2009

Talking to the Dead by Helen Dunmore

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talkingdead

The events of Helen Dunmore’s beautifully written novel Talking to the Dead take place during a blazing summer on the Cornwall coast. Nina has come to spend time with her sister, Isabelle, who has just given birth to Antony. It is a difficult labour and delivery and Isabelle is having a slow recovery.

You don’t look very alike, Susan said yesterday. I wouldn’t have guessed you were sisters. (29)

Susan has been hired to care for Antony while Isabelle recovers from the complications of Antony’s birth. Although the sisters are, as Susan notes,  unalike physically, they share the bond of family: an emotionally distant mother who worked as a potter, a drunkard father and the crib-death of their little brother, Colin.

They also share knowledge, perhaps suppressed, about the death of their little brother. It is during the hot days that follow that a family secret is revealed and Nina begins an illicit affair that sends shrapnel through the house Isabelle and her husband, Richard, have leased for the summer.

I’m a Dunmore fan. She’s a beautiful writer and much of the prose in this slim volume is breathtaking. So I am going to attribute the fact that I didn’t tear through this  novel (only 214 pages!) to the fact that I’ve had a serious case of book lethargy over the last few weeks. After all, like all of the Dunmore novels I’ve read – as literary as they are – this one has an element of psychological suspense. The pace isn’t fast though; information is revealed slowly, like veils pulled back one at a time. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be a problem for me…like I say, I was in a bit of a slump.

If you haven’t yet read Dunmore, you really should.  She’s quite remarkable.

Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon

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I was so excited to be given this book which had arrived at the bookstore where I used to work. The manager there knew I was a huge fan of McMahon’s novel Promise Not to Tell, and so she passed this along. Dismantled is the story of the Compassionate Dismantlers, four art students: Tess, Henry, Winnie and the charismatic Suz. The Compassionate Dismantlers believe that “to understand the nature of a thing you have to take it apart.” What they really believe, it seems, is that you can ruin someone’s career and set fires and manipulate lives for your own personal gain. At the end of their post-graduation summer in a cabin by the lake, Suz is dead and the remaining Dismantlers go their separate ways. Flash forward ten years. Henry and Tess are unhappily married and have a 10 year old daughter, Emma. Winnie has had her own struggles with mental illness. A simple act by Emma sets off a chain of events with far reaching consequences.

Dismantled was a big disappointment for me and it truly pains me to say that because I loved Promise Not To Tell and encouraged everyone I know to read it. For me, there was just too much going on. Was Dismantled a novel about a failing marriage, infidelity, the nature of art, childhood fears, imaginary friends, ghosts – real and imagined? Was it a mystery? Was it a ghost story? Was it a novel about revenge?

Honestly, I really struggled to finish Dismantled and only kept going because I thought maybe the end would justify the rest.  I didn’t like any of the characters and worse, I didn’t care about any of them.

Read Promise Not to Tell instead.

Testimony by Anita Shreve

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Testimony

Explosive… Shreve flawlessly weaves a tale that is mesmerizing, hypnotic and compulsive. No one walks away unscathed, and that includes the reader. Highly recommended. – Betty-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Pretty much everyone has raved about Shreve’s latest novel, Testimony. I’ve been a Shreve fan since Eden Close, so I was looking forward to reading this book. The novel opens when Mike Bordwin, headmaster of Avery Academy, a private New England boarding school, views a tape depicting three of the school’s top basketball players having sex with  a female student who is clearly underage. While the story opens with Mike’s point of view, the novel flips back and forth allowing us to see how this event and its aftermath affects everyone concerned: the so-called victim, the three boys, their families and even members of the press called upon to report the event once the story is leaked from the school’s hallowed halls.

Shreve is  a talented writer and she manages to make individual characters come alive in this novel by employing third, first and even second person points of view. When the young girl speaks, she seems every bit like a fourteen year old, both naive and culpable. One  boy’s mother speaks in the 2nd person – perhaps to distance herself from the news that her son has done something reprehensible, inexplicable.

