Tag Archives: literary fiction

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

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I didn’t get a chance to write my thoughts about Julian Barnes’ Booker Prize winning novella, The Sense of an Ending, back when I actually finished it – which was in June.  The book deserves a much more thoughtful review than I am likely to give it here.

Narrated by Tony Webster, a divorced father with a grown daughter, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on youth and the ways in which our memories are often skewed by our desire to remember ourselves differently from how we actually were.

“We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well,” Tony says. He also tells the reader that he is “not very interested in his schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began…”

It is at school that Tony and his friends meet Adrian Finn, “a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself.” Adrian is bright, clearly smarter than Tony and his friends – or perhaps just more thoughtful, more willing to question the subjects (particularly history) that he is being taught.

History is the certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

At the end of school, the four boys go their separate ways.  Tony  meets a girl, Veronica Ford, and it is this relationship which sets  the story in motion. Things with Veronica end badly and when she ends up dating Adrian, Tony is hurt and angry.

How this threesome plays out makes up the bulk of the story, but it isn’t a traditional love triangle. This is really a story about who we were, who we become and how we alter our memories to accommodate our own version of ourselves.

The Sense of an Ending is one of those books which would certainly benefit from repeat readings – and trust me, it wouldn’t be a hardship. Barnes’ prose is precise and devastating. The book reads like a mystery and in a way it is – we are often mysteries to ourselves and it is only when our memories are challenged that we see the person we have been.

The Slap – Christos Tsiolkas

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If you are not easily offended, The Slap is one hell of a book. I just now randomly opened it and counted half a dozen raunchy references to sex and another half dozen expletives. Tsiolkas throws around the ‘c’ word like he’s talking about making a cup of tea. Yet, The Slap is a very human story, albeit one filled with polarizing characters.

At our book club discussion, our moderator (that’s the person who chooses the book) asked us to write the name of the most reprehensible character on a slip of paper. Then she asked us to name the most sympathetic character. She wanted our thoughts on paper before we began talking and were swayed by opposing opinions. Then we began to discuss the book, the premise of which is simple enough. A group of disparate characters gather at the Melbourne home of Hector and Aisha for a barbeque. Hector is a gorgeous Greek man and Aisha is from India and owns her own veterinary clinic. They have a couple young kids. There are cousins and parents and friends and co-workers in attendance. One of the guests slaps the face of four-year-old, Hugo, who was going to — so the slapper thought — bash his son with a cricket bat. Hugo’s parents press charges.

But The Slap isn’t really a book about what becomes of Hugo and his parents or how the trial plays out. Tsiolkas drops in and out of the lives of various characters (one at a time a la Jodi Picoult only WAY more sophisticated and profane), giving us snapshots of their lives and insight into their feelings about the slap. We don’t hear from every character at the bbq and, interestingly enough, some of the characters we do hear from seem like unusual choices. The beauty of the book, though, is that we do get to know the characters well, feeling empathy, admiration and repulsion in equal measure – sometimes all at once for the same character.

The Slap, as another member of our group pointed out, is quite unlike anything else our group has ever read…and that’s saying something considering we’ve been meeting for 13 years. It isn’t just the language — which takes some getting used to even for someone like me who has been known to drop the occasional ‘f-bomb.’ Several of us agreed that we had a visceral reaction to the book and the characters: hard drinking, racist, violent, irreverent and funny drug users – the whole lot.  The Slap is thrumming with energy. It is almost impossible to put down.

Tsiolkas has important things to say about love, though – not just the love between a man and a woman, but the love between friends,  and parents and children.

This, finally, was love. This was its shape and essence, once the lust and ecstasy and danger and adventure had gone. Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness.

The Slap is an excellent novel.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand – Helen Simonson

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Helen Simonson’s debut novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is the next best thing to spending a holiday in the English countryside. When we meet the title character, Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), he’s just received the news that his younger brother, Bertie, has died. He’s trying, rather unsuccessfully, to cope with the news when Mrs. Ali, proprietress of the local village shop, appears at his door to collect the paper money. She takes note of his unsteady appearance and  offers to make him a cup of tea. Thus begins their relationship.

