"Beautiful Day," by Elin Hilderbrand

A novel about a wedding on Nantucket (regular readers know I love Nantucket novels), with lots of family and romantic complications and crises that all get resolved by the last page…what’s not to like? I don’t remember which review or friend steered me toward Elin Hilderbrand’s “Beautiful Day” (Little, Brown, 2013) but I know my current interest in weddings (because, as I wrote on 8/29/13, my daughter is engaged and we are planning the wedding) was partly responsible for my putting this title on my library request list, and reading it. The novel describes a wedding weekend on Nantucket, where the bride’s family has long owned a second home, and where there is much family history. The plot hook is that the mother of the bride died several years before of cancer, and during her last few months, wrote down in “The Notebook” all her advice for her youngest daughter’s future wedding – everything from location to food to invitations to décor to…well, you get the idea. She did so not to be controlling, but so her daughter would feel she had her mother’s loving guidance. There are of course many sidetrips into the past, and we learn about several of the main characters’ romances, marriages, divorces, affairs, and other personal matters. Although only competently written, the novel offers plenty of reading pleasure. Does the dreaded term “chick lit” apply? Probably. And once in a while, that is just fine with me.

"The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells," by Andrew Sean Greer

I thought Andrew Sean Greer’s novel “The Story of a Marriage” was beautifully written (and the San Francisco setting was a bonus!). So when his new novel, “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells” (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2013), came out, I planned to read it. Then the idea that it was about a character who, because of electroshock treatments given to her to treat her depression (because of her brother’s terrible death, and the breakup of her marriage) in 1985, finds herself living in three different time periods (1985, 1918, and 1941), made me reluctant to read it. As readers of this blog may remember, I generally shy away from anything that smacks of science fiction, even very literary science fiction. But on second thought, I realized that the book was still character- and history-driven, and the time travel conceit was only a way of getting at how we all have different possible (although here titled “impossible”) lives, so I decided to read it after all. Hearing, by chance, the tail end of an engaging talk by the author at one of my favorite local independent bookstores, Book Passage in Corte Madera, increased my interest in the novel. So I did read it, liked the novel, and found it intriguing. It was fascinating to see the same characters in three different time periods, all in New York City. But I can’t say I loved it, and I am not sure why. Perhaps it was too schematic as it cycled through the three time periods. At times it was a bit confusing as well. Sometimes it just dragged a little. And there was perhaps too much musing, mourning, wondering, philosophizing by Greta. I did like the characters (Greta, her twin brother Felix, her husband Nathan, Felix’s lover Alan, Greta’s lover Leo, and Greta’s Aunt Ruth), found them interesting, and felt for their often difficult lives. Their difficulties mainly arose from living in the disastrous times of two wars, World Wars I and II, as well as from the sadness of the closeted lives the gay characters had to lead (in 1918 and 1941) and then the tragedy of AIDS (in 1985). Finally we are left to ponder the question “Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels?” Why indeed?

The Man Booker Prize Expands its Eligibility Rules

It was just announced that the very prestigious Man Booker prize, which has always been awarded annually to a book by a British or Commonwealth author, will, starting next year, make eligible any novel written in English and published in Britain. The reaction among the British, Australians, and others is consternation. Some say they fear that American novels will dominate the competition. In the past, the competition for the Booker, with its carefully spaced announcements of the long list, then the short list, and then the winner, has created audiences for many books from, for example, Indian authors whose books might otherwise receive little exposure. I don’t have strong feelings about this, but I do associate the Man Booker (formerly the Booker) Prize with the best of Britain and the Commonwealth, and I have been introduced to some books I wouldn’t know about otherwise by perusing the long and short lists and the prize winners.

Acceptance Letters

I have written here about how lovely it is to find personal letters in one’s mailbox. Lately I have been thinking about the importance of another kind of letter: acceptance letters. For example, each spring millions of young (and sometimes not so young) people receive, if they are fortunate, acceptance letters from schools, colleges, graduate schools, law schools, and medical schools. Other people receive acceptances for internships, clerkships, fellowships, project proposals, and jobs. Writers are thrilled to get letters of acceptance for their submitted books, stories, poems, and articles. For academics, one of the most prized types of letters is those from academic journals accepting their articles for publication. A few days ago I received one of these (well, in this case it was an email, but the genre and the excitement were the same!). An article that, although brief, I had been working on for some time, will go out into the world and be read by others! Although I have had many academic articles published over the years, acceptances are still far enough apart that each time it happens is a special occasion, a bit of a relief, and a pleasure.

