justin

Another of my book clubs reads two short stories each month. Reading “Another, Better Otto” by Eisenberg, a new author for me, was one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've ever had. Immediately I hustled to the library and laid my hands on this collection, which includes that story along with five others, and sat down to savor them. Eisenberg's tales stretch out to give us a complex world with characters who tantalise the reader with their many facets. I am going to discuss the story I read for book club, but the other stories rise to the same level.

As we meet him, Otto is agonising over spending Thanksgiving with his family, meaning his siblings and their spouses and children. He and his partner, sweet and gentle William, have successfully avoided familial holiday gatherings for years. He's not sure how he got trapped this time by his somewhat bossy sister, Corinne. Otto congratulates himself for having freed himself from his family. But has he? He and William visit his other sister, Sharon, to pass on the invitation. He loves this damaged girl whose brilliant mind somehow slipped, but it is William who thinks to bring flowers.

Smudged as Sharon's brain has become, it is Otto's mind that we follow down dark and sometimes tortured paths. “Humans were born,” he thinks, “they lived. They glued themselves together in little clumps, and then they died . . Let the organisms chat. Let them talk. Their voices were as empty as the tinkling of a player piano.”

One member of my group suggested that the story shows the evolution of the modern family. What is the role of family today, when women can be both breadwinners and chief nurturers? Protection, perhaps, or mutual support. I have long said that it is the family we choose that matters, not necessarily the one we're born into.

Yet, as Otto says, “they had been one another's environs as children . . . there had been no other beings close by, no other beings through whom they could probe or illumine the mystifying chasms and absences and yearnings within themselves.” He goes on to acknowledge that “one did have an impulse to acknowledge one's antecedents, now and again.” I remember my aunt on her deathbed laying aside her lifelong quarrel with my mother, saying that my mother was the only person she wanted to see because she was the only one who remembered the things she did.

Even more mysterious is what ties two people together over the decades of our changing, growing selves. At first it's hard to see why William tolerates irascible Otto. Even here, Eisenberg delicately treads the edges of the bond between Otto and William.

Otto's need for connection to William is obvious even as he berates him for his addiction to pop psychology platitudes, but as one person in my group suggested, perhaps that grows out of or relates to his need to connect to himself. Not to be outdone in the platitude department, yet somehow touching what matters, another person said that love is the answer.

How does Eisenberg do it? There is the particular voice of each narrator, the net of images and references unique to each story, the subtlety of language. Most of all, she brings intelligence and much thought to ideas that matter, giving them a depth and complexity I see only too rarely. I have added Eisenberg to that pantheon of authors whose every book I intend to read.

The first couple of pages of this novel made me chuckle and look forward to a great read. However, round about page 50 I debated about giving up on the tedious plot. At page 100, terminally bored, I put the book down. I picked it up again a few days later only because it was my book club's pick for the month.

I've learned that if a book's cover trumpets that it is a National Bestseller and has pages of ecstatic rave reviews just inside, I won't like it. Blame the raised expectations that keep me from giving a mediocre book the benefit of the doubt or the feeling that I've been tricked by a bait-and-switch. As one member of my book club said, what does it say about the state of today's fiction that such a poorly executed novel could be nominated for so many prizes? But read on, because we may both be wrong.

It begins as Tassie, a college student in Troy, New York, is looking for a job that will start at the beginning of January term. Coming from the small town of Dellacrosse, Troy seems dazzlingly cosmopolitan to her, and there are funny snippets of her appreciation its glories—Chinese food! a man wearing jeans and a tie!—and mocking recollections of her hometown's charms. She eventually lands a job as a babysitter for a couple who don't yet have a baby.

The plot meanders around as she goes home for Christmas, returns, goes on scouting expeditions with her employer, Sarah, and sometimes Sarah's creepy husband, Edward, to check out prospective babies for adoption. Eventually, a baby is acquired as a foster child while the adoption proceeds. Other than the baby, none of the characters is particularly likeable. Tassie is—so I am informed—like many young people today (though none of the many I know): sad, discouraged, drifting through life, substituting humor for thought and impulse for decision. The title is explained early and often.

