Category: Modern Fiction

In This Grave Hour

By Jacqueline Winspear

Published 2017

Read May 10, 2017

I discovered Maisie Dobbs, Jacqueline Winspear’s “psychologist and investigator” a few years ago when I read Pardonable Lies, the third in a series of historical fiction/mysteries.  I’ve now read all thirteen books published to date (starting in 2003) in this series and look forward to more.

If you have encountered and viewed multiple seasons of BBC’s Foyle’s War, you will likely find this series of interest.  The Maisie Dobbs series is set in England and starts in 1929, some years after Maisie returns from serving as a nurse in WWI.  In This Grave Hour starts on Sunday September 3^rd, 1939 as Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tells the nation Britain has declared war on Germany.  Each book has an interesting mystery for Massie and her employee, Billy, to solve, often with a range of encounters with Scotland Yard, and occasionally other British agencies or their counterparts in other countries.  Of equal importance to each book and, I anticipate, a draw for her fans, is a description of the setting of the story—Britain dealing with the aftermath of WWI and eventually entering another war.

The continuing story of Maisie’s life is important to her approach to her work and the particular mystery at hand, but its telling is not a focal point of any of the books.  In fact, several years of her life including important events of marriage and loss of her husband and a pregnancy are handled in a few pages of a prologue of one of the books.  What Winspear does provide voice to are Maisie’s doubts and fears as she struggles to overcome the demons haunting her as a result of experiences in WWI and personal loss it imposes and the later losses of husband and child.  Maisie is painted as a strong and independent woman but one with much depth and many dimensions.

It’s not important to read the books in any particular order.  Winspear brings you up to appropriate speed quickly and clearly.  In various ways we are reminded briefly that Maisie Dobbs was born to a family in service and enters service herself when her mother dies.  Lady Rowan Compton learns that Maisie reads in the manor’s library late at night after her work is done and the house is quiet.  She decides to send Massie to university and engages  Dr Maurice Blanche, a family friend and neighbor to be a mentor to Maisie.  Maisie’s education is interrupted by World War I when she enlists as a nurse.  After the war, she apprentices with Maurice, an investigator with strong connections to Scotland Yard.   Lady Rowan provides Maisie some support while she gets her own business going Maisie remains close to her father who still supports Lady Rowan’s estate and to her school friend Priscilla, who is married to a wealthy WWI veteran who suffers with some war wounds.   This part of the back story provides us a vector to view the interaction of the “upstairs” and “downstairs” and corresponding changes induced by the progression of British society.

In summary, each Maisie Dobbs novel stands alone well as an interesting mystery with strong historical fiction attributes.  As a series they tell the story both of Maisie Dobbs and, of equal interest,  of Britain as it moves from post-WWI into yet another war that threatens country,  it people,  and its culture.

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Published 2013

Read 4/2/2017

This book followed Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning book of connected short stories, Olive Kitteridge and preceded her novel  My Name is Lucy Barton.  Strout returned to novel form for this book and sets the story between Shirley Falls, Maine and New York City.

In this book Strout opens with a prologue in which a woman and her mother talk about people from her hometown, where the mother still resides.  Both women are widowed, the younger one losing her husband the year after her kids left for college.  Their discussion sets up the characters of the novel.  1) Jim Burgess is a  lawyer made famous by his successful defense of a well-known singer accused of paying to have his wife killed, a case followed by the nation.  After the trial, Jim and his Connecticut born wife leave Hartford and Jim does not pursue a political career as expected but rather moves to New York City to work for an expensive law firm and defend white collar criminal cases. 2)  Bob Burgess is Jim’s younger brother, who accidentally killed his father when he was four.  Bob lives in Jim’s shadow in New York City, also as a lawyer.  He is currently divorced from his wife, Pam.  3) Susan Burgess Olsen is  Bob’s twin.  She is the only Burgess who stayed in Shirley Falls.  She  was left by her husband seven years ago when he moved to Sweden .  Susan lives with her 19 year old son, Zach, and an elderly renter.   Zach pulls a prank that lands Shirley falls on the national news.  This problem pulls Jim and Bob back to Shirley Falls.  The woman in the prologue, a writer, decides to write their story.

