Home Again, Home Again

There was a time in 2009 where it felt as if everyone I knew was reading “Olive Kitteridge”, Elizabeth Strout's book about the residents of the small community of Crosby on the coast of Maine. Strout created a series of interlocking stories, some in which Olive is the main character and others in which she stays on the periphery, which sketched with deft strokes the strengths, the flaws, and the complicated inner lives of various residents.

In her latest book The Burgess Boys Maine itself, specifically Shirley Falls, becomes one of her characters. The Burgess boys – Jim and Bob – are in fact grown men, and both have long ago fled Maine for New York, where Jim is a powerful lawyer and Bob is a struggling Legal Aid attorney, always in the shadow of his more accomplished and successful older brother whom he idolizes. Only Bob's twin sister Susie has remained in Maine, and it is her teenaged son Zach's legal difficulties which draw the two men reluctantly back to their hometown. And their return stirs up memories in them both of the childhood tragedy which drove them to leave Maine.

Literary conventions abound – the native returning home, the love/hate relationship between brothers, the corrosive effect of keeping secrets, the clash between natives and outsiders. But Strout avoids stereotypes to create honest characters, as she slowly reveals the ripple effects of a single tragic incident on all of their lives.

So Sorry

We have entered the era of the non-apology apology, and hardly a day goes by without a new example. They're so common that they are instantly recognizable by catch phrases - “Mistakes were made”, “IF I've offended anyone”, “I'm sorry you misunderstood my intent”. And in Johnathan Dee's novel A Thousand Pardons I learned that public relations firms have 'crisis management' specialists who shepherd their clients through very public crises which demand apologies.

Newly divorced Helen Armstead finds herself employed in that job in the wake of the breakup of her marriage. She discovers that she has a real talent for encouraging her crisis management clients to issue genuine apologies, without excuses or ifs or obfuscations. Ironically, her husband Ben blew up their marriage in such a spectacularly disastrous fashion that no apology could possibly repair it.

With a non-judgmental eye Dee follows Ben, Helen and their pre-teen daughter Sara as each struggles to adjust to a new reality, unable to help each other. But when Helen attempts to manage the crisis of a famous movie star (and high school crush), the family coalesces into an uneasy alliance where they learn to adjust to a new dynamic and to forgive. Dee avoids the cliches of mid-life crisis to present a flawed but believable story of an American family.

Family Ties

Is it just a coincidence that in the last year I have read three novels that began with a wedding? Is this a literary convention? I'll admit that it is a handy way to get all your main characters together in a situation where the combination of stress/passion/alcohol may well trigger dramatic scenes. In the previous two – Jean Thompson's “The Year We Left Home” (Leaving Home) and Johnathan Dee's “The Privileges (How The Other Half Lives) – the weddings served as vehicles to launch characters into adulthood, but in Carol Anshaw's Carry The One a single powerful event on the night of the wedding alters the lives of all the characters in the novel.

Does tragedy bind people more closely than passion? The three Kenney siblings – bride Carmen, her brilliant but fragile brother Nick, and her older sister Alice, a talented painter – all have desires which pull them in different directions, but they are drawn together. Surviving a common childhood with parents who waiver between indifference and malevolence helps explain this bond. And they share the same crackling sense of humor. But for twenty-five years all their lives are colored by the same tragic accident, and each compensates in a different way.

Anshaw's humor and sympathy makes this book far more entertaining and less depressing than it may sound from my description. Her portrait of the complex network of emotions that ties the siblings to each other and to their shared tragedy is honest and powerful.

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.

Leaving Home

Are novels which begin with a wedding more common than I realized? Jonathan Dee's “The Privileges” began that way, and Jean Thompson's The Year We Left Home opens in 1973 with the wedding of Anita Erickson in Grenada, Iowa. The device provides a great way to introduce the Erickson family – the simple hardworking parents, their four children, and their Viet Nam vet cousin Chip.

The books spans thirty years. Each chapter jumps forward in time and catches us up on the lives of some of the characters. Often a chapter reads like a short story – a fully developed episode in its own right. But this is definitely not a case where an author has simply sewn short stories together. Each episode expands and enriches our understanding of the characters and of the forces that pull the family members together and push them part. I especially enjoyed the arc Thompson created for youngest son Ryan as he moves from an earnest political science major to a disillusioned grad student to a successful IT professional and disappointed husband and father. Thompson sometimes weaves Ryan's story with that of his damaged and confused cousin Chip, deftly contrasting their two paths through thirty years of history.

