I enjoyed this short story collection immensely. The author was new to me, selected by one of my book clubs. Unlike Olive Kitteridge which I blogged about a few weeks ago, each story here stands alone.

Some people dislike reading short stories because of the effort required to get into a new set of characters and situations; once having made that investment, it can be frustrating to have the story end after a couple of dozen pages. However, I find short stories are perfect for when I have only a little bit of time to read, such as during my half-hour lunch. Also, I appreciate the punch they deliver, heightened by the compression necessitated by the short form.

What does tie the collection together is the author’s unsentimental compassion for his characters. And his generosity. And his remarkable writing.

In “Bastogne”, a man visits the Belgian village where his father fought in the Second World War. This is a story about love. Faced with his own mortality, the narrator moves back and forth in time, weaving his father’s tales into the threads of his own life, and those of his mother, his wife and young son.

Only a very good writer can handle this kind of impressionistic style without irritating me, and McNally is very good indeed. Instead of using linear time to create the narrative arc, McNally uses certain images—dogs, an apple-cheeked nurse, a burning tank—coming back to them again and again, finding a deeper meaning each time. The other thing that he does very well is include specific detail, for example about the design flaw in the original Jeep or Goring’s airdrop of meat paste or Russian-trained dogs. And in the midst of all this detail he can throw in a stunner of a sentence that makes me catch my breath. (I was going to give an example, but they’re not the same out of context.)

Another story that I particularly liked was “Skin Deep” about Lacey, a teenaged girl working for the summer for some landscapers. Her father is in jail, so she lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, “an indefinitely-suspended-without-pay firefighter”. Her mother—a former Amway saleswoman who now sells their furniture in yard sales to get by and has just decided to be a Broadway agent—believes Lacey’s destiny is to be a star and wants to sign her up for acting classes at the community college. However, skeptical Lacey has been making plans, with the assistance of her father’s lawyer, to go to college in Massachusetts. McNally captures the end-of-summer ennui, the difficulty of finding and holding jobs, the reluctant love for family mingled with exasperation. And he brilliantly captures what it’s like to be a teenaged girl getting ready to leave home and starting to see her family with objective eyes.

The last story, too, the title story, affected me deeply, resonating with “Bastogne” and its themes. Shortly after his father’s death, Thomas visits Paris with his wife and their young daughter. Paris is where his wife lived and loved before she returned to the States and met him. I loved the image of the gateway itself, a huge arch in St. Louis, the “gateway to the West”, Thomas’s home town where he returned after failing as a screenwriter in Hollywood and became a real-estate agent. Dreams not just deferred but abandoned. And I had to stop and think about mortality and love and parents and children when Thomas says, “People used to call my father The Colossus; then he died; and eventually, not that far into the future, there will be nobody left alive to remember the things he said and did. But when I was a boy, he explained to me the history of the world . . .”

These are real lives, stories from the heartland. I highly recommend this collection.

I had an odd experience with this book. For some reason, I had it in my head that this was a memoir, perhaps because before I started it, some people in my book club compared it to The Glass Castle, an excellent memoir by Jeannette Walls that we read a few years ago. I ordered Caucasia through the library, so I didn't see which section it came from. I didn't look at the back cover or flaps; just started reading. Yes, I noticed the author's name on the cover didn’t match the main character’s, but she says right away that she has changed her name.

So, thinking that it was a true story, I thought it brilliant. Really captured the time period—Boston during the Civil Rights era (which, yes, I remember well)—and laid out some very interesting issues re race. The narrator, Birdie, and her sister are daughters of a bi-racial family: their mother is Caucasian and their father is African-American. By the luck of the gene pool, Birdie can pass for white while the sister has obviously African-American features and coloring.

The father is a scholar, who disapproves of the mother’s activitism and the rather dangerous people she begins to hang around with as she becomes involved with a wing of the Civil Rights movement who believe violence is the answer. The parents separate, the sister going with their father and his new (African-American) girlfriend, Carmen, to Brazil while Birdie goes with their mother and begins a new life as a white girl, moving around to avoid the consequences of the mother’s activism, but eventually settling in New Hampshire.

