fiction

Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

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In this debut novel, described as semi-autobiographical, we meet John Grimes on the morning of his fourteenth birthday. It’s a Saturday, but he is consumed by thoughts of the family’s Sunday routines, dominated by attendance at the storefront church founded by his stepfather. We sense the tension in the family as he wonders if anyone will remember it is his birthday.

Although everyone has always expected John to become a preacher too, his stern stepfather Gabriel constantly demeans John and favors his own son, John’s younger brother. But Roy is wild, running the streets of Harlem with his gang and uninterested in the church. Over the course of the next 24 hours, John wrestles with the conflicting expectations laid upon him and with his newfound sexuality.

In doing so, he has to sort out for himself what is holy and what is good, and whether they are the same thing. Gabriel’s strict Pentecostal religion demands that members forgo worldly pleasures, forcing John to decide where he stands, as he considers the people he knows at church and his friends at school.

The second of three parts consists of extended flashbacks where we learn about the early lives of John’s aunt (Gabriel’s sister), Gabriel himself, and John’s mother Elizabeth. This unconventional structure not only gives us needed background, but also heightens the suspense as we wait to find out what the long night will bring for John.

My book club agreed that this book was hard to read. The overwhelming context of harsh Pentecostal Christian teachings, preached by Gabriel at church and at home, and Biblical references made for heavy reading. Outside of the religious doctrine, though, Baldwin’s language is stunning.

He was ill with doubt and searching. He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying, to the love of God. Or else he wished to stand up now, and leave this tabernacle and never see these people any more. Fury and anguish filled him, unbearable, unanswerable; his mind was stretched to breaking. For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness.

My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint far wind, which bid it: “Arise.“ And this weight began to move at the bottom of John’s mind, in a silence like the silence of the void before creation, and he began to feel a terror he had never felt before.

Even more than the preaching, it is the anguish that makes the book so hard to read. A controlling parent, emotional and physical abuse, being the one child out of several who is hated by a parent: these are experiences we know about, though the knowing doesn’t make them any less heart-breaking.

One person noted the outsized anger that consumes many of the characters. That reminded me of our last book, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, where she talked about how those who were part of the Great Migration found themselves crammed into overflowing segregated areas. Also, there was the disappointment of thinking they would escape racism by going north, only to find a different kind of racism. No wonder there is anger.

Like others in my book club, I found much of the preaching tedious. However, I was interested in Baldwin’s use of music in his prose. Here it is the music of hymns and the King James Bible, the one that I grew up on. In his later work he uses jazz rhythms but, as one person pointed out, we can see the influence of jazz even here in his riffs and solos.

We also appreciated his experimental structure, perhaps influenced by the modernism and post-modernism of the time. One person noted the similarity to the structure of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Most of all we were struck by the honesty of the book, its brutal honesty, as one person put it. Baldwin doesn’t sugarcoat anything or anyone, even his own avatar.

Have you read this classic? What did you think of it?

The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron

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Confessions of Nat Turner

As the title suggests, this 1967 novel about the slave revolt of 1831 is told in the first person by Nat Turner, leader of the revolt. It starts with Nat in jail, chained hand, foot and neck. In meetings with his White lawyer, Nat dictates his confession, and we learn something of what sent him on this mission to kill as many White people as possible. But we need his whole life to get past the surface and truly feel what motivated him.

Nat’s life, brilliantly written, is a litany of injustice and often cruelty. Some of his owners treated him well, some viciously. He has joys and pleasures too: his friendships with some of the other slaves, his study of the Bible, his deep satisfaction in his carpentry work.

While reading, I was fully immersed in Nat’s consciousness, yet at the same time swept by my own horror and grief and shame. None of it was a surprise—I’ve seen, heard, read too much for that—but the effects of continual trauma brought to life like this affected me deeply.

Having grown up in the Tidewater area of Virginia during the Jim Crow years, Styron had been interested in the story of Nat Turner since childhood and “haunted by the idea of slavery.” His good friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write this story and to do it by taking on the persona of the protagonist.