It may seem odd that the story’s inciting action is revealed in the novel’s opening pages, but as it turns out, the story unravels to reveal another event which contributes to at least one of the boy’s bad decisions. Silas’s story is heartbreaking and, for me at least, he  carried much of the story’s emotional weight on his shoulders.

We had an excellent discussion about this novel at Indigo’s book club. The ripple effect this event sends through the school and community- upsetting lives and relationships- was immensely powerful. In less confident hands, the novel might have slipped into tabloid sensationalism. Not for Shreve; she’s far too good a writer and Testimony is far too good a book.

The Woods by Harlan Coben

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Woods

So, I know there are loads of Harlan Coben fans out there. I get why people like him. He’s a straight-up writer, lots of dialogue and characters and plot threads to keep you busy. Coben’s the sort of writer you read when you’re looking for something fast-paced and, dare I say it, fluffy.

The Woods has a convoluted plot that concerns Paul Copeland, County Prosecutor. Twenty years ago his sister, Camille, went missing (presumed dead) along with three of her friends while they were all at a camp for teens. When one of the presumed dead turns up dead (again) twenty years later, it cracks open a door to a past that Paul knows nothing about.

I liked Paul’s character. He’s a smart-mouthed lawyer who isn’t afraid to look the bad guy in the eye. His chief investigator, Muse, is the female equivalent of Paul and they make a fine team.

For me, though, The Woods was just too busy and, at the end of the day, the secrets buried in the woods just weren’t enough to hang 400 pages on.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

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pearl

I taught The Pearl at summer school this year. Although I have read a couple other Steinbeck novels, I’d never read this one. It’s a great little novella to teach because of its simplicity and easily recognizable themes of greed and hope.

Kino and his wife Juana lead a simple life in La Paz, Mexico around 1900. Kino is a pearl diver, depending on the canoe passed down through the generations and his own work ethic.  He’s a man content with his lot in life because he appreciates what he has. When his infant son, Coyotito, is stung by a scorpion it sets off a chain of events that not only ruins Kino, but upsets the delicate balance of the natural world (if only metaphorically) and the community in which Kino had so happily lived.

The Pearl is an accessible novel. It gave us lots to talk about – do you need money and possessions to make you happy? Should you judge a man by the clothes he wears or his character? Is violence ever justified? Today’s teens often do think that money buys happiness and if ever there was a novel to disprove this assumption, The Pearl might well be it.

If I were just reading it for pleasure, though, I might have been disappointed. I’m not a gigantic fan of Steinbeck’s writing at the best of times (although he certainly deserves his place in that list of great American writers). The Pearl is simplistic and at times unrealistic (which likely has to do with the fact that it’s a parable which comes from the oral tradition of storytelling). As it teacher it offered me lots to work with; as a reader it was less enchanting.

The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle

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Man, this was a hard book to read and, strangely enough, a hard book to put down. Katrina Kittle’s novel tells the story of widowed, Sarah, and her two sons, Danny, 10, and Nate, 16. Like many other novels these days, Kittle employs alternating viewpoints, allowing the story to be told (mainly) from Sarah and Nate’s points of view. And Jordan’s.

In fact, this is Jordan’s story. He’s a classmate of Danny’s. One day Sarah sees him walking along the road in the pouring rain and she stops to pick him up. He seems ill, more than ill and when he asks to stop at a service station port-a-potty to be sick, she does. Her mother senses are jangling like crazy and when she goes to check on him, she discovers that he’s collapsed with a hypodermic needle jabbed in his neck.

Jordan’s mother, Courtney, is Sarah’s best friend, but Jordan’s desperate act opens a dark door into his life and this story asks Sarah and the reader to step through it. The Kindness of Strangers is about the worst kind of abuse and it doesn’t shy away from the topic.  Sarah and her sons are barely recovered from the death of their husband and father when they are called upon to help Jordan. In some ways the social network depicted in this novel seems like a best-case scenario; Jordan has some caring adults in his corner, but to live in today’s world is to know that that is often just fiction.

