Tag Archives: literary fiction

Me Before You – Jojo Moyes

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mebeforeyouLast night, my book club met to discuss Jojo Moyes’ novel Me Before You.  I was the only member of the group that didn’t love the book. I liked the book a lot, but it won’t go down in my personal annals as one of the most amazing, romantic, beautiful, (insert other appropriate adjective here) books ever. Trust me, I am the gushiest romantic on the planet so it came as just as much of a shock to me when I didn’t get all weepy and heartbroken at the end.

Me Before You is the story of  26-year-old Louisa Clark, an ordinary girl from an ordinary family. Until recently, she’d been working at the local cafe in the little market village she lives in in England. She lives at home with her parents and her younger sister, Treena and Treena’s young son, Thomas. Their house is too small; they don’t have much money and so when Louisa loses her job at the cafe she is desperate to find new employment so she can continue to contribute to the family coffers.

Enter the Traynors.  They live in Granta House which is on the other side of Stortfold Castle – I presume that’s the posh side. Camilla Traynor hires Louisa as a companion to her son Will who, two years ago, had been in a serious motorcycle-meets-pedestrian accident that has left him as a quadriplegic. He’s a bit of a git.

Circumstances being what they are, Louisa doesn’t feel like she’s in a position to quit, even when Will is arrogant and unkind. Instead, Louisa is determined to make friends with Will and so, of course, that is what happens. Will softens because of Louisa’s friendship; she  flourishes because of his. They are both irrevocably changed.

Me Before You was an easy book to read. I motored through 200 pages on Saturday night. I liked Louisa and I liked Will and I liked their story. Although I didn’t agree with the stylistic choice Moyes made to interrupt the story’s predominantly first person narrative to give readers a glimpse into the heads of a few other characters, I did appreciate this observation by Will’s mother:

It’s just that the one thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing. unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and his unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been rolled into one.

I am a mom and so I knew what she was talking about. Could I have lived without her insights?  Absolutely.

I also took issue with the epilogue. It felt cheap to me. Way, way too tidy. But no matter.

One of the questions  posed last night was whether or not Me Before You was a great book. Define great. That’s the cool thing about reading. Everyone’s definition of what makes a great book is going to be different. I am going to have to figure out how to articulate what makes a book great for me and get back to you.

As for Me Before You – it was a very enjoyable book to read. Could I niggle over a bunch of little things? Sure, but none of them really detracted from my reading experience which was totally pleasant. I didn’t shed any tears, but I did well up once or twice. So, almost, Ms. Moyes.

 

 

 

I Take You – Nikki Gemmell

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tlc tour hostThanks to the folks at TLC, I’m back with another book by Nikki Gemmell. You’ll recall that I took a look at her novel With My Body last month and today I am going to talk about her book I Take You. Beginning with The Bride Stripped Bare, With My Body and I Take You form a trilogy of sorts, although the characters and plots don’t really overlap so each book could be read independently of the others. I Take You

I Take You is the story of Connie Carven, wife to Clifford, a banker who has been seriously injured in a skiing accident and can no longer – erm – perform certain husbandly duties. No matter, Cliff has found other ways to satisfy his wife, most of them involving his Mont Blanc pen and a wicked imagination. At first Connie seems like a willing participant in her husband’s increasingly perverse sexual games, but one night Cliff takes things a teensy bit  (okay, a lot) too far and something in Connie–I don’t want to say snaps–changes.

Truthfully, I didn’t get Connie’s relationship with Cliff. Like, at all. Pre-accident he was  “her American…someone to be laughed at and admired and feared in equal measure.” Cliff is over-the-top rich and Connie “grew quickly addicted to this way of living — loved the sparkly, unthinking splash of it.”

When she tries to explain her relationship with Cliff to her father she says:

“We’re happy , Dad. As we are. I’m his wife and I have a job to do. A very important one. Now more than ever. Only I can help him, only me. I’ve become crucial to him in a way that’s impossible to explain.”

