A few years ago, when we did our Niagara/Ontario winery tour, Kim arranged for us to get a VIP tour at one quite impressive outfit. Being a wine neophyte, I was surprised to learn what a high percentage of bottles are “corked”, their taste ruined by leakage through the traditional cork. “If you’ve tried a wine that everyone said was great and hated it, that bottle may have been corked. Instead of giving up on that wine, you should try another bottle—you might really like it,” our guide said.

I’d heard about wines needing to breathe, of course, but he let us taste the difference between a newly opened wine and the same wine that had been allowed to breathe. I became a convert. Even more astounding, for me, was the effect of the shape of the glass on the taste of the wine. Our guide hauled out an assortment of the truly expensive glasses and showed us how to pair a shape with a particular wine. We tried the same wines in a variety of glasses and the difference was very clear even to my undiscerning palate.

All this is to explain why I went back to Meadowlands after not liking it at all the first time I read it.

I’d read and enjoyed two of Gluck’s earlier collections, The House on Marshland and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Wild Iris, but it was Vita Nova that blew me out of the water. I read and reread it. For a year, I dipped into it almost daily. During that turbulent time, it became an anchor for me, a solid block of perception, of knowing that steadied me and helped me through.

So I came to Meadowlands with high expectations. I found the language, of course, to be both strong and lovely, but the subject matter simply didn’t resonate with me. The hull of the book is made up of poems featuring a couple whose marriage is falling apart, some of them recording dialogues of their arguments. Completing the structure are poems, parables ,and monologues based on The Odyssey and exploring marriage, distance, and licit and illicit loves from different perspectives.

Perhaps I was jaded from just having read too many books about marriages breaking up, mostly from the man’s perspective justifying why he simply HAD to have an affair with that cute young cookie. Yawn. I’d also just been reading way too much about the earlier period, not just rereading The Odyssey itself, but books such as Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad that left me feeling like I’d overdosed on the whole cycle.

Then recently I read Gluck’s later book, Averno, for one of my book clubs and fell in love all over again. One of the members of the book club, in response to a comment of mine about Meadowlands, said that it was his favorite of her books and encouraged me to look into it again.

Without pushing the metaphor too hard, I’ll just say that like wine, the content of a book can age well or poorly through no fault of its own, such as the controversy over Mark Twain’s use of language: true to its time but anathema to ours. Also, much of the enjoyment of a book is out of the author’s hands entirely, dependent on the reader’s filters of context, background knowledge, and preferences.

I did enjoy Meadowlands a lot more this time around. The subject of failing marriages still doesn’t much interest me, but the people in these poems came alive for me in a way they hadn’t on the first reading. I particularly liked the poems from Telemachus’ point of view, what he thought of his parents’ problems. And I snickered at Gluck’s sly bits of humor: I’m astounded by the way she can tear your heart up and then make you laugh, all in a few lines. I’ll write about Averno another time.

What a lovely book! The narrator is an artist—a painter and a poet—who has come to a remote mountain, an out-of-season (or out-of-style) resort, in order to immerse himself in his art, leaving the busy world of trains and social obligations behind. The world where war, in this case the Russo-Japanese War, is eating up young people and leaving a river of blood.

As the narrator wanders mountain paths, stands under a magnolia tree in the starlight, examines the pattern of bamboo outside the window of his room, and watches the steam rise from his bath, he muses on life and the role of art and the artist. He sees the artist as one who stands outside of life, one who must leave mundane cares and worries behind in order to create the art that speaks to us and changes our lives. Distance, he believes, is necessary for aesthetic appreciation.

He has come to this mountain retreat to achieve that distance. Art is to be his only concern. He finds himself filling his sketchbook with poetry, and the brief poems in the text are lovely and profound, particularly meaningful given the context. What he does not do is paint. He thinks about painting. He carries his painting box with him on his rambles. He tries to construct pictures in his head using the elements around him, but something is missing.