Nat Turner has usually been presented as a fanatical madman, and apparently he truly did fast obsessively, see visions, and believe that he had been divinely appointed to this mission. Styron’s great achievement is to give us a credible and relatable individual within the confines of those facts. Two other recorded facts gave him some clues: Of the fifty-five White people killed in the revolt, Nat Turner himself only killed one, near the end, and the revolt “ran out of speed” after that.

Those facts indicate a moral consciousness at war with Nat’s mission. Throughout the book wee are in his head, thinking his thoughts, and he is always presented as rational and intelligent. By letting the reader merge into his life, taking each step with him, the author makes Nat’s actions seem reasonable, almost inevitable. Also, Nat’s thoughts are sprinkled with verses from the Bible which is his only reading material, verses which reinforce his decisions.

A third way this feat of characterisation is accomplished is by finding common ground between our experiences and his. Often Nat’s thoughts reflect insights that seem familiar to me, such as this one:

Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them?

It took Styron five years to research and write the book. With little hard information to go on—the actual 7,000-word document produced by that lawyer being the only meaningful record of Nat’s life and thoughts—the author had to imagine himself into the mind and soul of a slave in antebellum Virginia. His intentions were good: he wanted to “fashion . . . an imagined microcosm of the baleful institution has persisted into this century and become the nation’s central obsession.” The book quickly became a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month pick.

Yet only a few years later it was denounced as racist by a group of Black writers. I’ve not read their book yet and am not qualified to say one way or the other. What I do know is that it is no surprise that a book about the experience of slavery by a prominent White author would be considered proof of the privilege awarded to White voices by the publishing world.

Having already read many books about slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s injustices by Black authors, having grown up myself in a racially segregated time and place, I’m grateful to have this story too. It deepens my understanding of the early 1960s, when it seemed to me that things would never change. In some ways, sadly, they haven’t.

One thing I didn’t know before reading this book and the author’s Afterword is that in 1831 Virginia was poised to abolish slavery in the state, but Nat Turner’s revolt put an end to that. As Styron says, “the impact on the future (especially in terms of the possible avoidance of events leading to the Civil War) is awesome to contemplate.”

At this moment in time, when our democracy seems at a tipping point into destruction, largely because of deeply engrained racism, it’s daunting to consider how much can turn on a single event.

What novel have you read that gave you new insight into an historical event?

The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard

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This most unusual novel, published in 1980, breaks many of the writing guidelines that have become common today.

The story ranges over wide spaces of time, leaping in and out of various characters’ lives. Similarly, the author head hops without apology, jumping between the thoughts of multiple characters in a single scene. Also, we get flash-forwards, meaning we are told in an abrupt aside of what is going to happen in the future. All of these usually pitch me out of a book, but so engaging is the prose here and so unusual the story that I was irresistibly pulled on.

The Bell sisters from Australia, recent immigrants to post-WWII England, seem to have their new lives sorted. An English-rose sort of beauty, Grace is engaged to Christian Thrale, a young bureaucrat. Caro, who is preparing to take the exam for a government post, is beautiful in her own way, a way that fits her strength and independence, Grace being more conventional.

They are staying with Christian’s parents when their plans become muddled by the introduction of two men: Ted Tice, a young astronomer from a working class background, and Paul Ivory, an up-and-coming playwright and the son of a semi-famous poet. Ted falls in love with Caro, and she with Paul, who is engaged to a wealthy neighbor.

This novel could have become a simple love triangle. However, what starts as a comedy of manners quickly becomes something more profound, as the author takes us on a fierce ride through the end of England’s empire and the attendant issues of women’s roles, colonialism, class divisions, marriage, power and the corruption it incites. Love, as well, of course—Venus is after all the ruling planet of the story—but explored in surprisingly subtle ways.