Even when a storyline seems headed down a predictable path, as when rebellious younger daughter Torrie is severely injured in an accident, Thompson turns the narrative in a fresh, unexpected direction. Throughout the book some characters spin far from Iowa, others stay close, but the pull towards home is strong, and Thompson paints an honest, sometimes funny, often poignant portrait of an American family.

Under One Roof

I've enjoyed Antonya Nelson's short stories in the New Yorker for a number of years but I'd never read any of her novels. Sometimes a great short story writer disappoints me as a novelist (Alice Munro and Eudora Welty come to mind), so I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked up Living To Tell.

The book covers a year in the life of the Mabie family of Wichita, Kansas and it opens with a powerful scene. Thirty-three year old Winston Mabie is returning home after five years in prison for manslaughter, the result of a drunk driving accident in which he killed his grandmother. He returns to a large rambling house where his parents and two adult sisters live. His older sister Emily is a recently divorced mother of two young children, and younger sister Mona is an underemployed depressive with bad taste in men. The father, a retired history professor, is secretly grieving over the imminent death of his teaching colleague and best friend Betty, and Mrs. Mabie is losing both her vision and her connection to the rest of her family. The plot also includes a crazy uncle, a pregnant teenager, and a kidnapped dog. Can you say dysfunctional?

But Nelson is a witty and insightful writer, and although her characters may sound less than likable, she is fond of them all and gives each some space to reveal their better selves. There were moments when I felt that I was reading a set piece which had been dropped into novel (kind of like an embedded short story?), but she presents a funny, unsentimental but heartfelt view of an American family.

Family Memories

It's a familiar plot line. A traumatic event causes a character to examine his life, dredging up memories of his past in order to come to terms with a tragedy. In the case of Martin Lambert in Dennis McFarland's first novel The Music Room, the event is the suicide of his younger brother Perry. The call comes from the New York police just as Martin is cleaning out his San Francisco apartment and struggling to accept the ending of his marriage. He heads east to try to sort out the reasons his brother chose to end his life.

What follows is Martin's search, both in the past and in the present, to make sense of what has happened. McFarland beautifully describes Martin's memories of his unconventional childhood, fragments that slowly fit together to reveal some of the reasons for the difficulties he and his brother faced as adults. In his search for answers in New York, Martin becomes involved with his late brother's girlfriend as they both look for understanding of Perry's loss in each other.

The two brothers and their father are all musicians, and McFarland's writing often seems to have a musical quality, not just because of the beauty of his prose, but also because of the layered non-linear way that past, present and even Martin's dreams are woven together. Although it may sound relentlessly dark, there are moments of humor and an ending that offers a sort of redemption.

A Bird and a Bug

In one of the early years of our book group in the 1980’s we had a list of recommended books that included Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips. But we never selected it to read as a group nor did I read it myself. Then earlier this year there seemed to be a lot of press for Phillips’ new novel Lark and Termite . It was time to become acquainted with this author.

As has been mentioned in a previous blog, many of the best stories are in fact two stories. This new novel alternates between events at the beginning of the Korean War in Korea in 1950 from the perspective of a Corporal Robert Leavitt; and life in West Virginia in 1959 as it unfolds for Nonie, her niece Lark and her nephew Termite. Lark and Termite are half-siblings, the children of Nonie’s sister Lola. At the time of the novel, Lark is 17 and Termite is 9. The connection is that Leavitt is Termite’s father (but not Lark’s). The author presents it in a way that is not at all as confusing as I have made it sound.

Each of these four main characters tells a part of the story, and sometimes the same part, from his or her own perspective. This is especially challenging as Termite is severely handicapped - he cannot walk, can barely make some intelligible sounds, and has very limited vision if any. The chapters in his voice have a different cadence but are certainly the work of a creative and sensitive author. It makes you wonder just how much he may perceive (he seems to be especially sensitive to sounds) and if he is frustrated in trying to communicate it. It is a good reminder that lack of perception does not necessarily follow from lack of ability to communicate. Lark’s complete devotion to her half-brother and her selflessness in taking care of him are both heart-warming and heart-breaking.