We are meant to believe that Cliff’s accident was the impetus for her to fall in love with her husband because “it tipped their sex life into something else. Because Cliff gouged out — patiently, gently, beseechingly — the very marrow of his impenetrable wife. It had been the trigger that now tipped him into something else.”  But the thing is, I don’t see these two as having very much of anything at all except perhaps for a co-dependent relationship and a penchant for kinky sex. And I never saw Cliff as a nurturing, kind man and he can’t kiss worth a damn, apparently.

Then, matters get more complicated when Connie meets Mel — he’s the gardener who takes care of the private communal garden that belongs to the houses on their square. It was at this point that I had a ‘wait a minute’ moment. I Take You was starting to sound suspiciously like another book: D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover.  According to the blurb on the back (which I hadn’t bothered to read) Gemmell was indeed inspired by Lawrence’s infamous book.

Everything you think is going to happen, happens. Mel and Connie start an illicit affair; Cliff gets all bent out of shape about it; Connie chooses personal happiness over marital responsibility.

So how does I Take You compare with the other erotica out there? Well, Gemmel’s writing is still lovely (although I think I might have appreciated this book a bit more if I’d had more of a breather between this one and With My Body.) It’s often quite graphic, so if that’s not your cup of titillation tea — perhaps this isn’t the book for you.

I can’t say I was quite as enamoured with I Take You as I was with With My Body. I may need a little while longer to figure out why Connie’s journey just didn’t resonate with me the way the narrator in With My Body did.

A Peculiar Grace – Jeffrey Lent

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peculiargraceIt took me forever to finish Jeffrey Lent’s highly praised novel A Peculiar Grace. Forever. Just under 400 pages, it felt twice as long because Lent’s prose is just shy of purple and nothing happens. Nothing. Well, okay, that’s not exactly true. Stuff happens.

Forty-something Hewitt Pearce is leading a solitary life in the Vermont house he inherited from his father. Hewitt’s a blacksmith, a prickly artistic type who “had to sit there a while to see if  it was a day for iron or not. This was the essence of what his customers perceived as a great problem – the fact he refused to state a deadline however vague.”  A sign near his forge’s door states: “If you want it done your way learn how to do it & make it yourself. Your commission is not my vision.”

Well, okay then.

Into Hewitt’s insular life comes 20-something Jessica. Her VW breaks down on Hewitt’s property and he offers her something to eat and a place to clean up. So she pretty much moves in. Jessica isn’t 100% emotionally secure, and Hewitt is 100% emotionally closed off so anything that’s going to happen between them is going to be a long time coming. (No pun intended.)

There are complications. Hewitt’s still hung up on Emily, a girl he met and loved many years ago. She’d married someone else and Hewitt has worshipped and brooded from afar ever since. There are also some family skeletons including  a famous painter father, and  an older sister Hewitt’s on the outs with.  Then Emily’s husband dies and Hewitt decides it’s time to make his feelings known to her once more, but really — can these two crazy middle-aged kids overcome their past and make it? And what about Jessica?

I kept reading. I don’t know why. When Hewitt’s mother, sister and niece arrived for a visit and these family members started talking to each other it was bizarre. People don’t actually talk to each other like this, do they?

“Jesus mother. Don’t you flush?”

“I certainly do. …And haven’t you heard about conserving water? Speaking of which you need to change the gaskets in the faucets of the tub and sink upstairs. At Broad Oakes they sent around a pamphlet about the unnecessary use of water. And not just because of the drought but because there’s long-term stress on the aquifers all over the U.S. and people still want green lawns in August”

…

“I don’t think so, girlie. Whatever nonsense you’re up to here I want to be able to watch your face when it comes out.”

By the time Hewitt and Jessica (and Emily and Hewitt’s sister)  finally work out their messy and strangely overwrought lives,  I had reader’s fatigue. Partly it had to so with the stylistic nature of Lent’s prose — weirdly fragmented and dense — and partly it had to do with not really caring very much about any of these people.

Paper Covers Rock – Jenny Hubbard

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paper-covers-rockJenny Hubbard, the author of Paper Covers Rock, was a high school and college English teacher for seventeen years and I am guessing she was a good one. Her debut novel is filled with  references to poetry and literature and how they make us have “the feels” and allow us to connect with the world etc.

