Tag Archives: literary fiction

The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

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Madeline Miller’s Orange Prize winning debut The Song of Achilles is one of those books that, for a while at least, everyone was talking about. I watched a student in my Young Adult Literature class gasp and weep while reading the book. I just knew that I had to get to it over the summer.

Miller reimagines Achilles’ story through the eyes of Patroclus, a son of King Menoetius. In telling the story of his birth and younger years, Patroclus says

Quickly, I became a disappointment: small, slight. I was not fast. I was not strong. I could not sing. The best that could be said of me was that I was not sickly.

When Patroclus is nine, he commits an act of violence that exiles him to Phthia, and the care of King Peleus who was “one of those men whom the gods love: not divine himself, but clever, brave, handsome, and excelling all his peers in piety.” Peleus is father to Achilles. Even if you know nothing about Greek mythology, you’ll likely know Achilles.

Despite Patroclus’s dim view of himself, Achilles finds Patroclus “surprising” and the two become fast friends.

Our friendship came all at once after that, like spring floods from the mountains. Before, the boys and I had imagined that his days were filled with princely instruction, statecraft and spear. […] One day we might go swimming, another we might climb trees. We made up games for ourselves, or racing and tumbling. We would lie on the warm sand and say, “Guess what I’m thinking about.”

It’s not long before Achilles is all that Patroclus is thinking about, and then the two become lovers – which was not a big deal during the time and may or may not be historically accurate. According to Wikipedia, “The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is a key element of the stories associated with the Trojan War. In the Iliad, Homer describes a deep and meaningful relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, where Achilles is tender toward Patroclus, but callous and arrogant toward others. Its exact nature—whether homosexual, a non-sexual deep friendship, or something else entirely—has been a subject of dispute in both the Classical period and modern times. Homer never explicitly casts the two as lovers,[1][2] but they were depicted as lovers in the archaic and classical periods of Greek literature, particularly in the works of Aeschylus, Aeschines and Plato.”

Miller’s story follows the two men as they go off to the Trojan war, where Achilles grows into the revered warrior it is prophesized he would become.

Of course, there’s a tragic ending for our characters – as we know going in there will be. How emotional you feel about what happens will depend on how much you care about these characters and how invested you are in their love story. I felt sort of ‘meh’ about the whole thing, to be honest.

This is a book for die-hard fans of re-tellings and Greek mythology, but I think for anyone who is looking to dip their toe into the incredibly rich water of the Greek myths, this is as good a place to start as any. Just not my thing.

The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

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Catriona Ward’s novel The Last House on Needless Street is a Russian doll of a novel and if you haven’t read it yet, you should do your very best not to be spoiled before you start.

Ted lives with his sentient cat, Olivia, on a dead end street near the woods. Sometimes his daughter, Lauren, also lives with them. The house is boarded up and triple locked and Ted rarely leaves. Certainly he has no visitors. Ted was implicated in the disappearance of a six-year-old girl eleven years ago. He calls her Little Girl With Popsicle. In the end though, he wasn’t charged because on the day she went missing he “was at the 7-Eleven all afternoon and everyone says so.”

Dee moves in next door. Her sister, Lulu, went missing at a nearby lake, and she was never found. She is convinced that Ted is responsible for her disappearance and she is determined to prove it.

Based on this rather cursory synopsis, you might be inclined to think that Ward’s book is a rather straightforward thriller, but you’d be wrong. And not just because Olivia the cat is one of the book’s narrators.

I was busy with my tongue doing the itchy part of my leg when Ted called for me. I thought, Darn it, this is not a good time. But I heard that note in his voice, so I stopped and went to find him. All I had to do was follow the cord, which is a rich shining gold today.

There is nothing straightforward about this narrative. It flips back and forth through time, revealing its secrets slowly, which makes it almost impossible to put down. Just when you think you might have things figured out, well, you won’t. Okay, maybe you will. I didn’t.

