This surprisingly enjoyable memoir tells of Fraser's 33-year relationship with the playwright. She calls it a love story and, indeed, it is. Her first sighting of him is across a crowded room, though “it was lunchtime, not some enchanted evening, and we did not speak.” The enchantment comes later, when they do finally meet at a dinner party celebrating the first night of a play directed by her brother-in-law. She says they were “reckless” that night: both were married with children, he one and she six. Yet, as she relates, their connection stayed strong through the years until his death in 2008.

Although aware of the possibility that this could turn into a sob-fest or a soppy romance, I trusted my judgment of Fraser's earlier books, both her histories and her mysteries featuring Jemima Shore. She didn't let me down. Her amused and assured voice carries us through the years, describing the people and places they encounter, the causes they champion, and, of course, the books and plays they write. Made up of brief diary entries introduced by even briefer narratives, the book reads quickly and—even with all the bits and pieces—smoothly.

When I was 18 and wondering if there could be such a thing as a happy marriage, I read Pearl Buck's Portrait of a Marriage. The story of a painter and his sturdy, unbeautiful but restful wife stayed with me. Already an aspiring writer and knowing that I would always need my alone-time, I wondered what kind of relationship would work for me. At the time, the models available to me were the 1950s traditional wife who devotes her life to her husband's work and the emerging Second-Wave Women's Movement with its unlikely promise of mutual careers—even then, however, I questioned the eventually intractable problem of the Second Shift.

There was also what I could find in books, though so far none had satisfied me. I shivered at Faulkner's Wild Palms where when the two meet, she simply says, “‘Yes'” but then of course both are harshly punished for their temerity in going off together. I read novels of infidelity and divorce, of abuse and control.

I wish I had read this book back then. I hadn't yet discovered the joy of real lives, the histories and biographies and autobiographies that, although certainly shaped into narratives and colored by what is omitted, provide other possibilities. Buck's couple became yet another example of a woman devoting her life to her husband and his art. In Fraser's memoir, I found the dream come true of two artists devoted to each other. I'm sure there must have been rocky bits, beyond what she relates, but obviously their connection remained strong.

There is much here to like: the inside look at the theatre scene, the famous and not-so-famous people they knew, the different perspective on familiar events. I was particularly delighted by the inclusion of a few of Pinter's poems. I hadn't realised he wrote poetry, too, though I should have. They are strong and tender and add a bit of his voice to this lovely book. I appreciate Fraser's courage in sharing this so-personal story with us; it is one I will treasure.

This new novel from the Nobel Prize-winner continues Gordimer's chronicle of the evolution of her native South Africa. Here in the U.S. we get very little news about other countries. As newspapers have restructured, dismantling their overseas desks, we are forced to go out on the internet to read foreign newspapers or turn to novels such as this one for details about what is going on.

Steve and Jabu met as activists during the Struggle and married despite misogyny laws. Now, in post-reconciliation South Africa, their interracial marriage is accepted, and both have found places within society's structure, Steve as a professor and Jabu as first a teacher and then a lawyer. With so many choices now available, they debate where to live, what schools are best for their children, how engaged they should continue to be in political activism.

While the couple maintains relationships, albeit sometimes strained, with their families and with new friends, their former comrades-in-arms continue to make up their primary community. The trust forged in guerilla combat carries more weight even than blood. The group gathers at one person's house or another for a suburban barbecue and endless discussion of their country's political doings. This is a country in the process of recreating itself, so arguments and false steps abound.

The aftermath of revolution is always a curious time. Will the rebels put down their guns and create a government? Will power-grabbing guerillas-turned-politicians forget their ideals? Or will a Terror ensue following by a Reaction?

In her race to transcribe the shifting tides of political thought and corrupt behavior in this brave, new world, Gordimer sacrifices her characters and their story. Dispensing with scenes that might slow and deepen the story, she tells us straight out what Steve and Jabu think and feel, briskly rapping out dialogue between the comrades that explicates the minutiae of the news. The result is a voice that is distant and impersonal, and characters who seem little more than puppets set up to exemplify the author's arguments.

Gordimer's prose has always been difficult but it is sometimes almost impenetrable here. Repetitive, rambling, weirdly punctuated: it could have used an editor's hand. I've enjoyed other books by Gordimer, but not this one. Despite my curiosity about how various cultures within the country are handling South Africa's transition and my prior familiarity with at least the broad strokes of its government's changes, the endless political discussions—mostly in the form of expository dialogue—bored me. The arguments could have used more story around them to support and personalise them, as Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath, using the story of the Joads to bring home to the reader the unjust treatment of the Okies. Steve and Jabu's story is too thin, too lightly sketched to serve that function here.

