why you’ll like it:
Elizabeth Berg was once a nurse, and her innate understanding of the human heart and its hurts underlies her many bestselling novels, which include Talk Before Sleep, in my opinion one of the most astute descriptions of women’s friendships ever published. In Dream Lover, Berg uses her insights to explores a woman who was a rarity in her time: she achieved professional fame, publishing nine novels, plays, essays, literary criticism and more; yet she suffered personal heartbreak. Berg captures her contradictions and complexities in this deeply researched and well-written biographical novel.
What others are saying:
Library Journal’s starred review says: “George Sand, born Aurore Dupin in 1804 to a courtesan and a descendant of Polish royalty who was a distinguished military officer in France, is often reduced to the bullet points of her life: she was a prodigious writer who dressed in men’s clothing and smoked cigars in public, a friend and/or lover to much of the A-list of 19th-century European culture (Frédéric Chopin, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Liszt), and a divorcée who had troubled relationships with her mother, grandmother, and children. Berg’s years-long immersion in the writings of and about Sand has resulted in a remarkable channeling of Sand’s voice that imagines the contradictory strands of her nature. Among these themes are her fierce independence, so contrary to her endless impetuous romantic entanglements, which quickly devolve into difficult morasses. Sand’s endless struggles to be a good parent were compromised by her unsettled travels; all of these issues were driven by her intense need to write. VERDICT Years ago, Berg urged Nancy Horan (Loving Frank) to write a fictional biography of Sand. Horan told Berg to write it herself. Wisely, Berg took her advice to heart, as evidenced by this beautiful, imaginative re-creation of a brilliant, complicated writer, feminist, romantic, and activist.”
Kirkus Review says: “Best-selling author Berg turns her attention to the life of French writer George Sand with this vivid historical novel. The book begins twice: It’s 1831, and Aurore Dupin, a free-spirited young woman, is leaving her loveless marriage in the French countryside for a creative, bohemian life in Paris—the life that will lead her to become literary icon George Sand. Then time whips backward: It’s 1804, and the scene is Aurore’s birth. Her mother is fiery, passionate, low-born and beautiful; her father is handsome, musical, charming, a military star. And so Berg sets off on a project that’s part biography, part George Sand fantasy, alternating between scenes from Aurore’s fairy-tale childhood and tales of her adult affairs—her brilliant career, her difficult family life, her struggles with femininity and the limitations of femaleness, her complicated sexuality, and, above all, her many, many whirlwind romances. “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved,” Sand once wrote, and it is that quest that becomes the focal point of Berg’s novel: We follow Aurore in and out of her loveless marriage, through passionate relationships and bright-burning assignations, many of them with historical characters famous in their own rights. Her work, we are told, comes easily and brilliantly and is met with perpetual praise and complete success; her politics are progressive and generally to be admired. A more nuanced exploration of her professional and political life might have brought Berg’s Sand necessary humanity and texture, providing both a foil and a context for her love affairs. As it is, though, Aurore—for all that she’s intoxicating, beautiful, gifted, desirous, unconventional and heartbroken—never quite becomes human. She remains mythlike, and we remain one step removed. A thoroughly pleasant escape, if not a particularly deep one.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Berg’s latest novel is about the iconoclastic French writer born as Aurore Dupin but better known as George Sand. The story begins in 1831, when Aurore leaves her loveless marriage for a bohemian life in Paris. Born to an aristocratic soldier and a courtesan, Aurore’s upbringing is shaped by her father’s untimely death and her mother’s unpredictability. Craving love and reveling in the natural beauty of the family estate at Nohant, she finds that conventional marriage stifles her soul. Though it means financial uncertainty and separation from her two children, the move to Paris lets her authentic, creative, androgynous self emerge. Notoriety, bestsellerdom, and a place in glittering literary, political, and artistic circles follow; though she has relationships with myriad men, including Frédéric Chopin, Berg suggests that it was a woman, the actress Marie Dorval, who most deeply captured her heart. In its attempt to capture Sand’s entire eventful life, the novel can get overly expository. In the smaller, more intimate moments—the kind that helped make her previous books so successful—Berg offers vivid, sensual detail and a sensitive portrayal of the yearning and vulnerability behind Sand’s bold persona.”
“The Dream Lover is the dream match of writer to subject, Elizabeth Berg animating George Sand so vividly that you feel the Frenchwoman speaking directly to you. Infamous for her eccentricities and her passions, Sand is shown to be a touching figure, a woman needing to love and be loved, a writer needing to be read and understood. Bravo to Berg for pushing aside decades and decades of misunderstanding to reveal so compelling a story, and so human a heart,” says author Robin Black.
When is it available?
This novel about a remarkable woman and author 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!