The original title means The Grass Pillow which is a convention in Japanese poetry signaling that poem is to be about a journey. Although the translator, Alan Turney, speaks in his introduction of the book as a wondrous example of an artist’s immersion in nature bringing out his ideas about life and art, similar to Wordsworth but different in critical ways, Turney’s choice of an English title tells another story. Taken from the text of the book, the three-cornered world is what Soseki says is the habitat of the artist, what is left when common sense is subtracted from the four-square world.

Common sense! Zing! As the book opens, the narrator is walking up a mountain track thinking big thoughts about art’s role in bringing tranquility and beauty to this busy world, when he trips on a stone and falls full-length. Zing again. Throughout the book, this pepper of self-mockery keeps the discourse from becoming too cloying.

The narrator starts to take an interest in the landlord’s daughter, a young woman whose tangled life appears to echo a local story, the legend of the maid of Nagara who was loved by two men and—torn—drowned herself in the Fuchi River. With the shimmer of this story behind her and thinking of Millais’s painting, the narrator wants to paint her as Ophelia in the camellia-strewn pond he has found in his rambles.

Yet he cannot begin. In the course of his rambles, he meets various people: a packhorse driver, the town barber, the abbot of the local monastery, a young man about to go off to war. In conversation with these people, as well as the landlord and his daughter, the narrator learns more about the secret stories of the people in this place. Near the end of the book he realises how hard it would be to look into the eyes of each person he encounters and see the “turmoil and confusion” there, understand “what this world can do to a man”.

This is a book I will come back to again and again. The painterly descriptions of early spring in the mountains drew me in, while at the same time the narrator’s explication of why particular scenes are pleasing made me look around with a new aesthetic appreciation. This summer, I took my paints and my poetry off to the woods in order to step outside of my life and its obligations for a while, hoping to immerse myself in nature and find new, more satisfying, rhythms for my life. However, like the narrator of this lovely and disturbing book, I found that nature can only take me so far.

Saved this audio book for my long drive last week. As I set out, I listened to Kate Rusby singing “Botany Bay”: “Farewell to old England forever . . . “ Seemed appropriate. It's hard to say good-bye.

Then I settled down to this book, quickly becoming entranced by the voice of the narrator, Glen McCready. Many folks who listen to audio books have favorite narrators. I'm usually too caught up in the story to notice, but sometimes I'm just bowled over. For instance, Jim Dale's reading of the Harry Potter books is astounding. So many characters, so many voices—flawless. Or a man who has narrated some of the Nero Wolf books, who brought the individual characters to life to the point where I actually believed there were multiple actors narrating the story. When I looked to see who the narrator was, I had to laugh. I had seen him play Hamlet many, many years ago at Center Stage in Baltimore. His humor, intensity, and swordplay had sparked my sons' interest in Shakespeare, an interest that has lasted into adulthood.

In this book, it is not so much character voices that McReady has to keep straight and bring to life, for there are few characters. Rather, it is the mood, the atmosphere of a Hereford village, remote, rural. And he does it brilliantly. Listening to him, I remembered the early darkness of December in Yorkshire, the rustling hedgerows of June in Oxfordshire. Oh, it's not all the narrator, of course. It's the writing. I could see why this book was longlisted for the Orange Prize. The descriptions are so well-written; the story so absorbing.

Let's go back. This is the story of Richard Allen, a young man who has come to a remote village in Hereford to take up his first appointment as a curate in December of 1860. An idealistic young man, still mourning his father's recent death, nervous about being able to fulfill his new responsibilities. The bitter cold of his arrival, the bleak fields under the stars, made me shiver, despite the warmth of the car. Almost immediately Richard tangles with the vicar, Oliver Bowen, over an article refuting Darwin's monstrous theories.

Darwin is not the only catalyst shaking up the centuries-old village ways. Richard has arrived on the train, and there is much talk of the changes that the railroad has brought and will bring. Change. Stasis. Constancy. Growth.

