fiction

My Ántonia, by Willa Cather

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Suspecting we might need a reason to feel good about our country, one of my book clubs selected this well-known novel. It turned out to be an inspired choice (thank you, Pamela!). Published in 1918, most of the story takes place in the 1880s in Black Hawk, Nebraska, based on the tiny town of Red Cloud where Cather grew up.

After a prologue, the story is narrated by Jim Burden, who—like Cather—moved from Virginia to Nebraska. Unlike the author, though, his parents have died, and 10-year-old Jim goes to live with his grandparents. On the train he meets the Shimerda family, newly arrived from Bohemia and planning to homestead outside Black Hawk. He and their oldest daughter Ántonia immediately become friends.

It is still the early days of pioneers on the vast plains. While some, such as Jim’s grandparents, are finally making a living from the land, others must start from scratch. The Shimerda’s land turns out to have only a rough cave in the earth for a home and land that is mostly unbroken prairie. Near neighbors and somewhat isolated from town, Jim and Ántonia’s friendship grows.

The time and place come alive through their adventures in this picaresque story—tragedies, successes, hard work, plenty of play—and through the characters of Jim, described as “romantic and ardent” by another character, and Ántonia who is near bursting with joy in being alive. She reminds me of Lucinda Matlock from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology:  “It takes life to love life!”

Cather’s prose fills me with delight. Appropriately for the setting and characters, it is both clear and rich. It’s plain enough for young readers, yet there are layers of complexity for adults to appreciate. She sets the pace for the story right away, in the prologue. We are on a train. We will get there when we get there. You can’t hurry it along, so relax and look out the windows:

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

From this encounter between a middle-aged Jim and a former neighbor, we move into Jim’s account of his youth. Some of it strikes us, more than a hundred years on, as problematic: the treatment of the few Black characters, the sod-breaking that we now know will yield only a few good harvests before blowing away in Dust Bowl storms.

But what does come through, and became such a balm to us, are the virtues of these two characters: Ántonia’s life force and Jim’s passionate loyalty to friends, family and country. Even more, though, it is how the inevitable tensions and prejudices of people who have been thrown together are overwhelmed by the need to work together. Best of all is the way they, without hesitation, give unstintingly to neighbors when they need help.  

As happens in the best novels, Cather signals these tensions on the first page.

Once when he [Jake, the farmhand who’d been sent to accompany Jim to Nebraska] sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from ‘across the water’ whose destination was the same as ours.

‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.” She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!’

This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to ‘Jesse James.’ Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.

Later in the story, we see divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, and between the “town girls” and the “country girls” who were often from immigrant families. But these distinctions were forgotten when an untimely death, a fire or a blizzard struck.

I was also impressed by Cather’s capsule descriptions of characters. Here is how she introduces Jim’s grandparents (in Jim’s voice):

She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance . . .

My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.

Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.

We get a sense of how they look and of their distinct personalities. If you haven’t read this classic novel, or only long ago, try it out. You might find, as we did, a portrait of what is best about this country, what we can achieve when we remember that we are not just individuals, but members of a community.

What classic novel have you reread? How did it hold up?

Hello, Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano

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Families. They can be great or not. They don’t mean to hurt you, but too often they do. In Napolitano’s 2023 novel, William Waters was raised without love or attention, his parents having withdrawn into silence after the death of his three-year-old sister when he was only six days old.

He finds respite and respect on the basketball court, and friends among his teammates. At college, on a sports scholarship at Northwestern, he meets Julia Padavano, the oldest of four tight-knit sisters and is welcomed into their family. Julia’s father calls her a rocket: she knows what she wants and won’t let anything get in the way. William is a welcome and malleable companion, happy to have her tell him what to do.

When he suffers a career-ending injury, he begins a descent into darkness. His teammates and the Padavanos stand by him. Still, these relationships—between William and those around him, between the Padavano sisters, between their parents—are challenged as the story unfolds.

I’d been told this novel, loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and infused with Walt Whitman’s poetry, was a tear-jerker. For me, not so much. It was enjoyable for sure—certainly enough so to distract me from the news—but I found the characters too shallow to engage my emotions. Admittedly, this is often a problem for me with stories that have multiple main characters and multiple points of view.

