Monthly Archives: March 2014

Pioneer Girl: A Novel

By Bich Minh Nguyen

(Viking, $26.95, 304 pages)

Who is this author?

Bich Minh Nguyen, whose name is pronounced Bit Min New-’win but prefers to be called Beth, is the author of the memoir, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” which won a PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the novel “Short Girls,” which won an American Book Award. She teaches literature and creative writing in San Francisco, where she lives with her husband and their two children.

She understands the immigrant life well. As a baby, she and her father, older sister, grandmother and uncles—but not her mother — fled Saigon and landed in Grand Rapids, Mich., where her father worked in  a factory and her grandmother took care of the children. This experience engendered Nguyen’s deep interest, explored in her books, about what makes a family and what makes someone an American.

What is this book about?

You would hardly expect a Vietnamese American family to have a connection with the author of the classic “The Little House on the Prairie” books, but Bich Minh Nguyen makes it plausible in “Pioneer Girl.”

Its central character, Lee Lien, has earned a Ph. D,  but can’t land a job, and returns to her home outside Chicago, where she has a difficult mother to deal with and a family restaurant to help run. Then her brother goes missing, quite mysteriously, and she discovers he has left her a note and a gold-leaf brooch her mother once had in Saigon. Lee has long imagined that it may have belonged to “Little House” author Laura Ingalls Wilder and was left in Vietnam in 1965 by Wilders ’journalist  daughter Rose Wilder Lane. Lee is drawn into the researching the brooch and its true history as she tries to find out why her brother left and where he is, how to cope with her cranky mother – and not so incidentally, how to find her own place in the world.

Why you’ll like it:

Based on my reading of “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner,” I can tell you that Nguyen is a gifted writer and insightful about life. She is very good at showing the often poignant and occasionally absurd situations that a child of immigrants can find herself in while navigating a country and culture not her own – at least, that is, until she makes it her own.

What others are saying:

Publishers Weekly says: “As a child, Lee Lien loved to imagine that her mother’s gold brooch originally belonged to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and had been left behind in a Saigon cafe by Laura’s daughter, Rose, many years ago. Now unable to find a job after graduating with a Ph.D. in literature, Lee, the American-born daughter of Vietnamese immigrant parents, returns home to Chicago to help out with the family restaurant. This smart novel by American Book Award–winner Nguyen aptly conveys the anxieties connected to simultaneously trying to find one’s own way and live up to family expectations. When her brother Sam mysteriously disappears, leaving behind a cryptic note attached to the brooch, Lee begins looking into whether there’s any truth to her belief that the brooch’s original owner was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter. The question soon becomes an obsession, and she heads westward, eventually coming to San Francisco, searching for any small clue to the story behind the gold brooch. She must also deal with an irascible mother who believes that Lee’s Ph.D. is “a fake degree for a fake doctor,” and with returning to a life from which her degree was meant to free her. By acknowledging but not over-emphasizing how Lee’s identity has been shaped by her immigrant parents, Nguyen creates an insightful depiction of American life.”

Says Kirkus Reviews: “A Vietnamese-American scholar finds familiar ground when she stumbles across a lost fragment in the story of Laura Ingalls Wilder and daughter Rose Wilder Lane. The third-person perspective of the author’s novel Short Girls lent that work some distance. This more intimate first-person narrative is by Lee Lien, who has a newly minted doctorate in 19th-century literature but few job prospects. The book contrasts Lee’s life with that of journalist and Little House on the Prairie collaborator Rose Wilder Lane. Lee, who has moved back in with her difficult mother and works at her mother’s coffee/noodle house, has a combative relationship with her mother, much as the talented journalist Rose had with her own. “You are alike,” Lee’s grandfather tells her, much to her dismay. The discovery of a mysterious gold pin, etched with a little house and possibly abandoned by Rose in Saigon in 1965, leads Lee toward the book’s pivot point, a mystery about a potential descendent of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The subject of that investigation is the weakest part of the narrative, leaning toward rom-com meet-cutes and a dubious liaison. That said, it’s clear that Nguyen has a perceptive understanding of the tension between mothers and daughters and the troubling insights to be gained from digging into the past. An unexpected pleasure,  with a well-drawn and compelling narrator.”

“A narrow gold pin, engraved with a small house on a lake, is found at the table in Ong Hai’s Saigon restaurant where Rose, an American war correspondent, takes tea each afternoon. Ten years later, when Ong flees Vietnam for America with his daughter, that brooch is one of the few items he takes and will become the catalyst for the action in Nguyen’s novel of migration, family, and the search for rootedness. Like Little House on the Prairie’s Ingalls family that so enthralls her, eight-year-old Lee Lien, brother Sam, and their widowed mother and grandfather wander from one Midwestern state to another, working long hours in the restaurant business. As transients, Lee and Sam make few friends and are embarrassed by their mother’s immigrant ways, her cold detachment, and her refusal to talk about their father’s untimely death. Each sibling seems locked in a continuum of inexplicable hostility with their exacting mother. It’s not until Lee earns a PhD and returns home jobless that the gold pin resurfaces, taking her on a scholarly hunt for Laura and Rose Wilder and their heirs. VERDICT Nguyen draws a parallel between Rose and Laura Wilder and Lee and her mother. Though it’s a bit of a stretch, this imaginative device spices up an otherwise conventional novel about the constant tug between first-generation immigrants and their more assimilated progeny,” says Library Journal.