Sixteen-year-old Alex Stromm attends Birch Academy, a boarding school in North Carolina. He is, by his own admission, a good solid kid. When the story opens, Alex is writing in a journal his father had given him to write his impressions in when he’d started at Birch two years previously. Although the book has remained blank, now has something to write about: his friend Thomas is dead. He writes:

What I carry in my backpack down to the river, I carry not knowing that in less than an hour Thomas Broughton will be dead. That is not a knowledge I carry yet, but I will carry it soon – the knowledge of my darkest self – and I will carry it forever.

The reader learns about what happened that fateful day when Alex, Thomas, Clay and Glenn were at the rock by the river in fits and starts. Alex’s feelings of grief and guilt are only part of what compels him to scribble in his journal. He is also in love with his English teacher, Miss Dovecott, a recent Princeton graduate who is only a few years older than the boys she teaches. When she takes an interest in Alex’s writing he becomes even more conflicted about what happened that day on the rock.

Sounds sinister, eh? It’s not really, but I have to say that I did keep turning the pages and read the book in one sitting. Alex’s feelings for Miss Dovecott are complicated by his feelings of loyalty for Glenn. (Clay has taken the blame and left school; I’ll leave you to discover the reason why on your own.) Turns out that just after Thomas drowned, drawn by the screams, Miss Dovecott arrived on the scene and Glenn is convinced that she knows more than she is letting on. Oh what a tangled web.

And I have to say, the writing is stellar. The poetry Alex writes is lovely and it’s easy to see why Miss Dovecott takes an interest in him. Ms. Hubbard captures the male voices beautifully (not as crass as they might be now because, after all, the story is set in 1982) and also manages to make Alex both sympathetic and self-serving on his journey to manhood.

 

Blood – Patricia Traxler

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BloodNorrie Blume, the protagonist of Patricia Traxler’s debut novel, Blood, is a thirty-five-year-old painter who has taken a leave of absence from her job as a graphic artist to focus on her art. To do that, she has accepted a Larkin fellowship at Radcliffe in Boston and has moved into one of the residences. It is there that she meets two other Larkin fellows, Clara, a journalist from Chile and Devi, a poet from London. Norrie doesn’t make friends easily and she is used to a certain degree of isolation — partly because of her vocation and partly because of her relationship with Michael Sullivan, a best-selling novelist who just happens to be married. It’s not like they can hang out in public. Nevertheless, she likes Devi immediately and sees all Clara’s character flaws just as quickly.

I have mixed feelings about Blood. Generally speaking, I liked it. The writing was decent and the story moved along. My problem had to do with a certain degree of uneveness.

Norrie tells the reader, “Though it’s true there’s a killing in my story, its principal violence is, I think I’d have to say, the violence of love.”

True enough: Norrie and Michael can’t keep their hands off each other and in one respect, Blood is a relatively explicit examination of infidelity. Of course, while  there’s no real honour in adultery, Michael does genuinely seem to love Norrie and wants a future with her. On the other hand, he can’t quite seem to get his shit together enough to leave his wife of 25 years. And why should he when he can have his cake and eat it, too.

Much of Blood is given over to the push/pull of Norrie’s top-secret relationship with Michael (no one, not even her best friend Liz, knows about him even though they’ve been together for two years.) And that might have been quite enough for one novel, but Traxler also delves into the mysterious world of female relationships and that’s where Clara and Devi come in.

Clara is clearly passive-aggressive and Norrie alternates between feeling sorry for and irritated by her. When she meets Devi, however, her feelings are immediately of the warm and fuzzy variety. This strangely dysfunctional threesome makes up the other third of the novel’s narrative. It’s also what, apparently, drives the book’s suspense – not to say that I didn’t turn the pages, but towards the end it did get a little, um, silly.

Not content with all those relationships, Traxler also dips a brush into the whole world of creativity. Traxler herself is an award-winning poet and so she likely knows a thing or two about the creative process, I’m just not sure that as it was written here is added any value to this story.

