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Oracle Night, by Paul Auster

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I’ve been meaning to read Auster’s novels for a while and even have a couple of his books on my to-be-read shelf. However, I decided to start with this short one from the library.

As Brooklyn novelist Sidney Orr recovers from a life-threatening illness, he begins to walk around his neighborhood. Attracted to a Chinese stationery shop he’d never noticed before, he is drawn to a blank notebook with a blue cover. For the first time since the onset of his illness, he enters his tiny writing room and begins writing in the notebook.

The story pouring out of him, which he titles Oracle Night, tells of a New York editor who one day simply up and leaves his life, traveling by random chance to St. Louis. There Nick meets Ed, an elderly cab driver who is in poor health. Finding his wife—thinking him dead—has canceled his credit cards, Nick begins working for Ed, helping him reorder his collection of telephone books stored in an underground bunker.

Meanwhile, Sidney’s marriage is suffering; his wife Grace is behaving oddly. His friend and mentor John Trause, twenty-some years older and a longtime friend of Grace and her family, is acting strange as well. Trause (yes, an anagram) had been the one to suggest the story behind Oracle Night to Sidney, based on a brief incident in The Maltese Falcon. Even more mysterious things begin to happen, such as Grace dreaming about Sidney’s story and Sidney himself disappearing from his study when he is certain he’s been there all along.

Auster includes footnotes of varying length, usually containing backstory about a person or incident, which amused me. I also enjoyed the many literary references. So it was fun to read, though the characters were rather flat, and the novel more of a production to appreciate than a story to immerse oneself in. The similarities between the characters and Auster himself and the whole fiction-versus-reality theme seem a bit old hat, even for 2003 when this novel was first published.

In the summary above I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many interwoven layers of plot in this story within story within story. I did appreciate the resulting semi-chaos and the way it reflected Sidney’s growing distrust of reality. However, the various layers never quite cohered, and the turn to melodrama at the end rather ruined the book for me.

Will I try another Auster novel? Sure. Can you recommend a good one for me to read next?

Making Things Better, by Anita Brookner

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At 73, Julius Herz has spent his life obeying others. In his youth, he paid court to spoiled, flighty Fanny, but believed her correct in disdaining him. When his family fled Nazi Germany, they were set up in a London flat by Ostrakov, apparently a connection of some relative. He went on to give Herz’s father a job in a record shop, part of his empire.

As with Vivian’s daughters in On the Rooftop, Herz was controlled by his parents, ordered to work in the record shop and to live with them, even after his marriage, which of course quickly foundered. His parents continued to ignore him, though, and never acknowledged what Herz did for them. His brother Freddy, a violin prodigy as a youth, and the focus of his parents’ attention and ambition, suffered a breakdown after arriving in England, and spent the rest of his life in care.

Now his parents and Freddy are dead, and Ostrakov has decided to sell the record shop and the flat. Still the benefactor though, he gives the proceeds to Herz, enabling him to purchase a small flat and live simply but comfortably. Without the welcome routine of work, Herz wonders how to fill his days, usually falling back on “a newspaper and the supermarket in the morning, and in the afternoon a bookshop or gallery.” Regarding a photo of himself with a rare smile, he thinks:

Even the smile had become modified with age. The smiling boy had become a polite adult; the smile now had something dutiful about it as if it were expected of him; he would continue to offer it but without conviction. It was a smile that no longer expressed eagerness but was a suitable feature in his dealing with others. Preparing to listen, to sympathize, he would acknowledge the return of his habitual smile, while all the time registering his lack of joy.

I was especially charmed by the cover, which I recognised immediately as a Romaine Brooks painting. The quiet colors disrupted by strong diagonals match the tone of the book brilliantly.

My library adds a sheet to the back flap of books where readers can rate the book and add a comment. From these, I’ve learned that Brookner’s novels are not for everyone. You couldn’t call them fast-paced: because they are so internal to the protagonist, there is a preponderance of narration.

For me, much of their value lies in the deep dive into the psychology of a silent person. By that I mean someone who for whatever reason—introversion, social anxiety, solitude, learned behavior—does not interact much with others. They aren’t the ones who bend your ear about their latest love affair over a bottle of wine. They are not the ones who play tennis or join a book club.