“Elegant, sharp-eyed, and very funny, Pioneer Girl is ultimately about how one finds kinship – familial, cultural, literary – that transcends the usual lexicon about identity and belonging. Navigating Vietnamese ‘immigrant guilt’ and a stalled academic career, Lee Lien finds escape in trying to solve a literary mystery which leads her deep into her own heart and history. A wonderful read!” says Cristina Garcia, author of King of Cuba and Dreaming in Cuban.

When is it available?

You will find “Pioneer Girl” on the new books shelf at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

My Mistake

By Daniel Menaker

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24, 256 pages)

Who is this author?

After teaching high school English, he went from lowly fact checker to copy editor to New Yorker magazine editor, a literary career many would envy. Daniel Menaker worked for (in my estimation) the best magazine in the world for 26 years and then went to Random House, where he was an editor and then became its Editor-in-Chief. Menaker is also is the author or six books and also has written for such publications as the New York Times, the Atlantic, Parents and Redbook.  He is a professor at Stony Brook University’s MFA program and once taught  humor writing at Columbia University.  Here are some of the authors with whom he has worked: David Foster Wallace, Salman Rushdie, Curtis Sittenfeld, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Janet Malcolm, Elmore Leonard, Jonathan Kellerman, Elizabeth Strout, Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, Daniel Silva, Billy Collins, George Saunders. Pretty impressive. He once got a fan letter from Groucho Marx, which is even more impressive. And he has successfully – at least “for the time being,” he says – fought lung cancer.

What is this book about?

Daniel Menaker, as mentioned above, started as a fact checker at The New Yorker in 1969. He says his hard work, good luck and support by William Maxwell helped him rise to being an editor, despite never getting along with the magazine’s legendary editor, William Shawn. In “My Mistake,” a many-layered memoir, he looks back on life at the magazine, with all its quirks and quirky writers; contemplates how the early death of one of his brothers affected his life and gives us plenty of insights into the ever-changing world of publishing.

Why you’ll like it:

It goes without saying, but let me say it anyway: if you are going to be the editor of talented writers such as those listed above, you’d better be a pretty darn talented writer yourself. Make no mistake: Menaker is just that. Besides offering a delicious helping of book-flavored insider information (otherwise known as gossip), this is a very entertaining, often wry, often self-deprecating and often poignant look back at a life at the top of the contemporary literary mountain.

What others are saying:

” My Mistake’ is only sometimes rueful. It is also frequently funny and splendidly precise as it takes a look back at a life led in the world of magazine editing and book publishing, a behind-the-scenes rumination of a time gone by. Intriguing now, it will be necessary later; readers will be thankful for this quirky and delightful piece of history,” says Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.

In the New York Times Book Review,  Meryl Gordon writes: “Daniel Menaker loves words, and you can see it in every clause, in the rhythms of his language, even in the length of the sentences in his bracing memoir…He grabs the reader with urgency as he grapples with big questions: What shaped me? Where did I go right and wrong? What has my life meant? His clever, fast-paced prose makes you stop and think and wonder, meandering down your own byways, contemplating the ways his story reverberates.”

Publishers Weekly says:  “Menaker, once an editor at the New Yorker and Random House, grew up in the now-endangered class of New York communist intellectuals that had the nerve to call an elementary school (his alma mater) Little Red. He writes here of his hectic childhood with well-preserved romanticism. The result is charming. The memoir’s title phrase—it recurs, songlike, throughout—refers primarily to Menaker’s small but pivotal role in his elder brother’s sudden death when they were both young men. That event stands in sharp contrast to Menaker’s own slow battle with lung cancer. Mortality, that “Great Temporariness,” haunts this humble book. Menaker is at his best when irreverent: chuckling at aptronyms (people aptly named), or deflating New Yorker legends (William Shawn and Tina Brown, most notably). Still, in this book of years, gossip is secondary to the writer’s own musings and memories. Menaker leaves the reader with a sense of the vast triumph that is a life well lived.”

