"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.

"The Woman Upstairs," by Claire Messud

The title of Claire Messud’s new novel, “The Woman Upstairs” (Knopf, 2013), naturally brings to mind such hidden-away women as Rochester’s “mad" wife in the attic in “Jane Eyre.” Nora, the “woman upstairs” in this novel is a variation on that theme: she is also hidden away, although hidden in plain sight. She is a woman who has tamped down her own desires, her hope for artistic expression, fame, and love, as well as her anger at herself and others for her feeling so thwarted. Actually, those feelings are still smoldering, but she doesn’t show them; she purposely puts them aside, being afraid that what she wishes for will never come through, and instead she lives a tidy, helpful, “nice” life as an excellent elementary school teacher, a good daughter, and a good friend. But then something dramatic happens in her life: she meets a family that has settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the year, and her gradually increasing entanglement with them changes her life. The mother, Sirena (“siren”?) is an Italian artist; the Lebanese father, Skandar, is a visiting professor at Harvard; and their son Reza is a beautiful, bright student in Nora’s class. Nora finds herself feeling more alive than she has for years; she shares an art studio with Sirena and starts working on her art again (unsurprisingly, her art is all small-scale, obsessive, and preoccupied with other women artists who were somehow hidden away); she becomes closer and closer to all three members of the visiting family, to the point of, in a manner, falling in love with each of them in different ways. Messud describes the intensity and even urgency of her feelings with great understanding; we are reminded of how the way a person appears to the world may not at all reveal her or his true emotional self. But the visiting family’s visit inevitably draws to an end, and Nora has to deal with her feelings of abandonment. Then, when we think the story is coming to a close, it takes one more shocking (but in retrospect, not so shocking) twist, leaving readers to figure out what it all means for Nora’s future. This is a very feminist novel, one about the repression of women’s desires and ambitions and the pressures to play it safe and be a “good girl.” Messud is obviously emphasizing this theme through the title and through the name of the main character, which surely is meant to evoke Nora in Ibsen’s play “The Doll House.” This Nora’s character and intense repressed, and then finally expressed, feelings are almost scarily well portrayed here. "The Woman Upstairs," like Messud’s 2006 novel, “The Emperor’s Children” (which takes place in barely post-9/11 New York), has its finger on the pulse of a certain intellectual, literary, professional urban class, and explores themes of interest especially (although not only) to that class. At the same time, her stories and characters are gripping. Given the author’s reputation, my enjoyment of her earlier novel, and the feminist aspect, “The Woman Upstairs” was one of those novels that I couldn’t not read, so to speak, and I am glad I did read it.

"All That Is," by James Salter

James Salter’s long-awaited new novel, “All That Is” (Knopf, 2013), is beautifully written, in a calm, reportorial style that is deceptively simple (owing a bit to Hemingway). It is the story of a man’s life, a man who fought in World War II, then became a successful editor, enjoying the world of literature and all that New York and surroundings had to offer during the 1950s and onward. This character, Philip Bowman, reminds me of a kind of classic fictional character of this age (an age to have fought in WWII) found in the works of many male authors of the mid-20th century, such as John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Cheever, and William Styron. The story is mainly about Bowman’s work, travel, and serial relationships with women (he married once, early, and divorced soon after; the rest of his relationships are fairly brief and often either unexciting or, in one case at least, troubled, in a sad way). I wish there had been more about his work and about the authors he knew, and perhaps less about his love and sex life. Although Bowman is at the center of American literary life, in Manhattan post-WWII, and although he has adventures in Europe and elsewhere, his story, and his character, seem curiously subdued; his emotions seem tamped down, perhaps typical of the way men of that era were supposed to deal with emotion. When he once commits a rather shocking act of revenge on a woman he had loved who betrayed and cheated him, this act stands out dramatically for its breach of his usual understatedness. I have to say, finally, that I admire “All That Is” more than I actually like it.