"Life Span," by Molly Giles

I am of course drawn to writing set in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. For a while I have vaguely known of the Bay Area writer and writing professor (at San Francisco State University and elsewhere), Molly Giles, but had read little of her work. Her newest book, titled "Life Span: Impressions of a Lifetime Spent Crossing and Recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge" (WTAW Press, 2024) caught my attention, partly because crossing the Golden Gate Bridge several times a week has for decades been part of my life too. I raced through this book with much interest. The book is a sort of memoir in episodes. There is one entry for every year, beginning in 1945 when Giles was three years old, and continuing until 2023. Entries range from one to four pages, and each is an evocative vignette. Giles always wanted to be a writer, and although she has published several books and many stories, it has been an uphill battle for her, often discouraging, yet clearly fulfilling. The other main strand or theme explored in this book is that of her relationships with family over the decades. She had a somewhat fraught relationship with her parents; she has also had a series of partners who all disappoint her in many ways (although her current partner seems better than the rest). It is somewhat painful to see how she continues to be attracted to one difficult and unreliable man after another. Her relationship with her daughters is also at times fraught, but within the usual mother-daughter range, and improving with time; these daughters are the sources of real joy in her life. Although I was not initially drawn to the idea of depicting a life through these mini-narratives, I found the structure and story quite compelling. And even though (or partly because?) Giles is open, sometimes painfully so, about her own shortcomings, insecurities, and mistakes, I found myself both admiring and liking her, as well as the book. I will look for more of her work.

RIP Edna O'Brien

The Irish writer Edna O'Brien died 7/27/24 at the age of 93. Her fiction focused on women's lives and feelings, about which she wrote with passion. Her writing was sometimes controversial, especially in Ireland, because of its frankness about women's sexuality and love affairs. Her first book, "Country Girls" (1960), for example, was initially banned in Ireland. As Hillel Italie wrote for the Associated Press after O'Brien's death, "Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland's religious, sexual and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution." Nevertheless, O'Brien's writing was prolific, very popular, and prize-winning.

"The Paris Novel," by Ruth Reichl

I have devoured (forgive food/book reference) food critic Ruth Reichl's several memoirs and other writings (See for example my post of 6/1/19 on her memoir "Save Me the Plums."). I have now just finished her absolutely enchanting new novel, "The Paris Novel" (Random House, 2024), and I loved its exquisite focus on the city of Paris, high fashion, and, especially, amazing and delicious French food. Stella lives in New York, leading a rather constrained life as a copy editor living on her own, but when her mother (with whom she has not been close) dies and leaves her money with instructions, surprisingly, for her to go to Paris, she does so. There she meets fascinating people and has magical adventures in the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company, in several art museums, in a high fashion dress shop, in explorations of various parts of Paris and nearby towns, including beautiful houses and hotels and markets, and most of all, in a series of restaurants. It turns out that Stella has a hitherto undiscovered profound understanding of and appreciation of fine cooking and food, and one of the best parts of the novel is the mouth-watering descriptions of her experiencing the sense-filled and at the same time ethereal pleasures of fine French food. The story is full of interesting characters, and Stella herself blossoms as her world opens up. She has two quests, and -- not exactly a spoiler -- she achieves both. So okay, the novel is a kind of romantic fantasy, even a modern fairy tale, but it also includes some (not too heavy-handed) allusions to issues of identity, family, and other serious concerns. So this delicious (I couldn't resist...) novel is light yet substantive and meaningful in some ways, and an absolute delight to read.

RIP Ellen Gilchrist

I recently ran across a mention of the author Ellen Gilchrist and, in particular, of her short story collection "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams" (Little, Brown, 1981), and I remembered how much I had liked this book and others of Gilchrist's in the past, but had not thought about her work for years, perhaps decades. I immediately requested the above book at my local library. Then I went online to remind myself about her life and her books, and to my surprise, I saw that she had died in January of this year at the age of 88. I was surprised not to have heard this news, although I soon found that she had received obituaries in the New York Times and elsewhere that I had somehow missed. She was well-known in the 1980s especially, but less so in recent years. She was a National Book Award winner with a distinctive voice, often from the viewpoint of upper-class Southern women, but in unpredictable ways. Gilchrist, who was a Mississippi native and later lived in Arkansas, with a familiarity with New Orleans, often drew on her own life experiences, and was known for her "wry and poignant prose," as the Washington Post put it after her death. Interestingly, in college she studied under Eudora Welty. Gilchrist's characters were sometimes eccentric, seemingly free from certain societal constrictions (allowed to be so, it must be said, because of class privilege), yet still a part of the world of those constrictions. Her 26 books -- novels, stories, and essays -- often included recurring characters. I did reread "In the Land of Dreamy Dreams," and was glad to have revisited the world portrayed by Ellen Gilchrist. Perhaps I will soon reread her other most well-known work, "Victory in Japan" (1984) as well.

