Category: Modern Fiction

The Madd Addam Trilogy

By Margaret Atwood

Oryx and Crake:  Published 2003; Read 2011 and Oct 2017

The Year of the Flood:  Published 2009; Read 2011; partly re-read Oct 2017

Madd Addam:  Published 2013; Read 2013; partly re-read Oct 2017

By Margaret Atwood

Caution:  in discussing my experiences with these book there will be spoilers.

Margaret Atwood is a remarkable writer who wove an interesting tale across this trilogy.  I haven’t been able to find out if she planned to write all three books or even the second book but they work together very well.  Her interest in the impact of technology on society and the planet are prominent themes here.  She describes her work as “speculative fiction” and indicates accurately that much of the technology she includes isn’t made up—it’s already in laboratories.  The question she explores is “where will this technology lead society if we don’t think about how we’re using it or about to use it”.  This isn’t her first (or last!) set of books about the breakdown of society and the rise of secure Compounds where the “haves” live and work (here generally focused on using biological technologies in new ways for profit) and the wild, dangerous Pleeblands where the rest of humanity lives and works.    In this set of books she also explores the theme of the role of spirituality and religious practice in our lives.  As expected from Atwood, she shows the dark side of religion-for-profit.  She also explores the ability of religious practices (note she differentiates this from religious beliefs) to provide a framework for guiding people through crisis.  She also explores if the propensity for developing religious practice is an essential aspect of the human DNA and can’t be eliminated without eliminating humanness itself.

All three books use a structure a mix of action forward in the present and discussion of the history of the characters provided either through action/dialog or story-telling by a character to him/herself or another.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood cover similar time periods.  Each book opens in the same “present”–shortly after The Waterless Flood, a world-wide disaster of unknown origin to the reader initially.  In each book, a survivor (Jimmy in Oryx and Crake) or survivors (Toby and Ren in The Year of the Flood) tell the reader how they are dealing with their circumstances following the apocalyptic pandemic.  None of them are certain that there are any other (human) survivors.  Jimmy is fully aware of other survivors—the “Craker children” which were created by Crake and with whom he shares an interesting relationship which is developed over the course of the book. The “present action” aspect of each book progresses the characters in this post-apocalyptic time to the same ending scene, whereby Jimmy, Toby, Ren, and others come together in the same place and time.  Both books end with no clarity of what will happen next in this encounter or thereafter.

In Oryx and Crake, the primary character with whom the reader interacts is Jimmy.  As Jimmy is dealing with the hostility of his current situation, he recalls his childhood and adolescence as son of scientists employed in a Compound.  He meets Glenn while in high school in the Compound and who also is a product of a broken marriage, poor parenting, and the impacts of our current culture if it proceeds to coarsen unchecked.  That is, they spend much of their time taking drugs, getting drunk, watching pornography and playing violent video games.  They also share an interest in complex games and discover a web-based game, Extinctathon, run by MaddAddamm; Glenn takes “Crake” as his game name.   Following graduation, brilliant Glenn goes to the well-funded Watson-Crick Institute and “word-guy” Jimmy goes to the run-down Martha Graham liberal arts school.  Jimmy recalls his days at college and post-college which involve a continued amount of drugs, drinking, pornography, and sexual conquests.     I frankly had some difficulty staying with the book, hearing about Jimmy’s “interests”, his lack of desire to do anything productive with his life, and the general terrible state of society.  However, once Crake contacts Jimmy to join his well-funded project, over which he has sole control, at a company in a Compound, I became much more engaged with the book as it began to reveal what had happened.  Crake’s life work is taking a different path than intended by the for-profit company for which he works.  While the plan of his company and their competition at other Compounds is to take to a whole new level  genetic modification, gene splicing, and development of new species (like the Pigoons)—tailor made babies,  Crake is inventing a new species that will replace the current human species.  Crake also recruited Oryx, a girl Jimmy and Crake had first encountered as a child in a porn show on the web and for whom Jimmy has carried a life-long crush, to teach the Craker Children what they need to know.  My recent re-reading of this book, prompted by an upcoming book discussion of it, was much more positive than my first reading.  Now not naïve of the overall story, I could see the seeds of various aspects of the story I missed initially—when I read it without the benefit of any “blurb” about the book that would have informed me about its plot.

