"The Tell," by Hester Kaplan

I was very taken with Hester Kaplan’s collection of short stories, “The Edge of Marriage,” which I wrote about here on 2/5/13. So I was happy to read that she had a new novel, “The Tell” (Harper Perennial, 2013). This is a rich, “thick” (to use the anthropological term) description of a marriage, a marriage that seems to be very good, but turns out to be vulnerable to danger, in this case in the form of an aging male former television star who moves in next door. Mira is an artist; Owen is a teacher. They are not terribly prosperous, but they are doing fine, living in the house she grew up in, and seem quite happy. When Wilton becomes their neighbor, he insinuates himself into their lives, although it isn’t clear what he wants beyond company, and sympathy about his estrangement from his adult daughter. Gradually he -- purposely or unconsciously -- precipitates a rift in their marriage, as Mira becomes drawn into his quest to win back the estranged daughter, and as she joins him on his frequent trips to a casino. It is unclear if there is a sexual element in Mira and Wilton’s relationship, but if there is, that is not the main issue in the rift. The main problem is the erosion of trust, the lack of honesty that enters Mira’s and Owen’s marriage. Wilton too has his demons, which he tries to address not only with gambling and with usurping Mira's time and attention, but with compulsively rewatching episodes of the old television show in which he starred; in a disturbing counterpoint, Mira too watches these episodes over and over, late at night as well. Yet Kaplan does not make Wilton a pure villain; we see his sadness and we sympathize with him too. He had his moments in the bright light of fame, and now – although financially secure – he subsists emotionally on the recognition he occasionally receives from, say, a woman in the supermarket who excitedly remembers him and his television show, and perhaps asks for his autograph. There is a sad and unsettling tension between the initial seeming normality of the three main characters, and the increasing abnormality of their behavior and the way they live and relate to each other and to the world. Kaplan shows enormous insight into the motivations of her characters, although never over-explaining. She is a wonderful writer. I found the book powerful, but (and?) I was somewhat shaken by the story, itself a proof of the effectiveness of Kaplan’s writing.

"The Practice of Deceit," by Elizabeth Benedict

“The Practice of Deceit” (Mariner, 2005), by Elizabeth Benedict, made me feel itchy. The novel definitely caught and kept my interest, but it felt slightly disturbing, slightly uncomfortable, slightly off-putting. Well, perhaps that was the point. Psychotherapist Eric, a lifelong bachelor, meets and is not very subtly seduced by lawyer Colleen Golden, who also has a cute, sweet daughter. Colleen convinces Eric that they should move to Scarsdale. Every step of the way, she is controlling him, yet he does not realize it for quite some time – too long, in my opinion. For a therapist, he seems remarkably dense about Colleen’s motivations and actions. But -- partial spoiler alert ahead -- eventually Eric is shocked to find everything falling apart, and realizes he has been had, so to speak. The main interest of the novel is finding out the details of how this happens, and hoping against hope that justice will be restored. I won’t tell you the ending, but I will say that the novel is a page turner. And it still left me feeling itchy….

"Last Friends," by Jane Gardam

I was thrilled when I saw that the third novel in Jane Gardam’s “Old Filth” trilogy had been published. The first two volumes were “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat,” and the new novel is “Last Friends” (Europa Editions, 2013). Together they tell the story of British characters of a particular type: expatriates in Asia, yet loyal English citizens. They are Edward Feathers, his wife Betty, and Terence Veneering, who was Feathers’ rival and Betty’s lover. Each book focuses on one of the characters, but is complete in and of itself. However, reading all three allows one to see the events and relationships from different angles. These three characters, along with their colleagues and friends, lived a colonial life in what was known then as the Far East, and then retired back to England. Their lives are tangled with each other’s, and they are part of the Old Guard of post World War II, although they seem rooted in an even earlier, more colonial time period. The first novel focused on Feathers, and the second one on Betty. This latest novel, “Last Friends,” focuses on Veneering, who has retired near where Feathers retired. The second novel revealed that long after Betty’s death, these two rivals reconciled and became friends. But then Feathers died. This third novel brings in other characters who had known each other in the East but now live near each other, or visit each other, in England, including Fiscal-Smith and Dulcie. All are now elderly, and sometimes a bit forgetful, but still remember the old days and keep their old (mixed) feelings about each other. A few new younger characters are introduced as well. But none of my description can capture the wonders of Gardam’s writing; she is quite simply a genius in the strength and depth of her writing, and in the way she captures this particular world and the nuances of the characteristics of each person, and the relationships among them. Her writing is evocative but never sentimental; it is descriptive without going overboard; she involves readers without pandering to them. For me there is a special connection because of my life as the child of missionaries in India, so there are resonances there. But this novel would appeal to anyone who admires and savors masterful writing. Kudos too to Europa for the beautifully produced paperback version, with its eye-catching cover. Highly recommended. (But consider reading the other two novels first….)