The conversations between the woman and her mother and their relationship (small town girl moves to NYC and marries someone not well accepted by her family leading to an estrangement that lasts many years) are clearly of interest to Strout.  Strout explores a similar, although not identical, scenario and expands on it in her next novel, My Name is Lucy Barton.

The Burgess Boys covers a lot of ground with themes ranging from trying to leave an unhappy past by moving away, the bond of siblings being strong but relationships not easy, abandonment by a spouse and resulting impact on the spouse and children left behind, PTSD (although not verbalized this way) resulting from a childhood tragedy, guilt associated with secrets kept for decades, feeling “I am living the wrong life”, sexual harassment, and the stresses of children leaving home, among others.  These human themes are considered while the story is told of the prank Susan’s son Zach plays at a Somali mosque which escalates into a civil rights case and potentially a federal hate crime case, thus providing additional themes of small towns dealing with immigrants of a substantially different culture, politicizing of crimes and the impact of this on small town police, prosecutors, and the communities within the small town.

Strout works to tell a number of story lines simultaneously.  In Olive Kitteridge, the separateness of the related short story chapters allowed her to do this very successfully.  In this book, the switches are more jarring at times for this reader.  Strout is very good at peering into real human relationships.  A wonderful quote near the end of the novel:   “You have a family”, Bob said.  “You have a wife who hates you, kids who are furious with you.  A brother and sister who make you insane.  And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now.  That’s called family.”  Zach’s prank and resulting turmoil in the town for many parts of the community reminds us that while we work at living our lives and dealing with our personal issues there is also a broader set of issues and conflicts in the world that are actually not far from our doorstep.   That is jarring too— so maybe Strout has actually hit a tone that reflects the reality in which we live our lives.

A Calculated Life

By Anne Charnock

Published 2013

Read 3/12/2017

I’m not sure when I bought this book for my Kindle, but likely shortly after I got it in 2014.  I certainly don’t remember why I bought it, but likely it showed up on the screen and I was compelled for some good reasons to purchase it.  Fortunately I bought this book before I reigned in the tendency to purchase ebooks in such a manner.  Much more importantly, however, it’s fortunate that 47North, a publishing arm of Amazon, saw this book after it had first been self-published as an e-book and then as a paperback and decided that much more of the reading population ought to get to read it than might find it otherwise.

I started reading this book without knowing anything about it or its author.  I actually really like starting books under these circumstances although to increase the probability of it being a useful journey I generally reserve this approach for recommendations from reliable sources, specifically a few friends with whom I spend many hours discussing books.   Although this book didn’t come from one of my reliable sources, I heartily endorse it for others.

My experience with this book was not dissimilar from my experience with “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro.   In each case, you are introduced to a character doing what seems to be a usual type of job living a usual nondescript life.  In both cases the novel slowly unwinds a different reality.  In this book the job is to find relationships between things so predictive algorithms can be developed.  We slowly learn the algorithms aren’t just about predicting trends in financial market but also such events as violent acts and very unexpected measurable variables such as wind speed.  The goal is to develop predictive algorithms of value to someone or some organization that will purchase it, although how they exploit it is apparently not of great concern to the employer and certainly not the to the analyst.  The person doing the job isn’t actually a human being but rather a “stimulator” created, programmed, and made available via contract to her employer by the Constructor.  Jayna is a version which has benefited from learnings from earlier versions, some of which are still functioning in different roles under contract to various employers.

In each case, the world around the characters is a not inconceivable and doesn’t even seem terribly distant in time from our own.  This characteristic is what, for me, separates “speculative fiction” from “fantasy/science fiction”.  Margaret Atwood has spun a number of terrifically well-written novels in this genre and Anne Charnock is certainly committed to playing in this territory and does it very nicely with this offering.