Ted is a complicated character. He says “When I have a bad day, now and then get slippery.” He sometimes records his memories with a cassette player so “they won’t disappear, even if I do.” Even though his parents have been dead for years, he often feels his mother in the room with him, her hand “cool on [his] neck.”

Maybe she is spending a while in one of the memories that lie around the house, in drifts as deep as snow. Maybe she is curled up in the cupboard beneath the sink, where we keep the gallon jug of vinegar. I hate it when I find it there, grinning in the dark, blue organza floating around her face.

The Last House on Needless Street is a beautiful puzzle of a book that is confounding and creepy, but also – strangely – heartwarming. I could not put it down and highly recommend it.

If I Forget You – Thomas Christopher Greene

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Coming on the heels of You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, Thomas Christopher Greene’s 2016 novel If I Forget You confirmed what I already knew: I like my romance novels to be a little less fantastical. If I Forget You is my fourth novel by this author (The Perfect Liar, The Headmaster’s Wife and Envious Moon) and I think it is fair to say that he is one of my favourite writers.

This novel introduces us to Henry and Margot. Margot is as WASPish as can be (her father is a soft-drink kingpin; her mother lunches) and Henry is the son of Jewish immigrants. Their paths first cross in 1991at Bannister College, where they are both students. Margot’s father is a college benefactor; there is a building named after him. Henry arrives on a scholarship. The two meet after a poetry reading (Henry is the poet and a talented one) and are immediately smitten. More than smitten.

…she knows that tonight she will kiss him and that soon she will sleep with him and she also knows, more broadly, that if she doesn’t want to fall in love with him, she needs to decide that now.

The novel opens in 2012. Henry, a poet and lecturer at NYU, sees Margot – for the first time in 20 years – on the street in Manhattan. When their eyes meet, “the face Henry sees travels to him from a lifetime ago.” Instead of speaking to him, though, she runs away. It is from this point that their story unspools – toggling between their college days and this point in the present. Lives lived and all that.

Greene’s novel is filled with tenderness. The choices these characters make or, in some instances, are forced to make, inform their lives. Despite how young they are when they first meet, it is clear that Henry and Margot’s feelings for each other are sincere and deep, but as Henry remarks “The more you love someone, the more that person will eventually break your heart.”

Margot is also introspective. She is married to the bland but kind Chad, and has two almost adult children. Her son, Alex, causes her to get “nostalgic for the time of life he is occupying” although “part of her hates herself for this, the always looking back.”

If I Forget You is a quiet novel filled with joy and melancholy and hope. I loved both main characters and how, while their lives were filled with missteps, they managed to find each other again.

Highly recommended.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

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Published in 1992, Donna Tartt’s debut novel The Secret History is an astounding accomplishment. I read it for the first time shortly after it was published and I remember it making such a huge impression on me. It was a book that sort of stuck in my brain even though, over the years, I forgot the details of what it was about. I often recommend it to students and this summer my son Connor – who read the book, at my urging, when he was 13 or 14 – suggested we do a re-read. I did; he did not.

The book’s narrator, Richard Papen, recalls his time at Hampden College, a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont. (Many critics say it’s based off Tartt’s alma mater, Bennington.) The novel opens dramatically

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.

Richard has come to Hampden from Plano, California a place which has “created for [him] an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup.” After beginning college in California, a fight with his parents leads him to Hampden where he hopes to study Greek, a subject for which he has an affinity. The only Greek tutor, Julian Morrow, is reluctant to accept Richard into his class. Julian tells him, “I have limited myself to five students and I cannot even think of adding another.”

Those five students soon become central to Richard’s life. There’s Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, the twins, Charles and Camilla Macauley, Francis Abernathy and Henry Winter.

All of them, to me, seemed highly unapproachable. But I watched them with interest whenever I happened to see them: Francis, stooping to talk to a cat on a doorstep; Henry dashing past at the wheel of a little white car, with Julian in the passenger’s seat; Bunny leaning out of an upstairs window to yell something at the twins on the lawn below.

