barbara

The Final Case, by David Guterson

by

9780525521327_p0_v1_s1200x630

The unnamed narrator of Guterson’s latest novel is a writer who no longer writes. Like many retirees, he finds that house projects and what my friend calls life maintenance tasks quickly swell to fill up his days. Then his 84-year-old father calls to tell him that two things have happened: a tree has fallen in his yard, and he has had a minor car accident.

The tree is not important but the car is, because Royal is still working as a lawyer and now has no way to get to his office. The narrator agrees to be his chauffeur and quickly becomes caught up in one of his father’s current cases.

This setup for the story had me eager to read more. We have the contrast between the two men, one seemingly determined to continue working till his last day on earth and the other setting aside his career and seemingly not missing it at all. We have the loving relationship between them while navigating the problems of an aging parent: Royal decides that even when the car is fixed he should no longer be driving.

And we have the case. Abeba, a young Ethiopian orphan adopted by a fundamentalist Christian couple has died of abuse. The father was at work during the critical time, so it is the mother who is on trial. When no one wants to defend her, Royal agrees to do it, not because he thinks she is innocent, but because he believes everyone deserves a defender and that having one makes the prosecution present a solid case and makes the court apply the law fairly and accurately.

Beyond all these intriguing elements, we have Guterson’s mesmeric flow of well-wrought sentences that kept me reading past every self-imposed deadline. He captures voices of individual characters beautifully, from the gracious, considered words of the elderly lawyer to the Fox News Entertainment Channel-inspired courtroom rant of the accused’s mother. Guterson also gives the narrator a voice that is quiet, and intelligent, while his openness and emotional depth provide a surprising drive.

On another level, the narrator being a writer brings in questions about the uses of fiction and how to recognise it. He says after telling us right off that he used to write fiction:

If that leaves you wondering about this book—wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—everything here is real.

The story carries the question of how to distinguish fact from fiction into other realms, the trial testimony, for instance, and even within ourselves.

The fact that people do what they do, or think what they think, or say what they say–it can be so inconsistent with their view of themselves that they deny to themselves that it ever happened. They invent a story for themselves in which they didn’t think or feel or do or say anything wrong, and that story becomes reality for them, so real that they’ll defend it to the bitter end, even when the facts in the real world say otherwise. They play this trick on themselves, because if they don’t, they’ll have to accept that they’re not the good person they thought they were.

Guterson and his wife themselves adopted a child from Ethiopia, and the case in this book is apparently based on a real trial that occurred in 2011 involving another Ethiopian orphan. However, this novel is not a courtroom drama. Well, some of it is. And I felt I knew where I was when the courtroom testimony began. But then Guterson pulls the rug out from under the reader, abandoning the trial itself to accompany the narrator to his sister’s tearoom and other activities. At first this third part of the book seemed to me a jumble of unrelated, if beautifully written, anecdotes. Looking back after finishing the book, though, it came together.

One member of my book club was disturbed by the way the father-son relationship overshadowed the story of the young girl, Abeba. While I understand that was not the book Guterson set out to write, I did feel Abeba was given short shrift in the story, was in fact merely a pawn in the story of the father and son. Maybe that is Guterson’s point, or one of them: that no matter how much our hearts may ache for others, in the end we are the protagonists of our own story. Perhaps this is part of his questioning the uses of fiction.

I recently read an excellent essay by Sallie Tisdale in Harper’s Magazine on memory and memoir that questions the idea of autobiographical memory: that our life experiences link together in a narrative arc, and that they become the basis of our identity.

Perhaps Guterson is exploring some of the same questions. If you, too, find such ideas interesting and are willing to immerse yourself in well-wrought prose, I suggest reading this novel all the way through, and then giving yourself time to ponder your reactions.

What novel have you enjoyed that took you by surprise?