In The Year of the Flood, there are two primary characters that are survivors of The Flood and whose history we learn:  Toby and Ren  They were both previous inhabitants of a Pleeblands complex created by God’s Gardeners did not die during The Waterless Flood.  They now are trying to survive in the aftermath, also possibly as sole survivors on the planet. We learn that Toby’s parents were financially ruined while trying to deal with her mother’s failing health and she eventually loses both parents.  She eventually becomes an employee of a vicious man who likely will kill her soon but she is whisked away from harm by members of the God’s Gardeners, a green sect building a community fed by the gardens they build on roof-tops, and doing other things that aren’t apparent to Toby or the reader until later in the book.  Toby never becomes “a believer” but does begin to practice herb-based homeopathic remedies she learned at the Martha Graham liberal arts school, becomes an Eve in the sect, and continues Gods Gardner member Pilar’s bee keeping and mushroom growing after Pilar passes.  Ren is a pupil of Toby after she comes to the Garden with her mother, Lucerne, who has left her Compound scientist husband, and Zeb, Lucerne’s new lover.  Zeb is also clearly not “a believer” but is clearly associated in some way with Adam One, the sect’s leader.  Zeb teaches a course on survival post-the Waterless Flood that Adam One anticipates.  The flashbacks cover Toby’s time at the Garden as well as the departure of Ren, Zeb, and Toby from the Garden prior to The Waterless Flood.

An important, and in my opinion a delightful, element of The Year of the Flood are the sermons given by Adam One, and the songs the God’s Gardeners  sing after the sermons.  The sermons are given at celebration such as The Festival of Arks, Saint Euell’s Week, Mole Day, April Fish Day, and The Feast of the Serpent Wisdom.  I listened to an audio-version of the book and the songs were set to music.  Not being one to read poetry nor poetry within a novel, I might have otherwise missed Atwood’s wonderful words in these selections from the God’s Gardener Oral Hymn Book.  Nearly every day in The God’s Gardener’s oral calendar is named for a saint (such as Saint Rachel Carsen).  Adam One’s creation of a set of religious practices is fascinating and provides, to Toby’s surprise, grounding for her post The Waterless Flood.

MaddAddam begins immediately after the final scene in The Year of the Flood and  Oryx and Crake.  Atwood provides a several page summary of each of these two books so the reader has the required background to begin this part of the trilogy.  The “present action” story in this book takes the reader forward post The Waterless Flood as a group of survivors from the God’s Garden sect and the MaddAddam group wrestle with building a new community which will now interact somehow with the Craker Children they’ve met through Jimmy.  They are also working to heal the physical and mental wounds of Amanda, Ren’s friend from God’s Garden, who was abducted by the Painballers (men whose de-humanizing punishment when jailed was that of televised gladiator games), as well as protecting their community from the Painballers who still roam the area.  The story also shows us more about the Craker Children.  Atwood develops the character of one of them, Blackbeard, as he matures (very quickly per the species’ design) and describes his role in dealing with the Painballers and the pigoons, a man-made species we’ve learned about in Orxy and Crake and The Year of the Flood.

The historical part of this novel is that of Zeb and Adam One, who we learn are brothers and children of a corrupt for-profit minister who founded the PetrOleum Church and then pilfered great sums of money from its parishioners.   Zeb’s voice tells his story to Toby.  It connects together various strings of the overall history of Crake, God’s Gardeners, and MaddAddam.

Toby tells a few parts of Zeb’s story to the Crakers as she has been propelled into the role of providing them a daily story now that Jimmy is in a delirious state due to infection of a wound he received in Oryx and Crake. (Jimmy had been recruited into this role originally played by Oryx.)

As MaddAddam ends, we see that Crake’s vision has not played out as planned.   In particular, he has not eliminated the propensity of human nature to develop religious practices that are important element of humanity and provide a humane grounding for individual and community growth.  Atwood thus emphasizes her theme that unbridled technology always has unintended outcomes.

This trilogy is an interesting one.  The first two books cover essentially identical time periods but from two perspectives—a boy/man growing up in a safe, privileged, wealthy Compound; a woman living in the unsafe,  desperate Pleeblands.  The third takes up from where each leave off, telling the story of two men dealing with rejection of for-profit religion and fighting against the current progression of society and its horrid results for the planet.