The lack of interaction leads to fewer of the dramatic scenes that make up the bulk of most modern novels. Teachers of fiction and creative nonfiction (including me) emphasize that modern readers, accustomed to film and television dramas, expect a story to be mostly dramatic scenes with a little narration as necessary. Some readers have gone on record that they automatically skip over descriptions of a place or a person to get to the action.

Here the scenes are internal and the drama muted. But it is there, burbling underneath the seemingly drab story as Herz wanders the city, picks over his past, and tries, ineptly, to start or restart relationships. Now that he is free—finally—to do what he wants, he cannot decide what that is. He finds himself reduced to “hoping to catch life on the wing, and to make himself into a semblance of gentlemanly old age which others might find acceptable.”

As with all of Brookner’s novels (I’ve read 17 out of 26), there is much going on under the surface of this seeming simple novel. Multiple themes are there to be teased out. And her polished prose satisfies something in me that no other writer’s work does.

Do you ever wonder about the inner life of a seemingly ordinary person, perhaps someone you see in the supermarket or in the post office?

On the Rooftop, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

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In the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District had a large Black population, contributing to its reputation as the largest jazz scene on the West coast. Vivian sees music as the ticket to give her three daughters a better life. Ever since hearing Ruth, her oldest, astound the church with her choir solo, Vivian has been training her to become a professional singer, adding Esther and Chloe, the youngest, as they began to show interest and talent.

By the beginning of this, Sexton’s third novel, the three are performing regularly at neighborhood clubs as the Salvations. Vivian drills them relentlessly on their routines up on the roof of their apartment building, inventing warmup exercises, song arrangements and dance steps.

Having endured racial violence in Louisiana, the death of her beloved husband, and the drudgery of her own nursing job, Vivian wants more for her daughters. Now, just as the dream seems within reach, with an offer for major representation, the three young women begin to second-guess the path they’ve been following.

The joys and conflicts between three sisters are familiar from fairy tales and folklore. Some of us (me) also have personal experience of these dynamics. Sexton shifts between Vivian’s point of view and that of each of the sisters, giving us their distinct personalities and desires, as well as their complicated relationships with their mother and each other.

Further difficulties arrive with White developers, maneuvering to drive out Black residents and business owners with underhanded tactics and cash offers. Clearing out Black people in the name of “urban renewal” happened in cities across the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century. Here, not only renters like Vivian are threatened, but also the owners of the clubs, the church that is so much a part of the family’s life, and the businesses where they work.

This is not an action-packed thriller, but rather a story of family and community, how love and tensions can co-exist within them, how one generation’s dreams may or may not be relevant to the next. Even big blow-ups are treated with realism rather than melodrama. This isn’t a typical rags-to-riches drama of an artist’s life, but something more real, more important.

I mostly identified with Vivian and her concern for her children. However, I can imagine younger readers being put off by the amount of control she exercised over her daughters, trying to direct their lives down the path of her choosing. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can attest to how common it was back then for parents to expect to make such decisions for their children.

Also, as we just saw during the Olympics, to achieve at such high levels requires dedication and hard work from an early age. This family reminded me of Venus and Serena Williams and made me consider what sacrifices they had to make. It also made me wonder about the emotional negotiations that must have taken place between their dreams and their father’s.

I enjoyed this slow burn of a story, with its focus on relationships. Vivian, the three daughters, Vivian’s best friend Mary, even the Preacher are all vivid characters with their own dreams and desires, their own flaws. I found it a gift to be part of this family and their world for a little while.

Have you read a novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton? What did you think of it?

The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

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Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images and a visit to a shrine. First she notices the violets blooming separately in two hollows of the ancient maple tree in their courtyard, a sign for her each year that spring has arrived.

At the foot of the maple tree is an antique stone lantern. The carving, weathered by hundreds of years of storms, can no longer be distinguished beyond being a human figure. Her father thinks it might represent Jesus. They are not Christians but like the lantern as an ornament.

Then she considers the bell crickets she raises: “they were born, chirped, laid eggs, and died all inside of a dark, cramped jar. Still . . . it preserved the species.”

She leaves the shop to view the cherry blossoms at Heian Shrine with her school friend Shin’ichi. When he remarks three times on what a happy girl she is, Chieko questions him, and then reveals that she was abandoned as a small child outside the red lattice door of the shop where she lives now with her adoptive parents.

By now several themes have emerged that are central to Japanese literary tradition: the ephemerality of existence, connection to the natural world, and the traditional festivals that mark the year. In addition, we have more modern themes: the sense of isolation, loss of faith, and questions about identity.