The plane that both Ishiguro routinely visits and Charnock’s “A Calculated Life” is now on is the one in which the primary questions being addressed are “what does it mean to be x” and “what role does memory play in our being x” (x=human or otherwise).    Not surprisingly, perhaps, these authors help us realize answers to these questions are ones they don’t claim to own and ones that will keep us reading great literature as we continue to consider them.  Like “Never Let Me Go”, in “A Calculated Life” the plot evolves slowly.  Some readers have found this trying.  I think it’s a helpful attribute because the questions being poised are profound and require slow careful consideration which is supported by the slow speed of the novels.

I will not further compare and contrast these books as they do take different trajectories with their characters and plots and to say more there will further spoil it for readers.  Take the dive yourself and consider “what does it mean to be x” (human or otherwise).

My Name is Lucy Barton

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2016

Read 3/3/2017

I was walking through the library on the campus where I am an adjunct faculty member and saw this book on the “new books” shelf.  I previously experienced the author through her books Olive Kitteridge, a novel written through a series of short stories, and Abide with Me so I immediately checked out this new offering and devoured it quickly.  Then I  re-read parts of it more slowly, savoring its form and content, as I try to provide this column some ideas about it.

Strout draws the reader in quickly with a description of the view from the hospital room of the narrator and how the narrator longs to be on the street with the other young women instead of being where she is, and how she expects to give thanks when she was again.  The narrator tells us her story is a “simple” one–recovery from a simple appendectomy is stalled mysteriously resulting in a nine week hospital stay.  Her mother visits for five days, the visit being arrange by her husband who visits infrequently both because he is functioning as a single parent for their two young daughters and because he doesn’t like hospitals.  That he arranges the visit by the mother is somewhat remarkable for several reasons.  The narrator’s parents disapproved of the narrator’s chosen life—to attend college, to marry a man clearly descended from German stock, and to live in New York City.  The disapproval has led to little contact between daughter and mother and no contact between daughter and father since her marriage.  In addition, the narrator’s family is desperately poor and they have led a very isolated life outside a small town in Illinois.  Travel of any sort, especially plane travel, is far from the ordinary for her mother.  But the mother suddenly appears in the narrator’s room and spends five days and nights there. The book primarily describes their conversations and corresponding various thoughts of the narrator about topics including the characters in the gossipy stories she and her mother share, her family, her childhood, and her marriage.

Their family lived outside a small poor rural town, first in the garage and eventually in the house of an uncle.  They were even poorer than most and certainly considered oddities.  They lived in isolation physically and socially.  The narrator lets us know she is haunted by dark memories and slowly meters out the source of some of them but always in an incomplete way, leaving much to be imagined but not verified.  This is classic Strout which we saw in Olive Kitteridge and Abide with Me:  childhood forming us; memories from that time keeping us in that form unless and until we find a way to free ourselves from them—realizing them for what they are—memories but not life policies.

In Olive Kitteridge and Abide with Me we saw the characters only from the outside.  In My Name is Lucy Barton we are deep within Lucy.  She is our narrator and she chooses what to reveal to us, or actually keep to herself.  We are witness to her as she unwinds her memories.  The conversations with her mother are primarily about people they knew when Lucy was growing up.  Lucy learns about her mother’s view of these people as the mother describes them and fills in their history since the narrator left home.  The narrator tells us directly that she is unreliable in telling us about the conversations.  She says “but maybe that wasn’t what my mother said”.  But she also doesn’t tell us what might have been more accurate nor when and why she is inaccurate.   The narrator does tell us, however, that she specifically chose not to ask her mother the questions for which she most desperately wanted the answers, including “do you love me” and “does her father ask about her”.