Of the three books, The Year of the Flood was most engaging for me from the very start of the book. Toby is a strong, independent, but not perfect, woman who frankly admits her lack of faith and her limitations, but preserves for survival in the Pleelands and post-The Waterless Flood.   Ren’s story is interesting and provides a different view of Jimmy’s high school period as they were both at the same Compound.  These voices, combined with Adam One’s sermons and the hymns, as well as the cast of interesting supporting characters and sub-plots within the God’s Gardener story make The Year of the Flood my recommendation if only reading one of the first two books and remains my favorite among the three books.  I anticipate that the male perspectives in the other two books and their descriptions of drugs, sex, and pornography as part of their lives made these books harder to read.  However, I do recommend reading the entire series.  Atwood’s writing is tremendous—she creates a believable world that could be quite close in the future; she develops interesting characters, has interesting themes, and uses wonderful language to convey it all.

Mr. Ives’ Christmas

By Oscar Hijuelos

Published 1995

Read Oct 2017

This novel is not about a single Christmas in Mr. Ives’ life but rather many of them and the time in-between.  We learn on the very first page that Christmas time was always special for Mr. Ives. In particular, in that first small chapter we learn that being in a church at Christmas time was an extremely powerful experience for him.  In that section we also learn that he was a foundling but adopted by a man also substantially moved during Mass.  We learn in the very next section, on page 8, that Mr. Ives’ son Robert was murdered a few days before Christmas, just six months before he would have entered the Franciscan order as a young seminarian, and that for the rest of Mr. Ives’ life he has struggled with this loss. “A kid, now a man, whom Ives should have long forgiven but couldn’t, even when he tried to—Lord, that was impossible—so filled was his heart with a bitterness and confusion of spirit that had never gone away.”  So in a few short pages the stage and tone for the novel are set.

Through the course of eights sections comprised of numerous short unlinked chapters with multiple shifts forward and back in time, we learn the story of Mr. Ives:  being in a foundling home; being adopted by someone who was a foundling himself; memories from growing up; studying at the Art Students League where he meets his to-be wife Annie McGuire; their courting and having a family; working at the advertising agency and making enough money to move out of the city to the safer suburbs, which he never does; meeting and becoming lifelong friends with Luis Ramierz, a Cuban who works at the Biltmore, his wife and family; the murder of his son at age 16 by a Puerto Rican boy, aged 14;  subsequent interactions with the murderer’s family and later with him directly; middle-age and retirement life; the Christmas-time encounter with the paroled murderer of his son; and his marriage to Annie.

Through the descriptions of Mr. Ives’ life we also receive many details of life in New York City at the various stages of his life.  We learn a bit about the parallel evolution of New York City over this time with respect to the businesses and customs that fade away while Mr. Ives progresses through his life in a rather trudging way, always burdened by his sorrow following Robert’s death.

Mr. Ives’ life is divided into two parts—before and after Robert’s murder.  After the murder, Mr. Ives does many good works, has a successful career, and remains faithful to his family.  However, his grief never abates.  He and his wife drift apart as a result of his grief, but they remain committed to the marriage and family.  He continues practice of his religion and has a mystical experience which he wishes to understand but can’t.  The book ends in Church at yet another Christmas with Mr. Ives meditating about Christmases past and being once again filled with the promise of a final blessing that would be his when Jesus calls him to join him.

Author Hijuelos chooses to provide the story and some of its interpretations by telling them to us directly versus using a “show-me” approach available with dialogue.  The narrator focuses on telling us about Mr. Ives’ experiences, his thoughts, and his dreams.  There are a few time when he directly tells us about Luis Ramirez’s perspective.  Hijuelos is also direct when connecting Mr. Ives’ story to Charles Dickens and his work.  I personally was not engaged well by this style and had to work harder than I would prefer to stay with the novel to its end.

The novel is unique in that engages directly with the themes of the role of religious practice, the experience of celebrating Christmas, and the struggle of grief following loss a loved one “too early”.   In particular, Hijuelos engages with the theme of grief that never ends nor even fades for a devout person.

Black Water

By Joyce Carol Oates

Published 1992

Read Sept 2017

I chose this book for a book discussion group with the assignment “any book with a food in the title”.  “Water” may be a stretch but I was also interested in reading a Joyce Carol Oates book.

I knew from the book cover that this would be at least somewhat about the Chappaquiddick incident of 1969 in which Senator Ted Kennedy drove into a channel.  He survived, but his passenger, 28 year old Mary Jo Kopechne didn’t.

