Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Other Woman by Evelyn Lau

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Evelyn Lau’s book Other Women is a difficult book to recommend whole-heartedly. Alternating between first and third person, it tells the story of an artist, Fiona, who is recovering from a 15-month affair with successful businessman, Raymond who is twenty years her senior and married.

The problem with the book isn’t the story (what little story there is) because anyone who has ever had an obsessive relationship with the wrong person will certainly relate. The problem isn’t the prose; Lau can certainly write, although I would have to say that this story is over-written– nothing is stated simply, there’s a metaphor for every emotion.

For me the problem is the characters. Raymond isn’t at all likeable; he comes across as narcissistic (and in fact Fiona actually says this of him) and although he once cautions Fiona that she  mustn’t let him hurt her, he yanks her along a romantic trail of self-destruction and worse, Fiona isn’t the only affair he’s ever had. Fiona isn’t much more sympathetic. The whole novel is spent lamenting Raymond’s loss. Fiona drinks and compares every other man to Raymond, and all this for a relationship that is never even consummated.

Still, it was hard not to be swept along by Lau’s poetic prose, even though I could have cared less about the characters and their rather soggy affair.

The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier

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Devastating and dazzling; in its painful fusion of pathos, fantasy – ultimately- realism, Brockmeier’s heartbreaking book is reminiscent on The Lovely Bones.” Time Out

I’d agree with the first bit of this assessment of Kevin Brockmeier’s book,  but not with the second: this book is nothing like The Lovely Bones, a book which I admired the heck out of for the first 100 pages and was then incredibly disappointed with.

Other than a few rave reviews, I knew nothing about this book or its author. The book’s cover is disconcertingly like The Time Traveler’s Wife (a book I love to bits), but there are no other similarities. Brockmeier’s book is an incredible journey into the devastating grief that grips fantasy writer, Christopher Brooks, and his wife Janet, after their seven year old daughter, Celia, goes missing from their back yard.

The book consists of several short stories, all written by Christopher as he attempts to come to terms with Celia’s disappearance; he imagines (and writes about) her living in different worlds and he also addresses his own grief– and the grief of his wife– in these stories.

There is nothing linear about this book and there is no resolution, and the mystery of Celia’s disappearance is never solved and none of that matters one bit. The Truth About Celia is luminous, heartbreaking, and utterly beautiful.

highly recommend it.

Swimming Sweet Arrow by Maureen Gibbon

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Maureen Gibbon’s novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow, is something of a surprise. The first surprise might be the very graphic sex. But the second surprise will most definitely be how affecting the novel’s narrator, 18 year old Vangie is.

“When I was eighteen, I went parking with  my boyfriend Del, my best friend June, and her boyfriend Ray. What I  mean is that June fucked Ray and I fucked Del in the  same car, at the same time.”

Gibbon establishes Vangie’s voice– at once innocent and experienced– from the novel’s opening lines and from that moment on it’s hard to stop turning the pages as a year in Vangie’s life unfolds.

Vangie graduates from high school, moves in with Del, parties incessantly and slowly begins climbing out of her youth and into her adulthood. The success of the book is the way in which Gibbon writes Vangie, a character who never shies away from who she is or what she wants. And even when she makes horrible mistakes in judgment, Vangie never passes the buck.

Despite the subject matter, which might be potentially too-graphic for some, Vangie’s search for meaning, for love, and for a place to belong is a thing of beauty.

End of Story by Peter Abrahams

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I cut my teeth on mystery novels when I was about eight. Every gift-giving occasion, my uncle would give me two brand new Bobbsey Twins books– hard covers. I loved following Bert and Nan, Flossie and Freddie as they solved mysteries in and around their home town, Lakeport. My daughter has those books I managed to save through numerous moves.

Anyway, I still love a good mystery and I finished a new one this morning. Peter Abraham’s new book End of Story. I added this book to my ‘must read’ list when it appeared on Entertainment Weekly’s list of Best Books for 2006. End of Story is a great book, but not just because EW said so. (Or any of the other media outlets which have called it everything from “cunning…suspenseful…very scary” (New York Times Book Review) to “almost physically impossible to put down.” (Booklist) I’d have to agree with that last one; I read last night until my eyes were burning. This is a great book because it pays attention to details, transcends crime-story cliches and delivers characters that are cunning, charismatic, naive.

End of Story tells the compelling tale of Ivy Siedel, an aspiring writer, who takes a job teaching writing to a small group of inmates at Dannemora Prison, in Upstate New York. When one of her students, Vance Harrow, turns out to be a talented writer, Ivy decides to take a closer look at his history and discovers something about him that both shocks and excites her…and changes her life forever.

Abrahams doesn’t waste any time –  dumping the reader right into the middle of Ivy’s story- which barrels along as fast as you can turn the pages (and I was turning pretty fast. I read the book over the course of two days.) Obviously, since this is a mystery novel, I can’t give you too much info. But I can say that the novel’s natural climax offers a surprising twist as Ivy works and reworks the details of Vance’s story. Along the way Abrahams makes some interesting observations about writing and the process of doing it.