There is much to satisfy in this novel: history (the incidents at No Gun Ri); just a little magical realism (the new wheel chair); mystery (who is Lark’s father, why are the children being raised by their aunt); and Mother Nature (a devastating flood).

You can find links to author interviews and podcast readings at Phillips' website.

Fathers and Sons

The Book Shop in West Portal in San Francisco is a readers book store. The
books are carefully put out on large tables to easily browse and read. I am always impressed by the choice of books I find. Many are the titles we have read in book club or ones we have blogged. I love to slowly browse and read the backs and covers of the books until I find the one that appeals to me. I had never heard of Paul Harding or his novel “Tinkers” but I liked the blurbs on the back. Interestingly the copy I purchased was autographed, so Mr. Harding must have visited the Book Shop. I was elated to find “Tinkers” to be a special and amazingly good book.

“Tinkers” is Paul Harding’s first novel. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a teacher of creative writing at Harvard. “Tinkers” is the story of George Washington Crosby. We find him as he lays dying in the living room of the house he built. The story is a series of hallucinations that emerge as George slowly loses consciousness with the world and people around him. He begins to relive his childhood in the rural West Cove, Maine. He remembers his father, Howard, a tinker who drove a wagon over the countryside, filled with household goods, to sell to the people living in the remote woods. George tells the story of a kind, humble father who suffered from epileptic fits, a father who disappeared from George’s life when he was young. The beauty of this story lies in the thoughts of these two men. The author brings the reader into the hearts of these men and shows us that even though they were separated there remained a strong connection. George was a teacher but in his retirement he repaired and tinkered with antique clocks. Paul Harding delves masterfully into the workings of a clock and the skill of "horology", the study of measuring time or making clocks. He also describes the mystery of an epileptic seizure with wonderful, clear, insightful language. The story moves from George and Howard to Howard’s father, a minister, who was strangely removed from Howard's life when he was a boy. The author goes into the minds of these three men, who did not or hardly knew each other, to illustrate the mystery of existence and connection.

Paul Harding’s prose is beautiful whether he is describing some wonderful force of nature or the sadness of a young boy. His sentences can go on for a full page and demand the reader’s full concentration but the effort is rewarded with an intricate story and a beautifully written novel.

Let’s hope Paul Harding has other stories to tell us with his amazing prose and skillful narrative.

Going Home

It was Robert Frost who said: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." So it is in Marilynne Robinson's newest novel, Home. Robert Boughton, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife had eight children: 4 girls (Faith, Hope, Grace and Glory) and 4 boys (Luke, Dan, Jack and Teddy). (What do you notice?) There is now an extended family: six of the children are married, adding six in-laws, with twenty-two children. Six of them are married, with six more in-laws, and five grandchildren. At the beginning of the novel, the senior Mrs. Boughton is deceased and the retired Reverend Boughton has been living alone in the family home in Gilead, Iowa.

Then, Glory, the youngest, at age 38 returns home to live. She had moved away and been a high school English teacher for 13 years. The unhappy termination of a long-term romantic relationship brings her home. Once at home she takes over the housekeeping and care for her increasingly frail father and they begin to settle into their routine. Until Jack returns - Jack, the Prodigal Son. Jack had been missing for 20 years. No one knew if he were alive. He hadn't even come to his mother's funeral. He had been the typical ne'er-do-well child, at times a truant and a thief, and finally himself a father who abandons the unwed mother and child and leaves Gilead. For all that, as in the parable, Jack is the dearest to his father of them all, the one who is missed at all of the family gatherings and who is welcomed home by the Reverend with undisguised and unbounded joy. Even Glory, despite her initial hurt and resentment, is glad to have him back. As a child, she too had always sought unsuccessfully for the approval of her older brother.

Robinson by turns explores the relationship between each pair of these three principal characters. Each is complicated. Watching as Glory and Jack reveal themselves to each other, their hopes and heartaches, is especially moving. Their father's struggle with his love and his fear of losing this son is wrenching. The portrait of life in their small rural town in 1956 is beautifully drawn. I will be thinking about this book for a long time: What is sin? What is grace? What is home?