This stunning debut novel was my book club’s selection for this month. William Talmadge’s life is a quiet one, tending his apple and apricot trees, selling his produce in town. His movements as he inspects his trees, grafts a branch, fixes coffee are slow and deliberate, well-suited to the pace of life in rural Washington State at the end of the 19th century. When two girls show up, both pregnant and starving, he feeds and protects them. They are feral, too fearful to come close, grabbing the plates of food and withdrawing to the woods to eat.

A nurturing man, Talmadge has created this orchard starting with the two ailing apple trees that he and his mother and sister found on the land back in 1857. His mother passed only three years later, and he cared for his sister until she wandered off into the woods only two years after that, and not found again. He searched for the 17-year-old, helped by his friend, Clee, a mute Nez Perce, leader of a band of horse wranglers who stopped in Talmadge’s valley a couple of times a year.

There are many silences in this book: Clee’s muteness, the sisters’ refusal to talk to Talmadge, the secrets later that blossom and spread. Later, when Talmadge has lost one of the girls, “a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders.” And later, sitting at a campfire with Clee, Talmadge reflects on the sound of the horses:

The sound was loud and soft at the same time, like the sound upon which other sound was built. You didn’t hear the horses until you listened for them; and then they were very loud. Already Talmadge was becoming used to them. How that presence equated with silence until it was gone, and then you understood what silence really was.

I was entranced by the beauty and power of the prose, feeling as though I could happily drown in the luscious paragraphs, the startling turn of phrase, the unexpected thrust. Part 1, the first 90 pages, simply blew me away. After that, the story loses some momentum, but by then I wanted to follow Talmadge’s story to the end. There are some flaws in the book, which I will mention since this is a blog about the craft of writing (usually), but let me reinforce that this is a beautiful book.

Though the members of my book club disagreed about some things—one person thought the girls’ background was preposterous given the time period while others of us found it believable—we all agreed that other than Talmadge the characters were rather flat. We just didn’t see enough of them beyond a single dimension. The one other character who seems to be developed, the younger of the two girls, struck some of us as inconsistent and not plausible.

We also found the remainder of the book, after Part 1, choppy. To some extent that came from the very short chapters in the later parts, some only a page or a half page or even a quarter of a page. Even the longer chapters are only 3-5 pages. The short bursts of text advanced the plot in flashes, without the sustained narrative of the first part. In some places, it felt a bit padded, leading me to wonder if the book started as a 90-page novella that was then stretched into a book. I also thought the last part should be cut entirely. A brief summary of the orchard’s life in the following decades, it raises many questions that it does not answer. I thought perhaps the author loved the place and the characters too much to let them go.

At a book release party today, several of us authors were talking about how essential a critique group is in the development of a manuscript. We need other eyes to tell us when we are being long-winded or too much in love with our own sentences. If I were editing this book, I would have trouble cutting it (other than that last part) because of being myself so in love with Coplin’s sentences. Still, I think it would have benefited from losing about a hundred pages. To our surprise, even the slack parts maintained the suspense, but one person astutely noted that the author shows us each character’s vulnerability and how each one is at risk, making us fear for them.

The Orchardist is not just a story of silences but also a story of solitude and how we communicate and what we owe to each other. In other words, exactly the kind of story I like. I especially loved the descriptions of Della learning to ride and to communicate with the horses. It reminded me of my struggle to learn to ride in my fifties and how the great benefit to me was learning to “listen” to the horse’s language.

Despite my few caveats, I recommend this book. It will take you away to another time and place, and you will be reluctant to return.

Have you read this novel? What did you think?

There are not enough hours in the day (or night) to read all the books I want to, as evidenced by the TBR (to be read) stacks threatening to take over a corner of my study. Reading one book leads me to read others, as The Rings of Saturn which I blogged about a few weeks ago sent me searching for a copy of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.

One area where my attention has been deficient is the Russian authors. I somehow missed reading them in school and, apart from Nabokov, never got around to reading them until recently. Prompted by my nephew, I did read War and Peace a couple of years ago, and now, driven by one of my book clubs, I’ve dipped my toe in Dostoyevsky’s oeuvre. Unfortunately I missed the discussion, but I’m grateful for the push.