"The Home Jar: Stories," by Nancy Zafris

Readers of “The Home Jar: Stories” (Switchgrass Books, 2013), by Nancy Zafris, are plunged into a dizzying variety of settings and strange stories. Although the stories are set in quiet, out of the way locales, there is always something unusual, a little bit dangerous, that simmers in the background and sometimes bursts into active menace. I have written here that I like stories that surprise me; these stories not only surprised but jolted me into an uneasy fascination. And yet the characters are understandable, and readers will feel concern and even compassion for them as they bravely, even stoically, get on with life, dealing with what has been dealt to them. And what characters! The sad, burnt-out chef with a secret. The small town mother haunted by the high-pitched sound she hears only in the town limits. The gifted wax museum artist who carries out a strange, sad task for a family. The curious, haunted flight attendant. The old woman who used to round up lepers and take them to a sanitarium for a living, and her long, vexed relationship with one of the patients. Yet no matter how removed the lives of these characters seem from those of the reader, there is a strong thread of connection, the thread of our shared humanity.

"A Dual Inheritance," by Joanna Hershon

“A Dual Inheritance” (Ballantine, 2013), by Joanna Hershon, is another “big” novel, not only in pages (almost 500) but also in scope and reach. It follows the three main characters, and then their two daughters, over the period from 1962-2010, depicting not only the intense drama of friends and family, but the larger intense drama of the events of the period. In these ways, the book reminds me somewhat of recent "big" novels by Jonathan Franzen (“The Corrections” and “Freedom”), Jeffrey Eugenides (“The Marriage Plot”), and Allan Hollinghurst (“The Stranger’s Child”), as well as of “big” Victorian novels. In general, I love these sweeping novels (although readers of this blog may remember that I really struggled with, and basically disliked, Franzen’s “Freedom”), and “A Dual Inheritance” is no exception. The main characters, Hugh Shipley and Ed Cantowitz, meet while about to graduate from Harvard, and begin an unlikely friendship; they are different in many ways related to family background, social class, ethnicity/religion, ambitions, and style, among others. Hugh has been in a relationship with Helen Ordway, the third main character and a member of a similar family and class background to his, and eventually marries her. Hugh somewhat rebels against the expectations for a young man of his class, is rather aimless for a while, but eventually finds his passion and has a career setting up medical clinics in Africa and Haiti, meanwhile becoming increasingly alcoholic. Ed, having come from a poor, rough background, fights for and achieves success in the financial world in New York. Both friends are successful on their own terms, but both eventually suffer various setbacks and comedowns. To complicate matters, Ed has long loved Helen as well, but goes on to marry Jill and, after their divorce, to have various relationships with other women. For many years the three friends are out of touch, due to Ed’s not wanting to be around Hugh and Helen as a couple, and due to another plot twist which I won’t reveal here. Years later, their two daughters meet and become friends at their boarding school, and eventually discover that their parents were old friends. Much of the later part of the book is about the lives of these two young women as much as about the parents, and about the various emotional entanglements among all of them, the members of both generations. It is an engaging novel that draws you into its world, and deftly interweaves the stories of the main characters with the stories of the larger world around them: poverty and disease around the world, financial excesses and eventually collapses on Wall Street, the war in Vietnam and its repercussions in the U.S., social class issues and those of inequity everywhere, and more. However, and I think this is important in a novel, the personal stories always predominate.

Courtship Letters

Looking through old files the other day, I ran across one containing letters between my husband and me in the first year of our relationship, especially from one summer when he was away for a couple of months visiting his family across the world. This was over 35 years ago, so reading the letters gave me that strange, unsettling but enjoyable “time travel” feeling. I have written here before (6/5/11) about my mom’s and my discovering old letters written to our parents by my brothers and me when we were in boarding school, and about how unfortunate it is that people seldom write letters any more. Yes, we email, and I love email, but it is not the same as receiving a handwritten letter in one’s mailbox, and then perhaps years later rediscovering the letter in one’s files or drawers. In any case, the letters between my husband and me from so long ago took me back to a time when we were young (our mid-twenties), and reminded me of the excitement, romance, and intensity of the early days of courtship. Since he and I have been together ever since, we haven’t had many occasions to write letters over the years, so these letters are very special to me.