New Century Reading

All That Is Solid Melts into Air

After watching the very well done Chernobyl series on HBO, I remembered that I had this book on my shelf. Obviously, the timing was right. All That Is Solid Melts into Air is a fictionalized account of the disaster, told from various viewpoints: a doctor, the woman who loves him, her sister and nephew, who's a budding piano star, and a young boy who lived in the countryside near Chernobyl, along with his mother. We see how they all react to and are affected by the crisis. 

The book had me in its grip for about the first half, especially the parts directly related to the explosion and subsequent fallout (no pun intended). But then it began to slow down for me. There were too many characters, with the result that many weren't all that fleshed out. Worse, there's a romance that really doesn't work and feels like the author forced it in for unknown reasons. To prove that love conquers all? That there can still be love after something as awful as Chernobyl? I don't know, but it felt forced and unbelievable. 

In the end, if you're interested in what life was like for the people of Russia/former USSR after Chernobyl, you'd do well to track down a copy of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, a nonfiction history that's just gutting to read. And no fake romance.

Independent People

What an odd, unsettling, hilarious, dark, disturbing novel this is. Written by an Icelandic Nobel-winning author, it's the story of a remote farm area in Iceland at a somewhat unspecified time in history, although at one point, the Great War shows up, at a distance.

Independent People is the story of Bjartur, a man driven to be independent. After 18 years toiling away, he finally has earned his freedom: a croft called Summerhouses and sheep, sheep he can raise and sell wool and meat to keep his land and his growing family free of debt. Bjartur is a character for the ages; he's feisty, cranky, stubborn to an extreme, blindered to all but his goal of independence. The locals think his land is cursed and suggest he build an altar to the evil spirit, but he refuses--to him, all that matters is sheep.

He brings a woman and her mother in to be his family. The woman is pregnant and dies giving birth, but Bjartur keeps the child, a girl, as his beloved daughter, and lets the grandmother stay too. There's another wife, and more children that are biologically his, but his tie to the first-born almost never wavers.

And, in this remote realm of hardship and struggle, there's poetry. Bjartur is a devotee of the classic Icelandic sagas, tales of heroism and valor. But as Asta (the first-born) grows up, she finds herself attracted to a different kind of poetry:

"One would have thought that a young girl on a lonely croft would have been stirred most at hearing a poem that tells of virtue, or at least of sacrifice ... But such was not the case, not altogether. The poems that touched her heart most, suffusing her with exalted emotion, so that she felt she could gather everything to her, were those which tell of the sorrow that wakes in the heart whose dreams have not been fulfilled, and of the beauty of that sorrow. The ship that in autumn lies deserted on the shore, rudderless, mastless, used no more; the bird that cowers low in shelter, likewise in the autumn, featherless and forlorn, driven before the storm; the harp that hangs trembling on the wall, silently mourning its owner's fall--all this was her poetry, all this she understood."

It's a stunning passage, and there are many more like this. But the book keeps the reader off guard with changes of tone. Just a few pages after this passage, there's a chapter describing Bjartur's children's interest in God, and what happens when a teacher comes to educate them on the topic:

"The story of how He created the world aroused their interest immediately, even though they received no answer to the question of why He had had to do it; but they found it difficult to understand sin, or the manner of its entry into the world, for it was a complete mystery to them why the woman should have had such a passionate desire for an apple when they had no idea of the seductive properties of apples and thought they were some sort of potatoes. But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days' rain and forty nights'. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood. When they began to question their teacher more closely about this riddle, he replied, perhaps not without a trace of irritation: 'Well, I don't vouch for it in any case.'"

It's a book with beauty, with grimness and despair and tragedy, with sardonic humor and memorable characters. What more can you ask of a book than that?

 

Henry, Himself

I'm a big fan of a couple of Stewart O'Nan's novels, Last Night at the Lobster and Emily, Alone. Both are quiet books, with not a lot of action, but big on heart and illuminating the human life in all its vagaries and minutiae. So when I saw that he had a prequel to Emily, Alone called Henry, Himself, I could hardly wait to read it.