The writing in some parts of the story, especially one long night involving William, is just amazing. I loved the descriptions of one sister’s murals and their effect on others. There were some parts that I questioned, though, such as the way William’s parents completely shut down. I was a little dismayed by the depiction of William’s teammate and best friend Trent who seems to be in the story only to provide him with unstinting support and love. As a Black male, Trent struck me as a riff on the mammy stereotype.

Kirkus, home to the Kirkus Prize and celebrated book reviews, places Hello, Beautiful in the category of literary fiction. A subject of much discussion among my writer friends, categories and genres have undergone many changes. It used be that fiction was divided between literary fiction and genre fiction, which included romance, mystery, science fiction, horror, etc.

As many of the books in these genres have become so well-written that they qualify as literary (as some already were, but that’s another soapbox), literary has become a catchall for everything else. New genres have been added to try to identify books that are well-written, but a lighter read, perhaps, than people might think of when they hear literary: women’s fiction, upmarket fiction, book club fiction. However, as you can imagine, there has been pushback against these new genres.

Defining the term “literary” is a discussion for another day. One of my book clubs, the one I’ve been a member of for decades, differentiates between difficult reads and lighter reads. We include both, of course, but like to mix it up. Some books take a little more effort on the reader’s part, a little more attention. This novel was not difficult to read, which is a plus for many readers. Another plus is that it explores family and love in new and fresh ways. It’s won literary awards and been selected for Oprah’s Book Club.

Families are complicated. They can be wonderfully supportive. However troubled the relationships over the years, siblings are—or so my mother’s sister told me as she lay dying—the only ones who remember what you do. We also sometimes come to appreciate once-despised parents when we become parents ourselves. Not always, of course.

What I appreciate about this story is Napolitano’s exploration of one family’s story and of different ways of being together.

What would you expect to find in a literary novel? What’s a story about families that you would recommend?

Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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People wander into Funiculi Funicula, a small café in a Tokyo alley and, charmed by its quiet atmosphere, become regulars. Almost unchanged since it opened over a hundred years ago, the café is mostly a haven for those who want to read or have a leisurely cup of tea or coffee. But sometimes people drop in who have heard the rumor that it contains a portal that enables you to travel into the past.

In this play-turned-novel, translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot, four people decide to risk a trip into their past. And it is a risk. You are launched when you sit in a particular chair and Kazu, cousin of the current owners, pours you a cup of coffee, but you must return as the title says or risk becoming a ghost, like the woman in white who inhabits that chair most of the time, silently reading a book.

Another rule is that the present cannot be changed, no matter what the time traveler does, so you would think no one would attempt such a dangerous journey. Why twist yourself to obey all of the arcane rules and risk becoming a ghost when you cannot change whatever it is about the present that is making you unhappy? Why indeed do we pick over our pasts, write memoirs, visit psychoanalysts when whatever we learn does not change what has happened?

It seems like a thin premise for a book, and I expected a light read. However, Kawaguchi endows each of the four stories with subtle and surprising layers of emotion. The writing was a bit clunky in places: repetitive or explaining too much. Perhaps this was due to its genesis as a play. And without giving too much away, some of the women’s stories were annoyingly patriarchal.

Still, I enjoyed reading it and am left wondering which part of my past I would visit if I made my way to Funiculi Funicula. Would I want to enjoy once again a particularly happy time or attempt to repair a terrible mistake I now regret?

If you could travel into the past, would you do it?

The Personal Librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

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I recently toured Ventfort Hall Mansion and Gilded Age Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Many folks might recognise it as the location used for the film of The Cider House Rules. I was intrigued because the house was built in 1893 for George and Sarah Morgan, Sarah being the sister of J.P. Morgan, and I happened to be in the middle of reading this story of J.P.’s librarian.

The tour was fascinating, with much detailed information and background. I was drawn to a display about the book and its protagonist Belle da Costa Greene, hired in 1905 as Morgan’s personal librarian to build and curate his library, and the first director of the Morgan Library and Museum after his death.

Belle, as we know now, was a woman of color passing as White. Even as a White woman, her being awarded this position shocked the male-dominated world of the early twentieth century. She went on to become fabulously successful. Intelligent, witty and well educated, she outmaneuvered others to acquire rare and valuable books for the library.