Although a couple of people in my book club liked the book, others shared my two main concerns: plot and character. The plot is all over the place, wandering off in different directions and getting bogged down in lengthy scenes that add nothing to the story. People pop up at the beginning and then disappear until the end. The climaxes seem tacked on to provide drama. As for the characters, they start out rather two-dimensional with a quirk or two pasted on, and then do not develop in the course of the story. A couple of them get sadder.

One person suggested that perhaps these seeming flaws were deliberate on the part of the author. Since the book is from Tassie's point of view, it is only too likely that she experiences the world as chaotic and unstructured and people as cardboard with amusing quirks. It's an interesting idea. If true, well, it takes a lot of courage to write such a poorly crafted novel. Perhaps the idea was that the humor would make up for the lack of narrative structure and character development. It certainly is very funny. Moore also employs amazingly original yet apt metaphors.

Perhaps the most interesting comment from my book club was from a person who compared Sarah and Edward to the characters in The Great Gatsby. As Fitzgerald famously said, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” I would say this is true of all the characters, not just Sarah and Edward. Perhaps, then, it is appropriate for the book to be carelessly crafted. Perhaps it is indeed deliberate.

Baffled by how such a book could have garnered so many awards and ovations, I broke from my usual practice of waiting to read reviews until I had completed this blog post. The critics universally seemed to praise it as an extraordinary book, even as some noted the problems I've mentioned. Readers were less forgiving, awarding many one-star reviews. Most of the four- and five-star reviews started out by saying the reader was a huge fan of Lorrie Moore. Maybe what is at work here is something like what used to happen in figure skating when a champion put in a poor performance in the finals and the judges still gave him or her a 6, based more on the entire career than that performance.

What do you think? Do you find reviews helpful? Do you find a significant difference between reviews by critics and by readers?

I attended a book club this week who read my memoir, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother. The attendees were mostly lawyers or law students, and we had a lively and wide-ranging discussion. I especially enjoyed hearing people's personal stories; as always there was a mix of people who had been in the system themselves at some point (even if just getting food stamps) and people whose eyes were opened to a world foreign to them.

One question that stumped me, though, came when we were discussing the chapter on the Welfare Rights Organization that so changed the system in the 1960s and 1970s, making it more consistent and fair. We agreed that with all the cuts in eligibility and services, the time was ripe for a new wave of activism to support those in poverty, both on public assistance and the working poor so dramatically brought to the limelight by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed. Why, I was asked, isn't this happening? Where is the outrage? Where are the activists?

I don't know what happened to all of the energy of the 1960s and 1970s activism. Maybe we just got older, busy with jobs and children. Maybe our early successes made us complacent. I do know that, contrary to the media stereotype, nearly everyone I know has remained true to those ideals of peace and freedom, of fairness and equal rights. Recently the Occupy Movement has given me a glimmer of hope that the long sleep is finally ending.

Virgin Soil, Turgenev's last novel, is about the Populist movement in Russia a hundred years before my experiences, in the late 1860s and 1870s. These idealistic revolutionaries want to awaken the slumbering people and help them take back their country from the ruling classes. The story focuses on Alexey Nezhdanov, a young student in St. Petersburg, who wants to devote his life to the cause, condemning as elitist the poetry he cannot keep himself from writing.

So much of this is familiar! Nezhdanov and his friends go among the poor, hoping to blend in and teach them to expect more, with the result you would expect. There's paranoia about possible infiltrators and dissension over which leaders to trust. Some advocate a violent uprising while others work within their own small sphere to create change. Some show common sense while others seem more concerned with self-aggrandizement. There are witting and unwitting betrayals. Nezhdanov falls in love with a young woman from a good family who shares his ideals and commitment to the cause.

The most interesting characters to me were two of his friends, minor characters whose loyalty is tested, and the aristocrat for whom he works, whose charming duplicity drives much of the action. This dramatic story helps me understand what happened to the movements of my youth, the disillusion and disarray they fell into. In these troubled times, with many people suddenly furloughed from work without a paycheck and others still bearing the brunt of losing most of their savings in the banking fiasco, perhaps the awakening has begun. What do you think it will take to create a new movement for change?

