RIP Dorothy Bryant

I am sorry for two RIP posts in a row. But today I saw the obituary of writer Dorothy Bryant in the San Francisco Chronicle. I hadn’t thought about this author for a long time, but memories came rushing back as soon as I saw her name. I most associate Bryant’s work with my longtime Reading Group (see my posts of 1/26/10, 1/8/12, and 2/4/16 for more on this group), as we read several of her novels in the mid- to late-70s, when our group was young (as were we!) and when Bryant published her first few books. Bryant was born in San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area most of her life; she died in Oakland on Dec. 21, 2017, at the age of 87. She was the daughter of Italian immigrants, the first in her family to graduate from college, and some of her fiction reflects that background. It has aspects of the local (San Francisco and Oakland), of immigrant culture, and of working class life, as well as of the teaching life. Bryant taught in schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, and was known at least a bit to some of my friends in the Reading Group (all of us educators) through those teaching circles. We read her books because she was local and because she was a feminist, and we thoroughly enjoyed and celebrated those books. She also wrote plays and a book about writing. I am not sure how well known she was outside of the Bay Area, but here she was known with respect and affection, especially among women, and most especially among feminists. I am happy to remember those days of reading her fiction with my Reading Group friends, and connecting it to our lives in those early days of our group and of second wave feminism. Thank you, Dorothy Bryant, for your sustaining work.

RIP Sue Grafton

I am very sad to hear of the death of writer Sue Grafton on Thursday, December 28, in Santa Barbara, of cancer. She was 77. Grafton was the much-beloved author of the best-selling series of mystery novels featuring private detective Kinsey Millhone. Each novel's title begins with a letter of the alphabet, in order, starting with "A is for Alibi" and ending with "Y is for Yesterday." Unfortunately, there will never be a "Z is for..." novel. The alphabet novels are entertaining and enjoyable for the mystery plots, but also for the cast of interesting characters (neighbors, friends, police officers, others) we grow to know as we proceed through the alphabet, and for the setting in the mythical Santa Teresa in Southern California. We soon feel we know the territory and the characters well, which enhances the reading experience; of course every new book offers many surprises as well. Most of all, readers enjoy the character of Kinsey herself, whom we feel we know well after reading several of the novels. Something that has been important to me in the series is that without in any way being explicit, didactic, or polemical, these novels are definitely feminist. When Grafton published the first book in the series in 1982, novels featuring women detectives were rare, and thus such novels were happily welcomed by many of us. As her longtime editor Marian Wood says, "Unlike so many female characters in the mysteries that preceded her appearance, [Kinsey] is not a loyal helpmate or willing employee or second banana. Now, how refreshing is that?" Kinsey Millhone is smart, funny, tough, and resourceful, but sometimes prone to mistakes, sometimes endearingly self-deprecating, and sometimes even a little goofy. What a joy it has been for readers -- women and men -- to get to know, appreciate, and enjoy Kinsey and her adventures. On a personal note: Although, as I have written here before, I love mysteries but go in and out of phases of reading them, sometimes for years at a time, I always came back to Grafton's series. Just within the past few months, I went back to catch up on some in the series that I had missed, and then read the last one (without knowing it would be the last one), "Y is for Yesterday." Thank you, Sue Grafton, for the great pleasure, entertainment, and joy you have given so many, many readers over the past 35 years! And I am sure that many more readers will have the pleasure of discovering these books in years to come.

Happy Holidays, Dear Fellow Readers!

Dear fellow readers, On this Christmas Day, I want to wish you a Merry Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas), Happy Holidays, and a wonderful New Year! Today I am counting my blessings, and in addition to being grateful for family and friends, I am most grateful to you who read this blog and for all the other readers in the world. I am grateful for books, for writers, for publishers, for editors, for bookstores, for libraries, for book reviewers, for those who teach children to read, for those who teach literature, and for all the others involved in the process of giving us the wonderful gift of books.