"Spiderweb," by Penelope Lively

How wise English author Penelope Lively is! And how assured her writing is! I have written here before about this wonderful author and about several of her novels. I have just re-read her novel “Spiderweb” (Harper Flamingo, 1998), which I originally read before I started this blog. It is the story of a just-retired social anthropologist, Stella Brentwood, who has for the first time bought a house in England and settled down. During her working life, she was constantly moving, doing fieldwork in various farflung locales. Her particular area of study was family and community lineages and relationships, those that form the “spiderwebs” of the title. Yet she herself, despite romances and friendships, never wanted to marry or confine herself to one place. Now, in her new cottage, she tries to observe the local people as she has observed her research subjects elsewhere over the years. She tries to get involved, and does so to an extent, but feels the ways in which English life has changed and in which community’s ties are less tight and compelling than in the past. She has both some friendly and some rather disturbing neighbors; her portrait of one family, with its abusive mother and two resentful teenaged sons, is quietly chilling. "Spiderweb" serves as a meditation on gender, love, connections, aging and the life choices we all make. Most of all, it focuses on the eternal balancing act between the life of the individual and the life of a member of a larger society; we all have both roles, and we are all constantly negotiating and readjusting those two roles. Finally, I want to say once again that Lively is one of the very best writers writing today.

"Leaving Everything Most Loved," by Jacqueline Winspear

As I have written before, all my reading life I have enjoyed mysteries, especially those of a certain kind, those that some call English cozies, although I also like those about California women detectives. Like millions of other mystery readers, I started with Agatha Christie, in my case when I found a cache of her books on a shelf under the stairs of the living room area of my boarding school dormitory in India, and continued from there. There have been periods, however, when I have been tired of mysteries and stopped reading them for several years. I have just been in one of those periods, during which I stopped reading even new novels by my favorite mystery writers. For some reason, though, I recently picked up Jacqueline Winspear’s latest Maisie Dobbs novel, after choosing not to read the last couple of books in the series. This one, “Leaving Everything Most Loved” (Harper, 2013), turned out to be quite enjoyable and satisfying, reminding me of why I have liked this series so much from its inception. The series is about Maisie Dobbs, a woman who grew up poor, but through her interest in books and learning, was helped by a rich family to become a nurse during World War I, where she saw many terrible things, and then was helped by a mentor to become a private detective who uses psychology as much as traditional detective work to solve her cases. There is an almost spiritual element to her detecting. I was particularly interested in this current novel because it features characters from India, who were a real novelty in London at the time of this novel, the 1930s. Along with the mystery – the murders of two young women – the novel explores topics of immigration and prejudice, as well as a thread throughout all the Maisie novels: the terrible after-effects of war, physical and mental, on soldiers and their families. Although these are serious topics, Winspear is able to integrate them into her stories in a way that we note and grieve them, but that does not overwhelm the main thrust of the stories: the detection that solves the mysteries of the murders. There is also the plot thread of Maisie's romance and the uncertainty of whether this strong, independent woman will choose to marry, or to postpone marriage until she has traveled the world, something she feels drawn to do. I don’t know yet whether reading this one mystery was an aberration on my part, or whether I have cycled back to wanting to read more. Maybe an Elizabeth George -- another favorite in the past -- will be next?