In a starred review, Kirkus says: “A well-known editor’s funny and thoughtful memoir of wrong turns, both in and out of publishing. As sums up his life, he can’t get past his mistakes–the big ones he’ll never stop paying for and the small ones that changed his life. As a young man, he goaded his older brother during a game of touch football, leading to his brother’s fatal injury and leaving himself with a lifetime of guilt. He smoked, quit and got lung cancer years later. He began working for the New Yorker, where it was easy to sweat the small stuff under the famously idiosyncratic editorship of William Shawn. Urged to find another job, he stayed for 26 years, skating on thin ice even as he climbed the editorial chain. There were rules of decorum (“You don’t say ‘Hi’ to Mr. Shawn–you say ‘Hello’ “) and regular surprises on what would or would not pass the Shawn smell test. When Menaker suggested ending a story with a mild pun, Shawn told him it “would destroy the magazine.” “What you want to write is an article,” Shawn admonished him at one point, “and the New Yorker doesn’t publish…articles.” On the plus side, Menaker learned high-level editing, not just from Shawn, but from the contrasting examples of magazine stalwarts Roger Angell (rough and tumble) and William Maxwell (kind and gentle). After the Tina Brown coup, Menaker moved on to Random House, where he eventually became editor-in-chief, wrestling to stay afloat and to stay alive. Menaker doesn’t just recount experiences; he digs away at them with wit and astute reflection, looking for the pattern of a life that defies easy profit-and-loss lessons.”

“[Menaker] contemplates the origins, happenstance, and consequences of his devotion to literature in a warm, humorous, on-point memoir. Amiably self-deprecating, Menaker is a deft sketch artist, vividly portraying loved ones (especially his older brother, who goaded him to excel and whose early death is the source of depthless sorrow) and colleagues (his portraits of New Yorker staff are hilarious, barbed, and tender). His insider view of publishing is eye-opening and entertaining,” says Booklist.

When is it available?

It will be your mistake if you do not borrow a copy of 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!

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and The Spending of a Great American Fortune

By Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

(Random House, 428, 496 pages)

Who are these authors?

Bill Dedman, who won a 1989 Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting while at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. After stumbling upon the grand – and empty – home of heiress Huguette in Connecticut, he began writing a series about her for NBC, and it became the website’s most popular feature ever, receiving more than 110 million page views.  He teamed with Paul Clark Newell, Jr., a cousin of Huguette Clark, who was very close to this reclusive  woman and spent 20 years researching the family history..

What is this book about?

The old cliché, “you can’t make this stuff up,” really applies to the story of Huguette Clark, who spent the last 20 years of her 104-year-life living in a hospital room, even though she was not ill, had a huge fortune and owned great mansions in California, New York and Connecticut. Bill Dedman learned about her when he noticed that one of these palatial homes was for sale in 2009 and had not been lived in for 60 years.  What he learned about its owner,, daughter of a wealthy copper magnate, U.S. Senator and  founder of Las Vegas, a generous patron to her friends (she gave her nurse  more than $30 million worth of gifts), an artist and one who valued her privacy above all else, is told in this book. Her life spanned American history from the days of the Titanic to the 9/11 attacks and offers a rare look into the world of a phenomenally rich and deeply eccentric woman. The book has 70 photographs that help tell the story.

Why you’ll like it:

We hear a lot today about the highly privileged 1 percent. In this book, we meet one of them. She owned many mansions that she seldom inhabited, along with a Stradivarius violin, masterpieces by Degas and Renoir and a vast collection of antique dolls and other luxuries. The family fortune was immense, but we are left wondering if all this money really bought her happiness. Perhaps it did, on her own terms. This is history as mystery, a biography with the power of a good novel. “The rich are different,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. This book proves how right he was.

 

What others are saying:

Says Booklist: “What goes on behind closed doors, especially when those doors are of the gilded variety, has fascinated novelists and journalists for centuries. The private lives of the rich and famous are so tantalizing that Robin Leach made a career out of showcasing them. One of the biggest eccentric, rich fishes out there was Huguette Clark. Deceased for more than two years, Clark, brought to life by investigator Dedman and Clark’s descendant, Newell, owned nouveau riche palaces in New York, Connecticut, and California. An heiress, Clark disappeared from public view in the 1920s. What happened to her and her vast wealth? Answering this question is the book’s mission. Based on records and the hearsay of relations and former employees, the book pieces together Clark’s life, that of a woman rumored to be institutionalized while her mansions stood empty, though immaculately maintained throughout her life. Clark left few clues about herself, but she willed vast sums to her caretakers and numerous charitable endeavors. Still, her absence acts as a shade to seeing her fully, hinting at possible financial malfeasance, all the while conspiring to produce a spellbinding mystery.”

Publishers Weekly says in a starred review:  “Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr., a cousin of the book’s subject, reconstruct the life of reclusive copper heiress Huguette Clark (1906-2011) in this riveting biography. The authors bring Huguette’s odd past into clear perspective, including the hilariously corrupt political schemes of her father, W.A. Clark, who was a Montana senator. Though less celebrated than his compatriots Rockefeller and Carnegie, W.A. Clark was at a time wealthier than they, and by extension, so was his daughter. She was a regular in the society pages during her youth and even married for a short time, Clark later slipped into her own world and stayed there, quietly buying multi-million dollar homes for her dolls. Kind and unspeakably generous to those who worked for her and usually suspicious of family, she wrote a few big checks to people she hardly knew. Other family acquisitions, valuable musical instruments and jewelry among them, she simply gave away. The authors provide a thrilling study of the responsibilities and privileges that come with great wealth and draw the reader into the deliciously scandalous story of Clark’s choices in later life, the question of Clark’s presence of mind always at issue. Hewn from Huguette’s stories, purchases, phone calls, gifts, and letters, the tale of where and how Huguette Clark found happiness will entrance anyone.”

