A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep, by Rumer Godden

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In my search for comfort reads to give me a rest from what’s going on in our world, I’ve turned to Rumer Godden, whose novels are set in earlier times and places. I’m looking forward to rereading old favorites like The Greengage Summer, and in the meantime picked up this memoir of her early life. I completely ignored the note that it covers the years from her birth in 1907 to 1946, thus landing me once again in the experience of a woman at least temporarily distant from Hitler’s reign of terror.

As Godden sets out to trace the beginnings of her life as a writer and her formative influences, one theme that emerges immediately is the contrast between her charmed childhood in Narayanganj—then part of colonial India, now Bangladesh—and her stints in England. In India, where her father worked as a shipping company executive, children were “left to grow” where in England they were “brought up.” When she and her sister Jon as tweens were briefly sent to their aunts, “[f]or the first time we had to live by rules, strict rules.”

Throughout her life in India, she ignored the privileged cocoon of the members of the British Raj in favor of getting to know the local people. As it turned out, she was thus able to store up experiences she later drew on in her novels. Her unconventional attitude sometimes landed her in trouble, such as when she starts a dance school in town. “In Calcutta’s then almost closed society, ‘nice girls’ did not work or try to earn their living.”

She had to start the dance school because her charming but irresponsible husband had recklessly run up debts that ate up all of her income from her surprisingly successful novel Black Narcissus.  She chose to live apart from him for much of their marriage, her struggles as—essentially—a single parent again taking her outside the bounds of convention.

Godden’s prose did indeed carry me away. Her vivid descriptions of people and places and her extraordinary encounters make the story come to life. She also intersperses excerpts from her diary and letters to capture the essence of the moment.

In 1942, with the war affecting Calcutta, she and her children move to Kashmir as an “abandoned family,” meaning the family of a soldier normally stationed in India but serving abroad in wartime. They were more abandoned than most, since her husband spent all of his pay on himself and couldn’t be bothered with them. The place where the British government housed them in Srinigar was rife with disease, forcing her to take the children first to a houseboat and then to Dove House, a dilapidated building isolated up a steep mountain path.

The path went up to a knoll where a gap in a baked-earth wall served as a front gate; inside the wall spread a garden of terraces and fruit trees which led to a rough lawn and there, set so perfectly that it seemed to nestle into the side of the mountain, was the house. It was built of pink-grey stone with a wooden verandah and a roof of wooden shingles. Beside it the stream fell from terrace to terrace and in front, rising almost as high as a gabled window in the roof, was a magnolia, one of the slender kind that would have white flowers and purple buds.

Their life in Dove House is extremely primitive, since she has almost no money. But in fact that is where she learns the difference between her circumstances and the true poverty of the local people. For example, when winter finally turns to spring, she is so enchanted by the blossoming almond trees that she breaks off a spray to bring home, eliciting a frown from her gardener/car.etaker

“It’s only one spray.”

“You do not know what it is to be poor,” said Nabir Das.

Further experiences reinforce this lesson. As once a single parent living in poverty myself, I felt equally chastened. As we teeter on the edge of catastrophe, I draw strength from remembering how much worse it can be and has been. It may yet be, but for now I’m ready to return to the fight.

What comfort reads have you found? What strength have you drawn from them?

The Face on the Wall, by Jane Langton

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Professor Homer Kelly already has plenty on his plate, when his wife Mary presents the part-time sleuth with an important task: find out why her former student Pearl Small has disappeared. Worryingly, Pearl’s husband Fred is negotiating a deal to turn the land, a former pig farm which is in Pearl’s name, into a development of McMansions.

Meanwhile, the Kellys are helping Mary’s niece Annie as she uses the windfall from her suddenly success as a children’s book illustrator to build her dream home, constructing it as an extension to her current house and renting that out. Annie goes all out to make it everything she’s ever wanted, including a 35-foot blank wall where she begins to paint a mural of famous stories for children.

Enter the Gast family. Social climbers Roberta and Bob who rent Annie’s house have two children: ten-year-old Charlene, a self-centered swimming champion, and eight-year-old Eddy, who has Down’s syndrome. Eddy loves to visit Annie and watch her paint. When she gives him some materials to work with, she finds that he is a remarkably gifted artist.