I did think the bond between the sisters almost too good to be true, but maybe not everyone fought with her sister the way I did, and I was willing to cut the author some slack since truth is often odder than fiction. I read about a quarter of the book before I actually looked at the flaps and realized it was a novel. I can't tell you how disappointed I was! I think that original misunderstanding was why I began to feel that the story—though very well-written—was too far-fetched.

For one thing, certain things were just paired too neatly. One white-looking daughter, one black. A fat, sloppy mother and a hip, gorgeous aunt. One sister overtly favored by their mother’s mother (a wealthy suburbanite), one by Carmen (In fact, I found Carmen's favoritism hard to understand; there seemed no basis for it). Polar opposites always make me suspicious; the world seems more complex than that.

Secondly, parts of the story, starting with the part set in New Hampshire, seemed unrealistic to me. I don’t want to give anything away, but things fall into place for them very easily and the last scraps of their former life seem to float away. To me, the first part of the story was character-driven and the second part more plot-driven, where the exigencies of the plot overrode the nuances of the characters and the complexity of their relationships.

The book raised interesting questions about race, which I thought could have been explored more fully. The weirdness/madness of the father's situation at the end—like a male cat lady—kept me from considering his theories about race. The whole did-she-or-didn't-she of the mother's situation kept me from considering how Birdie felt about being secretly black in white world.

These minor quibbles aside, I think the book is very well-written. The voice was wonderful; Senza really captured the child's and then the teenager's language and world view perfectly. And the period details were added in just the right amount. I loved the way the relationship between Birdie and her mother was developed, the clear-eyed love Birdie had for this flawed woman.

A few weeks ago, in blogging about the Donna Leon book, I mentioned that in the mysteries I like, the detective has a moral code. This code may be openly expressed, as in Robert B. Parker’s books, or it may be shown through the detective’s actions, as in Reginald Hill’s books. Red Harvest takes this concept a step further. Hammett’s first novel was the April selection for one of my book clubs. I hadn’t read it before, though I’d heard it was the basis for Akiro Kurasawa’s Yojimbo and therefore all its descendants. Hammett’s detective is unnamed, but commonly referred to as the Continental Op because he is an employee of the Continental Detective Agency. He is also the narrator of Hammett’s second book, The Dain Curse and several short stories.

The Continental Op is sent to the mining town of Personville, Montana, hired by the newspaper editor to help smoke out corruption, but before they can meet, the editor is murdered. The man’s father, Elihu Willsson, runs the town: he owns the mines, the bank, the two newspapers, the sheriff, etc. He is also the man who brought in the gangsters that his son was trying to nail, brought them in as strike-breakers, but was now powerless to rein them in. Willsson couldn’t openly break with his thugs, the leaders being Pete the Finn, Lew Yard, Max “Whisper” Thaler, because they had too much on him. Elihu Willsson sees his chance to take back his town and hires the Op to clear out the gangsters. The story thus marries two genres, detective fiction and westerns, the first to do so.

Personville—known to its residents as Poisonville—is loosely based on Butte, Montana, where Hammett was sent as a union-buster by Pinkerton. While there, Hammett was traumatized by the lynching of an IWW leader, Frank Little. Hammett suspected other Pinkerton agents may have been involved, but the murder was never solved. The horror stayed with him—Lillian Hellman later wrote that the lynching was “a kind of key to his life”—and it may have been what prompted him later to join the Communist Party. Certainly one of the main characters here is Bill Quint, a labor organizer from Chicago sent out to help the local IWW regain its footing.

Published in 1929, the book was first serialised in Black Mask and is dedicated to its editor, Joseph Thompson Shaw. Shaw demanded tight writing, lots of action, and no dilly-dallying with literary techniques. Within those parameters, Hammett does an amazing job of conveying characters through dialogue and compressed description, such as depicting the Op as “a blond Satan”. The dialogue is full of period slang, portraying these tough guys in their element. Despite the limitations of the first person narration, Hammett enables us to make our own assessment of the Op; his short bursts of dialogue convey when he’s being sarcastic or outright lying, a marvel of compression.