The authors have filled out the few records of Belle’s life to create a stirring portrait of this complicated woman. Her father Richard Greener was the first Black graduate of Harvard, a lawyer and professor who worked for civil rights causes all his life. However, her mother Genevieve decided that the only way for her children to succeed in a prejudiced world was to pass for White. To that end, she moved with the children to New York City and changed their name to da Costa Greene to bolster her claim of Portuguese heritage.

The accounts of Belle’s complicated relationship with Morgan, the enmity of his daughter Anne, and Belle’s adventures in the world of rare books keep the story moving. The real driver of the story, though, is her inner life as she wrestles with her identity and preserving her role, including leaving behind her birth name Marion.

Of course, we don’t know how the real Belle felt about any of it. This is historical fiction. However, its consistency and psychological acumen make it thoroughly believable. I have some qualms about books like this one that interpret the life of a real person, someone who isn’t here to correct mistakes. However, without such books, few of us would know about someone like Belle, long forgotten by history.

While the second half of the book dragged a bit as she goes from success to success, it is still an enjoyable read, and a good complement to Anderson Cooper’s Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, which I read recently. In Stockbridge, I learned a bit about its other Gilded Age “cottages” which, like the New York mansions in Vanderbilt, competed to outdo each other in size and excessive expenditure. And all, including Ventfort, were quickly disposed of by succeeding generations due to bankruptcy or lack of interest. Ozymandias indeed.

How do you feel about historical fiction based on real people?

The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, by Kelli Estes

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Inara Erickson faces a difficult return to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands. A childhood of wonderful summers visiting her Aunt Dahlia ended when her mother was killed in a car accident on Orcas. When Aunt Dahlia dies and leaves the large house and estate to her, Inara has to overcome her reluctance and get the property ready to sell. Then she can take up the corporate job her father has arranged for her, and make use of her new business degree.

 

However, she begins to fall under the island’s spell again and, while working in the house, finds a beautifully embroidered silk sleeve. She wonders who could have done this spectacular work, why it had been cut from a robe, and how it came to be hidden here.

 

In an alternate story line, a second generation immigrant in Seattle named Mei Lien lives with her father and grandmother above their dry goods shop until a violent mob ousts them. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, reflecting the anti-immigrant emotions common once the Chinese were no longer needed to build the railroads, results in the mob bent on ethnic cleansing. They force hundreds of Chinese residents onto a ship captained by Duncan Cameron, supposedly to be sent to San Francisco and then to China.

 

This debut novel has a lot to recommend it. Based on true events, the descriptions of Mei Lien’s life are particularly rich. Everyone in my book club found things they enjoyed, such as the setting on Orcas Island, the detailed description of the embroidery, the deep dive into Chinese spirituality, and the historical information about the plight of the Chinese residents—so relevant to today.

 

At the same time, we were put off by the multitude of coincidences powering the plot, as well as some plot points that were just too unrealistic. Also, while we were captivated by the first part, our interest waned as the story began to concentrate on the two young women’s rather predictable romances. Most of us felt that, instead of a dual timeline, a novel about Mei Lien alone would have been something really special.  

 

Still, our curiosity about the sleeve and our fondness for Inara and Mei Lien carried us through, and we all concluded that we enjoyed the book and were glad we read it. I, for one, look forward to the author’s future novels, as her skills—already great—grow even more.

 

Do you like dual timeline stories? Can you recommend a good one you’ve read?

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter, by Hazel Gaynor

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I first heard of Hazel Gaynor through her partnership with Heather Webb. They are co-authors of a number of delightful novels, including Meet Me in Monaco about Grace Kelly’s wedding. Here, Gaynor again gives us historical fiction based on real events. In one of two braided stories, twenty-two-year-old Grace Darling helps her father operate the Longstone Lighthouse on the Farne Islands in Northeast England. The family lives there, as well as being responsible for the light itself.

My sister Thomasin used to say she imagined the stairwell was a long vein running from the heart of the lighthouse. In one way or another, we have all attached human qualities to these old stone walls so that it has become another member of the family, not just a building to house us.