A chance encounter in the library offers Richard an invitation to this insular group and from there a front row seat to their complicated dynamics. The novel traces the shifting alliances, the pretentious ponderings and the copious drinking of this group of young academics. Oh, and there’s a murder and other dark deeds.

The Secret History is considered the grand dame of dark academia, although it wasn’t even really a thing when the book was published. Dark academia became a thing on Tumblr in 2015 and “is a genre of literature that literally revolves around academia or learning. Therefore, you will see that it is mostly set in educational institutions and follows the lives of students.” (Medium) TikTok has a trend for the aesthetic subculture of dark academia. (NY Times) For me, dark academia is a story that takes place on a college campus or at a boarding school, where students are concerned with the study of literature but there are also dark forces (not of the supernatural variety) at play. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview here.

When I read The Secret History the first time, dark academia didn’t exist, so it was interesting to read it this time and see all the qualities that I recognize now as being hallmarks of the category: an isolated, insular campus setting, a preoccupation with academia, toxic relationships, corrupted morality. I think inherent in dark academia is bildungsroman. It is certainly true that Richard is changed by the novel’s end – and not necessarily for the better.

My memory of my first reading of Tartt’s book is that it was exceptional. This is a literary novel which I would now describe as overwritten, but that is a stylistic choice. Tartt has penned two other novels, The Little Friend and The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer in 2014 and they all have this in common: Tartt loves language and she is a master of her craft.

This reading of The Secret History was a little bit more of a slog than the first time around considering I was waiting for the “big” things to happen. I also found the characters just a little bit precious and not of this world. For a book that is set in the 1980s – granted a lot more years ago now than it was when first written – Richard and company seem just a tad foolish. They dress in “starchy shirts with French cuffs” and Richard sometimes observes to his delight, Francis wearing pince-nez. I mean, really. Sometimes they speak as though they are from another planet. But perhaps all the pretention is the point. These are students in their early 20s, trying to make sense of their world but they are, perhaps, too clever for their own good.

If you haven’t yet read The Secret History, I highly recommend it. And if you are already a fan of dark academia, check out these titles:

If We Were Villains – M.O. Rio

Bunny by Mona Awad

The Girls Are All So Nice Here – Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Babel – R.F. Kuang

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

One of Us Is Lying – Karen M. McManus

The Broken Girls – Simone St. James

Vladimir – Julia May Jonas

See What I Have Done – Sarah Schmidt

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“Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one.”

I have been fascinated with the story of Lizzie Borden since I was a kid and saw a movie where the rhyme about Lizzie was sung by schoolchildren. (Unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of the film.) Years later, I read Evan Hunter’s novel Lizzie. I can’t imagine there’s anyone out there with zero knowledge of this famous true crime case from 1892, but you can easily go down the rabbit hole by searcing her name on YouTube.

Sarah Schmidt’s 2017 novel See What I Have Done reimagines the infamous case through the eyes of four characters: Lizzie; her sister, Emma; the Borden’s maid, Bridget; Benjamin, a mysterious man hired by the sisters’ Uncle John. 

The novel opens with the discovery of Mr. Borden.

I looked at father. I touched his bleeding hand, how long does it take for a body to become cold? and leaned closer to his face, tried to make eye contact, waited to see if he might blink, might recognize me. I wiped my hand across my mouth, tasted blood.

It is clear early on that things are not “normal” in the Borden household. Lizzie has a prickly relationship with her stepmother, Abby, whom she often calls Mrs. Borden. Emma is away from home so she is not there to act as a buffer between Lizzie and the senior Bordens. There seems to be a love/hate relationship between the sisters; both of their dreams have been thwarted by their overbearing father and their petty jealousies. Bridget wants desperately to return to Ireland and has been squirreling money away, planning her escape. Schmidt lets us see into the interior lives of these characters, and the stifling house they inhabit.