Library Journal says: “Drawing on extensive research by Newell, a cousin of the subject, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Dedman (NBC News) provides a comprehensive account of the late copper mining heiress Huguette Clark (1906–2011). Unlike the Rockefellers, the Clark family had all but been forgotten by history until Dedman’s 2009 television and msnbc.com pieces on the enigmatic heiress and her “empty mansions” in California and Connecticut set the stage for this book. The authors describe her lavish estates, art, jewelry, and musical instrument collections. They convey how, despite her affluence, Clark strangely chose to live her latter days as a relatively healthy recluse in a modest New York City hospital room. Nurses, acquaintances, and distant relations vied for her fortune during her life; the biographers tell how her entire estate is now contested and awaiting legal settlement. . . . An enlightening read for those interested in the opulent lifestyles afforded the offspring of the Gilded Age magnates and the mysterious ways of wealth.

Kirkus Reviews says: “An investigation into the secretive life of the youngest daughter and heiress to a Gilded Age copper tycoon. Huguette Clark (1906–2011) lived for more than a century and never once wanted for money. At her death, she was estimated to be worth–incorrectly, as it turned out–about $500 million. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Dedman stumbled onto her tale and wrote a series of stories about the Clark family, their fortune and the mystery surrounding Huguette. Here, with the assistance of Huguette’s cousin Newell, the author expands his search for information about the heiress who disappeared from public view in the 1980s–though she lived for another three decades. After an introduction to Clark’s fortune, Dedman moves his focus to her lifestyle and pursuits, always following the money. Clark was certainly eccentric, and her decisions, both financial and otherwise, definitely capture the imagination. She chose to live in seclusion after her mother’s death and then lived out the last few decades of her life in a hospital, despite being healthy. She spent money seemingly without thinking, giving away tens of millions of dollars to friends and employees, even selling off prized possessions to do so. As Clark aged, her family became concerned that her gifts were not necessarily voluntary and went looking for her. The story picks up steam with the family’s search for their wealthy relative and its aftermath. . . .”

When is it available?

“Empty Mansions” can be found 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!

Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books

By Wendy Lesser

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25, 240 pages)

Who is this author?

Wendy Lesser grew up in California and went on to study at three prestigious universities: Harvard, Cambridge and UC Berkeley and to teach at Princeton and other schools. In 1980, she founded the acclaimed literary magazine The Threepenny  Review, which she edits, and she has published 10 books, including novels, memoirs, biography and literary studies. She also reviews books, dance and music performances and art, and has homes in California and New York.

What is this book about?

Wendy Lesser loves everything about books: the way they feel, their unique scent, their characters, plots, meaning and language. As a longtime editor, author and reviewer, she knows books from all sides and aspects. And in this book, she shares with readers her love for the written word. In the prologue, she writes: “Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it.”  She examines a wide range of writing here: novels, plays, poems, mysteries, sci-fi and memoir.

Why you’ll like it:

“I read to be alone. I read not to be alone,” the author Bich Minh Nguyen writes with Zen-like wisdom in her memoir, “Stealing Buddha’s Dinner.” Wendy Lesser would understand.  Reading, and responding to what she has read has animated her life. Book lovers and book club members would do well to welcome her as a wise guide to a pastime they treasure, but perhaps have never analyzed. Besides offering insights into the work of many great authors, some familiar and some perhaps new to you, Lesser’s book will help you to understand he unique pleasure of reading.

What others are saying:

“Reading Wendy Lesser is like attending a book club where the leader is an Olympic champion reader.. . . [In] Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, Lesser tackles a deceptively simple question: Why does one read? The question might be impossible to answer, but it’s a pleasure to explore . . . Just like your favorite book club, the discussion is brainy, it’s personal, and it’s occasionally off topic,” says the Christian Science Monitor

Publishers Weekly says in a starred review:  “In this elegantly meandering narrative, critic and editor Lesser. . . , takes us through her expansive reading life. This is not so much a memoir of reading as it is about the craft of literature—the merits of both grandeur and intimacy, the double-edged sword of novelty, the ways character and plot are inextricably linked.  . . . Lesser likens the book to a spiraling conversation exploring what literature can truly offer us, and why we read even when we know the ending, as with Milton’s Paradise Lost.  . . . She investigates the “eerily bridgeable gap between the ‘you’ and the ‘me’ of a literary work” and describes the “terrific, inconsolable hunger” that comes after finishing a great novel. Lesser’s idiosyncratic reading list and her wealth of insights will speak to booklovers of all types.”