Unvarnished Life, by Yenna Yi

by

unvarnished-life-pic

After a full day at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, immersed in poetry from many different voices, I turned to my friend Yenna Yi’s recently published book, one of three poetry collections. Her poems draw on her background as a psychotherapist to celebrate life’s joys and cope with its blows.

She’s also the author of Ring of Fire, a memoir of 14 years living on a catamaran with her husband and two sons sailing the globe. One of the poems in this book recalls that time. “The Stormy Sky” begins:

I remember the days in 1985 . . .
Waking up dancing on the liquid fire
Of gale force wind in the Tasman Sea,
The home of wind—wet, wild,
Lost in the valley of waves,

We held onto the halyards
Of the jittering canvases . . .

In another poem, “In the Stealth of Darkness” she tells us: “I’m haunted and besieged / By life’s gifts and punishments.” Yet she finds solace in poetry, the words “forging their way/ Into my heart like a river / Through stone.”

In other poems she examines the uses of memory and the restorative powers of nature. She explains the title in her author’s note, which says in part:

. . . I call my early childhood unvarnished—roughhewn between [the] aftermath of WWII, Korean War, poverty, family separation and loss . . .

However, I find beauty in unvarnished life—turning a shed into a home, making a dress out of rag and drift wood into art . . .

With these poems she delves into the experiences of a lifetime, finding that “A blemished bowl wants to be mended, / A healed scar adds another layer of skin.”

What poems are you turning to as the days draw in and the nights linger?

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

by

0f88819e74d566105d87d4314b00ef6a

There are some authors whose every book is a must-read for me. Tóibín is one, ever since I picked up a battered copy of The Heather Blazing at a used book and tool sale in a market town in England twenty years ago. I persuaded my book club to read it as well and they’ve gone on to enjoy other novels by him. You’ll find several of his books in my blog: Brooklyn, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, The Empty Family, Nora Webster, and The Magician.

Not having been raised Catholic and a longtime feminist, I’ve given little thought to the culture that has built up around Mary, aside from discarding the stereotype of her as docile and obedient that many people hold up as the ideal toward which all women should strive. As a mother, I could feel her horror and grief at the death of her son, but that made me dislike even more the priestly glorification of human sacrifice. Well, I guess they would say half-human.

However, this first-person narrative captured me immediately, giving me a new and completely plausible image of an historical Mary. Here, she is older and alone, living in Ephesus, a city known for its Temple of Artemis, located in what is now Turkey, thus far enough away from Rome to offer safe haven from her Roman pursuers. There, she is visited by two of her son’s disciples who watch and support her even as they question her repeatedly about her son’s life to bolster their own narratives. She says:

They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep . . . They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.

She considers those who followed her son a “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” and judges herself with the same brutal clarity. In this slim novella, she tells us her story, the one she holds in every part of her body.

And it is an utterly credible story. If there truly was an historical Jesus—his name is never mentioned in this book—then this portrait of a happy, playful child grown into a cold and distant man is one I can believe. It is the story of too many men, and a few women, who have embraced the portrait of themselves they see in others’ eyes and the power that comes with it.

It is not the story that has come down to us; that’s the one crafted by his followers, the one she disputes. It is still an enthralling one. A mother, telling us about her son—her son. She discounts the stories she hears about his so-called miracles as exaggerations by the crowd that follows him. Even her glancing acquaintance with the results, such as meeting the undead Lazarus, are ambiguous.

Tóibín has crafted a tender and agonizing book that has changed my view of Mary and her son.

What novel of Colm Tóibín’s have you read? What did you think about it?

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

by

{623877D4-527B-4DE4-B476-93BB01DC871C}IMG100

My horror at the devastation wrought by evangelical “Christians” (who eschew the basic tenets of Christianity) in the U.S. made this novel tough going for me. I couldn’t get past my outrage that anyone would submit themselves to torture and starvation in the name of religion when salvation—an earthly one to be sure—was so easily available.

