Daily Archives: January 2, 2010

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

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Elizabeth Gilbert’s well-received book, Eat, Pray, Love tells the story of the author’s own search for meaning in the world. Personal meaning, that is. In order to find it, she takes a year off from her very successful writing career (she’d have to be successful, wouldn’t she) to spend four months in each: Italy (for pleasure), India (for prayer) and Indonesia (for balance).

This book is huge- practically every woman alive will have read it- or plans to- and don’t let my cynicism dissuade you. Gilbert is a wonderful writer. It’s hard to sustain the perfectly pitched conversational tone her book does and not be a skilled craftsman, but…

But, here’s the thing. Lots of people wish they could stop their hectic, horrible, messy, complicated, screwed up lives in order to find their deeper purpose; in order to mend their broken hearts and psyches, in order examine their place in the world, their connection to the people with whom they share the planet…and their relationship with a higher power (God, in Gilbert’s case, although she says “I could just as easily  use the words Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu or Zeus.”) Not everyone has the means. Plus, although Gilbert’s journey was preceded by a divorce, she has no children. Trust me, I’d love four child-free months in Italy, too.

That said, the book is so engaging that even though I didn’t internalize Gilbert’s search, I certainly enjoyed listening to her talk about hers.

Losing the Moon by Patti Callahan Henry

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Patti Callahan Henry’s book snuck up on me. I wasn’t overly impressed with her writing when I started the book and I can’t say that I fell in love with the characters or the secondary story (of the main character’s quest to preserve an island off Georgia’s coast) and yet, I finished the book with a lump in my throat.

Amy is happily married to Phil. Her kids, Jack and Molly, are grown; Jack is actually away at college and Molly in her last year of high school. Her world, however, is about to be turned upside down when Jack invites her to the homecoming football game to meet his new girlfriend and her parents. Turns out, the girlfriend’s father, Nick, is Amy’s old college boyfriend. Suddenly Amy’s world turns upside down. Her feelings for Nick (and as it turns out, Nick’s feelings for her) are complicated because of the way their relationship ended. And as Amy starts to question her feelings for her husband and her role as wife and mother, she starts orbiting ever closer to the girl she once was and the way she felt about Nick.

A lot of what happens in Losing the Moon is predictable  (although Amy herself might use the word inevitable). The story tracks Amy’s feelings, but also Nick’s. While I wasn’t rooting for any particular outcome, I have to admit to feeling incredibly sorry for both Amy and Nick by the end of their story – even though Henry did a plausible job of explaining Amy’s choices.

I related to this book on quite a few levels- perhaps because I am around the same age as Amy. Her questions (as she cleans her house again) about her place in the world, about her dreams, about her role in her marriage all rang true to me. Is this what I wanted for my life? Who hasn’t asked that on occasion?

And of course Nick is a painful reminder of what she has left behind- not just the loss of his love, but the loss of her youth as well. A conversation she has with her daughter about the passage of time nearly had me bawling.

So, yeah, good book.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy by Helen Dunmore

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Your Blue-Eyed Boy is my second novel by Helen Dunmore. I read her book With Your Crooked Heart a couple years back. Dunmore is a poet and although it’s not always the case, her skill with language translates beautifully to prose. She creates captivating and complicated characters, with interior lives that are filled with wreckage and hope.

Your Blue-Eyed Boy is, I think,  about ghosts. Simone is a District Judge, married to an unemployed architect, mother to two young sons. Her story is told by layering all the bits of her life: her childhood, her young adulthood and her married life. When the story starts Simone describes herself as being “in that stage of youngishness which seems as if it’ll go on forever”.

And then, out of the blue, Simone receives a letter from someone from her past. If you were to take the novel’s prologue at face value, you would think that this book was about blackmail. “There are things you should know about blackmail…” Simone says.

But Your Blue-Eyed Boy is not as simple as that. This is a novel about reconciling who you are now with who you were when. It’s easy enough to pretend that each section of your life is complete and separate, but this is a novel that asks us to question our past choices, our past loves and our place in the here and now.

It’s a gorgeous book that reads like a thriller.

Off Season by Jack Ketchum

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There’s no way to describe Jack Ketchum’s book, Off Season other than to call it torture porn. I was called out for this label, but I stand by it. It’s so gruesome, so over-the-top, it’s impossible to call it straight up horror.

This book caused quite a sensation way back in 1980 when it was first published. It was Ketchum’s debut novel and the editorial team at Ballantine wanted to make substantial changes to the book’s vivid (for lack of a better word) writing and pretty damn depressing denouement. Ketchum was reluctant, but also pretty excited about having his first novel published. Ultimately, he went along with the changes. He tells the whole story in the Afterward of the Leisure Fiction edition  of  Off Season, which is uncut and uncensored (and by this I mean, the story appears as Ketchum had intended it to appear all those years ago.) And, likely for some readers, the book is unpalatable.