All is not well, though. The Gast parents are embarrassed by Annnie’s artistic eccentricity, and covet her part of the house. Accidents plague the property. Worst of all, a face keeps appearing on Annie’s wall, no matter how many times she and Flimnap O’Dougherty, a strange handyman who showed up one day, paint over it.

And where is Pearl? We learn that she loves her inherited acres and has been turning them into a nature sanctuary, planting trees and flowers.

This thirteenth Homer Kelly mystery is a light-hearted story about art, hubris, and community action. What do we value? What do we owe each other?

There are a few incidents that strain the reader’s credulity, but they fit with the fairy-tale atmosphere of the story. I especially enjoyed mentions of various beloved children’s books, such as Wind in the Willows, and other favorites, such as Three Men in a Boat, and the pen-and-ink illustrations of Annie’s wall. There is also plenty of suspense that builds throughout the story, so that the pages fly by.

Jane Langton, who died in 2018, remains one of my favorite authors. Her children’s book Diamond in the Window has to have been the most influential book I read as a child. I still often think of the adventures in it. What I love about her adult books is the way she weaves a tale that whose charm and humor hold serious questions for those who care to look for them.

Have you read any of Jane Langton’s books?

The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins

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“How very odd it must be, living at the mercy of the tide.”

Eris is a tidal island off the coast of Scotland, meaning that it can only be accessed at low tide. It is a place of crashing seas, wild storms, and dark woods where mainlanders once buried their dead to keep wolves from disturbing them.

Once the home of the reclusive artist Vanessa Chapman, now—five years after her death—the island’s only inhabitant is Grace, her friend and companion. However, Vanessa’s art and papers were left, not to Grace, but to the Fairburn Foundation run by Vanessa’s lover-turned-enemy Douglas Lennox, who feuded with Grace for years, certain that she was holding back art and papers. He is now dead, shot in a hunting accident, and his son Sebastian in charge.

When one of Vanessa’s pieces, on loan to Tate Modern, is discovered to contain a human bone, Sebastian sends James Becker, curator of the Chapman collection to Eris to gather any papers that may shed light on the origin of the piece. Becker intends—unlike Sebastian’s family—to be conciliatory toward Grace, while she initially defends her isolation but gradually finds Becker eases her loneliness.

The shifting ground between the two of them captured and kept my attention.I found myself eager to get back to the book every time I set it down, wanting to explore the twists in the plot, rummage through the complicated relationships between the characters, and measure the reliability of each person. In a time when we are told so many lies, looking for the truth becomes a skill to be honed.

While two of the story’s voices are those of Grace, who loved her, and Becker who wrote his thesis on her work and is still obsessed with her, it is Vanessa—the third voice—who is at the heart of this story. A creative woman who fled domesticity and came to this wild island, her journal entries throughout the book bring out her voice and her rage to be free.

Through Vanessa’s own words, as well as those of Becker and others, her paintings became so vivid in my mind that I could almost swear I’ve seen them. I enjoyed imagining them and can easily say that it would have been worth reading the book solely for them.

The title also drew my attention, as I have always loved that mysterious hour before sunrise and after sunset. The image signaled to me that this would not be a breakneck thriller like Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Instead, it’s a slow burn of buried secrets, sinister suspicions, and mysterious deaths. It reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s novels.

A glimpse at some of the reviews on Goodreads reveals a widespread dissatisfaction with the ending. I won’t give it away, but my interpretation of it is quite different from most people’s. I like ambiguity in fiction. I like being asked to invest some of my attention into working out the subtext of a story. Here, I felt quite certain of what was being said between the lines, and am surprised to find myself at odds with so many others. I’ll say no more, but once you’ve read the book, I’d be happy to share views on the ending.

 Can you recommend a mystery about a woman artist?

A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter

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Translated by Jane Degras

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria to join her husband Hermann in Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, which lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole. It is one of the most northern inhabited places on the planet. Hermann has been spending increasing amounts of time there, hunting and trapping, and as a result has found a new serenity. Christiane is there to stay with him for a year in a tiny hut, the size of a large closet, where they are joined by a young hunter named Karl.

If 1934 makes your ears perk up, you recall that in August 1934 Hitler merged the chancellery with the presidency into the title of Führer, thus completing his rise to power. Christiane almost never mentions the politics back home where their democracy is being demolished by a dictator, partly because she is too isolated to hear more than a few random scraps of news, and partly because she is absorbed by her new life. Many of us dream of such isolation these days as our own democracy is attacked.