Well, now I have, and I'm still mulling over my response to it. Emily, Alone is the story of Henry's wife, Emily, and how she gets through life as his widow. In Henry, Himself, we see Henry late in his life, retired, trying to live by his own moral code, troubled by the difficulties of family relationships, still in love with his wife even if he's learned various self-protection techniques in the many years of their marriage against her sometimes snappish temper. 

The problem with Henry's story is that he's so invested in that minutiae of his life that we get pages and pages of highly detailed home improvement projects, a full list of his medications, way too many details of golf games (mini and regular), in between the more poignant vignettes that show him trying to grapple with his mortality and whether or not he's really lived his best life. And that minutiae overall drowns the book, I think. There were points that really got me emotionally, but then he'd go play golf or start to repair something, and I'd think, really? Really???

I did finish the book, which does tend to mean I liked enough of it, as I'm pretty devoted to the 50-page rule (like Henry, life is marching on for me, and I don't want to waste time on books I won't like). On the other hand, when I closed the cover, my immediate response was: meh. As time went on, I began to have more mixed feelings. And that's where I'm at.

I will say, it makes me want to reread Lobster and Emily.

The Golden State

This debut novel is an odd, but finally compelling story of motherhood, international marriage, mental health issues, and the relationships we forge at the most unlikely times, with the most unlikely people.

Daphne is the mother of toddler Honey and married to Engin, a Turkish man who has been caught in the immigration nightmare taking place in the U.S. today (although, spoiler alert, he's not been stuck in a camp somewhere with his child taken away and given to other people to adopt, but he is stranded in Turkey while his US-born wife and daughter are stuck in California). This difficult situation has gone on for eight months, with Daphne managing a full-time job at a university while struggling to raise Honey as, essentially, a single mother.

One day, Daphne just snaps and leaves work, gets Honey, and drives north to a rural town where she owns an old mobile home. It had been her grandmother's, then her mother's, and with those family members dead and gone, it's now hers. She's trying to sell it, but the market for old mobile homes in a rural, remote part of the state isn't great. 

Once she gets there, she doesn't quite know what to do with herself, or Honey. The endless hours of the day, and the monotony involved in caring for a toddler, quickly begin to take a toll. She makes tentative overtures to neighbor Cindy, whose xenophobic ideas don't exactly work well with Daphne's marital state, and Cindy is also part of a movement to create a 51st state from this slice of northern California that strikes Daphne as not particularly valuable. Still, Cindy's an adult with whom Daphne can share some grown-up talk and the occasional cigarette.

Daphne also meets Alice, an elderly woman returning to the place she fell in love with her husband decades earlier, and as Alice has traveled in Turkey and knows some of the language, the two women bond over that.

By the end of the book, these fragile alliances with Cindy and Alice converge in a fairly terrifying way. And that's all I'll say about that, except that I found it all too believable and sad. There was also an aspect of the ending that I saw coming, although I couldn't for sure say that the author didn't intend me to know; Daphne's first-person narration is somewhat unreliable, and thoroughly distracted by the endless tasks involving Honey.

That is perhaps the part of the book that really resonated with me: the constant needs of a toddler. It's rarely seen in fiction, how demanding this life can be, and how draining, and how much time a young mother can spend doubting herself and second-guessing everything she does. Yes, it makes for repetitive reading at times, almost monotonous, but it's also hugely representational of how that life is.

The one quirk of the book that annoyed me was a very light hand with punctuation, particularly commas. I get that the author wanted to show how fleetingly the mind works under these conditions, but frequently it pulled me out of the story as I tried to separate the phrases and clauses into their proper portions. That said, I was never tempted to stop reading, and read faster and faster as I approached the end. It's a very strong debut, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

 

Late in the Day

I've been aware of Tessa Hadley for some time, having come across her fiction in the New Yorker and liking it quite a bit. But somehow that hadn't translated to actually reading one of her novels. Well, now I have, and wonder what took me so long?