No Time Like the Present raises important and interesting questions. As an historical document, this book is invaluable. As a novel, though, not so much. What stories of Gordimer's have you liked?

A young boy—only eleven—is sent alone by ship from Colombo to London where he will join the mother he hasn't seen in four or five years. He is nominally supervised by a woman his uncle knows, but since she is in First Class he rarely sees her. For his meals he is seated at the Cat's Table, the one farthest away from the Captain's Table and clearly reserved for the least important passengers. There he meets two other boys his age, Ramadhin and Cassius, who will become his constant companions on the voyage, and a handful of peculiar adults: a botanist, a down-and-out pianist, a silent tailor, and a woman who keeps pigeons in the pockets of her jacket.

Another person at the Cat's Table is Mr. Nevil, a retired ship dismantler, a gentle man who lets the boys pester him for details about the structure of ships. He tells them of how in a month they could make a ship disappear, pulling apart walls, carefully gathering everything that could be reused and burning the remainder. He says, “'. . . in a breaker's yard you discover anything can have a new life, be reborn as part of a car or railway carriage, or a shovel blade. You take that older life and you link it to a stranger.'”

Similarly, the boy, now grown, is dismantling the experience of this once-in-a-lifetime voyage, unpacking the past, discovering new meanings, linking it to the rest of his life. Although the narrator is named Michael and shares some biographical details with the author, Ondaatje says in an end note that this story is fiction, not a memoir.

This is a story that you can read lightly, chuckling over the boys' adventures and mourning their frayed innocence, or you can pay closer attention. The book is dense, as one person in my book club said, with motifs and themes that all tie together. There are secret wounds—literally: a scar on a belly, a weak heart—and impaired senses: a blind girl, a man who cannot speak. There are certain moments when a touch, perhaps on a shoulder in the moonlight, reveals everything. There are people who are controlled by others: the mysterious prisoner in chains, Michael's cousin Emily in thrall to her lover, a young girl subject to her father's needs. The three boys each feel the need to protect “others seemingly less secure than ourselves”.

Above all, or perhaps beneath all, lie the hidden things: the spy rumored to be on board incognito, the magician producing lost items with a flourish, the mysterious nighttime conversations the boys overhear. After a terrible storm, Michael says, “What we had witnessed was only what had been above the sea. Now something shook itself free and came into my mind. It was not only the things we could see that had no safety. There was the underneath.” Later Emily tells of a time when a wealthy American for whom she worked in Italy took her elbow and “walked me down the hall until we were in the grand Rotunda, where a sixty-foot tapestry hung. He lifted a corner and held it up so I could look at the underside, where the colors were suddenly brilliant and forceful. ‘This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath.'”

Ondaatje's books always reward close attention. This one, too, is a masterpiece worth reading and rereading. It is a Boy's Own adventure of knives and dogs and mischief, and at the same time a coming-of-age story. Memories are dismantled and reused; the mysterious motives and knotted hearts of adults are unwound; and the secret scars of childhood laid bare. Read it. Then read it again.

This fantasy novel is the story of young Jack who was born on the coldest night of the year, so cold that his heart is frozen. To save his life, the midwife, Dr. Madeleine, who is also a mechanical genius and suspected witch, grafts on a cuckoo clock to act as his heart. The clock dismays would-be adoptive parents, so the orphaned Jack continues to live with Dr. Madeleine and her entourage in 1800's Edinburgh. Dr. Madeleine warns him that strong emotions may damage his fragile heart; above all, he must not fall in love.

But of course he does. On his tenth birthday he encounters Miss Acacia, a street singer with a glorious voice and poor vision. Despite her propensity for bumping into things, she too recognises the connection between them. However, the two children are separated, and the novel becomes Jack's quest to find Miss Acacia again. This quest sends him to school, over Dr. Madeleine's misgivings, where he encounters a bully who takes delight in torturing the small boy. Eventually he sets out across Europe for Andalusia where he believes Miss Acacia to be living. Along the way he encounters Méliès, a magician and clock-tender, who joins Jack. In Andalusia, he finds her performing at the Extraordinarium, a sort of ongoing carnival.

