fiction

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

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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?

Pumpkin Moonshine, by Tasha Tudor

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With little ones in the house several days a week, I’ve been reading lots of picture books. This one is a favorite just now, as we enjoy all the pumpkins on porches while we walk around the neighborhood.

Sylvie—who appears to be around four years old—is visiting her grandparents in Connecticut and wants to make a Pumpkin Moonshine. She and the dog Wiggy climb up the hill to the cornfield where she chooses the largest pumpkin, one that is half as tall as she is. She can’t lift it, so she rolls it in front of her, like a snowball in winter.

When they reach the edge of the field it gets away from her and caroms down the hill, starting the livestock (cue various animal sounds) and knocks over the hired man, making him spill a can of whitewash over a startled cat (the 20-month-old’s favorite page) before bumping into the house. Sylvie and her grandfather go on to make a Pumpkin Moonshine from it.

I’d never before heard this term for a Jack-o’-Lantern, but it is certainly descriptive. I don’t know whether the author knew it was also a term for a homemade alcoholic beverage made from pumpkin, sugar, yeast and water. The book was first published in 1938 and Sylvie puts on a bonnet to go to the field, so the time period is well established.

Writing a picture book is said to be one of the hardest writing tasks there is, and nothing chills the heart of an agent like hearing that their popular author of adult books wants to write a picture book. Of course, you have to consider what words and ideas are appropriate for your young audience, but the biggest problem is that you have very little real estate in which to tell the story. Every word needs to be essential, even more than in poetry.

If you are the artist, too, like Tasha Tudor, you do have the advantage of knowing what information will be conveyed in the pictures. Tudor has been my favorite artist of children’s books since, well, since I was a child. I’ve collected a shelf-full of books with her illustrations. While some might view them as sentimental or outdated—more kindly characterised as nostalgic—I found and find them full of magic, probably because she illustrated my copy of The Secret Garden, one of my favorite books of all time and a formative one from my early years.

She lived in New Hampshire and then in Vermont. Somehow I always sensed the air of New England in her work. Pumpkin Moonshine was Tudor’s first book. She went on to write and illustrate many others and illustrate still more, gathering awards along the way.

The children love the idea of going out and choosing their own pumpkin. The terror of losing control of it on the hill is manageable for them. Add in animal noises and the face on the startled cat and you have an exciting (but not too exciting) adventure for young children, ending with the somewhat subversive comfort of Sylvie and her grandfather hiding in the bushes hoping to see the surprise and fear of passersby when they see the Pumpkin Moonshine on the fencepost. My munchkins enjoy even more the description of the process of making the scary thing and of Sylvie planting its seeds the following year.

Who is your favorite picture book author or illustrator?

Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis

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When I ran across Matt Mikalatos‘s blog posts on rereading C.S. Lewis’s work, I was inspired to look again at the Narnia books. In Prince Caspian, a sequel to the first book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are about to board a train back to school when they are suddenly whisked off to the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, though they do not recognise it at first because over a thousand years have passed.

Narnia is now ruled by Miraz who became Lord Protector of his nephew Caspian upon the death of Caspian IX but now calls himself the king. Miraz prohibits any mention of Old Narnia: the talking animals, dwarves, the dryads and other what we would call mythological beings, and most of all Aslan himself. He dismisses Caspian’s nurse for telling the child such stories and replaces her with a tutor.

Dr. Cornelius turns out to be just as devoted to the old ways but more circumspect, and it is he who warns Caspian to escape when a son is born to Miraz and his wife, thus putting Caspian’s life in danger. Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who had become Kings and Queens in Old Narnia are dragged back to help Caspian and the remaining Old Narnians in their attempt to restore the rightful king to his throne.

I came to the Narnia books in my late teens, not as a child, but it was a time in my life when I was on the lookout for magic, spending time in the woods, studying Transcendentalism, and caught up in the 1960s whirl of possibilities. Charmed by the magical aspects of the Narnia books, I found the overtly Christian foundation a little off-putting, though tried to fit it into my then-exploration of different religions. I was also dismayed by the treatment of women and what I now know as colonialism, but recognised where these fit in the context of Lewis’s time.

On rereading the book now, I’m less struck by the religious overtones than by the similarity to today’s political climate. As Mikalatos says:

Imagine, if you will, a political climate in which truth has been completely discarded. Even the history books are full of falsehoods that advance the narrative of those ruling the nation. Stories of the past have been ignored, abused, or outlawed. In the midst of this political rule, certain classes of people have been persecuted, harmed, sent into hiding.

That is the world of Narnia during Prince Caspian.

As Hamlet says: “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” Lewis himself said the book was about the “restoration of the true religion after corruption.” Leaving aside the religious aspect, the theme of a disordered world needing to be set right can’t help but resonate for me as I watch so many people who claim to follow democratic ideals betray them. At one point, after the children have been attacked by a non-talking bear, Lucy says:

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day, in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?”