As for the fourth character, Benjamin – he comes into the picture after a chance encounter with Uncle John. As far as theories are concerned, having another suspect in the mix isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

What I admired most about this version of Lizzie Borden’s story was the writing and Schmidt’s ability to make all these characters sympathetic. None of them are particularly reliable and whether or not you believe everything they have to say, is up to you.

Borden was acquitted of the actual crimes and See What I Have Done doesn’t offer any definitive resolution in terms of her guilt or innocence. That said, I think Miss Borden might have gotten away with murder.

A great read.

We Spread – Iain Reid

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Canadian novelist Iain Reid is an auto-buy author for me. A few years back I read and loved his debut I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Then I read his equally compelling novel, Foe.

Oh, Iain – your mind is a strange and wonderful place.

In We Spread, readers are introduced to Penny, a woman left alone after the death of her long term partner.

I am near the end now, and I am alone. Very old and very much alone. I have been both for some time. surrounded by the listless stacks and heavy piles of a life already lived: vinyl records, empty flowerpots, clothing, dishes, photo albums, magazines about art, drawings, letters from friends, the library of paperback books lining my shelves. It’s no wonder I’m stuck in the past, thinking about him, our days together, how our relationship started, and how it ended.

Penny leads an insular life. She has no children or extended family. She has lived in the same apartment for over fifty years, surrounded by the detritus of a life that is winding down, things that at one time “wasn’t just stuff. It all meant so much to [her]. All of it. Marrow that has turned to fat.”

After a fall, Penny is taken – by a pre-arrangement she and her partner made but that she does not remember – to Six Cedars Residence, a special care home out in the country. There are only three other residents, Pete, Ruth and Hilbert, and – as far as Penny can tell – two employees, Shelley and Jack. Shelley tells her that she will “feel at home in no time.”

And, at first, it is nice. Her room is beautiful.

I can almost feel a weight lifted off my shoulders, not having to think about objects. No debris. All that stuff that comes with obligation and duty. It hits me that I won’t be the responsible one here. No upkeep or cleaning. No laundry. No shopping. No bills or light-bulbs to change. No decision-making.

But then things start to get weird. When she has a shower, Shelley gets in the stall with her. There’s a weird rule about not being allowed outside. She starts losing time. The story’s structure, and the way the words appear on the page – short paragraphs with big gaps between – add to the breathlessness of Penny’s narrative and contribute, I think, to the reader’s own sense of unease. Holy unreliable narrator, Batman!

I read We Spread in just a few hours. I vacillated between theories about what the heck was going on, but at the end of the day – it doesn’t really matter. Reid seems to love ambiguity and I am there for it. He’s way smarter than me and that’s okay by me.

Great read.

Zennor in Darkness – Helen Dunmore

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In 1915, D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, moved to the Cornish coast and spent two years living in a cottage in Zennor. (You can read a little bit more about that here and see pictures of the cottage where they stayed here.)

In her debut novel, Zennor in Darkness, Helen Dunmore imagines a friendship between the Lawrences and a local girl, Clare Coyne. It is the nearing the end of World War 1, 1917, when the story takes place and suspicion and paranoia are rampant, so the fact that Lawrence’s wife is German and Lawrence himself is vehemently opposed to the war is the cause of much consternation and rumour mongering among the locals.

This is also a novel about Clare, who lives with her widowed father, and spends time with her extended family, particularly her cousins Hannah and John William. When John William returns from France, it is easy to see that the war has changed him, and the easy relationship between the cousins is forever altered.

He is lost to her. He is a thousand miles away, hearing the guns, seeing the ring of faces round him and knowing their chances.

Nothing much happens in this novel, yet it does capture a real sense of a specific time and place. I have been to St. Ives and so it was easy to imagine the windswept cliffs and natural beauty of the places Dunmore describes.

It is a landscape of irregular small fields shaped by Celtic farmers two thousand years ago. Lichened granite boulders are lodged into the hedges. They stand upright in the fields, a crop of stone. Lanes run tunnel-like between the furze down to the farms. Here, by the cottage, the lane dips and dampens and is lines with foxglove and hart’s tongue fern and slow drops of oozing water. It is so quiet here.