The transit referred to in the title is the rare occasion when Venus passes in front of the sun, a dark planet crossing a flaming sphere. The secrets in that dark heart are boldly drawn out in this vivid story. And its tragedies are hinted at by the early anecdote of a French astronomer who traveled to India to see the transit but missed it due to delays on the journey. He stayed there for eight years until it came around again, but the day was overcast, completely hiding the planet. The next transit wasn’t for another hundred years.

The story is rich with betrayals and subtle conflicts, as when Caro interrupts Professor Thrale’s peroration, pre-empting his reveal, and he goes on as though she hadn’t spoken. The interactions between the characters leave unusual gaps, forcing the reader to step up and fill them. Conversations are spiced with asides such as this about Mrs. Thrale:

She did not choose to have many thoughts her husband could not divine for fear she might come to despise him. Listening had been a large measure of her life: she listened closely—and, since people are accustomed to being half-heard, her attention troubled them, they felt the inadequacy of what they said.

I had a little trouble finding my footing at first, rereading the initial few pages because I thought I’d missed something. No, the author takes our intelligence for granted, giving us the opportunity to navigate her unusual and thrilling sentences in our own way.

One of the things I have come to look for and enjoy in stories is when the author treats their characters—protagonist, antagonist, and everyone else—with respect and compassion. We have that here. While it may occasionally undercut the drama, this approach finds deeper currents and insights about society in the second half of the twentieth century, shown through the lives of these two sisters, and the human condition itself.

What book have you read that, as soon as you reached the end, you turned back to begin it again?

Best Books I Read in 2021

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2021. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

2. This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped. I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored.

3. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team. While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed— one I am familiar with.

4. The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward
I read this collection of essays and poems three times over before I allowed the library to repossess it. Subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, it provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

5. Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo
Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through this difficult time. From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts. Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity.

6. The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny
Penny latest novel of Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines in Quebec is simply extraordinary. More than any other book I’ve read, it captures this unprecedented time, while still being an engrossing mystery.

7. North River, by Pete Hamill
James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. All he has left is his work and, after the carnage of the Great War where he served as a medic, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway. I loved this novel. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

8. The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente
In these poems Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh. In addition, exquisite care has been taken with the ordering of the poems. It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

9. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie as a companion. The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

10. We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz
The story of Vermont’s Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone of this nonfiction book. Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. The book combines the focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community.

What were the best books you read last year?

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

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The year is 1596. Hamnet carefully, quietly descends the stairs, searching for an adult, anyone other than his abusive and often drunk grandfather. The child needs help because his twin sister Judith has fallen suddenly and disastrously ill. He doesn’t realise that his mother is off tending her swarming bees.

O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. Agnes herself is an outlier in her society: the first thing we learn about her is that she keeps a falcon, unheard-of for a peasant much less a woman. Independent, strong-minded, more at home in the woods than anywhere else, she is an herbalist and a healer. She also has a mysterious ability, presumably from her long-dead mother, to read people’s fates.

What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. Instead of tearing through a scene to keep the reader hopping, the author takes the time to richly imagine the sights and sounds, the minutest actions, staying with the scene until we are there, and stays there before moving on.

Suspense comes from our foreknowledge about Hamnet’s fate—perversely denied to his mother—and from the dual timelines: one being the year of Hamnet’s death, and the other the 1580s when Agnes and William begin a life together. A lengthy middle section describing how the plague made its way from a glass-blower in Italy to Judith in Stratford-upon-Avon may at first seem unnecessary, but it serves to increase the suspense as we long to return to that house on Henley Street.

That middle section also adds to our immersion in the period, envisioning how and why goods are packaged and transported, and what the costs are. I couldn’t help but be struck by the many people felled by the plague during its journey, people whom we don’t have time to mourn as we mourn for Judith and Hamnet.

What we know about Shakespeare comes mostly from his work. What we know about his son Hamnet is simply that he died at the age of 11, four years before Hamlet was written. What we know about Shakespeare’s wife is only a name, which is probably wrong.

