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I hadn’t read this classic since my schooldays but bits of it have stayed with me over the years, particularly Lucinda Matlock: “It takes life to love Life.” Rereading it now was a mixed experience. The pieces hardly seemed like poems to me, but rather pieces of conversation, almost completely devoid of imagery, and few with any subtlety of meaning.

What they do have is emotion and plenty of it. Each poem is meant to be a single person speaking to us from beyond the grave, as though we were walking through a cemetery and the tombstones began to talk to us. They do not speak to us of Heaven or Hell but instead are preoccupied with their earthly concerns: married couples continue their hostilities; the soldier killed in the Philippines debates just and unjust wars; the unrepentant capitalist applauds his own actions while those ruined by him vent their bitterness.

What I found most interesting were the intertwining fates of the individuals, how they affected one another, and how unaware of each other they were. So many secrets and dreams and disappointments. In fact, the book seemed to me more like a novel, and I was gratified to find when I picked up his autobiography Across Spoon River that he originally envisioned the book as a novel. The autobiography gave the sources for many of Spoon River’s denizens and had the same rather peevish tone of many of the poems, as though it were written to get back at everyone who had harmed Masters, or not appreciated him sufficiently.

For the most part, the poems are depressing reading. Yet the book—with its tales of crooked politicians and hypocritical preachers, judges and newspaper editors who have been bought and paid for—is curiously contemporary. One friend of mine says that she finds it horribly depressing to think that people have not changed over the centuries. I, on the other hand, am comforted to think that today’s appalling scandals, reckless destruction, and blatant power-grabbing are nothing new. Greed, dishonesty and selfishness have always been a part of human nature, just as generosity, self-sacrifice, and integrity have been. And no society has been completely successful at taming the one while nurturing the other.

I didn’t intend to write about this book, thinking I had nothing to say about it. However, the three novellas have stuck with me for weeks like a tune that I cannot get out of my head.

The first concerns a vocal group that has received a grant to spend two weeks in a Belgian chateau preparing for a difficult concert. Told mostly from the point of view of one of the women, the director’s wife, the story teases out the harmonics and dissonances of the ever-changing relationships between the three men and two women who make up the group.

The second follows a woman who goes on an archeological dig in Whitby, England, taking along her nightmares from a stint in Bosnia. She encounters a man with a dog and finds herself in the middle of a two hundred-year-old murder mystery.

The third, oddly enough, relates the adventures of two small children brought up in total isolation by their parents in an Arctic research station. What is most remarkable about this story is the way Faber captures the world-view of such children, their beliefs and magical thinking.

I picked up the book because my attention was caught by the settings: I’ve been to Belgium and explored its dark woods and golden fields. I’ve spent time in Whitby, climbed the steps to the Abbey ruins, and walked along the Marine Parade. I haven’t been to either pole but, buried in Scott’s journals or Cherry-Gerard’s memoirs, sometimes feel as though I have.

What has stuck with me, however, is not so much the pleasure of revisiting places I love as it is the characters. The woman in Whitby kept saying, “‘I want. I want.'” So fundamentally human. And yet so poignant, with its unspecified object. In these stories, people fumble toward understanding what they want, sometimes aware of, but more often disregarding the effect their pursuit is having on others.

One reason I read so much is that motives—my own and those of others—remain so murky to me. I search stories for clues, motifs, signatures. I find people who want without knowing what for, who recognise a little too late that the random notes are actually a tune, who reach for a resolution that slips away even as their fingers seem to close on it. I took comfort from the children, who at least understood what they were looking for when they found it.

Recently, there has been some discussion on DorothyL, a mystery maillist, as to whether the inclusion of details about the detective’s private life adds to or detracts from a mystery, with readers’ opinions predictably split pretty equally. Some readers are interested in only the mystery itself and don’t want to waste time on the detective’s home life, while others find the personal information adds to their understanding and appreciation of the character.

My feelings fall somewhere in the middle. I like some information about the detective, if only because real detectives don’t work a case every second of every day, so a little of their private lives helps me suspend my disbelief. Too much, however, or the wrong type and it intrudes on the story.

For example, in Robin Paige’s otherwise very good series of Edwardian mysteries about a husband-and-wife team, Kate Sheridan (the wife) writes novels and considers her authorial persona as a separate person—named Beryl—with whom she carries on conversations and arguments. This is just a little too precious for me.