The Sellout
By Paul Beatty
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
Paul Beatty was a poet back in 1990, when he became the first Grand Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Café, which got him a book deal for his first poetry collection. He went on to publish a second collection and three novels — Slumberland, Tuff and The White Boy Shuffle—before his latest, The Sellout, which is garnering raves. His biting humor, which demolishes racial stereotypes and stereotypical thinking about race, is earning him comparisons to the great black standup satirists of our time, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle.
What is this book about?
The surest way to kill a joke is to dissect it, but here goes: This novel, set in a fictional area on the edge of southern Los Angeles, is about a farmer who grows artisanal watermelons and marijuana (one type is called Anglophobia) and for complicated reasons, attempts to bring back slavery and a segregated school. Raised by an unhinged sociologist who carries out weird psychological experiments on the boy and is later killed by police during a routine traffic stop (dark humor that is not so funny today, in light of Ferguson and Baltimore), the son inherits Dad’s penchant for crazy social science experiments and somehow winds up “owning” elderly Hominy Jenkins, a fictional character who claims to have understudied Buckwheat on The Little Rascals and insists on becoming the young farmer’s slave. One of Hominy’s show biz insights: “You know, massa, Bugs Bunny wasn’t nothing but Br’er Rabbit with a better agent.” The farmer winds up explaining things to the Supreme Court, and readers wind up with a supremely funny and biting novel.
Why you’ll like it:
Anyone who can write the way Pryor, Rock and Chapelle can (or could) riff deserves your attention. At this moment in American history, when the country is inflamed by the killing of unarmed black men by white police, leading to riots, looting and an outpouring of gassy pontificating by pundits of the right and the left, it is refreshing, if somewhat alarming, to read a book that manages to speak clearly about racism yet still makes the story at hand hilarious.
Here is some of what Dwight Garner said about Beatty’s book in The New York Times: “Broad satirical vistas are not so hard for a novelist to sketch. What’s hard is the close-up work, the bolt-by-bolt driving home of your thoughts and your sensibility. This is where Mr. Beatty shines.
Almost the entirety of black American culture and stereotypes are carved up under this novel’s microscope: Tiger Woods, Clarence Thomas (given a memorable line), Oreo cookies, fairy tales (“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your weave!”), Bill Cosby, cotton picking, penis size, Saturday morning cartoons, George Washington Carver, lawn jockeys, Mike Tyson. The “do-gooder condescension” of Dave Eggers comes in for a hazing. The American liberal agenda is folded into origami.”
What others are saying:
In its starred review, Kirkus says: “The provocative author of The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Slumberland (2008) is back with his most penetratingly satirical novel yet. Beatty has never been afraid to stir the pot when it comes to racial and socioeconomic issues, and his latest is no different. In fact, this novel is his most incendiary, and readers unprepared for streams of racial slurs (and hilarious vignettes about nearly every black stereotype imaginable) in the service of satire should take a pass. The protagonist lives in Dickens, “a ghetto community” in Los Angeles, and works the land in an area called “The Farms,” where he grows vegetables, raises small livestock and smokes a ton of “good weed.” After being raised by a controversial sociologist father who subjected him to all manner of psychological and social experiments, the narrator is both intellectually gifted and extremely street-wise. When Dickens is removed from the map of California, he goes on a quest to have it reinstated with the help of Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, who hangs around the neighborhood regaling everyone with tales of the ridiculously racist skits he used to perform with the rest of the gang. It’s clear that Hominy has more than a few screws loose, and he volunteers to serve as the narrator’s slave—yes, slave—on his journey. Another part of the narrator’s plan involves segregating the local school so that it allows only black, Latino and other nonwhite students. Eventually, he faces criminal charges and appears in front of the Supreme Court in what becomes “the latest in a long line of landmark race-related cases.” Readers turned off by excessive use of the N-word or those who are easily offended by stereotypes may find the book tough going, but fans of satire and blatantly honest—and often laugh-out-loud funny—discussions of race and class will be rewarded on each page. Beatty never backs down, and readers are the beneficiaries. Another daring, razor-sharp novel from a writer with talent to burn.”
The Barnes & Noble Review says: “The Sellout is narrated by a young black man who owns a slave, albeit entirely against his will; who reestablishes segregation in his Los Angeles ‘hood; and who uses the word nigger, both in his exposition and in his own speech, with a frequency that must match or exceed Twain’s in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (I didn’t keep count, but my money is on “exceed.”) Its repertoire of racial stereotypes is so exhaustive that some readers may not even recognize or understand all of them, and others may not want to admit they do.
So, graduates of Sensitivity Training are forewarned: This is an offensive book. It is also a timely, phantasmagoric, and deliriously funny look at American race relations in the twenty-first century. As a starting point for that “national conversation on race” Americans keep meaning to have, The Sellout is perhaps an unlikely candidate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an ideal one.”