Much more will happen, of course. This may seem a simple story on the surface, but much is going on underneath. There are small things on every page that reflect or enhance these themes: an old shop sign that has become a mere decoration, the Botanical Garden that now includes beds of garish Western tulips, or the particular attention to camphor and cedar trees, both of which are used to preserve garments.

Speaking of the closing of the last streetcar, the proprietress of a teashop says, “It’s essential that people should cling to the past.” So much here is about negotiating the loss of the past. The old festivals are celebrated, though in abbreviated form; young men and women still go courting, but expect to be able to choose their own spouses; the capital was moved to Tokyo in 1868, yet people still refer to Kyoto as the old capital.  

The Botanical Garden has only recently reopened; the occupying American military used it for their housing and closed it to Japanese citizens. To me, this detail signals the loss that haunts this book. It was first published in Japan in 1962, only 17 years since the Japanese surrender ending WWII and 10 years after the end of the Allied occupation.

More than just being defeated, losing the war was a blow to the identity of a proud people. There were the catastrophic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; then they were ordered to revise their constitution, give up their empire status, and see their formerly divine Emperor reduced to symbolic status. Plus the country was opened to Western influences in a way ithadn’t been before.

Such a huge cultural upheaval must have created conflicts between tradition and innovation, excitement and nostalgia. On a large scale, of course, but also within families and even within individuals. We see this most clearly in Chieko’s father.

As writers we’re advised to remember the larger context of our stories (political, social, legal, etc.) and how that might influence our characters’ situations and choices. We are also advised to make every detail count and align it with our theme. This seeming simple story does both to a remarkable extent.

The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Have you read anything by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata? What book would you recommend?

Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

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Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her sole remaining child, her 17-year-old daughter Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. That same night a young, Black man was found dead in a Southie subway station, apparently hit by a train.

Mary Pat knows whom to talk to, who’s connected to whom. Her search takes her into the inner circle of Southie’s Irish mob, run by Marty Butler. They’ve known each other for years—everyone knows everyone in this tight enclave—and he advises her to let it go lest she bring the attention of the authorities down on his activities. One of his lieutenants explains that Jules has probably gone to Florida, which reminded me that the film Midnight Cowboy had come out only five years earlier, though it isn’t mentioned in the book.

This mostly Irish-American neighborhood may be Mary Pat’s world, the only one she’s known, but the outside world makes itself felt. There’s Vietnam and the heroin epidemic. There’s Nixon’s resignation and the recession caused by the oil embargo among other things. Most of all, there’s Judge Garrity’s order to desegregate Boston’s schools by busing children to schools outside their neighborhoods.

Boston exploded. I was living nearby and well aware of the uproar, though several members of my book club only read about it later. Lehane takes us inside one of its hotbeds: Southie, where residents—mostly the women—rose up in protest. The casual racism and racist epithets may seem incredible to those who were not around then, but they were common enough, not just in South Boston but most other places as well—certainly in the city where I grew up—though more often in private conversations than yelled on the streets.

By laying bare the web of connections between the characters, going back to childhood, and the insistent demands to conform to the neighborhood’s customs, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. You risk losing everything, even the little that you have. Once one of the leaders of the protests, Mary Pat is now only concerned about her daughter. The more she discovers the circumstances of Jules’s disappearance, the more she finds herself in conflict with the mob and her former friends.

What most fascinated me were the tiny, incremental changes in the characters. Not epiphanies or redemptive realisations, but rather the slightest doubt, the whisper of a question. Is what I’ve been taught and believed all my life actually true? Did I miss an important piece of information somewhere along the way? Questions all of us might find it useful to ask ourselves now and then.

It’s easy to look back, and in our self-righteousness call the crowds protesting integration ignorant, but Lehane enables us to see their point of view. I also loved the way Lehane, who grew up in neighboring Dorchester, slips in the little social codes of that time and place, such as that a man didn’t curse in front of a woman he doesn’t know, no matter what foul language she dishes out to him.

Some people in my book club thought Mary Pat was unrealistic. One called her “almost Wonder Woman.” But I’ve known women like Mary Pat who, hardened by life’s blows, have learned to fight back and win. They’ve learned timidity doesn’t work; you have to raise your voice and demand what you need.