Donoghue, author of Room, has constructed another story where people are confined in a tiny location, dependent on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant. In 600 A.D. Cluain Mhic Nóis, an Irish monastery, hosts a visiting holy man, perhaps the holiest man on earth: Artt, legendary for having read every book in existence and surviving the plague with the loss only of a finger.

While there, Artt has a dream—surely a holy vision!—that he should found a new monastery on a remote island off the Irish coast, far from the earthly temptations that have, in his view, corrupted Cluain Mhic Nóis. The dream/vision/mandate from God further commands that he take two of the monks: Cormac, an older man who came late to religion and is fond of telling stories, and young, impressionable Trian, who was given to the monastery at 13.

They fetch up on a stony isle that it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a week on, though the author’s note assures us that it is indeed the site of a medieval monastery. The fascination for me was in the various ways they—mostly Cormac to be honest—find to survive in this hostile environment. Trian, too, captures the heart with their sweetness and love for everything—birds, fellows, mussels, God. Artt is just, in my opinion, a self-righteous, narcissistic blowhard, convinced that he alone is the conduit of God’s word.

Well, obviously I’m the wrong audience for this book. I could hardly bear continuing to read of their hardships, knowing that civilisation—with, sure, its evils, but also actual sustenance and shelter—is only a short boat ride away. The writing is gorgeous but the story infuriating.

I have my moments of thinking like Artt that the world is incurably decadent, and wanting to preserve some small piece of what life could really be like. But this is not the way. And I’m far too practical to take my minions, even if I could bear to have minions, away from necessities like food, water and shelter to create religious monuments. Nor could I ever sacrifice others to my vision of my own greatness.

So, while I admire the prose, the story left me cold. No, not cold, but a turbulent mix of emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, a hint of longing. The book challenged me to think outside my own box, a challenge I guess I failed. Stil, I’m left thinking of John Lennon’s Imagine: no religions, nothing to die for.

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham, by Fred Gerhard

by

61gWB47D-OL._SL1500_

A new chapbook from my friend Fred Gerhard is subtitled Songs of Spring. Like that season, the poems in this tiny book carry sweetness and renewal.

Some of the poems are about everyday happenings, like children gathering dandelions, infused with a whisper of philosophy. Others are tributes to poets, their ideas and voices carried forward into today.

In some poems, striking imagery or unusual word choice captures the reader’s attention. Here’s the first stanza of “Moss.”

I once loved a woman who loved moss, knew moss,
and why the softest moss lay between the
rain-worn stones of indecipherable lives—

The natural world fuels these poems with its grandeur and generosity, its small gifts and minor delights. The beneficent effect of paying attention to the world around us provides a melody for the collection, as in the title poem where the narrator says: “I blossom / breaking my green walls.”

At a time when every bit of news arouses a mix of fury, despair and determination, these poems are a salve to the spirit.

What books or poems do you turn to when you despair at the state of the world?

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

by

9780802158741_p0_v2_s1200x630

What a gem of a book! This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life. As a purveyor of wood and coal, he refers to himself as “a man of doorways.” True, he is often knocking on doors to deliver loads coal or wood, but the description carries more meanings, both literal and metaphorical.

His background is unusual: an only child of a servant woman whose employer did not dismiss her when the pregnancy became obvious. Instead she kept his mother on and welcomed the child as well. Thus he grew up, while not exactly a member of the family, at least surrounded and supported with love and care from his mother, her employer, and Ned who worked there as well.

Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. I’ve read a good bit about the Magdalen laundries, so was not surprised by the conditions Bill gradually begins to discover. Yet Keegan presents them so quietly, so carefully through his personality, that they shocked me anyway.

There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. This book reminds me that there is goodness in this world if I am open to seeing it, and that it doesn’t have to be big thing like leading your nation’s resistance against an invading tyrant. It can be a small thing and still break your heart and mend it to be even stronger.

This is the novel I’m recommending to everyone this year. What novel are you recommending to people?