I guess that’s why when I came to the end of Blood I couldn’t really say I loved the book. I might have liked it a whole lot better if it had been about just Norrie and Michael, or just Norrie and Clara and Devi or even just about Norrie and her struggles to create art. As it was, the canvas was just a little too crowded for me.

Master of the Delta – Thomas H. Cook

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masterofthedeltaI always say Thomas H. Cook is a mystery writer and he is…but I think he is also so much more than that. Master of the Delta is my 8th outing with Cook and it didn’t disappoint, even though some of the themes were familiar. The novel has the propulsive energy of a mystery, a book with a thread of whodunit twined with a ribbon of ‘is this going to end like I think it’s going to end?’ And of course – nothing is ever quite what it seems. But Cook operates on another level and this is where I think he excels.

Master of the Delta is Jack Branch’s story. Branch is a twenty-three year old teacher who has returned to his hometown to teach at Lakeland High School. Branch has had a priviledged upbringing: he grew up at Great Oaks, one of the town’s massive plantation homes.  It is 1954.

As a boy I’d sat with my father on just such a veranda, evenings that despite all that has happened since still hold a storied beauty for me. There was something calm and sure about them, and it would never have occurred to me that anything might shatter the sheer stability of it all, a father much admired, a son who seemed to please him, a family name everywhere revered and to which no act of dishonour had ever been ascribed.

Branch is a fussy young man – no, fussy isn’t the right word. He’s cocky. He believes his own hype. I don’t mean to say that he is without merit, but his youthful arrogance is partly to blame for events that haunt him for the rest of his life.

And that’s one of the cool things about Master of the Delta (and Cook’s novels in general). Cook always manages to weave past and present together seamlessly so Branch’s story is told as it unfolds, but also from the vantage point of Branch as a much older man – someone who is, from this vantage point at least, able to see his own character flaws.

Branch is teaching a course on evil through the ages and he discovers that one of his students, Eddie Miller, is the son of Luke Miller, the Coed Killer – a man who had killed a local girl and subsequently been killed in jail. Branch encourages Eddie to write a paper about his father. He feels it will help Eddie get out from under the weight of his awful heritage. So Eddie starts to research the father he barely remembers, but when this research reaches into his own life, Branch’s age and inexperience begin to show.

Really, Master of the Delta is a book about fathers and sons, about the part luck plays in how our lives turn out, about kindness and cruelty.  It is a book that has something to say about teachers and books and as a teacher who loves books, I enjoyed that. I truly believe Cook is a masterful observor of human life – our weaknesses and our strengths.  He might wrap it all up in a mystery, but I can’t think of anyone who does it better than he does.

Falling Under – Danielle Younge-Ullman

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fallingunderMara, the twenty-something narrator of Danielle Younge-Ullman’s debut novel, Falling Under,  is a hot mess.  An artist who can barely leave the house except to have violent sex with a guy called Erik, Mara is clearly suffering from the cumulative effects of a troubled childhood, a stalled career, and a tragic love affair.

Love always starts out well. There’s the chemistry, the lust, the gushy, dizzy, cuddly, branch-eating phase, the wonder, the miracle of togetherness. And then familiarity creeps in, followed by disappointment, disillusionment, fear. Inevitably there is silence, screaming, betrayal, the wrenching ugly truth when you look at each other and know that your love has turned to disgust, despair, boredom, hate.  All happiness gone, all rotten, all rotting.

Good times.

Younge-Ullman employs two narrative perspectives in the novel. When Mara is reliving her childhood, her parents’ messy divorce and its fallout, she speaks in the second person: “When you reach out to touch your shiny new bike, Mommy might start yelling at Daddy about how dare he spend their money and how you’re only five and what do you  need a new bike for anyway?”  The second person works really well here because Mara’s childhood, although not abusive per se, scars her emotionally and clearly hinders her ability to form healthy attachments to people as she grows up.  The second person narration is both intensely personal and somehow distancing at the same time.

The rest of the novel is first person narration and Mara’s black humour, self-doubt, and neurosis is on full display. The reader will traipse though Mara’s life, often unwillingly, as she negotiates the thorny relationship with her mom, her co-dependent relationship with her dad and, miraculously, a new relationship with Hugo. But none of it is easy for Mara. She just doesn’t have the skills. She is sure, as was Chicken Little, that the sky is about to fall.

