"Only the River," by Anne Raeff

I will start with a simple statement: Anne Raeff is an outstanding writer. As I wrote about her first book, she is in complete control of her material, and her fiction, although (or, of course, partly because) her topics are serious and grim, she makes us feel the life force that always comes through. That first book, the 2002 novel “Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia,” which I posted about here on 3/2/11, completely won me over. I was thrilled when her second book, a story collection titled “The Jungle Around Us,” appeared in 2016. I posted with great appreciation and enthusiasm about it on 12/8/16. Then Raeff’s third work of fiction, the novel “Winter Kept Us Warm,” was published in 2018. I was overwhelmed by how good it was. And here is the confession I am building up to: I kept wanting to write about that third book here, but I kept being paralyzed by the feeling that I couldn’t possibly do it justice. So I put off and put off writing about it, and finally gave up, not without a feeling of failure and even shame. Now I have just read Raeff’s latest book, the novel “Only the River” (Counterpoint, 2020), and once again, I am blown away by how wonderful, profound, meaningful, and expansive it is. Once again, I feel inadequate to express how good it is, and how great a writer Raeff is. But I am determined to at least try to do so. It is “about” the ways in which people are affected by wars and immigration, and about how people and families change as they move among cultures. It is about generational connections, family connections, the environment, and so much more. It is compelling and beautifully written, a real triumph. And it has intangible qualities such as integrity, deep honesty, and true caring about the characters and issues Raeff writes about. Although I feel the book deserves more than what I have written here, I am going to leave this post at that, so that I don’t delay any longer in giving tribute to both “Winter Kept Us Warm” and the current book, “Only The River.” Highly recommended!

Four Novels about Summers in Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod

It is summer, but because of the pandemic, most of us are not going on beach vacations, or any other kind. I realize how fortunate I am that I and my family have our health, our jobs (which we can do from home) and our pleasant homes to shelter in. So I am not complaining, but I do miss summer vacations or some type of travel. I have turned to “summer”/beach novels for escape. It happens that three of the four such novels I have very recently read, in search of that summer feeling, have the word “summer” in their titles. All four are set in the storied New England area encompassing Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and Cape Cod, with all the history and magic suggested by those names. All four are reasonably well-written examples of a certain genre, with romance, family issues, obstacles and triumphs over those obstacles, all in gorgeous settings. Two of them are relatively light-hearted; the other two are a little bit heavier, darker, but only a little bit. Two of them feature surfers among their characters. The four novels all go down easy, and distract from the fact that most readers themselves probably do not have access to these settings, especially not during the pandemic. I am not going to “review” these four novels individually, but will list them here: “28 Summers,” by the bestselling author Erin Hilderbrand; “Girls of Summer,” by the also bestselling author Nancy Thayer; “Summer Darlings,” by Brooke Lea Foster; and “The Second Home,” by Christina Clancy. Note that the first two are the more lighthearted ones that I mentioned, so if you really want escape, you might want to go for those two.