The New York Times review by Dwight Garner also says: “The first 100 pages of…The Sellout are the most caustic and the most badass first 100 pages of an American novel I’ve read in at least a decade. I gave up underlining the killer bits because my arm began to hurt. “Badass” is not the most precise critical term. What I mean is that the first third of The Sellout reads like the most concussive monologues and interviews of Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle wrapped in a satirical yet surprisingly delicate literary and historical sensibility. Mr. Beatty impastos every line, in ways that recall writers like Ishmael Reed, with shifting densities of racial and political meaning. The jokes come up through your spleen…Broad satirical vistas are not so hard for a novelist to sketch. What’s hard is the close-up work, the bolt-by-bolt driving home of your thoughts and your sensibility…in this landmark and deeply aware comic novel.
In The New York Times Book Review, Kevin Young writes: “I thought often of the 1990s appointment TV In Living Color when reading the novel; Beatty takes the same delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you…From its title on, The Sellout so clearly and gleefully means to offend that any offense taken suggests we aren’t as comfortable with race or ourselves as we wish to be…Beatty’s novel breaks open the private jokes and secrets of blackness…in a way that feels powerful and profane and that manages not to be escapist.
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Beatty’s satirical latest, biting look at racism in modern America. At the novel’s opening, its narrator, a black farmer whose last name is Me, has been hauled before the Supreme Court for keeping a slave and reinstituting racial segregation in Dickens, an inner-city neighborhood in Los Angeles inexplicably zoned for agrarian use. When Dickens is erased from the map by gentrification, Me hatches a modest proposal to bring it back by segregating the local school. While his logic may be skewed, there is a perverse method in his madness; he is aided by Hominy, a former child star from The Little Rascals, who insists that Me take him as his slave. Beatty gleefully catalogues offensive racial stereotypes but also reaches further, questioning what exactly constitutes black identity in America. Wildly funny but deadly serious, Beatty’s caper is populated by outrageous caricatures, and its damning social critique carries the day.”
Booklist’s starred review says: “Beatty, author of the deservedly highly praised The White Boy Shuffle (1996), here outdoes himself and possibly everybody else in a send-up of race, popular culture, and politics in today’s America . . . Beatty hits on all cylinders in a darkly funny, dead-on-target, elegantly written satire . . . [The Sellout] is frequently laugh-out-loud funny and, in the way of the great ones, profoundly thought provoking. A major contribution.”
When is it available?
The Albany and Mark Twain branches of the Hartford Public Library have copies 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!
We Are Pirates
By Daniel Handler
(Bloomsbury, $26, 288 pages)
Who is this author?
Daniel Handler’s career reminds me of that line in The Eagles’ “Hotel California:” We are just prisoners here, of our own device.” In Handler’s case, his “prison,” and a lush and lucrative one it was, was his phenomenal success as Lemony Snicket, author of the wildly popular 13 books in his A Series of Unfortunate Events and four-book series All The Wrong Questions, written ostensibly for young readers but embraced by many adult readers as well. Writing under his own name, Handler published four previous novels, The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and Why We Broke Up., but none achieved the success of his Snickety work. Though he grew up in San Francisco, where he and his family now live, Handler has plenty of Connecticut connections: he is a 1992 Wesleyan University graduate and his wife, the illustrator Lisa Brown, is from West Hartford.
What is this book about?
Larceny on the high seas! Well, maybe not so high: it’s San Francisco Bay we’re talking about. Living in a condo overlooking the water is Phil, an unhappy husband, mostly-failed radio producer, dreamer of rebellion and fortune hunting and the confused father of Gwen, a 14-year-old with issues. Gwen is a good student, an accomplished swimmer and a basically good kid, but she too is bored stiff and longs for some adventure, even if it means becoming an outlaw. Then there is Gwen’s new pal, her best friend Amber’s grandpa, a cranky old guy in a nursing home who has unwillingly set sail, metaphorically speaking, to the dread Isle of Alzheimer’s, but with Gwen and Amber will soon set sail for real on a piratical adventure.
Why you’ll like it:
Handler has a terrific sense of humor and can mix the dark with the light with skill. This book combines family drama, a coming of age tale, a going into that good night tale and a swashbuckling adventure. You may not have read a good pirate story since Treasure Island, but avast there, mateys, and get on board with this one. It’s a delightful voyage.