Mrs. Ali was, he half suspected, an educated woman, a person of culture. Nancy had been such a rare person, too, fond of her books and of little chamber concerts in village churches. But she had left him alone to endure the blunt tweedy concerns of the other women of their acquaintance. Women who talked horses and raffles at the hunt hall and who delighted in clucking over which unreliable young mother from the council cottages had messed up  arrangements for this week’s play group at the Village Hall. Mrs. Ali was more like Nancy. She was a butterfly to their scuffle of pigeons. He acknowledged a notion that he might wish to see Mrs. Ali again outside of the shop, and wondered whether this might be proof that he was not as ossified as his sixty-eight years, and the limited opportunities of village life, might suggest.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is one of those little gems of a novel – beautifully written, with characters so remarkably authentic they seem to jump off the page. Pettigrew is a widower and Mrs. Ali, too, has lost a spouse. They are drawn together because of a shared love of Kipling, but they live in a small town – everysmalltown, really, where everyone knows your name and your business – and not everyone would have them together. Although Mrs. Ali was born in England, she’s Pakistani and therefore viewed by some as ‘unsuitable.’ I think Pettigrew’s feelings for her take him quite by surprise.  I suspect he thought that at 68, that part of his life was over.

In some ways, Pettigrew is a stuffed shirt. He likes things ‘just so.’ He desires attention and often  believes he’s entitled. The beautiful thing about him, though, is his willingness to change, and he does, too. His relationship with his son, a pompous banker who lives in London, undergoes a transformation. He starts to care less about tangible things, like a pair of shotguns that had once belonged to his father, and more about feelings and people.

To say that nothing much happens in Simonson’s novel is to miss the quiet patina of daily  life – much of which, at least as it’s written here, is laugh out loud funny. As people plan parties that can only go awry, as children squabble over their rightful inheritance, as the battle-lines are drawn between cultures, Major Pettigrew tries to find a way to navigate the messy business of living. He is proof that life does offer second chances, if we are brave enough to open our hearts to receive them.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter – Tom Franklin

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Although there is a murder mystery at the centre of Tom Franklin’s novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, it isn’t what kept me reading.

In the late 1970s in rural Mississippi, Larry Ott lives with his parents. Larry’s an awkward kid who spends his spare time reading Stephen King novels and trying to ingratiate himself with the students at school. His father owns the local garage, and while Larry admires the way his father can tell a story, he and his dad aren’t close.

Then Silas Jones moves to town. Silas and his mother live in a shack deep in the woods, property owned by Larry’s father. A tentative friendship blossoms between the boys. Then, when the boys are in high school, Larry takes a local girl to the drive-in and she’s never heard from again. There’s no evidence to prove Larry had anything to do with her disappearance, but serious damage is done to his reputation.

Twenty years later, Larry operates his father’s garage but has no customers because of his tarnished past. Silas returns home to Chabot as a constable and another girl goes missing. Larry is the obvious suspect.

It sounds like a murder mystery and that is part of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter‘s appeal, but the book is  more than that.  I felt a great deal of sympathy for Larry, for his awkward relationship with his father – a man he tried to please but never could. When the story opens, we see him lovingly tend his mother’s chickens. He’s built them a contraption, a “head-high movable cage with an open floor” which he could move around so the hens would always have new grass to graze. Not exactly the actions of a cold-blooded killer. He also forms a relationship with a petty criminal, Wallace, out of sheer loneliness.

The story alternates between present-day and the boys’ shared past. Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask why Larry didn’t stay away when he had the chance, or why Silas came home, but I still think Franklin handled their relationship, its secrets and revelations well.

Envious Moon – Thomas Christopher Greene

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I am a sucker for star-crossed lover stories. People who can’t or shouldn’t be together, but who have this tremendous connection – something that they can’t fight even if they wanted to.

Thomas Christopher Greene’s novel Envious Moon tells the story of Anthony Lopes, son of Portuguese immigrants, who lives in  a coastal town, Galilee, Rhode Island, where he earns money by fishing. Anthony is smart, but poor. His father was killed on a fishing boat; his mother works hard to provide and while Anthony dreams of a better life, he doesn’t quite know how he’s going to have it.

One day Anthony’s best friend, Victor, tells him something that has the potential to change both boys’ lives forever. Victor sometimes worked for a funeral home and he’d been at a wake on Cross Island. He was alone in the room and he’d lifted the corner of the Persian rug. There – to his amazement – he’d found an envelope, stuffed full of money. Victor tells Anthony that the house is empty and that they should break in and steal the money. Who could it hurt?

Of course, the boys’ plan doesn’t play out in quite the way they expect. Inside the house, Anthony sees a girl:

…a girl surrounded by golden light and wearing a white nightgown. Through the gown I could see the outline of her legs. I could not see her eyes and I could not tell the colour of her hair. But the part of her face that I could see, was more beautiful than any face I had ever seen. her high cheekbones and her full lips and her strong nose. Part of me understood that I should not be considering any of this, that I should just run, but something kept me completely still.

It is a moment that changes Anthony’s life forever.