Oates has indicated to interviewers that the book is not about that incident.  She’s correct.  The incident in Oates’ book occurs in 1989; the actual incident occurred in 1969. The Senator in this book is in his 50’s and about 25 years older than Kelly; Kennedy was 37 at the time of the incident and only 9 years Mary Jo’s senior. The party in this book was off the coast of Maine and The Senator and Kelly were trying to make a ferry to the mainland.   The actual incident occurred on a bridge connecting a small island to the larger island of Martha ’s Vineyard.  The party in this book was hosted by a college friend of Kelly and The Senator stopped by, a welcomed but not fully anticipated guest; Kennedy hosted the party in the actual incident. In this book, Kelly packed to leave the party with The Senator and said goodbye to her hostess.  Mary Jo Kopechne did not pack and even left her hotel key behind.   In this book, Kelly’s prior connection with The Senator was her college senior thesis; Mary Jo Kopechne had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential election along with the other 5 girls at the party.  In this book, The Senator had been at the 1988 Democratic party convention and had turned down Michael Dukakis’ offer of the vice-presidential candidacy and had overtly decided not to pursue a run at the presidency himself because “he’d understood, as Dukakis had not, that the Democrats’ best efforts in that election year were doomed.”  Kennedy actually did pursue his party’s nomination for presidential candidate in 1980 but lost to Jimmy Carter.  The Senator goes back to the party after the incident in this book to consult the host regarding best next steps; Ted Kennedy did not interact with anyone until the next day.

So it’s not the same incident but Oates was evidentially influenced by it.

She chooses to tell this story primarily from the perspective of Kelly.  Kelly’s backstory is revealed including her feelings of inadequacy following a breakup with her boyfriend and the devastation she felt after Dukakis (for whose campaign she worked) loses the presidential race.  She’s not financially, professionally, or personally where she thought she would be by this age.  She’s trying to break free of expectations of her parents and not live the life they would have preferred but is not consistent with her desire to be a successful, independent, sophisticated woman with substantial and noble views on important topics.  She meets The Senator, an older, very powerful, very successful politician whom she has admired to the point of writing a 90 page paper about him.  She is so compelled by his attention to her  and his physical advances toward her that she accepts his invitation to leave the island and go to the mainland with him. She is aware of what she’s doing, although she continuously fortifies herself that she’s making the right decision to leave with him .

Oates paints The Senator as an older, powerful man, separated from his family and always ready to explore short-term relationships with adoring younger women. We learn some of The Senator’s perspective, in particular after he has escaped the submerged vehicle which involved pushing against Kelly to free himself from the wreckage and move towards the surface.   His most immediate thoughts are focused on the impact of the event on his career and how the press and law will treat him inappropriately.

The story is told quickly in only 154 pages. The 32 chapters vary in length from a mere paragraph to multiple pages.  The scene changes repeatedly between the party, the drive, and spends much time with Kelly’s thoughts and actions while she’s trying to keep herself alive in the submerged car.  There is a sense of a Greek chorus that is chanting the oft repeated phrase:  “As the black water filled her lungs, and she died.”

What does this book accomplish? Why did she write it?  Oates dedicates the book:  “for the Kellys—“.   My take is that Oates has several intentions—1)  keep alive the memory of the actual incident —it occurred almost 50 years ago now and risks fading from general memory; 2) cause us to wonder about the fact that the senator remained a senator despite this incident; 3) cause us to think about the continuing situation of an older, powerful man and his pursuit of a young woman—the fragility of self-perception and the impact of sexual advances of someone with power who knows they have that power.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

By Anne Tyler

Published 1982

Read September 2017

I selected this book for a book discussion with the assignment “any book with food in the title”.  I struggled finding one and settled on something I hope close enough—you eat food in a restaurant….  I also selected this book because I read two of her novels in the distant past and thought this would be a great time to revisit this author.