This book precedes his famous novels. According to the Introduction (which, as always, I read only after finishing the story), it is a pivotal novel in his development as an author, leading him to find his own voice and themes. There is a brief chapter describing how the narrator meets a quiet, withdrawn man named Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff. When the man passes away, the narrator is given the pages of the narrative that make up the rest of the book. It turns out to be an account of the ten years Alexander Petrovitch spent in prison in Siberia.

As a nobleman, Alexander Petrovitch fears the other convicts while envying their camaraderie. He thinks that now they have a nobleman within their power, the men will take out on him their rage at the whole social class. Yet, as he gradually gets to know them, he is able to distinguish good characteristics from bad. The joy of the story for me lies in these vivid portraits of his fellow prisoners and the people who run the prison. It was this appreciation of the value of the lowest of the low that gave rise to his later novels.

Though it is called a novel, this story is based on Dostoyevsky’s own experience. He spent nine years in Siberia after being arrested for supposedly being a member of a revolutionary group. According to the Introduction by Nikolay Andreyev, in writing this book “Dostoyevsky was circumspect in his descriptions.” He toned down both the brutality of the conditions and the hostility of his fellow inmates.

There are a couple of lessons here for memoir writers. Dostoyevsky called the book a work of fiction at least in part to avoid retribution by the authorities. Many memoir writers worry—as they should—that by telling their own story, they will hurt family members or others. I believe that telling someone else’s story, as we inevitably must in telling our own, is a huge responsibility, not to be taken lightly. One solution is to call your book a novel, changing names and recognizable details to hide the identities of the other people.

Another solution is to treat the other people in your memoir with respect and compassion. While I wouldn’t go so far as Dostoyevsky’s decision to hide the truth of his experience, I do think we owe it to the other people in our memoir to present them objectively. No matter how badly they may have behaved, we can try to understand why they did what they did. I personally found that making that effort benefited me as well. It made me see them with new eyes and wiped out any remaining resentment.

This book is a good example of an episodic plot. As we follow Alexander Petrovitch’s days (and nights), we meet various people and incidents, but there is no overall rising action that leads to a climax and resolution, the more common plot structure for novels. Nonetheless, it held my attention and introduced me to characters I will not soon forget. I’m looking forward to reading more of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors.

Which Russian novel do you recommend?

This poetry chapbook from Broadkill Press caught my attention at the CityLit Festival last week at the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Black Narrows is an oyster shack town on an island in the Chesapeake Bay, an island slowly being submerged by the rising water level and the erosion of its edges. It is a fictional island, but based on actual islands now lost beneath the Bay.

Whitaker’s spare and strong poems describe the people of Black Narrows, and a way of life that has almost disappeared.

At least at the edge of the land,
before ocean swallows all hope,
we know what we want . . . .

There are young boys skating on the ice on Narrows Marsh that cracks like “the snap of crab-backs over thumb”, joyfully racing down the sawgrass-lined channels. And Ally with her rum flask and cigar. There is John Max who “stole / the backside oysters off the beds laid by Smith, / Sharp and Floyd.” And Marie Countee who came as a new bride to live a fantasy of being a waterman’s wife, who has to learn to pry oysters from their beds and pace within the narrow limits of her walls. Folks so poor they save scrapes of material in Mason jars to use as patches.

There are work songs that capture the rhythm of the old sea chanties. And songs about unruly drunken nights. There are some poems about those who leave, going up the coast to cities where they can make their lonely money, and those who stay behind, “who will not leave the marsh until it is broken.” Those too old to leave light their stoves and drink chicory and make meal from horse corn.

Together the poems build a portrait of a place now lost, or nearly so, and its people. Whether they are yelling their drinking songs or quietly going mad, these people will touch you. You will not soon forget them.

What other books have you read about the Chesapeake Bay, its islands or its borders, such as Virginia’s Tidewater or Maryland’s Eastern Shore?