The Jane Austen Book Club byKaren Joy Fowler

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Karen Joy Fowler’s book is “a luxuriant pleasure! Karen Joy Fowler has written a novel that is rich and wonderful in all the ways I treasure. Smart, funny, full of robust characters and a wry wit that is uniquely her own. If I could eat this novel, I would.” Alice Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones)

I started The Jane Austen Book Club as soon as I finished The Myth of You and Me. Like Myth, this book was easy to read. Fowler’s prose is fresh and without pretense. Her skill as a writer is that she made each character spring from the page- even though there is nothing traditional in the way she tells their stories or in the way that these characters come together.

Joceyln, Sylvia, Bernadette, Prudie, Allegra and Grigg (a man) meet to discuss Jane Austen novels. Whether you have as deep and abiding a love for Austen’s work as these characters do hardly matters: you’ll grow very fond of the characters all on their own. Their personal histories, carefully chosen anecdotes, illustrate some of the very same observations Austen made about the people of her generation. And Fowler observes them with as much good natured affection as Austen observed her characters.

The Jane Austen Book Club does not have a beginning, middle and end and yet I felt as though I spent time in the company of compelling, funny, loving, special people. (And there were even a couple passing references to Buffy!)

The Nature of Water and Air by Regina McBride

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Emily White of the New York Times Book Review says “Regina McBride writes in a shimmering and often hypnotic prose style, one that’s full of incantatory repetition…The Nature of Water and Air has an urgent melancholy about it — it casts an undeniable spell.”

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I thought McBride managed to capture a particular time and place (1970s Ireland) extremely well. I was intrigued by the book’s opening lines: “There are silences all around my mother’s story.” But in some intangible way, I felt that the novel failed me.

The narrator of The Nature of Water and Air is Clodagh, a sensitive, intelligent girl whose life is touched by tragedy. Clodagh and her twin sister, Mare, live with Agatha, their emotionally distant mother, and Mrs. O’Dare, their housekeeper, in a crumbling manor house. Agatha is not a traditional mother. Before she “settled”, she was a tinker– part of a sub-culture of people who traveled in caravans, selling bits and pieces and camping in fields. What little affection Agatha does manage to share goes to Mare, who is very ill and subsequently dies. Clodagh spends the rest of her young childhood watching her mother from behind corners and through windows.

It is difficult to say much more about this book without spoiling some of its revelations.

McBride is a poet and it’s apparent in her prose. Her writing is lyrical and often quite lovely, but it also occasionally stands in the way of the narrative. While I can’t say that I loved this book, I certainly appreciated McBride’s talent. And in the end, despite some of the questions I had, I felt satisfied by the time I had spent with Clodagh.

The Myth of You and Me by Leah Stewart

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Library Journal said this book was “incandescently beautiful [with] passages about the challenges awaiting young women as they come of age. The story, filled with secrets and treasures, is a well executed, compelling look at attraction, love and trust.”

Poppycock, I say. Yes, this was my book club selection. You have no idea how I stress (in a good way) about which book to choose. The way our club is organized allows for each member to host once a year– meaning we choose the book, lead the discussion and feed everyone. So, with only one choice a year, you want to get it right. Well, I do.

The book I wanted to pick was Envy by Kathryn Harrison, but given that people were going to have to read it (partly at least) over the holidays, I thought it might be wiser to choose something a little less heavy. Which lead me to The Myth of You and Me.

The book is a light-weight look at the friendship between Cameron and Sonia, who meet the summer they are 15. Narrated by a soon-to-be-thirty Cameron, the novel traces– through flashbacks– their friendship, their personal histories, the men they love but I was never convinced of any of it and that may have to do with my lukewarm feelings about Cameron herself.

Early on in the book we learn that Cameron and Sonia have parted company. Some horrible event caused the unresolved rift in their friendship, but when Cameron’s employer Oliver Doucet dies, he leaves her with one last task: find Sonia. The rest of the book sees Cameron on a journey to find Sonia and deliver a mysterious package.

Despite my reservations, Stewart makes several observations about friendship and relationships which I thought were really interesting and which I hope will lead to some good discussion when my book club meets.  I have a feeling people will be divided on this one. As for me–I had a mostly tepid reaction to the book.

Billy Dead by Lisa Reardon

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Lisa Reardon’s book, Billy Dead, earned copious praise when it was published in 1998 and it deserves the honors. Years after I first read it, I keep thinking about the story’s flawed and difficult characters, siblings Billy, Ray and Jean. The story is narrated by Ray and it’s a story of poverty, abuse, and redemption. It’s unflinching, too; Reardon doesn’t gloss over any of the details and it is for perhaps this reason that the book was highly regarded by critics. Alice Munro (perhaps the greatest writer of short stories ever) said: “Billy Dead is a brave, heart-wrenching debut. I couldn’t look away.”

I chose it for my book club several years ago… and no one liked it. Truthfully, the book probably isn’t for everyone: it’s graphic and violent. But the characters are so compellingly real and their journey is so honest, they’ll make an indelible impression on you. Really.