Late in the Day is the story of two couples, Lydia and Zach, Christine and Alex, who have known each other since college and whose lives have been twined ever since. Each couple raised a daughter (plus Alex's son from a previous marriage) and watched each other's careers grow and change.

The book opens (so this is not a spoiler) with Chris getting a phone call from a distraught Lydia: Zach has died unexpectedly. This is clearly something that's going to have an impact on all three remaining friends. But what Hadley does then is take us back in time, to how they met and how their relationships form. Normally it annoys me when a book opens with a big event, then drops to backstory. But here, it works. Seeing after the death how their lives became entwined adds a ton of nuance. 

The rest of the story goes back and forth between past and present, and I won't give spoilers. I will say that as the book went on, I became fearful that some obvious plot twists might happen. But no. Hadley is too strong a writer for that. I found the ending unexpectedly satisfying and poignant, but not sentimental or soppy. 

In fact, I'd say that while there were occasional slow points in the book, by the end, I was fully immersed. I'd even go so far to say that this is a book worth sticking to until the end, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Now I can't wait to explore more novels by Hadley.

Women Talking

Women Talking is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, for a number of reasons, but it sure was mine. The reasons it won't appeal to everyone is partly because of its wildly triggering, true-life premise: that a number of women in a remote Mennonite colony wake up in the morning, bruised, bloody, and sore, that the male elders of the colony tell them they've been attacked by a demon, but eventually the women discover the demon is actually in the form of Mennonite men, drugging the women and then raping them in their sleep. That's enough to put some people off right there, and I'm not blaming anyone. It's horrifying to even consider.

The book takes up the story after the men have been identified and hauled off the jail. Other men in the colony have gone to town to try and pay their bail and get them back to the colony. While they're gone, several of the women gather in the hayloft of a barn to decide: Should they do as the men have told them they must and forgive the rapists, or should the women attempt to leave altogether?

This raises another area that some readers might have trouble with. The premise overall is so horrifying that you can't help but expect a book of violence. But the violence has already occurred. This book is, literally, women talking about what to do and trying to work through their religious beliefs against these violations. So it's a quieter book in some ways than some might expect.

Finally, and I have seen this already raised as a complaint, the book has an unusual point of view: August Epp, a gentle young man with his own checkered past who is deemed "effeminate" by the colony and is of no practical use other than teaching. Author Toews chooses him to tell the tale in first person, having been invited by the women to take notes for them. I've seen a lot of indignant commentary about this, how it should be a women's story, why is a man getting to tell it? But for me, it worked, on a number of levels. First, because it's made clear that the women have never been taught to read (yes, it's this level of patriarchal society). Second, because it's also made clear that he doesn't quite belong in the men's side of things either. And third, because yes, this is a hugely patriarchal society. Finally, giving him a sympathetic first person voice brings us closer to the women's stories than a more distant third person would have.

But yes, this is women talking. And it's anguished talking, trying to reconcile what they believe with what they know and what they've learned. And these women are far from saintly; they smoke illicitly, are passive-aggressive towards each other, have varying levels of denial. Which makes this portrait so complex and multifaceted. 

If you're not OK with a talky book, this one may not be for you. But if you're interested in the inside doings of such a closed-off community, filled with fallible human beings, then it might be right up your alley. It sure was mine.

All My Puny Sorrows

Recently the New Yorker published an interview with Canadian author Miriam Toews that was so interesting, and it reminded me that I had this book sitting on the shelf unread. Off the shelf it came, and I devoured it.

All My Puny Sorrows is the story of sisters Elfrieda and Yolandi, who had a somewhat unusual childhood growing up in a rural town heavily populated with a strict sect of Mennonites. Elfie is essentially a musical genius who, against the advice of the church elders, leaves the community to become a sought-after concert pianist. Yoli, who narrates, is a bit more lackadaisical and doesn't have the gift her sister has, and often ends up making some dubious choices regarding men and the resulting children. Nevertheless, Yoli and Elfie are very close, due in no small part to their father's tragic death by suicide.