I’ve been meaning to read this book for some time. It’s ostensibly a travel memoir, a record of a walking tour of Suffolk, on the east coast of England, that Sebald took in August, 1992. However, the narrator sometimes seems to be someone else. The title comes from one of the epigraphs, a quote from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia explaining that Saturn’s rings are probably “fragments of a former moon” that was destroyed when it came too near the planet.

The image works on several different levels, not just his circuitous route around Suffolk but also the wanderings of his mind. Each location prompts a memory, some bit of arcane knowledge or history which Sebald shares with us. For example, sitting on the beach near Southwold, he is reminded of the Battle of Sole Bay, when the Dutch fleet attacked in 1672 and of the painting at the Greenwich Maritime Museum. He imagines the scene in rich detail, the powder magazines exploding, the hulls burning down to the waterline, the yellowish-black smoke. He says that the body of the commander of the English fleet, the Earl of Sandwich, washed ashore a few weeks later, “the seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour.”

In another chapter, the bridge over the Blythe reminds him that the train that first ran on it was originally built for the Emperor of China. The story of how that came to happen is spun out through the Taiping rebellion, the Opium Wars, several emperors, Charles George Gordon (later of Khartoum fame), a scheming dowager empress and her silkworms.

In other chapters we learn about herrings, an Anglo-irish rebel, Joseph Conrad, Norfolk’s silk industry, and a housekeeper who obeyed her employer’s injunction never to speak to him and as a result was left a fortune, among much else—all of it fascinating. And almost all of it tinged with melancholy. He visits the once-thriving towns of Suffolk that are now run-down, remembering the luxury hotels and mansions that have now disappeared or become schools or hospitals. He walks across scrub that was once fields for the flocks of sheep required by the booming wool trade, now gone. His stories are illustrated by grainy black and white photographs, quirky evocations of a remembered past.

He ruminates about the things that are lost, things that have been destroyed or have disintegrated, such as the windmills “whose white sails revolved over the marshes of Halvergate and all along the coast”, dismantled after WWI. It is not surprising that he checked into a hospital at the end of his tour.

The narrator is working on a translation of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, a 1658 philosophical “Discourse” prompted by the discovery of some Bronze Age burial urns in Norfolk. While talking about various burial customs, Browne, a devout Christian, reflects on the transitory nature of our achievements in this life. References to Browne crop up in Sebald’s narrative, from his presence at an anatomy lesson in Amsterdam, recorded by Rembrandt, to his catalogue of remarkable books and other artifacts that Sebald believes were mostly imaginary.

The fashion these days is for memoirs to be built primarily of dramatic scenes, held together by as little narration as possible. This book is an interesting hybrid because, though it is all narrated by the author, he infuses his stories with plenty of drama, enough to keep me reading through the night. Even with his stories of what has been lost or forgotten, I loved this book. It is one I will long treasure and return to. Saturn’s rings made of fragments of a moon also make a fitting image for these themes of memory and decay.

What comes to mind when you think of the east coast of England?

This quirky novel revolves around two people. One is Peter Straker, who lives in a decommissioned lighthouse on the Devon Coast, haunted by an event from his past. His only company consists of the voices from that event. Although he goes into the village via bike and boat to purchase groceries, he does not speak to anyone. He has not spoken aloud in years. The cliff is eroding at an ever-faster rate, ensuring that the lighthouse will soon fall into the sea. Straker, however, views this prospect with complacence. He hopes he will be in the lighthouse when it falls.

The other is Imogen Doody, a loud, prickly and inexplicably angry woman who works as a school caretaker. She has been left a dilapidated cottage in the village by her godfather and begins coming down on weekends to fix it up. She also begins to be curious about the godfather she never met, a friend of her parents whom they lost touch with early on. Fired by an ongoing love of the series of children's stories featuring Biggles, , she is intrigued to discover that her godfather was a pilot.

There are several mysteries to untangle. What events so damaged these two people? What happened to Doody's husband who inexplicably disappeared 25 years earlier? Can Straker ever come to terms with his past? Will these two people, both seriously lacking in social skills, ever come to communicate with each other?

