fiction

Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry

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Two aging Irish gangsters sit in the Algeciras ferry terminal. It’s October 2018 and, though they’ve been drug dealers since their teens together back in Cork, earning fabulous sums and losing them in failed business deals and their own drug habits, that’s not why they are there waiting for the next boat from Morocco to arrive. They pester the young man behind the hatch in the INFORMACIÓN booth since they don’t understand the Spanish announcements over the PA. He ignores them.

Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond sit on a bench just a few yards west of the hatch. They are in their low 50s. The years are rolling out like tide now. There is old weather on their faces, on the hard lines of their jaws, on their chaotic mouths. But they retain – just about – a rakish air.

They are in search of Maurice’s 23-year-old daughter who left Ireland after her mother’s death to wander the earth among other new age travellers. The two men have information—having “persuaded” a young traveller earlier—that she will be coming through the ferry terminal on this day. They hand out missing persons posters and question the tired, distracted passersby.

Dilly Hearne, Charlie says. She’s a small girl. She’s a pretty girl.

She may just possibly have done us over, Maurice says.

It’s in her blood to, Charlie says.

Green eyes, Maurice says. Off the mother she took a lovely set of Protestant eyes.

Cynthia. God rest her. She had the palest green eyes.

They were like the fucking sea, Maurice says.

Among the chapters in the terminal that read like a screenplay are other chapters set in the past, flashbacks that illuminate the incidents that got them to this place. Fractured, as memories are, the flashbacks help us understand the old weather on the men’s faces. “He was more than possessed by his crimes and excesses – he was the gaunt accumulation of them.” They help us understand what it is to be an Irish man riding the wave of the Celtic Tiger and then stranded by its withdrawal and their own failures.

They were hammering into the Powers, the John Jameson, it was breakfast from the bottle and elevenses off the mirror. The child would as well be raised by the cats that sat lazily in what April sun troubled itself to come across the rooftops of Berehaven.

These are damaged men: physically, emotionally, morally. It’s the last that stands out for me. Instead of romanticised gangsters, we get real men and their crimes, the risks and violence, and the effect of all that trauma on their souls. One could complain that there’s no mention of the effects on their victims, other than neglected baby Dilly. Yet that omission comes across as genuine: we are in Maurice and Charlie’s point of view, and how their doings might hurt others is simply not something that would occur to them.

Equally, their limited point of view explains why Cynthia, Maurice’s wife and Dilly’s mother, seems not fully fleshed out. Even when talking about his great love for her, it’s all about Maurice: “He adored Cynthia the first time he saw her. When she turned the twist of a smile on him, he felt like he’d stepped off the earth.” And “The first six months on heroin with Cynthia were the most beautiful days of all time. Love and opiates – this is unimprovable in the human sphere.”

Yet Barry is brilliant with tiny evocative characterisations. Here’s his description of a farmer that Maurice meets in a mental hospital: “Some misfortune netted from the hills of the country, Maurice guessed, who listened to the rain too insistently, maybe, until he took his instructions from the voices within it.”

Barry’s descriptions of place are equally strong, summoning atmosphere through sometimes surprising images:

It was a little after 4 a.m. on a January night. It was in the long, cold sleep of the winter. The shapes of the city were blocked out above the dark river, against the moonless sky. On the southside quays only the ghosts of the place traipsed by the doorways or idled on the steps of the river wall with their stories of old love. The black surface of the river moved the lights of the city about. It was hard not to believe sometimes that we were just the reflection, and that the true life existed down there in the dark water.

In an interview with the LA Times, Barry said “No matter what I’m writing, whether it’s a short story or a novel, it almost always starts with a place. It’s the atmosphere the place gives off, the vibration you get off the place, that’s usually what creates the desire to write something in response to it.”

Algeciras is certainly a perfect place to draw out the contradictions of these characters. Terminals—whether ferry or airport—are liminal spaces, despite the finality of their name. Similarly, stations—bus or railroad—make me feel as though I’ve stepped out of my life into a sort of limbo. What better place to take a hard look at what you’ve done with your life.