Or take Deborah Crombie’s excellent series about Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Beautiful writing and delightfully tangled plots, but they are somewhat ruined for me by Gemma’s affair with her boss—Duncan—and the way this is not only presented as okay but also as without any repercussions, no jealousy from colleagues, no issues of power and authority, no cross-over between the professional and personal relationships. I find this unrealistic. In the later novels Gemma no longer works directly for Duncan.

I prefer mysteries like P.D. James’s series about Adam Dalgliesh or Ian Rankin’s Rebus, where we get just enough about the personal lives of the detectives to round them out but not enough to intrude on the story.

The Babes in the Wood is part of Rendell’s series about Chief Inspector Wexford. Two teenagers and the woman who was supposed to be babysitting for them have disappeared. It is not clear whether foul play is involved, and the investigation is stalled for some time while the rain-swollen rivers and lakes are searched on the assumption that the three missing people have accidentally drowned.

There is a great deal about Wexford’s home life and his concerns about one of his daughters, so much so that in another book I would be seriously bothered. I didn’t mind here, however, because the investigation stretches over several months so of course more of the detective’s life outside of work must intrude. Even more importantly, Wexford’s domestic concerns add a rich layer of understanding to the main story. I found the book entirely satisfying, not least because the ending, when we finally got there, seemed not only right but inevitable.

I expected to start out this entry by saying that this was the freshest and funniest book I’d read in a long time. My bark of laughter at the first sentence sent my surprised cat shooting off my lap and running to hide under the couch. I never LOL at a book. Well, almost never. However, the further into the book I got, still snorting at the narrator’s wit, the more I saw the story’s serious side.

This is the first-person narrative of Ruby Lennox, born in 1952 to the owners of a pet shop in York, England. First person can be tricky and often is a turn-off for me, but here it is handled brilliantly. Atkinson captures the voice and viewpoint of a child at every stage of life, from the wonder and egocentricity of a baby up through the insolence and depression of a teenager. Woven into Ruby’s story are the stories of her family. In a series of footnotes, Ruby bares the complicated tangles of their relationships, the losses they suffer, and the dreams they are unable to fulfill. What gradually emerges is the way reckless choices affect the later generations.

If this sounds a bit like Charming Billy in theme, it is, although the execution is totally different. The tone here is about as far as you can get from the gentle, ineluctable recounting of McDermott’s book. Also, focusing on so many people rather than just one necessarily diffuses the impact. However, the final picture is similar: communities, families held together with stories and secrets, needing in the end each other in ways they never expected.

This family included generation after generation of children at risk—ignored, considered more of a burden than anything else—and parents who were too self-centered to notice or care what impact their behavior had on the children. As a parent myself, and one who immoderately adores her brilliant and talented offspring, I found the selfishness of these parents incomprehensible, until the weight of their lives, particularly those of the women, and the aridity of their choices made me—however reluctantly—sympathetic. Without birth control, without the rights women enjoy today, women of as little as fifty years ago had to bear child after child, long past what their physical strength and financial resources could sustain.

Ruby’s funny and surprisingly sweet story left me thinking about the fragility of the family, how tenuous its structure is, how easy it is to loose the ties that McDermott celebrated. People disappear, homes are broken up or abandoned or burnt. Memory and the meaning of the past can slip away before we know it, leaving us with only a photograph and a silver locket.

I followed All Souls with this story of another Irish family embedded in its community, this time in New York. Fiction rather than memoir, this book was deeply moving. Much has been written about Charming Billy so everyone probably knows that it uses the funeral and wake of Billy Lynch to explore the grip of the past and the strength of a community’s ties.

Usually I’m disappointed when I finally get to a book that has been praised and hyped and awarded prizes, but Charming Billy was even better than I had been led to believe. Reading it was like having my hair combed by someone whom I trusted completely. McDermott took the tangled mess and calmly picked apart the knots until by the end each strand had been smoothed and laid in place. Quiet, unassuming, this book led me deep into the hearts of Billy and the people around him until I felt as though I knew them all too and had grown up in this tight-knit family with its joys and griefs and compromises.