I’ve got a pretty strong stomach. Thank God because this book was pretty horrific. It tells the story of a group of six friends who are about to spend a week together in a remote cabin on the coast of Maine. This is Deliverance country, folks, only ten times as nasty. Ketchum does a good job of moving the story along (the whole thing plays out over a couple days), of giving us characters we can root for (although not necessarily keeping them alive) and of grossing us out even as we’re turning the pages.

It’ll only take a couple hours to read the book, but I don’t recommend you do it at night or if you have a queasy stomach.

And, while I’m here: I read Ketchum’s novel The Girl Next Door a couple years ago. Based on true-life events, that book was a riveting story of how people are able to justify extreme cruelty against innocence. It was even scarier, for me, than Off Season because the narrator was, despite his compliance, likable.

In This Dark House by Louise Kehoe

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What makes another life fascinating enough to commit it to paper? I know that memoirs are all the rage these days and I have read a few and this once did not disappoint. In This Dark House was the winner of a National Jewish Book Award and uniformly praised by critics who called it “well constructed and beautifully written, has an emotional honesty which generates its own kind of lasting truth” (Susie Harris, The Times Literary Supplement) and a “heartbreaking story…astonishing enough on its own, but her riveting luminous prose style transforms it into a triumphantly beautiful and moving work of art.” (Booklist)

Louise Kehoe was born in England in 1949, the youngest of four children. Her father, Berthold Lubetkin, was a well known architect who had been born in Czarist Russia  and her mother, Margaret Church, was born in England and met Berthold as an architecture student.

Kehoe recounts her childhood living at World’s End, a remote house in Upper Killington, England. A practicing Communist, Louise’s father is intellectual and emotionally remote. One might say he’s actually abusive- he withholds and doles out praise like a dictator.  Kehoe’s mother does her best to moderate, but her loyalty is to her husband and her children, although she clearly loves them, come a distant second.

What Kehoe doesn’t know until her father’s death (at nearly 90) is that he is harbouring a horrible secret and the beauty of this book is that Kehoe, despite the barren emotional landscape of her youth, cares enough to search it out. Uncovered, the secret opens a door wide into her father’s life and makes him much more sympathetic. And, of course, Kehoe is able to forgive him which she does eloquently and with love.

A beautiful book.

Sleep No More by Greg Iles

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Stephen King said “should come with a red wrapper marked DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES” about Greg Iles book Sleep No More. People magazine said: “Irresistible Pass-the-popcorn fun.” And somewhere in the middle is the truth.

There are three different types of books – fun books without a lot of literary merit and intelligent books that are, often, dry as toast and books that fall in the middle- well written prose with characters that jump off the page. Iles isn’t a bad writer and Sleep No More isn’t a bad book- but it’s not literature. I read the book in a day and a half, but I had to suspend all disbelief to do it because the premise of this book is ridiculously silly.

John Waters lives in the south with his wife and young daughter. The blurb on the back of the book would have you believe that he’s got all his ducks in a row- happy marriage, successful business, but that isn’t true. His business (oil dilling) and his marriage (his wife has been depressed for four years after the loss of their second child) are both floundering making John the perfect candidate for an infidelity. So, he cheats. Only he cheats with someone from his past and things get slightly more complicated than he might have expected.

It’s impossible to say much more about the plot without giving away the book’s central conceit- the one you’ll have to suspend disbelief for. The book is filled with illicit couplings- though none of them are very titillating, so you won’t be getting your thrills that way. The characters aren’t particularly sympathetic and the whole thing tidies up just the teensiest bit unbelievably. Still, if you want to haul a book to the beach this summer, this will be reliably entertaining so long as you don’t expect too much.

The Way the Family Got Away by Michael Kimball

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Critics loved this book. For example, Angus Wolfe Murray from ‘The Scotsman’ said: ‘Occasionally a novel by a new writer will cause critics to choke with excitement. This is one.’

For me, though, the style got in the way of the story which is too bad because the story was kinda sad.

A family (mother, father, boy and girl) set off in their car from Mineola, Texas to Gaylord. They have all their worldly possessions in that car, including the body of the infant they lost to yellow fever. As they travel they sell/exchange their things in exchange for gas. They are going to Bompa’s house (one can assume this is a grandparent).

What makes this story odd (and I guess critics would say amazing) is that the story’s narrators are the two remaining children,  both of them very young.