He would never understand how being happy makes you sad. How the happier you are the more you know the sky is about to explode into tiny, sparkling shards of glass that will pick up speed as they fall to the earth and slice right through you leaving your skin with little holes in it, leaving your heart bleeding.

Mara is, despite her quirks, a likable character. And Falling Under is a good book. But I can’t say that I finished it feeling wholly satisfied. Was it really necessary to make all the dangling and complicated threads of Mara’s life into a beautiful cat’s cradle in the end? Maybe — but given her problems, I wouldn’t have minded a little less happily-ever-after.

The Greatcoat – Helen Dunmore

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The-Greatcoat-Helen-DunmoreI am a Helen Dunmore fan, no doubt about it. Although her novels aren’t especially propulsive, I still find her work compulsively readable. She is particularly gifted when it comes to creating believable and sympathetic characters and her novels are moody and atmospheric. Her latest novel, The Greatcoat, caught my eye in the horror section – of all places.

Isabel Carey is a young bride who has moved to Yorkshire with her husband, Philip, a doctor.  They’ve been married just two months and this move to Kirby Minster is isolating: it’s a small town where they are clearly outsiders, Isabel is somewhat socially awkward and “bookish” and although she considers finding some work, Philip doesn’t think it would be acceptable for the wife of the town’s newest doctor to be employed. It is 1952. Although the war is over, both Isabel and Philip “had been children of wartime and all they asked of food was that it should fill them up.”  Good thing: Isabel is a terrible cook and food is still scarce and often unpalatable. Isabel is clearly out of her depth. She is “a little girl pretending to be her mother.”

Isabel and her husband take a flat in the home of Mrs. Atkinson, a woman Isabel dislikes on sight.  The flat is cold and grey and their landlady is constantly pacing the floor over their head. There is something decidedly menacing about her.

One particularly cold night, Isabel roots around in a closet looking for something extra to put on the bed and discovers an old greatcoat.

It was a coat. An RAF   officer’s greatcoat, she saw at once, recognising it with a thud of memory. There was the heavy, slatey grey-blue  wool, the buttons, the belt with its heavy brass buckle. It had been folded up a long time, she thought.

The coat does provide warmth, but it also brings a visitor. A man comes to her window:

She saw the pallor of his face first, as it seemed to bob against the glass, too high up to belong to a man who had his feet on the ground. The street lamp lit him from the side, throwing the sharp shadow of his cap over his face. He was too close, inside the railings that separated the house from the pavement. Of course, the level of the ground there was higher than the level of the floor inside. That was why he seemed to float in middair. A man in a greatcoat.

From this point in the novel, Dunmore elegantly weaves past and present as Isabel succumbs to loneliness and the thrall of the past.

The Greatcoat was published under the Hammer banner (horror aficionados will recognize Hammer as the British production company behind  films like The Woman in Black and Let Me In.  They’ve entered the world of publishing in partnership with Arrow, a subsidiary of Random House. It’s nice to read a “horror” story that is less about blood and guts and more about the kind of chills which prickle your skin and send a shiver up your back. There are no monsters here, but The Greatcoat is deliciously creepy nonetheless.

The Painted Girls – Cathy Marie Buchanan

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paintedgirlsCathy Marie Buchanan has taken French Impressionist Edgar Degas’  famous statue, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, and spun it into a piece of historical fiction that will probably really appeal to some people, but with which I had a love/hate relationship. The Painted Girls is the story of sisters Marie and Antoinette van Goethem, who live with their widowed, absinthe addicted mother and younger sister, Charlotte, in Paris in 1878.

The novel alternates between elder sister Antoinette’s story and Marie’s as they struggle to survive extreme poverty and a mother who just doesn’t seem capable of taking care of them. The only way out of their dire situation is if Marie makes it into the Paris Opera (Antoinette tried, but didn’t have the talent) as a ballet dancer.