Before leaving, she imagined she would spend her time there reading books, sleeping a lot, and darning socks. But she quickly learns otherwise. There’s a reason the nearby coasts are called Anxiety Hook, Distress Hook, Misery Bay and Bay of Grief.

The closest neighbor is 60 miles away, and even they are inaccessible in the winter’s depths. She and Hermann have brought some provisions, but mostly rely on what they kill. Her description of preparing her first seal dinner is eye-opening. She is sometimes left alone for days and weeks while the men hunt, and she begins to grasp the “terror of nothingness”  that has driven men—and at least one woman, or so the story goes—mad.

Now everything around us is quite dead; even the battering of the storm has ceased. A heavy mist weighs on everything; the hut is shrouded in stillness and darkness. It seems to me as if only now has the real night fallen, and slowly my courage begins to seep away. Perhaps the sun will never come back again. Perhaps it is dark all over the world.

Yet hard as life in the Arctic is, she finds much to appreciate, especially as an artist.  Describing the early morning, she says, “The whole sky is deep lilac, lightening into a tender cobalt blue at the horizon, over the sea of ice. From the east a pale-yellow brightness spreads, and the frozen sea, reflecting the heavenly colours, shines like an immense opal.” 

In one passage I loved, she compares the twilight at the beginning of the Arctic night with ‘the delicate, wonderful paintings of the Chinese painter—monks, in which the immense and mysterious effect is achieved entirely by gradations from light to dark grey, by forms indicated rather than outlined.’

She finds herself changing. “Why have I been so shaken by the peacefulness of nature?” She even comes to appreciate the isolation.

I am conscious of the immense solitude around me. There is nothing that is like me, no creature in whose aspect I might retain a consciousness of my own self; I feel that the limits of my being are being lost in this all-too-powerful nature, and for the first time I have a sense of the divine gift of companionship.

I appreciate all the details of daily life. Her first responsibility is as a housewife, wrestling with the cracked stove that is their only source of heat, sewing curtains from a scrap of fabric once used as a sail. Nothing is wasted. Driftwood logs are propped against the hut to keep it from being blown away. Paths must be shoveled again every day.

There are gaps in the story. We don’t know why Hermann started spending so much time there, when it seems he and Cristiane have a close relationship. They have a teenaged daughter back in Austria, mentioned once, I believe, but we don’t know how Christiane feels about leaving her for a year. I also wondered how Christiane felt when she learned that Karl would be joining them, though she does show us how grateful she is for his help as the year continues.

The book is written as a journal, mostly in the present tense, so we live through her year of changes with her. I love winter, the cold, and the snow, though I think the hut in Spitsbergen would be beyond even me. I loved the book, though, for its appreciation of the natural world and our place in it, and for the brief escape into a simpler, more rigorous life.

What book have you escaped into recently?

Walk the Blue Fields, by Claire Keegan

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In this second collection of short stories, the author of the remarkable novella Small Things Like These takes us to rural Ireland. The seven stories occur in the modern day but they seem timeless, as though they could be happening anytime in the last century. Partly this sense comes from the rural setting, where so little has changed, and partly because of the psychological realism of Keegan’s characters. We know these people.

Keegan is a brilliant writer, able to condense masses of meaning into a few pages, and those so clearly written that you almost miss the layers they encompass. I’ll just mention a couple of the stories, and tread lightly so as not to ruin them. As with the best stories, several of them turn on a secret revealed, and I would not spoil your discoveries.

As the title story begins, we are placed in a chapel decorated for a wedding, and a priest ready to officiate. The ceremony itself is dispensed with in a few sentences; the story concerns the immediate aftermath—the photos, the hotel reception, the speeches—as filtered through the priest’s eyes. We do not know his name since he is only referred to as “the priest” or called “Father.” It must be a poignant moment when you lose your identity and begin to be held at arm’s length.

A melancholy air comes forward as the priest locks up the church and heads to the reception. He’d rather walk down by the river, but the hotel is “where his duty lies.” As he walks down the avenue,

On either side, the trees are tall and here the wind is strangely human. A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There’s pleasure to be had in history. What’s recent is another matter and painful to recall.

Then we are caught up in the whirl of the reception. The scene comes to life through the banter, the details, the people described so acutely. I won’t go on; just know that you are in the hands of a master, and the story will take you to surprising places. The ending is particularly satisfying in the way tiny, almost unnoticed details from the beginning of the story come into play.