Surprisingly, the murder is solved early in the book, but there are many murders to come, hence the title. This unusual structure keeps the action moving at a clip almost too fast to follow. The most interesting character (for me, anyway) is Dinah Brand, a prostitute, but not the stereotype with a heart of gold; rather, a hand held out for gold. She paints herself as a woman who will do anything for money, but at the same time gives houseroom to a man afflicted with tuberculosis, a disease from which Hammett himself suffered. She is Whisper Thaler’s girlfriend, but manages to thread her way through the town’s corruption and bloodshed, following her personal code.

The Op’s own moral code evolves as the story progresses. His plan for cleaning up the town is to turn the various factions against each other, but as the murder count rises, he finds himself becoming callous and indifferent to the wholesale slaughter around him. He says, “‘Poisonville was beginning to boil out under the lid, and I felt so much like a native that even the memory of my very un-nice part in the boiling didn't keep me from getting twelve solid end-to-end hours of sleep.'” Watching him teeter on the brink of the abyss is the real suspense in this story.

Looking for gentle wisdom and beautiful writing? Try this collection of short stories, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. How I wish I’d read this book when I was younger, back when I read novels to try to understand the world and why people did what they did. These stories tease open the secret chambers of people’s hearts, revealing everyday pettiness and unexpected generosity. In some cases, we find motivations that are hidden even from the person herself.

If I were teaching a writing class, I’d assign this book as an original way to create character. Olive is a retired math teacher living in a small town in Maine. She has a difficult relationship with her son. Her husband, Henry, runs the town pharmacy. Although Olive is only a bit player in some of these stories, we grasp her essence by understanding what’s happened to her former students, by seeing how Henry befriends his mousy assistant in the pharmacy, by hearing her exchange a few words with her neighbors at the grocery store or a local concert. We watch Olive learn in the most unlikely way that a small kindness reaps a greater one.

In a small town everyone knows each other’s business. More than that, their lives are so closely tied up with each other’s that commonalities emerge, as a couple after years of living together come to resemble each other. By exploring the ramifications of a community’s everyday life, this book complements last week’s David Adams Richards book, which dwelt on the tragic consequences of gossip and boredom and self-importance. The tragedies here are smaller but no less painful. They are lightened by those rare moments of grace, when one person recognizes another’s pain or loneliness and speaks a gentle word to soothe it.

What I valued most was the insight into the long marriages, the ebb and flow of affection and loyalty. There are some young people in the book, but most of the stories explore the consciousness of older people, as for example those who have lost a spouse and feel the lack of someone to tell about the small things that have happened during the day.

With Harmon, we sense his unexpected melancholy now that the children are grown and gone. Although he struggled for years with the chaos they brought in their wake, keeping the house in a confusion of bickering and lost ice skates, he misses them now. Not his wife Bonnie, though. She’s taken off: joined a book club, written a recipe book, reinvented her life. She makes things: braids rugs, creates wreaths from dried roses and bayberry, sews quilted jackets. In Harmon’s hardware store, the customers talk about each other, about their hip problems, and he sees their loneliness. He finds himself visiting Daisy Foster, a recent widow. He brings her a doughnut.

It doesn’t sound like much, but really, it is. Patiently, Strout pursues her characters, sometimes catching them in a net, worn soft with years of use; sometimes slipping in the sharp filet knife and laying bare the hollow bones. She captures familiar turns of phase and spreads them before us: “Now was that so hard to do?” “Say, isn’t that something?” Each story is full of small truths, like realising you want to hear that someone is having more trouble with their child than you.

These are working people. We see them in their jobs, with their families, out for meal or a party. We are presented with life in its entirety, life in the round: petty jealousies, small prejudices and intolerances. Yet throughout the book there is, not a sweetness, but a current of acceptance, bracing and salty and aware. We are constantly aware that these people, however flawed, however small their lives, have value.