“I began Wendy Lesser’s Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books with my usual yellow highlighter in hand, notepaper and pen at the ready, opening the reviewer’s copy as I would for any normal assignment. By the time I’d finished, the notepaper was still mostly blank, but the thing in my hand resembled a brightly painted fan—every page saturated in color, with so many corners folded down the book had trouble staying closed . . hers has been a no-holds-barred, art-loving life, and her dedication to that quest irradiates Why I Read,” says The San Francisco Chronicle.

Says Kirkus Reviews: “A lover of books reflects on her abiding passion. More than a decade ago, Threepenny Review founder and editor Lesser (Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, 2012, etc.) wrote about the pleasures and insights gained from rereading (Nothing Remains the Same, 2002). Now, in a kind of prequel to that book, the author steps back to ask a broader question: Why read at all? “I am not really asking about motivation,” she admits, but rather about what “delights” and “rewards” she gets. . . . For Lesser, literary characters are more alive than actual people, and she sometimes finds it “hard to keep in mind” that authors “were all living, once.” Literature functions as a “time-travel machine of sorts”: Faulkner has taken her to the South, Dostoevsky to 19th-century Russia, Rohinton Mistry to the slums of Bombay. Her quest to discover why she reads is inseparable from the question of how she reads, which includes noting characterization and plot, as well as the quality of a writer’s voice, authority and empathy. . . . She has read books on an iPad and iPhone but loves the feel, smell–the solidity–of bound pages. She ends her celebration of books with 100 titles, culled through “excruciating excisions and hesitant substitutions.” A gift of pleasure from one reader to another.”

“Lesser’s taste is eclectic, her range large. She offers insights into George Orwell and Henning Mankell, Emily Dickinson and Roberto Bolaño, J.R. Ackerley and Shakespeare, Henry James and Isaac Asimov—to name but a few. There is no claim to a comprehensive approach, nor even a sense that what is discussed is of greater importance that what is not. […] The effect is rather as if Lesser were writing to a friend about the most fabulous literary party of all time, where she’d been in conversation not with authors but with their works. […] Her book is […] thoughtful and intelligent, conversational without being “improving,” and it ultimately encourages us to formulate our own responses, to continue and enlarge the literary conversation,” says author Claire Messud in Bookforum.

When is it available?

You can read “Why I Read” if you pick up a copy at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.

Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!

The Boy Detective: A New York Childhood Hardcover

by Roger Rosenblatt

(Ecco, $19.99, 272 pages)

Who is this author?

Roger Rosenblatt knows his way around the essay. And the play. And the novel and books that are a wonderful blend of memoir and meditation. He has won many awards for his work in various media: two Polks, a Peabody and an Emmy. He has written six off-Broadway plays and 16 books, including many bestsellers. He also has taught writing at Harvard University, and is Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University. Rosenblatt’s daughter Amy was 38 when she died of a heart defect no one knew she had in 2007; his New Yorker essay on the tragedy was later expanded to a best-selling book, “Making Toast.”

What is this book about?

Rosenblatt looks back with humor and tenderness at his New York City boyhood, when as a 9-year-old he liked to pretend he was a detective chasing crooks and solving mysteries. Some 60 years later, he walks the city again on a winter night after teaching a writing class and explores the same neighborhood where he lived as a boy. This leads to his musings on his life, the ways of the city and its past, writers such as Poe and Melville who also walked those streets, fictional detectives and real detective work, the great buildings of New York and much more.

Why you’ll like it:

It’s memoir, but also a meditation on how memory works and whether it can always be trusted, as well as a deep exploration of famous fictional detectives, some of whom are likely to be favorites of any reader. Rosenblatt has a wonderful writer’s voice, both funny and poetic, and I recall several compelling talks he gave at the Writers Weekends that The Courant used to present.  This book, like those talks, lets him display his supple mind and gorgeous turns of phrase.

What others are saying:

Says Booklist: “Teaching a class on memoir writing, Rosenblatt is struck by his own powerful memories of a childhood in Manhattan with fantasies of being a boy detective, focused then on clues, now on significant moments. Snatches of conversations with students are interspersed with remembrances of growing up as Rosenblatt recalls longing for but knowing he lacked what he admired in great literary detectives, “Holmes’s powers of observation, Hercule Poirot’s powers of deduction, Sam Spade’s straight talk, Miss Marple’s stick-to-itiveness, and Philip Marlowe’s courage and sense of honor.” The amateur sleuth searched for intriguing clues to a hardware store break-in but had no interest in solving the mystery of a teacher’s suicide at a local school. Rosenblatt shares poignant memories of the landscape of his childhood: the New York Public Library, Gramercy Park, Union Square, Madison Square Garden, and long-gone tenements and movie theaters. With the beautiful, lyrical writing and thoughtful reflection for which he is known, Rosenblatt offers beautifully rendered memories of childhood and ongoing curiosity about the city he so obviously loves.”

“A hallmark of memoir is the self now reflecting on the self then. This book pulls off the high wire feat of illuminating that double identity and giving readers the mental atmospheres of both narrators, the rascal back then and the reflective adult today…deliciously satisfying,“ says the New York Journal of Books.