The Fell, by Sarah Moss

by

57845085

In the COVID lockdown. I was one of the lucky ones: healthy, able to work at home, and enough of an introvert to relish the time alone. Not everyone was so lucky, as I was well aware. Every say I saw and thought about the mail carriers, trash collectors, and delivery personnel on our otherwise empty street.

When I finally began to venture out to the grocery store, I wore a mask to protect the cashiers and other employees. I felt sad and angry that so many people—including my own sons and daughter-in-law—had no choice but to put their lives and those of their families on the line.

Now, a few years later, I barely remember those times, so I was eager to pick up this brief novel by Sarah Moss, whose Ghost Wall I had previously enjoyed.

Set in a village in the Peak district of England during the early lockdown, the story moves between four characters. Fittingly, the four almost never interact with each other, so we meet each one alone and plunge deeply into their psyche, creating a surprisingly gripping psychological novel.

Kate is a progressive single mother who has been exposed to COVID, so must self-isolate for two weeks, along with her teenaged son Matt. Since cafe where she works is shut down, they are struggling financially, but worse for her is the confinement to the house and yard. Matt is happy to blow off his online lessons and spend his days immersed in video games and helping his mom around the house, but she is not. Devoted to the outdoors, she is used to rambling the fells every day and feels suffocated and nearly out of her mind.

One day, near dusk, she grabs her backpack—always filled with the essentials dedicated hikers know to carry—and sets out for a brief walk on the nearby fell, reasoning to herself that she will almost certainly be the only out there, so she won’t endanger anyone.

When she doesn’t return, Matt is frantic but doesn’t want to get her in trouble by reporting her missing. Their next-door neighbor Alice, retired and with health problems, sees Kate go, but for the same reason doesn’t report her. Still, when Kate doesn’t return Alice worries about Matt, and eventually calls and persuades him to report his mother as missing.

The Mountain Rescue Team is summoned, including Rob, a divorced father whose teenaged daughter is furious about his departure on this rare night together. He is our fourth person, weighing his responsibility to his daughter against the missing woman’s safety, his commitment to the team, and his own desire to be out on the fell.

This is the thread through the four people’s stories: how do we balance our wants and needs with our responsibilities to others, not just family, but the person next door, the cashier at the village shop, the team that has to come out on a cold night to scour the fell?

Alice mourns for Matt, left alone through the long night, as the team searches for his mother, but is unsure about going to be with him, given her health problems and his exposure to the virus. Matt is unsure how to interact with the rescuers. And they, if they are lucky enough to find Kate, will have to touch this person who may have COVID and then go home to their families. Kate must wrestle with her own guilt and possible mortality.

Having hiked those fells myself just a few months ago, I was especially invested in this story. I saw how easily things could go wrong, even for the most experienced hiker. I met people on the trail who set off this way and that, determined to explore remote paths, and a woman who swam alone every day all the way around a large, usually deserted, mountain tarn. I knew about the Mountain Rescue Team—bless them!—and was doubly diligent about being careful on the slippery stones on the steep fells. I did not want to be carried out with a broken ankle!

Moss set herself a challenge with this book. A story about isolation and boredom could fall apart so easily, especially one with almost no scenes showing characters interacting. However, she succeeds brilliantly, with suspense building throughout the brief time frame of the story, abetted by the ticking clock of injury and exposure.

The characters come alive, convincingly portrayed in their intensely personal sections. Each of them will haunt me for some time. And each is wrestling with an issue that all of us—COVID or no COVID—are navigating every day: how to balance individual freedom with collective responsibility.

Have you read a novel that illuminates our particular moment in time?

Swarm, by Jorie Graham

by

swarm_200

When I enter the world of a poem or story, I expect to be entering the author’s mind through the world they have created. Nowhere is this feeling stronger than in reading Graham’s poetry.

I know that each poem is carefully crafted, yet I feel a rare immediacy. I am in the presence of a mind in conversation with itself, breathlessly carried from one thought to another, whether the flow is tumultuous or a slow stream or even stuttering drops, a trickle that comes and goes.