I’m still trying to figure out how McDermott did all that. I was never confused by the large cast of characters. Somehow she spiraled around their stories until each appeared clear and distinct in my mind. And the way the past was brought forward and gently inserted into the present. I’m going to have to read it again and possibly a third time before I begin to understand the craft that went into this book.

What the book brought home to me was how the stories we tell about each other bind us together. They become the legends and the common legacy of our community. I usually mistrust these tales, assuming that they are distorted or exaggerated. They can be so wrong and that lie becomes what is remembered about the person, as Milan Kundera in Immortality brought out so effectively.

Perhaps not lies, just ignorance or misunderstandings. My mother liked to tell stories about her children, putting her own opinions in our mouths. So, for example, she told one sister that I disliked her husband (my brother-in-law) so much that I could not bear to be in the same room with him, when in fact I like him very much and enjoy his company immensely. At first, I thought my mother was bored and trying to cause mischief, but now I think she did not even realise what she was doing.

Charming Billy opened my eyes to how we enchant ourselves with these tales and the way being lied to is the flip side of believing. Stories are powerful, especially those we tell ourselves about ourselves, but their power is not just destructive. Their power can be creative, and they become our common memories, the currency of our shared lives, the very fibers of our network of relationships with friends and family.

I cannot recommend this memoir highly enough. MacDonald’s prose is straight-forward and engaging as he tells this story of growing up in the projects in Southie. I happened to pick it up just after watching The Departed and found the book a refreshing real-life look at the symbiosis of drug lords, politicians and policemen in South Boston. I never lived in Southie, but spent a lot of time there and in Roxbury in the mid-Seventies when I was considering moving there. MacDonald’s tales of project life ring true to me.

Since the story takes place in the Seventies and Eighties, it captures the progress of the drug trade, beginning with the—in retrospect—almost idyllic time when the kids idolized the local marijuana-peddler because of his wealth and his commitment to the neighborhood and carrying through the hard times: the crime and killings after cocaine and heroin took over. The book almost becomes a threnody as MacDonald memorializes not only his lost siblings but others from the neighborhood, with page after page of visits to the local funeral home to bury friends. I was lucky that when I was living in poverty, it was the Seventies, before the cocaine epidemic hit my town.

However, the book is for the most part upbeat. The individual members of this large, close-knit family are clearly drawn and their pranks and shenanigans lovingly recounted. Kids find a way to have fun, even living in the projects. One of the most remarkable things about the book is the way his voice migrates from that of a child, aware of the things a child would be aware of, to that of an adult. He is unapologetic about the love they had for their neighborhood, particularly the all-Irish project that was their territory.

Sometimes your territory—the place where everyone has your back—is all you have. Within the context so brilliantly evoked here, the protests against court-ordered busing in 1974 make sense. Racism had its part, for sure, but it was more that people who had little else wanted to hold onto the fabric of their lives. And there was the excitement. Who could be bored when there were marches and protests going on? One of the things I hadn’t realised was how many children dropped out of school with parental blessing rather than be bused to Roxbury, leaving them vulnerable to crime and drugs.

MacDonald presents both the good and the bad sides of Southie: the interconnectedness of a community where neighbors watched out for each other, the secrecy and refusal to admit that the gangsters who ran the place were not actually a source of protection. He was shocked to find out that the most powerful gangster of them all was collaborating with the feds. At the same time, though, MacDonald rejoiced to find, for example, people still giving quarters to a street person known as Bobby Got-a-Quarter without his even having to ask. For me as well, the best thing about my years in poverty was the strong support of my community of friends.

I have a friend who is boy-crazy, even now. When she is obsessed with a man, she can go on for hours about him, dissecting every minor nuance of his behavior, every inflection of his words. It can be quite boring. However, I put up with it (for a while, anyway) because when she is not obsessing about a man, she applies that same relentless analysis to books, films, music, politics—the interests that we share. Plus, she can be a lot of fun, coming up with bizarre and hilarious escapades.

Similarly, the early stories in this collection put me off. There was way too much boyfriend angst: does he like me? will he call? should I call him? is it too soon to call him again? The fact that the narrator was usually middle-aged, if not older, added a fillip of interest, but no more than that.