"Long Island," by Colm Toibin

I am an ardent fan of Colm Toibin's fiction, and have read his novels with great admiration and pleasure, and not a little awe. I have also heard him speak, and he has an amazing, powerful yet warm voice and presence. So I was thrilled when his most recent novel, "Long Island" (Scribner, 2024) came out. This is a sequel to one of Toibin's best known and best loved novels, "Brooklyn" (2009). In "Brooklyn," a young woman -- Eilis -- emigrates from Ireland to the United States in the 1950s, then briefly returns to Ireland, during which time she has to choose between two men, Tony in the U.S. and Jim in Ireland. In "Long Island," we find that Eilis and her husband and children now, twenty years later, live in Long Island, and their lives have recently been roiled by an unexpected betrayal. Eilis, angry and confused, then returns to Ireland to visit her mother and to figure out how she feels and what she should do next. When she sees Jim again, the old conflict in her mind between her husband and her former Irish love gradually returns. The twists and turns of the plot are certainly part of the attraction of this novel, as they were with "Brooklyn." But the reader is even more caught up in the portrayals of the characters. Toibin is so psychologically astute, and writes so well about the nuances of the characters' feelings and behavior, that we feel we are inside the characters' minds and hearts, and yet we wonder about the inscrutable mysteries of those same minds and hearts. His writing is perceptive, insightful, and gorgeous. I will admit -- and this is hard for me to say -- that at times while reading "Long Island" I felt it was just a tiny bit repetitive of "Brooklyn." But of course all sequels need to have some overlap. And nothing could keep me from reading and deeply admiring every novel that Toibin writes. I highly recommend this novel. I suggest reading "Brooklyn" first, if you have not yet read it, but even if you have not and do not, "Long Island" is freestanding, and provides plenty of context about the earlier novel, so you can thoroughly savor and enjoy it even without having read "Brooklyn." (For more on Toibin and his novels, see my posts of 1/28/10, 12/4/12, 1/20/13, 11/9/14, 11/16/14, and 12/6/14).

"Real Americans," by Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong is an author I have heard about for a while, and her new novel -- "Real Americans" (Knopf, 2024) -- got good reviews, but I wasn't sure if I would like it or not. I requested it from the local library, still not sure if I would actually read it. (Side note: Thank goodness for libraries, and for the luxury of checking out a book one has heard about, taking it home, holding the book in one's hands, reading the flap descriptions, and leafing through it, all in service of deciding whether to actually read it. If the answer is no, then no harm done. If the answer is yes, and it turns out to be wonderful, hurray!) This longish (400-page) book is crammed with storylines, alternating timelines, swoops among countries, racial identity issues, complex family dynamics, some medical science, a little light science fiction, love affairs, alienation, many emotions, whiplash changes in the characters' lives, secrets, mysteries, and the answers -- eventually -- to those mysteries. The main characters are Lily, who is Chinese American, and her son Nico/Nick, but there are many other characters, including four generations of Lily's family, both in China and the United States. I hesitate to say much about the plot, first because it is somewhat tangled, and second, because I don't want to give away any plot points that the reader should discover on her/his own, and at the right time. So this is a long way of saying that although right up to when I started the book, I hesitated (partly because of the science-fictionish parts that had been mentioned in one review, and readers of this blog may remember that I am generally not very interested in science fiction, except for a few of the classics) to go forward with it, but I was soon drawn in, and then couldn't stop reading. So yes, I recommend this complicated, compelling novel.

"Ana Turns" and two other books by Lisa Gornick

I very recently "discovered" the novels of Lisa Gornick. How glorious it always is to find a new (to me) author! I stumbled across "Ana Turns" (Keylight, 2023) in the new books section of my wonderful local library. The main character, Ana, has been called (by writer Helen Simonson), aptly, "a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway," and is clearly intended by Gornick as such. In this novel, as in Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" (one of my very favorite and most admired novels), we read the story of the day of a woman, with many flashbacks to, and thoughts on, the complicated events and relationships she has experienced. Both novels lead up to a dinner party. Along the way in "Ana Turns," as 60-year-old Ana moves about in current-day New York, we learn of her complex family history, her lovers, her friends. Gornick expertly interweaves these various actors and actions, vividly painting one woman's life, a life that will resonate with the lives of many contemporary women. I was so enchanted with "Ana Turns" that I then found and read two of Gornick's earlier books. "Louisa Meets Bear" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), is a novel that is formed by a set of interlinked stories in which it is not at first clear what the connections are among the stories, but gradually (almost) all is revealed. The third Gornick book I read was "The Peacock Feast" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). As with the other two books, this novel is not at all linear, but roams back and forth in time over a century, focusing on a now almost-100-year-old woman, Prudence, and her family history, mostly in New York City and environs, but with visits to Europe and elsewhere. Also as with the other narratives, the family history holds both great love and great troubles. Readers must be patient as the various plot lines are untangled, but this is not onerous and is part of the pleasure of the books. What a brilliant writer Gornick is, drawing us into her stories, making us wonder and speculate and, in at least one instance for this reader, weep. I highly recommend all three books. (Oh, and yes, the author is, as I wondered about and then found out with a little online research, the niece of feminist essayist/memoirist/literary critic Vivian Gornick, a writer whose work I have long admired and treasured; see my posts of 10/15/15 and 3/28/20.)