This early novel by Brookner is about Frances Hinton, a not-young woman who works in the reference library of a medical research institute and does not like to be called Fanny. Her life is a lonely one, lightened only by her friend and co-worker Olivia, a woman who is never discomposed. Frances says that “Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.” She shares with us the antics of the regular patrons of the library, including reticent Dr. Simek and the blowsy Mrs. Halloran.

Then there's Nick Fraser. “‘That,' says Mrs. Halloran heavily after every other one of Nick's disruptive visits to the Library, ‘is one hell of a man.'” Nick and his wife Alix are a lively, charming couple who add a new dimension to Frances's life by unexpectedly taking her up, inviting her to dinner and other outings with them. They call her Little Orphan Fanny and carelessly bring her into their circle of friends.

For Frances, it is more than their charm and brilliant sheen that attract her; she wants to learn how to be selfish. She says that she never wants to be loved by the sort of men who loved her mother: “kind, shy, easily damaged.” She says, “In a way I prefer them to be impervious, even if it means they are impervious to me.” Later she says, “I needed to know that not everyone carries a wound and that this wound bleeds intermittently throughout life.” Yet the title betrays a fundamental human need that cannot be ignored.

The premise for this story seemed a familiar one to me, having recently read A Note in Music, by Rosamond Lehmann, where lonely Grace's life is similarly changed by the entrance of a glamorous and carelessly chic couple. As in that novel, I found deep satisfaction in the deliberate development of characters who side-stepped my preconceptions, surprising and delighting me.

As always with Brookner, the joy is in the details. We gradually get to know Frances and the people in her small canvas, layers built up gradually with a fine brush. I have long been a fan of Brookner's work, ever since Christine gave me a copy of Hotel du Lac several decades ago. This novel seems to me one of her best; certainly it moved me profoundly and I will not soon forget it.

What is your favorite Brookner novel?

The title is a bit misleading since these linked short stories about a woman named Adrienne start when she is 28. However, they do follow her into her 50s, and they are about finding love and finding a place for herself in the world. And I do mean the world. It's refreshing to read stories set in locales ranging from Amsterdam to the south of France to Canada's Northwest Territories.

What I've learned from participating in critique groups and my poetry discussion group, as well as from writing this blog, is how very different people's tastes are, and even how different mine are depending on my mood and the circumstances. Sometimes I want an exciting thriller; sometimes a puzzle to work out. But sometimes I want something less challenging. The easy flow of van Zanten's narrative was the perfect thing for a long day of travel, changing flights and enduring layovers in listless airports.

As I say, the narrative flow is good, and the voice interesting, if mild. The stories contain some unusual events such as a canoe trip on the mighty McKenzie River to attend a Native American pow wow. But mostly the stories catalogue the ups and downs of an ordinary life: love found and lost, the death of a parent, difficulties with teenaged children. I particularly enjoyed the humorous story about Adrienne's adventures with starting a matchmaking business.

There is a curious evenness of tone which under other circumstances might not have held my attention, but provided the restful interludes I needed during that long, difficult day. The lack of strong dramatic ups and downs building to a climax in part comes from the preponderance of narration. The stories are narrated in a calm and assured voice, with a few half-scenes (narration interrupted with some lines of dialogue). Where there are fully dramatised scenes, they tend to be mostly dialogue without the actions and reactions that ratchet up the dramatic emotion. Actions, as the cliché goes, speak louder than words.

To understand the difference between narration and scene, consider Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie where Tom stands at the edge of the stage narrating the story, and then he stops and is silent while Laura, her mother, and the Gentleman Caller actually act out a scene. The percentage of narration to scene has changed over time. Lengthy narrative passages are common in the 19th century novels I grew up on. These days, perhaps due to the influence of movies, most novels tend to minimize narration and go from scene to scene. The writer's challenge is to find the correct balance of narration, scene, and half-scene for the particular story she is telling.