The way the author uses names, starting with the title, gives us the frame for this book. The epigraph, a quote from Stephen Greenblatt, tells us that Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably at the time. Similarly, his mother, who was called Agnes in her father’s will, is the woman we know as Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare himself is never named in this novel, instead called the glover’s son, the Latin tutor, her husband. My book club debated why, deciding that the book was not meant to be about him. One person astutely suggested that the author didn’t want us to think about Shakespeare the bard, but Shakespeare the man.

Our name is tied to our identity, so by introducing this uncertainty, the author reminds us how little we can know of each other, whether that other is in the past or our present. Members of my book club could not help but be struck by how many of the playwright’s works deal with misunderstandings and misinterpretations, switched and mistaken identities.

Every reference I’ve seen to Anne Hathaway depicts her as an older woman preying upon young Will, forcing marriage on him by getting pregnant. In truth, though, we know almost nothing about this woman—basically just the mentions of her in her father’s will and her husband’s—as we know nothing about the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

Thus, though I am usually wary of fictional representations of real people who are not alive to defend themselves—per Milan Kundera’s masterful Immortality—here I welcome this reimagining of a woman and her passionate relationship with her husband.

In his review of Carole Angiers’ Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald in the London Review of Books, Michael Wood writes:

Sebald’s deep preoccupation is with what his character Jacques Austerlitz calls ‘the marks of pain’, psychological and physical, in human and other animals. These marks are indelible, and for some people unforgettable.

Similarly, O’Farrell writes:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry . . . It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Speaking from experience, I can say that the wrenching pages after Hamnet’s death truly capture a mother’s grief: the stunned emptiness, the guilt (contrary to all logic), the obsessive replaying of the child’s suffering, the eventual return to being able to function though changed, profoundly changed, forever.

As I am changed by this story. I was afraid to read it, despite the glowing reviews and recommendations, because I feared the pain. I’m grateful to my book club for giving me the impetus to gather my courage and begin. As Agnes discovered, art can help heal our heart’s wounds. So I say to you, go ahead. Give yourself over to this extraordinary book.

What book have you put off reading?

The Darkest Evening, by Ann Cleeves

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In the teeth of a blizzard, DCI Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland & City Police sets off for home but becomes disoriented in the tangle of snow-covered rural roads. For a while she is able to follow the lights of another car, but then they disappear, and she finds the car veered off onto a farm track, the driver’s door standing open and—upon investigation—a toddler strapped into a carseat.

Assuming the driver has gone for help, though surprised they left the child, Vera takes the child with her—I could identify with her struggle to connect the carseat in her ancient Land Rover!—and continues along the now-familiar road. It leads to Brockburn, the Stanhope family seat, but one Vera knows little of since her father had become estranged from them before she was born. Her cousin Juliet reconises Vera and welcomes her and the child, even though there’s a party going on, hosted by Juliet’s husband, theater director Mark Bolitho.

Then the dead body of a woman is discovered just outside, found by a local farmer come to pick up his daughters who’ve been helping out with the party.

This is a satisfying mystery with a fascinating cast of local characters, lots of buried secrets, and settings that feel entirely real, whether we’re in woods, mansion, or cottage kitchen. There are constant surprises as Vera investigates. For example, the murdered woman seems to be estranged from her parents and they from each other, but there are unexpected emotions roiling beneath that surface.

Two aspects of this mystery make it stand out for me. One is the information about Vera’s family. I knew her now-deceased father had been the black sheep of the family, but hadn’t realised his aristocratic lineage. His brother Crispin left the house to daughter Juliet with the condition that her mother could live there. Browbeaten by her mother, Juliet is also miserable over her inability to have a baby, while Mark is absorbed in his plans to fix their financial woes by turning the mansion into a theater venue. Vera’s interactions with each of these relatives illuminate the family’s dynamics.