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “Life is a confused and confusing mess—but it still offers plenty of room for mischief, as Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, informs us. When you’re a kid, you don’t know which side is up half the time. Then you grow up, and you really don’t know. So it is with Gwen Needle, who’s taken on the nom de crime Octavia (a good one, Octavia having been an exceedingly bad noblewoman of ancient Rome). It’s not that Gwen/Octavia is evil; she’s just antsy: “Twelve and thirteen she was pretty happy….Then one day boredom just set upon her with a fierceness.” She’s also penniless, since Dad, an always-pitching radio producer, is always this far away from landing a deal. Popped for shoplifting, she’s sent off to a veterans’ home to do community service. There, she meets an old coot who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s—not yet full-blown, Gwen’s warned, though the patient is given to flights of fancy and strange thefts of his own. He asks her if she’s there for a school project, and when she answers that it’s punishment, he growls, “Good, I’m glad. I don’t like the school project kids. You know you’re going to die when they come at you with a tape recorder.” Meanwhile, Dad keeps hoping the heavens will part and he’ll finally get to do something interesting with his life, like be an outlaw—a dream his daughter, it seems, is living, along with a band of merry mates, the old coot among them. Handler is a master at depicting the existential chaos all his major characters are living through, and with warmth, sympathy and considerable humor at that. The reader will delight in Gwen and old Errol’s escapades, which involve plenty of jawboning but some good old-fashioned larcenous action, too, all of which affords her the street cred to say piratical things like, “You take one more step away and I’ll split your gullet” and “Totally verily.” Affecting, lively and expertly told. Just the sort of thing to make grown-ups and teenagers alike want to unfurl the black flag.”
Publishers Weekly says: “Why do pirates appeal? Because, as 14-year-old Gwen Needle puts it, when you’re a pirate, you can “go anyplace” and “do whatever you want.” Compelling ideas to Gwen and her friend Amber, whose supervised lives—Gwen is not even allowed to take the bus alone—are the opposite of pirate freedom. The pirate lore comes from Amber’s grandfather, Errol, who’s just as trapped, in his case by Alzheimer’s and an old-age home he loathes. While Gwen and Amber visit Errol and plot kidnap and ruin together, Gwen’s father, Phil, tries to make it big in radio, which might be consolation for a wife who doesn’t like him much, a house he can’t afford, and a very angry daughter. Can a couple of teenagers, a befuddled old man, and a nursing home orderly really steal a boat and wreak havoc in San Francisco harbor? Sure, says Handler, crossing and mixing genres—dark and light, YA yarn and midlife doldrum—while making readers root for his 20th-century privateers. The book never quite decides how serious it wants to be, becoming dark when the adventure turns violent, then shirking some of the consequences of that darkness, but it does offer a jaunty and occasionally jolting, and honest take on the discomforts of youth, midlife, and old age, and how ineffective we are at dealing with them.”
The Independent on Sunday (UK) says: “Sails against readerly expectation to brilliant effect. Gloriously cut loose from much in the current book market, We Are Pirates is a pirate adventure for grown-ups set in modern-day San Francisco . . . It is a swashbuckling, wonderfully eccentric message in a bottle for those seeking a social order beyond the realm of traditional authority . . . Handler’s yarn, replete with as many twists and turns as the classic pirate stories, captivates from start to finish, but it is his stylistic exploration of the piratical yen for elsewhere which most cleverly shanghais the imagination.”
“A witty adult novel by Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler . . . . Lemony Snicket’s gothic humor lingers over this tale of upper-middle-class despair . . . [A] dark and whimsical novel . . . Yes, we are pirates, but we’re chained on barren land. Has that theme ever been explored in such a weird mixture of impish wit and tender sympathy?” says the Washington Post .
“Exuberant . . . Handler’s a master with language, crafting showstopping sentences that are fresh and funny . . . [He gives] everything the feel of legend, a story burnished with each retelling, and gleaming with rich moral lessons . . . Although the novel is a raucously funny adventure, it’s also a tragic exploration of the restlessness in all of us, of the ways we want to claim our happiness like buried treasure that might change everything. We Are Pirates is about how we try to forge our own destinies, and if we’re lucky, become heroes of our own stories,” says author Caroline Leavitt in her San Francisco Chronicle review.
Says Library Journal: “As the Huffington Post says, “If it’s possible to be criminally underrated yet also be a millions-selling author, then Handler is it.” He’s world famous as Lemony Snicket, but not everyone remembers that his last adult book, Adverbs (2006), won considerable praise for being both formally experimental and emotionally arresting. Here, conscientious-to-a-fault 14-year-old Gwen follows her dreams, rounding up a motley crew and becoming a pirate who spreads terror on San Francisco Bay. “
When is it available?
You can dig up this treasure 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!
A Spool of Blue Thread
By Anne Tyler
(Knopf Doubleday, $25.95, 368 pages)
Who is this author?
Although Anne Tyler was born in, Minnesota in 1941, grew up in North Carolina and earned a degree at Duke University, she has made Baltimore her literary and literal home, setting many novels there. In 50 years of writing, she has produced 20 novels, many of them best-sellers, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her 11th, “Breathing Lessons.” Among her other successful books are “Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant” and “The Accidental Tourist,” which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, was No. 1 on The New York Times Bestseller list and was made into an Oscar-winning film with Geena Davis and William Hurt.
What is this book about?