Lucy’s question about talking and non-talking animals illustrates a technique that Lewis deploys throughout the book of using pairs as foils or complements. We have Prince Caspian and the four children; the separate narratives of the boys who pursue the war against Miraz and the girls who with Aslan dance and sing and awaken the Old Narnians. The latter pairing carries forward the scene early on when Dr. Cornelius takes young Caspian up to the tower to witness the conjunction of the two stars Tarva, The Lord of Victory, and Alambil, the Lady of Peace, which together indicate a great good is coming to Narnia. Note that both victory and peace are needed.

There’s also the contrast between belief and skepticism. In the first book it was Lucy who first visited Narnia and the others did not believe her. Here, she is the first to see Aslan and the others say they do not believe her, with terrible consequences. Believing in Aslan and the Golden Age of Narnia is what sets Miraz and his people apart from Caspian and his magical beings. I don’t see belief and skepticism as absolute good and evil, though understand why Lewis made them such here. To me, like victory and peace, both are needed.

Lucy’s reaction to not being believed illuminates a more important theme, that of doing the right thing even when no one around you agrees with you. Of course, the difficulty is that even they think they are doing the right thing, though as in this case a deeper look at their motives reveals more complexity. The question of what authority to follow is here handed off to religion, the old religion of Aslan. In our world and as adults this question has become more complex.

Much of my thinking about this book has been informed by Mikalatos’s posts and the ensuing discussions on them. He says of Lewis: “For him this is all about myth and fairy tales and what they signify. The stories we love are all about deeper truths.”

In my creative writing classes I often talk about tackling big ideas. As Donald Maass says in Writing the Breakout Novel:

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.

What deeper truth has a book you’ve read recently explored?

If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin

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This is a story of young love up against a society determined to keep them apart, yet it’s a story like none you’ve heard before. Tish, 19 years old, and Fonny, 21, have known each other most of their lives, friends first, then lovers, and now pledged to marry. However, in 1970s New York, like today, it can be a crime to be black. Fonny has been jailed for raping a Puerto Rican woman, framed by a white policeman who was still smarting from an earlier encounter with Fonny.

It’s also a story of family, the strength of black families despite the stereotypes that tell you otherwise. Tish’s family not only supports her in her pregnancy but love Fonny as a son, and all—mother, father and sister—join forces to find a way to get him out of jail. Fonny’s family is dominated by his self-righteous mother who believes her religion puts her above others.

It was like there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you.

Fonny’s sisters follow their mother’s lead and there are wonderful snarky scenes between them and Tish’s sister. However, Fonny’s father Frank defies his womenfolk and puts himself on the line to help his son.

“It’s a miracle to realize that somebody loves you.” This is Tish talking about her beloved, but it is also true of the gift of familial love. You can’t take it for granted. One of my friends is concerned about the lack of stories—books, movies, television, news articles—about the strong bonds of love within black families like her own. Something to set against the flood of stories of gangsters and drug dealers, the abused and the abusers. Here is one such story.

I guess it can’t be too often that two people can laugh and make love, too, make love because they are laughing, laugh because they’re making love. The love and the laughter come from the same place: but not many people go there.

Tish’s voice conveys love in a fresh, unsentimental way. It reflects her hard-won understanding of how the world works: when to speak up against injustice, when to just keep going; how to hold onto dreams without getting lost in them. In giving us Tish’s inner thoughts, Baldwin expertly navigates the steady heartbeat of being black in America, almost never shouting, letting the events speak for themselves.

This is also a story about prison and what it does to a man, not just Fonny unjustly locked up, but also his childhood friend Daniel. Only recently released from prison on a charge of which he was innocent, though guilty of holding weed, Daniel is a shadow of his former self. Unfortunately, as Fonny’s alibi, he is also the target of the white policeman determined to make sure Fonny goes down.

The structure of the story reflects another of Baldwin’s themes. While the main storyline follows Tish from when she is three months pregnant to when she gives birth, we constantly dip into the past. Ranging from scenes of their childhood to their attempts to find a loft to rent to the events that led to Fonny’s arrest, Baldwin’s shifts in time are expertly handled, reflecting the rhythms of jazz and blues that he’s known for. More significantly, they summon thoughts about time itself.

Time, the word tolled like the bells of a church. Fonny was doing: time. In six months’ time, our baby would be here. Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met; somewhere, in time, we had loved; somewhere, no longer in time, but, now, totally, at time’s mercy, we loved.

The contrast of being in time and being at time’s mercy reflect the long, slow path to equality for the black people brought against their will to this country. I am reminded of the early days of the Civil Rights movement when whites and blacks (though mostly whites) told the protestors to be patient, to set aside their songs and marches, that things were getting better, but slowly.

Things are better than they were in the early 1960s, mostly due to those protesters, but not enough.

This subtle book, full of love, unsettled by the dark currents of racism, is as relevant today as it was when it came out in 1974.

Have you read this book or one of Baldwin’s other novels? What are your thoughts about it?

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?