The other is the way the theme—how much about a family is invisible to an outsider—is woven into the plot. It takes an expert geologist to see beyond the surface of a happy family or an estranged one, to sift through the buried layers of past actions, tangled roots and resentments. But Cleeves weaves the theme in subtly. It is only in looking back that I see how it is embodied in the rich characters and their public and private relationships, even in their homes. There are only a couple of places where the idea of family becomes explicit. This is something I struggle with: how much to trust my reader to see what isn’t stated outright.

Having enjoyed the Vera television series I decided to try one of the books on which it is based. I chose this one because it takes place around the winter solstice, and enjoyed it very much, though of course I heard Brenda Blethyn’s voice in my head. That’s one reason I usually try to read a book before seeing its dramatisation, so I can form my own images. I didn’t mind that here because the performances of Blethyn, David Leon as Joe, and especially Wunmi Mosaku as Holly provided extra texture to the story.

There’s plenty of suspense, looking out for danger where it isn’t and being surprised by where it is. With several potential solutions, there’s much to think about. As with the best mysteries, it’s not so much about identifying the murderer as it is about finding the correct narrative among the many possibilities that could have led to this outcome. I found it the perfect read for this season.

What do you think: read the book first or see the show first?

Landing, by Sarah Cooper-Ellis

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There’s a moment in mid-life when many, if not all of us stop and wonder if it’s time to change course. Maybe something brings home how short the time we have left may be, and we rethink how we ought to use it. This novel begins with such a moment (Full disclosure: I know the author slightly.) Sometimes we look back over our lives to see if we missed a turning somewhere. Sometimes we get drawn into something new almost without realising it.

At 60, Meredith Carter must take a break from her work at a childcare center due to physical injury. She enjoys her job but realises “that there was something else she should be doing.” An independent New Englander, she has only herself to consult about changing course. Her husband died 17 years earlier and her only child is grown and living in New York City.

Life in her rural New Hampshire home is disrupted by her siblings who, across the river in Vermont, are starting a maple syrup business. Smaller than a small town, the village of Middlefield where they grew up holds ghosts and memories: ponds where they used to skate, new developments covering fields that once held forests.

As she spends more and more of her time staying with one of her brothers while working in the store, Meredith feels the pull of the past even as she enjoys flexing new muscles managing sales and inventory. Then she meets Arthur, a woodworker who lives across the road. Fifteen years older than Meredith, there is a calm strength about him that draws her.

The story moves across time as Meredith explores her own willingness to return to her hometown or to share her life again. What I most love about this book are the descriptions. Meredith had once been a forester and so a walk in the woods takes us deeper into the landscape than one might expect, reminding me of Tom Wessel‘s masterful Reading the Forested Landscape. More than mere ornaments, these images embody her own exploration of her native ground.

There are a few places where I wanted more: a scene with a former boyfriend that ends almost before it’s begun, a story thread that didn’t seem to ever get resolved. But I found much to like about this book: the independent woman at its center, the immersion in rural New England life and landscape, the idea of investigating the possibility of a new life, the emotional journey of an older woman that rings so true.

What novel have you read where the landscape is an integral part of the story?

Murder and Miss Austen’s Ball, by Ridgway Kennedy

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As her 40th birthday approaches, Jane has decided that at her advanced age she no longer needs to worry overly about society’s strictures, and so she will throw herself a ball. She has sent for a dancing master and gets in his place Freddy Worth, an itinerant musician and apprentice dancing master. Nonetheless, after hearing Freddy play, Jane is willing to give him a chance.

Her wealthy neighbor, feckless Aloysius Ellicott, impulsively offers the use of the ballroom at Kellingsford Hall. His father, Lord Horatio Ellicott, Viscount Kellingsford, has gone a bit gaga and only seems concerned about his fashionable clothes. The house and estate are run by older brother Percival who is in the process of enclosing fields formerly used as commons, while calling in debts from a neighbor whose income will suffer from his tenants’ loss of the common land.