There was quite a remarkable article in the New York Times on 29 July. Apparently, even now scientists don't really understand why glass acts as it does. It seems to be a liquid whose molecules have slowed until they are not moving at all, until they are neither liquid nor solid. Richard Allen's story plays out at a particular tipping point of the culture, when centuries of certainty began to give way to doubt, when the modern age began to change the pace of life, and the self began to be felt as something independent, something separate from the community.

I enjoyed this book. It reminded me of Carr's A Month in the Country which also captured so well what it is like to walk into an English village church and how people can touch each other's lives. Allen wrestles with his faith, his doubt. The main storyline, though, which was of somewhat less interest to me, involved his falling in love with the vicar's young wife. Oh, it was well done. Not overly sentimental. But I couldn't help but think his rhapsodies about his beloved sounded like what a romantic young woman would want a man to feel, to write in his journal, to avow in brief passionate encounters.

I'm just an old cynic, I guess. It's a lovely story, sad, of course, and difficult. But quite the perfect thing to listen to on a long drive.

Why do I dream of a city? Why don't I dream of the pond with its dark trees, its shifting surface?

I had to pick up someone at the train station in Kingston late one night. Arriving with time to spare, I stopped by the Borders, though I didn't really think it would be open so late. Imagine my surprise at finding it not only brightly lit, but full of pre-teens dressed in Goth attire. It turned out to be a midnight release party for some YA vampire book.

I took the opportunity, though, to pick up this book, which Moira had recommended when I told her about my dreams—that I often dream about being in this city, the same city, its streets and shopping malls as familiar to me as those of Towson or Kingston for that matter.

Yet it is a city that—waking—I have never seen.

Well, twice. Once in Lyons, France, when I went to visit Ilya and Jasmine. We were on our way to this restaurant on Presqu'Isle where we would sit at a long table with other patrons, sharing food and listening to music provided by the owner's Romany brother-in-law who just happened to drop by.

Anyway, Lyons was all lit up and we passed by this plaza a few steps above street level and surrounded by brilliant white buildings. In one corner, a young man was recklessly dancing to music only he could hear, and I recognised the plaza as one I had often passed while walking in my dream city.

The other time was in Yokohama, Japan, where our hotel, tall and foursquare with a connecting shopping mall snuggled against its feet was in fact the hotel and mall from my other life. Oddly, I seem to have frequented them much more often than I ever have such places in my waking life: late for a conference at the hotel's meeting room or stopping for coffee in one of the mall's shops. So to see the place standing there in the middle of Yokohama, to walk its corridors in this life, was eerie.

I don't know what to think about all this. Part of me doesn't believe in dreams and part wonders if the dreams led me to these places.

Note that I'm not talking about the book. It's remarkable. But I can't talk about it. You just have to experience it. Moira asked me which was my favorite of Calvino's cities. Maybe Euphemia where stories and memories are traded. Or Zobeide, the white city, which was laid out according to paths followed in dreams. Or Eusapia with its identical city of the dead. But really, all of them.

I love the inventiveness of these brief descriptions, like Ersilia where the houses have been removed leaving just the labyrinth of strings that once stretched between homes and offices to show relationships. I love the reversals or the turns at the end that add another layer of understanding.

Why do I dream of a city? I think because cities are where people come together. Where we have a chance at achieving the unity Forster wrote about. Where we knock off each other's rough edges and learn to get along. Where we tell each other our stories, even if it is only under dark suburban trees, their shadows holding us and keeping us separate from the silent, slumbering homes.

Despite the laudatory comments on the covers and its self-proclaimed best-seller status, I found this book to be deeply flawed. It is a love story, the story of Lou and Toby Maytrees. The two meet in Provincetown in the 1930s, fall in love and marry, but that is just the beginning of their tale. I usually feel frustrated reading stories that end with marriage because the whole chasing-catching-marrying thing is much less interesting to me than what comes after the wedding. So I was pretty happy that Dillard concentrates on the long life after the cake is cut and the dishes washed.