The flow of language carries you along irresistibly, page after page, a brilliant example of dialogue where all the meaning is in the subtext. You think it’s just kerfuffle and then you see it’s a lot more. The dialogue is also a great example of how to suggest dialect with word choice and order.

In the same LA Times interview, Barry said of the book, “It’s built on talk . . . It’s built on dialogue. One of the interesting things about Irish people is talk. We love the sounds of our own voices. We talk a lot and say very little. It’s what’s going on under the surface of the talk is what’s interesting.” He also said, “I think every good story or novel has its own kind of tune or a melody, and as a writer what you’re doing is trying to hear the music of it.” It’s that music that lures you on.

It’s true that I’ve been trying to read different voices, and there’s certainly no lack of novels about white male gangsters. Yet I could have happily listened much longer to these two men talk, with their humor and profanity and their evocation of a long friendship. But what makes this book stand out for me, more than its humor, beautiful descriptions and incredible dialogue, is its moral discernment, its subtle depiction of the erosion of the soul.

Have you read any of Kevin Barry’s work?

Permanent Rose, by Hilary McKay

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I’ve been taking refuge in YA books from the depressing ugliness of some of my adult reading. This series about the Casson family started out fun. It’s a rather madcap family where the mother, flighty Eve, is too busy painting in the garden shed to feed the children, while the father Bill lives in London where he can do his “real art” without being bothered by children underfoot.

Yes, I should have know then.

However, at first it’s rather fun. As in the best MG and YA books, the children take charge. Indigo makes hearty meals to keep Caddy’s strength up while she studies for exams and takes ridiculous driving lessons. She’s a heart-stoppingly incompetent and distracted driver but her teacher , “darling Michael”, is too enamoured to care. Saffy becomes friends with the wheelchair girl who lives nearby when they have an encounter that is half a battle and half a recognition of soulmates, before hatching a daring plan to find Saffy’s inheritance.

In the first book, Saffy’s Angel, we learned that the children are named after colors on the paint chart posted in the dining room: Cadmium is the oldest; then the boy Indigo, with the youngest being Permanent Rose who was so very impermanent at the time of her birth. Saffron, however, can’t find her name on the chart and thus learns that she is adopted.

My irritation with Bill grew, but what kept me reading was my fascination with Rose, a belligerent, truth-speaking child who is—through some trick of genes and chance—a born artist, more of an artist than either parent. She’s fierce in her passions and honesty, and utterly blunt in her exposé of the Casson family dynamics.

In this, the third book in the series, she writes letters to her father—“Darling Daddy,”—describing the desperate happenings at home, hoping that they will persuade him to come home, something that he has ceased doing since acquiring a new girlfriend. Bill, happy in his London life, spending the money he earns on trips to Paris and New York and on Samantha rather than on his cash-strapped family, chooses to believe that Rose is making things up.

She isn’t.

Indigo also pulled at my heartstrings. I have too often seen children bravely take up the slack and act as parents when their own irresponsible and self-indulgent parents prove useless. Sent to buy groceries—“Real food!” as one child demands—Eve returns with cherries and tubes of paint.

I know it’s all meant to be jolly fun and aren’t the children clever to manage on their own, but frankly, it’s all too real to me. I find it heart-breaking. Tempted to strangle Bill and smack Eve, I wanted—if nothing else—to call child services on the pair of them. They obviously “love” the children, but how empty is a declaration of love without a meal behind it or even just noticing that a child is struggling?

My only consolation is the other adults who step in to help the children with a meal or a timely helping hand. And the competence of the children themselves.

The theme of all these books seems to be that quirky families are far more interesting and wonderful than those boring families with regular meals and clothes and parental attention. For me, though, the only thing that matters in these stories is the love—as in care and attention—each child has for the other.

I learned long ago, when still very young myself, that “love is not some wonderful thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do.” As always, I learned that from a book, in this case one by Elizabeth Goudge. In these stories of the Casson family, I don’t see anything I would call love from the parents, only between the children. And that—the absence of parental love—seems to me a tragedy. No wonder Permanent Rose is so belligerent, demanding what she needs and brooking no denial.

Have you read a novel where you had mixed feelings about the characters and the theme?

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

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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. The AFs are apparently companions for the children in this future time: they don’t go out much and have little contact with other children except through “interaction meetings” set up by parents of other “lifted” children.