With such a whimsical start I had high hopes for this novel. I listened to the audio version, read by Jim Dale, my favorite reader, with his evocative voice and strong characterisations, so the book had everything going for it. However, I became bored rather quickly by the focus on Jack and his increasingly unattractive emotions. As his behavior deteriorated, I became fed up with him and wished for some other storylines. Malzieu has wonderfully inventive side characters, including Madeleine and Méliès, two prostitutes and a man who have also been the recipients of Madeleine's wizardry—Arthur plays When the Saints on his metallic spine—and the brusque owner of the Extraordinarium. I wish the author had made more use of these side characters, both for their intrinsic interest and to give some relief from Jack's complaints.

First published in French as La Mécanique du cœur (The Mechanic of the Heart), it has also seen light as an illustrated novel and a concept album, La Mécanique du cœur, by the French rock band, Dionysos—Mathias Malzieu is their lead singer—and is soon to be released as an animated feature film. Although it sounds as though it should be appropriate for YA or adults, the rather obvious sexual imagery makes it more of an adult fairy tale.

There are some lovely images and ingenious descriptions, as well as of course the marvelous core image of the clock-heart, but I found the book disappointing. Aside from my increasing dislike for Jack, the love story that propels the plot never seemed real to me, perhaps because Miss Acacia, described in Jack's first-person narration, is never presented as more than a pretty picture; we don't learn anything about her as a person. Although it may seem odd to say about what is, after all, a fairy tale, the ending seemed far-fetched to me—even in fantasies, I look for internal consistency—and somewhat clumsy. Yet the material is so promising! Perhaps it is better served by its incarnation as an album or illustrated novel. I will also look for the film, which is due to be released in October, 2013.

I'm taking a break from talking about books this week to celebrate an anniversary. Last year at this time I participated in Robert Lee Brewer's Platform Challenge: How to Build (or Improve) Your Writer Platform in 30 Days. Each day in April 2012, he posted an assignment and explanation on his My Name Is Not Bob blog. I am a writer as well as a reader, and writers these days are told they must have the dreaded P-word. However, details of what it actually means to have a platform are pretty fuzzy, so Robert's challenge came at a good time for me.

Each day I and others pushed ourselves, sometimes far outside our comfort zone, to complete the assignment. In the comments section of each blog post, we documented not only our accomplishments, but also our questions and confusion and fears. In further comments we comforted each other and shared what we knew, always supplemented by Robert's encouraging and clarifying comments. Many of the tasks I'd already done—joining Facebook, starting a blog—while others I hadn't yet attempted. I learned a lot during that month, but what came afterwards really astounded me.

The group of us who came through the challenge continued to stick together, following each other on Facebook and Google+, connecting on LinkedIn and GoodReads, commenting on each other's blog posts, continuing the Twitter chats—all assignments from the Challenge originally that took on a life of their own. We decided to formalize the group, originally naming ourselves the Not-Bobbers and then—returning Robert's name to him—Wordsmith Studio. People created a Facebook page, a Google community and a website. We've continued to use these fora to stay in touch, ask and answer questions, celebrate successes, and commiserate with the inevitable rejections.

If I have a mission driving my various activities, it is to build community by bringing people together and finding common ground. Writing and reading are a compelling way to do that, sharing our stories, seeing the world through someone else's eyes. But I never expected a community like this! Before this year I would not have believed that a group of men and women who had never met in 3D (as one of my friends says) could form a community as tight as any I've been a part of.

Why does it work? Because of everyone's openness. In the original challenge, any competitive instinct was set aside as we helped each other untangle the technology and confront our doubts. We wrote openly in the comments to Robert's blog posts about the dread that comes with attempting new territory. Then we continued to write blogs and Facebook/Google+ posts about our struggles as writers.

The only reason it's continued to work, though, is because people volunteered to be part of the Steering Committee. People set up the fora mentioned above, as well as twice-weekly Twitter chats, a couple of virtual book clubs, and the beginnings of critique groups. This is one community that I had very little hand in creating, so I want to take this opportunity to thank all those volunteers who made it happen.

Members of the group have enjoyed tremendous successes this year, winning blog awards, getting published. I myself have a new collection of poetry, Terrarium, coming out in May 2013. I've been invited to speak about my memoir, Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother at festivals, bookstores, libraries, universities and book clubs. I've continued to lead memoir-writing workshops and will be teaching an extended, week-long version at Common Ground on the Hill in July 2013. I've also taken what I've learned about book promotion over the last few years and created a workshop which I've been presenting. So it's been a sensational year for all of us wordsmiths.

The good news is that Wordsmith Studio has opened to new members. You don't need to have participated in Robert's Platform Challenge to join. Check us out here.