Although at first I was disconcerted by the absence of the dramatic structure I've come to expect, this collection of stories turned out to be the ideal thing for me on that particular day, and I enjoyed the quietly intelligent voice accompanying me on my travels.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a digital copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

As the title declares, this novel retells the story of The Tempest. Set in 1961 on Trinidad and the small island of Chacachacare off its coast, Prospero's Daughter portrays the intersection of a handful of lives as England's empire withdraws. Assistant commissioner, John Mumsford, has come to Trinidad because as a white man and an Englishman he can live the life of a lord that his middle-class birth could not provide at home. Change is in the air, though, with calls for independence, and Mumsford is not certain he can trust his Trinidadian commissioner, whose white skin does not preclude the African blood most people assume runs in the veins of Trinidad's French Creoles.

Mumsford is sent to Chacachacare to investigate an alleged rape of a white girl by her black servant, the Englishman's worst nightmare. But he has also received a note from Ariana, the other servant in the household, who says that there was no rape and that the two are in love. The household is run by Peter Gardner, a disgraced and reclusive scientist, who came out from England with his young daughter, Virginia, several years earlier. He took over the house from Carlos, then a young, newly orphaned boy, claiming that he had bought it from the dying servant who had been caring for Carlos and the servant girl, Ariana. The only other inhabitants of the island are a small leper colony and a doctor who serves them.

In secret the educated Carlos calls Gardner by the magician's name because, like Prospero, Gardner has used his botanical knowledge to create a world of his own, with grass that does not need watering and polka-dotted flowers. To make space for this fragment of England made even better by his successful experiments, he has destroyed the native habitat, cutting down the fruit trees planted by Carlos's father and taming the terrifying jungle to remain at a safe distance.

I was recently in St. Croix where the native trees were cut down to create sugar plantations, plantations that failed when the bottom dropped out of the sugar market. I'd never thought of The Tempest in terms of ecology, but of course it is the story of an outsize ego believing that his power is absolute; he can do whatever he wants on his island. But we are not islands, and the outside world intrudes. As we have learned, the effects of ecological disasters are not limited to the area where they occur.

This story is enthralling, keeping me up nights to finish it. Nunez's descriptions are gorgeous, evoking the tangled beauty of the island, the cold precision of Gardner's house, the delicate carvings of birds and flowers made by Carlos's father. The relationship between Carlos and Virginia is delicately traced, believable and sweet. Brave Ariana is the one my heart aches for, but it is Mumsford who most interests me. He may start the story as a rigidly prejudiced and fearful Englishman, but he reveals unexpected strengths. Like its precursor, this is a story about power, the power of knowledge, the power of love, the power of courage, the power of integrity. It brilliantly brings out the relationship of power to class and race buried in Shakespeare's play.

Who knew a book about a group of elderly people contemplating death could be so funny? Dame Lettie Colston is the first to start receiving the phone calls from a mysterious stranger who says, “Remember you must die.” She's a managing sort of woman who spends a lot of time changing her will. She suspects her nephew of making the calls to get his inheritance quicker, so she cuts him out. Then she suspects the retired Inspector she's hired to investigate the calls, so she cuts him out of her will too.

At that point her brother, Godfrey, starts getting the calls, as do other friends. One of them, Alec, has made a lifelong study of aging, taking meticulous, cross-referenced notes on his subjects: friends and family, expecting to learn the secrets to staying young. He especially likes tracking the progress of Godfrey's wife, Charmian, as her dementia waxes and wanes. He also likes to stir up trouble, especially if he can check the person's pulse and blood pressure before and after.

They all visit Miss Taylor, Charmian's former maid, who in spite of having the most common sense has been reduced by advanced age and disability to residing in a public ward for elderly women. They are all addressed as “Granny” and treated as though mentally incompetent. Some of them are, but not Miss Taylor. Her reaction to the calls, when Dame Lettie consults her, is that she should ignore them. She says, “‘Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and dying as on a battlefield.'”