Although never defined, lifting seems to be the use of genetic engineering to increase children’s future professional and financial success. Josie’s neighbor and best friend, Rick, is unlifted and thus unlikely to be able to get into any college or university. Lifting seems to be the next step for the ambitious parents of our own time who are willing to do anything, break any law, to ensure their offspring get into a top college.

Along with our narrator Klara, we learn about Josie’s home life, the schooling she receives on her “oblong,” and the mysterious illness that threatens her life. It is Klara’s voice that makes this novel work. Befitting a machine, her tone is affectless and a little alien, yet with just enough warmth to beguile the reader.

Klara is constantly learning and adjusting based on her observations. She sees and describes the confusing emotions of the humans around her. She comes to believe that the sun is a healing god who can be approached and petitioned. One member of my book club wondered if perhaps Klara was solar-powered, which would bolster her religion.

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.

It is also a theme on the minds of many of us today as we consider the front-line workers who have had to bear the brunt of the pandemic, not just the doctors and nurses, but the workers who delivered meals and groceries and everything else to the doors of those who could afford to hole up at home.

Like so many of today’s dehumanised servers, Klara is considered a thing, an appliance. When Klara accompanies Josie to another home, the mother there asks, “ ‘Are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?’ ” Klara is sometimes sent to stand alone in a closet until she is wanted. She does not seem to pass judgment on the humans around her, only to observe. On the other hand, Josie mostly treats her as a person, and even Josie’s distant mother begins to interact with Klara as she would with another person.

What does it mean to be human? Can a machine become human?

I was surprised by my book club and the reviews I read that many if not most people think that Klara is sentient. That she does experience emotion. That she loves Josie.

I’m not so sure. Klara has been programmed to do her duty as an AF which includes a dedication to Josie’s well-being. Klara goes all out to find a cure for Josie’s mysterious illness, but is that love or duty? Is there some essence of humanity that a machine can never have? One character says of human beings that there is ” ‘something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer.’ ” Is that true or wishful thinking?

These questions are complicated by the genetic tinkering that makes the lifted children into something deliberately built to specifications.

By using Klara as the narrator, Ishiguro leaves many questions open. We keep reading, hoping to understand exactly what Josie’s illness is, why her sister died, what the Cootings machine is. It is never explicit why young people need artificial companions, but here and with the other questions we ponder and perhaps come up with our own explanations.

One of the things that initially confused me is the way Klara describes what she “sees.” She talks about “partitions” which seems to be creating a two-dimensional grid before being able to recognise them as three-dimensional objects. The number of partitions increases when she is struggling (with emotion as some maintain? or with overwhelming input?). The effect is mesmerizing, as for example when a human in front of her appears in multiple partitions, each expressing a different and sometimes conflicting emotion—a brilliant way of illuminating the mix of emotions we feel at any time.

What I like most about this book, and indeed all of Ishiguro’s work, is his willingness to write about big questions. Here he explores the moral dimension of our rapidly changing world—expanding technology, environmental degradation, the ever-increasing wealth gap—in the context of our inevitable mortality and the love that may be the key to our redemption.

What novel have you read that left you pondering the big questions it explores?

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

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Anger.

On page one Messud gives us an angry woman. Is that allowed? Women are supposed to tamp down their rage so as not to upset others. And writers are told to work up to an intensity of emotion because if you start with high passion, where can you go from there?

Messud shows us in this brilliant novel. Nora Eldridge is the woman of the title: the quiet single woman who never keeps you awake with loud parties, whose help can be called on when needed, a woman for whom “Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.” A second-grade teacher who regularly calls and visits her elderly father and irregularly sees her married lesbian friend, Nora’s early dreams of becoming a famous artist have withered to her seldom-used “studio” aka the second bedroom.

I was captivated immediately by Nora’s voice. Unlike Barbara Pym’s excellent women, Nora is open about her passions. She says her anger is “not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human.” What she’s angry about is the “hall of mirrors,” a society that is “lost in appearances” where every door that seems to lead to a more authentic life (though she wouldn’t say it that way) just leads to more mirrors.

