Sometimes Only Fiction Will Do

I usually have several books going at once. A few days ago, I found that the books on my current, partly-read pile included three nonfiction books and one book of poetry, as well as a book of short stories that was turning out to be something I wasn’t at all enjoying reading. (That last one got taken back to the library only partly read. No sense wasting any more time on it.) The first four books were all interesting and satisfactory, but something was missing. I needed to have at least one novel or short story collection on the pile, one that I was enjoying and looking forward to reading more of. How could I have forgotten that I always have to have fiction easily available, i.e., in my house? (Of course I have novels on my bookshelves, but mostly classics that I have read several times, and I wasn’t in the mood to re-read at this particular time.) I didn’t have time to immediately go to a library or bookstore, but fortuitously I remembered that I had a library book in the trunk of my car that I had put there in case I needed it while waiting somewhere. (My philosophy is to always have something to read wherever I am! Waiting at the doctor's office; waiting in line; having unexpected times between errands.) Hurray! It was a novel that I had already read and enjoyed some time ago, but liked it so much that I wanted to re-read it. I went to the garage, retrieved the book, plunged in, and immediately felt the joy, relief, comfort, and pleasure of being immersed in well-written fiction, and in a world that I wanted to learn more about. The book was “The Flight of the Maidens” (Carroll & Graf, 2000), by the inestimable writer Jane Gardam. I have read most of Gardam’s novels and short stories with great pleasure and admiration (see my posts of 3/8/10; 6/3/12; 6/22/13; and 9/9/14), and every one of them is well worth reading and re-reading. I have read this book before too, but before I started this blog, so I have not posted about it here. It is the evocative story of three young women, friends, from Yorkshire, England during the summer of 1946, before they leave home for college, all on scholarships. Each is figuring out who she is and what she wants. Each has secrets. Each has adventures that summer, going out into the world on her own. The writing is, as Gardam’s always is, of a very, very high quality, and at the same time very approachable and compulsively readable (not that these are incompatible, but perhaps you know what I mean.) If you haven’t discovered Jane Gardam’s fiction yet, please consider checking it out. And, getting back to my main point in this post: in the future I will make sure that I always, always, have some (good!) fiction at hand!

My Favorite Books of 2017

There were some wonderful books published in 2017. Here is my list of the best ones I have read, in my opinion, in the order in which I read them. After each one, I put the date of my blogpost on that book, in case you want to read more about it. 1. “Difficult Women: Stories,” by Roxane Gay (1/24/17). 2. “The Mothers,” by Brit Bennett (1/30/17) (I cheated a little in including this book, which was published in 2016 but which I read in 2017). 3. “Another Brooklyn,” by Jacqueline Woodson (2/5/17) (Like #2, this one was published in 2016 but I read it in 2017). 4. “Anything is Possible: Stories,” by Elizabeth Strout (5/28/17). 5. “Trajectory: Stories,” by Richard Russo (6/3/17). 6. “Bad Dreams: Stories,” by Tessa Hadley (6/5/17). 7. “The Leavers,” by Lisa Ko (12/3/17). 8. “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” by Jesmyn Ward (12/15/17). 9. “The Ninth Hour,” by Alice McDermott (12/19/17). A few notes: 1. Readers of this blog know that I mainly read fiction, and will not be surprised that all of the books I list here are either novels (five books) or short story collections (four books). 2. Eight of these nine books are by authors whose other books I have read and enjoyed and written about on this blog (all but Ko). 3. Eight of the nine books are written by women (all but Russo). (Sorry, male authors, but remember how I studied and read your books almost exclusively for the first 20+ years of my reading life?) (But note that I have always, and will always, read everything and anything written by -- in addition to Russo -- male authors Julian Barnes, Kent Haruf, Alan Hollinghurst, William Maxwell, Stewart O’Nan, V. S. Pritchett, Tom Rachman, Colm Toibin, and William Trevor, among others.) 4. Most of the main characters in these books are also women. 5. The authors, and the main characters, are racially diverse, with (to the best of my knowledge) four African American authors (Gay, Bennett, Woodson, Ward), one Asian American author (Ko), three white American authors (Strout, Russo, McDermott), and one white British author (Hadley). 6. Most of the books focus on family, friends, and relationships -- my favorite topics. 7. Several of the books grapple with issues of gender, race, and social class.

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.