Recently I came across the notion that all modern fiction may be about overcoming the personal isolation that is a consequence of urban life. While I know the cosy village life referred to as “Merrie England” never really existed, there was a certain groundedness in living in the same small area all of your life, among the same people. The need to find a way to get along with each other and to depend on each other's help is lost when we can change jobs and homes and even countries with ease. Our fractured existence, the idea goes, leaves us feeling rootless and alone.

Perhaps I have just been lucky, but I have have always found multiple warm and welcoming communities wherever I have landed. The community may be a neighborhood, or just as easily a book club, a writers' group, regulars at the skating rink, a community dance, or even people at your job. Any activity collects like-minded people who tend to take an interest in each other and can easily grow into a community as you meet again and again over the years.

Still, I agree that isolation and overcoming our fears and hesitations in order to connect with each other are important themes. They do not weigh heavily on this book, though. I quickly became invested in these two people and even in the others around them, their families, their adversaries. The pacing is good, with twists as they strike out in different directions trying to find answers or perhaps peace. The descriptions are outstanding, such as the booming wind that pummels the lighthouse and makes the suicides who regularly show up have to fight their way to the edge; they really have to want it to throw themselves over! Best of all, the ending satisfies.

Have you read any books that seem to trail off or stop abruptly without a satisfying ending?

I could just hear the pitch for this nonfiction book: a literary travel book like the huge bestseller by Elizabeth Gilbert, but going to double the number of countries and, instead of a vague goal of finding yourself, a fascinating goal of gauging reactions to Jane Austen's books, thus pulling in the legion of Austen fans. Its subtitle is A Year-Long Journey with Jane.

Although I haven't read the Gilbert book, I was intrigued by Smith's premise. Austen's novels, which she herself called “miniatures”, provide witty commentary on a narrow band of society: English landed gentry of the early 19th century. To say her plots are basically romances is to say that Joyce's Ulysses is the story of an ordinary day. Her books remain popular 200 years later because her characters capture our imagination; they are universal without being stereotypes. Austen's eye for detail gives readers a sense of living within that world. And we can delight in her linguistic wiles, used to delicately and subtly skewer pretension.

Easy enough for us in the Anglo-American world, but how would Austen's books resonate with Latin American readers? This is the question Smith set out to answer, taking a year to travel in Central and South America, leading book groups and teaching a course based on three of Austen's novels.

Her qualifications are excellent: an inventive writing and literature professor at a small university in California who has her Austen students do creative projects instead of a final paper, resulting in such mashups as Northanger Abbey in rhymed heroic couplets. She found that her students react personally to Austen's characters, saying that they know plenty of Mrs. Bennets or wanting to “dope slap” Marianne. Smith had even started studying Spanish, and wisely begins her year with an intensive language course in Guatemala. Other countries she visits are Ecuador, Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, and Mexico.

Smith's other quest was to identify the Austens of these countries. Readers in the U.S. unfortunately get little exposure to authors of other countries, the only exception being England. Even major Canadian authors cannot get recognition in the U.S. Only if an author wins the Nobel Prize or is vehemently promoted by someone powerful in the U.S. literary world will we even hear about them. So I loved this idea. She gives us lists of authors she learns about from each of the six countries and a little about each, but not the kind of literary commentary that made Reading Lolita in Tehran interesting to me. Still, I now have a much longer TBR list and there is a little more detail on her web site. She also runs across one of my favorite books, El Pinto de Batalles by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Her writing carries us through this light, entertaining memoir. She enlivens humorous descriptions of her adventures with details of local color such as feeding iguanas in Ecuador or attending a boxing match in Mexico. She gives us just the right amount of herself, enough to enjoy and participate in her reactions without overwhelming the story. I love that she allocates so much space to the people who join her book clubs and course, giving us their reactions and thoughts in their own words. I also love the diversity of the groups: from society matrons to working-class folks to academics. They provide her with plenty of recommendations for authors from their countries.

What Latin American authors have you read?