Kittle does a terrific job of getting us into Sarah’s headspace: her horror over what her best friend has been accused of, her horror over what Jordan has suffered, her struggle to balance her own issues with the day to day business of running a house and business and looking after two sons.  She was equally adept at letting us see what motivates Nate, a character who is both flippant and incredibly mature. Finally, Jordan’s voice is heartbreaking; the mother in me nearly wept every time he spoke.

The main story of The Kindness of Strangers is bracketed with chapters from Danny.  I think I understand why his is the first and last voices we hear, but I don’t think losing those two chapters would have harmed the book in anyway.

Not everyone will be able to stomach this novel’s subject matter, but if you think you can, it’s a fantastic book about a very serious topic.

Dark Debts by Karen Hall

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debtsKaren Hall’s novel Dark Debts is a lot of things, but the most ‘terrifying horror thriller of the last decade’ is not one of them. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy this book – I did. But it didn’t scare me.

Dark Debts tells the story of Randa, a newspaper writer; Jack, eldest son of a cursed family (all of whom have either committed suicide or been executed); and Michael, a Jesuit priest who’s in love with Tess, a book editor. Their connection isn’t immediately apparent, but as it turns out they have more in common than you’d think. Don’t worry, all is revealed by the book’s rather neat-bow ending.

What I liked about Dark Debts had less to do with its, at times, heavy-handed musing on the nature of faith and more to do with Hall’s ability to write dialogue that is often very funny.It’s the dialogue that propels the novel along, and so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Hall’s other career is as a successful television writer. (The fact that Dark Debts is destined for the big screen should therefore be no surprise either. )

Her characters are all likable, too, even when they do unrealistic things.

There’s a lot going on in Dark Debts – murders and devils and exorcisms, but none of it’s scary –  or maybe I’ve just been forever spoiled by the demon who possessed Regan in The Exorcist.

Envy by Kathryn Harrison

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envy

I have mad love for Kathryn Harrison. I think she’s a beautiful writer and she often tackles difficult subjects, train wrecks from which you can not turn away.

Envy is the story of psychoanalyst Will Moreland. The landscape of his life is pitted with estranged relationships (his identical – save for the brother’s wine-stain birthmark – twin, Mitch); death (his young son, Luke, killed in a boating accident) and a strained sexual relationship with his wife, Carole (they still do it, but not face to face and Will isn’t allowed to touch her).  From these more-connected-than-you-think threads, Harrison weaves a story which is often funny, sometimes creepy, and slightly over-wrought (particularly near the end).

The novel opens as Will is about to return to his alma mater  for his 25th reunion. He’s clearly not interested in the majority of his classmates. He’s on the lookout for two people in particular: his brother, whom he hasn’t seen since he married Carole 15 years ago and Elizabeth, his college girlfriend.  His brother is a no-show. Elizabeth is there, but their reunion brings to the surface a disturbing revelation.

There are elements of Envy which revisit  some of the themes Harrison has used before in her work: sex used as power, grief, incest. It’s one of the reasons why I like her work so much- she’s practically fearless. Still, I didn’t love this book. I understand Will is traumatized by the death of his young son. I understand that as a professional in the mental health field he’s likely to be less astute about his own feelings and motives, but Envy (for me at least) suffers under the strain of too much plot. For instance, I liked Will’s dad, but do I care about his extra-marital relationship or his second career as a photographer. Not particularly.

And I didn’t like the ending all that much.  Some pretty devastating things happen in this novel, yet Carole and Will seem to move past it all almost effortlessly.  Since the book is told entirely from Will’s point of view, Carole’s feelings about the loss of her son, her struggles to carry on, her own traumatic experiences are exposed only in dialogue and only at the very end. On the other hand, Will examines and re-examines his feelings, sort of distantly and myopically, though. Sometimes I just wanted to see him as  a middle-aged man trying to do his best. And who, might I ask, is paying the least bit of attention to Samantha, the couple’s surving child?

