Category: Modern Fiction

An American Marriage

By Tayari Jones

Published 2018

Read Jan 2019

I devoured this book.  It’s really good.

In the first section of the book Roy and Celeste, through their first person narratives, introduce the reader to them, their views of their spouse, and their recollections of the fateful weekend trip to visit Roy’s parents.   Roy was born and raised in Louisiana but attends college, meets and marries Celeste, and makes a home with her in her home town of Atlanta.  When they visit Roy’s parents, they choose to stay in a local motel.  They are woken by police that night and Roy is arrested for raping another guest in the motel.  Although falsely accused, Roy is convicted and sent to prison in Louisiana for 12 years.  Celeste returns home to Atlanta.  Life disrupted….

The second section of the book is presented through letters Roy and Celeste write to each other while Roy is in prison.  Through this approach we have a very intimate view of them and their marriage.  We hear exactly and fully what Roy and Celeste say to each other through this medium, their only route of regular communication given the distance between Roy’s prison and Atlanta (which results in few “live” visits).  In his first letter, Roy indicates he thinks he last wrote a letter when assigned a French pen-pal in high school and “That whole thing lasted ten minutes.” He knows with certainty it’s the first time he’s written a love letter.

In the meantime, Celeste’s uncle works to free Roy and he is eventually successful.  Roy leaves prison after 5 years hoping to “return home”.  But home is not as he left it.  In the third section, Jones returns to first person narratives by Roy and Celeste.  A third voice, Andre, also participates and alternates with the other two. Andre was a college friend who has remained part of Celeste’s life while Roy was imprisoned.  It seemed to this reader that Jone’s writing made the pace of the alternation of the three voice-lines hastening dramatically as the three characters reach a point of, potentially, no return.

The title of Jone’s book is “An American Marriage” and it is a story of a marriage– one that has been disrupted.  She requires the reader to face this disruption—the immediate terror of police breaking into the motel room, the disbelief that Roy could be found guilty of a crime he didn’t commit, the lost years of his imprisonment.  In one of Celeste’s early letters she indicates “Uncle Banks is preparing the first appeal.  He reminds me it could be worse.  Many people have run-ins with the law and they don’t live to tell the tale.  There’s no appealing a cop’s bullet.  So at least there’s that but it’s not much.”

Much of the story is universal–disapproving in-laws, a husbands’ wandering-eye, a couple’s first year of marriage when they are trying to figure out how they will live together as a married couple.  Many novels are available that deal with these topics written across many centuries by countless authors.  But Jones also provides the reader some insights that are different.  The characters are black.  Roy had a scholarship to Morehouse.  Celeste graduated from Spelman but spent her first year at Howard University.  They are upwardly mobile and they expect to be “rich black”. The disruption that impacts their marriage is one that traumatized Roy, and his family, through a system that is far from color-blind.  This reader got a different view of life in the US through their voices and their reactions to this disruption.  Jones provides us distinctly unique characters whose feelings were realistically painted and which certainly impacted this reader.    I look forward to discussing this book with others.

 

 

Mrs.

By Caitlin Macy

Published 2018

Read Dec 2018

Mrs. has some parallels with Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities:  set in high-end New York City, providing a glimpse of “how the other half lives”, and a crime committed that brings down one of the characters.  What’s different:  this book is told through the eyes of most members of each of three couples (vs the primary protagonist in Wolfe’s book), supplemented by a “chorus” of unidentified mothers; the binding tie between the characters is St Timothy’s Preschool which all the characters’ children attend; the criminal’s voice isn’t one we hear nor is he apparently concerned about his crime.

Macy is most sympathetic towards Gwen Hogan and her husband Dan.  Gwen is a chemical engineer turned stay-at-home mother; Dan works for the measly salary of $150,000 as a lawyer for the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan.  They have one child who wowed St Timothy’s enough to earn a big scholarship.  Dan and Gwen’s  dreams of moving to the suburbs to raise a houseful of children have been destroyed by a gone wrong.   Their child attends St Timothy’s because Dan heard it was the best school in town and while Dan and Gwen consider themselves “different from the others”, Dan wanted his daughter in the best school possible as he hasn’t really silenced his ambitions.

Phillipa Lye Skinker grew up in next town over from Gwen, didn’t attend college, and maybe didn’t even finish high school before she started a career in modelling that took her to Japan for a while, although her history isn’t fully clear to the other mothers.  She somehow married Jed Skinker, current CEO of the last privately held investment bank who would prefer to be living on the farm in the country he inherited from his uncle.  Nonetheless, although they have money coming out of their ears, Phillipa can’t remember to bring her purse with her during dropoff of the kids at St Timothy’s and the other mothers rescue her when she can’t pay for the taxi. 