The combination of realism and lingering remnants of legends and superstitions are even more central in the last story, “The Night of the Quicken Trees.” That is ancient name for the rowan tree or mountain ash, well known for its magical properties.

Margaret Flusk—”a bold spear of a woman . . .  not yet forty”—moves into an isolated house on the coast in the autumn. The house had belonged to a priest, now dead, and is joined to another house of the same size. It’s inhabited by a forty-nine-year-old bachelor named Stark, who has an odd relationship with his goat Josephine. A blend of comedy, folklore, and the way isolation and loneliness can set a person askew, the story is surprising and inevitable at the same time.

I love the morning when Stack first comes to her door. “Margaret wasn’t dressed. She was scratching herself and thinking. She liked to roam around in her nightdress having a think, drinking tea in the mornings.”  Such a great description of someone used to living alone.  

I saw an interview with Keegan in which she said that rather than planning out her stories ahead of time, she lets her main character loose and follows their footsteps. Perhaps that is why we get the sense of discovering the story—and the story behind the story—along with her.

Although these quiet stories speak of lost opportunities, escape, and desire, they are told with “a measured, almost documentary reserve,” as one reviewer put it, which give the reader a little psychological distance, thus enabling us to appreciate the tiny moments that carry considerable meaning, as well as the larger threads of timeless situations and how people survive them.

What short story collection have you come across that entranced you?

The First Ladies, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

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Benedict and Murray, authors of The Personal Librarian, once again join forces to bring us a well-researched and fascinating story of a friendship that helped form the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. Eleanor Roosevelt’s work as First Lady of the United States is legendary; less well known is Mary McLeod Bethune’s work, which led to her being called the “First Lady of Negro America” by Ebony magazine.

The daughter of a formerly enslaved couple, Mary Bethune became a fearless and passionate Civil Rights activist. Among her many accomplishments, she founded the American Council of Negro Women, and a private school (which later became Bethune-Cookman University) for Black students in Florida.

The friendship between the two women lasted many years, through the 1920s and 1940s, during which they partnered to push for equal rights. They first connected over a shared commitment to women’s rights and education, which later evolved to include equal rights for people of color. In this story—and this was one of the most interesting parts of the story for me—Eleanor gradually begins to recognise her personal shortcomings and blind spots around race. Their friendship is powerful enough to enable Mary and Eleanor to talk honestly about racial issues, to give and receive advice. And to understand that the work is never done.

The women partnered to work directly—Eleanor trying persuade Franklin to ensure Black citizens reaped the benefit of the New Deal jobs, for example, which led to Mary heading the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration—and indirectly. During a time when even driving in a car together was “not done,” they not only did that, but also met in public, shared a table for  tea in a restaurant, attended each other’s events, etc. By doing so, they changed public perceptions, normalising integration and promoting equality.

Their story is a good reminder that the fight for civil rights in the U.S. began before the 1960s. But the story isn’t all politics. We learn about the family relationships that offer a context for each woman. I found it fascinating to see the ways status and power shifted back and forth between them as the relationship between the two women deepened. As friends and admirers of each other, they rose above such petty concerns. They shared secrets and dreams. They supported each other through disappointments and tragedies.

Readers might be familiar with Eleanor’s struggle with her overbearing mother-in-law Sara and heartbreak over Franklin’s affair with his secretary Lucy Mercer. However, both receive even-handed treatment here, as we see Franklin’s early ideals clashing with the political realities of getting the New Deal laws through, and how Sara’s early support of equal rights for women and people of color influenced Eleanor.

Mary’s handling of daily insults and microaggressions, her insistence that she be addressed as Mrs. Bethune in professional settings rather than by her first name as though she were a servant, are inspiring. When one of her students got appendicitis and was refused treatment at the local hospital, she raised money and founded a hospital for people of color. When her grandson was refused access to a segregated beach, she collected investors and bought a stretch of the beach and waterfront, which they then sold to Black families–and White people were allowed to visit the beach. She invested in Black businesses, including a newspaper and several life insurance companies.