However, I was less happy about the self-consciously poetic style of the book, jumping around in time, providing an impressionistic narrative that I sometimes found difficult to follow. The structure was quite odd: both a preface and a prologue that together constituted a third of the book, and then three uneven sections. I was also less happy with the labored attempts to come up with original imagery. Sentences like “Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand. Four times a year the seasons flopped over” would get a less-famous writer laughed out of the room.

I was astounded by Dillard's first book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which seemed a whole new way of writing about the natural world, mixing humor, reflection, and emotion. The few of her later books that I've read haven't reached that acme, but have had moments of gorgeous writing. Here, too, are some lovely bits, especially about Provincetown and the way of life there in the middle of the 20th century.

Yet the story as a whole rings false to my ears. The young couple decides that free time is more important than possessions, so they choose not to work. It helps that they have inherited a big house in town and a shack on the beach. And somehow, with no money, they never seem to have a problem with taxes or food or heat or medical bills for the baby that soon arrives. Perhaps I am just not poetic enough, but I can't help wondering how the heck they get by.

In their later life, Toby does actually work and money becomes a bigger factor in his life. Lou, on the other hand, appears to be the epitome of a Zen monk, open to the world, unencumbered by self, desires, etc. Easy enough to free yourself from desires, I can't help but think, when you're getting a generous alimony check and free housing. It's hard to be open to the universe when you can't pay the heating bill.

Maybe I'm being too picky. I heard Dillard interviewed at the International Authors Festival in Toronto a few years ago and was appalled by her behavior. She refused to sit in the armchair provided, insisting on standing behind it. She deliberately upstaged the author interviewing her, forcing him to turn his back on the audience. When he tried to come level with her, she moved further upstage. She made fun of his questions and treated him with disdain. I don't know if she had a beef with that particular author or if she is that rude in all of her interviews, but I do know that I've never seen a grown person behave like such a brat. I try not to let what I know about the author influence my reading, but I'm not always successful.

In the end, despite the moments of lovely description, the story was simply too light and unrealistic to hold my interest for long.

This memoir opens with the murder of Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 by a Muslim outraged by a film Van Gogh had made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I remember my horror at Van Gogh’s murder, despite my years in Baltimore with its high murder rate, because it happened in Amsterdam.

I had been spending a good bit of time in The Netherlands where I delighted in what seemed to be the nature of Dutch culture: calm, practical, tolerant. I felt that I had found my spiritual homeland. All the more shocking, then, this assassination in a land where reason rules.

The film Van Gogh and Hirsi Ali made was called Submission and explored the treatment of women in Islamic culture in connection with the actual verses from the Quran mandating such treatment. After this introduction, Hirsi Ali goes back to her childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, and Ethiopia to show how a devout Muslim girl could grow up to question the beliefs that structure and define her world.

Of course, I have read a good deal about women’s lives under Islam, but the accounts have been inconsistent, even conflicting. In this memoir, Hirsi Ali discusses the differences in the practice of Islam in different countries, and how the more repressive strain from Saudi Arabia came to dominate. Islam is more than a religion; it is a guide to daily life, prescribing men’s and women’s roles.

There are politics here, but in the form of stories: stories about her mother, her sister, her friends. A way of life is built up that is completely foreign to me. There are atrocities here too. I’ve read about female circumcision—excision, as Hirsi Ali calls it—but hadn’t grasped the full horror of it until this first-person account made it impossible to flinch away.

However, the biggest shock for me in this book was the short shrift Hirsi Ali gives to tolerance, that virtue I prize so highly and aspire to in my dealings with others. Having come of age during the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., I try to respect and value differences of culture, ethnicity, appearance, gender, etc. But the latter part of this account, when Hirsi Ali moves into Dutch politics, actually being elected to Parliament, blows away my comfortable—perhaps smug—perspective. She demonstrates that tolerance can become an excuse for inaction. Some things we should not tolerate, such as girls being mutilated, wives beaten at a husband’s whim, women murdered because they have been raped and are therefore impure.