It’s not just thwarted ambition; it’s the sense that she’s done everything right and ended up empty-handed. Influenced by her now-dead mother’s admonitions to be independent and not rely on an allowance from a husband, she postponed marriage and children to the point where it now seems too late. The idea that turning forty seems like the end to her may seem absurd, given our long and often late-blooming lives, but I know many women feel that way.

Meeting a professional artist, a successful woman on the verge of breaking out to international fame, sends Nora into unknown territory. Italian Serena Shahid has come to Cambridge, Massachusetts in this beginning of the 21st century with her husband, Lebanese Skandar, for his year-long fellowship at Harvard. When their son Reza appears in Nora’s classroom, Nora falls in love with him, and ultimately with both of his parents.

As they become friends, Serena asks Nora to share a studio with her, not only prompting Nora to take up her own art again, but also giving her the chance to be around a “real” artist at work.

I’ve heard often from writers and artists about their feelings of imposter syndrome and certainly felt it myself at the beginning of my career. If you’re not careful, the goal post of deciding you are a real writer or artist can keep moving: completing the novel, publication, achieving a certain sales number, bestseller, matching some perceived rival’s status. The only way off the hamster wheel is to accept in your heart of hearts that, as Julia Cameron says, since you create, you are an artist, whatever your medium.

Messud raises valid questions about what it means to be an artist. Does it mean, if you don’t want to simply work in obscurity, sucking up to the pretentious gatekeepers, those who schedule shows and write reviews and hang out with the “right” people? What must you sacrifice? What do you have to tell yourself?

I’m rarely angry, but I could relate to Nora. Plus the questions raised are ones I have long been interested in. As a memoirist and teacher of memoir-writing, ethical questions around creating abound. Even more, though, ever since the women’s movement of the 1970s I’ve been fascinated by the choices women make within the changing and unchanging constrictions of our society.

The writing is amazing. Nora’s voice just would not let me go as her relationship to her art, to the members of the Shahib family, to herself, all twist and turn, tangle and untangle. I’ve rarely encountered such an inhabited voice, one that leaves me feeling as though I truly know this woman. The passion in her voice is sculpted with a poet’s concision for maximum effect.

I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes — rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast.

Each phrase is so perfect: “deployed for domestic purposes!”

I especially relished the descriptions of the art: Serena’s Wonderland installation, Nora’s tiny boxes, each a room in a famous woman artist’s life. The ending felt a bit rushed, but satisfying. It left me speculating about what Nora would do next.

What novel have you read that cast a new light on your own experience?

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

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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.

It rains all the time in Faha. Sometimes it is a hard rain, sometimes a mist, and anything in between. The rain loves the earth in Faha. Noel helps his grandmother, Doady, race out and hang clothes on the line for a ten-minute dry span. So when the sun comes out and stays out, it might be a miracle.

The other remarkable event on Easter Sunday is the arrival of Christy, a middle-aged man who works for “the electrics” and will be staying in Doady and Ganga’s cottage, sharing the loft with Noel. For electricity is finally coming to Faha, bringing not only light to the unsuspecting villagers, but the previously unknown modern world. And Christy has a secret agenda.

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. Conflict doesn’t have to be a battle or a car chase; it can grow out of miscommunication and missed connections.

Through Noe, as he’s known, we enter into the life of the village: the doctor with his three beautiful daughters, the young priest whose well-known goodness leads him keeping the church door unlocked so thieves don’t have to break in. There’s a forge rather than a hardware store and of course the farms.

In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February.

There’s a lot of gentle humor here. Williams describes the eccentric villagers with compassion and often a deft turn of phrase. In such a small village people must get along, no matter how oddly their neighbors behave. Noe and Christy take to riding Doady and Ganga’s bikes around to pubs—where of course it’s only polite to have a bottle of stout or three—in search of the legendary Irish musician Junior Crehan.

But it’s the language that lays a spell on me. Writers are often advised to avoid too much dialect because it can be challenging for the reader. I once actually had to give up on a novel written in broad Glaswegian dialect after only a few pages. Instead we are advised to find a way to suggest the lilt of an accent through the music of our sentences: the choice of words and the way we arrange them.