The calls continue as the various characters pursue their goals, whether it's getting the new Ward Sister transferred or indulging in blackmail. In the course of their activities, secrets from their past trickle out. Although I laughed, I did come to care about these friends and enemies who are in the last stages of waiting for the up elevator. I hadn't read any of Sparks's books except The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie back in my teens, but am now inspired to go back and look them up. Sparks herself passed away in 2006.

In her introduction, Janet Watts calls this novel from 1930 “sombre in colour and mood.” I agree, and yet, like its protagonist, the unprepossessing middle-aged housewife, Grace, there is something about it that attracts and holds me, almost I might say enchants me.

Grace's existence in a provincial town in northern England is humdrum indeed. She has Annie to do the housework and cooking, so there is little for her to do all day while her husband Tom is at the office. She lumbers along, thinking that “Nothing mattered, nothing would ever happen for her again.” She has only one friend, Nora, who occasionally drops by to take her for a drive. Tom, himself, has no friends, aside from some people he goes fishing or plays golf with on weekends. Tom's goal in life is to keep everything “comfortable and jolly”, but Grace does not have even such a slight ambition.

Nora has left behind her gay, debutante years to keep house for her morose husband, Gerry, and their two rowdy boys. She possesses all the vitality that Grace lacks, but even Nora sometimes longs for “rest from this perpetual crumbling of the edges, this shredding out of one's personality upon minute obligations and responsibilities. She wanted, even for a few moments, to feel her own identity peacefully floating apart from them all.”

The two couples' lives are upended when handsome, cosmopolitan, young Hugh Miller comes to town to try his luck working for his uncle who owns the firm where Tom works. His sister briefly joins him; she had known Nora in the old days but has managed to retain her sophisticated lifestyle. This bright twosome bring home to Grace, Tom, Nora and Gerry just how dull their lives are.

As I started the book I could not imagine that people could lead such unexamined lives. But Lehmann gently teases out what is good in them, their small wounds and disappointments. We see Nora coaxing Gerry back from depression, Grace unselfconsciously entertaining the dazzling Hugh. We hear Gerry's thoughts, and it is the beauty of the sentences that raise all this above the mundane: “in the bitter times, he whispered to himself, looking with a faint hope to the years ahead: Calm of mind, all passion spent. But in the worse he knew that he would make a desert around him and call it peace.”

Even Hugh, who seems to lead such a charmed life, suffers his own grief and comes to realise his own shortcomings. I think it is his view of Grace that interests me and in turn interests me in her. Initially dismissing her as a frumpy older woman, he is charmed by her light touch, her sense of the ridiculous. He stays for tea and is unexpectedly drawn to Grace. Not romantically, this is a much more subtle connection, a fragile one. I think it is my curiosity about such an unusual relationship that draws me on.

And the power of Lehmann's prose. Here is Grace, remembering the beech woods of her childhood: “She went into the wood and saw the first wild flash of the bluebells. They ran away into the shadowy distance on every hand, flooding the ground with urgent blue—with a blue that cried like the sound of violins. She sat beneath the smooth, snake-striped, coiling branches of her chosen tree, and saw beneath her a creaming tide of primroses, clotting the mossy slopes, brimming in the hollows.”

Far from sombre, such sentences take me back to the woods above Robin Hood's Bay where the bluebells did indeed run away. This is a book about that stage of life when we realise our choices are narrowing, and we can't help but wonder if it's too late to change our way. I feel privileged to have been given access to the inner lives of these people, to have my perplexity cajoled into compassion.

This new novel by Helen Dunmore provides what seems to me to be a realistic portrayal of life in Stalin's Russia. It takes place in Leningrad in 1952 where a young married couple is trying to live an ordinary life while navigating the treacherous currents of a society where everyone fears the arbitrary and violent Ministry of State Security. Andrei, a doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, have no children of their own but include Anna's teen-aged brother Kolya in their family. The three of them are alone in the world, having barely survived the seige of Leningrad during World War II, which ended only nine years previously. Their quiet life is thrown into disarray when Andrei is called in to treat the son of Volkov, a high-ranking government official.