The book's full title, Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands, captured my attention as I was perusing the shelves after a reading at my local bookstore. Although the title seemed a bit lurid, I was pleased to find the book itself a well-written and -researched narrative of two Catholic priests undertaking a mission to convert a group of Eskimos, as they were then known. In 1913, when this journey took place, this particular group had met few white men, trappers mostly, and scraped a living in their harsh environment as previous generations had: gathering in large communities, sharing everything, migrating with the seasons.

One of the priests, Father Rouviére, had come north the previous year with a trapper who had agreed to guide him and three men who were investigating the rumor of copper deposits. His bishop had sent him on a race to convert the “heathen” to Catholicism before the Anglican missionaries got there. Father Rouviére's contacts with the native people were generally friendly, though limited by his inability to learn their language. He and Father LeRoux who joined him in 1913 were spectacularly unprepared for their journey to the north. They had no wilderness skills, having grown up in France's well-settled and gentle land. Unable to hunt and lacking appropriate clothing, they were forced to rely on the very people they hoped to convert for sustenance and support. Even though this additional strain on their meager resources represented a grave danger to their community, the people were hospitable and generous to the priests, at least at first.

Drawing on primary and secondary sources, Jenkins lays out and substantiates the shifting relationships between the priests and the people, between their different cultures and assumptions, between their languages. I especially enjoyed the details of the traditional way of life and how it had adapted to an environment where it seems inconceivable that anyone could survive. The people the priests set out to convert had no religion per se, though Jenkins describes their superstitions and use of shamans. They lived in the far north, migrating between Great Bear Lake and the mouth of the Coppermine where it empties into the western corner of Coronation Gulf, in the Barren Lands of the Northwest Territories.

The murder referred to in the title results in a trial, which gripped my attention just as much as did the account of the priests' encounter with a foreign culture. The questions raised by the trial rebound on all of us. Those of us who have sat on juries and been baffled sometimes by the logic behind some of the deliberations in the jury room will be interested in how the concept of a “jury of our peers” plays out here.

I have long been fascinated with hard places, desert sand and polar ice. I've read many of the books Jenkins refers to and am as fascinated as he with the interaction of place and people, “the relationships that human beings develop with the land on which they choose to live.” The blurbs inside say the book reads like a mystery novel. While there are mysteries, I would describe the book differently. Jenkins's measured tone and clear prose makes him a reliable narrator whom I felt I could trust to give me the story undistorted by prejudices and polemic. There may not be any car chases here, but the book is as compelling as any novel.

Note: Although we have read some of the same books and, according to the acknowledgements, apparently frequent the same coffeeshop, I am not acquainted with the author.

This is not a memoir. Memoirs are nonfiction, and Jhabvala makes it clear that these stories are fictional. Each features a different cast of characters, different conflicts, different settings. As she says in her “Apologia”, “The central character—the ‘I' of each chapter—is myself, but the parents I have claimed are not, or hardly ever quite my own.” However, she does say that these stories are tales of a life she might have lived. “Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and sometimes, to some extent, was.”

It's an intriguing premise. Perhaps we all wonder what other lives we might have lived given a different decision casually made long ago. I'm reminded of the alternate paths the children follow when they go through the mirror in A Diamond in the Window and of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where the two courtiers wonder when and whether they made a choice that thrust them into their current predicament. I, myself, have derived great entertainment from the Google Alert set up on my name, which enables me to follow the careers of a jazz singer, a professional hockey player, and someone in Yorkshire who competes in sheepdog trials.

In one sense, then, we can listen to the resonances between Jhabvala's stories to discover where they chime, teasing out the person who has sent out these messages to us. In another sense, though, every story written is a possible life. Writers imagine ourselves into our characters, imbuing them with some sliver of ourselves, or our possible selves.

It may be that these stories are a joke pulled on those earnest readers who pull apart novels looking for the author, who interpret fiction by way of the author's life. I sometimes do that, not on the first reading which is for pure enjoyment or the second which is for reading as a writer, but on the third or fourth because I'm curious as to how other writers conjure stories from all the bits and pieces of our lived lives. I also like to read a favorite author's entire oeuvre, not so much to hear the books in conversation with each other—though that may happen, just as poems change when placed next to each other in a collection—but to see the author's development as a writer.