Religious belief does not trump the law, at least not in The Netherlands. Nor in the U.S. But what about in a Muslim country? I struggle now to reconcile my consciousness of the abuse of women with my respect for other cultures. I don’t want to force my religious beliefs on anyone else, nor my form of government. Yet by advocating equal rights for women, including Muslim women, I am doing just that. I don’t have any answers at this point, only questions.

I found these diaries very difficult to read. I haven’t read any of White’s novels yet, though I know that her Frost in May was one of the initial “lost” women’s masterpieces rescued by Virago Press in the 1970s. Apparently, the diaries were not written to be read by outsiders. Instead, they seem to serve mostly as a place where she can work out just what is going on with her.

She doesn’t use the diaries as a writer’s notebook, with character sketches and plot vignettes. Nor does she use them as a memory box, with descriptions of friends and happenings. She alludes to many friends and lovers. In fact, the number of people cited in these snippets left me floundering, even with the help of the biographical sketches in the back. White certainly knew a lot of interesting people, and I would have welcomed more information about many of them, such as Julien Green, George Barker, and Graham Greene, but they are only mentioned in passing. There are a couple a brief references to World War II starting, but nothing else of the interesting times that she lived through.

Of course, she wasn’t trying to write a narrative with these diaries. Or perhaps she was: the story of her life. More than anything else, she writes in the diaries in order to understand herself and her experiences. Born in 1899 as Eirene Botting, she came of age in the wild years after the Great War, with three marriages and a number of lovers, two daughters, and a nervous breakdown.

The influence of her resulting years of pschoanalysis is evident in these diaries, as she records her dreams and explores her memories of her parents. Even towards the end of this volume, when she is in her fifties, she is still going back over childhood events, trying to work out their effect on her life. There is much about her financial difficulties and writer’s block. She complains about how her pen works, the way the light falls, feeling depressed.

What I valued most was her bluntness. I may have found it hard to like her when she goes on about how much of a burden her children are and how finally, after many years, she might be starting to love them a little bit, yet I appreciated such sentiments much more than a pretense at more conventional maternal feelings.

On the other hand, her reconciliation with the Catholic Church in 1940 made for sticky reading. Between talk of making God the center of her life and breast-beating over the conflict of the church’s teachings with her “over-sexed” nature, I was tempted to put down the book entirely. Then there was the bizarre relationship with another convert, with the two of them trying to out-Catholic each other and fighting over White’s oldest daughter, Susan.

Another difficulty I had with the book is that has been edited by Susan herself. Since much of the second half has to do with Susan—analysing her personality, admitting to jealousy of Susan’s beauty, lamenting their falling out—I began to question the editing that went into producing this volume. There are many ellipses in every passage which appear to mark excised phrases rather than being White’s writing style. I couldn’t help but speculate about what was missing. A comment on the end flap (I always read the end flaps last) leads me to think that the other daughter opposed the book, making me wonder what sort of book might have been produced by a less biased editor.

And what kind of picture of White might have come out of a different selection. This book makes her seem completely self-centered, thinking only of herself and her needs, trying to dominate former husbands and lovers even after leaving them, ignoring her daughters except to complain that they don’t love her enough. Perhaps she was an insufferable egotist, but surely she was also a victim of changing cultural mores, struggling to balance the strictures of her parents and the church against the sexual freedom and spiritualism of the years between the wars. And White, like Elizabeth Smart, another single parent, obviously struggled to find the emotional and intellectual energy, not to mention simply the time, to write. Was it the writing that made her a bad mother, as Alice Walker’s daughter has famously accused? Or is the writing just a convenient scapegoat?