Minnie Curtis left her husband to marry John Curtis, a man aggressively climbing the ranks in finance, although perhaps not always according to Hoyle.  Minnie worked at the same law firm at which Phillipa spent a short time before she met her to-be husband Jed in a bar.  Minnie and John are clearly eager to become a large splash in high-end society in New York City so have enrolled their (too old?) daughter at St Timothy’s and Minnie pursues Phillipa to get a seat on a foundation board on which she’s a member.

Stage set for something to happen–which I won’t detail. 

We do learn through this book that:  more money = poorer diet for the kids (daily chicken nuggets vs homemade healthy stews); some wealthy mothers drink in the middle of the day; some wealthy attractive mothers send their nannies to pick up their kids from pre-school, but not chemical engineer-turned-stay-at home moms who are “different”; persons previously desirous of a relationship with wealthy attractive people will have their children be a no-show at a birthday party if the skeleton in that wealthy attractive person’s closest is exposed; even less than wealthy husbands cheat on their wives.

Macy’s book is entertaining.  She gives “the rest of us” a particular lens into the “rich and famous”—specifically one that tells us we’re lucky not to be so “rich and famous”. 

Waiting for Tomorrow

By Nathacha Appanah

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Published 2015 (French); 2018 (English)

Read Dec 2018

This slim volume uses an interesting structure to tell the story of Anita, an immigrant from Maurituis  and an aspiring journalist/writer, and Adam, “a woodcutter/ cabinetmaker/ painter/ surfer/marathon runner/ only son” and architecture student from the countryside of France.  The opening section is entitled “Today” as is a chapter in each of the three parts.    In these passages, we learn a small bit of their future state—Adam is in jail, Anita is at home with daughter Laura, who is now confined to a wheelchair, and someone named Adele drowned the same day as Laura’s accident.  Through three parts Appanah tells Adam and Anita’s story—how they met, their early days falling in love in Paris, moving to Adam’s home province, Anita’s ambivalence about being a stay-at-home spouse who originally had different ambitions, their struggles to juggle two careers while raising a small child, their desires to retrieve what they once had as a young couple in love with their artistic paths still open.  We eventually meet Adele and slowly learn her story and how that story becomes engaged with Anita and Adam.  I won’t give away more here. 

Appanah uses little dialogue but rather relies on beautiful descriptions of her character’s thoughts and their encounters during their days to paint pictures of Anita and Adam and their travel through life together and as individuals. Her approach managed to show me their struggles and progress—I didn’t feel she was merely “telling” me, something that dialog often accomplishes. 

It’s apparent the paths Anita and Adam are taking are going to result in a collision of some sort.  The “Today” passages spell out the result of that collision but Appanah effectively delays disclosure of its details to very near the end.  Appaneh leaves the future ambiguous.  She also leaves the reader with the dilemma to decide how they now feel about these characters whose struggles they have witnessed and whose futures this reader hoped would be closer to the ones they were beginning to track towards.   

The Leavers

By Lisa Ko

Published 2017

Read Dec 2018

The author tells her story through the voices of the two major characters via a number of flash-backs and flash-forwards. 

Deming Guo is 6 when his mother, Polly, disappears mysteriously.  His sections tells his perception of the story:  his last day with his mother; living in the Bronx with Polly, his boyfriend Leon, his sister Vivian and Vivian’s son Michael;  early days with adoptive parents Peter and Kay Wilkerson; and present time (age 22) as he struggles to gain a footing in the music scene with high school friend Roland after he has dropped out of college.  Deming is renamed Daniel Wilkerson when he is adopted and moved to a small town six hours from New York City.  He is continually conflicted about his feelings towards his American parents while missing his Chinese mother and especially by not knowing why she left.  He can’t follow, with conviction, Kay and Peter’s preferred path for him to be a college graduate although he makes some stumbling steps along that road.  Deming/Daniel is contacted by his boyhood friend, Michael, and he slowly and painfully finds a path to his mother, now in China, while wrestling with his feelings for Kay and Peter and while wandering into his future.  