Williams is a master at this, and rewards careful study. Every now and then he’ll throw in an Irish phrase, but mostly it is simply the music. The villagers’ memory is embedded in story, stories told over and over, that become the fabric of their share life.

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor the knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

And the other part of the binding is the old songs, traditional Irish music:

Gilbert Clancy… said the pipes recalled what couldn’t be remembered, the old bard times, and in their melancholy and joy was this world and another.

I loved being a part of this community for the space of this novel and will be looking for more of Williams’s books.

Sometimes we like novels or appreciate or even admire them. What novel have you read recently that you simply enjoyed?

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

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As a high school student in Tallahassee, Florida in the 1960s, Ellwood Curtis studies hard and is chosen to attend classes at the university. When he isn’t studying, he listens to a record of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches which fires his idealistic determination to stand up to injustice.

However, it only takes one innocent misstep to suck him into the criminal justice system. As one member of my book club who is a lawyer remarked, we don’t see the trial. Another pointed out that for a black teenager it was a foregone conclusion that he would be incarcerated.

Ellwood is sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys that Whitehead based on Florida’s actual Dozier School, which was not closed until 2011 amid longstanding accusations of beatings, sexual abuse, and even murder. For Ellwood, a young man from a protected environment, cared for and encouraged by his grandmother, the gritty truth of Nickel is a shock.

A member of my book club noted how quickly things can go wrong—something I well recall from my time on welfare—saying, “One thing unravels, and if you don’t have anyone to help it’s like a pebble rolling down a hill creating an avalanche.” Ellwood’s grandmother tries to help, hiring a lawyer, but he takes the money and disappears.

Luckily, Ellwood is befriended by Turner, another inmate who understands the system at Nickel and how to work it. A member of my book club pointed out that Turner is a fascinating character because he is so adaptable, finding ways not just to survive but to thrive even in this horrific environment. The two boys—so different—admire and support each other. Turner’s cynical realism makes him try to persuade Ellwood to keep quiet rather than speak truth to power. Yet Ellwood clings to his earlier role model: Dr. King.

The boys’ time at Nickel is framed by a story set in the 1960s where Ellwood is a successful business owner living in New York City. News stories of graves found at the now-closed Nickel Academy lead him to remember his time there.

Most of us in my book club had some quibbles about the ending, but all attested to the power of the writing.

As a writer, I paid particular attention to Whitehead’s treatment of the abuse. He himself has talked of how difficult it was for him to write about such subjects, saying in a USA Today interview, “I think if I was angry or sad every day I couldn’t create art. So the subject of slavery and the subject of the abuse in the reform school had to be held at a distance on a day to day basis.”

In order to start reading what was obviously going to be a serious book, many of us in my book club had to summon our resolve. We knew that we would be confronted by painful and terrible truths, yet knew too that it was important our eyes be opened and that we bear witness.

Though we thought that we would not be able to read some of the scenes, in fact the author pulled back and left the details to our imagination, giving us instead scenes of the aftermath, the wounds, the scars—physical and emotional: an effective technique. This is a good book to study to see how we as writers can handle shocking or gruesome scenes so that they don’t turn off readers while still moving them.

I found myself thinking of a recent talk by Heather Cox Richardson about the news of graves being found at indigenous schools in Canada. She reminded us that the people who originally created the schools were do-gooders who thought they were helping the children. They meant well. Today we see them as misguided, but at the time most white people believed that indigenous people were “savages” who needed to be “civilised” if they were to succeed in what had become a white man’s world.

How did things go so wrong? How did benevolent intentions become institutions even worse than Charlotte Brontë’s Lowood School? I’m afraid I’ve become as cynical as Turner. Too many people are willing to exchange whatever moral code they have for the rewards of corruption and power.

As Turner himself thinks, in response to Ellwood’s invocation of King’s nonviolence, “The law was one thing. You can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people . . . You can change the law, but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

How people treat each other. Starve them in order to steal food and medicine and sell it elsewhere. Sexual abuse. Power plays. It can be hard to believe that human beings can be so selfish, so unfeeling, so greedy, especially when it comes to children. But there it is.