Last week I wrote about reading Cheever’s stories and journals at the same time. I’m always curious about how other writers use their journals. I’ve written in this blog about Elizabeth Smart’s journals and how she used them in creating her novels. Based on these extracts, Cheever seems to have used his journal occasionally as a sketchbook for his stories but primarily as a place to have a conversation with himself about himself. And while it was fun to see the original sketches that became characters and bits of plot in the stories, it was far more interesting to see him exploring his experiences and thoughts and emotions in ways that fed into the stories in a more subtle manner.

I was surprised that there not much about writing. Very rarely he would refer to another writer—a brief reference to Phillip Roth or John Updike—but not much beyond a note of praise for that author’s work, no recordings of discussions with any other writers. So it came as a surprise that, when a reporter falsely informs him of Updike’s death, he is shattered by the loss of this (now we find out) close friend.

And there is nothing about his own writing. Once or twice he cites his success at achieving his goal in writing, but never explains what that goal is. Of course, the journals were not written with an eye to publication, so perhaps he didn’t need to state it. I need to keep reminding myself of my goals and what I am trying to accomplish—it’s a method I use to stay on track and not get distracted by all the intriguing branches down which I could wander.

Nor does he, except in the last few months of his life when his mental and physical powers were waning, talk about the physical act of writing, the difficulties and satisfactions of getting words down on paper.

In the early years, he occasionally mentions financial difficulties, but I have to say that this is one area that completely baffled me. I was amazed that he could make a living, a good living, just from writing stories. Yes, it was a different era, and yes, the New Yorker bought a lot of his stories, but how in the world did he maintain a wealthy suburban lifestyle for himself and his family with just his writing? His wife didn’t have a job. Nor did he, apparently, other than writing.

His relationship with his wife dominates these journals, as he tries to puzzle her out or recounts the ways that he has betrayed her despite his best intentions. I was surprised by the consistency of his concerns. He came back again and again to the same preoccupations, fears, and laments year after year. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, because I’m well aware that my own journals circle back over the same ground repeatedly. I like to think that I’ve progressed, but often find that I am having to learn the same lesson over and over.

Beyond the content of these journals, the simple experience of reading Cheever’s prose is delightful. These sentences, presumably dashed off casually before beginning his real writing, are as exquisite as the finely crafted sentences in the stories. Between the journals and the collected stories, I had a sense of an oeuvre, a lifetime’s accomplishment. I thought, as I did walking through the rooms full of Turners at the Tate: This is a person’s life, this body of work.

It took me a couple of months to read this book, much longer than normal for me even with a longer work of fiction. What I found was that I couldn’t read more than a couple of stories at a time, and that I needed to take time off to read other things in between.

I’d read a few of Cheever’s stories before, but the experience of reading them in bulk was quite different. What drew me to this collection was the opportunity of reading his journals at the same time, hoping to satisfy my curiosity about how other writers transform their experiences into fiction. Also, of course, about anything he had to say about the experience of writing itself.

The stories, at least those in this collection, were written in the years after World War II through the Seventies and describe a single, small segment of society: the upper middle-class suburban culture where men commuted into New York every day for work and women stayed home to keep house, raise children, and volunteer for worthy causes. At one point, he notes with surprise that men have stopped wearing hats and women gloves. Some stories turn on the isolation of a suburban man or family in a foreign culture, and others on the introduction of someone from another culture (an Italian count, a Jewish family, a brassy lower-class wife) into this world.

This is the world that dominated the entertainment media in those mid-century decades: the Petries, the Cleavers, etc. Cheever’s gift is to show the loneliness, fear, and even violence behind the quiet suburban windows, as Grace Metalius showed the sexual games and musical beds. Cheever demonstrates that lives which seem fixed and certain, even boring, are in fact precariously balanced and can tumble down at the slightest cross-breeze. Death haunts these stories, death of the spirit as well as the body. Occasionally, after reading a few of these stories, I’d be reminded of Fortinbras “knee-deep in Danes”, as the song goes.