This is a cracking good read, as you’d expect if you’ve read other Lehane novels. Like me, you’ll find it hard to tear yourself away. When you do, still thinking about Mary Pat and Jules and the other characters, you’ll find their story gives you a context for today’s news, a more accurate picture of the past instead of the fairy tale some people would like you to believe.

What’s your favorite Dennis Lehane novel?

The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

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Like Patchett’s previous novel Commonwealth, this is a story about the effects of a divorce, bonds between siblings, and coming to terms with the past.

Maeve and Danny Conroy are the siblings, whose mother Elna left  when they were 10 and 3 to help the poor in India. Danny is the narrator, so all he knows is the story he was told: that she hated her life in the Dutch House, partly because it was a fabulous and gaudy mansion with a pool and landscapes grounds, and partly because her husband, real estate developer and landlord Cyril Conroy, bought it as a surprise for her in 1946, at a time when Elna thought they were dirt poor.

The house came fully furnished, with a servant named Fiona, quickly nicknamed Fluffy and joined by two sisters Jocelyn and Sandy. These three women are the ones to raise the children after their mother left, until Fluffy is dismissed for striking Danny. In many ways Maeve took over as Danny’s mother, cementing a lifelong bond between them. Then Cyril marries a young fortune-hunter named Andrea who comes with two little daughters.

Such is the setup, with the wicked stepmother taking over the house and gradually forcing Danny and Maeve out. One of the most poignant scenes for me centered on Maeve’s room, the nicest bedroom according to Danny, with a window seat overlooking the back garden. Patchett gives just enough detail for the reader to make the room her own and grieve with Maeve when she leaves it.

Patchett’s use of detail also works well in summoning a vision of the Dutch House: certain ornaments, some furniture on the landing, a ceiling, a ballroom on the third floor. This pastiche gives the reader a framework for envisioning the place and remembering what takes place there. The portrait of Maeve (shown on the cover of the book) gathers layers of meaning as we go through the story.

Much of the middle of the book dragged, as we learn about Danny’s life after leaving the Dutch House, his marriage and children, his work. Danny is not very emotionally aware, which sometimes made me wish Maeve were narrating the book. She’s a far more interesting character.

When the two are together, Danny visiting her in Pennsylvania, they park across the street from the Dutch House to talk about the past. In a burst of insight Danny says, “like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father.”

Sandy says it best, explaining why she returns to the house near the end: “The ghosts are what I come for.”

I wanted to like this book. I’m a sucker for stories about lost paradises and enchanted houses (let me tell you about mine . . . ). What I liked best about it was Tom Hanks as narrator. His distinctive voice, reassuring and trustworthy carried me over the somewhat boring stretches and the underdeveloped secondary characters.

Thinking of it as a fairy tale helped me over the unlikely plot points. As Danny notes, how does a man who doesn’t even own a char buy a mansion? Not to mention Elna leaving to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta only a few years after the nun founded the Missionaries of Charity. And the wicked stepmother.

Patchett is an accomplished writer, so I trust that sentence by sentence the writing is good, even without Tom Hanks bringing it to life. The book has received a lot of praise and many good reviews. I’m not sure I would have finished it if I’d been reading a print book, but I’m glad I made it to the end. There’s the painting on the cover, the still somewhat mysterious and contradictory Maeve, and the lost paradise.

What story about motherless children who are also poor little rich kids have you read?

The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware

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On a damp, chilly night, Harriet “Hal” Westaway finally makes it home to her dismal flat. At 21, she’s been scraping out a living doing tarot readings in a kiosk on Brighton Pier she inherited from her mother. In her mail, mixed in with the past-due notices are two letters: a threat from a loan shark demanding immediate payment and one from a lawyer in Cornwall.

The lawyer’s letter informs her of the death of her maternal grandmother and invites her, as a beneficiary, to a reading of the will. Hal knows her mother’s mother died years ago, so this must be a case of mistaken identity. She’s alone in the world, her mother killed in a hit-and-run three years earlier and her father dead when she was too young to remember him.

Still, the promise of a sizeable bequest and the increasing violence of the loan shark’s threats combine to overcome her scruples at deceiving this mourning family. After all, she reasons, they are obviously rich enough to spare a few thousand pounds. In crafting her tarot readings, she’s become superbly skilled at reading people, so she just might be able to pull it off.