Says Peter Hamill in the New York Times Book Review:  “To enter the world of this wonderful memoir is to leave the dull certainties of home and go wandering. The author’s destination is always the great wide world Out There, and through his sharp, compact prose, Roger Rosenblatt takes the reader with him. He is, after all, what some 19th-century Parisians called a flâneur, a stroller sauntering through anonymous crowds in the noisy, greedy, unscripted panoramas of the city…In this extended essay, at once a memoir and a meditation on the literary form itself, Rosenblatt writes the way a great jazz musician plays, moving from one emotion to another, playing some with a dose of irony, others with joy, and a few with pain and melancholy… “

Publishers Weekly says:  “In the vein of his other recent works, Rosenblatt (Making Toast) has taken memoir writing—a subject he teaches at State University of New York at Stony Brook—and turned it on its head once again. Walking the Manhattan streets of his childhood, Rosenblatt uses the city landscape to delve into eclectic ruminations on the nature of time and space, the slipperiness of reality and memory. By mixing in history, literary references, geography, philosophy, and poetry, he is somehow able to create a 14th Street where (or when) Luchow, a 19th-century restaurant, sits side by side with a modern Trader’s Joe’s store. Rosenblatt’s writing is honest, yet it produces a magical world unto itself, as when he describes his writing process (“Why do I have to produce an ocean in the morning, much less paint the sun-streaks on it, much less the plaster clouds or the goddam sun itself?”). The title refers to the author’s childhood desire to be a detective on par with Holmes and Marlow, and the idea of controlling the uncontrollable comes into play throughout the book. But Rosenblatt isn’t out to uncover the meaning of life—he is celebrating the fact that “life calls for nothing but itself.”

When is it available?

You don’t have to be a detective to find this book. It’s 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!

The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel

by Jennifer Vanderbes

(Scribner, $26, 320 pages)

Who is this author?

A graduate of Yale University and the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she also has taught writing, as well as a winner of coveted literary fellowships, Jennifer Vanderbes  enjoyed notable success with her debut novel, “Easter Island,” which made “best book of 2003″ lists of  the Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor. She also has written essays and reviews for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and the Atlantic and has published short stories in Best New American Voices, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Granta. Vanderbes also has taught creative writing for Columbia University’s M.F.A.Program, and at the Colgate Writers’ Conference and now is a teacher in the University of Tampa’s M.F.A. program.

What is this book about?

Set during World War II, “The Secret of Raven Point” is a war story, a mystery and a romance, parts that  Vanderbes’ cleverly blends into an effective whole.

It’s heroine, Juliet, is 17 when we meet her. Motherless since age 3, she is extremely close to her soldier brother, Tuck, who sends her a puzzling letter and then goes missing in action in Italy. Juliet, ever resourceful, fudges her age and becomes an army battlefield nurse, the better to search for her brother. In Italy, she becomes involved with a gravely psychologically wounded and suicidal deserter, Christopher, and his young psychiatrist, Dr. Willard. We soon learn that Christopher was in the same squad as Tuck, and may have the information that Juliet so desperately craves. But he’s mute due to his wartime experiences, and he’s heading to an execution. How Juliet and the doctor work to save him and learn his secrets powers the novel.

Why you’ll like it:

Secrets, romance, war, mystery: any of these can capture a reader, and this novel has them all. Add a strong young female protagonist, and you have a winning combination. Throw in skillful writing and characterization, and you have “The Secret of Raven Point.”

Here is what Vanderbes told Vogue about her latest book:

“I likely chose to make Juliet a nurse because I’d been a hospice volunteer for years and had firsthand experience tending the dying. (Though Juliet faces more blood and bone than I’ve ever seen.) But in all my training sessions over the years, I was always struck by the fact that the rooms were full of women. Dame Cicely Saunders invented hospice care. Florence Nightingale, of course, professionalized nursing. I was interested in that part of women, and of myself—caretaker, nurturer. How does helping someone else, often a man, become empowering?

“Juliet is plucky, awkward, and deeply caring, but she’s young, and she has no idea what war looks like until she arrives in Italy. Oddly, she wasn’t seventeen in the novel’s first draft, but as I got older and kept reworking the novel, she got younger. And then I became a mother and my relationship to her changed profoundly. I had a speechless infant in the next room, a person I knew I would spend my life loving and caring for, and yet I had no idea who she was, what kind of person she would be. Suddenly Juliet, offered me an outlet: She became a fictional daughter, a young woman I was trying to guide into womanhood on the page.

“I was resistant to writing a romantic war novel, yet I was deeply interested in exploring sibling love, platonic love, unrequited love. Losing her brother seemed just the right caliber of heartbreak to set Juliet in motion—both toward Italy and adulthood. I have an older brother—a paramedic, in fact—so the sibling bond is a natural thing for me to write about. He actually helped me fact-check a lot of the hospital material.”