“Show; don’t tell,” novice writers are told, a cryptic rule which leads some of them to wail, “What does that mean?” Were I teaching an introductory creative writing class, I would use this book as an example.

The first 70 pages (Part I of the book) are almost entirely “telling”. The events preceding the main story are summarized: “The year after Will took over the entire Jameson tract, Owen fell in love with a whimsical, emotional girl named Lula Brower.” So much for falling in love, meat for any number of entire novels. Characters’ motivations, which writers are told to “show” through their actions and reactions, are laid out in plain, declarative sentences: “Nolan was certain of his position and did not like being challenged.” And imagery is made explicit, rather than leaving it for the reader to notice: “These were the gnarled and toughened trees. Like the men, they came to root in tough soil and could not be easily defeated.”

However, as with all rules, once you understand the “show; don’t tell” dictum, you may break it for effect, which is what Richards does here. This is the story of a logging family and the men who work for them in the harsh, 30-below woods. It is also the story of the townspeople whose opinions shift with the wind of rumors born of boredom, envy, greed, or pride. Richards’ incantatory narration is not only appropriate for these simple souls, but also puts the reader at a distance from the story, reminding us that it happened a long time ago (just before and after the Great War) and far away (New Brunswick in the Maritimes), making it over into a legend, something that has been handed down in the oral tradition. The forces that drive the story—unscrupulous labor barons and the damage done by irresponsible rumors—match those common to the stories of that time as well.

Two brothers are left to run their father’s lumber company after his early death, first Will, the golden boy who knows the woods and the trade, and then Owen, the frail, bookish younger brother who wants to read a million books. Once the groundwork is laid, Richards proceeds to show just what life in a lumber camp is like, harsh and brutal. He names the men and their roles: the “Push” who oversees the work, the “tend team” who feeds the horses, and the teamsters who work them: the Belgians, Clydesdales and Percherons. Some of the fallers use axes; some use saws to cut down the great trees, but none of them realise that that in a handful of years, they, their tools, and the horses will all be replaced by the mechanisation that is coming.

Richards takes great risks here, even as his woodsmen risk their lives and horses every time they race downhill in front of sleds carrying tons of timber. When he talks about the men or describes walking through the virgin woods at night with no guide or lamp but instinct and memory, he is not afraid to sound as sentimental as a Stephen Foster song. Many times I found myself thinking Ah, too bad; now he has ruined the book such as when he gives a twist to the title partway through. Yet, like the men hauling logs too heavy and working hours too long for any human to survive, Richards pushes on with his blunt, sometimes even clumsy sentences, refusing to give up. And he brings it off. Inevitably, ineluctably, he carries us away with him into this world and leaves us shaking with the wonder and the tragedy and the humanity of it all.

I’m a big fan of Chabon’s writing. When my book club read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay some years ago, I didn’t think I would like it because the subject didn’t interest me. However, I was so caught up by the writing that I ended up loving the book. Recently I read (and blogged about) his book of essays, Maps and Legends, one of which has to do with how he came to write this book. Apparently, he stumbled across a phrase book called Say It in Yiddish and was utterly taken with the notion that somewhere there might exist a country or even a town where Yiddish is the primary language and business is conducted in Yiddish by everyone—gas station attendants, hotel clerks, police officers. Where could that be?

This mystery, then, takes place in fictional Sitka, Alaska, a temporary Jewish colony established in 1948. In reality, such an Alaskan safe haven was actually considered by Roosevelt, but of course support for the state of Israel in then Palestine won out. In Chabon’s alternate universe, the District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan control, and the Jewish population dispersed. Our moral center in this atmosphere of chaos and fear is Meyer Landsman, a homicide detective who can barely keep his own life together since the collapse of his marriage, leaving him with only alcohol and work to hold onto. Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner investigate the murder of one of Landman’s neighbors.