She barely manages the one-way fare to Cornwall, where she’s met and taken in the pouring rain to Mrs. Westaway’s funeral at a church outside Penzance, where she meets her “uncles” and is taken back to Trepassen House, a gloomy mansion complete with hostile housekeeper who shows her to a tiny room set off from the rest of the house with a small iron bed and bars on the window.

There was a lock on the door. Two, in fact. They were long, thick bolts, top and bottom.

But they were on the outside.

I generally avoid thrillers—the world is producing a more than sufficient supply of anxiety these days, thank you very much—but I keep gravitating to Ware’s books anyway. This is the first one I’ve managed to read through, entranced by the echoes of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and the brilliant use of tarot cards.

Hal and her mother never believed in the cards; they were a means of making a living.

The cards tell you nothing you don’t already know. It was her mother’s voice, steady in her ear. They have no power, remember that. They can’t reveal any secrets or dictate the future. All they can do is show you what you already know.

Yet the author tantalises us with one card or another, turned up in a reading demanded by her new “relatives” or left conspicuously out, its meaning exerting power over the other characters and perhaps holding a clue to the mystery.

I’m also not a fan of the glut of woman-in-danger stories, but here the gothic atmosphere combined with the fascinating house and its grounds made for a captivating read. And Hal is an interesting heroine. I liked her integrity and how it is put to the test, not just once but over and over. At times I wished she were more strong-minded, but I could also see how the tragedies in her life could have left her afraid and uncertain.

As an author I was intrigued by the pacing and the reveals: when information is revealed, questions answered or new questions raised. Some things I did see coming, so I especially liked the times (no spoilers!) when I expected something to happen and was all set to condemn it as predictable—and it didn’t. Or it happened in a different way. Nice.

A contemporary gothic mystery with a mysterious mansion in Cornwall and plenty of family secrets to unearth: who could ask for anything more?

What mystery have you read that is set in Cornwall?

Family Lore, by Elizabeth Acevedo

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Seventy-year-old Flor decides to throw herself a living wake, alarming her three sisters because they know Flor has a special gift: she can predict when someone will die. They, too, have special gifts: Pastora can tell whether or not someone is telling the truth, and Camila, the youngest, creates herbal tonics and medicines that always heal.

The occasional narrator, Flor’s daughter Ona, has a magical vagina, and Pastora’s daughter Yadi has a mystical relationship with limes. The oldest of the four sisters, Matilde, doesn’t have a magical gift, but her salsa moves are beyond brilliant, and she loves deeply and loyally.

The first adult book by children’s author Acevedo weaves together the stories of these six women with a sure touch. This enchanted tale moves between New York and Santa Domingo, slipping through time, interleaving English with bits of Spanish. The Spanish was not a problem for me, though I don’t speak the language, because the context clues were sufficient.

Reminding me of early Isabelle Allende, like The House of Spirits, the novel delivers a feast. Little by little, Acevedo fills in the lives of these women, their care for each other tugging against their push for independence.

Normally I struggle with multiple narrators and time jumps, but here I didn’t have any trouble keeping the characters and timelines straight. However I did look back at the list of characters at the front of the book for about the first quarter of the book, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I’d be listening to the audiobook. Also, I wouldn’t have had the formatting that signaled time jumps, so I might have gotten confused

Some of the members of my book club did indeed find the book confusing. They also struggled to get into the characters, perhaps because of the difficulty of tracking so many characters.

One member of my book club noted that she was surprised by what the sisters didn’t know about each other, but secrets within a family are not that uncommon. And actually for a couple of us, seeing the minute changes in their relationships was part of what we enjoyed about the book.

I found the writing joyous and fresh. For example, introducing the story of Flor and her husband: “Pedro had approached her like a strong breeze through an open doorway, unexpected, soft on the skin even if it did scatter a few things to the ground.” 318

When the sisters turn to Yadi, Pastora’s daughter, to look up information on the internet: “The younger generation brought new ways of doing things, these new inventions, and the hermanas touched their fingers to gadgets, or their tongues to new words, and sewed the technology into the fabric of their lives the way one embroiders lace.” 274

I was also intrigued by the way the women went back and forth between New York and Santa Domingo, each city giving them something the other couldn’t. So different from the usual emigrant narrative of longing to return home and not being able to, or of not wanting to return ever. I also saw this in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Discussing this idea sent my book club into the history of the Dominican Republic to look at political changes in that country and whether they related to the waves of immigration.