This book is subtitled: How artists and craftsmen make their way to mastery. What Smith does here is examine what it takes to have a meaningful life. “I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create.” Whether your practice is gardening, painting, writing or building boats, pursuing a creative artistic effort adds a richness to your life, not just a sense of accomplishment but joy.

And frustration. Smith looks at the things that get in our way. She suggests that these undertakings, whether art or craft, call for “common mental processes of mastery. One must work hard to learn technique and form, and equally hard to learn how to bear the angst of creativity itself.” (her italics) Individual chapters look in detail at aspects of this angst, such as fear, guilt, shame, and the perils of recognition. She compares these psychological obstacles to a milling mass of sheep blocking the road. One of the pleasures of the book for me are her inventive images.

The title comes from Henry James's Roderick Hudson where the character Rowland Mallet explains that an absorbing errand is necessary if you are to get out of yourself and stay out, thus achieving true happiness. Mallet is searching for a means of expression, saying “‘I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.'” This line resonated with me, reminding me of my late friend Bill, a photographer who sometimes seemed on the brink of professional success but never quite getting there. He said that when he discovered photography, he felt that he had found the magic key; he just couldn't find the lock that it fit.

Smith doesn't offer pat solutions to overcoming the potential obstacles to mastering your art or craft. Instead, she explores why they affect us and gives examples of artists coping with them (or not). In the chapter on fear, she delves into John Keats's life and his great fear that he would not live long enough to write the poems that filled his mind. Indeed, he did die young from tuberculosis, but used his fear to defeat the self-doubt that paralyzes so many writers.

She mentions a conversation with Alistair MacLeod, one of my favorite authors, who writes about coal miners and fishermen in Nova Scotia. She asked him why so often the best fiction is written by the first generation not actually doing the work, and he responded, “‘There has first to be a chair. And time for someone to sit in it.'” This is a brilliant summary of the problem faced by many writers I know. Even if we succeed in securing a room of our own, we struggle to squeeze out the time to enter it.

“Whether by design or by accident, many of us seem to find enduring gratification in struggling to master and then repeatedly applying some difficult skill that allows us to at once realize and express ourselves.” I'm reminded of a scene in an early episode of the tv show Homicide: Life on the Streets when Bolander finds comfort in playing his cello with a woman he's discovered plays the violin. They don't need an audience; just playing together creates a magical moment and the conviction that life is worth living.

This book is an ideal gift for any creative person you know. It's a comfort to know that we are not alone. And it's inspiring to remember why we want—no, need!—to create.

What books about creativity have you found useful?

I am not a fan of horror stories. The first horror film I saw was Rosemary's Baby and it scared the pants off me. I tried to watch Aliens because I was fascinated by Sigourney Weaver's tough Ellen Ripley, but ended up climbing over the back of my chair and cowering behind it, even with Ripley doing battle for me. Not sure why I'm such a wimp about horror; maybe because I jump into stories with both feet. Given half a chance I'll immerse myself in their world and not surface until I'm forcibly dragged back up.

So I thought I knew what to avoid. But this book caught me off guard and scared me more than any horror story. Lethal Remedy is part of Mabry's Prescription for Trouble Series, which he's labeled “Medical Suspense with Heart”. We follow a handful of doctors who are involved in a study of a new antibiotic that is supposedly 100% effective against Staph luciferus, a particularly virulent form of staph infection that is resistant to existing antibiotics.

Dr. Sara Miles works on the front line, seeing patients, making the hard decisions about appropriate care. Some of her patients have been enrolled in the study which is run by her arrogant former husband, Dr. Jack Ingersoll, who discovered the drug. Sara's former medical classmate, Rip Pearson, is Jack's assistant and dogsbody, doing the on-the-ground work while Jack is flown off to conferences courtesy of Jandra Pharmaceuticals, the drug company subsidizing the trial.

Sara and Rip become concerned when one of Sara's patients, a teenager named Chelsea, seems to show dangerous side-effects from the drug. They are joined by Sara's close friend and colleague, Lillian Gordon, and by Dr. John Ramsey, who has just come out of retirement to work at the clinic. Ingersoll and Jandra maintain that there are no dangerous side-effects to the drug.