But Elfie begins to struggle with mental health issues, and eventually there are suicide attempts. Yoli stays by her side as much as she can, along with their mother (a wonderful character), trying to find a way to make Elfie want to live. Slowly, a new question occurs to Yoli: What if it's not possible to bring Elfie back into some kind of a happy life? What if, in fact, the greater kindness is to let her go and cease the suffering that may not end otherwise? 

From reading the New Yorker article, I realized that while this is technically a novel, quite a lot of it happened to author Toews. (Also, the article does give spoilers if you haven't already read this book.) It sounds like a downer of a book--and in many ways it is. But Toews also has a dark sense of humor that pops out in various small details, or this description of her mother's career trajectory in the small Mennonite town:

"When Elf went away to Europe my mother decided to emancipate herself as well and enrolled in university classes in the city to become a social worker and then a therapist. By this time the church elders had washed their hands of [us]. When she graduated she turned the spare bedroom into an office and a steady stream of sad and angry Mennonites came to our house, usually in secret because therapy was seen as lower even than bestiality because at least bestiality is somewhat understandable in isolated farming communities."

It's not a perfect book. I found the first third a bit slow in spots, although then the pace and tension kicked up. Also, Toews doesn't use quotation marks, which is a big pet peeve of mine in general. Specific to this book, not having the quotation marks occasionally made me stumble as to whether some lines had been spoken or were just thoughts. But those flaws are small against the overall impact of the book.

So. A hard book, though not without humor, dealing with hard topics straight on. I'm glad the New Yorker piece came out and helped nudge me to pull this off the shelf. Well worth the read.

Elevation

I've got some mixed feelings about this recent Stephen King novella. It's a quieter book than King's usual fare, and not really a horror book. Which is fine--he's strayed out of the horror area before. The premise here is that Scott Carey, long-time resident of the fictional small town of Castle Rock, Maine, has something interesting happening to him: He's losing weight. Without losing weight. In other words, every day he steps on the scale, and the scale shows him down first a few ounces, then pounds. But his appearance never changes. Oddly, he can eat an enormous meal, put on winter boots and parka, and fill his pockets with pounds of coins--and the scale doesn't change. 

Obviously this is a trend that could have consequences. This part of the book I enjoyed, as Scott recognizes and comes to terms with what's happening, and the final resolution.

The part that gave me trouble, I will acknowledge, was certainly done with good intentions. Stephen King has been publicly outspoken about his dislike of the current White House resident, and he takes on some politically charged ideas. Scott has a house near him owned by two lesbians who opened a vegetarian fine-dining restaurant in town. The women are married, and that isn't going over well in Castle Rock, which apparently voted heavily for Trump. The restaurant is on the verge of failure. Scott doesn't much care one way or the other. He just wishes the women would stop letting their dogs poop in his yard and not clean up after them. When he tries to talk to Deirdre about it, she's an absolute ice queen who accuses him of being bigoted against them because they're gay. No, he tries to explain, he just really wants them to pick up after their dogs.

But then Scott becomes increasingly aware of how the town is rejecting these women and their restaurant, so he tries to help them. It's not received well at first. But--slight spoiler alert--eventually he helps the town come around, and the women become his friends and help him as his weight continues to decline.

Look. I appreciate that King wants to promote the idea that we shouldn't judge people based on their sexual orientation. I appreciate that he's trying to show that that kind of rejection could lead someone (Deirdre) to become prickly and difficult. But: That's a bit of a cliche. And do we really need a middle-aged white man acting as savior for these women? 

And yet, even though it's so very heavy-handed, I mostly enjoyed the book. I just wish King had found a way for the women to be their own savior. 

The Lake on Fire

In The Lake on Fire, the Shaderowsky family flees Ukraine for America in the late 19th century, eventually landing in rural Wisconsin. Life there is beyond difficult. Finally daughter Chaya-Libbe cannot take it anymore, and she makes plans to escape. When she does, she's both frustrated but happy that her younger brother Asher, who has a preternatural intellect, has figured out her plans and joins her. Together, these two naive but hopeful young people arrive in Chicago, just in time for the construction of the World's Fair.