Whether this cruelty is simply human nature or learned behaviour is not a question I can answer. The only way I can think of to combat it is to expose it and bear witness to the suffering of the victims.

Have you read this important and timely novel? What did you think of it?

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

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As this popular novel opens, a 30-year-old woman returns to her hometown. Residents are shocked to see her, and word quickly travels around that one of the Vignes twins has been spotted. There are two reasons for this outsized reaction, one being that Desiree and her sister Stella have not been seen since they disappeared when they were 16 while everyone else was at the Founder’s Day Dance, dismayed that their mother pulled them out of school to start working as domestic servants. But the greater reason for the town’s shock is the dark-skinned daughter Desiree brings with her, described by the owner of the diner as “blue-black . . . like she flown direct from Africa.”

Mallard, Louisiana is an all-black town, like Eatonville in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Fictional—though based on a real town the author’s mother heard of—Mallard has a peculiar philosophy, created by the town’s founder: the best way to combat racism is to lighten their skin by always having children with lighter- and lighter-skinned people.

By the time of this story, most people in town can pass for white, which is exactly what Stella began doing when she applied for a job in New Orleans. She married a white man and neither he nor their daughter knows Stella grew up identifying as black.

Rebellious Desiree married the darkest-skinned man she could find, hence her daughter Jude’s dark skin. Now, in 1968, only a few weeks after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, she’s come home with a scarf hiding the bruises on her neck, hoping her husband won’t be able to find her. Unknown to her, he has hired a bounty hunter to find her.

There’s plenty to like about this story. The situation carries dramatic potential: Desiree adjusting to being back in the small town; Jude suffering the prejudice against her due to her skin color; Desiree and her mother trying to find a new connection; Stella wrestling with her reaction when a black family moves into their all-white neighborhood; and the threat of the bounty hunter on top of all that.

I was particularly interested in Stella’s story, having recently read Nella Larsen’s Passing. I’m fascinated by the strain of pretending to be someone you’re not. Of course, it’s not hard, and even fun, to do it for a little while, but to keep it up for years would not only make you feel as though you are always in danger, but would also cut you off from your past. Those memories and the narrative through-line that we create from our life experiences are foundations of our identity, so walling off part of them must have consequences.

There’s another aspect of this story that is fascinating: the hold that the culture we grow up in continues to assert on our actions and reactions, our emotions and desires. We may think we’ve left those childhood beliefs behind, no matter how hard our parents drilled them into us, but they crop up when we least expect it.

As a writer, one thing I’m taking away from this book is the subtle way we can use the works of our literary forebears. In addition to Hurston and Larsen, there are also references to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. If the reader recognizes these works, the references add depth to the story and provide a sense of familiarity. At the same time, the story stands alone; a reader who doesn’t know these works won’t notice the difference.

What underpins the entire story is the one-drop rule, that one drop of black blood makes you black. Of course, that terrible rule was commonly accepted in 1968, so it’s appropriate for the story. However, we still see its effects today in who identifies as white and who as black. There are other aspects of racial prejudice, such as descriptions of people as an Oreo or a snowball, and colorism itself. And of course, the concept of race itself is a social construct. Still, Mallard’s obsession with lightening their skin through successive generations makes me wonder when, if ever, they would consider themselves white. What vanishes? What remains?

Have you read this best-selling novel? What did you think of it?

The Trespasser, by Tana French

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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Tana French’s mystery series. The early ones are police procedurals, with members of Dublin’s Murder Squad as protagonists. Since it’s the same squad, a minor character from one book sometimes reappears or even stars in a later book.

That is the case here. The protagonist and secondary character from the previous book swap places. In The Secret Place, Detective Stephen Moran has been looking for an opportunity to get on the elite Murder Squad when it arrives as a new clue in the unsolved murder of a popular boy on the grounds of a girl’s boarding school.

Stephen’s previous contact with one of the girls, Holly Mackey, daughter of detective Frank Mackey (protagonist of Faithful Place and a character in The Likeness), led her to bring him the clue. His ability to communicate with the girls persuades the lead detective Antoinette Conway to keep him on the case—provisionally. We follow Stephen’s twists and turns as he tries to figure out the best approach for each witness, determined to impress the bad-tempered Conway. She believes that the entire squad is out to get her for being a woman and that she’ds been given this one for her first case on purpose to see her fail.