"The Ninth Hour," by Alice McDermott

Sometimes it takes a while to write and post about a book I have read, because I am too busy to write (although, apparently, never too busy to read!). But occasionally the reason for a delay between finishing a book and writing about it is my worry about not being able to adequately convey how good the book is. The latter is the case with why I finished reading “The Ninth Hour" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), by the consistently wonderful writer Alice McDermott, a couple of weeks ago but have not posted on it until now. But here goes. I have read most of this author’s novels and am in awe of her talent. (See my post of 1/29/13 on “Someone”; her other works were published before I started this blog). The current novel has many elements of McDermott’s earlier novels: a focus on female characters; locales and storylines steeped in Catholicism, usually with Irish-American settings; explorations of family dynamics; and a clear-eyed but forgiving description of human foibles, and a deep sense of the histories and backgrounds of the characters. Her characters always seem completely real and specific, yet also universal. Her stories are always soaked in history and always evocative. “The Ninth Hour” takes place in early twentieth-century Brooklyn, and the main character is a young woman named Annie, newly widowed at the start of the story when her husband commits suicide. Her daughter, Sally, who never knows her father, is another major character. Both are exquisitely delineated in all their complexities. However, the characters who steal the story in many ways are the nuns of the Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor, whose vocation is to help whomever in their neighborhood needs it. Sister St. Saviour, Sister Jeanne, Sister Illuminata, and all the other nuns are true saints, true heroines. Of course they have their weaknesses and quirks, but they are truly selfless, devoted and hardworking for others. They take the young widow Annie in by giving her a job in the laundry of the convent, and Annie’s daughter grows up playing there, knowing the nuns, in a strange but in some ways enchanted childhood. Many intriguing characters enter the story. I won’t say more about the plot, in fear of giving spoilers, but I will say that in its gentle but compelling (and sometimes surprising) way, the story certainly keeps readers’ attention. As when I have read others of McDermott’s novels, I feel strongly how humane her stories and characters are, not whitewashed, but understood. I highly recommend this beautiful, and exquisitely written, novel.

"Sing, Unburied, Sing," by Jesmyn Ward

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” (Scribner, 2017), by Jesmyn Ward, is a powerful dirge, relentless and deeply sad, yet with a spark of hope and life in its midst. It tells the story of the fateful road trip of 13-year-old Jojo and his black family traveling through rural Mississippi to pick his white father Michael up from prison at the end of his sentence. Jojo lives in a very rural area with his unreliable mother Leonie, torn by her own history and addictions, as well as with his almost saintly, loving grandparents. His grandparents are both great inspirations to Jojo and provide a rock solid loving foundation for him, but the grandfather has his own demons, and the grandmother is painfully dying of cancer. Jojo is also the one who takes care of his little sister Kayla, a child being a rock for a still younger child. The family burden, besides a history of discrimination and pain, is the loss of Leonie’s brother Given to a senseless shooting. The road trip is dogged by unhappy events, but ultimately achieves its goal. Back home, despite a deep love between them, there is still strife between Leonie and Michael, made worse by the fact that Michael’s father cannot accept that Michael loves and has children with a black woman. Throughout the story, Jojo is visited by the ghost of his uncle Given, as well as by the ghost of a young man, really almost a child, Richie, whom Jojo’s grandfather had tried to save when the two of them were in the same prison where Michael was later; these two are the unsettled, unhappy, still questing, “unburied” of the title, although the titles resonates in other ways as well. It turns out that several members of the family have intuitive qualities and can see and hear ghosts. With the presence of ghosts, and the structure of the road trip, there is a mythic quality to this story. It is hard to exaggerate the power and compelling qualities of this novel. Of course there is no such thing as one “rural Southern African-American experience,” but this novel gives readers a riveting look at one family in Mississippi whose story combines the details of everyday life and the mythic in one potent package. Ward is a passionate, gifted writer, whose also-powerful memoir “Men We Reaped” I posted about here on 1/24/14. Having been moved and shaken by these two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, I will definitely seek out her other work, past and future.

Don't Get Between Me and Finishing My Story!