This is the first book Strout has written via a first-person narrator.  She crawls inside the character so far that one of course wonders if the book is autobiographical.  Both Strout and the narrator wanted to be writers from a reasonably young age.  However,  Strout was surrounded by books her whole life in her home while the narrator only had books at school where she stayed to do her homework and read when finished to avoid going home to where it was desperately cold.  The narrator was also so socially isolated that when she attends college, possible due to the intervention of a counselor who recognizes the promise of this girl with nearly perfect academic performance (because if you just stick to doing the work, it gets done), she imitates people to learn how to do things.  The narrator decides to become a writer because she takes the learning that books make you feel less alone and she wants to make other feel less alone also. Strout takes us fairly quickly through later years of Lucy’s life—writing, publishing, leaving her husband and the impact that has on her relationship with her children, which is far less than she hopes it would be.   At least one trace of Strout show up here—-Strout indicates publically that while her family was growing, she only had a few hours a day to write.  Lucy Barton also tells us “the two or three hours a day in which to write were terribly important to me”.

We learn about Lucy’s last interaction with her mother as the mother lay on her deathbed.  Once again Lucy doesn’t say what she wants to say.  Once again she hopes her mother hears what Lucy says to her in the hallway.  Once again we see a real relationship between two people as we do when Lucy recounts, with acknowledged lack of reliability, her last encounter with her father.

Strout has a remarkable way to telling us stories about real people and their real, painful relationships where so much remains unsaid but not unfelt.

I look forward to reading more from this author.

The Rent Collector by Cameron Wright

Published 2012

Read Feb 27, 2017

This book was inspired by the documentary, River of Victory, written, directed, produced, and photographed by Cameron Wright’s son, Trevor Wright.  Trevor Wright’s film explores a young family, mother Sang Ly, father Kim Lim, and their son, Nisay, as they live in and make their living from scavenging recyclables from Stung Menchey, the largest municipal waste dump in Cambodia.  Nisay is chronically ill with diarrhea and Sang Ly believes living among the stench and filth of the dump is a driver of that illness.  However, the family seems to have few choices for making a living as revealed when the family returns to their homeland to visit a healer.  As she reunites with family and friends there she is reminded that the financial situation in her homeland is as dire as theirs.

Cameron Wright decided to take this real-life story and retell it adding a fictional story regarding the woman who collects rent on their shack in the dump.  This framing provides Cameron Wright a platform for describing in words and book form the difficult life the documentary reveals:  the filth and danger in just existing on and in the dump, the hand-to-mouth level of existence of collecting and selling bits of material “picked” from the dump.  The book includes the trip Sang Ly and her family make to their homeland and the trip to The Healer.  The treatment is not discussed, but apparently it is effective while treatments received in the city from both western and homeopathic medical practices have not worked.

Sang Ly discovers that the dreaded, usually drunk, and mean Rent Collector can read.  Sang Ly and asks the Rent Collector to teach her to read.  The Rent Collector eventually agrees and Sang Ly progresses from learning the alphabet to reading words and eventually reading stories and poems and experiencing the riches that great literature can provide.  This is possible as it happens that the Rent Collector was a teacher educated in the US and, most probably, a professor of literature.  Soriyan (the real name of the Rent Collector) lost her husband and baby to slaughter by the Khmer Rouge during their “cleansing” missions to rid Cambodia of all intellectuals.  Soriyan’s housekeeper, Sopeap, is killed instead of Soriyan when she pretends to be her so Soriyan is doomed to live under a false name and pretense.  Soriyan eventually is able to provide for Sopeap’s family and does so for many years without the family knowing the identity of their benefactor.  This story allows Cameron Wright the ability to remind us of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and other similar regimes that have risen to power in various times and places in history.  It touches on the theme of self-sacrifice and  the reality of the resulting survival guilt and the burden accompanying it.

A primary purpose Cameron Wright seems to have for bringing together the Rent Collector and Sang Ly is to discuss the role and value of  literature:   the universality of many of the important stories that various cultures tell in various ways (ie Sarann in Cambodia, Cinderella in North America, Ye Xian in China,  etc); dreams as inspiration for and subject of various works of literature; the indistinct boundaries between good and evil, heroes and villains,  and especially the ability of literature make us think differently than we ordinarily would or could.