“My brother’s fever wouldn’t leave him or our house,” the little boy says.

His sister says: “The sun-color got too bright and too inside and under my little brother’s skin until it burned his insides out inside his crib.”

What follows is a strange narration which flips between the brother and sister as their parents navigate their way from town to town in an effort to escape their grief.

I think your enjoyment of the novel will depend on your willingness to fall into the strange rhythm of their language.

For me, it just didn’t work. And I hate it when a book makes me feel as though I didn’t get it. Like- if I was smarter this would make sense and I could jump on the bandwagon with all the smart critics…one of whom actually said “you can’t read if you can’t read this book.”

I can read the words, thanks. They just didn’t move me.

The Boy on the Bus by Deborah Schupack

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Meg Landry is an unreliable narrator. She’s the central character of Deborah Schupack’s novel, The Boy on the Bus. Meg lives in rural Vermont with her asthmatic son, Charlie, and her partner, Jeff (who is mostly away working as an architect) and her 13 year old daughter, Katie, who attends boarding school.

As the novel opens, Meg is waiting for Charlie’s school bus (and Charlie’s school bus driver, Sandy, for whom Meg has ‘feelings’)But when the school bus arrives, Charlie won’t get off the bus and when Meg goes to get him she discovers that this boy is not, in fact, her son.

“Meg sat in the row in front of him, facing forward. He seemed to be a good boy – whoever he was- and eager to please.”

It is from this intriguing start that we learn the story of this family as seen through Meg’s eyes. And I would advise reading this book in as close to one sitting as you can manage because the effect of Meg’s estrangement from her partner, her ongoing battles with Katie and the emotional toll of caring for Charlie’s illness has a cumulative effect that I’m not sure would be apparent if you read the book in fits and starts.

It is only when we see Meg through the eyes of others (the town sherriff, Charlie’s doctor) that we begin to understand what is actually happening and while some reader’s might find Meg unsympathetic- I felt quite sorry for her and hopeful at the book’s end.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest

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Cherie Priest’s book was a huge disappointment to me. And it’s a book that makes me wonder about the ringing endorsements you find on book covers- because this book had them in spades. Even Ramsey Campbell, a writer I admire, had glowing praise for it, calling the book “breathlessly readable, palpably atmospheric and compellingly suspenseful.” I just don’t get it.

Orphaned at birth, Eden Moore lives with her aunt Louise and Uncle Dave. She’s a strange little girl, but it’s hardly her fault: she sees dead people. Okay, maybe I’m being a little glib, but she does have a trio of dead women who appear to warn her of danger. And Eden is often in danger; her wacky nut-job of a cousin Malachi is often trying to kill her; she fearlessly (stupidly) wants to know the secrets of her past (why doesn’t someone just tell her already) and none of the chills added up to very much of anything for me.

I know a book isn’t working for me when I start to notice punctuation issues…and when dialogue just seems stupid- there’s a whole section in the book when Eden’s Aunt Eliza tries to convince her to go home with her and Eden keeps on saying ‘no’ just because it’s fun. Um- not so much fun for the reader. And I also found the book had a lot of exposition- Eliza conveniently has a ‘butler’ who has the answers to all the questions Eden has and is able to fill in all the missing blanks just like that.

So, not for me, I’m afraid. But reviews are generally good so I suspect I am in the minority.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

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There are always novels that you envy people for not yet having read, for the pleasure they still have to come. Well, this is one. Long, dark, twisted and satisfying, it’s a fabulous piece of writing…and unforgettable experience.” Julie Myerson, Guardian

Fingersmith was my choice for book club. As always, I deliberated endlessly over what to choose and wanted to pick something off my ‘to read’ shelf. Despite the book’s length, reviews had promised a page-turner and they were right.

Fingersmith is a difficult book to talk about without giving anything away – there are more plot twists and deceptions packed into its 500 plus pages than any other book in recent memory.

Set in Victorian England, it concerns the life of Sue Trinder, who was orphaned at birth and  raised by Mrs Sucksby and her ‘family’ of fingersmiths or petty thieves. At 17, Sue is drawn into a plot to bilk Maud Lilly, another orphan who lives in a remote estate with her Uncle, out of her fortune. This plot and the effect it has on Sue’s life (and Maud’s as well) is told first from Sue’s point of view and then from Maud’s and it is intricate and filled with intrigue.

There are some Dickensian elements – Waters makes some social commentary, although not overtly, and there is melodrama galore- but, ultimately, Fingersmith is a highly satisfying read populated with intriguing characters and more chilling dips than a roller coaster.

Highly recommended!