Amid this turmoil, Jane moves forward with her ball. There is a hilarious scene of Freddy teaching the dances to red-coated dragoons whom Jane has enlisted to serve as partners, their swords clashing and tangling. Freddy’s naval background comes in handy as he translates dance instructions into parade ground commands.

The ball itself starts off beautifully, but then disaster strikes. Determined to discover what has led to the awful events at her ball, Jane enlists the reluctant aid of her dancing master, who is concerned with protecting her reputation, and they roam far and wide following various leads. Austen fans familiar with what is known of her life will for the most part appreciate this depiction of the author, though some of Jane’s escapades may raise eyebrows.

There are other mysteries in bookstores starring Austen as a detective. What sets this novel apart are the remarkable descriptions of the experience of playing in a small ensemble and of dancing these simple and graceful dances.

In this debut novel, Kennedy brings his considerable expertise playing for and teaching English Country Dance (ECD): country dances of this and other periods, including newly composed ones. (Full disclosure: I have met Kennedy; we both belong to a large traditional dance and music community.)

While it surely helped that I was familiar with the dances named, Kennedy’s evocation of how it feels to dance them is remarkable. I was even more awed by his portrayal of the musical sessions. Not a musician myself, I’m still aware of the subtle signals and changes within an ensemble, the turns at improvisation, the sudden quiet or swelling volume, aware enough to applaud these passages.

Mystery readers will not be disappointed with the fast-moving plot, with its surprises and red herrings. Those who have been to Chawton, Bath, and other places in Austen’s life will recognise the settings that are briefly but effectively described.

Fans of cosy mysteries will enjoy this light-hearted romp through Jane’s world. For me, it brightened these bleak midwinter days.

What books have you turned to for a bit of cheer during this month of shortening days?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

North River, by Pete Hamill

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James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. He had returned from the trenches of the Great War where he was a medic to find his parents dead from the flu, his wife furious at his desertion of them, and his daughter wary of the stranger he’d become. Now they have all left him, his wife first, simply walking away one day so that most people thought she’d thrown herself in the river, and then Grace, marrying a Mexican revolutionary and disappearing with him.

All Delaney has left is his work and, after the carnage of the war, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway with a note from Grace asking him to care for her two-year-old son Carlos while she goes in search of her husband. Recognising that with his work he cannot care for a small child alone, he enlists the help of Angela, who owns the local restaurant where he usually has dinner. She sends Rose, a Sicilian woman, to live with them and care for Carlito as he is known.

This incident is but one of the many that show the interconnected webs that support city life, something that I have thought about often. Cities are said to be impersonal, and they are, but we humans find and create our networks just the same.

This is the novel I’ve been wanting to read. None of these modernist games of “I’m using my real name and much of my real life, but much is fiction, and it’s up to you to guess what’s real and what’s not, and oh by the way what is reality?” No bouncing between multiple protagonists. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat, says, “Readers connect when they are able to make immediate, positive moral judgments about characters. Generally the characters who are the most universally appealing demonstrate heart values.”

Despite his near poverty, Delaney continues his work among his neighbors in the poorer parts of town, where he has chosen to remain. Even when they can’t pay him. Even when he sees the same problems over and over, such as men getting drunk and beating their wives. The neighborhood, like the city is caught between opposing gangs, part gangsters and part politicians. His own father had been a powerful leader in Tammany Hall, and Delaney is well aware of both the good and the not-so-good done by Tammany, so he has a complicated relationship with the gangs who both threaten and need him. Indeed, the leader of one served with him in France.

Beyond the brilliantly realised characters, Hamill recreates the world of Depression-era New York in all its vibrancy and squalor and beauty. Whether it’s the mayhem of the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade when the Irish immigrants march down Fifth Avenue to remind the rich that they need the Irish votes, or a visit to the Met to see the Botticelli exhibit where Delany and Rose have to drag Carlito away from the armor only to have Delaney himself mesmerised by the Primavera, Hamill conjures the scene so expertly that my own experiences are summoned and swell my emotional response.