This collection, more than the others I’ve read or tried to read, is something to absorb all at once, a perhaps-coherent whole. Yet for all the time I have sat with it, I cannot give you a thumbnail description.

It describes not so much an epiphany—Graham has long stood out against poems that offer such a moment, such a resolution—as a grappling with a moment of profound change. In some poems she takes on a persona such as Agamemnon, Calypso, Eurydice; others read like journal entries, while still others are prayers or explorations of what it means to live a life or to lose it.

Graham’s poems can be difficult to read. A Modernist, she treats narrative and even language itself as suspect, constantly doubling back on herself, doubting herself, exposing herself. Crusty critic William Logan says, “Graham makes you wish stream of consciousness had never been invented.” Yet even he praises her “sprezzatura.”

It is her daring that thrills me, her going all out even if it means discarding forms and traditions and the poetic line itself.

I also appreciate how she attaches value to the moments of our lives, how she finds joy in small things. The poem “2/18/97” begins:

Of my life which I am supposed to give back.
Afterwards.
Having taken part in it.

She goes on to name some of the things to give back.

. . .the gentle lawns of this earth.
A sudden rain sweeping the petals along.
And pebbles the rain won’t move.
And these bodies . . .

The poem is more than these moments. It is an argument with the “soil that brightens and darkens,” that demands we live and later that we die. It is a holding close of our treasures even as they slip away:

children playing music on their knuckles,
feet skipping, dirt tossed round and then resettling on
                        their prints
where dance steps are
for just a moment longer
        visible—

It is a vision of a god, a breath, a giving up, and that which will not be given up.

Yes, her poems can be difficult to read. But if you sit with them for a while, you may find the words—mistrusted as they are—opening. You may find new ways of being in the world.

Have you been reading any poetry lately? Share in the comments.

The Maid, by Nita Prose

by

55196813

NOTE: There may be some spoilers in this review.

My first reaction to my local book club’s choice for this month was that it was a shoddy knockoff version of the delightful Japanese bestseller Convenience Store Woman. Like that subtle, smart novel, Prose’s protagonist is a young woman apparently on the autism spectrum who works in a menial job and loves it. Unfortunately, The Maid doesn’t measure up.

Molly Gray works as a chambermaid in a five-star hotel where she enjoys restoring each room to “a state of perfection.” Less enjoyable is the disdain with which most of her colleagues treat her—referring to her a weirdo, a robot, a Roomba—though not to her face. Still, she calls on the platitudes and proverbs she learned from her gram, recently deceased, to keep her world in order. Then one day she enters a room to clean it and finds the guest staying in it dead on the bed.

Billed as a cosy mystery, the book fails to be either. True, there is a death and cups of tea, but there is no intrepid sleuth tracking down the killer. There are no clues to follow, no investigation. Instead, the story limps through a threadbare plot, every step of it embarrassingly obvious. There are a few gratuitous “twists” at the very end which come across as cheap tricks because they are not integrated with the plot at all.

Not only is the plot childishly simple, but the language is in the middle grade range (appropriate for age 8-12), often even simpler than that. And that gets to the worst aspect of the book. Since it’s quite obvious to the reader what’s going on, the plot is not the driving force in the book. Neither is the setting, which is barely sketched in. The people in the story are caricatures and stereotypes, either all good or all bad, so nothing there to keep the reader going. The only thing left is Molly herself.

Yes, the force propelling the story is the reader’s amusement as Molly constantly misinterprets what’s obvious to all of us neurotypical folks and responds with prim childish speeches. Making fun of neurodivergent people is a bizarre—and repulsive—choice for the basis of a book. I’m aghast that so many people seem to think this is just great, and that the book has won multiple awards, achieved bestseller status, and will be made into a film.