The details of the story, the conversations, the descriptions all convey the suspicion and fear that trickled through every action and interaction. When their neighbors complain about Kolya's piano playing, Andrei and Anna know how easily they can be denounced and limit Kolya's practicing. Both are committed to their work, but struggle to weigh its demands against the family's safety.

I'd previously read two books by Helen Dunmore, though not The Seige, her novel about the seige of Leningrad. She has clearly done a lot of research about the city and the period, but it sits lightly on the story, providing just enough context. My book club praised the story. We all cared about the characters from the start. I think Andrei's obvious integrity and compassion for the child at the center of his dilemma won us over.

We talked a lot about the title. It distracted some people, making them wonder who was going to betray whom. But in discussion we found many larger resonances of the idea, from Volkov's betrayal of his own humanity to Stalin's betrayal of the original ideals of Communism. There are also those who do not betray, the friends who help the beleaguered couple.

This is not a period I might have chosen to read about if my book club had not selected this book, but I'm glad I did. Experiencing the emotional climate of this repressive regime reminded me of Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout where a whispering campaign against a small town's grieving pastor takes him to the edge of the abyss. The outcome of Strout's book reminds me of what I value in our society. The outcome of Dunmore's book reminds me of what I value in people everywhere: integrity and loyalty.

Sadowsky has written a wrenching memoir of her son's mental illness, which was eventually diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. The film A Beautiful Mind, based on a true story, characterises the most common course of the disease: onset in young adulthood, auditory hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and social disfunction. It is not multiple personality disorder, now commonly know as dissociative identity disorder, but rather a disruption of cognitive processes. It is far more common than I thought; Sadowsky quotes a doctor saying “‘One in every hundred people in the world suffers from this illness at some time or other. More than a quarter of all hospital beds in the world are filled with patients who suffer from schizophrenia.'”

As a parent, my heart ached seeing the disease gradually take hold in their beautiful son in spite of the family's best efforts. Initially they were stymied by a lack of information, as Sadowsky and her husband battered themselves against the medical profession trying to get a diagnosis.

Still, the book is not as dark as I expected. There are many moments of joy and humor and family togetherness. There's a lot of love in this family. But Sadowsky's fear and worry for her son come through, as well as at times fear of him, what he might do in the grip of a delusion. I appreciate her honesty and openness. This is no saccharine after-school special. We are not spared her frustration at his limitations and failed attempts at independence or her weariness at having to go through it all again when he relapses or stops taking his medicine. Most difficult is her concern about her two daughters; not only were their parents distracted by their brother's needs, they could not bring friends home to a house made chaotic and were themselves sometimes targets of their brother's violence.

Most frustrating is the lack of support for the family. They were not given a diagnosis for years because the doctor was hesitant to diagnose someone so young as schizophrenic. Instead, the parents were openly blamed for causing their son's problems, either through neglect or malicious intent. Once he was diagnosed, the mental health professionals continued to blame the parents—in the face of overwhelming proof that parents cannot cause schizophrenia—and refused to offer any advice on how to deal with their depressed and sometimes violent son.

Through all the fear and anger and frustration, what is most apparent is the love, not just for this difficult and damaged boy, but between all members of the family. Sadowsky reminds us of the smart and generous child, the avid surfer that David had been. Her husband does not leave a difficult situation, as many do. The daughters complain, but in a supportive way.

Sadowsky did not begin to get answers or assistance until she discovered a support group. It was in Israel where she lives and conducted in Hebrew. She went on to found one for English speakers and continues to speak to parents and health professionals about her family's experience and what can be done to improve support for those suffering from schizophrenia and their families. She also works to erase the stigma associated with mental illness that hampered her family every step of the way.

The author sent me a copy of the book to review, knowing from this website that I share her goal of confronting social stigmas. I approached the book with caution. I knew there would be tears, and there were, but found comfort in the love binding this family together. I read the book all in one go, unable to pull myself away. I'm grateful to Sadowsky for giving us this authentic account and encourage everyone to read it and re-examine your ideas of mental illness. Check out her website for more resources for caregivers: http://www.jillsmentalhealthresources.wordpress.com