Greene’s novel begins as an older Anthony contemplates that failed heist and its aftermath. He says, “I confess that I sometimes forget what she looks like.” Whatever tale Anthony is about to tell, the reader knows that it is part of some sort of therapy because this forgetting is considered a good thing by Dr. Mitchell. Every once and a while, we revisit present-day Anthony as he works through the events of his 17th summer.

Anthony is a likeable character. It’s impossible not to care about him as he makes one bad decision after another – each becoming more desperate than the last.  Hannah, the girl he loves, is slightly less transparent.  Anthony’s motives seem clear, but it is impossible to know how much of their story is motivated by grief.

Envious Moon reminded me a little of Endless Love by Scott Spencer. Love is the one emotion that drives people, especially young people, to reckless behaviour. Greene’s novel captures that love-fueled momentum and propels Anthony, Hannah and the reader on a journey that is both heart-felt and heart-breaking.

In Search of Adam – Caroline Smailes

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“Jude, I have gone in search of Adam. I love you baby.

I didn’t understand. But I took the note. It was mine. I shoved it into the pocket of my grey school skirt. I crumpled it in. Then.”

Jude is just six years old (four months and two days) when she discovers the lifeless body of her mother. It shatters her young life and the hurt train keeps on coming.

Her father farms Jude off to various neighbours after the death of his wife while he begins a new relationship with Rita. One of these neighbours is Aunt Maggie at Number 30. It is here that Aunt Maggie’s brother, Eddie, sexually assaults Jude. And it is here that Jude begins a journey that twists her life in ways that are often impossible to read about.

Jude is desperate for attention – and it’s completely understandable since her father virtually ignores her. At school, one of her teachers takes a special interest in her, but it isn’t enough to save her from the hurt that is gnawing away at her insides; big girls don’t cry is Jude’s mantra.

Smailes writing is often beautiful, but unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Sentences are fractured and stagger across the page, perhaps to mimic Jude’s own thoughts. This isn’t one of those novels where a child endures horrors only to bounce back, more resilient than ever. In Search of Adam is almost relentlessly dark and as a mom, it was often extremely difficult to read.

But I couldn’t put it down.

After You – Julie Buxbaum

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Do we really know the people we love?

Ellie Lerner’s already problematic life is turned upside down when her best friend, Lucy, is murdered while walking her daughter, Sophie, to school. Ellie flies to London to be with Lucy’s husband, Greg, and daughter, leaving behind her own husband, Phillip.

As Ellie settles into life with Greg and Sophie, she pushes her own problems further away. And it is clear from the beginning that she has problems. When, after the funeral, Phillip suggests that she come home, Ellie replies:

” They need me here.”

“I need you here,” he says, but we both know he is pretending.

After You is a story about friendship – a long complex friendship between women who have known each other virtually their whole lives. The novel tells the story of Lucy and Ellie in anecdotes Ellie recalls during her time in London.

When you meet someone at the age of four, tumbling and doing the “downward doggie” in Mommy & Me yoga, and their house is just two blocks away and they make you laugh for over three decades, starting their first day when she stuck out her tongue and made stupid faces behind the yoga teacher’s back, a friendship is inevitable. Maybe even fated.

But as Ellie settles into her life in London, she begins to realize that she didn’t know everything about Lucy. In many ways, Ellie is closed off to possibilities. Instead of dealing with her marital problems and the issues that precipitated them, she decides that she will stay in London where she is needed and wanted. As a way of helping Sophie cope, Ellie starts to read her Frances Hodgson Burnett’s magical book The Secret Garden. Burnett’s book, if you’ve never had the pleasure of reading it, is a book about grief and renewal. As they read, Ellie and Sophie book begin the process of letting go of their pain.

Buxbaum’s novel tackles some  big questions: what do you do when you’ve been betrayed? how do you move on? how do you forgive? is it really possible to have a second chance at love? I think she does an admirable job in After You. Ellie is a likeable character; in fact there are no bad guys here – just people, doing their best to live their lives, however imperfectly.

One Night – Margaret Wild

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The parties were Bram’s idea-

calculated,

sophisticated,

daring.

For a long time

they were the best-kept secret

in the city.

They ended one night

when Al nearly killed Raphael.

 

Margaret Wild isn’t the first writer to pen a novel written in poems, but One Night is the first poetic novel  ever read. One Night tells the story of three friends, Gabe (the beautiful one), Al (the wild partier) and Bram (the planner).  They’re in their last year of high school somewhere in Australia. Their personalities are revealed slowly, little snapshots that illuminate them, make them more than what they seem on the surface. Bram, for example “catches two buses to school,/ and never brings friends home.”  Al wears a coat summer and winter because “without it he would be/ a snail without it’s shell-/soft/exposed/defenseless.”