As with most of Tyler’s work this book focuses on a particular family and relationships within it.  The reader is first introduced to Pearl Tull as she is dying with son, Ezra, at her side.   The reader learns that Pearl was surprised she wanted “extra children” after she had her first son, Cody, late in life (in 1931).  She was married (to the surprise of many including herself) at age 30 to Beck Tull, age 24 and a travelling salesman.  Pearl and Buck had three children and moved frequently from town to town as Beck had “invites” to new sales territories for the Tanner Corporation.  “One Sunday night in 1944, he said he didn’t want to stay married.  They were sending him to Norfolk, he said; but he thought it best if he went alone. ….”We’ll sleep on it,” she told him.    But he said, “It’s tonight I’m going.” And he was gone.  We learn that Pearl stays in the rented row house in Baltimore with the three children, Cody (14), Ezra (11) and Jenny (9).   She never tells them their father has left (he travelled frequently for weeks at a time) and they never asked her about him even after they realize he’s been gone for a very long time and may not return.  She takes a job as a cashier to provide for them as Beck sends only a small amount of money monthly.   Chapter 1 gives a short glimpse of Pearl’s perspective on their family and life and ends as she “was borne away to the beach, where three small children ran toward her, laughing, across the sunlit sand.”  Chapters 2-9 explore the three children and their perspectives on events in their lives and on their fellow family members.  Pearl’s voice shows up during these chapters as well.  The final chapter draws us back to Pearl’s death, the gathering of Cody and Jenny and their families from their homes back to Baltimore, and Ezra’s attempt to have a family dinner after the funeral.

Tyler told an interviewer that her work is all about the characters; plot is secondary.  That approach is evident here.  The first and last chapters serve as bookends to the exploration of mother Pearl and her children Cody, Ezra, and Jenny.  The family has little interaction with others.  Pearl and Buck moved frequently and friendships were never pursued.  Pearl focused on making the rental safe, secure, and extremely orderly. (Note “homey” is not part of the description).  Stair repair, gutter cleaning, clean clothing neatly arranged in the cardboard dressers and closets—that was her focus.  This focus doesn’t change after she takes a job where she serves the public daily but never engages with it.  Interestingly, oldest son Cody, who is extremely focused on “beating” favorite son, Ezra, becomes an efficiency engineer who travels the country bringing order and efficiency to various companies’ operations sites.  His continuous travel makes it easy for him to avoid building friendships with others but he is adamant that his wife and son always travel with him as he goes site to site.  Jenny, the youngest child, becomes a successful pediatrician who is too busy to interact with those outside the family. She has severe challenges developing meaningful relationships with any of her family including mother, siblings, husbands, and her own children. Ezra, who Pearl acknowledges is her favorite, is the only child to stay in Baltimore, and in fact remains in the row house with his mother and cares for her as she loses sight and health.  He does develop external relationships, becoming like a second son to the owner of the restaurant at which he begins working in high school. He visits her in a very devoted manner while she slowly dies and even develops a relationship with a foreign family who visits their dying family member in the same facility.  Despite his mother’s plans for him to be a teacher, he eventually becomes partner in and then owner of the restaurant.  As it becomes soley his, he fervently evolves its nature in a somewhat chaotic manner to a format focused on cooking “what people felt homesick for”.   He alone pursues a relationship with and among his family by repeatedly trying to provide a family dinner that brings the family together for a whole meal.

I appreciate the book’s deep appreciation for the remarkable but not uncommon outcome that children experience vastly different childhoods while living with the same family members, under the same roof, eating the same food, and attending the same family outings.  I appreciate that the book presents four complex characters for whom you feel empathy even while you can’t understand them.  They are characters not caricatures.  They are not simple and they are not grotesque.  They are real people.  Pearl and each of her children “make it” in that they are financially self-sufficient, have respectable occupations, and are not obviously outside the mainstream of society.  But all face significant challenges in figuring out how to deal with situations they can’t control, how to deal with family they don’t understand and how to interact with the greater society with which they feel limited connection and with which they have limited understanding.    The author doesn’t tell us why this is so; she leaves us to consider that for ourselves.  Thus I recommend this as a straightforward, unassuming read that packs a whallop.

The Heart Goes Last

By Margaret Atwood

Published 2015

Read 6/20/2017

This speculative fiction offering from Margaret Atwood was more difficult for me to stay with compared with other books she’s written.  The premise wasn’t the troubling part.  Stan and Charmaine lose their jobs (like pretty much everyone else) as the economy of the US shifts to the west coast and the economy and society collapse generally.  They are reduced to living in their car and are constantly worried about being robbed, raped, and killed by roving gangs.  This is a scenario that doesn’t seem unrealistic or surprising, unfortunately.  They learn about the Positron Project and quite readily sign on board.  They are in a cycle whereby they spend one month working in the town of Consilience and living in a nice townhouse.  The next month they spend in prison, working in jobs there while living separated by gender, but safe.   Then they cycle back to their townhouse and “town” jobs.   The couple settles into this situation for a while and generally feels safe and satisfied.  Premise established; not what?