It’s about a home as much as it is about a family. Most of this multi-generational story of the Whitshanks takes place in the meticulously constructed home on Bouton Road in Baltimore, built by the aspiring Junior Whitshank in 1936 and later handed down to his blunt but caring son, Red, who runs a construction business, and his wife Abby, a social worker who seems to regard her kids as clients and adores them with a fierce devotion that skirts the boundaries between motherlove and smothering love. The kids, actually all adults, are capricious, mysterious and frustrating Denny, who drops in and out of family life, deeply annoying his siblings; lawyerly Amanda and quiet Jeannie, and sweet-natured Stem, an adopted child whose presence irks jealous Denny and who is married to the preternaturally respectful and caring Nora, a religious fundamentalist who calls Abby “Mother Whitshank,” much to her mother-in-law’s chagrin. There’s also Red’s social-climbing sister Merrick, and a passel of grandkids. What happens? Nothing earthshaking, but nevertheless highly relatable events: marital squabbles and reconciliations, coping with a blacksheep son, the poignancy and perils of aging, the fraying and re-knitting of family ties.
Why you’ll like it:
Tyler’s novels are known for their quirky characters, and Tyler herself is an oddity among successful self-marketing writers today: she won’t do in-person interviews, read from her work in public or participate in book signings or tours to promote her novels. And sadly for her many readers, Tyler, who is 73, has said this book is likely to be her last. What keeps those readers in her corner? It’s her innate understanding of the ups and downs of typical marriages and the often-thwarted but spectacularly indulged urge to kick over the traces of a dutiful life and embrace rebellion, the ability to write lyrically without being grandiose and to create comic novels from everyday life and often, sad circumstances. If this is indeed Tyler’s final novel, it’s a good one to cap a career with, and for readers who are charmed by her novels of Charm City, it opens a door to her previous 19 books.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “…graceful and capacious…Give or take a few details, this extended/blended/fouled-up family could be any of ours. That makes it cliché territory, risky for an ambitious novelist. It’s also quintessential Anne Tyler, as well as quintessential American comedy. Tyler has a knack for turning sitcom situations into something far deeper and more moving. Her great gift is playing against the American dream, the dark side of which is the falsehood at its heart: that given hard work and good intentions, any family can attain the Norman Rockwell ideal of happiness—ordinary, homegrown happiness…In novel after novel [Tyler] predisposes her characters to crave the unattainable—parental love (in both directions), a sense of belonging (among your own and in the world), forgiveness, amnesty from familial wrongdoing, the comfort of home. And yet she’s a comic novelist, and a wise one. The calamities she depicts are minor, after all, and her characters aren’t the twisted, fearsome ones of much American fiction.”
Publishers Weekly says; “Thoroughly enjoyable but incohesive, Tyler’s latest chronicles the Whitshank family through several generations in Baltimore, Md. The narrative initially tackles the mounting tensions among the grown Whitshank siblings as their aging parents, Red and Abby, need looking after. The youngest son, Stem, adopted as a toddler, moves back into the family house to help care for Abby, who has spells of forgetfulness. This causes resentment in Denny, the family’s eldest biological son, who is capricious and has been known to drift in and out of their lives. As matters come to a head in Abby’s life and the lives of her children, the story suddenly switches to an in-depth exploration of Red’s parents and Red and Abby’s courtship, delving into Whitshank family lore. The interlude proves jarring for the reader, who at this point has invested plenty of interest in the siblings. Despite this, Tyler does tie these sections together, showing once again that she’s a gifted and engrossing storyteller.”
“Happily, A Spool of Blue Thread is a throwback to the meaty family dramas with which Tyler won her popularity in the 1980s . . . As in the best of her novels, she here extends her warmest affection to the erring, the inconstant, and the mismatched—the people who are ‘like anybody else,’ in Red’s words,” says the Wall Street Journal.
“Deeply moving . . . A Spool of Blue Thread is a miracle of sorts, a tender, touching and funny story about three generations of an ordinary American family who are, of course, anything but . . . Tyler’s accomplishment in this understated masterpiece is to convince us not only that the Whitshanks are remarkable but also that every family—no matter how seemingly ordinary—is in its own way special,” says the Associated Press.
Library Journal’s starred review says: “Three generations of Whitshanks have lived in the family home in Baltimore since the 1920s, in which they have loved, squabbled, protected secrets, had children, and, in some cases, led inauthentic lives. Using her signature gifts for brilliant dialog and for intricately framing the complex messiness of parental and spousal relationships, Tyler beautifully untangles the threads that bind and sometimes choke all of them, especially Red and Abby, the last Whitshank homestead occupants. In 2012, Red and Abby are in their late 70s, and their fractious children rally to the modern dilemma of the sandwich generation—caring for aging resistant parents in their home safely, while raising their own children. VERDICT It’s been half a century since Tyler debuted with If Morning Ever Comes, and her writing has lost none of the freshness and timelessness that has earned her countless awards and accolades. Now 73, she continues to dazzle with this multigenerational saga, which glides back and forth in time with humor and heart and a pragmatic wisdom that comforts and instructs.”