Through teaching Sang Ly, the Rent Collector regains her connection with humanity.  Although she had provided for her housekeeper’s family, she had isolated herself from everyone and everything, finding solace only in alcohol.  The Rent Collector leaves Sang Ly a collection of essays and stories as lessons for her after the Rent Collector leaves for a reason she is unwilling to articulate.  Cameron Wright decides to tie everything together for us and the characters; I won’t detail the ending here.  He does let us know, however, that Sang Ly and her family remain in the dump although Sang Ly is certainly in a different state than we found her at the beginning of the book.

I was sometimes unconvinced by the tenor of the Sang Ly’s voice as narrator and had to accept the seemingly rapid rate of learning of Sang Ly to progress from alphabet to the study of serious literature.  I also found some of the subplots almost distracting as they were not fully developed so we only got a very brief hint of the theme they carried.   Cameron Wright touches on multiple human themes including:  what a mother will do for a child; what a father will do to protect his family; surviving dire financial circumstances; self-sacrifice; survivor guilt.  Cameron Wright’s book was primarily written to enable us to learn about life in Cambodia post- Khmer Rouge and the challenges the Khmer Rouge wrought on the population.  An even better version would have more fully developed all of the themes which interest him while telling it within the framework of the post-Khmer Rouge situation.

Some describe the book as one with a message of hope.   An apparent goal of the Khmer-Rouge was to wipe out all sources of education and thinking not authorized by the government. There is certainly a warning in this book that all must diligently oppose any kind of force that seeks to fulfill such a goal.   However, if there is a trace of literature available and any willingness to share it, that literature will enable humankind to continuously grow, learn, and expand its capability and capacity to make a positive difference in the world regardless of current circumstance.  That is truly a hopeful message.

My Sunshine Away by M.O. Walsh

Published 2015

Read 2/14/2017

This book is the subject of a book discussion group to which I belong.  If it wasn’t I might not have finished it but, as is the case with most books that are the subject of book groups in which  I enjoy membership, the book was worth pursuing to the end.

The book starts with the rape of a 14 year old local track star, Lindsay, an attractive, but not ravishingly beautiful, nice neighborhood girl who attracts the attention of many boys in the neighborhood and school.  This lets us know immediately that this book won’t be a breezy read.  As expected, the event profoundly impacts her, her family members, and their family relationships.  But we only experience these impacts through the eyes of the unnamed narrator, a boy neighbor who is 13 years old at the time of the event and in the full throes of a crush—on Lindsay.  Our narrator is initially a suspect but his ignorance of what “rape” means and involves is so clear that he is quickly dismissed as a suspect.  The reader’s opinion of his innocence is tested, however, as he reveals the kinds of feelings he has for Lindsay and the things he does to observe her.  The crush is better termed an obsession and his innocence is thwarted through associations with a neighbor who is the adopted son of a family who has fostered many children.  The narrator obtains, from this neighbor boy, a disturbing photo of Lindsay taken by the boy’s adopted father, and thus brings another person into the list of potential rapists. We’re given hints that that this family’s fostering involved likely horrendously damaging hurt inflicted on the children by at least the foster father, with minimally the knowledge of the foster mother.  The author also spends a number of pages discussing the Jeffry Dahlmer serial killing case that occurred during the time of the story.  Thus the book has a Law and Order SVU type plot serving as an overarching plotline for the book and ventures well into other types of horrors that humans can inflict on one another and on children.  This is the source of my discomfort with this book.  Despite being a fan of law/order procedurals, I don’t appreciate the SVU version or stories involving serial killers.

Fortunately, the book dramatically departs from Law and Order SVU-type offering on several accounts.  First, the crime remains publically unsolved, although the narrator may have discovered implicating evidence that isn’t shared, and no one gets resolution or closure as a result. This is perhaps not satisfying for the reader, but the impact of lack of resolution on the narrator both personally and as a result of its impact on those around him, including Lindsay, is more interesting.   Second, a central focus of the book is the life and development of the narrator.  We learn about the rhythms of life in the suburban Baton Rouge neighborhood pre-rape as see through the eyes of the narrator, including the games the neighborhood kids (including Lindsay) played and the lushness of the wooded area in which their neighborhood was set.  We learn about the breakup of the narrator’s parents’ marriage and the further damage inflicted on the family by the death of the narrator’s sister.  We see the narrator grow in his understanding of the impact of the rape on Lindsay through their late night phone calls and we see the evolution of the narrator’s obsession with Lindsay.