Into the boys’ world comes Helen. She has a damaged face and a dazzling smile. Just one night and one of the boy’s lives is forever changed.

One Night only took a couple hours to read, but that doesn’t mean that Wild’s novel is lightweight.  These characters are fully realized. In just a few short lines, Wild had me feeling tremendous sympathy for Bram, a character who appears to be – on the surface at least – all hard edges. One Night captures the daring sense of ‘anything goes’ shared by many young people; the notion that actions have no real consequences. In Helen, we have a character willing to make sacrifices and decisions far beyond her years.

One Night is also about family. It isn’t only biology that binds us; sometimes we choose our families out of need and circumstances and sometimes these families serve us better than those we came by naturally.

One Night is a terrific novel – timely and beautifully witten.

Every Last One – Anna Quindlen

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Sometimes I feel as though the entire point of a woman’s life is to fall in love with people who will leave her. The only variation I can see is the ones who fight the love, and the ones who fight the leaving.  It’s too late for me to be the first, and I’m trying not to be the second.

Anna Quindlen’s 6th novel Every Last One is  filled with the quiet detritus of every day life.

“This is my life: the alarm goes off  at five-thirty…” thinks Mary Beth Latham, the novel’s narrator. Wife to Glen, mother to daughter Ruby, 17, and twins Max and Alex, 14, Mary Beth spends her days spinning the every day plates that keep families in motion and trying to carve out a little time for herself, something to remind her that she is more than just a wife and mother.

Mary Beth loves her family, but she doesn’t gloss over the difficulties of raising kids or trying to keep a marriage afloat. Ruby, an aspiring writer,  is just about ready to leave home. The twins are as different as night and day and as Mary Beth finds herself focusing more and more on Max’s moodiness, she fails to acknowledge that Ruby’s ex-boyfriend, Kiernan, is trying too desperately to win Ruby back.

Quindlen does a masterful job of leading the reader towards a climax that – even if you see it coming – shocks the hell out of you. It’s her careful layering of life’s little details – the slights, the carelessness, the mistakes we make, family dinners, blow-ups and meltdowns, reconciliations – that add power to the book. Mary Beth isn’t a saint.  And just like the rest of us, she’s forced to put one foot in front of the other and keep on walking, even when it doesn’t seem possible to take another step.

Anna Quindlen has the distinction of being the first author my book club ever read twelve years ago. We read Black and Blue for our first ever meeting and despite the subject matter (domestic abuse), we all really enjoyed it. A few years ago we read Rise and Shine, but I have to say I didn’t enjoy that one at all. Every Last One, while often difficult to read, confirms what I always thought about Quindlen’s talents though. It’s definitely worth a read.

 

What Love Mean to You People – NancyKay Shapiro

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I started to read NancyKay Shapiro’s debut novel a couple years ago, got about 40 pages in and put it aside. I’m not really sure why I stopped, I just wasn’t groovin’ to the story. And I desperately wanted to like it. See, NancyKay Shapiro was something of a Big Fandom Name back in my days in a certain fandom (which shall not be named so I don’t out her). She wrote a different pairing than I did and I didn’t always agree with her characterization, but there was no question that she could turn a phrase.

In a way, What Love Means to You People is sort of like reading her fanfiction. The writing is smart and often quite beautiful, but I had serious problems with the characterizations of her three main characters: Jim, a widowed gay man in his early 40s; Seth, Jim’s new beautiful, troubled, much younger lover and Cassie, Seth’s sister who shows up and causes all sorts of trouble for the men.

Jim is a rich advertising guy. He’s been single ever since the love of his life, Zak, died. One day, he meets Seth McKenna:

Rippled nose with a slender ring in one nostril. Cheekbones and a clean jaw. Shorty bleached hair in trailing bangs, pointy sideburns. Silver rings climbing one earlobe, small, smaller, smallest. An appealing athletic body, too, in white chinos and a tank shirt. Quite nice, despite the trivializing modifications.

Jim is smitten. They have dinner. Seth tells a lie. Or two. Seth, it seems, has a past from which he has tried desperately to distance himself. It looks like none of it will matter, until his younger sister, Cassie, shows up with her small-minded attitudes about gay men and the key that opens the door to Seth’s past.

There are lots of plot twists, relationships fractured and pieced back together. Lots of graphic gay sex, too, if that’s your thing. I think Shapiro was aiming for a story that examines families, and how sometimes the ones we choose are better than the ones biology gives us but, ultimately, for me, What Love Means to You People wasn’t really much more than a well-written soap opera, complete with stock characters and a neatly tied bow of an ending.