Undercover

I think there was part of me that always wanted to be a spy. Years ago I turned down an offer to work at NSA, and perhaps I was secretly expecting a tap on the shoulder from CIA. That may explain why Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth appealed to me. It's the late 60's and the tap on shoulder of Cambridge grad Serena Frome (rhymes with plume) comes from her older lover, a Cambridge professor. She is hired by MI5, the domestic counterespionage service. (Note to the esteemed Mr. McEwan: if you want your character's name to be pronounced Frume why don't you just spell it that way?).

Like virtually all the female employees, Serena's job is as a clerk to the male officers. But her love of literature, despite a degree in math, lands her an assignment to recruit a young fiction writer to unknowingly use his talents to advance the agency's anti-Communist position. She falls for him, it's mutual, and they tumble into a wholly unprofessional but enjoyable affair. She keeps her real job a secret from him, and you just know that's going to come back to haunt her.

McEwan is too good a storyteller to let this unfold in a predictable way. It's never clear until the very end who's lying, who's being deceived, who's in the loop and who's out of it. Serena is the book's narrator, and she looks back from a distance of forty years, but she lets the story reveal itself as the events occur.

I do have one quibble with McEwan. In several of his recent books - “Saturday”, “Solar” and this one - there is a 'smartest man in the room' kind of character who bears more than a passing resemblance to the author, and his female characters seldom seem as smart as the males. Maybe he'll remedy that the next time out. He's too good a writer to be weighed down by a stereotype.

I've Been Sequestered

Yes, I've been sequestered with Patrick Melrose. At least that's how it feels. Once I read Edward St. Aubyn's first book about the fictional Patrick Melrose, “Never Mind”, I was compelled to keep going. How could a writer create such a poisonous family dynamic, in which five-year-old Patrick is a helpless pawn, and still find a way to make me laugh out loud? How could I want to read more about a father like this: “He was determined to harden the calluses of disappointment and develop the skill of detachment in his son. After all, what else did he have to offer him?”. A father whose philosophy was that “what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about”.

Not surprisingly, this wretched childhood produces an adult Patrick whose attempts to harness his rage and self-pity through drugs and booze, even as he mutters darkly funny observations about the English upper class, lead him through addictions, recoveries, affairs, relapses, marriage, and parenthood in his subsequent novels “Bad News”, “Some Hope” and “Mother's Milk”, as he is all the while unable to permanently right his own foundering ship. 

The final book in the series, “At Last”, opens on the day of the funeral of Patrick's mother. He wrestles once again with his anger and depression, but still finds time to observe of his aunt: “She stood in the doorway looking exhausted by her own haughtiness, as if her raised eyebrows might not be able to stand the strain much longer”.

So clearly this is not a book for readers looking characters they can admire, people whose company they'd enjoy. Patrick would be hell to live with, but I liked being along for the ride. St. Aubyn creates a world where each darkly comic observation is matched with moment of piercing comprehension of the effects of family violence. Patrick asks himself: “What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power?”. As the books ends I was left with at least a shred of hope that this might be possible for him.

A Year in the Life

Sometimes what leads me to a book is a straight line, sometimes it's a long twisted path, but this time it was somewhere in between. I loved David Mitchell's “Cloud Atlas', so I tried “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” but I just couldn't get into it. So much for David Mitchell, said I. But then I listened to the podcast of the Slate Audio Book Club where they discussed “Cloud Atlas”. (These podcasts are very entertaining, and I loved the latest one where they discussed “”Pride and Prejudice” on the occasion of its 200^th birthday). They enjoyed "Cloud Atlas", but all of them said that their favorite Mitchell book was Black Swan Green, so I decided to try it.

What! Another coming-of-age novel told in the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy? Why I am reading this? But I was hooked immediately. The chapters, each about a month apart, recount episodes in Jason Taylor's life in Worcestershire in 1982 . They don't initially seem to tie together, but they slowly reveal Jason's world and his view of it. He is a sharp observer, perhaps because his stammer makes him wary of talking too much, but also because he is acutely aware of the thin and shifting line that separates a thirteen-year-old from being part of the crowd to being the object of bullying. He has secret aspirations to write poetry, and some of his prose reflects his attachment to the lyric and mystical in nature. But he can also be snarkily funny, keenly observant of the odd characters that are part of small town life, and sharply critical of his parent's crumbling marriage.

If you've been put off by complicated, mannered style of Mitchell's previous works, I highly recommend that you spend a year with Jason Taylor.

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.