fiction

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

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While all Colson Whitehead’s novels are well-written, their subjects and genres vary widely, much as Graham Greene wrote literary novels like The Power and the Glory and what he called “entertainments.” After The Underground Railroad and the wrenching Nickel Boys, Whitehead seems ready for something a bit lighter. Harlem Shuffle is entertaining, for sure, with serious undertones.

Ray owns a used furniture store in late 1950s and early 1960s Harlem. He’s always on the alert for an angle, milking his network of friends and contacts for deals like trading an outdated radio for a used television. The son of a legendary gang leader, Ray wants to play it straight; as we learn in the book’s first line: “Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked.”

So he turns away the serious capers he’s offered a part in and concentrates on making his business a success, hard as that is for a Black man in mid-twentieth century America. He wants a better life for his wife and children and that takes money. And it means he has to keep his nose clean, not be like his father. Adding to the stakes for Ray, his in-laws never let him forget that he is not good enough for their daughter.

But he has this nephew. Ray feels responsible for Freddie who keeps getting into trouble, finally getting in deep enough to call on Ray for help, endangering both of them. Thanks to his father, though, Ray knows who to call on for backup. He’s also adept at navigating the treacherous waters of Harlem’s dual economy, the one that’s above-board and the one that isn’t. Of course, as in any life, race is always a factor in Ray’s dealings with others, explicitly or implicitly.

It’s a light story on a serious theme: Is breaking the law the only way to lift yourself and your family out of poverty? One thing that struck me, reading Ray’s story, was just how easy it is to slip into a pattern of minor grift, no matter what your race or socio-economic status. Do a favor for a friend, bend the rules a little to help someone out, and there you are: on the other side of the line. You may say, I’d never fence stolen goods, but it’s only a matter of degree.

While some in my book club were disappointed that the story wasn’t as weighty as The Nickel Boys, we were all entertained. We liked the elaborate schemes Ray comes up with to get Freddie and himself out of trouble or to revenge a slight. I was especially amused by Ray’s rhapsodies about furniture: memorising the ad copy for a new line of furniture or appreciating the details of a particular recliner.

One person noted that we get to see the softer side of people who in other stories might just be stereotypical thugs or prostitutes. One assassin-for-hire dreams of owning a farm someday, while a kept woman turns out to have an extraordinary sense of drama and design. I appreciated the care taken to fill in even the minor characters, though several of us still had trouble keeping them straight. The few women play very minor roles in the book; I guess that too is true for someone like Ray in that time and place.

Through the three time periods of the novel, we see Ray drawn deeper into the life he’d sworn to avoid, betrayed by his love for his family and his loyalty to Freddie. I admire the structure of the novel: the three sections, the pacing, the well-spaced turning points, and the resonance between the heists at the beginning and at the end.

One member of my book club was surprised that the “heist” parts weren’t more suspenseful, as in some of the heist movies we’ve seen. I, on the other hand, enjoyed the measured unfolding of Ray’s plans, his ingenuity and resilience. In this “entertainment,” Whitehead has given us a slice of life: realistic characters responding to real-life challenges.

What is your reaction when a favorite writer switches between genres from one book to another?

Wrecks and Ruins, by Eric Goodman

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The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi values the beauty of things that are imperfect, unfinished or ephemeral. Drawing on Buddhist concepts of the fleeting nature of this world and life’s inescapable suffering, the wabi-sabi aesthetic differs from Western ideals of beauty and perfection, based on those of ancient Greece.

In this engaging story, Stuart goes beyond wabi-sabi. Having decided that “some items held more weight—more meaning—when distressed or damaged,” he collects shards of brick from torn-down buildings and twisted scraps of metal from car crashes. As a young man, Stu has experienced enough loss to recognise the impermanence and sadness that come with living.

He finds the ideal job for someone who collects broken things: a claims adjuster in an insurance office, doing inspections and appraisals. Through his work, he begins taking photographs of the broken or ruined things he encounters. With the camera he explores how isolating something we might consider trash from its context forces the viewer to appreciate the purity of its shape, and perhaps reevaluate what we consider art.

Believing that everything eventually breaks makes him wary of commitment, at least when it comes to romance. He wants to continue hanging out with his three lifelong friends, but with women he prefers playing the field. Then he meets Tiffany.

The characters are well-drawn, especially the three friends whose different paths provide a contrast to Stu’s. When one friend drops out of high school to marry his pregnant girlfriend, Stu’s reaction is “‘Don’t you guys realize we’re too young for a life sentence?’”

Through Stu’s story, Goodman gently probes the way identity is formed and its fluidity. As Stu navigates the currents of his life, his turning points seem to occur when the Brood X cicadas appear every 17 years. Whenever the cicadas sing again, he finds himself reevaluating his decisions. He returns again and again to the identity he forged when young, an identity that rests on his determination to live in the moment because nothing lasts.

Part romantic comedy and part coming-of-age story—as long as you understand that we are coming of age throughout our lives—this is a story that is particuliarly apt for our time. The COVID pandemic brought many unexpected changes to our lives, and as we emerge from it, many of us debate what we will keep and what we will discard, or if we have a choice about it. We ponder whether it is time to change the way we live or even if it is possible to do so.

As the world changes around us, have you been thinking about what to keep and what to leave behind?

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

Another Country, by James Baldwin

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Baldwin’s third novel starts with Rufus Scott, a jazz musician, standing near Times Square, broke with nowhere to go. We don’t need to be told he is Black; Baldwin accomplishes that with a simple, economical sentence: “The policeman passed him, giving him a look.”

Once well-known with many friends, a loving family, and numerous lovers, now he is “one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous.” He believes he has only one friend left, Vivaldo, a writer laboring over his first novel.