A few of the stories venture into the metaphysical, and these seemed to me less successful than those that stayed on a realistic plane. One (“Boy in Rome”) even played with the idea of writing itself, a bit of meta-fiction that impressed me: not overdone, not playing for the sake of playing, just enough.

I particularly liked the stories about the role work plays in our lives, such as “The Ocean”, where a man is eased out of his high-level job with a substantial golden parachute, but wants only to find a place to work, an arena in which he can use his skills. He is reduced to driving to the station to meet the evening train, rejoicing in the sight of all the commuting husbands erupting from it to join their waiting wives.

Most of the stories are, however, about love. And marriages gone wrong. These concerns dominate the journals as well. A few stories allude to the difficulties women faced, confined to the home but wanting to work. Having read many such stories from the women’s point of view, I found a man’s point of view revealing.

While the post-war New York suburban culture is not a world that interests me, Cheever’s prose is mesmerizing. I found myself going back after reading a story and looking at the brief character descriptions, the transitions from one scene to the next, even individual sentences, trying to pick apart where the magic happens, how he manages to convey so much emotion with such straight-forward language. What made me keep putting the book down was the sadness of the stories themselves, their desolate tone and bleak philosophy.

Some years ago, when I lived in New England, my next-door neighbor decided to burn the brush he had cleared from his yard. Unfortunately, mixed in with that brush was poison ivy.

Now, I catch poison ivy if you simply tell me that your second cousin had it ten years ago, so I reacted strongly to this smoke. My face swelled to twice its size. It turned beet-red and lumpy, and my eyes were reduced to mere slits. I was lucky, I guess, that I just got a faceful of smoke and didn’t breathe it in; if I had gotten poison ivy in my throat, I would have ended up in the hospital on a ventilator.

As it was, I called my doctor and got her to call in a prescription for a strong antihistamine. Walking around the corner to the drugstore, however, was a more difficult experience altogether. People gave me a wide berth, their eyes flickering to my face and then quickly away again. Even the pharmacist, whom I’d come to know well through my children’s various ailments, looked over my shoulder rather than at my monstrous face.

“I’m still me!” I wanted to shout.

But was I? How much of who we are has to do with what we look like? I’m always intrigued by people whose appearance contradicts their personalities. Take Buster for instance, a huge, husky steelworker whose terrifying demeanor incited newcomers at the corner bar to pick fights with him in order to prove their mettle. But in fact Buster was the most gentle man imaginable and loathed fighting. Or Christine, who worked with me several years ago. A blandly beautiful young woman, with the blond hair, blue eyes, and clear complexion once commonly found in teen magazines. She looked like a ditzy blond but actually boasted a fierce intelligence that she refused to hide.

Egan’s excellent novel explores these issues around the intersection of appearance and identity. It opens with a fashion model who has been in a terrible auto accident. The resulting reconstructive surgery has left her looking beautiful but different, so unlike herself that even her friends and agent do not recognise her at first. She is also at an age where her bookings had already started falling off, even before the accident, and Egan adds to her examination of identity the dimension of celebrity and how that relects or influences our idea of ourselves.

There is much more to the book, other fascinating characters whose charisma waxes and wanes, plotlines that vary from teen-aged self-discovery to acts of terrorism. It is almost too much. In fact, it is too much for Egan to handle. She does an astonishing job of keeping all her balls in the air, making me think this one of the best books I’d read a long time. But the balls tumble down in chaos at the end of the book. I was so disappointed by the ending, which felt as though Egan simply got tired of writing and stopped, leaving many plot threads dangling. The only attempt at resolution, in an epilogue, had such a different tone that it seemed to have come from another book entirely.

Still, it is an excellent book and well worth reading. There is much to think about here. How and when we define ourselves, or allow others to define us. What consistency we can expect with our past selves. What effect our influence on others has, on them and on us. And how our appearance affects the construction of our identity. I certainly found my monstrously altered appearance prevented any interaction with others. If it had been more permanent, I wonder how my image of myself might have changed.