Speculations on Eastern vs. Western Literature

In a San Francisco Chronicle review (5/26/13, pp. F1-F2) of Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, reviewer G. Willow Wilson tells of -- a few years ago -- asking a Pakistani writer (whom she does not name) “what, in his opinion, makes contemporary Western literature distinctive?” “Simple. It’s about bored, tired people having sex,” he replied. Wilson comments that “The response was so immediate, delivered with such deadpan frankness…shorthand for the opaque cynicism of the postmodern novel, so very different from the urgently political, emotionally riotous books coming out of the Middle East and South Asia.” Wilson goes on to opine that the popularity of Hosseini’s novels (which take place between countries and cultures) “hints at the advent of a new, more global, less culturally compartmentalized era of literature,” and suggests that “we are living in a time when such distinctions are increasingly meaningless, and cynicism is going out of style.” The original distinctions, and the declaration of their going out of style, seem to me far too sweeping, and there is perhaps an unfortunate bit of stereotyping going on. But I did find these speculations intriguing, and started to think about which books I choose to read, and how they might fit into this schema. True confession: I realize that many of the books I read could be, very loosely (no pun intended!), put in the Pakistani writer’s “bored people having sex” category. But -- and I know it was partly a joke -- such a description is very reductionist. Of course sometimes the sweeping statements are the ones that make us think, even as we question them, or partially reject them.

"Fools," by Joan Silber

Joan Silber’s “Fools” (Norton, 2013) doesn’t say “stories” or “a novel” after the title, as so many works of fiction do. It appears that this is a collection of stories, but some characters are found in more than one story, so each story’s history and events provide a sort of background and network for the other stories. The stories take place in New York, Miami, Paris, and India, among other places, and although contemporary, often dip into the past. The characters and events are genuinely interesting, and I like that politics play a part in the stories. For example, there are anarchist characters; this is not something often found in today’s fiction. Several of the characters are quite poor at various times in their lives, and struggle with alcohol as well. Actually, some of them would be labeled “losers” by most people, yet they have their own integrity, their own ways of dealing with life. The stories are fresh, different, and thought-provoking, which is what we all look for in stories.

"The Burgess Boys," by Elizabeth Strout

I (along with many other readers, clearly, as testified to by its long-running bestseller status) loved Elizabeth Strout’s collection of interconnected short stories, “Olive Kitteridge,” so I was primed to love her new novel, “The Burgess Boys” (Random House, 2013). I did in fact enjoy it, but I must say that at times it was a bit of a struggle, and at times it was depressing. This novel tells of the Burgess family, three adult siblings who have a closely connected and yet vexed relationship with each other. The two “boys” of the title are lawyers Jim and Bob; the third sibling is their sister Susan; other characters are Jim’s wife Helen and Susan’s troubled son Zach. Susan still lives in Maine, where the siblings grew up; Jim and Bob have moved to New York. Jim is the successful one of the family, a prominent lawyer who gained fame after he defended an O.J. Simpson-type character and was on television every night for a while. Now the family is challenged and brought together uneasily when the somewhat sad and immature Zach commits what some consider a hate crime, but what it seems clear he didn’t really do with any malice. This precipitating event brings out all the family history, all the family dynamics, and eventually uncovers an old family secret in the process. This book has a lot going on: It is about family, about Maine, about religious prejudice, about America's uneasy absorbing of new immigrants, about the law, about marriage, about parenting, about family secrets and their consequences, and more. It is sometimes sad and difficult to read, and other times uplifting. Most of all, as we read it, we are in the thick of the human condition.