With lyricism and passion, Baldwin indicts the city’s inhabitants, always hurrying somewhere, careless of themselves and others. And then there are the artists, like Rufus’s friends who are writers, actors, musicians, singers. Divided into three parts, this novel immerses us in their world: their ambitions and weaknesses, their kaleidoscope of lovers, their fallible selves.

We learn that they know little of themselves, much less of others. Several, including Rufus, are bitterly confused about their sexuality: identifying as heterosexual while occasionally giving in to overwhelming attraction to other men. For the main characters, the ones whom we get to know, are all men. There are women but they are just devices to drive the men’s plot lines. Which are deeply painful.

Set in the U.S. and France, there are countries within countries: Harlem, Greenwich Village, Riverside Drive, various locations in the Deep South. And each person is a country unto themselves, ultimately unknowable. The story shifts between Rufus, Vivaldo, and several other characters, each trying to find their footing after unimaginable loss, sometimes driven to sex work and other degrading activities in order to survive.

The shifting relationships between them drive this long novel, as the characters make connections and then destroy them in a desperate fight for power. Perhaps a kinder word is control; they try to assert control over the other to shore up the crumbling relationship. “But it was only love which could accomplish the miracle of making a life bearable—only love, and love itself mostly failed.”

Coming to this book from the two earlier novels, I found new power and resonance in Baldwin’s use of language. Passionate, yes, and often lyrical, each sentence is weighted with meaning, pulling us ever deeper into these characters. Here is Vivaldo:

He walked out of the phone booth into the bar, which was a workingman’s bar, and there was a wrestling match on the TV screen. He ordered a double shot and leaned on the bar. He was surrounded by precisely those men he had know from his childhood, from his earliest youth. It was as though, hideously, after a long and fruitless voyage, he had come home, to find that he had become a stranger. They did not look at him—or did not seem to look at him; but, then, that was the style of these men; and if they usually saw less than was present, they also, often, saw more than one guessed.

Baldwin needs only two details to set the scene. Then there’s the quick one-two: we think Vivaldo is comfortable among men he has know all his life, and then—boom—we get the one word “hideously” to show us how dreadfully wrong we are. The next sentence gives us the synthesis: his knowledge of them helps him interpret their actions, or inaction in this case, and regain his footing after the terrible blow of feeling alone, not just a stranger but someone who has lost what once supported him.

The characters’ actions and interactions testify to Baldwin’s shrewd understanding of the human heart. Each flawed character, each cruel or selfish act is treated with love and compassion. As one character says, “‘…what can we really do for each other except—just love each other and be each other’s witness?’”

Which book by James Baldwin is your favorite?

Even Dogs in the Wild, by Ian Rankin

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In this twentieth book in the Rebus series, the detective himself has retired from the force. A team from Glasgow has come to Edinburgh out of concern that the crime family they have been building a case against is looking to move into the vacuum left by Edinburgh crime boss “Big Ger” Cafferty’s imprisonment. Now released, supposedly due to ill health, Rebus’s long-time nemesis is watching the jockeying of those trying to take his place.

Meanwhile, Rebus’s protégé Siobhan Clarke is investigating the murder of an important former prosecutor that looks like a burglary though nothing has been taken. Clarke discovers that the victim received a threatening note just before the murder. When a shot is fired at Cafferty while he’s at home, and a similar note is put through the door, the only person Cafferty wants investigating the threat is Rebus.

My introduction to the Rebus novels came in the early 1990s when I found Knots and Crosses in a Toronto bookstore. Rankin’s books were not yet available in the U.S. and online bookstores were not yet a thing. I’ve followed the series ever since, often rereading earlier books, enjoying the complexity and ever-deepening characterisation.

Writing any series, much less a long-running one like this, must be enormously hard. Of course, you have a steady group of characters and a setting. But you can’t let either get stale.

Then there are technical issues. Not only do you have to keep track of what has already happened in previous books, but you must find a way to make each book new. Plus there’s the challenge of providing enough information in each book so a new reader isn’t lost while not so much that a dedicated reader gets bored.

Rankin excels on all counts. It helped having John Rebus be a policeman, so there would be new cases to solve for each book. However, Rankin made the choice to have Rebus age in real time, so eventually the detective hit mandatory retirement age. The author’s solution has been to bring forward Clarke while having her still consult with Rebus on cases. And of course the ex-cop can’t resist tinkering.

Rankin also introduced another character who works in the Complaints division, the equivalent of Internal Affairs, even having him investigate Rebus. Now assigned to assist the Glasgow team, Malcolm Fox brings his attention to detail to the team while struggling to gain the trust of the other detectives who consider anyone who has ever worked in Complaints a traitor.

By the time of this book, Fox, Clarke and Rebus have forged an informal alliance despite their very different ethical codes. Rebus came of age in a time of much looser policing which puts him at odds sometimes with Clarke and even more so with Fox.

My enjoyment of the series has been enhanced by a visit to Edinburgh itself. The city seemed familiar after being there so often in my imagination. I enjoyed tracking down places from the stories and even went in search of the tiny dolls from an earlier book. Rankin has said that he started the series as a way to get to know Edinburgh; through it he has succeeded in introducing others to the city as well.

What I like best about this particular book is the way Rebus’s relationship with Cafferty is developed. Because Cafferty is targeted as well, Rebus must consider him a victim. Plus both of them are older and have been more or less forcibly retired, so they have more in common that just their history with each other. The nuances of the relationship shift throughout the story, adding shades to what we know of both characters from previous novels.

As always in Rankin’s books, even rereading one, I found myself wondering how in the world he would bring all the different strands to a conclusion, yet trusting that he would. If you like mysteries, if you want a challenging puzzle and complex characters, delve into Rankin’s Rebus series.

Have you read any of the Rebus books? Do you have a favorite?

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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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?