Bear in mind that these two amazing women led active political lives. Historical fiction comes in many flavors, so it’s important to adjust your expectations. I enjoy a light, historical romance as much as anyone else (Georgette Heyer, anyone?), but that is not what we have here. While we do get insight into the personal lives of these two women, for them the personal is political, as the saying goes. Much of the book shows how their personal beliefs and experiences motivate their political work. Thus the pace is sometimes leisurely and the story is rich with historical detail.

I especially appreciated the historical notes from each of the authors at the end, clarifying what came from the historical record and what was added by the authors. I also enjoyed the authors’ discussion of their collaboration. The narrators of the audiobook, Robin Miles and Tavia Gilbert, did an excellent job of bringing this story to life.

Especially in these difficult times, the story of these two women, their courage and commitment, their comradeship and deep friendship, is inspiring.

Who are you turning to for inspiration these days?

After Long Silence, by Helen Fremont

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In this 1999 memoir, Helen Fremont recounts her discovery at thirty-five that everything she thought she knew about her family was wrong. Raised Roman Catholic in a small midwestern town, she knew that her parents had emigrated from Poland, but they rarely spoke about the war or the death of their own parents. Only as an adult, practicing law in Boston, did she discover that her parents were in fact Jewish and Holocaust survivors.

What a sense of betrayal, to find that your parents have been lying to you all of your life. She and her sister Lara want to know more, which sends them digging for tiny scraps of information, following threads that they could begin to weave into the story of the past. The secrets they uncover are appalling.

Their father Kovik spent six years in the Soviet gulag, thinking that the woman he’d fallen in love with back in Poland—Batya—must be either dead or have forgotten him. Meanwhile, she was trying to save her parents as they all suffered starvation and abuse. She eventually relents enough to tell her daughter the story of one pogrom, in the courtyard of her own grade school.

The story moves back and forth between the present and the past, as we discover her parents’ live as she does. I love the Author’s Note at the beginning, because with a memoir it’s important to be honest with your readers about how much your imagination is filling in the gaps.

This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names, locations, and identifying characteristics of a number of individuals in order to protect their privacy. In some instances, I have imagined details in an effort to convey the emotional truths of my family’s experiences.

Later she writes about her doubts about the information they’ve pried out of their mother.

I wondered about everything now. The more I knew the more I wondered. If you open one door, a thousand other doors creak open. At least, there were two of us, Lara and I, tiptoeing through this wobbly past, doused with the blood of relatives we only now were getting to know. Lara gave me the courage to face our parents and our past.

In the memoir classes I teach, people often ask about revealing things that hurt others. We are not the only people in our memoirs. Here, Fremont’s parents resist being outed as Jewish. No wonder, when that identity meant terror and torture and death.

My own parents, with a surname that could be thought Jewish, did everything they could to make sure everyone knew they were not. It could have been prejudice, but the reason they gave me was that they wanted to protect us children from what they had seen while serving in World War II. If they were still alive today, they would be horrified by the current threats to create concentration camps here in the U.S. Perhaps they’d derive some satisfaction from saying I told you so.

Kovik’s and Batya’s escapes from the gulag and occupied Poland respectively make for thrilling reading. It’s no surprise they wanted to put those desperate and traumatic years behind them and pose as an ordinary Catholic couple. Was Fremont wrong to write this book and reveal their secrets? Judging from her sequel, the book caused them terrible pain. True, the main thread is her story of discovery, yet much of the content recounts the lives of her parents. If nothing else, this story shows the way secrets held too long fester and damage our most precious ties.

Can you recommend a memoir in which family secrets surface and cause big trouble?

Ghostland, by Edward Parnell

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Subtitled In Search of a Haunted Country, this unusual book combines travelogue, literary review, and memoir. England is that country, home to nearly all of the ghost stories I grew up on and to the legends that fired my imagination as a child. Parnell sets out to revisit the ghost stories that have been meaningful to him throughout his life, and actually go to the places where they are set or were written.

I felt as though I were making this journey with him. As he takes us to these places, he shares not only their sometimes beautiful, sometimes eerie atmosphere, but also his own memories of visiting them as a child with his family or later on birding expeditions with his brother Chris. He introduces us to the writer associated with the place and one or two of their stories. This is no dry, academic tome, but rather a genial, engaging story, as though we were in a pub somewhere listening to a fascinating storyteller.

Hard as it was to put down, I spent most of December reading this book because I kept stopping to find and read stories and books that Parnell discusses. Many of the authors, stories and places are old friends of mine. Some were new to me, all or in part. For example, I didn’t know that Rudyard Kipling had written ghost stories. I loved being introduced to The Children of Green Knowe, and returning to old haunts in the fen country and Arthurian-haunted Cornwall and Dorset.