In its starred review, Kirkus says: “Tyler’s 20th again centers on family life in Baltimore, still a fresh and compelling subject in the hands of this gifted veteran. She opens in 1994, with Red and Abby Whitshank angsting over a phone call from their 19-year-old son, Denny. In a few sharp pages we get the family dynamic: Red can be critical, Abby can be smothering, and Denny reacts to any criticism by dropping out of sight. But as Part 1 unfolds, primarily from 2012 on, we see Denny has a history of wandering in and out of the Whitshank home on Bouton Road just often enough to keep his family guessing about the jobs and relationships he acquires and discards (” ‘Boring’ seemed to be his favorite word”) while resenting his siblings’ assumption that he can’t be relied on. This becomes an increasingly fraught issue after Red has a heart attack and Abby begins to have “mind skips”; Tyler sensitively depicts the conflicts about how to deal with their aging parents among take-charge Amanda, underappreciated Jeannie and low-key Stem, whose unfailing good nature and designation as heir to Whitshank Construction infuriate Denny. A sudden death sends Tyler back in time to explore the truth behind several oft-recounted Whitshank stories, including the day Abby fell in love with Red and the origins of Junior, the patriarch who built the Bouton Road home in 1936. We see a pattern of scheming to appropriate things that belong to others and of slowly recognizing unglamorous, trying true love—but that’s only a schematic approximation of the lovely insights Tyler gives us into an ordinary family who, “like most families…imagined they were special.” They will be special to readers thanks to the extraordinary richness and delicacy with which Tyler limns complex interactions and mixed feelings familiar to us all and yet marvelously particular to the empathetically rendered members of the Whitshank clan. The texture of everyday experience transmuted into art.”
When is it available?
You can unwind this tale of family life 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!
The Whites
By Harry Brandt (pen name for Richard Price)
Holt, $28, 352 pages)
Who is this author?
Harry Brandt is the pen name of novelist Richard Price, the talented author of eight previous crime novels that have gained him a wide and devoted audience. His other novels include Clockers, Lush Life, The Breaks, Freedomland, Blood Brothers and more. He has also written the screenplays for such hit films as The Color of Money, Sea of Love and Shaft, as well as for the HBO series The Wire. Price, who is now 65, lives in Manhattan.
What is this book about?
Police detectives, even the most successful, all have their “whites,” those Moby Dick-like criminals who tantalize their pursuers yet always seem to get away. In this novel, one such detective, Billy Graves, is haunted by a never-solved murder, his sketchy past and a stalker out for cruel revenge. His involvement in the accidental killing of a little boy has stalled his career, but now, years later, circumstances throw him back into the dark world of cops seeking off-the-record vengeance. Even his personal life gets twisted up in the dangerous tensions that result when Graves begins probing the hidden involvement of his old pals in the Wild Geese unit. A gripping story of good guys and bad guys and some guys who are both.
Why you’ll like it:
You know him as Richard Price, who first gained fame at age 24 as the author of the inimitable, hilarious and touching novel, The Wanderers, the saga of bunch of Italian American kids in the projects in the Bronx in 1962. Price also grew up in public housing in the Bronx, and his understanding of urban mean streets is visceral and vivid. You can feel, smell, taste, see and hear that gritty world in his on-the-money descriptions. Price has become one of our most admired and respected novelists, whose crime stories are always about much more than just crime. The Whites is gaining universal high praise, even from such hard-to-please reviewers as Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times. Price/Brandt is a master of realistic dialogue: its word choice, pacing and nervous energy. By any name, this author is always worth reading.
What others are saying:
Kirkus Reviews says: “Old tragedies combine with fresh ones in Brandt’s steely-jawed, carefully constructed procedural. Few crime novelists are as good at taut storytelling as Richard Price who, for reasons of his own, writes here under a pseudonym. But then, everyone in these pages is hiding bits and pieces of their lives and nursing secrets. Billy Graves, for instance, is well-known among Gotham’s cops for having been an almost mythical crime fighter back in the day, until an errant bullet put a kid instead of a bad guy into the ground. Since then, Graves has been shunted from one graveyard shift to another, and though he nurses hard feelings, he’s also glad just to have a gig in a time when it seldom seems that “the Prince of Peace was afoot.” Certainly that’s true when another perp of old turns up dead at just about the time it dawns on Billy that others nurse grudges, too: “Although money was the prime motivation for those signing up for a one-off tour with Night Watch, occasionally a detective volunteered not so much for the overtime but simply because it facilitated his stalking.” The city quickly becomes a set for a sprawling, multiplayer game of cat and mouse, with vengeance not the province of the lord but of the aggrieved mortals below. Or, as one player ponders while assessing the odds, “To avenge his family, he would be destroying what was left of it.” When vigilantes try to do the work of cops, no one wins—but how can there be justice in a place where everyone seems to consider the law a private matter, if not merely a polite suggestion? The grim inevitability that ensues follows lines laid out in such recent fiction as Mystic River and Smilla’s Sense of Snow—but also, for that matter, in The Oresteia. In the wake of rage and sorrow, ordinary people respond by going crazy and screwing up. In this far-from-ordinary novel, Price/Brandt explores the hows and whys. Fasten your seat belt.”
