"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.)

"Fourteen Days," edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston

Although many people feel that we are now beyond the COVID pandemic, it is still with us, and there are an increasing number of novels about it. "Fourteen Days" (Harper, 2024) describes the first two weeks after the lockdown was declared in New York City in March 2020. The unusual thing about the book -- besides the topic -- is that it is subtitled "A Collaborative Novel" and is co-authored by 36 prominent writers, such as Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Dave Eggers, Ishmael Reed, Scott Turow, and Meg Wolitzer (and edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston), and that the individual pieces/chapters do not reveal which was written by which author (although one can find this information in the back of the book). The premise of the book is that the residents of a rundown apartment building start to gather on the rooftop, the only place they can get fresh air while socially distancing. Gradually, these characters start telling stories, some eagerly and some reluctantly, about very different topics at different time periods and in very different styles. The effect is to draw the residents together, although many are still wary of each other. The stories are almost all very compelling, for the participants as well as for us, the readers. The collection of stories, the ways they are told, and the relationships among the tellers, are reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales and the Decameron. We are also reminded of other storytelling situations through history, especially those in the midst of difficult, precarious times. Part of the appeal here is the confluence of the various characters and stories with the current dilemma they all share, as they are trapped by the pandemic, and are surrounded by its effects (sirens wailing, refrigerated trucks with bodies, the deterioration of their building and of course the psychological impacts of it all). I wasn't quite sure how I would respond to this book, but I found myself completely drawn into it; it is truly -- despite the terrible events -- enthralling reading.

RIP Alice Munro

A great light has gone out. Generally acknowledged to be one of the best short story writers ever, the Canadian writer Alice Munro died yesterday. She was 92 years old. She was highly lauded by many, and received many awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Most of her stories are set in rural Ontario, which is where Munro lived for most of her life, and most often focus on women in that milieu. She has been compared to fellow short story writers Katherine Anne Porter and Raymond Carver. Fellow writers have praised her highly. Edna O'Brien ranked her with William Faulkner and James Joyce as influences on her work. Cynthia Ozick called her "our Chekhov." (I drew on today's New York Times article/obituary, by Anthony DePalma, for some of the above.) I have long read and loved Munro's stories (and her one novel, which she later said was more a series of linked stories); her work is so very original, powerful, psychologically astute, and perceptive. I have posted about her work here (e.g., on 7/22/10, 12/6/12, 10/10/13, and 8/3/14). What I have written today seems vastly inadequate, but I hope readers either already know her work, or will seek it out.