When a terrible storm erupts in 1838, Grace and her parents are the only ones home, her brothers elsewhere. When the paddle steamer Forfarshire is wrecked on the rocks, she insists that she and her father should try to rescue the survivors despite the raging sea and high winds. That feat made her famous, to her dismay, bringing reporters, tourists, and portrait painters to their previously lonely outpost.

One hundred years later, nineteen-year-old Matilda finds herself banished to another lighthouse in Newport, Rhode Island, to spare her parents back in England the shame of her unwed pregnancy. The lighthouse is run by a distant relative, a grim, reclusive woman.

As Matilda tries to find a way to connect to Harriet, she becomes intrigued by the lighthouse itself and soon begins to learn about its history and operation. In a trove of family artifacts she learns about her ancestor, Grace Darling. She’s also curious about Harriet’s mysteries and secrets.

The 1938 New England Hurricane, one of the deadliest and most destructive ever to hit the United States, requires both women to summon reserves of courage and love if they and the lighthouse are to survive.

In spite of the hurricanes and other tragedies, this novel was the absorbing comfort read I was looking for. I couldn’t help but cheer on these women who worked so hard and set themselves such high standards. The relationships within the families and with those in the wider world were presented with nuance and depth.

I might have liked a little more development of some of the secondary characters, but that’s a minor quibble. There were a few anachronisms in each of the time periods, which gave me a chuckle.

Still, I treasured the insights about what it takes to operate a lighthouse in each time period, and the attendant duties, such as rescuing shipwrecked people. I had no idea that women had been lighthouse keepers, though—of course—why not?

Like Gatsby and Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsey, I used to live with a distant light, a lighthouse on the Chesapeake Bay that lit my bedroom and dreams for years. I once tried to swim to it. It seemed so close! But it was not; it was beyond my power to reach.

So Gaynor had me at “lighthouse.” Then came the bonus of just the sort of story I was looking for: one that held my attention, gave me a break from the anxieties of current events, and even taught me some things I didn’t know.

Have you read a novel or a nonfiction book about a lighthouse and/or its keeper?

Oracle Night, by Paul Auster

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I’ve been meaning to read Auster’s novels for a while and even have a couple of his books on my to-be-read shelf. However, I decided to start with this short one from the library.

As Brooklyn novelist Sidney Orr recovers from a life-threatening illness, he begins to walk around his neighborhood. Attracted to a Chinese stationery shop he’d never noticed before, he is drawn to a blank notebook with a blue cover. For the first time since the onset of his illness, he enters his tiny writing room and begins writing in the notebook.

The story pouring out of him, which he titles Oracle Night, tells of a New York editor who one day simply up and leaves his life, traveling by random chance to St. Louis. There Nick meets Ed, an elderly cab driver who is in poor health. Finding his wife—thinking him dead—has canceled his credit cards, Nick begins working for Ed, helping him reorder his collection of telephone books stored in an underground bunker.

Meanwhile, Sidney’s marriage is suffering; his wife Grace is behaving oddly. His friend and mentor John Trause, twenty-some years older and a longtime friend of Grace and her family, is acting strange as well. Trause (yes, an anagram) had been the one to suggest the story behind Oracle Night to Sidney, based on a brief incident in The Maltese Falcon. Even more mysterious things begin to happen, such as Grace dreaming about Sidney’s story and Sidney himself disappearing from his study when he is certain he’s been there all along.

Auster includes footnotes of varying length, usually containing backstory about a person or incident, which amused me. I also enjoyed the many literary references. So it was fun to read, though the characters were rather flat, and the novel more of a production to appreciate than a story to immerse oneself in. The similarities between the characters and Auster himself and the whole fiction-versus-reality theme seem a bit old hat, even for 2003 when this novel was first published.

In the summary above I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many interwoven layers of plot in this story within story within story. I did appreciate the resulting semi-chaos and the way it reflected Sidney’s growing distrust of reality. However, the various layers never quite cohered, and the turn to melodrama at the end rather ruined the book for me.

Will I try another Auster novel? Sure. Can you recommend a good one for me to read next?