The third aspect that separates this book from a typical SVU story is the homage the author pays to his hometown of Baton Rouge.  He spends a fair number of pages on the differences between New Orleans and Baton Rouge and works to fill in the gap of most readers’ knowledge about Baton Rouge.  In particular he works to fully convince the readers that Baton Rouge should not feel guilty that it isn’t like New Orleans.

An interesting question is whether the narrator really ever understands the impact of the rape on Lindsay—both the physical rape itself and the revelation to her schoolmates that she had been raped.  Since the rape occurred during the summer and since it was so quietly investigated, the kids at school were unaware of the event until it’s revealed by the narrator in the school yard.  The revelation is not intended to be hurtful and neither Lindsay nor the school kids are supported by adults at the school in how to work through how to digest this information.  Perhaps this would be different in 2017 or at least one can hope it would be.  The narrator does get a small glimpse of the depth of despair to which Lindsay has fallen and remains several years after the event when she states she sometimes wishes she were dead and the narrator recognizes that she means it.  Of course he is not equipped to help her nor is he inclined to think he might aid her in getting some help.  Only when he is in his thirties and runs into her at a football game does he seem to begin to truly understand the long-term effect this event and corresponding exposure of it has had on Lindsay.

M.O. Walsh has told interviewers that he feels he “got lucky with this one” that his book received exposure and recognition in the face of a vast number of other books published in the same year.  Kirkus Reviews concludes its review of the book with “Celebrate, fiction lovers: The gods of Southern gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member.”

I do look forward to future offerings from the author although I also hope he doesn’t feel compelled to follow a trend I’m seeing in recent literature and which he used here—to use deeply evil acts as a device to explore human nature.

The Inheritance of Loss (published 2006) By Kiran Desai

Read Dec 1, 2016

Desai’s lush writing reveals the stories of her characters and the political unrest that infiltrates them in the Darjeling district of West Bengal in 1986 in carefully designed aliquots.  Sai is the daughter of parents estranged from their families.  She is raised in a British convent until their death when she is left at the doorstep of her grandfather, a retired judge.  We meet her at age 17 as she is enjoying first love with her local math/physics tutor, Gyan, who becomes partially radicalized by the Gorka National Liberation Front.   The judge was trained in Britain and served as a travelling Chief Justice for the Indian Civil Service.  We meet him while he is leading a solitary life “with the solace of being a foreigner in his own country, for this time he would not learn the language” in a decaying mansion built by a Scotsman in the hills with a view of the Himalayas.  Prior to Sai’s arrival, his only interactions after taking residence in this house are with his native cook and his beloved Mutt.  The cook’s son, Biju, is an important character as we learn about his immigration to the US, his miserable existence in New York City as an illegal alien, and his strong connection to his father.  Rounding out the character list are the closest neighbors of the judge and Sai—a pair of Anglophile sisters and a household made up of a Swiss priest and “Uncle Potty” who is generally drunk.

Desai starts us with the intrusion of the judge’s home by young men and boys, local members of the GNLF, to steal his guns and other possessions of possible worth.  She proceeds to unwind the story of the various characters and their various relationships to this intrusion.

She exposes us to the challenges of being a foreigner—whether actual (Biju), chosen (the judge, the sisters, Father Booty and Uncle Potty), or accidental (Sai).  We are exposed to the impact of prejudice against minority members of society and lower caste members in Indian society and the extreme strategies they apply to break into a better life.  We get a taste about the complexity of India—a single country forged from nearly countless sets of cultures, religions, and ethnicities.

While not an easy book for me to initially connect with, it has turned out to be one that is hard to leave, and one that has opened a new set of things to ponder.  Can one ask for more from a book?