Most of all, I enjoyed revisiting W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, a formative book for me, and similar in some ways to this book, being also a combination travelogue, memoir and collection of curious information. Parnell refers to a particular scene which

. . . cuts to the heart of Sebald’s work and his exploration of how we, both individually and collectively, come to forget (or at least suppress) the losses we have suffered, the memories of people and events that once came to us to us with such clarity, and the atrocities to which we are in some part complicit.

With this book, though, we are doing just the opposite: exploring the memories that haunt us. I was most moved by a story new to me: “Pirates,” by E. F. Benson, in which a fifty-six-year-old, successful business man comes across his childhood home, now abandoned and beginning to decay. The man becomes obsessed with buying and restoring it, recreating the happy home of his youth, returning even the furniture and other items now in his London home. The story gave me a jolt of recognition for I often dream that I’ve discovered my own beloved childhood home, miraculously not destroyed after all, and that I can buy it and, indeed, return these items from my current home to their rightful places. Then I wake up.

There is something about this time of year that makes me turn to ghost stories. Of course, traditionally the solstice and Christmas Eve are moments when the veil between the living and the dead thins, and perhaps disappears. And there’s something about ghost stories and England. Parnell mentions the Happisburgh footprints discovered in 2013 in Norfolk, England. Dating to the end of the Early Pleistocene, they are the oldest known hominid footprints discovered outside of Africa.

Although only in his late thirties, Parnell has suffered great losses: the deaths of both parents and Chris, his only sibling, leaving him—as one of my friends said of herself—the Last of the Mohicans. He talks about the period during and after the Great War, with its huge loss of life, when those desperate to see again their lost loved ones embraced Spiritualism. One of the themes that lends power to this story is the question of how best to heal from grief. Can we really sense something of them lingering around us? Do we hold onto our dead or let them go?

And of course there are the attendant themes around memory: what we hold onto and what we suppress, why these particular memories stay with us, even though at the time the incidents may have seemed inconsequential. As the year dies, I think about death and welcome my ghosts. I believe this is a book I will return to every December.

Who or what haunts you?

So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell

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In this 1980 novella, the narrator revisits an incident in his past—1921 in rural Illinois, to be exact—in which tenant farmer Lloyd Wilson is murdered by his neighbor Clarence Smith. The grisly story has stayed with the narrator because he briefly became friends with the murderer’s 13-year-old son Cletus.

At the time, the two children encountered each other in the skeleton of the new home being built by the narrator’s father and began playing together. Not surpisingly, they never spoke of their lives outside of that space: the death of the narrator’s mother three years earlier and his father’s subsequent remarriage, or whatever tensions gripped Cletus’s family. Now, many years later, the narrator tries to reconstruct that boy’s home life, the relationship between Cletus’s father and Wilson that led to tragedy, and the narrator’s own involvement.

Smith and Wilson had once been the best of friends, helping each other out with farm work, spending long hours chewing the fat. Until Lloyd became infatuated with Clarence’s dissatisfied wife Fern, forcing his own furious wife Marie to decamp with the children. A Catholic, she refused to divorce Lloyd.

A not uncommon story, here brought to ferocious life by Maxwell’s measured prose. A contradiction, yes, and a tour de force. For one thing, the novella is pure narration—anathema these days when readers, trained by television and film, expect one dramatic scene after another. This choice, and Maxwell’s extreme emotional reserve, give the story a certain bleakness. Yet there was plenty of suspense to keep me turning the pages.

We start with the narrator’s brief memory of a gravel pit where he used to play as a child and quickly pivot—“One winter morning shortly before daybreak, three men loading gravel there heard what sounded like a pistol shot”—to a straightforward account of the crime, drawn from testimony at the inquest.

The novella continues to move back and forth between the two stories: that of the murder and that of the narrator as a boy. It also alternates between two characters: the boy who has little experience beyond his own losses and the adult narrator who knows so much more. Meghan O’Rourke calls this a “palimpsest narrator” who conveys both timelines: “two authentic, but possibly contradictory perspectives.”

That movement and the tension it creates is similar to what I find in reading a braided story that moves back and forth between two timelines, often found in historical fiction. There’s a built-in cliffhanger each time the story shifts, a pause is one timeline while we visit the other. It happens again when we shift back.