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani writes: “…riveting…[Price] not only has a visceral ability to convey the gritty, day-to-day realities of [his characters'] jobs, but also a knack for using their detective work the way John le Carré has used spy stories and tradecraft, as a framework on which to build complex investigations into the human soul…No one has a better ear for street language than [Price] does, and no one these days writes with more kinetic energy or more hard-boiled verve. His high-impact prose is the perfect tool for excavating the grisly horrors of urban life…And his ability to map his characters’ inner lives—all the dreams and memories and wounds that make them tick—results in people who become as vivid to us as real-life relatives or friends…[The Whites] is, at once, a gripping police procedural and an affecting study in character and fate. “
In The New York Times Book Review, mystery author Michael Connelly says: “…as much an entertaining story as it is an examination of the job of policing…The novel posits a simple axiom: Those who go into darkness as a matter of course and duty bring some measure of darkness back into themselves. How to keep it from spreading like a cancer, eating at your humanity, is the police officer’s eternal struggle. It’s this struggle that [Price] places at the heart of his storytelling. Another great so-called crime novelist, Joseph Wambaugh, has said that the best crime novels aren’t about how cops work cases, they’re about how cases work cops. This holds true, with fervor, in The Whites…The routine of police procedure…is just right, depicted in its perfect shopworn way. And the dialogue…reaches the high-water mark of previous Richard Price novels…The Whites is a work of reportage as much as it is a work of fiction…It tells it like it is. It provides insight and knowledge, both rare qualities in the killing fields of the crime novel. It’s a book that makes you feel that Price has circled the murders at this detective’s side and in the process really gotten to know a city.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Price is one whale of a storyteller by any name, as evinced by the debut of his new brand—okay, Brandt—a gripping, gritty, Greek tragedy of cops, killers, and the sometimes-blurry line between them. The sprawling tale centers on stoic police sergeant Billy Graves, banished to the purgatory of the NYPD’s night watch since his role in a racially charged, politically explosive double shooting a decade earlier. Despite the adrenaline-pumping emergencies that routinely erupt during his 1–8 a.m. tour, he has time to obsess over his troubled wife, Carmen; his increasingly demented father, Billy Sr., a retired former chief of patrol; and, most of all, his “White” (that’s what Billy, with a harpoon salute to Melville’s tormented mariner, calls the one who got away): triple-murderer Curtis Taft. He’s the elusive monster Billy is fated to hunt, probably even after retirement—to judge from the way Billy’s former colleagues in the Bronx, a group calling themselves the Wild Geese, continue to hunt their own Whites. Suddenly, one of Billy’s friends’ Whites turns up murdered amid a St. Patrick’s Day scrum at Penn Station. Soon a second disappears. And then it starts to look as if someone is stalking Billy’s family. The author skillfully manipulates these multiple story lines for peak suspense, as his arresting characters careen toward a devastating final reckoning.”
In its starred review, Booklist says: “This is going to be a strong contender for best crime novel of 2015…. With one-of-a-kind characters and settings so real you can smell them, Brandt plunges us into the chaos of domestic life, the true agony of a parent’s grief, the cost of secrets kept and revealed. He does it all with indelible phrasing that captures both the black humor of the on-the-job cop and the give-and-take of longtime married couples. While the finely tuned story engine accelerates, it’s supercharged with complications…In the end, The Whites isn’t about cops and killers so much as it is about the damage we all carry [and] the sins we’ve all committed.”
Stephen King says: The Whites is the crime novel of the year — grim, gutsy, and impossible to put down. I had to read the final 100 pages in a single sitting. I began being fascinated, and ended being deeply moved. Call him Price or Brandt, he knows everything about police life, and plenty about friendship: what your friends do for you…and what they sometimes do to you.”
When is it available?
The Whites is on the shelf at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves
by Carolyn Chute
(Grove/Atlantic, $28, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
Carolyn Chute, a quirky but powerful writer, lives off the grid in rural Maine and has produced five previous novels that explore the people and predicaments of backwoods life: The School on Heart’s Content Road, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Beans of Egypt, Maine; Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts; Snow Man; and Merry Men. Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves is a sequel to The School on Heart’s Content Road, and a third book in the series is planned. Chute has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Thornton Wilder Fellowship.
What is this book about?
It’s 1999 in Maine, and stories are flooding the rural area where a man named Gordon St. Onge, known locally as “The Prophet,” runs a cult-like counterculture commune and homeschooling group called The Home Place Settlement. Rumors swirl about caches of weapons, violent behavior, child abuse – and indeed, there is a growing group of pregnant teens living there – and Gordon soon becomes involved with a new recruit, a bright but disturbed girl, Brianna, who paintings reveal her political and personal issues. It all comes to a head when a local reporter, looking for a big story, works her way into The Settlement and finds Gordon compelling, to say the least. When her story is finally published, the results are profound and unexpected.