Making Molly be so childish and naïve seems like the author knows nothing about autism. We talk about cultural appropriation in literature. If a neurotypical author is going to write a first-person novel in the voice of a neurodivergent person, they ought to at least be knowledgeable about the condition. There’s also the way Juan Manuel, who works in the hotel’s kitchen, is presented as naive, unintelligent and helpless, summoning the most despicable stereotypes about immigrants and Mexicans. The police too are shown as bumbling and cruel.

In addition to the above concerns, there are gaping holes in the logic of this story, For example, Molly bounces back and forth from clueless to astute and back again. She tells us about her condition, but sometimes doesn’t show it in her behaviour. Also, no police detective arresting a young woman in her pajamas, would cart her off to jail without enabling her to get dressed. Here, Molly even has to appear in court in her jail-begrimed pajamas, like that would actually happen.

Maids do not trundle their carts through the lobbies of five-star hotels or leave them outside the door to the bar. Nefarious boyfriends are not able to clean out a person’s entire savings account at an ATM in one fell swoop; there are limits on how much you can take out at a time. Plus, how is it that criminals can be running a drug ring in a fancy hotel without anyone noticing? Where are the security people?

Most of all, how is it that no one, from Molly’s childhood teachers to her co-workers to anyone on the police force, recognises that she is neurodivergent?

I am baffled by the praise heaped on this book. As I read it, I alternated between boredom and outrage. Of course, even though it’s a first novel, the author is a longtime editor and, at the time it was published, vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster, so she knows a few people.

There are some cute things in the story, like the devotion of Molly and her gram to the Olive Garden and the old tv Show Columbo. But that’s not enough to make up for the story’s weaknesses.

What story have you read with a neurodivergent narrator? What did you think of it?

The Years, by Annie Ernaux

by

s-l300

Writing guru Donald Maass—writer, agent, and writing teacher—reminds us to include what’s going on in the world in our stories, partly because our characters will probably be thinking about current events and reacting to them. Mostly, though, because including specific details and big-picture events helps make the world of our story seem real to the reader.

In this book, Ernaux has gone further, focusing on the larger life of a society and placing the life of one woman within that.

. . . the idea had come to her to write “a kind of woman’s destiny” set between 1940 and 1986.

Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

Time is the only narrative structure in this collage of private memories, public events, photos, songs, brand names, television, advertising, headlines. There’s no plot, no protagonist, no story question. Instead, we are given “abbreviated memories” spun together, some personal and some common.

It will be a slippery narrative, composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.

I especially like the way Ernaux, looking back on a long life, refers to the past as a series of “palimpsests.” It’s an effective way to describe the veils that layer over each other as we try to recall how we were.

At first, I felt overwhelmed by the flow of historical events, popular culture, and experiences. I could barely grasp each fragment before it was replaced by another, perhaps because I was listening to the audio version, beautifully performed by Anna Bentinck. Eventually, though, I began to recognise how artfully they had been assembled to create a continuous narrative.

More importantly, I came to feel a part of the story, engrossed in the passing decades and fascinated by the ways my own life interacted with this collective story, merging and sliding apart, only to merge again and again slip away. I began to feel as though she were telling me the story of my own life, with occasional diversions.

Perhaps I should have first mentioned the unique point of view. Unlike most life writing, there is no “I” in the book. Instead—and fittingly for the story of a generation—it is narrated by “we,” as though by a chorus of voices. Apparently, in the original French version, the pronoun used is “on” which is the generic he/she that English is lacking, though it could be translated as “one.” The translator, Alison L. Strayer, has chosen instead to use “we,” which works brilliantly to capture the voice of the collective sections.

Some parts are about a specific woman, spoken of as “she.” As she nears the end of life, she begins to write this book to defy death’s erasure.

By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subjects that she has seen.

I plan to delve into other books by Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. I can see why this particular book was longlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize. Without getting into the controversy over whether it qualifies as fiction (a requirement for the Booker), I have to rank it high on my list of best books ever. To reach into my own past: it blew my mind.

Have you read a book by Annie Ernaux? What did you think about it?