Making Things Better, by Anita Brookner

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At 73, Julius Herz has spent his life obeying others. In his youth, he paid court to spoiled, flighty Fanny, but believed her correct in disdaining him. When his family fled Nazi Germany, they were set up in a London flat by Ostrakov, apparently a connection of some relative. He went on to give Herz’s father a job in a record shop, part of his empire.

As with Vivian’s daughters in On the Rooftop, Herz was controlled by his parents, ordered to work in the record shop and to live with them, even after his marriage, which of course quickly foundered. His parents continued to ignore him, though, and never acknowledged what Herz did for them. His brother Freddy, a violin prodigy as a youth, and the focus of his parents’ attention and ambition, suffered a breakdown after arriving in England, and spent the rest of his life in care.

Now his parents and Freddy are dead, and Ostrakov has decided to sell the record shop and the flat. Still the benefactor though, he gives the proceeds to Herz, enabling him to purchase a small flat and live simply but comfortably. Without the welcome routine of work, Herz wonders how to fill his days, usually falling back on “a newspaper and the supermarket in the morning, and in the afternoon a bookshop or gallery.” Regarding a photo of himself with a rare smile, he thinks:

Even the smile had become modified with age. The smiling boy had become a polite adult; the smile now had something dutiful about it as if it were expected of him; he would continue to offer it but without conviction. It was a smile that no longer expressed eagerness but was a suitable feature in his dealing with others. Preparing to listen, to sympathize, he would acknowledge the return of his habitual smile, while all the time registering his lack of joy.

I was especially charmed by the cover, which I recognised immediately as a Romaine Brooks painting. The quiet colors disrupted by strong diagonals match the tone of the book brilliantly.

My library adds a sheet to the back flap of books where readers can rate the book and add a comment. From these, I’ve learned that Brookner’s novels are not for everyone. You couldn’t call them fast-paced: because they are so internal to the protagonist, there is a preponderance of narration.

For me, much of their value lies in the deep dive into the psychology of a silent person. By that I mean someone who for whatever reason—introversion, social anxiety, solitude, learned behavior—does not interact much with others. They aren’t the ones who bend your ear about their latest love affair over a bottle of wine. They are not the ones who play tennis or join a book club.

The lack of interaction leads to fewer of the dramatic scenes that make up the bulk of most modern novels. Teachers of fiction and creative nonfiction (including me) emphasize that modern readers, accustomed to film and television dramas, expect a story to be mostly dramatic scenes with a little narration as necessary. Some readers have gone on record that they automatically skip over descriptions of a place or a person to get to the action.

Here the scenes are internal and the drama muted. But it is there, burbling underneath the seemingly drab story as Herz wanders the city, picks over his past, and tries, ineptly, to start or restart relationships. Now that he is free—finally—to do what he wants, he cannot decide what that is. He finds himself reduced to “hoping to catch life on the wing, and to make himself into a semblance of gentlemanly old age which others might find acceptable.”

As with all of Brookner’s novels (I’ve read 17 out of 26), there is much going on under the surface of this seeming simple novel. Multiple themes are there to be teased out. And her polished prose satisfies something in me that no other writer’s work does.

Do you ever wonder about the inner life of a seemingly ordinary person, perhaps someone you see in the supermarket or in the post office?

On the Rooftop, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

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In the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District had a large Black population, contributing to its reputation as the largest jazz scene on the West coast. Vivian sees music as the ticket to give her three daughters a better life. Ever since hearing Ruth, her oldest, astound the church with her choir solo, Vivian has been training her to become a professional singer, adding Esther and Chloe, the youngest, as they began to show interest and talent.

By the beginning of this, Sexton’s third novel, the three are performing regularly at neighborhood clubs as the Salvations. Vivian drills them relentlessly on their routines up on the roof of their apartment building, inventing warmup exercises, song arrangements and dance steps.

Having endured racial violence in Louisiana, the death of her beloved husband, and the drudgery of her own nursing job, Vivian wants more for her daughters. Now, just as the dream seems within reach, with an offer for major representation, the three young women begin to second-guess the path they’ve been following.

The joys and conflicts between three sisters are familiar from fairy tales and folklore. Some of us (me) also have personal experience of these dynamics. Sexton shifts between Vivian’s point of view and that of each of the sisters, giving us their distinct personalities and desires, as well as their complicated relationships with their mother and each other.