What others are saying:

Kirkus Reviews says:  “When her beloved brother is declared missing in action, smart, flinty Juliet Dufresne, training to be a nurse, goes to Italy to find him, in an empathetic, oblique take on the layers of damage done during war. Part mystery, part coming-of-age tale, part World War II novel, overlong but incrementally moving latest is written from the perspective of a bright Southern teenager who is forced to become an adult too soon. Losing her mother at age 3 has left Juliet especially close to her brother Tuck, so when he disappears while fighting in Europe, she forges her birth certificate so she can enlist immediately after graduating from the Cadet Nurse Corps. Soon, she is tending injured men on the Italian front, one of whom is Barnaby–a deserter who has attempted suicide–who was in the same squad as Tuck. Working with the attractive psychiatrist Dr. Willard, Juliet tries to discover what Barnaby knows about Tuck’s last movements while all around her, young men and even her colleagues are being wounded and destroyed. With Barnaby sentenced to death, Willard and Juliet find themselves involved in a wild effort to save him, a journey which leads to truths Juliet will fully understand when the war ends. What begins as formulaic turns unusual and affecting as the emotional depths of Vanderbes’ story slowly emerge.”

Library Journal says in a starred review: “It’s 1944, and Juliet Dufresne is busy caring for wounded soldiers at a field hospital near Rome. At the same time, she’s hoping to hear news of her brother, a soldier listed as missing in action. Juliet goes about her daily duties tending to her patients as she thinks of the mysterious letter she received from her brother shortly after he disappeared. Everything changes when a wounded soldier from her brother’s platoon serendipitously enters the hospital. Unfortunately, getting answers is more complicated than it seems. VERDICT At first glance, Vanderbes’s  . . . novel is a touching tale of a sister’s love for her brother, but the underlying themes are much deeper. Readers will fall in love with the delightful Juliet, who is a smart and courageous heroine, and other hospital workers as they form friendships and struggle to accept tragedy and loss while treating their patients’ physical and mental wounds. While not all the mysteries here are resolved, the only disappointing thing about this book is that it has to end.”

“Vanderbes graphically depicts the gruesome nature of battlefield injuries, both to the body and to the psyche, even as she shows Juliet’s courage and strength. The skillful Vanderbes’ aching depiction of Juliet’s struggle to maintain her humanity amid the army’s callous bureaucracy and the horrors of war works as both an homage to our armed forces and a moving personal story of emotional growth,” says Booklist.

Says Publishers Weekly: Vanderbes’s third novel explores sibling bonds and what it means to push oneself beyond limits. In 1943, two weeks after high school graduation, Juliet Dufresne signs up to be an Army nurse, hoping to find her missing brother, to whom she is exceptionally close. Serving at battlefield hospitals, she has to live up to enormous expectations, and she finds a well of compassion and strength she didn’t know she possessed. She begins working with Dr. Henry Willard, who pioneers new psychiatric techniques, including some pertaining to battle fatigue. One of their charges, a deserter named Christopher Barnaby, is suspected of attempting suicide and is up for court-martial. Yet he may be able to tell Juliet what happened to her brother, if she and Henry can excavate it from his psyche. Juliet and Henry find themselves drawing closer together, and making decisions that put their own careers and lives on the line, in order to help Barnaby. Juliet surprises herself with her capacity for growth and for maintaining her own integrity against seemingly insurmountable odds. The book does not shy away from the grotesque details of battle or the horrible decisions that ordinary people must make when faced with war’s extraordinary demands.” 

When is it available?

Vanderbes’ new novel 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!

The Guts

By Roddy Doyle

(Vking Adult, $26.95, 336 pages)

Who is this author?

Roddy Doyle lives in Dublin and his novels embody the ups and downs of life in that quintessentially Irish city. He’s written lots of novels, as well as children’s books, plays and screenplays and many short stories. He won the prestigious Booker Prize In i993 for “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha” and “The Van” was a 1991 Booker Prize finalist.

Doyle is perhaps best known for his “Barrytown Trilogy,” three novels set in working-class Dublin  about the indomitable Jimmy Rabbitte, whose story is told in “The Commitments,” “The Snapper” and “The Van,”  all of which were made into feature films. Now there’s “The Guts,” perhaps the last of the series, which I guess makes it the Barrytown Quadrology. Or something like that..

What is this book about?

Jimmy Rabbitte is a musician, husband, father, dreamer, schemer and a bit of a rogue: in short, a delightful character. In the ‘80s, against all odds, he put together a band called The Commitments, which played American soul music and was an unlikely success. Now Jimmy is older and wiser, but  not necessarily smarter in his choices – and suddenly facing a diagnosis of cancer. Does this floor him? Not our Jimmy. He reaches out to lost pals and estranged family members, and he’s got some ideas about making some money off the rumored visit of Pope Benedict. He may be down, but he’s surely not out. And he still has his music.