I like mysteries, and the plotting here is great: twists and turns that shed new light on the clues and put them in a different relationship to each other. As always, Chabon’s writing is a thing of beauty, with marvelous images such as “In the rain the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat.” Yet, for some reason, I never felt engaged with the story; rather I felt that I was observing it from the outside. However, I must say that the other members of my book club were thoroughly caught up in it.

A friend told me about a puppet show she saw recently, where there was no theatre or curtain. Instead, a man stood operating his puppets in full view of the audience. As a result, she focused on his expertise rather than the story being enacted by the puppets. This, I believe, is what happened to me here: I was so busy admiring Chabon’s cleverness that I never really connected to the story or to Landsman. Perhaps as well, I thought Landsman too much the stereotype of the noir detective. Some of the other characters seemed more complex and interesting: his ex-wife, particularly in her efforts to balance work and personal life, and his partner, particularly in his relationship with his father.

My book club discussed the religious sects described in the book, as well as how some fundamentalist factions in various religions seem to want to “return” their culture to a former time, a past that appears less complicated, when it was easier to be good. Nostalgia for a golden past is part of the human condition. All paradises are lost paradises. The modern world can be terrifying and, like many others, I take comfort in mysteries. There, wrongs are righted and, as P.D. James has said, we are reassured that we live in a moral universe.

In his essay, Chabon goes on to wonder what Europe would look like today if those millions of Jews had never been killed, if they had gone on to have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Perhaps there would be rural towns where Yiddish is the first language. Perhaps he would have cousins in these towns whom he could visit and family roots he could search out. What does it mean, Chabon asks, to come from a culture that no longer exists and from a language almost no one speaks anymore? Recalling my mother’s obsession with her genealogical researches and her pride in how far back she could trace her family history, I wonder about how we define our identities when we are stripped of language and history. Can this loss ever be freeing, making it easier to engage in the peculiarly American pastime of reinventing ourselves? Or does it always cause alienation, leaving us longing to recreate a past, even a mythical past, where we might feel at home?

This is the twelfth of McPherson's books, but the first I've read. It is made up of two parts: the first, the portrayals, are poems about outsider artists; the second, the trails, longer poems about particular trails she has traveled, rich with descriptions of flora and fauna.

In the endnotes, she mentions the resonance between the two words, portrayals and trails. An epigraph defines edge effect as the place where two communities overlap like a Venn diagram. Because these liminal areas share characteristics of both communities, they boast a richer diversity than the bulk of the community. I am reminded of a time Jill and I were at the Worcester Art Museum looking at a painting of two blocks of color. I couldn't make sense of it until Jill pointed out that where the colors met was no clear line, but a shimmer of many colors, spreading, interpenetrating, playing off of each other.

I enjoyed the first part of this book but the second, the trail poems, seemed impenetrable to me. In one of my maillists we have been discussing poems you have to take a chisel to, their peculiar rewards, and what it is fair to ask of a reader.

I've mentioned here before how each reader brings to a book a constellation of circumstances that the author can have no way of anticipating. I had just come off a stretch of reading the poetry of William Carlos Williams in order to prepare to lead a discussion and, after his adherence to plain language and the rhythms of speech, McPherson's trail poems seemed overly complex and obscure. I had trouble following the sense of the sentences. Even some of the flora was new to me: I know weeds and wildflowers, but mostly those of the east coast. Of the places she names, I have walked only one.

Remembering the chisel, I struggled with several poems, reading and rereading, not sure that the effort was worth the reward. Then as night fell, I read a poem that I simply didn't understand. Irritated at being held at arm's length, I tossed the book aside.

That full-moon night I dreamed many dreams, but the last one was of my city, the one I often dream about, but a new aspect of it: underground. Cynthia had to go downtown for an interview, so for the adventure of it, we decided to go by way of the abandoned water tunnels that we'd heard interconnected in such a way that you could get from the uptown plaza with the blue reflecting pools to downtown's towers without ever surfacing.