Still, it’s Kathryn Harrison and I’ll take one of her books over just about anything else out there any day of the week.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

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sawtelle

When B. pulled The Story of Edgar Sawtelle out of her bag at last month’s book club reveal there was a silent sigh of dismay. I know I felt it. Despite the fact that the book has garnered heaps of praise and was flying off the shelf at Indigo last summer, I had no desire to read it. When my friend said she was going to take it with her when she went to England with her mom I said: “Don’t do it; this book weighs a ton!”

As it turned out,  of the ten members of my book club I was (along with B.) the only person who read it. Er…finished it. One person got about half way through, a few others read 50-100 pages. The book is l-o-n-g…562 pages but lest you think I actually judge a book by its length, let me say that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is very well written. I would have said that dog lovers would eat this book up- but this wasn’t the case with the dog lovers in my book club; none of them finished.

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I didn’t love this book in the way most others have- well, the critics at least, who have compared this book to Shakespeare, an “American Hamlet” even (Mark Doty). The book concerns the Sawtelle family, parents Trudy and Gar and their son, Edgar, who is born mute. They live on a farm in Wisconsin where they breed dogs known as the ‘Sawtelle’ dogs, remarkable because they can read Edgar’s signs. When Gar’s younger brother, Claude, returns to the farm Edgar’s idyllic life starts to unravel and when his father dies suddenly, Edgar’s grief is palpable. As Claude grows closer to his mother and assumes more of a role on the farm, Edgar becomes obssessed with proving that Claude had something to do with his father’s death.

Things don’t work out quite as Edgar plans though, and he leaves the farm, taking three ‘Sawtelle’ dogs with him. Eventually, though, he returns to the farm to confront his uncle – with dramatic results. (I actually thought the ending was spectacularly melodramatic.)

Why do some books work and others not so much? I can’t fault Wroblewski’s writing. In some ways I felt like he jammed the book with every possible theme, like maybe this debut might mark the beginning and end of his literary career. Ultimately, though, there was just too much ‘dog talk’ – sits and stays and day-to-day kennel business that just wasn’t of interest to me and, in some ways, diluted the book’s larger themes of revenge and love.  It wasn’t that I had a hard time reading the book…I just never really invested my heart in Edgar’s story.

Body of a Girl by Leah Stewart

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bodyofgirl

I read Leah Stewart’s novel The Myth of You and Me a couple years back and I had a lot of problems with it. I had a lot of problems with Body of a Girl, too.

Olivia Dale is a crime reporter for a Memphis newspaper. She’s not a rookie, but she’s young and it shows despite her best attempts to hide her reactions to the horrible things she’s called upon to write about. When the novel opens, she’s at a crime scene. Timing allows her to be closer to the body of a girl than she would normally be allowed.

“I’ve learned to stomach the photographs they show me,” Dale says, “but now I know it’s nothing like being so close you could lean down and touch that dead, dead skin” (2).

Perhaps because the dead girl is similar in age and appearance or perhaps she’s just the final straw in Dale’s precariously constructed life-  either way,  she  becomes obsessed with finding out everything there is to know about the dead girl. Not only does she throw  her personal safety out the window, she chucks out her common sense as well. As the book chugs along I felt less and less sympathetic and more and more annoyed with her.

I think Body of a Girl attempts to answer some of the questions we all ask: what makes us the same, what makes us different? How close to the edge can we walk without toppling over? Can we ever really know someone? The problem with Dale is that, despite her profession, she’s a piss-poor judge of character and doesn’t seem to have a compass of any sort. Her journey, ultimately, seems self-destructive, rather than a real attempt to understand the human condition. Dale just seems reckless and stupid by the novel’s rather sappy ending.