In The Trespasser, Conway is our point-of-view character. Stephen Moran is still working with her, now as her partner and member of the squad. They are assigned minor cases, mostly domestics, when finally they are tapped to investigate what is apparently a domestic gone wrong: a woman found murdered in her own home amid the wreckage of what was obviously meant to be a romantic dinner for two.

They are also given Jimmy Breslin, star of the squad, to work with them which makes Conway bristle. She’s unsure whether this is more harassment or a lack of confidence in her, both equally maddening. Breslin pushes them to arrest the boyfriend, despite the lack of evidence, but Conway and Moran see more paths to investigate.

The interplay between the partners is what makes this book spectacular. Throughout, but especially in the interview room, Conway and Moran bounce off each other, inspire each other, support each other, tiptoe around each other’s wounds—all the things good partners should do. Until they don’t.

Nobody does friendships like Tana French. While most stories rely on love stories for emotional content, French gives us friendships, intense as any romance, whether the working friendship of partners, the intense intimacy of teenage girls, or—as in The Likeness—the friends who can become another family.

I’m not really sure how she does it, beyond the individuality and authenticity of their voices. It’s partly what they are willing to do for each other. It’s partly what they understand intuitively about each other. In this book, Moran and Conway have worked together long enough that when they are interviewing a suspect they can anticipate what the other is about to say. Acting as one, they can volley questions and statements to guide the suspect where they want them to go.

With the girls at the school, French brings out the passionate loyalty and secrecy of their friendships. Through interviews we learn what others say about them. We see and hear how little they themselves give the detectives. We learn more about them in the contrast and conflict between different cliques. And when the girls are alone, we sense through their thoughts and actions the volatility of their emotions and the potential for devastation.

This book in particular also examines the stories people tell themselves, stories about themselves and about others, and the influence of these stories on their actions and reactions. I’m fascinated by this theme and looking for other books that might examine it.

As you can tell, there’s a lot more going on here than simply a puzzle to be solved, though that’s here too, and it’s a knotty one. This layered and intricate story is captivating on so many levels.

Have you read any of Tana French’s novels? Which one is your favorite?

The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner

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In a back alley in 1791 London, a wooden door opens to what appears to be a storeroom. However, those in the know are aware that behind a hidden door lies Nella Clavinger’s apothecary shop. Like her mother before her, she caters only to women and dispenses powders and salves to ease their pains. However, unlike her mother—and this is why her shop is secret—she also sells poisons to women who need to get rid of a man who is mistreating them.

Nella’s work with poisons has prematurely aged her, and she suffers pain and weakness. One day she is surprised when it is not a woman who arrives at the appointed time to collect a poison, but a 12-year-old girl, Eliza Fanning, a maid picking it up for her mistress. Eliza is fascinated by Nella and begs to be taught her skills. Nella refuses, but Eliza’s presence still has catastrophic consequences.

There’s more: This book has a dual timeline.

In present-day London Caroline Parcewell is visiting from Ohio. Although this long-planned trip was to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, she has left her husband at home, after discovering that he has been having an affair.

As she wanders disconsolately around the city, she stumbles on a mudlarking tour, mudlarks being the name for people in earlier centuries who dug in the edges of the Thames looking for anything they can sell. She finds a mysterious vial and eventually suspects she’s on the trail of eighteenth-century London’s “apothecary murderer.”

The two stories intertwine, both speaking of women trying to control their own destinies. Nella keeps a register, the one started by her mother, noting the name of each customer, the date, and what they purchased. She knows that women like her—not wealthy, not royalty—are not recorded or remembered. So her register is one small way to recognise women who would otherwise be forgotten.

Even as Nella tries to find a way out of the troubles that come upon her, Caroline looks back over her marriage, assessing where she has abandoned her own dreams and debating whether she can continue with the marriage.

There’s a lot of suspense, with as many twists and turns as a back alley in eighteenth-century London. As always, after my first immersive read, I examined some technical aspects of the book. In this case, I was interested in how the two timelines bounced off each other, sometimes reflecting, sometimes diverging. I was also interested in the way information was gradually revealed, heightening the suspense. I have a few minor quibbles, but overall the book was a good read and a fine way to while away a rainy afternoon.