Like with her other works of fiction, Zennor in Darkness has a thread of the gothic and the forbidden running though it and this book is particularly melancholy because of the setting. Modern readers will have had no experience with the horrors of WW1 and what it did to communities and individuals, and although this book doesn’t take place in the trenches the book captures so much of that horrible period in history.

I am a long-time fan of Dunmore and have read several of her novels including The Greatcoat, A Spell of Winter, Talking to the Dead, Your Blue-Eyed Boy, and With Your Crooked Heart (which predates this blog and was the first book I read by her) and one collection of short stories, Ice Cream. All her work has something in common: the writing is beautiful. Dunmore began her career as a poet and it shows, but not at the expense of plot. Her work is not a case of style over substance.

A beautiful read.

Edited to add: I was delighted to talk to Shawn (of Shawn the Book Maniac) about this book. My segment starts at about 7:22.

Yellowface – R.F. Kuang

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R. F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface — a book about as buzzy as its possible to be right now — is the story of June Hayward, a struggling writer with one mediocre published novel under her belt. June is “friends” with Athena Liu, a celebrated Chinese-American novelist, who shot to fame after her debut novel was published and has since gone on to further acclaim and a Netflix deal. (Here’s how readers will know that this book is very much of the moment; it’s not enough to be published — you want to be nominated for awards, Internet famous, and optioned for a streaming service adaptation.)

The truth of the matter is, June doesn’t really like Athena all that much. Athena doesn’t have any friends and June is convinced that people find her as “unbearable” as she does.

She’s unbelievable. She’s literally unbelievable.

So of course Athena gets every good thing, because that’s how this industry works. Publishing picks a winner – someone attractive enough, someone cool and young and, oh, we’re all thinking it, let’s just say it, “diverse” enough – and lavishes all its money and resources on them.

June is not without some talent, but she’s just “brown-eyed, brown-haired June Hayward, from Philly.” No one is interested in stories by white female writers. When Athena dies accidentally (not a spoiler — the novel’s first line tells us this happens), June does the unthinkable: she steals an unfinished manuscript from Athena’s desk. The manuscript needs some work, but June can see that it is a “masterpiece.” The problem is that it’s the story of the “unsung contributions and experiences of the Chinese Labor Corps”, a subject about which June knows nothing. It’s barely even a draft, but June acknowledges that she can “see where it’s all going and it’s gorgeous.” It’s so gorgeous, that June feels that she should finish it.

I know you won’t believe me, but there was never a moment when I thought to myself, I’m going to take this and make it mine. It’s not like I sat down and hatched up some evil plan to profit off my dear friend’s work. No, seriously – it felt natural, like this was my calling, like it was divinely ordained.

This is a novel that is tuned into the publishing world, the social-media-famous landscape, and online bullies. When June/Athena’s novel is published to critical acclaim, June feels validated and deserving. There’s no imposter syndrome here because she feels as though she worked every bit as hard on the novel as Athena did. So what if she’s not Chinese (as some of the critics says). She did her research. When there is any criticism of the book, June can chalk it up to Athena’s contribution: she always knew Athena was a fraud. The only thing she had going for her was the fact that she wasn’t white.

This novel seems very timely given the trouble other writers have faced because they were writing from a point of view that was clearly not part of their experience. (American Dirt springs to mind.) If you are a voracious reader and pay attention to things that happen on social media, you’ll certainly get some of the references Kuang makes.

June isn’t a particularly likeable character– neither is Athena for that matter. June isn’t trying to hide her theft from herself or the reader, but she does spend a lot of time justifying it. I ripped through this book waiting for the other shoe to drop and loved every minute of it.

Everything We Lost – Valerie Geary

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Valerie Geary (Crooked River) is definitely an auto-buy author for me. Although Everything We Lost wasn’t what I was expecting, I still found the book well-written and thoughtful.

