The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li

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I’ve been a fan of Yiyun Li’s writing ever since I picked up a copy of her first book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in Toronto shortly after it was released in 2006. In her latest novel we meet Agnès and Fabienne in 1950s rural France. Only 13, they have already seen a lot of death, not just the war but the death of Agnès’s brother after his return from a German prisoner of war camp and of Fabienne’s older sister in childbirth.

The two are inseparable, linked in one of those intense adolescent friendships—do boys have them too?—that ignore the rest of the world. Fabienne, the leader, boils over with mischievous, sometimes violent games that Agnès eagerly joins. She says, “I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did not give this Agnès to others, but what they asked of me I did my best to accommodate.”

Agnès says of her friend, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart . . . That crystal in place of a heart—it makes things happen. To others.” Fabienne yearns for the excitement of the world outside their village while Agnès yearns merely to be with her friend, to live in the world Fabienne creates.

Then Fabienne comes up with a scheme for the two of them to write a book. She dictates her dark stories—an American GI is executed; a young woman suffocates her newborn and leaves it in a pig trough—for Agnès to record in her excellent handwriting. Fabienne decides to drag in the local postmaster, reasoning that as a widower with no friends, he must be lonely and bored.

What happens with the book and how it affects the girls’ friendship follow. As shown in the quote above, the book is narrated by Agnès, but an adult Agnès, married and living in Pennsylvania where she raises geese.

In my writing community, we have been talking some about how to sustain momentum in a story when you have a passive protagonist. One way is to have a mesmerizing voice, which this story certainly has. I kept trying to put it down in order to tackle more of my to-do list, but was unable to stay away.

It’s an unusual voice and an odd story. What I saw in it, and treasured, were the kinds of friendships I remember from my youth, and also the shifting of power within those friendships over the years. I saw the yearning for freedom, and the question of how much freedom is enough.

As I was reading, it seemed a meandering story, but in retrospect it comes together as an astute psychological portrait, a fairy tale, a story of secrets and social pressures. It will not leave me alone.

Have you read anything by Yiyun Li?

Riding the Earthboy 40, by James Welch

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Reading and rereading this sole collection of poetry by Native American novelist and poet James Welch has been an adventure. Welch is considered to be a founding author of the Native American Renaissance in literature. The book’s title refers to the land he grew up on: forty acres leased by his parents from a family named Earthboy on the Gros Ventre Reservation in Montana. It’s a prosaic explanation for a phrase that conjures so many associations.

Steeped in the Blackfeet and A’aninin cultures of his parents, he attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations before attending high school in Minneapolis. The tension between the Indigenous world and the White world can be found in these poems, but there is so much more.

I don’t pretend to understand all of them. Many of the poems seem like, as James Tate says in his introduction, a kaleidoscope of images. What comes through most clearly to me is the connection to the land, whether we’re talking about the stark power of a butte or the iron cold of winter in the far north. “Thanksgiving at Snake Butte” begins:

In time we rode that trail
up the butte as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top . . .

Welch moves around in time with the ease of a storyteller, conjuring a memory of three boys who barricaded themselves inside a grocery or finding the truth behind a photo in a hotel lobby. There is much about death and hardship and betrayal, much about violence done to and done by.

But there’s far more about the strength of tradition and community, even if sometimes that legacy must be questioned. He tells stories of individuals like Doris Horseman, Deafy, Eulynda, Bear Child, Lester Lame Bull. In “Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan Hunters” he says “Comfortable we drink and string together stories” of the past, but insists

Let glory go the way of all sad things.
Children need a myth that tells them to be alive . . .

He writes of small moments that take on grandeur of “Such a moment, a life.” And there’s also much about the lonely road to yourself. From “Blue Like Death”

. . . Now you understand:
the way is not your going
but an end. That road awaits
the moon that falls between
the snow and you, your stalking home.

Moons slip through these poems and “stars/that fell into their dreams.” There are single phrases that haunt me, even when I cannot grasp the poem as a whole, such as “Man is afraid of his dark” and “No dreamer knows the rain.” “To stay alive this way, it’s hard . . .” and “goodbyes creaking in the pines” both conjure strong memories.

I will keep reading and rereading these poems, letting them sit within my consciousness, within my dreams.

Have you read the work of James Welch or of another poet of the Native American Renaissance?

Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe

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One autumn day when I lived in Massachusetts, we took the children to Purgatory Chasm, a park in Sutton with a playground, nature trails, and the chasm itself. Only some of the adults and older children attempted the difficult path between looming rock walls. There were strange and unworldly formations: deep clefts, overhanging boulders. I found it unsettling.

I remember that feeling whenever I drive past the exit for the chasm, and again when I heard Charles Coe read from his new collection of poems. In the title poem he explores his early understanding of purgatory, summoning with characteristic vibrancy “the dust-covered relics” of his Catholic schooling. As in the best meditative essay, we engage with him as he sorts through these memories and carries them forward into a new understanding of what it means to be us, today, in this damaged world.

Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

In other poems, he invites us to recognise how it feels to be a person of color is our society. He writes feelingly of his father being belittled by a young white drugstore clerk in the 1960s, and what he understands now of the difficult terrain his father had to traverse.

He writes too of his own experiences. He shares with us the everyday things that, unlike the great glacial gush that created Purgatory Chasm, wear away at one. It might be a stink eye from a doorman or an uncurtained window at night. The six-line poem “Things White People Have Said to Me” begins:

You’re so well-spoken.
You don’t seem like you were raised in a ghetto.

In “Blocked” he writes about an encounter in the parking lot. The tone of this poem, as in others, is one I struggle to achieve. Because it is calm, aware, restrained, we reading it are free to feel our own outrage, our own concern about possible consequences, and our own recognition that we are all imperfect beings.

Coe’s sense of humor inflects many of these poems, sometimes wry and subtle, sometimes flat out hilarious, as in “Butt Dialing Jesus” which begins:

There was a time when voices emanating from my pants
would have caused concerns. But now I simply shrugged
and pulled out my phone . . .

It is a joy and a comfort for me to read such poems. Their effect on me is similar to that of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, which reminded me of the goodness in this world and its people. While Coe notes the rocks that litter our path and the walls that rise around us, his generous warmth and humor become welcome companions on this journey.

What poems have you read that were both a comfort and a joy?

The Final Case, by David Guterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What novel have you enjoyed that took you by surprise?

Unvarnished Life, by Yenna Yi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham, by Fred Gerhard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

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

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

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

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

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

The Fell, by Sarah Moss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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