Polly’s sections are written as though she is talking to Deming.  Through her voice we learn that Peilan Guo was born and raised in a small village outside Fuzhou, China.  She left her village as a teenager to work in the city of Fuzhou.  A boyfriend from the village eventually went there as well and Peilan became pregnant.  To avoid marriage she left, with financing from a money lender, and entered New York City illegally.  She lived in Chinatown in a makeshift dormitory with other Chinese immigrants seeking to pay-off their debt to a moneylender.  After the baby was born, she eventually turned to a common practice for immigrants from China and sent her son to China to be raised by his grandfather until he is was ready for school.  Deming returned to Polly in Chinatown when he was five and his grandfather died. After Polly met Leon, another undocumented Chinese, she and Deming left their dormitory in Chinatown to live in the Bronx with him, his sister, Vivian, and her son, Michael.   Polly wanted to leave NYC to go to a job in Orlando, Florida but both Leon and Deming object.  Near the end of the novel we learn from Polly what happened the day she disappeared and how she accidentally became so completely separated from her son.

 Through this engaging story Ko exposes us to some reasons why people are willing to risk much to enter the US, what they are willing to endure to stay here, and the consequences they face when things go wrong.   The picture she paints of Peter and Kay is somewhat unflattering, but it does cause the reader to consider the child involved in a foster care turned adoption situation and the special issues associated with cross-cultural adoptions.  Deming/Daniel and Polly’s stories come to some resolution by the end of the novel but their next steps remain somewhat ambiguous which was appreciated by this reader.    Ko offers much for discussion and the book should be a welcomed addition to a book discussion group. 

The Vegetarian

By Han Yang

Published in Korean 2007

Translated by Deborah Smith

Published in English 2015

Read Dec 2018

I thought that my first experience with Han Yang (and also translated by Deborah Smith), Human Acts, would prepare me for Yang’s unusual choice of topics and feeling seared by her treatment of it.  Not so.

 The Vegetarian  is composed of three parts, each part from a different person’s perspective and with their voice.   In the first, Yeong-hye’s husband, self-described as always taking the “middle course in life”, describes his life with his seemingly bland wife and its disruption when she decides to become a vegetarian.  “I had a dream” is her only response to his question “why?” We are introduced to her sister and brother-in-law and to her parents who are all mystified by her behavior.  Her father strikes her and tries to force her to eat meat.  He fails and she hurts herself and ends up hospitalized.  Throughout this section, the Yeong-hye’s husband only considers his wife’s change as an inconvenience to himself.  He initially is dismissive and, after she apparently tells him about the dream that caused her to become a vegetarian, he doesn’t want to hear more from her about her dreams which are clearly becoming more consuming and difficult for her.

The second part is told by the brother-in-law about his extraordinary interactions with Yeong-hye after she has been released from a hospital and after her husband has divorced her.  This male relative also is focused on himself and his unusual desire to create a film with her in it with little regard for Yeong-hye.   His final encounter with Yeong-hye causes her to be hospitalized again and precipitates the end of his marriage.

 The third part is told by Yeong-hye’s sister who is trying to help her while she is a patient in a mental hospital and falling farther into an unreachable state.  The sister is devoted to Yeong-hye, visiting her monthly and then weekly after Yeong-hye had disappeared into the woods during an unsupervised walk.  It was “a miracle” she had been found as she was standing so still and silently while the rained poured down on her.  The sister has a dream herself in which Yeong-hye communicates she is becoming a tree.  Only the sister is self-reflective and reveals she is trying to understand her sister.  She recalls their childhood and changes in Yeong-hye which she hadn’t previously noticed.  She tries to understand her own motivations for marrying her husband, who, she considers, never really loved her and who has also been as quiet as Yeong-hye had become.  She blames herself for not understanding earlier that Yeong-hye was fully withdrawing into herself.  She tries to continue managing her business, be a (now) single mother, and stave off the consequences of insomnia she herself is experiencing now.  When Yeong-hye is admitted to the latest hospital, “the reason she gave the doctor, was this worry about a possible relapse.” Yeong-hye stops eating completely, and tells her sister she is becoming a tree and only needs water; she asks her sister “Why, is it a bad thing to die?”.   The sister realizes “Now she was able to admit to herself  what had really been going on.  She was no longer able to cope with all that her sister reminds her of.  She been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner.  And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.”

Yang leaves us many questions including:  Why did Yeong-hye marry her husband?  What are Yeong-hye’s dreams about and why did they start? What role does Yeong-hye’s father play in her slow then quickening descent? Her husband?  Why are food and clothing the things Yeong-hye avoids?   Why is Yeong-hye’s husband the only one of the three narrators who isn’t impacted by her mental state/breakdown?  Why are Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law and sister so impacted by her situation and what will become of them? Will the sister be able to hang on for the sake of her child at least or will she cross the boundary Yeong-hye (and her husband?) had?  