Lucy Durant was just 14 when her older brother, Nolan, 16, disappeared. Although life wasn’t particularly easy for the siblings (their father left and their mother turned to alcohol), they have always been close, that is until Nolan’s former best friend, Patrick, starts paying attention to Lucy and she decides that Nolan and his interest in the stars and UFOs is just too uncool.

After Nolan goes missing, Lucy goes to live with her father and that’s where we find her, ten years later, with a stalled life. Her father, Robert, is about to remarry and he feels that it’s time for Lucy to get on with her own life.

They were kicking her out. She had seen this coming, was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, like after she dropped out of college her freshman year, but still her eyes blurred with tears that she quickly blinked away. She wasn’t ready. She would never be ready.

At loose ends, Lucy returns to Bishop, the small California town where she grew up. She feels as though she might finally be able to unravel the tangled truth of what happened the night that her brother disappeared. That means she’s going to have to talk to her mother, from whom she’s been estranged for the past decade. It also means that she is going to have to try to remember what happened on that last night she and Nolan were together.

Lucy and Nolan take turns telling the story of what happened leading up to the night Nolan goes missing. Nolan’s narrative illustrates his growing isolation, and fascination with outer space. He is convinced of the existence of life on other planets and extraterrestrials. He spends all his time watching the sky and taking notes about what he sees. When he meets and strange and beautiful girl called Celeste, he is sure that she is from another planet.

Everything We Lost is really a coming-of-age story, even though Nolan’s disappearance is an intriguing mystery. Geary writes Lucy and Nolan’s story as believer and non-believer. From the outside looking in, it is easy to dismiss Nolan’s increasing paranoia as just that: the men in the black cars are watching him; the lights in the sky are from space ships; he imagined Celeste before she miraculously appeared in his life.

Although I have my suspicions about what happened to Nolan – and I think the clues are in the story – Geary doesn’t offer any easy answers, and I am okay with that. Everything We Lost isn’t a quick read, but I enjoyed the book.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart – Ed Tarkington

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The whole time I was reading Ed Tarkington’s debut novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart, I was having this weird deja vu. I don’t know whether it was specific plot points – although the story isn’t particularly original – or just the book’s general vibe. In any case, it was very reminiscent of M.O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away or any number of Thomas H. Cook’s mysteries. This is high praise, trust me.

The narrator of Tarkington’s novel is Richard “Rocky” Askew. He’s telling this story from some distant point in the future, but when the book opens he is seven and lives with his father, “the Old Man”, mother, Alice, and his older-by-eight-years step brother, Paul, who “had a reputation around town as a “bad kid.””

Rocky worships Paul, hangs on his every word, and follows him around like a puppy. He is equally smitten with Leigh, Paul’s girlfriend, daughter of the town’s judge. When the novel opens, Paul suggests a visit to Twin Oaks, the huge unoccupied mansion with a violent history near the Askew’s property. Turns out, someone (Brad and Jane Culver) has purchased the house and Paul is shot on the property. This incident sets off a strange chain reaction of events – perhaps too many for one book – that includes a failed business deal, a romantic tryst between a teenaged Rocky and the Culver’s adult daughter, Patricia, and a double homicide. This murder comes late in the novel and propels the novel’s final chapters forward to its tidy conclusion.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart is not a story which is driven by plot. This is a story about family, love, regret. The novel takes place, for the most part, in the 70s and 80s. Paul introduces to Rocky to music, including Neil Young, whose song “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” provides the title of book. This is a novel that is very much steeped in a time and place. That’s one of the novel’s admirable traits. Actually, there is a lot to like about this book even though sometimes I felt like I wanted more of one thing (why did Paul “kidnap” Rocky; where did Paul disappear to and why?) and less of another (the choice of Equus as the high school play felt a little too on the nose).

Still, I enjoyed my time with Rocky and although there wasn’t a huge emotional payoff at the novel’s conclusion, this was still a great read.