To save you from signing up, here’s a review from the NY Times

Lisa Reardon’s first novel, Billy Dead, instantly brings to mind Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Both depict poor, rural white families in which innocent lives are ravaged by brutality and incest. But Billy Dead, if you can believe it, is even more harrowing, and while Reardon possesses enough skill to render any awful act believable, she does so at the expense of the book’s frail beauty. When you finish reading it, you’re left with a crowd of horrific images that overwhelm what the story is finally about: the redemptive power of love, no matter how unconventional.

Unlike Allison’s child narrator, the speaker in Billy Dead, Ray, is an adult who has the language and sexual knowledge to describe the family’s heinous history in graphic detail. Of the three Johnson children, who grew up in Michigan, Ray was clearly the least equipped to shoulder abuse; as a man, he is helpless and dazed, given to hallucinations and physical self-torture. He lives in a perpetual cringe, shrinking from memories that constantly threaten to unravel him. But when he learns that his beastly older brother, Billy, has been sadistically murdered, Ray can’t help flashing back to his freakish family life, a three-ring circus of savagery in which the siblings all take turns in the spotlight.

Ray and Billy have a little sister, Jean, who not only suffers her father’s beatings as they do but also endures sexual abuse at the hands of all her menfolk. But she is a mean, tough kid — qualities that meek, sensitive Ray admires. When Jean is only 7, Billy and Ray force her to perform fellatio on them, an act that belies Ray’s affection for Jean and underscores his fear of Billy. A few years later, she pounces on her opportunity for revenge: as Ray, now 14, lies weak in bed with chickenpox, she burns his sores with a cigarette while bringing him to orgasm with her other hand. ”Do you love me?” she asks, grinding the hot cigarette into his wounds. ”Are you sorry?” He appears relieved to submit to Jean’s punishment; he is also in awe of her spitefulness.

Ray and Jean remain allies in their house of horrors. After his senior year, Ray spends the summer working in another town; Jean, now 16, joins him. Away from their tormentors, they become lovers, and, impossibly, you find yourself actually rooting for them. It’s a credit to Reardon’s writing that their romance seems right and tender. But everything goes wrong when they return home to find that the whole town knows about them. In a flash of possessiveness, Ray turns on Jean, and the two remain estranged until Billy’s death years later — an event that prompts Ray to seek her out again. Whoever got Billy ”must have been even meaner than him. Only one person I know like that,” Ray says as he begins a delirious search for the love of his life, his baby sister.

Billy Dead is quite well written, but its literary merits are diminished by the relentlessness and intensity of its atrocities. Billy throws a cat against a wall for fun, breaking its neck, and his father then chops the dying pet’s head off with a shovel; after Billy molests her, Jean hangs his dog from a tree and beats it to death with a baseball bat; during one particularly violent episode of rape, Jean nearly bites her father’s penis off. Still, all this excess isn’t just sensationalism, and most of these scenes seem warranted by the larger story. Indeed, this is an extremely powerful novel, but whether you want to read it depends on your stomach for human — or, better said, subhuman — ugliness.
-By LAURA JAMISON

The Gardens of Tokyo by Kate Walbert

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“Kate Walbert’s fine, delicate prose captures voices that we don’t hear much anymore…The Gardens of Kyoto is a ghost story, a mystery, a love story.” – Amy Bloom

I read about The Gardens of Kyoto by  Kate Walbert on a ‘Top Ten’ list and chose it for my book club a couple years ago. Many of the members of my book club weren’t enamored with the book, but I was smitten from the book’s opening line: “I had a cousin, Randall, killed in Iwo Jima.”

The story seems simple enough. The novel’s narrator, Ellen, comes of age around the time of World War II and recalls her life and her relationship with Randall some forty years later. Her story makes for compelling reading. But it isn’t just Ellen’s story to tell– she inherits Randall’s diary and a book called The Gardens of Kyoto and we get a glimpse of several other lives.

Walbert’s book is marked by gorgeous prose and a fully realized sense of place. I found the book wholly satisfying, heartbreaking, and emotionally resonant.

Deception by Denise Mina

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Deception by Denise Mina is described as “a masterly psychological web of people on the edge and the devils that lie beneath their apparent respectability.” —Guardian

I picked up Deception in a remainder bin based on the blurb which tells the story of Lachlan Harriot whose psychiatrist wife, Susie, has just been convicted of the murders of Andrew Gow, recently released serial killer, and his new bride, Donna. Lachlan spends time in his wife’s private office going through her files and trying to piece together evidence for an appeal. He spends a fair amount of time reminiscing about his courtship with Susie, their early married life, and the hundreds of ways he believes her to be innocent. He also tries to hold things together for their daughter, Margie, who is not quite two.

The book cranks along at a good pace and the character of Lachlan is well written and sympathetic. I won’t spoil the ending by telling you of the deception of the title- only that it’s slightly more complicated than you imagine it to be when you start reading.

Deception is a smart, well-written, and ultimately satisfying thriller.