Further difficulties arrive with White developers, maneuvering to drive out Black residents and business owners with underhanded tactics and cash offers. Clearing out Black people in the name of “urban renewal” happened in cities across the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century. Here, not only renters like Vivian are threatened, but also the owners of the clubs, the church that is so much a part of the family’s life, and the businesses where they work.

This is not an action-packed thriller, but rather a story of family and community, how love and tensions can co-exist within them, how one generation’s dreams may or may not be relevant to the next. Even big blow-ups are treated with realism rather than melodrama. This isn’t a typical rags-to-riches drama of an artist’s life, but something more real, more important.

I mostly identified with Vivian and her concern for her children. However, I can imagine younger readers being put off by the amount of control she exercised over her daughters, trying to direct their lives down the path of her choosing. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can attest to how common it was back then for parents to expect to make such decisions for their children.

Also, as we just saw during the Olympics, to achieve at such high levels requires dedication and hard work from an early age. This family reminded me of Venus and Serena Williams and made me consider what sacrifices they had to make. It also made me wonder about the emotional negotiations that must have taken place between their dreams and their father’s.

I enjoyed this slow burn of a story, with its focus on relationships. Vivian, the three daughters, Vivian’s best friend Mary, even the Preacher are all vivid characters with their own dreams and desires, their own flaws. I found it a gift to be part of this family and their world for a little while.

Have you read a novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton? What did you think of it?

The Old Capital, by Yasunari Kawabata

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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 and a visit to a shrine. First she notices the violets blooming separately in two hollows of the ancient maple tree in their courtyard, a sign for her each year that spring has arrived.

At the foot of the maple tree is an antique stone lantern. The carving, weathered by hundreds of years of storms, can no longer be distinguished beyond being a human figure. Her father thinks it might represent Jesus. They are not Christians but like the lantern as an ornament.

Then she considers the bell crickets she raises: “they were born, chirped, laid eggs, and died all inside of a dark, cramped jar. Still . . . it preserved the species.”

She leaves the shop to view the cherry blossoms at Heian Shrine with her school friend Shin’ichi. When he remarks three times on what a happy girl she is, Chieko questions him, and then reveals that she was abandoned as a small child outside the red lattice door of the shop where she lives now with her adoptive parents.

By now several themes have emerged that are central to Japanese literary tradition: the ephemerality of existence, connection to the natural world, and the traditional festivals that mark the year. In addition, we have more modern themes: the sense of isolation, loss of faith, and questions about identity.

Much more will happen, of course. This may seem a simple story on the surface, but much is going on underneath. There are small things on every page that reflect or enhance these themes: an old shop sign that has become a mere decoration, the Botanical Garden that now includes beds of garish Western tulips, or the particular attention to camphor and cedar trees, both of which are used to preserve garments.

Speaking of the closing of the last streetcar, the proprietress of a teashop says, “It’s essential that people should cling to the past.” So much here is about negotiating the loss of the past. The old festivals are celebrated, though in abbreviated form; young men and women still go courting, but expect to be able to choose their own spouses; the capital was moved to Tokyo in 1868, yet people still refer to Kyoto as the old capital.  

The Botanical Garden has only recently reopened; the occupying American military used it for their housing and closed it to Japanese citizens. To me, this detail signals the loss that haunts this book. It was first published in Japan in 1962, only 17 years since the Japanese surrender ending WWII and 10 years after the end of the Allied occupation.

More than just being defeated, losing the war was a blow to the identity of a proud people. There were the catastrophic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; then they were ordered to revise their constitution, give up their empire status, and see their formerly divine Emperor reduced to symbolic status. Plus the country was opened to Western influences in a way ithadn’t been before.

Such a huge cultural upheaval must have created conflicts between tradition and innovation, excitement and nostalgia. On a large scale, of course, but also within families and even within individuals. We see this most clearly in Chieko’s father.

As writers we’re advised to remember the larger context of our stories (political, social, legal, etc.) and how that might influence our characters’ situations and choices. We are also advised to make every detail count and align it with our theme. This seeming simple story does both to a remarkable extent.

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.

Have you read anything by Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata? What book would you recommend?