What is Han Yang trying to tell us about mental health issues—about “the patient”, about those who love them, about those who are charged with caring for them? What is it that keeps any of us from slipping across that boundary?   I anticipate much discussion will spring from these and other questions.    Yang forces us to face questions regarding mental health and provides us no answers. Likely because there are no simple answers but avoiding the questions isn’t the answer either.

 

There, There

By Tommy Orange

Published 2017

Read Nov 2018

This debut novel is really quite impressive.  Orange opens the book with a Prologue that gets and keeps your attention.  It is a powerful indictment of the White Man for his intended impact on the Native population.   I use the word intended here because it’s hard not to when the US uses the term “Indian Termination Policy” to describe its policy regarding Native Americans in the 1940s through mid-1960s.  A “positive” attribute of the policy was to grant Native Americans the rights and privileges associated with US citizenship (something denied anyone with more than 50% Native blood since the 1600’s).  But it also meant that the US ended its recognition of the sovereignty of tribes.  The intent was that Native Americans abandon their traditional lives, become civilized, and just plain assimilate.    In the Prologue and Interlude later in the book Orange writes a number of short essays informing the reader of facts and figures that are difficult to digest and to which you want to hide.  We also learn that Urban Native is a term describing Natives that have been born in urban environments vs those that were moved there or moved there themselves.

This book is about 13 characters who live in Oakland, CA, whose varied paths take them to the Big Oakland Powwow, and what happens to them at that fictional event.  The characters are rather diverse.  Single mothers; offspring of single mothers with various degrees of problems; offspring of two parent households with a variety of issues; a daughter of two Natives who is given up for adoption and raised White while knowing she isn’t; offspring from one Native and one White parent; offspring of wholly Native or part-Native who have some connection with some of their Native customs; offspring of wholly Native or part-Natives whose parents or grandparents have suppressed their connection to their Native background; significant others of Natives.  Some of the characters are family members.  Some of the characters meet through their involvement in planning the Big Oakland Powwow.  Some of the characters know each other through drug dealing or using.  There are many interesting characters with a range of connections and a range of experiences.

Each chapter is titled for a character and is told by or tells about that specific character and some part of the overall plot.  Each character has at least one and usually several chapters titled for them but many appear in other chapters as well.   The point of view in these character titled chapters is not constant.  For instance Tony Loneman’s first chapter is in in first person but a later Tony Loneman chapter is in future tense told by a third person.  One chapter has a long email written by the title person to his brother, another significant character who never has his own titled chapter.   The language is straightforward and it’s clear who the chapter is discussing and what is happening in that chapter.  What takes a bit of work understanding  the various connections between characters and the interleaving circumstances.  I eventually succumbed to re-reading and taking notes to which I could refer to more fully tease out  he various characters’ situations and  interleaving story lines that all press them towards the day of the Big Oakland Powwow.

So this is a book with a simple structure that is actually a fairly complex product which is about complex characters that represent a very complex situation of Urban Natives which is but one type of Natives in this very complex and complicated county that has always dealt poorly with how to interact with people of different blood (even when everyone is “All White”).

This book demands you work at reading it and listening to the many kinds of things it is sharing with you.  It is well worth all the energy required to take it in. You will be changed.

Pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

Published 2017

Read Oct 2017

Lee gives us an engaging saga of a family and their friends over several generations and about 80 years.  The setting being Korea and Japan provides an opportunity to learn about the challenges faced by working class families in this area of the world during this period of dramatic change.

Pachinko is a gambling game in Japan found in Pachinko parlors which are run nearly exclusively by Koreans.  We don’t start learning about Pachinko until about half way through into this novel that follows an extended Korean family.  We slowly learn that Koreans in Japan have very few opportunities for rising above a poverty or poor working class level.  Pachinko is a primary path for actually running a business and developing some wealth.  Through this book we learn or are reminded that Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and lost it through WWII.  A new learning for me was that Japan has maintained a policy that Koreans can never attain Japanese citizenship, even if they are the second or third or more generation born in Japan.    Further, social standing for an entire family, even among Japanese, can be lost through a shameful act by a family member, making it impossible for them to marry well or find good employment.