The stories themselves bear up well under this burden of expectation. I enjoyed all of them, whether sad or happy. The first, aptly named “Life”, is narrated by an elderly woman who has returned to India. Rosemary, a name she never felt suited her, first ventured there while working on her PhD thesis about an Indian woman poet, in company with Somnath, a clerk she met in her native New York City. This is a story of family, her film-star mother Nina and sturdy father Otto, Otto's second wife Susie, Somnath's family in India. Rosemary struggles with the conflicting demands of family and desire; even when she is in “the remotest part of a remote province, trying to decipher the inscription on a Sufi poet's grave,” a phone call makes it through to the single phone in the village, located in the hut that serves as the post office, with a plea from Susie that she return immediately. Somnath's great gift to her is “that sudden leap of recognition—as when listening to poetry or music—that this is how life could be and maybe, somewhere else, really was.”

In “Gopis” Diane, a successful New York publicist, befriends young Lucia who is studying Indian dance over the fierce objections of her WASP parents in Connecticut. Lucia says that Indian dance is about “love in spite of, love in absence—all that Krishna and gopi stuff.” She wants her new friend to persuade her father to send Lucia to India, but then Diane's former lover, the larger-than-life Vijay arrives for a visit. A shopkeeper in New Delhi, Vijay also seems to be involved with “murky politics”, a past that catches up with him, reaching halfway round the world to Diane's apartment.

Other settings include London, a country estate outside New York City, and a remembered Germany. Many revolve around the unexpectedly persistent influence of someone from the past or the complicated relationships with parents and siblings. Jhabvala's prose is wonderfully clear and, as one would expect from the screenwriter of films such as Howard's End and A Room with a View, she builds drama effectively. From the first page I felt myself in the hands of a storyteller who knows what she is doing. She doesn't reveal too much; by the end of the book I had some sense of her preoccupations but not of the author's own life. I'm still intrigued by the idea of these stories that she says are “potentially autobiographical”.

Robert suggested this book to me, and I'm glad he did or I never would have found it. Published in 1949, this first novel explores the hold memory has on us, those earliest memories, of childhood's dark cellars and magical woods, of the family that looms like a race of giants. Snippets of memory repeat and repeat, creating our own personal mythology.

These are the memories of Boy Ganchion, called up on a dark night in strange city. Walking in rain turning to snow, he falls into his past, into his childhood in an large old house in Charity, Texas, filled with family: Swimma, Malley, Berryben, Folner, Christy, Granny Ganchion. He gives them to us, allowing some of them to tell their own stories, in their own voices, of the war between the yearning to go out into the world and the pull of the voices calling them to come home, of the loneliness and despair of sitting in a rocking chair doing the calling.

Goyen's descriptions are compelling. “Christy was big and had dark wrong blood and a glistening beard, the bones in his russet Indian cheeks were thick and arched high and they curved round the deep eye cavities where two great silver eyes shaped like bird's eggs were set in deep—half-closed eyes furred round by grilled lashes that laced together and locked over his eyes.” Christy, the hunter, ventures into the woods and returns garlanded with small birds, speckled with their blood. Isolated with a deaf mother, “He had just talked so long into deafness that he came to judge the whole world deaf, and so he no longer said anything much . . . It was what he didn't say that said what he said.”

The unusual style of Goyen's prose captures the confusion as one memory calls up another, while the voice echoes like a preacher repeating ancient phrases. Folner, who had to leave Charity to indulge his love of spangles and tap shoes, comes home in a cheap coffin. “At your funeral there was a feeling of doom in the Grace Methodist Church, and I sat among my kin feeling dry and throttled in the throat and thought we were all doomed—who are these, who am I, what are we laying away, what splendid, glittering, sinful part of us are we burying like a treasure in the earth?”

The place is a character, too, and Goyen brings alive the creaking house with shelves of old preserves in the cellar, the fields around it full of bitterweed, and the bird-crowded woods. He gives us the town of Charity, the tiny Bijou Theatre, and the City Hotel that burned. “You had this little river, Charity, that scalloped round your hem like a taffeta ruffle. It glided through your bottomlands (that could be seen from the gallery of the house) winking with minnows and riverflies and waterbugs. It was ornamented with big, drowsy snap-turtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and thick purple catfish shining in it and sliding cottonmouth watermoccasins.”

This river acted as “a kind of Beulah Land for everybody: people gathered at you, gathering at water like creatures. You were known to be treacherous after rains and in your deep places, where it was quietest, were dread suckholes sometimes marked by the warning of a whirlpool, but not always.”

I had to adjust to reading this memory-packed stream-of-consciousness style, so the first few chapters went slowly. I felt that, like Boy, I was struggling to sort out and make sense of the overwhelming rush of memory. However, a semblance of structure emerged, and the power of the prose grew on me. The last few chapters are simply magnificent, culminating in a celebration of what it means to be alive in the world, carrying our own particular past.

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?