The relationship between these women—and they with their men—are nothing like what I’ve experienced. Well, now I have, thanks to Acevedo. If you want to understand what a family can be, this is the book for you.

Sisters, sisters! What novel can you recommend about sisters?

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

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Chung’s debut memoir explores several important themes. Her parents—Korean shopkeepers with two daughters already—were warned that the premature baby might not live and if she did, was likely to have expensive disabilities. They decided to offer her up for adoption, and a white couple who badly wanted children brought her home to Portland, Oregon.

She accepted the story her new parents told her, of the selflessness of her birth parents and that adoption had been the best thing for her. Her religious parents told her that she was a “divinely ordered” gift from God. However, they did not see the racist bullying that Chung encountered in Portland, one of the least racially diverse places in the U.S. Their parents’ colorblind insistence that they didn’t think of her as Asian also meant that she did not learn about Korean culture or language.

“Sometimes the adoption — the abandonment, as I could not help but think of it when I was very young — upset me more; sometimes my differences did; but mostly, it was both at once, race and adoption, linked parts of my identity that set me apart from everyone else in my orbit. I could neither change nor deny these facts, so I worked to reconcile myself to them.”

It was only as an adult, pregnant with her first child, that Chung began to question the legend and to begin discreetly searching for her birth parents. “It was time to lay down the burden of being ‘the good adoptee,’ the grateful little girl who’d been lost and then found.” At the same time she did not want to hurt the parents she loved and whom she would always call Mom and Dad.

I appreciated Chung’s openness in writing her journey and also her compassion toward all of the people involved. The themes of the search for identity, adoption in general, and interracial adoption in particular are important ones, and Chung provides much insight into one person’s experience of them.

However, I’m surprised by the awards and praise for this book It might have been better as an essay. Yes, it’s a super important topic, but there’s a lot of repetition and the narration is rather dry. She includes few scenes along with some scenelets (short snippets of scenes). Instead, Chung tells us this story, summarising the events and dwelling on her thoughts and emotions rather than showing us what happened.

Chung herself is an editor, first at The Toast magazine and then becoming editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine in 2016, whose book division published this memoir. In her Acknowledgments, she thanks her editor before anyone else, so I remain a bit baffled by the final product.

Still, Chung gets so much right with this book: genuine emotion, vulnerability and loving compassion for the parents who gave her away and those who raised her.

Have you read a book about adoption that made you think more deeply about the issues involved?

Neighbors, by Diane Oliver

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It may seem unfair to read a debut story collection by a 22-year-old woman right on the heels of reading the final short stories written by a Nobel Prize winner. However, Oliver’s work stands up to the comparison. In fact, although Munro’s stories take place in Ontario and Oliver’s mostly in the South, they seemed quite similar.

Both are almost all about women, ordinary women, with piercing insight as to the reality of their lives. While Munro’s works remind me of how confining women’s roles were in the middle of the 20th century, before feminism’s Second Wave, Oliver’s open up the lives of Black women at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the title story, young Ellie is helping her little brother Tommy get ready for bed. In the morning, the first-grader will be integrating the local school. Oliver captures the nuances of concern and caring and determination of the children as well as the parents. His father says, “‘I keep trying . . . to tell myself that somebody’s got to be the first one and then I just think how quiet he’s been all week.’” In a later story a young woman goes off to college to oblige her parents but inwardly hates being “the Experiment.”

In other stories, parents struggle to care for their children in the Jim Crow South. A few deal with mothers who’ve been left behind by husbands who’ve gone north as part of the Great Migration. One packs her children onto a bus and takes them to meet the father who hasn’t written in months. In response to her daughter’s question, she says, “‘I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.’”

These stories go beyond the stereotype of the strong Black woman. We see their weaknesses and accommodations. Oliver’s subtle prose shows the self-deception of a rich doctor’s wife and the blank face that a maid turns to her employer. We walk with a young woman as she heads to her first lunch counter sit-in.

So much meaning is packed into each sentence of these stories, each gesture, each bit of dialogue. What is left unsaid rumbles beneath the text, driving the characters down what comes to seem an inevitable road.

Sadly, this brilliant writer died in 1966, only 22 years old. At the time, she’d had four stories published in journals, so was just beginning her career. I’m grateful for this new collection of her work, and so terribly sad that she couldn’t have been with us longer.

These are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Is there a short story you’ve read that you’ll never forget?