Chicago was (and likely still is) a tough place to arrive without money or connections, barely speaking English. But Chaya and Asher stumble upon a gentleman who guides them to the Jewish part of the city, where they're able to find a room to rent from a newly bereaved widow. Chaya is sure she can get work somewhere respectable, like one of the city's fine retail establishments, but she quickly is humiliated into understanding that they have no interest in her Yiddish-speaking, drably dressed self. Eventually she has no choice but to take work in a cigar factory, with a second shift at a private cigar manufacturer. Even working two jobs, she can barely provide for herself and Asher. She also can't keep track of Asher, who quickly takes on an Oliver Twist lifestyle. But he also begins developing a budding progressive view of the world, particularly how the world of business treats workers (and remember, this is the 1890s, so factory conditions were far from ideal--not that they necessarily are now, but still).

As the novel unspools, Chaya finds herself being courted by a member of the upper class who has socialist leanings, and that creates ambivalence in her--and worse in Asher. But Gregory (suitor) introduces her to Jane Addams and the world of Hull-House. She doesn't quite belong there either--her relationship with Gregory makes her more well-to-do than the audience Addams is trying to serve, and yet her recent life as an overworked, underpaid and underfed factory worker (not to mention being Jewish) puts her at odds with Gregory's family.

While she's struggling with all these events, Asher is getting deeper and deeper into the world of trodden-upon workers, a world that his formidable intellect is still somewhat too immature to manage. It also leads him to associations and actions that Chaya, if she knew about them, would have difficulty understanding and condoning.

Brown is a formidable writer, with surprising turns of phrase and wonderful imagery. She also quietly makes this book very relevant to today, with our times' controversies over immigrants, workers' rights, etc. The opening chapter describes the family's flight from Ukraine on a horrible ocean crossing, not sure they'll actually be taken where they paid to go. When they realize they're approaching America, one of their group takes out a flag embroidered with the phrase Am Olam, which means People of the Earth. When a ship's crewman demands to know what the flag means, he misunderstands the broken English of the passengers and thinks the flag says they want to take over the land. Outraged, he rips the flag away from them and throws it overboard. We don't have to think far back in current history to stumble on the "Jews will not replace us!" chants used by the anti-Semites in Charlottesville and realize how entrenched these ideas can become--and how hard to eradicate.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. But at times, the pacing was sluggish; it felt like the author was so busy spinning beautiful phrases that the actual story got a bit left behind. And the relationship between Gregory and Chaya did not, to me, feel fully fleshed out or believable. Still, I was never tempted to stop reading, and overall, I can easily recommend it.

Lying Awake

Sister John has spent most of her adult life as a cloistered Carmelite nun, struggling to find God and Christ. She is quietly reverent about the sacrifices she and the other nuns make, uncomplainingly taking her turn at every chore while she searches for that holy relationship. And then she finds it, and begins writing religious poems that are published and help the order earn some much-needed money for repairs and upkeep. But at the same time, she's experiencing severe headaches and other symptoms, and finally she is sent to the doctor. Diagnosis: A condition in her brain which is likely fully operable--but may take away the connection to God she worked so hard to make, as well as her ability to write about it. What should she do?

This lovely little book doesn't necessarily have a lot of plot, but it does have a lot of heart, even for a non-Catholic, non-religious person like me. Not least of which because it takes the reader into the inner sanctum, the place where only the nuns go, and shows us life there. Author Salzman doesn't idealize any of the characters; they're as human as human can be while still striving for holy perfection. The journey through Sister John's diagnosis, interspersed with her childhood that explains in part why she became a nun, through to her final decision, are all peacefully, calmly told, which only adds to the book's effectiveness. Reading it was like a little retreat from the everyday world--and who wouldn't benefit from that, especially these days?