Lee slowly reels out the story of the various family members and their friends and how they deal with the limited options available to fishing village working class Koreans in Korea and Koreans in general in Japan.   For much of the story, the strength, daily hard labor, and resourcefulness of women members of the family (the widowed mother, her daughter and her daughter’s sister-in-law) are essential to the families’ survival.  The story shifts to the daughter’s sons and their families and friends and how they make their way through life as non-citizens of Japan and having no real country that’s theirs.   The sons rise above the manual labor lives of their parents through education for one son and through hard work in a business setting for the other son.  Both end up working in the Pachinko business but from totally different paths.  A grandson seems to have an a chance at breaking out of the confined opportunities for Koreans with a US based education and a US born girlfriend but in the end finds himself limited by his Korean background.

Lee uses a universal narrator approach so we are told the thoughts and feelings of the character being discussed at the time.  This is effective in telling us what the author wants us to know but seems a weakness at the same time as Lee leaves us little to figure out for ourselves about the characters.   The dialog and some responses to challenges seemed a little “modern” and “western” to me at times.

However, Lee does help readers in the USA appreciate the precious treasure of a policy that confers citizenship to all those born here and that this is not a world-wide policy.   She directly reveals the unfair challenges of being a non-citizen in Japan if you descend from Koreans even if your family has been there literally for generations.  She also expands our consideration, though not directly, of the plight of other peoples who aren’t considered citizens of a particular country, defined by current political borders, either because they have migrated to it, usually driven by man-made reasons for fleeing their native country, or because they aren’t members of the ethnic (defined by bloodline, race, region, etc) majority of the current political country.  She quietly provides us the opportunity to think about how groups treat other groups that are different, how hard and fast that line of differentiation can remain,  and the resulting human barriers raised against being simply human.

Sycamore

By Bryn Chancellor

Published 2017

Read July 2018

Jess is a newcomer to a small town in Arizona, moving there with her newly divorced mother from Phoenix.  They are both processing, in private, their loss of father/husband after he chose a younger woman and baby daughter issuing from that relationship instead of them.

Laura Drenna is a newcomer to the same small town in 2009, 18 years after Jess goes missing.  She too is mourning the loss of her husband to another woman.  While on one of her many walks to forget and think she finds the skeleton in a crevice.  Is this the remains of Jess who went missing 18 years earlier?

Chancellor spins her story via two parallel paths.

One part of the weave is Jess’s story in in 1991—her loneliness as a new high school girl from the “big city” in a small town she didn’t choose, making one good friend who drops her for unknown reasons, making a second good friend, and beginning to find her way… for awhile…    This story line is fairly straightforward and progresses through the year ending with the night she goes missing.  The interesting element of this storyline is that the reader learns about what’s happening to Jess during the year and that final night, but the other characters are privy to very little of her life or thoughts and are not at all aware of what happens the final night of her life.

The other part of the weave consists of individual chapters focused on each of a dozen characters who play some role in Jess’s life including her mother, several friends, a couple of adults, and Laura who finds her.  These chapters often includes their perspectives of the happenings in 1991 as well as revealing more about the character either before or since Jess goes missing or both.  The form of each chapter is different.  The chapter about the father of the friend is a letter he writes.  The chapter about the mother of the friend, a professor of theater at the local college, is provided in the form of a script of a play.  Through this set of chapters, an overall picture of the backdrop of Jess’s story in 1991 and what happens to these characters thereafter slowly evolves.

Chancellor’s approach provides an interesting approach to consideration of a not uncommon situation:  an act by one causes pain to others, sometimes resulting in long-lasting damage that may never be undone.

Anything is Possible

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2017

Read June 2018

I keep reading Elizabeth Strout for the same reason her other readers do.  She provides us characters who have survived difficult to dreadful family situations as children or as adults and who become or remain real people who are living real lives and trying to make the best of it. She writes beautifully.  We believe her characters could be real—people really go through these trials and people really survive them although usually not fully intact—which is true for her characters.

Strout enjoys the format of short stories that have some connection with each other and through those connections we more deeply learn about the various characters she’s chosen to consider in this particular work without being told too directly.  Her previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, touched on some of these characters (she didn’t need to do this and in some ways the “gossip” the mother conveys about these characters is almost distracting in that book) and her readers aren’t surprised this novel follows so she can more deeply consider their stories.   Strout directly brings Lucy Barton back to her home town for one of the stories of this book while exploring more about her siblings and neighbors in other stories.

Strout’s stories are heavy.  Her characters are sad and struggling.  But we read them because they are well written and her characters are believable.  Strout gives us a little relief in the final story in which one “mature” (over 60) character strongly confronts another “mature” character.  In the final sentence of the story we do believe Strout’s character when he decides” Anything was possible for anyone.”