We also meet some of the characters from Jandra, a company that is close to bankruptcy and relying on the new medicine to not only save the company but make their fortunes. They will stop at nothing to ensure not only that the FDA approves their drug, but that they approve it before a competing company can get their product out.

You can see why I would be scared! I come from a family of doctors and nurses, and believe that most of them are motivated by the desire to help others. As Mabry points out in his Author's Note, this is fiction and he has never encountered this situation in his 36 years of medical practice. However, “Given enough power, money and selfcentered [sic] greed, I have no doubt that men and corporations could act in this way. We are fortunate that they do not.” Well, sometimes they do. We know about drugs rushed to market with disastrous results, drugs like Thalidomide and DES, and the generic drug scandal in 1989.

Even though I suspect I'll have nightmares for a while, the book is a good read. Mabry handles the multiple characters deftly. He keeps up the suspense with twists and red herrings and numerous subplots. The “Heart” part is, I assume, the Christian aspect of the story. Several of the characters consult the Bible and avoid worrying about problems by telling themselves that God is in control. Luckily these moments are rare enough that they do not intrude upon the story and do not change the outcome.

There are many people ranting about downsizing the U.S. Government and doing away with agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration. But the FDA is our only protection against those who are so greedy they do not care who suffers or dies as long as they make money. The FDA and the few brave whistleblowers who don't look the other way are the only things standing between me and my nightmares.

What books have given you nightmares?

One person in my book club thought this book boring because the main character never amounted to much, but the rest of us loved it and partly for that reason. This slim novel tells the story of one life, one ordinary and astonishing life. Marie is seven when we first meet her, sitting on the stoop waiting for her father to come home, a not particularly attractive child, burdened with thick glasses. There is nothing so clumsy as a year to tell us the time period. Instead, an accumulation of finely observed details clues us in: boys playing stickball in the street; a girl wearing a spring coat, feathered hat, gloves, and a run in her stocking. As another book club member said, McDermott involves us in the story by making us think a little bit and put things together ourselves.

Marie's story is roughly chronological with the interpolation of scenes from other time periods. As yet another friend from book club said, these interpolations feel like a natural association of ideas. For example, that first scene on the stoop when Pegeen, the girl with the run in her stocking, tells Marie about falling and how there is always someone there to help her up is followed by a scene where Marie, now grown and pregnant, falls “and I remembered Pegeen then: there's always someone nice.” The flow mimics the way our minds work, our memories, bringing together two incidents to shed new light on both. And these are memories. They are Marie's reminiscences from late in life. We are signaled that partly by the tone, but also by these sentences at the end of the first scene:

I shivered and waited, little Marie. Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waited for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.

One of the things I like best about this story is the way we seem to be headed for a big dramatic scene, a blowup of some sort, only to find pleasant and helpful people: “there's always someone nice.” For example, the owner of the local funeral home is named Fagin, leading me to expect some cruel bully, but he turns out to be perfectly kind and determined to change the public's perception of his name. Occasionally the teasing gets carried too far or someone's difficulties are not fully understood, but no one is evil. There are no monsters here. The emotional progression in these scenes is subtle and sure. McDermott proves that you don't need a car chase or a train wreck to create suspense and hold a reader's interest.

Most of all I loved the sense of community: several of us envied Marie's neighborhood. There's always someone there to help you up. There is a place for everyone: clumsy Pegeen, Walter Hartnett who wears a built-up shoe, blind Bill Corrigan who had been gassed in the war. Much later when Marie meets Walter after a difficult parting and the passing of many years, they fall into easy reminiscences: “It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.”

Marie is strong-minded and a bit rebellious, but she has reasons for her assertions, even if she may not understand them until later in life. For example, she refuses to apply for a job downtown because she's heard that it's dangerous there. But when her mother tells her that Fagin is looking for someone to help out in the funeral home, she complies. And that job, unlikely as it may seem, is exactly what she needs. We see her grow into a competent and sensitive woman. She learns when it is best to remove her glasses and when she needs to see more clearly. She realizes what a key role the funeral home plays in the community, in those times when death was more common, before so many childhood and other diseases were tamed. It is an agora for the neighborhood, a commons, a place where everyone gathers. The only equivalent in this predominantly Irish neighborhood is the church.

