Worth a Second Look

I'm taking another run at Denis Johnson. I tried before with “Tree of Smoke” and I just couldn't get out of the starting blocks. Maybe I just wasn't ready to tackle a Viet Nam novel, and somehow it seemed so very male. I gave up early. But I always feel a little guilty when I abandon a book. So when I saw Johnson's new novella Train Dreams (short read!) I decided to try again. I'm so glad I did.

The story is simple (and still quite male) – it follows the life of Robert Grainier, an orphaned boy who works on logging crews in the Northwest in his youth, loses his wife and child to a wildfire, and lives out his life in a remote cabin in Idaho where his only company is wolves, coyotes and the sound of the train's whistle as it passes through the valley two miles below him. He makes a modest living using his horse cart for hauling, and rides the train to Bonners Ferry when he's in need of supplies or human contact.

Doesn't sound like much of a story? In Johnson's hands it becomes a spare, honest portrait of a man's life. Grainier's existence is basic, but his connection to nature is powerful and profound, and Johnson slips effortlessly from the simple declarative sentences that describe Grainier's unadorned life, including the occasional humorous encounter with an odd assortment of characters peculiar to the isolated West, to the evocative dream-like descriptions of his experience of the force and mystery of the natural world.

You can read this entire book on a plane ride or on a rainy afternoon. I hope you will find it as powerful and absorbing as I did.

Commune Life

If you're old enough to remember an era of history does it make a novel about that time more interesting for you? Or do you just get annoyed because the author has gotten some details wrong? In the case of Lauren Groff's Arcadia it's neither for me. Although I remember the 60's and 70's, I have no idea if she got the details right because I have no idea what life was like if you joined a commune. But I admit I've always been curious.

The story is seen through the eyes of Bit (Ridley Sorrel Stone), child of commune members Abe and Hannah, who live in a bread truck in the sprawling commune Arcadia somewhere in upstate New York. In the book's four sections Groff shows us Bit at pivotal times in his life: at five, at fourteen, in his twenties and approaching fifty. The commune is not painted in idyllic tones, but in the early sections it's easy to see Bit's love of the beauty of nature, even as he struggles to understand the adults around him. His turbulent adolescence is mirrored in the turbulence and discord within the group itself. And as an adult he and other commune members struggle to fit into life outside Arcadia.

But Groff isn't just telling a story about the effects of commune life. She is ultimately telling a story about families, and she creates an array of complicated, flawed but believable characters. Her beautiful descriptions of nature combined with her sensitive portrayal of the evolution of a family made this an interesting read for me.

Unhappy Families

Did you know that there is something called the Anna Karenina principle? (What did we do before Wikipedia?). It derives from the famous Tolstoy line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. In statistics this is translated to mean “there are any number of ways in which a dataset may violate the null hypothesis and only one in which all the assumptions are satisfied”. In ecology it is used to explain the fragility of ecosystems, since the failure of any one element can cause the entire system to fail.

And what does all this have to do with Leah Hager Cohen's The Grief of Others? Well, it is certainly about an unhappy family. Each member of the Ryrie family – parents Rickie and John, teenager Paul and his younger sister Biscuit - is unhappy for a different reason, and a shared tragedy serves to isolate them from each other even more. Perhaps in a happy family the members would mourn together a loss that has touched them all (the birth and rapid death of a severely damaged infant), but because there were already fissures in the relationships, each is pulled farther apart, and their lack of communication causes these fundamentally decent people to hurt each other.

Cohen takes time to unfold the complicated layers of each of her characters, so I found each one sympathetic even as I winced at their mistakes. The slow rebuilding of trust is unforced and powerful. Cohen tackles an extremely difficult subject and presents it honestly. I know this sounds depressing but I found this book moving and ultimately hopeful.

Reverberations

On a summer afternoon in suburban Melbourne, a group of friends and family gather with their assorted children for a barbecue. The host Hector is of Greek descent, his wife Aisha is Indian, and their guests are a mix that probably represents Australia in the 21^st century – white, aborigine, Muslim, Jewish, gay, straight, wealthy and working class, young and old. Three-year-old Hugo has been behaving obnoxiously all afternoon, but his parents keep making excuses for him rather than correcting him. Finally, wielding a cricket bat, he vaguely threatens nine-year-old Rocco, whereupon Rocco's father Harry, Hector's cousin, slaps him.

That's the starting point for The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, and the reverberations from that slap ripple through the entire story. Tsiolkas divides his book into eight sections, each one exploring the inner life of one of the characters from the party. Some of the storylines directly follow the effect of the slap – Hugo's parents press charges, family and friends are forced to take sides in the dispute, friendships are threatened. Others explore more personal stories – marriage and infidelity, mid-life crisis, the bonds of friendship, adolescent coming-of-age and dealing with the loss of aging friends. Through them Tsiolkas examines racism, homophobia and class prejudice without ever preaching or sentimentalizing.

Every time I thought he was headed for a stereotype he swerved from it to give a realistic but sympathetic view of a character. I found some stories more compelling than others (maybe I've just read too many coming of age tales?), but Tsiolkas does an admirable job of keeping all eight threads woven together. Starting with a single shocking act he paints a nuanced picture of a network of complex relationships.