However, the stories where romance becomes secondary, such as the title story, are truly remarkable, full of precise description and insight into human behavior. I love these little windows into the motivations of others. For example, “A Very Nice Day” chronicles a Sunday-lunch party at the home of friends, Patrick and Oliver, and nails the relationship between them in a single sentence about Patrick having prepared the not-very-good luncheon because he does not like to admit that Oliver is the better cook. Immediately, Oliver became clear to me as well: patient, generous, forbearing.

The stories I liked made me go back and look at the others I had dismissed. I found much that had lingered in my mind despite my impatient reading: images such as a living room being an archeological dig, compact descriptions of life in a particular time and place, the nuanced reactions of a reporter (described as “almost old but lively” – how precise is that?) when interviewing women in a shelter for victims of domestic violence.

It is a shame that women are so often pushed to write romance, as if that is the only plot-line available to them. I have heard it in creative writing classes, always addressed to only the women in the class: I liked that story, but I would have liked to hear more about the husband. Doesn’t the main character have a boyfriend? It would be more interesting if the narrator had a love interest. You should include some steamy bedroom scenes.

I think the marginalisation of romance is one reason I like mysteries. In the ones that I enjoy most, if there is any romance at all, it is secondary or even tertiary to the plot. Take Prime Suspect for example. Even more than the crime-solving, I was fascinated by the way this series looked at a woman working in a male-dominated field. Jane Tennison’s relationships with her co-workers, bosses and subordinates, were picked apart and their nuances and subtle changes made visible.

Our lives are not just about romance, not even primarily about romance. We have many stories to tell.

I was drawn to this novel by the settings: southern Italy, Rome, New York. The book evokes these places, particularly the austere beauty of Puglia’s olive trees and red earth, while pulling me into an intriguing story of several generations of women, all told—thankfully—from the single viewpoint of the youngest, Alina.

The story also covers some of the territory of the wonderful miniseries La Meglio Gioventu which I saw recently as part of my Italian class: the violent student uprisings of the 70’s, the organising of the Red Brigade, the assassinations of key political figures. Although not the main thrust of either story, each has a character who is convicted of terrorism and examines how that character changes during her prison years.

Remorse. There are people who are paralysed by the fear of making the wrong decision, people who end up doing nothing. But what about the person who makes a choice, who acts and then finds the consequences not just unexpected but horrific? How do you deal with the remorse? And what about the victims? Is forgiveness possible? Is it enough to move on without forgiving?

My book club read Ian McEwan’s Atonement last year and couldn’t stop talking about it. We spent a long time discussing what it meant to atone for something you had done, how you might do that, and if indeed it was even possible. We compared atonement and redemption, teasing out the differences. We looked at the structures various religions have created to contain and control these needs. I had just been catching up on Joss Whedon’s Angel series, which (in among the funny quips and comic book aspects) had some interesting things to say about the means of atonement and the possibility of redemption.

It is hard for me to separate the rational responses to remorse—justifications, good intentions, recompense for the victims where possible, good works in general—from the emotional response—the crushing responsibility, the endless self-flagellation, the fear of doing harm that keeps you from future action.

One of the things I liked best about this story was the way that the people did not give up on each other. No matter how awful the betrayal or how hurtful the neglect, they found a way to let go of old grievances and reconnect with each other. Add to that the rich Italian light and the warmth of sandstone tiles under bare feet, and you have a perfect read for a late winter ice-storm.

Having been involved with traditional music and dance for some years, I was looking forward to reading one of Sharyn McCrumb’s ballad novels. This one, set in Tennessee and North Carolina, centers around a ballad brought from Islay in 1759 by a young sailor. The book meanders between the story of that sailor and his present-day descendents, particularly a young folksinger named Lark. Unfortunately, it also dips into the stories of several neighbors, four intermediary descendents, a rival folksinger, a hostel owner in the next state, and a young 911 volunteer.

Yes, yet another book muddied by too many main characters. We do usually stay with each one for a full chapter, and certainly they are vividly drawn. The afterword gives a clue: apparently, the historical characters are the author’s own ancestors. I heard that a review of Small Island (see the entry for this blog from 19 February) complained that the story suffered from the author’s decision to stick closely to historical events. I think this book has a similar problem. The story of the original sailor—Malcolm—interleaved with the present in interesting ways, but the intermediary descendents were unnecessary and distracting.