"Flora," by Gail Godwin

It is hard to stay interested in a book in which so little actually “happens.” Yet Gail Godwin, in “Flora” (Bloomsbury, 2013), manages to make a rather static situation simmer with tension, because of all the family history so very present in every minute of the story. The situation is a classic example of a few characters’ being confined in a small space, and then one or two outsiders entering that space and tilting the precarious peacefulness of the original characters and situation. The two main characters are the precociously bright ten-year-old Helen and the 22-year old Flora, a relative who is taking care of Helen in Helen’s family’s house for a summer while her father is away doing secret war work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II. They are mostly isolated in the house, because of a local polio scare, and see very few visitors. Further isolating them is that one of Helen’s friends has gotten polio and gone to a hospital; another friend has moved away. Very present throughout the story, in spirit, are Helen’s long-dead mother and her recently deceased and much-beloved grandmother, Nonie, and Helen’s father, although he is away throughout most of the story. The house itself, on a hill just outside a small town in North Carolina, is almost a character in itself; it is roomy and has a long history as a sanitarium as well as a family home, but now is badly decaying and feels isolated. The main focus of the story is the evolving relationship between the very clever Helen and the naïve, “heart-simple” Flora. Helen is teaching herself psychological skills such as manipulating Flora to do what she, Helen, wants her to do. Helen is not a bad child, but her precocity makes her too powerful for her age or for her own good. Yet we sympathize with her because of all her losses. Helen is also the narrator of the novel, so we readers are led to see things from her perspective. So, although nothing very big “happens” during the course of the novel, the weight of all that has happened before, and the impact of an event at the end, when something big finally happens, bring import and tension to everything in between, during that fateful summer. This novel is, finally, fascinating psychologically, as well as a slice of life from a certain time and place in American history (the South during World War II, suffused with all the history that has come before). Gail Godwin, always so good at creating atmosphere, has done so again in “Flora.”

San Francisco Boosterism!

This post is an unashamed (and slightly tongue-in-cheek) instance of regional pride in the area where I live: The San Francisco Bay Area. Perhaps readers will consider this pride provincial, and it may be, but here goes! Looking at the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday book section every week, I often notice that the Bay Area and National best-seller lists -- especially the fiction lists -- are significantly different. For example, on 5/26/13, only two books appear on both hardcover fiction lists of 10 books each; the rest were different titles. The Bay Area lists, in general, include more “literary” books than do the national lists. On that same 5/26/13 list, for example, the Bay Area list includes Claire Messud’s “The Woman Upstairs,” Isabel Allende’s “Maya’s Notebook” (OK, Allende lives in the Bay Area, which may be a factor, but still…), Kate Atkinson’s “Life after Life,” and Therese Anne Fowler’s “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald,” none of which appears on the national list. The national list, in contrast, includes books by perennial bestselling authors such as James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and Mary Higgins Clark, none of which appears on the Bay Area list. Granted, the Bay Area list often also includes such less “literary” books as well, but the overall distribution of titles on the two lists is fairly different. Readers may draw their own conclusions. And to my readers in other areas around the United States and the world: please forgive my San Francisco-centeredness in this post!

"Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald," by Therese Anne Fowler

Reading novels based on the lives of writers is always dicey. Because we bring so much knowledge (or “knowledge,” perhaps myths and rumors) to the reading of these books, we can be both intrigued and disturbed by portrayals that don’t fit with our preconceptions. In the case of “Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald” (St. Martin’s, 2013), by Therese Anne Fowler, the focus is on the wife of the famous novelist, as was the case with the novel “The Paris Wife” (see my post of 7/1/11), which was about one of Ernest Hemingway’s wives. But Zelda was much more than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife: she was a gifted writer, painter, and dancer herself. In fact, according to the novel (and other sources), she actually wrote, or co-wrote, many of his short stories; it was considered that they would sell better under Scott’s name. As many readers know, this was a couple that had a great love, and great talent, but also was eventually destroyed by alcohol and mental illness. Another factor that this novel highlights is the gender aspect: Scott wanted Zelda to be a more traditional wife, and he felt threatened by her own talents and the time she spent on writing, painting, dancing; he was also very jealous of time she spent with other men. In addition, there are -- at least as portrayed in this novel -- at least two instances of his physical violence against her. The novelist also makes it clear that Zelda’s mental illness was probably misunderstood and mistreated; she also suggests that sometimes Scott found it convenient to leave her in institutions, “for her own good,” for long stretches of time. This is fiction, so we will never know how much of it is “true.” The author, in a “note” at the end of the novel, states that “I have tried to adhere as much as possible to the established particulars of those people’s lives” but also says that “It’s impossible to find universal agreement, however, about many of those particulars.” In any case, she has written a compelling, even fascinating, novel about this real-life, but larger-than-life, character, Zelda Fitzgerald. I came away from it feeling I understood Zelda better, and feeling sorry for her. And despite all Scott’s shortcomings (and there were many, many of those), at times he is a sympathetic character as well. His legacy is the wonderful novels and stories he left behind. We will never know if Zelda, if she had been male, would have been able to write and publish, and be given recognition for, great stories and novels as well.