To make it more interesting, and because we thought it too far to walk, we rode two glossy brown horses. I'm not sure where we got them—the only horses I'd seen in this city before had belonged to mounted police—but we seemed to know them well. And our small cats, Blue and Sophie, came with us, scampering alongside when not dashing off to explore.

The tunnels were where our friend Frank, who had designed the plaza with the reflecting pools, said they would be and tall enough for us to ride easily. I'm not sure what the source of the dim illumination was. Sometimes we slowed to a walk while the horses picked their way over cobbles strewn with broken chunks of branches, smoothed from their immersion years earlier. Other times we moved up to a trot, the smooth motion of posting like a second heartbeat.

But then we came to a dark pool with no way around. Nor was it shallow enough to walk through. I let my horse step into it, but he soon lost his footing and began to swim, so we returned to shore. Cynthia didn't want to risk ruining her interview clothes, tied up in a bundle behind her saddle, so we decided to retrace our steps and ride downtown on the familiar surface street.

As we emerged from the tunnel, Cynthia spied two friends of hers—she has friends everywhere, dream city or no—entering an apartment door. Chatting of many things, she explained our dilemma. The women said they often used the tunnels and invited us to dinner the next night. I hoped that over pasta and wine they would reveal the secrets of the unfathomable pool and how to traverse it. We emerged into sunshine and the bright shimmer of the reflecting pools. My cat Blue squirmed under a fence, taking off on her own adventures, and I awoke.

I reread the poem, and this time it made perfect sense. I found that I had dreamed the poem: the wood underfoot, the depths and dim tracings of time, the intricate working of fetlock, cannon and pasterns. I went back to the earlier poems, and their rewards came easily. Sometimes it takes a chisel; sometimes a dream.

Last year, Kyoto celebrated the 1,000th anniversary of this epic tale, generally considered to be the world's first true novel. Consisting of 54 chapters, it describes courtly life in the Heian era of Japan, which extended from 794 to 1191, when Kyoto was the nation’s capital. An extended period of peace and prosperity meant that art and literature flourished, and a Japanese culture, distinct from that of China, began to emerge, a culture based on poetry and music rather than the arts of war.

The author is a woman, Murasaki Shikibu, who lived in Kyoto from approximately 978 to 1014. Her real name is unknown. Her first name, Murasaki, is the name of Genji’s most beloved wife, while Shikibu comes from an office held by her father. After her husband's death, she became a courtier to the empress Joto Mon'in. According to tradition, Murasaki dreamt up The Tale of Genji during a single night at the Ishiyama-dera Temple in August of 1004 while she contemplated the moon (which curiously reminded me of J.K. Rowling’s famous train ride in which she conceived of the entire Harry Potter sequence). Evidence indicates the tale was composed sometime between 1001 and 1010.

The story covers three generations of aristocratic and royal families, but concentrates primarily on one man, Prince Genji, the son of the emperor and a lesser consort. Genji is a hero of love rather than battle, a man who appreciates women of all types and stations. These women are not just conquests to him, notches on a sword, but individuals. He is attentive to their lives and wants and needs, and it is this sensitivity, along with his surpassing beauty, that makes him so successful a lover.

I had to keep reminding myself to suspend judgment. This tale is set in a different culture, far distant in time and place, with different mores and different expectations. I found it hard not to be shocked by the casual assumption that all women are there for an aristocrat’s taking, whether they like it or not, and that a man forcing himself on a woman may be considered romantic and the prelude to a love match. Genji is regarded as remarkable for taking responsibility for the women he has used in this way, housing them in a wing of one of his palaces or providing for their upkeep. A different time. A different culture.

Once I could let go of outrage, I fell victim to the poetry:

“‘_Ageless_ shall be the name of our pleasure boats.’

‘Our boats row out into the bright spring sun,
And water drops from the oars like scattering petals.'”