The scenes from Malcolm’s time are vividly brought to life. From his childhood on Islay to his life on board ship and his adventures in America, I was pulled into another world. I know Morristown, New Jersey, pretty well, but I had never considered its role in the Revolutionary War until Malcolm explained its strategic location. I felt his discomfort in society, even the small society of his family, and his desire to strike out for more and more remote places. I understood his recognition, when he saw the mountains in what is now Tennessee, that this was where he belonged.

I enjoyed the descriptions of the mountain culture, particularly the changing roles of the songs and the singers. The contrast between the traditional music and professional country music interested me: Lark’s reflections on what makes a career successful, sailors exchanging songs to pass the time and make the work easier, cousins singing on the back porch. I appreciated the irony that the tradition of singing together almost died out over the need to have a performance-quality voice, while with today’s technology, a good voice is no longer so much of a necessity for a professional country singer—it’s gone full circle.

This story was not the first time I have heard the complaint that collectors of traditional music—songcatchers—paid the local men and women who sang the songs for them little or nothing, and then went on to copyright the songs as their own. Legal, yes, but not right. However, knowing what I do about Cecil Sharp, the collector who started the whole thing back in the early 20 th century, I have to agree with the character in this book’s assessment that he was not out for financial gain, but was motivated primarily by a desire to preserve the songs. I am so glad that he did.

What are we missing today that ought to be preserved? It’s odd knowing that people are writing histories about events in which I participated, such as the revival of morris dancing in the latter half of the 20 th century, the second revival. I wish now that I had paid better attention, kept better records. What we were doing didn’t seem all that significant.

If this novel hadn’t been for book club, I would have put it down after fifty pages or so. I simply couldn’t work up any interest in what happened, mostly because of the way the story jumped from one character to another, not staying with anyone long enough to do more than sketch out his/her character and story. By way of contrast, in Small Island Andrea Levy manages multiple viewpoints very well but she limits herself to four and stays with each one for chapters at a time. Here, having my attention dragged away from a character every few pages made it impossible for me to care about any of them.

Apparently there is no main character. The person we start with, Jerome, is promising and his situation interesting, but then—aside from a couple of walk-throughs—he disappears for the rest of the book. I also would have liked to hear more about his brother Levi, who again is beautifully set up and then abandoned. Or their mother who gets two or three good scenes. Or Carl, the young poet. Smith has come up with a plethora of potentially intriguing characters; she could have written an entire book about any one of them.

Another reason the book dragged was the triteness of the situation. Please. I am so sick of middle-aged men’s angst when they cheat on their wives with another woman and/or a student. My hopes for a different perspective from this young writer were dashed when she chose to present those scenes through the eyes of—yes—the cheating middle-aged man. I can’t tell if the author adequately captures a point of view so foreign to her; the man certainly sounds like all the other cheating middle-aged men in the canon of American Lit.

The sections set in England come alive in a way that the rest of the book does not. The description of Hampstead Heath in particular is fabulous. Settings on our side of the pond do not work so well. For example, the family’s house is described simply as “a typical New England house” yet it is clearly neither a triple-decker nor a Cape Cod nor anything else particular to the region. And the occasional misplaced British idiom voiced by an American character is further distracting.

There was another reason I hung on to the end. Having just written an essay on beauty, I was hoping for some interesting insights or shrewd questions about the subject, something a little more than the observation that men like to have sex with beautiful girls or that beautiful girls want to be appreciated for more than their looks even as they make use of them. Smith is certainly capable of going deeper: she gives us a brief but powerful description of a shy student’s thoughts about two pictures. Unfortunately, that is the student’s only appearance.

Another scene I loved involved another student revealing to a professor how students use references to tomatoes to describe their classes. Hilarious. And some of the family scenes, such as the mayhem getting everyone out the door in the morning, ring true. Smith uses body language well: an insecure young woman tottering to a party on high heels, a couple positioning themselves on a staircase while conversing. She succeeds, too, at capturing the feel of much of today’s media with all the frenetic jump cuts and samplings (a chunk of Forster, some Roth, a little Cheever). However, in doing so, she sacrifices the depth and multi-dimensionality that make characters and their stories come alive.