The telling of even an ordinary person's life can take up volumes. McDermott has selected the ideal scenes and presented them in nuanced perfection to give us Marie's life: her childhood with her beloved father, strong mother, and golden boy of an older brother; her teens with her first grief and first love; marriage and children with all the pain and fear and comfort that they bring; all the way to old age when her defective sight begins to fail entirely. I loved the use of sight as a motif throughout, not just Marie, but Bill Corrigan, the neighbor who was blinded in the war. It is a sweet story, strong like honey in the comb.

Some people in my book club thought the title too minimalist, that it didn't convey the richness and depth of the story inside, but others of us thought it perfect: like Marie's life, so ordinary from the outside, so dazzling within.

What books have you come across that have the perfect title or, conversely, a title that is all wrong?

When I first read this novel forty years ago, I found the structure fascinating but the story itself disappointing. I had understood the book, first published in 1962, to be a story of free women, the title of the frame story that begins each section and ends the book. I eagerly looked forward to reading about the lives created by women who had freed themselves of society's constraints on women's roles. However, as Lessing herself points out in her 1971 introduction, this book is not about women's changing roles; it is the story of an artist whose creativity is blocked and who eventually cracks up.

Anna Wulf and her older friend Molly are free in the sense that they are not married anymore and have careers, Molly as an actress and Anna with a communist press. They each have a child: Molly's son Tommy is a difficult twenty-year-old and Anna's daughter Janet a young schoolgirl. While the two women have much in common, their friendship is complex, full of shifting alliances and attacks, envy and admiration. The emotional honesty of Anna's story eventually won me over.

And I was fascinated by the structure of the book: each section also contains portions of Anna's four notebooks in which she writes about different facets of her life: a black notebook about her life as a writer, a red notebook about politics, a yellow notebook where she writes stories based on her experiences, and a blue notebook which is more of a diary. Thus we see events and entanglements through a variety of lenses, their meaning shifting. Eventually Anna abandons these notebooks for a single golden notebook.

What made this novel valuable to the Women's Movement of the 1970s is that the artist in question is a woman, so the ways in which she is blocked and fragmented are those of a woman. What disappointed me then and startles me today is that she is a woman steeped in the culture of the times, the late 1950s and early 1960s, when women were supposed to be happy homemakers, vacuuming in their pearls and high heels and ever-ready to serve their men.

At the same time, whipped up by books written by men, women as mothers and lovers were blamed for all of men's problems. In fact, later that year I actually tore up a Philip Roth book—the only book I have ever destroyed—in my fury at his insistence that women were only put on earth to serve the male protagonist's needs and that he was entitled to destroy any woman who dared to ask for something from him. As Anna says, “‘None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.'”

Anna's reactions to the men with whom she becomes entangled reflect her times and her struggle to change, thus contributing to the perception that the book is about, as Lessing says, the war between men and women. To me, it is more the war within a woman, and in that first reading despaired at what seemed to me Anna's weakness.

On this reading, however, I have a better appreciation for the difficulty of change and treasure Anna's small victories. It is not easy to create for yourself a new kind of life, one for which there are no role models. I value the honesty of this book, where Anna truly weighs and expresses her commitment to one social structure after another. For example, she is forthright about her shifting attitude toward communism: the danger of conformism—when two people meet they speak honestly about politics, but add a third and they revert to the party line—and the way one's will is sapped by the belief that someday the world will be a worker's paradise. Yet she values “the company of people who have spent their lives in a certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central philosophy.” It is only through this honesty that Anna is able to win through to a new understanding.

So I was surprised by this novel a second time and impressed by how well it holds together despite its fragmented structure and deeply troubled protagonist. In some ways it is an artifact of its time, but its refreshing truthfulness and candor make it a book for all time.

Have you reread a book years later and changed your opinion of it?