With the news that Maman is sending us to the dance school, Charlotte threads her fingers together, knuckles whitening as she works to hide her joy. I keep my face still, my dismay to myself. The petit rats – the scrawny, hopeful girls, vying for the quickest feet, the lightest leap, the prettiest arms – are babies, like Charlotte, some as young as six. It puts my nerves jumping, the idea of me – a thirteen-year-old –  lost among them at the barre, rats who earn their name by scurrying along the Opera corridors, hungry and dirty and sniffing out crumbs of charity.

It is here that she comes to the attention of Mr. Degas, who hires her to model for him. Marie wants something more for her life and she is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it. That is not to say that she consistently makes wise choices, only that the desire for a better life is what drives her.

Antoinette’s journey is slightly more bumpy. She has already been turned out of the ballet as she is too old and not talented enough. She understands Marie’s talents, though, and works to ensure she has the lessons she needs to progress and food in her belly. Then she meets Emile Abadie, a shifty boy who  “is not much to look at …with that scrub-brushy hair of his creeping low on his forehead and his black eyes sinking too deep beneath the weighty ridge of his brow and his jaw looking like the sort of those on dogs it is best to steer away from in the streets.” Emile is a charmer though and even when he abuses Antoinette, she stays by his side.

The Painted Girls evokes the Belle Époque  period in Paris, a period which is, ironically, characterized by optimism. Art, music, literature and scientific discoveries all flourished during the period and Buchanan makes the most of them including bringing Zola’s masterpiece L’Assommoir to the stage.

Despite the novel’s merits (and there are many) I found the book overwritten. Not badly written, the language is often quite beautiful, just over-written. The sisters’ journey was intriguing, I am a fan of both the ballet and Degas, but at times I have to admit that it was a bit of a slog.

The Last Weekend – Blake Morrison

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Henry Sutton wrote an interesting article for The Guardian about fiction’s most unreliable narrators but he neglected to include Ian from Blake images_list_co_uk_blake-morrison-the-last-weeken-chatto-and-windusB-LST072324Morrison’s entertaining novel The Last Weekend. Although it isn’t obvious in the beginning, Ian’s narrative soon starts to unravel as he and his wife, Em, spend a weekend with his college roommate, Ollie and Ollie’s partner, Daisy.

Ian is a primary school teacher and Em a social worker and their marriage seems solid enough, although perhaps slightly lacklustre compared to Ollie and Daisy’s relationship. Of course, as seen through a series of reminiscences, we come to understand that Ian’s relationship with Ollie has always been fraught with jealousy and a certain prickliness.

“I met Ollie in my second term at university,” Ian remembers. He admits that he was something of a loner, that  he “didn’t really have a circle – my circle was me.” Ollie, on the other hand, was hard to miss  with his “brooding intensity. ” He was, Ian admits, “smart, sporty, funny, handsome and popular – the antithesis of me.” And yet chance throws the two young men together and a strangely co-dependent relationship is forged.

It’s a lopsided relationship, a fact that Ian is only too willing point out.

The essential contrasts, all to our disadvantage, go: large Georgian house in west London vs small modern semi in Ilkeston; Range Rover and BMW vs Ford Fiesta; Mauritius (Florence, Antigua, etc.) vs Lanzarote (if we’re lucky); The Ivy vs Pizza Express; Royal Opera House vs local Odeon; Waitrose vs Morrisons; golden couple vs pair of ugly toads. I exaggerate but not much.

So, off Ian and Em go, on a hot summer weekend at the end of August to visit with Ollie and Daisy. And it’s weird from the very start. First of all, Ian had been expecting “posh” accommodations instead of a dwelling which is a “serious disappointment.”  Secondly, there is a strange undercurrent in the house. At first I suspected that Ollie wasn’t all Ian had described, but as it turns out much of what happens during that weekend is not quite as it seems.

“As to the events of August,” Ian says near the beginning of the novel, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever get over them. I’m the kind of guy who feels guilty even when he’s innocent…” It’s only after I finished reading The Last Weekend that these words revealed their menacing underbelly. And much of the novel is strangely creepy and also deeply funny. Once it is revealed that Ian is not to be trusted, The Last Weekend becomes a wonderful maze of a book.