"Under the Rainbow," by Celia Laskey

The novel “Under the Rainbow” (Riverhead, 2020), by Celia Laskey, begins with an unlikely plot device: An LGBT group sends a “queer task force” to live for two years in a town that has been billed “The Most Homophobic Town in the U.S.” Their task is to try to change people’s minds. Of course it is hard, and they suffer many setbacks, but – and this is predictable, right? – they start to make some inroads. First, there are of course closeted queer people in the town (“Big Burr, Kansas”), and they gradually, tentatively, make contact with members of the task force, and some even start to join in on the group's work. Second, some townspeople are won over as they get to know the visitors. Although this plot could go very wrong, in seeming too predictable, it manages to approach that state but not go over the line. The characters seem genuine, and the artificial original premise yields real-feeling situations and relationships. The novel is in fact heartwarming, and that is OK; the author has not taken the easy way there, and therefore has earned the book’s emotional status.

"America is Not the Heart," by Elaine Castillo

There is a fairly large body of Filipino-American literature, but it doesn’t seem to be as well-known as other Asian-American literature, such as Japanese-American and Chinese-American fiction. And many of the Filipino/a authors have only become published and somewhat well-known in the past couple of decades. I remember that in the early 1990s when I taught a class titled “Contemporary Fiction by Nonwestern Women” (now I would probably not use the Western-centric term “Nonwestern”), I taught a novel by one of the rare (in the U.S.) well-known Filipina writers at the time, “Dogeaters,” by Jessica Hagedorn, who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and was also a performance artist at the time. I have just read an intense, vivid, bursting-with-life novel by the born-and-raised San Francisco Bay Area writer Elaine Castillo: “America is Not the Heart” (Penguin, 2018; paperback 2019). This is the author’s first novel, but you wouldn’t know it: it is a take-no-prisoners tour de force. It is over 400 pages long, but the reader is swept into and out of it with the author in complete control. The novel is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in particular in the suburb of Milpitas, where many Filipino-Americans live. The main character is a woman named Hero, who has recently arrived in the U.S., after starting life as part of a prestigious and wealthy family, then joining the rebels living mostly in jungles for ten years; she has been imprisoned and tortured. We also learn about her extended family, both in the Philippines and in California, as well as the community of friends in which she is caught up. She falls in love with a woman, takes care of and dearly loves a younger relative, and is constantly caught up in the conflict between her past and present lives. One realistic aspect that I appreciated was the characters' easily going back and forth among Filipino English, Tagalog, and other Filipino languages, as well as “standard” American English. There is little in the way of explaining words or terms; the author trusts readers to figure them out for themselves if they don’t already know. The novel is crammed full of intrigue, violence, love, sex, caring, friendship, work, and just plain getting on with life and dealing with what has to be dealt with. Highly recommended.

"Saint X," by Alexis Schaitkin

Many readers will remember the sad case of the young American woman, Natalee Ann Holloway, who disappeared while on a high school graduation trip in Aruba in 2005. Her body was never found, and the leading suspect was never convicted; he was, however, convicted of the murder of another young woman in Peru five years later. Alexis Schaitkin’s novel, “Saint X” (Celadon, 2020) does not explicitly refer to that case, and the facts and details in the real-life case and this imaginary case diverge in many ways, but Holloway’s story is clearly the inspiration for this novel. College student Alison Thomas disappears while on a family vacation on a fictional Caribbbean island called Saint X. The novel shuttles back and forth between the story of that vacation and the story of how Alison’s younger sister Claire, only seven years old at the time of the tragedy, spends much of the next many years, well into her adulthood, focusing on -- one might say obsessing about -- her sister’s disappearance. In a huge coincidence, she sees one of the suspects (who has been exonerated by police) in New York City, and becomes fixated on him. Finally she actually meets him, and strangely they develop a sort of friendship. This is a story of the longlasting effects of family tragedies, as well as of the effects of age, gender, and race in every aspect of life. It is a compelling story, compellingly written. Despite the huge danger that the novel will seem exploitative, it does not feel that way; the author tells the story in a very humane way, slowly revealing the complexities of all the characters. There is a resolution which readers may or may not find satisfying, but which in any case brings a kind of closure to this sad, very readable and well written novel.

"Rodham," by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, “Rodham” (Random House, 2020), is very timely, as the upcoming U.S. presidential election reminds us of the 2016 election, and of the sad loss of that election by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Some of us older feminists have been waiting for decades for a woman (not just any woman, of course) to win the U.S. presidency for the first time; it is disgraceful that there has never been one. We were crushed when Clinton lost. And we know that she would have done so much better a job than the current incumbent, especially during this deadly pandemic. This novel – and it is fiction -- is an artful and compelling blend of true biographical facts, especially in the first half of the novel, and the author’s imaginary story of what could have happened. I don’t want to give too much away. But the plot of “Rodham” is not the main point; the novel is full of the kinds of details we would all want to know if we could know more about the character. The over 400 pages allow a leisurely (and very engaging) laying out of the different stages of the main character’s life, and of the context of the changing political and social landscape of the U.S. over those years. Sittenfeld, the author of several other novels, has written about politics and the presidency before, in her novel “American Wife,” which is based on the life of First Lady Laura Bush. I read that novel, despite my disinclination to be interested in the Bush family, and found it almost riveting. Actually, Sittenfeld had me at her first novel, “Prep,” about life in an exclusive boarding school. I have read most of her novels since then, and will keep doing so.

"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.

"The Vanishing Half," by Brit Bennett

“The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead, 2020), by Brit Bennett, has received much attention since its publication earlier this year, and rightfully so. This is partly because the always-important topic of race in America has even more dramatically come to the fore in recent weeks. It is also because of Bennett’s powerful take on race and gender in the United States, both in her prior novel “The Mothers” (see my post of 1/30/17) and in this novel. Her two main characters are twin sisters who grow up in a Black family in a small southern Black town that prides itself on its population’s being very light-skinned. The twins run away together at the age of 16, first landing in New Orleans. They are extremely close. But then one day one of them, Stella, disappears without a word, leaving Desiree behind. Stella is the “vanishing half” of the title. The twins do not have any contact for years, as their lives completely diverge, and Stella has to keep a big secret. She slips into passing as White, and marries a White man who does not know she is Black; she lives in terror of someone finding out her secret. Desiree, on the other hand, chooses a very dark-skinned man for her partner. Both sisters have children; Stella’s daughter is blond, while Desiree’s daughter is dark-skinned. The two daughters become part of the story, and even meet by chance in Los Angeles. There is some closure at the end of the novel, but I won’t give any endings away. The topic of “passing” reminds me of Nella Larsen’s novel titled “Passing,” as well as other books on the subject. Bennett's novel and the others raise many questions about the meaning and significance of race in America, and all of the weight and freight carried by race and color and the way they are perceived. However, the novel is not only “about race,” but also a beautifully written and constructed story of the carefully delineated characters of the twins, their mother, their partners, their daughters, and others.