Why you’ll like it:
Carolyn Chute has a vivid and powerful voice and she uses it to illuminate her characters and the out-of-the-way world in which they live. This is not hipster Portland or blue-collar Bath; it’s the deep back country Maine where abject poverty is rampant and so is the desire for personal freedoms. Chute is an author who thrives on afflicting the comfortable and complacent; there is nothing remotely sissified about her voice or her ideas about society and politics, and while the plots of her books are interesting, it’s the real-life dialogue and characters that jump off the page that will keep you hooked. If you are intrigued by the current debates about income inequality, this book will resonate with you.
What others are saying:
In The New York Times Book Review , author Bill Roorbach, who lives in Maine, says: “…Chute…continues to make great art out of the nexus of the two Maines, and more and more (certainly in Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves), she is making great art out of the truer multiplicity of Maine. And isn’t this the multiplicity of greater America? Blue and red, for sure, but rainbows too …Chute’s method…is to offer up the kisses, the confusions, the tongue-tied eloquence of teenagers, the battles of brothers, the fraught caring of women, the paranoia of one disenfranchised group rubbing up against another, the pains of disassimilation, and from them build her story. Carolyn Chute is a James Joyce of the backcountry, a Proust of rural society, an original in every meaning of the word. She inhabits everyone in her creation, sees everything that goes on within it. And though we might at times rather look away, we readers see everything—and everyone—too.”
“Quirky, intensely original…an intellectual page-turner…Chute combines strident political commentary with humor, surrealism, and inventive language. Her novel, like its author is multilayered and complex, deeply critical of society but fiercely devoted to humans,” says O Magazine.
“A complex, multilayered story worth digging into, which explores, among other things, poverty, democracy in America, and the role of community in helping those living on the fringe of society take even the tiniest steps forward,” says Booklist.
Kirkus Reviews says: “Second volume in a planned series about the St. Onge Settlement, a collective of disaffected have-nots in North Egypt, Maine. At first we see the settlement and its charismatic leader, Gordon St. Onge, mostly through the eyes of Record Sun feature writer Ivy Morelli, who receives multiple phone messages warning of child abuse, drugs, guns, religious brainwashing, and anything else the anonymous callers think might prompt her to visit the place and expose its nefariousness. In the scornful eyes of Gordon and other settlement members given voice in this polyphonic novel (which also includes the comments of extraterrestrial “grays” we could do without), Ivy is a media lackey of the ruling class, alternately dishing out human-interest pabulum and scary crime stories to keep the masses frightened and passive. In a country that prefers to ignore the existence of social classes, Chute’s contempt for such air-brushing is bracing, as is her refusal to neaten up her decidedly flawed male protagonist’s opinions and actions. . . . He despises corporations and well-meaning liberals equally. He also dislikes feminists and has an awful lot of “wives” with an awful lot of babies; his newest spouse, Brianna Vandermast, is only 15. Brianna is no victim, however; she goads Gordon to move beyond creating an alternate world at the settlement and directly challenge the political system that pretends to serve democracy. This provokes sinister undercover servants of the powers that be to make use of Gordon’s messy personal life to manipulate another rebellious proletarian into doing their dirty work. The plot, the prose and the political pronouncements are as over-the-top as they often are in Chute’s work—which by no means negates the value of her career-long mission to show the elite what people at the bottom of the heap think of the American dream. Bottom line: They’re not fooled.”
Library Journal says: “In this latest work from Chute. newspaper reporter Ivy Morelli investigates the Home Place Settlement in Maine, a collective that exists outside the social and economic norms of modern America under the charismatic but troubled leadership of Gordon St. Onge. What Ivy finds is more nuanced and complex than the tempting soundbites of “cult” or “militia”; despite some unsavory aspects of Settlement life, it’s hard to argue that St. Onge and his followers don’t have a point about the destructive nature of much of the media and the detrimental effects on ordinary citizens of corporate and political corruption. Unfortunately, the sympathetic story Ivy relates is the first in a chain of events that threatens to break down the settlement way of life. This big, sprawling, messy, tour de force employs multiple narrators (including space aliens) and metafictional techniques. Though she does evolve, Ivy’s character is so annoying and shallow that it’s something of a relief when she takes a backseat in the last half of the novel and other characters emerge. VERDICT At turns funny, moving, and disturbing, this book will challenge readers to check their assumptions about how people choose to live in today’s society.”
“. . . Fiery, impassioned, and unlike anything else you will ever probably read, you can take Chute’s book as a warning, a letter from the future — or from the present — from people who are tired of promises and lies and just might not be willing to take it anymore,” says the Boston Globe.
When is it available?
Chute’s new novel 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!
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