Charmaine finds herself in a sexual affair with the man who occupies their house during Stan and Charmaine’s prison month and then Stan starts his own sexual fantasies about the woman who shares their house.   The book then follows the various twists and turns of their situation and a number of unsavory and twisted people they encounter along including characters who have been subjected to some of the experiments of the bad-guy owners of the Positron Project.  The plot feels forced (“what am I going to do with these bland, boring characters”) and is very heavily focused on various sexual fantasies and actions happening around the couple.

I made it to the end of the novel and was mildly pleased with how Stan and Charmaine are treated in the end.  Some reviewers describe the book as a dark madcap comedy.  Although I have regularly felt Atwood’s dark humor in her other books, this one was disappointing and I just wanted it to be over.   I would, however, strongly recommend Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood” for a better example of her brilliance in taking the reader for a look at the possible not too distant future and keeping the reader willingly thinking and reading until the very end.

One True Thing

By Anna Quindlen

Published 1994

Ellen Gulden is 24 and a Harvard graduate employed by a magazine in New York City when, during a visit home to see her brothers before they left for their next years in college, her father informs her that her mother has advanced cancer and will need her.  Ellen resists and suggests they hire a nurse.  But she leaves her NYC life behind and comes home to care for her mother.  She tells us this is not because she loves her mother, but because she felt she had no choice.  Kate Gulden was the mother who made everything from scratch, was on a first name basis with the hardware store employees, was on many community committees, and always designed and executed the best decorations for her assigned tree in the town square.  Kate Gulden’s life as wife of English Professor George Gulden of Langhorne College, a small liberal arts school in the small town of Langhorne, was one Ellen knew would never be hers.  But she agrees reluctantly to take care of Kate Gulden, in large part because it was another case of trying to achieve something her father demanded.

Quindlen tells the story of the months Ellen spends with her mother as the cancer slowly destroys her body, but not her spirit.  The descriptions of cancer’s impact are quite vivid although not in a way that causes recoil but rather draws you closer to Kate Gulden, her daughter, and all who suffer from cancer and all who take care of cancer victims.  The hospice nurse is carefully drawn and the compassion she brings to Kate, and indirectly Ellen, is clear whether or not Ellen can accept it.

Also during this period, Ellen learns much about and from her mother.  In the early stage of the caregiving, Ellen has “the childhood I might have had, had I been a different sort of girl, my mother a different sort of woman, and both our needs to woo my father less overwhelming”.   They start the Gulden Girls Book and Cook Club with only two members—mother and daughter.  They read Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Anna Karenina, all books Ellen has, of course, read.  Ellen learns eventually her mother had already read them too.

Eventually the disease begins to take a huge toll on Kate including losing strength so that Ellen needs to help her with more and more movements and activities.  The relationship between Kate and Ellen starts to shift more towards Kate as the child needing care and Ellen as the mother to provide it.  Pain becomes an overwhelming aspect of Kate’s life and her need for and use of morphine increases.

During this time Ellen’s relationship with her father also takes a shift and she becomes less all-adoring and more critical of him.  The biggest shift, however, occurs after her mother passes and it is determined that Kate’s death was due to a bolus of morphine well above and beyond what her morphine dispenser would allow.  Ellen is arrested for murder of her mother, although she hadn’t given her the overdose, and her father doesn’t even post bail for her.

The second half of the book deals with Ellen’s life immediately after Kate’s death and how it is impacted by the murder investigation and court proceedings.  I won’t spoil your reading by detailing how this goes.   There is some discussion about the ethics of supporting and/or hastening the end of life in this kind of case but fortunately the author doesn’t peach a line on this.

One review of this book suggests the epilogue makes the ending too tidy.  I somewhat agree with this view for the reason given—the author knows life, especially family relationships, grief, and loss, is untidy so a tidy ending is somewhat inconsistent with the rest of the book.

I very much appreciated the intelligent language of the book, its exploration of care giving and receiving care for such as devastating disease, and it exploration of the untidy nature of mother-daughter, father-daughter, mother-father, and mother-daughter-father relationships and how none of these relationships are static over time whether we want them to be or not. These aspects will enable the book to remain relevant for many decades (it’s already 23 years since publication).  Only one scene would definitely be different if occurring in the day of cell phones vs telephone land lines but by clearly stating the story occurs in 1985, this isn’t an issue.    I put this book on my “recommendation to others” list although not immediately for others whose life situation involves cancer and/or recent loss as a result of cancer.