It is not just the small poems Genji exchanges with friends and lovers, but the narrative and description. “Even the most ordinary music can seem remarkable if the time and place are right; and here on the wide seacoast, open far into the distance, the groves seemed to come alive in colors richer than the bloom of spring or the change of autumn, and the calls of the water rails were as if they were pounding on the door and demanding to be admitted . . . ‘A bridge that floats across dreams?’ he whispered, reaching for a koto . . . Diffidently she took up the lute which he pushed towards her, and they played a brief duet.”

And it is not all about love and music. The author writes sensitively of nature: “There was a heavy fall of snow . . . The contrast between the snow on the bamboo and the snow on the pines was very beautiful . . . (Genji says,) ‘People make a great deal of the flowers of spring and the leaves of autumn, but for me a night like this, with a clear moon shining on snow, is the best — and there is not a trace of color in it. I cannot describe the effect it has on me, weird and unearthly somehow.'”

Here is Genji after his father’s death:

“Coming to the grave, Genji almost thought he could see his father before him. Power and position were nothing once a man was gone. He wept and silently told his story, but there came no answer, no judgment upon it. And all those careful instructions and admonitions had served no purpose at all?

‘Quickly the blossoms fall. Though spring departs,
You will come again, I know, to a city of flowers.'”

And of Genji’s own death Murasaki says:

“He went away like the foam upon the waters.”

Picking up this quiet book after last week’s The Clockers was like bursting out of the rapids into a wide pool of water, where ripples gently rock your craft and the roar of the water is replaced by the soothing buzz of crickets and cicadas. Price’s sprawling saga of inner city violence gave way to this focused exploration of a man’s heart.

Lin Kong is a doctor in the Chinese Army, living at the army hospital in Muji City. Every summer, he visits his home in the rural village where he grew up and where his wife and daughter still live. His marriage to Shuyu was arranged by his parents, and after the wedding, Lin is disappointed to find that she looks decades older than her age and was illiterate. Shuyu is old-fashioned both in appearance, with her bound feet measuring only four inches long, and by nature, humble and deferential. Hard-working, she labors in their plot of land, takes care of Lin’s parents until their deaths, and raises their daughter Hua.

Meanwhile, Lin has fallen into an understanding with a nurse who lives in a dormitory at the hospital. Forbidden by hospital rules to live together or even to walk together outside the hospital grounds, they still spend time together. For many years Manna has eaten meals with Lin, walked with him inside their restricted area, and waited for him to divorce his wife. The hospital rule is that a man had to be separated from his wife for eighteen years before he can divorce her without her consent. As the story opens, Lin has not had relations with his wife for seventeen years, since Hua’s birth.

Of course, if Manna had known from the outset how many years she would have to wait for Lin, she might have made different choices. On his annual visit home, Lin would ask Shuyu for a divorce. Sometimes she would agree but always changed her mind when standing before the judge. Part of what fascinated me about this story was the way minor, seemingly inconsequential choices over the years can lead to an impasse that no one wants or can find happiness in.

It is the mysterious nature of happiness, or—let’s not go overboard—just contentment that is being examined here. Unfulfilled longing can eat away at your soul, but getting what you ask for can be a curse.

Of course, I was reminded of Faith Wilding’s 1972 monologue, “Waiting”. As Wilding herself describes it:, the monologue “condenses a woman’s entire life into a monotonous, repetitive cycle of waiting for life to begin while she is serving and maintaining the lives of others.” When I first read it in Judy Chicago’s book Through the Flower, a few years after its inaugural performance at Womanhouse, it jolted me into a new understanding of wasted time and the need to be mindful of each moment.

Although this brief description of the story as a man trying to divorce his loyal wife while also keeping the modern woman he loves on a string would be enough to raise the hackles of any self-respecting feminist, I gave the book a chance because it was by Ha Jin. I’d read another book of his, a seemingly simple story that ended up resonating deeply, not just with me, but with everyone else in my book club. I found Waiting just as satisfying.