Why you’ll like it:

The hallmark of Doyle’s writing is his lively, raunchy dialogue – so vivid it is like a character itself  as well as the prime driver of the plot, along with his great good humor and his piquant characters. It’s a cliché to say Irish storytellers have the gift of gab, but Doyle really does possess it. What he also demonstrates is heart and a flair for being poignant without being treacly. If you’ve never read the Barrytown Trilogy, you’ll have fun meeting Jimmy Rabbitte through this book, but I am betting it will send you back to the first three for the full picture.

What others are saying:

The New York Times Book Review says: “Sequels, of course, are tricky things. All too often they feel like products of convenience, if not of commercial necessity…Yet these fears were rapidly dispelled by Doyle’s unsentimental way with both scene and sentence. He’s not milking anything here, and whatever possible bathos inheres in a book that’s going to twine mortal confrontation with light-stepping domestic comedy, Doyle coolly avoids it…I was undone by the emotional clarity of the writing itself, and by the calm, yet never static, way Doyle has of presenting a scene…What saves The Guts from sentimentality, too, is Doyle’s deft tendency to play on the backbeat, so to speak, to give us not the moment of confrontation, but the moment of consequence…The effect is gorgeously understated, and lets the book’s high comedy, as well as its melancholy, have its full due. “

Says Publishers Weekly: “Booker Prize–winner Doyle returns with this hilarious and tender pseudo-sequel to The Commitments. Jimmy Rabbitte—last seen as the brash, young manager of the Commitments—is now middle-aged. He’s still kicking around Dublin, married, with four kids, and working as a reasonably successful promoter of nostalgia bands—one-hit wonders that have been generally forgotten. When Jimmy is diagnosed with bowel cancer, however, he finds himself suddenly reevaluating his life, his decisions, and his legacy. While Jimmy endures his treatments, he must also contend with a tanking Irish economy that is drying up jobs (and potential music sales); his kids, who act out as they struggle with their dad’s diagnosis; and the Pope’s scheduled visit to Ireland, which Jimmy is sure he can find a way to make money on. Only two other Commitments make significant appearances in Doyle’s latest. Imelda, the most desirable Commitmentette, is still turning heads in middle age. And Jimmy reunites with Outspan, his old rhythm guitarist, outside a chemotherapy center where they are both, coincidentally, seeking treatment. While clearly dealing with more serious issues than its predecessor, Doyle’s witty and lively ninth novel still captures much of the fun of The Commitments, even as the Commitments themselves struggle with a notably more sobering world around them.”

“It’s rare to read about a man’s midlife crisis, complete with a stalled career, bowel cancer, and an extramarital affair, and burst out laughing. Yet acclaimed Irish author Doyle  . . . pulls it off with his trademark running dialog replete with Irish obscenities and sly musical references. Readers may remember Jimmy Rabbitte from Doyle’s first novel, The Commitments. Now a music promoter reviving old bands at kelticpunk.com, Jimmy is your average bloke trying to pay his bills, raise his kids, and come to terms with his own mortality, all while struggling with text messaging and other modern tribulations. When Jimmy and some lads, including his estranged brother Les and former Commitments guitarist Liam “Outspan” Foster, take in an outdoor music festival (think: Irish Woodstock), hilarity ensues. There are plenty of poignant moments among the laughs, too. VERDICT Sensitive readers may not get past the foul language, which is a shame, and even Anglophiles may need to read sections aloud to decipher the Irish slang, but this work is too good to miss. Grand!” says  Library Journal.

Kirkus Reviews says:  “. . . The publication of The Commitments (1987) established Doyle as a master of the Irish vernacular, earning its place on the short shelf of great rock novels and inspiring a movie that reached an even wider audience. The prolific author has since written some novels that are even better than the first, though his recent output has been more erratic. This represents a return to form, not quite a sequel to that debut and not quite as good but a novel that shows how the musical generation he chronicled earlier is now dealing with mortality, family, nostalgia and all sorts of issues of getting older but not necessarily smarter (or, in some cases, happier). Protagonist Jimmy Rabbitte, who formed and managed the Commitments, is still a musical hustler, but now his racket is reuniting and reissuing music from bands of that earlier era, many of whom he holds in great contempt. It seems that even in the midst of an economic downturn, “[t]he middle aged are still finding the money to fund their nostalgia.” There’s a hilarious middle-aged, punk-rock duo–a married couple who break up (the band at least) during every session . . Much of the book is very funny, audaciously so, considering that Jimmy is suffering from bowel cancer, undergoing chemo (while reading Chemotherapy & Radiation for Dummies), cheating on his saintly wife and watching while the country’s entire economy goes down the toilet. Yet, it is full of loose ends–a reconciliation with his brother, the attempt to fake a recording from 1932–that the author never ties together, perhaps since Jimmy’s is not the sort of tidy life. Whatever its novelistic flaws, the rock criticism and pop-culture insights are sharp throughout.”

“The feat of The Guts is Doyle’s ability to create in Jimmy a character who hangs together even while so many of his certainties have collapsed.  And to get a few good jokes in as well,” says The Washington Post.

When is it available?

The Downtown Hartford Public Library has Roddy Doyle’s gutsy 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!