Can you recommend a book with a dual timeline?

The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner

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This final novel in Lerner’s autofictional trilogy has been much written about and much praised. Minimally framed by his present-day adult self, the bulk of the book is Adam Gordon’s account of his teen years in Topeka, Kansas, during the 1990s. The events and circumstances mirror Lerner’s own.

A debating champion, Adam uses words aggressively and defensively both onstage and off. He’s a master of “the spread,” where debaters spout multiple arguments as fast as they can spit them out, making it difficult for their opponents to respond or, I would imagine, for the audience to follow. If this sounds a lot like mansplaining and talking over people, if it reminds you of everything hateful in our current public discourse—whether on social media, political circles, or family get-togethers—welcome to the club.

I disliked this book from the opening scene where teenaged Adam, unmoved by the romantic potential of being on a moonlit boat with his girlfriend, is so busy sharing all the marvelous wonders of his mind that he doesn’t even notice his girlfriend is no longer beside him. Some members of my book club found this sequence hilarious while I was only reminded of too many teenaged hours pretending to listen to boys orate.

Since it was our book club’s selection, I kept reading and found much that was interesting, especially about the uses and misuses of language, about language as power.

Chapters about Adam’s teen years are interrupted by a two chapters each from his parents’ point of view. Adam’s parents are members of “the Foundation,” a progressive clinic and training center for psychiatry (Lerner’ mother is connected to the Menninger Foundation). Jane, like Lerner’s mother, has written a popular feminist book, which incites anonymous calls from angry men and envy among her colleagues. Jonathan’s research involves “speech shadowing” where words repeated at increasing speeds turn into nonsense.

Adam’s chapters are also interspersed with chapters from the point of view of Darren, a townie adopted by Adam’s group of friends who mistreat and befriend him at the same time. Not gifted with the verbal fluency of the Foundation kids, Darren’s only power is physical. The threat of violence winds through these chapters, providing a bit of tension, a story question we read to answer. The other tension comes from Adam’s preparation for a debating tournament.

Our book club discussion was enlivened by one member’s actually having grown up in Topeka where her parents were associated with the Menninger Foundation. Others had a more positive reaction to the book than I did, though I recognised the critique of modern culture and the idea that much of what is so hateful today is rooted in the toxic masculinity the teens in this novel are steeped in.

Some members spoke of the blurred boundaries in the book, such as Jane having her friend become her analyst as well. Others mentioned that the characters all sound the same, except for Darren, though of course that could be because they have all been brought up in Foundation-speak. Some people thought the author was trying to put in too much, perhaps because autofiction—using real events with some fictional tampering—tempts you to include everything.

I am not a fan of autofiction. Though I appreciate the fun for the writer of playing with the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, and recognise that novelists have always drawn on their own experiences, I miss the alchemy whereby fiction transforms the dross of everyday life. Also, I’m not happy with the way lies have replaced facts in our political discourse, so blurring the line seems to me to go in a less than productive direction.

Lerner’s prose is occasionally quite beautiful. One of the benefits of novelists also being poets is increased attention to the music of language. However, I did find myself skimming sections, especially the many about debating, being bored and a little disgusted.

Writers are sometimes admonished to make their main characters more likeable, leading to debates among writers as to the necessity of having the main character be likeable (and a side discussion of whether this only happens to women writers). As a reader I don’t have to like the main character, but I have to find some common ground with them or I cannot engage with the story.

I didn’t here. My dislike of Adam only increased as I continued reading. At the same time, I appreciate the use of his specific story to shed light on much of what is wrong with our society today, at least here in the U.S.

And I’m clearly in a very small minority, as this book is both widely popular and critically acclaimed: another reminder that not every book is for every reader. It may be that I would have enjoyed it more if I were reading it 20 years from now instead of still suffering the fallout from this kind of behaviour. Still, I’m glad it being my book club’s selection pushed me to read it. I don’t have to like a book to admire it, and as a writer to learn from it.

What book of autofiction have you read? What did you think of it?