I particularly like stories like this one where we stay with one or two characters, examining them from all sides, observing their natures gently unfolding, just as I like to stay awhile in that quiet pond, listening to the cicadas ruffle the air with their song, watching the damselflies skim across the water’s surface, instead of paddling quickly past to get somewhere else. Stories like this one reveal the depth and complexity of a person, of each person. They remind me to pay attention. To be present in this moment, instead of waiting, as Wilding says, for what might come next. 

The stories of two men alternate here. The first, Strike, is a lieutenant in Rodney Little’s drug kingdom in Dempsy, NJ. Strike oversees clockers selling bottles from the benches outside the Roosevelt Homes, trying to teach them sales skills but too often disgusted with their lack of common sense. His sense of responsibility is both a strength and a weakness. He’s also hampered by a stammer and an ulcer that seems to be getting worse every day.

He has an instinct for commerce, gauging factors like the weather, the lateness of the hour, the day of the week to determine how many more bottles to get in the next re-up. It was his idea to move the sales out to the benches, reasoning that their white buyers were afraid to come into the projects. Yet he has dropped out of high school, lured by the money to be made on the street and by the reassurance of Rodney’s powerful presence, and as a result is estranged from his law-abiding mother and brother who live in the Homes.

Rodney brings teens in off the street to work in his store where he tries to train them in how to survive as part of his crew. they shouldn’t flaunt their wealth in ways that attract the notice of the police. Rodney himself drives a rust-colored Cadillac with six Garfields stuck to the windows. In fact, Rodney encourages them not to blow all their money on shoes and gold jewelry but to keep reinvesting it. Strike is one of the few who understands Rodney’s lessons and, as a result, has twenty-five thousand dollars stashed away in several safe houses. When he has enough, he plans to leave this life and buy himself a better one, but what is enough?

The second man is a Homicide investigator named Rocco who equally longs for a better life. He loves his wife and baby daughter but sees almost nothing of them, spending long hours on the job, often handing around watching tv even after his shift ends. He and his partner Mazilli work together smoothly, with a long-standing division of labor and an understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As the story opens, Rocco is leading around an actor who’s researching a movie role as a Homicide investigator. Tired of the street, Rocco becomes obsessed with visions of Hollywood and a more glamorous life.

Rocco and Mazilli catch a murder, Darryl Adams, hard-working manager at Ahab’s, a fast-food place near Rodney’s store. Besides being found with a roll of cash in his pocket, Darryl used to work for Rodney, so Rocco suspects he might have been dealing drugs out of Ahab’s. It is this murder that drives the book. Who did it? Why?

The writing here is terrific. Price has an eye for the detail that shocks a scene into life, such as one young man caressing his stomach under his shirt as he talks—how often have I seen that in the kids lounging outside school? However, my first reaction was that the book is too long, nearly six hundred pages in my trade paperback edition. There’s a lot of repetition: Strike is doubled over with stomach pain or ordered into the car by Rodney and others so many times I couldn’t keep them all straight; policemen repeatedly break up gangs of drug dealers outside the Roosevelt and O’Brien projects with taunts and body searches. Granted, part of Price’s theme here is the Sisyphean nature of life in the hood, for both clockers and cops. Granted, too, the writing is so good that I kept at it. Still, I thought it too long.

As I mused about what scenes I would cut, I realised that I was looking at the book all wrong. Of course, it reminded me of The Wire, David Simon’s brilliant tv series set in Baltimore. Price was one of the writers for the show, so I was not surprised by the similarities of diction, mannerisms, even anecdotes. One of the things I liked best about The Wire (besides the writing, directing, acting, and so on) is that the story arc spans the entire season. True, each episode has its events and minor climaxes; some stories go across several seasons. But the main unit of the story is the season.

And that’s what Price is doing with this book. It is episodic, with small epiphanies, wins and losses, but the book as a whole is like a season of shows. There has to be a certain amount of repetition, since viewers tend to forget details from one week to the next, but given a whole season to play with, Price can allow the story to spread out and sprawl across a lot of real estate. Once I let myself adjust to his pace, I enjoyed the book a great deal.