Another source of suspense in this quiet story is the unreliability of memory and of the narratives we create of our past. “Who believes children,” the narrator asks on the second page. Throughout the story, his memories are held up for examination. He also tells us frankly that he is using his imagination to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of Cletus’s life.

Much of the novella is apparently drawn from Maxwell’s own life. Fiction editor of the New Yorker from 1936-1975, Maxwell said in an interview in the Paris Review (“The Art of Fiction # 71”): “I felt that in this century the first person narrator has to be a character and not just a narrative device. So I used myself as the ‘I’ and the result was two stories, Cletus Smith’s and my own.” I’m a bit suspicious of autofiction, a term for fiction with a strong autobiographical foundation, coined by novelist Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, but I appreciate that the author here makes it clear all along that many of the details are imagined.

Memories, regrets, the summing up of our past: these are tasks common to those of us in the latter phases of life. For me, the emotional restraint, the bleakness, the effort to imagine what we cannot know—and the regrets—are familiar and gave this novella a surprising power. We never know when we wave goodbye to a friend if we will actually see them again or, indeed, if we truly know them—or ourselves—at all.

Have you read anything by William Maxwell? What did you think of it?

Best Books I Read in 2024

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are ten of the best books I read in 2024. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Note: I did not include poetry here, though I read the work of some amazing poets, such as Richard Wilbur, Sam Schmidt, Linda Pastan, Ellen Bryant Voight, and Mahmoud Darwish. If you’re interested in reading a wider range of poets, consider joining in on the monthly Poetry Discussion Group I host. Free, no experience necessary, and copies of the poems are provided. Details on my website.

Fiction

  1. Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become. Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. A powerful story that puts our current social and political tensions into a (so far) fictional authoritarian world.

  1. The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd

Nell Young loves maps and once dreamed of working with her brilliant father in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. Her even more brilliant cartographer mother died when Nell was a toddler. When Nell gets an emergency call from the New York Public Library, she embarks on a quest to identify the monster behind a string of thefts and murder. The delightfully complicated plot uses maps in surprising and satisfying ways.

  1. The American Queen, by Vanessa Miller

This fascinating novel is based on the true story of twenty-four-year-old Louella Bobo who in 1865 leads a group of her fellow former slaves to build a community in the Carolinas. The part I enjoyed most was the building of the Happy Land: how Louella managed to negotiate what they needed, the ways they found to make the money they needed, and the success of their communal sharing of all resources.

  1. Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her remaining child, Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. In this complex story, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. It is a cracking good read, and accurate in its depiction of the time and place, at least according to my memories.

  1. The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

Chieko lives with her parents in the same building that houses their shop in Kyoto. This gentle story of a few months in her life begins with three images that embody themes central to Japanese literary tradition while later, more modern themes emerge. The microcosm of Chieko and her family holds a much larger story about how we handle the past—what we keep and what we discard—not only traditions but also our memories and our own identities.  This beautifully written story is one that will haunt me.

Nonfiction

  1. Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities. As MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders of the natural world, she encourages us to see nature as something other than a reflection of ourselves. I read and reread these essays, loving the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world.”

  1. Burning Questions, by Margaret Atwood

Subtitled Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, this is Atwood’s third collection of essays, speeches, book introductions, and reviews. What astonished me was how readable this heterogeneous collection is. Of course, we have Atwood’s voice throughout: intelligent, calm, learned, self-deprecating, and witty. For a more global understanding of the issues facing us, their interconnectedness, and how we can move forward, this book cannot be beat.

  1. Normal Women, by Phillipa Gregory

This astonishing book should be required reading everywhere in the Western world. This history of women in England for the last 900 years is fascinating and infuriating. Women have suffered ever since William the Conqueror brought his patriarchal ideas about the superiority of men over women to England in 1066, obliterating the more equitable society he found there. In this book, every assertion is backed up by example after example drawn from primary sources, starting with the Norman laws that dictated the so-called natural inferiority of women, morally, mentally, and physically. As the book progresses through the centuries, we get stories of many extraordinary women and their struggles.

  1. The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty

Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, created in 1960 to provide a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. The book provides fascinating insight into the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.

  1. Proust’s Duchess, by Caroline Weber

Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.

 

What are the best books you read in 2024?