The story is engaging too because it moves quickly from scene to scene, with little narration in between. When we do get a moment of reflection it is all the more meaningful for its rarity. This moment comes early in the book and captures the isolation that Rose and Carlito begin to heal.

There were too many people to ever know them all. Everyone has a story that he’d never hear, and he had heard more stories of human grief than most people. He met them in the present, but each of them had a past. Better to shut down, stop imagining, deal with all other human beings the way he dealt with patients. Cage the past. Deal with them, gently if necessary, and then seal them out of memory. They could vanish like the words of a song, recovered only in isolated fragments. Worry about your friends, he often thought, and the few people you love, and leave the rest to Providence . . .

In helping novelists understand how to create a story that will break out into popular acclaim, literary agent and writing guru Donald Maass says, “A breakout novelist needs courage, too: the courage to say something passionately. A breakout novelist believes that what she has to say is not just worth saying, but it is something that must be said. It is a truth that the world needs to hear, an insight without which we would find ourselves diminished.”

And that is what I found here: a truth about navigating this perilous world with its wounds and compromises, about love and work and family.

What novel have you read recently that satisfied a need you didn’t know you felt?

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

by

Nguyen

This 2015 debut novel finally gives us the Vietnamese war and its aftermath, not from an American perspective but from a Vietnamese point of view. The narrator is half-French and half-Vietnamese, rejected by both cultures, but told by his mother that he will do something extraordinary.

Like his parentage, he embodies the title: he sees both sides of every issue and can understand where the various parties he has to deal with are coming from. Even his loyalties are divided. He is committed to the communist cause and working at their behest as a mole in South Vietnam, an aide to a general. At the same time, he is utterly loyal to his two childhood blood brothers, Bon fighting for the south and Man for the north.

The story is framed as a confession to a commandant. A prisoner, though of whom is unclear at first, the narrator begins with April 1975 and the helter-skelter departure of the U.S. from Saigon. As a side-note, reading this book during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan gave the story added power. After a harrowing scene at the airport, he and Bon escape on one of the last planes with the general and his family. The narrator would have rather stayed and cast off his cloak to welcome his comrades but is ordered to continue as a mole to track what the Vietnamese refugees are up to in the U.S.

Much of the book is taken up with his experiences in California. While the racism and colonialism are much as you would expect, the narrator’s voice carries the story here more than the plot, at least for me. Others in my book club disagreed and liked this part the best.

The voice being so engaging makes it hard to stop reading; I would often look up and realise I’d read long past the time I’d allotted. There’s an understated humor punctuated by barbed comments about the people the narrator encounters. Seeing through them so easily enables him to detect their machinations and dance around them.

At one point he is asked to consult on a movie. He accepts even though he knows they only want him to collect Vietnamese refugees to be extras—extras who will be killed in a multitude of ways. He tries instead to bring some of their point of view to the story, correcting details, finagling speaking parts.

This section to me illustrates what this novel is: not so much an anti-war story as an attempt to show what the Vietnamese really thought or think about the war, the U.S., and the Americans’ arrogance and entitlement. Seeing the narrator code-switch as he moves between different groups of people is illuminating.

Just as a big part of my interest in the tv drama Breaking Bad is watching the main character change from a caring teacher to a progressively more aggressive drug dealer, here I enjoyed seeing how our narrator navigates different circumstances.

The parts I come back to are where he and other characters reminisce about their country, their homes, the village routines. As one person in my book club said, it’s something they hold close to their hearts. Even going back and finding everything changed does not disrupt that connection.

I think most of us can identify with that. Reading itself helps me be more aware of other ways of seeing the world, so I’m grateful that my book club likes to explore diverse voices. Nguyen’s book won the Pulitzer and is a great addition—and corrective—to books about the Vietnam War.

What books about the Vietnam War have you read?