The other day while waiting in my dentist’s office, I started reading a story in one of those magazines that I only (honest!) read there, or at the beach, or at airports: magazines about celebrities, movies, etc. I wasn’t able to finish the story before my dental work was done, so – true confession – I took the magazine home. In my defense, it was one of many on the tables in the waiting room, and it was about four months old. Still, I shouldn’t have taken it. Or at least I should have asked. I’m sorry, Dr. L! The reason I tell this story is that it reminded me of the power of story, and how once we hear or read part of a story, we want very much to hear or read how it ends. I learned this in childhood. One particular example still stands out in my mind. In early elementary school, a librarian came to read to my class, and at the most exciting point in the story, she STOPPED READING! She cheerfully told us that if we wanted to know the ending, we could go to the library and finish the book there, and she left us without finishing the book. I was both very disappointed and a bit outraged, because I wanted to hear the rest of the story immediately. I also didn’t think I would be able to go to that library and find that book, and as it turned out, I never did hear or read the end of the story.I don’t remember the title of the book, or what it was about, but I vividly remember my feeling of something like betrayal, as if we children, listening with upturned faces, had been tricked. I understand now the motivation of the librarian, showing us the excitement of reading, but I thought then, and still think now, that she chose the wrong way to illustrate it. Years later – perhaps 25 years ago – I had a similar experience when I accidentally left a Barbara Pym book I had almost finished on an airplane. When I realized it, I rushed back to the plane, where the workers were sympathetic but said the airplane had already been cleaned. However, they said they would try to track the book down, and lo and behold, they did find it and return it to me perhaps a half hour later! (I am doubtful that airlines would be that helpful nowadays….) I had read the book years before, and I knew I could probably find it again, but it was somewhat obscure, and would take time to track down. I certainly wouldn’t be able to get a copy during my trip. So I was thrilled to have my book back, and be able to finish the story. I guess the lesson is never to get between an avid reader and her or his ability to finish a book or story!

"The Leavers," by Lisa Ko

My good friend SB, the same one who recommended the novel “Silver Sparrow,” which I very much liked, and about which I posted on 10/26/17, also recommended the novel “The Leavers” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2017), by Lisa Ko. I had read reviews of the novel and it sounded interesting, and was being very well received, but somehow I wasn’t drawn to read it. But after SB recommended it, I took another look at it, and then got completely caught up in it. It is very good on so many levels. It is being labeled by reviewers as a novel about the immigrant experience, and it is certainly that. But it is also about what constitutes family, what constitutes “home,” the meaning of the parent/child connection, gender, class, race, adoption, addiction, and the moral ambiguities that we all encounter. It is also fascinating on the level of a good story that draws the reader in. The two main characters are a mother, Polly, who is an immigrant from China (and therefore already a “leaver”), and her American-born son, Deming. Polly struggles to manage financially and to take care of her son, but her life is hard. She lives in New York City with her partner Leon and others of his relatives, including Deming’s friend Michael. Then one day when Deming is eleven years old, Polly disappears, a "leaver" once again. Soon after, Leon disappears. No one else among the relatives can afford to take care of Deming, so he is adopted by a white American couple, professors at a university in a very white town in upstate New York. He becomes “Daniel,” and has to adjust to a completely new life, meanwhile always wondering what happened to his mother, and why she left him. His new parents are good people, but they are naïve about cultural issues (despite their best intentions and efforts, and their academic knowledge) and cannot understand Daniel’s true self. The story follows Polly and Deming/Daniel in alternating sections, as Daniel grows up into his twenties and has trouble figuring out who he is, where he belongs, and what he wants to do with his life. He becomes a sort of “leaver” as well, making several moves in a sometimes aimless fashion. But he is also a “searcher” for the truth about what happened to his mother. I won’t give away any more of the story, but will say that it is alternatingly painful and hopeful. Readers will not be sorry to undertake a journey with these two deeply and carefully described characters. So once again, thank you, SB, for this recommendation! And I will look forward to reading future fiction by this gifted first-time novelist, Lisa Ko.